through life as educated men living in the world, or dwelt as learned compilers, reading in the cloister. But scant were the rays of their enlightening influence amidst that period's vast encompassing ignorance.
To have classified the Carolingian intellectual interests according to topics would have been misleading, since that would have introduced a fictitious element of individual preference and aptitude, as if the Carolingian scholar of his spontaneous volition occupied himself with mathematical studies rather than grammar, or with astronomy rather than theology. In general, all was a matter of reading and learning from such books as Isidore's Origines, which handled all topics indiscriminately, or from Bede, or from the works of Augustine or Gregory, in which every topic did but form part of the encyclopaedic presentation of the relationship between the soul and God, and the soul's way to salvation.
What then did these men care for? Naturally, first of all, for the elements of their primary education, their studies in the Seven Arts. They did what they might with Grammar and Rhetoric, and with Dialectic, which sometimes was Rhetoric and formal Logic joined. Logic, for those who studied it seriously, was beginning to form an important mental discipline. The four branches of the quadrivium were pursued more casually. Knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (one may throw in medicine as a fifth) was as it might be in the individual instance—always rudimentary, and usually rather less than more.
All of this, however, and it was not very much, was but the preparation, if the man was to be earnest in his pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom lay chiefly in Theology, to wit, the whole saving contents of Scripture as understood and interpreted by Gregory and Augustine. There was little mortal knowledge which this range of Scriptural interpretation might not include. It compassed such knowledge of the physical world as would enable one to understand the work of Creation set forth in Genesis; it embraced all that could be known of man, of his physical nature, and assuredly of his spiritual part. Here Christian truth might call on
