The Trivium
Sister Miriam Joseph’s Guide to Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric
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Until relatively recently, if you asked any teacher or student in the classical education renewal what was at the heart of classical education, you would be most likely to receive a simple answer: the Trivium. When asked for clarification, you would receive one of two answers: 1) The Trivium describes the stages of learning necessary for mastery of any subject, corresponding to the natural process of child development, or 2) The Trivium is the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, which train mind and tongue in the critical thinking, clear communication, and eloquence necessary for a well-rounded life. Some answers might land somewhere in between and claim that the Trivium contains a bit of both—stages and subjects alike—which is why it is so central and effective as a metaphor for the project of returning education to its pre-modern roots.
In recent years, many classical educators have made an effort to change the prevailing paradigm of the movement from “rigor,” “fluency,” and “well-roundedness”—terms which emphasize the development of intellectual and linguistic skills in utilitarian contexts—to the language of “wonder,” “leisure,” “contemplation,” and “virtue,” which are more in keeping with an education undertaken “for its own sake.” This signals a gradual shift away from the analogical interpretation of the Trivium as a series of learning stages popularized in the early years of the movement by way of an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers. Still, success is usually found in the mean between extremes. Amidst the backlash against the Sayers model, it can be easy to ignore the fact that the seven liberal arts (of which three encompass the Trivium: the arts of human order as expressed in language) are not incidental but central to any educational program that claims continuity with Greco-Roman paideia, medieval learning, and Renaissance humanism.
With this in mind, Sister Miriam Joseph’s impressively dense, meticulously conceived volume, The Trivium, deserves to play a much more prominent role in the classical education literature, particularly in the crop of books dedicated to the recovery of the humane and mathematical studies comprising the seven liberal arts. As Marguerite McGlinn’s elegant introduction and John Pauley’s brief biography of the author make clear, this work is here released to the public for the first time. Sister Miriam Joseph taught for much of her life at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. A gifted literary scholar of Shakespeare, Thomas More, and the English Renaissance, she created and taught a freshman course on the Trivium for 25 years. This book, first printed in 1937, served as the basis for the course (those interested in the history of American education may be fascinated to learn from Pauley’s biography that Joseph was inspired to investigate the arts of language by attending a lecture on the topic from Mortimer Adler).
Due to its conception as a classroom text, it is not surprising that Joseph’s book is structured and formatted more like a textbook than an informal guide to the Trivium. In eleven chapters, Joseph ascends from a short but profound general consideration of the liberal arts and the nature of language—crucial prolegomena to the actual content of the arts—through the parts of speech, analysis of terms, statements and arguments; and concluding in a guide to compositional style. Important rules, tables, and diagrams are consistently included on almost every page to break up the expository text, along with a multitude of quotations from the Western literary tradition which serve as vivid illustrations of grammatical usage, argumentation, rhetorical devices, and other expressions of the possibilities of language. Indeed, Joseph’s recognition of the natural connection between literature and the Trivium is one of the book’s major assets. Her attention to the great auctores situates The Trivium as a spiritual successor of the medieval Trivialist John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, which revolves around the importance of engaging with the authorities of the past to sharpen the moral imagination. Joseph does not simply want to inform her reader about the Trivium: she wants to situate the reader within the liberal arts tradition of considering the nature and end of man as a speaking, thinking, creating being.
Those who are even somewhat acquainted with the Trivium will recognize an apparent idiosyncrasy in Joseph’s ordering of topics. She places logic first as “the art of thinking,” followed by grammar as “the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought,” then rhetoric as “the art of communicating thought from one mind to another” (3). According to this order, logic is the fundamental humane art because it involves understanding, judging, and arguing about concepts through clear thinking. Logic “directs the very act of reason, which directs all other human acts to their proper end through the means it determines” (10). With the use of reason harnessed correctly, clear thinking can then be symbolized and arranged through grammar, and communicated persuasively through rhetoric. “Grammar first” apologists may retort with the necessity of ensuring that the structure of language is clear before getting to the content of terms, judgments, and syllogisms; but within the framework that Joseph adopts, the progression of topics makes great sense. For example, genus, species, and the categories of being precede the parts of speech before the majority of the book takes up Aristotelian logic.
That said, the presentation of topics does have potential to confuse those without prior exposure to the Trivium. Joseph writes in a very compacted, almost scholastic prose that, like the process of reading Aristotle or Aquinas, requires the reader to pay great attention to every sentence lest a significant piece of the thread be lost. Her sentences are beautifully crafted and deeply considered, evincing a lifetime of immersion in Christian humanism. Within a classroom setting, this renders the book most suitable for advanced courses in logic or composition at the college level (although McGlinn has most helpfully included 20 pages of endnotes that clarify Joseph’s lines of thinking). The average reader who has read some old books will likely be able to track the threads with some difficulty, but there is no denying that this is an extremely content-rich book—a Summa of language arts with logic as the crowning centerpiece.
There are also some shortcomings in Joseph’s treatment of specific topics. In the one chapter entirely devoted to grammar, she does not discuss formal sentence analysis. Whether done through diagramming or another method, this is a critical way for students to understand how each word in a sentence relates to the rest in order to express a complete thought, and its absence is conspicuous. She extensively employs a novel shorthand for categorical propositions both before and after introducing the more familiar Square of Opposition—this may produce headaches for those accustomed to other logic texts. And, also following John of Salisbury, rhetoric is almost an afterthought. She briefly touches on the five components of rhetoric and some stylistic devices, but her focus in this final chapter is not on the structure of the classical oration but on literary analysis, composition, and poetic scansion. Rhetoric handbooks like How to Win an Argument, James M. May’s excellent compendium of texts by Cicero, will have to be consulted for a fuller consideration.
Despite its nature as a encyclopedic resource for the arts of language, The Trivium is ultimately a defense of the classical liberal arts for human flourishing. Rather than reading the Trivium analogically, Joseph vindicates the Trivium by simply presenting its copious content in all its glorious richness, inviting her readers to treat and employ language with gravity and respect. This book has intimidating facets. But if we want ourselves and our students to speak, write, and persuade others of reality at the highest level, The Trivium is perhaps the best available single-volume resource for such a task—even if books devoted entirely to each of the three arts are also needed as supplements for a more comprehensive view. In Sister Miriam’s words, liberal education “imposes forms on the mind” that are “received through active cooperation” by the student (7). Much cooperation will be needed on the part of the reader to get the most out of this work, but the type of person which Joseph aims to form is a most noble goal for attainment.
Davis C. Smith holds an MA in Classical Education from Hillsdale College. His work has been featured by several publications, including the Circe Institute, Voegelin View, American Reformer, and the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education.