be ungrateful indeed if we forgot that we owe the civilization of to-day to the scholars who were so long gathered round the church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, before she fell into the hands of the barbarian, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque.
In the Middle Ages, then, it was well understood that the Holy Spirit was the giver of intelligence. Judges opened their tribunals, professors their courses, and councils their deliberations, with a Red Mass, the service of the Holy Ghost. In East and West alike, the symbolic dove is represented hovering over, or whispering into the ears only of those saints who were distinguished for their learning or their literary gifts.[1] But perhaps the most remarkable as well as the most famous instance is Taddeo Gaddi's fresco, at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, where are represented on the one side the seven theological sciences, and on the other the seven sciences proper— Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy. Well might an old writer— a hundred and fifty years before Taddeo—write ' Spiritus sanctus inventor est septem liberalium artium' , 'the Holy Ghost is the inventor of the seven liberal arts, which are, Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectics, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy': for this was bound up with the philosophy
- ↑ For instance, in a tenth-century Greek Psalter (reproduced in M. A. N. Didron, Christian Iconography, Eng.
