PART I

The phrase artes liberales and its synonyms make their first appearances in the writings of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Rome’s greatest statesman and orator, and in the works of Vitruvius and Seneca, who follow and build on Cicero’s writings on education. It is surprising to juxtapose the bloody and gruesome violence that destroyed the Roman Republic and Cicero’s descriptions of the beautiful unity and order of nature that he wants his new liberal arts education to emulate. I believe that the liberal arts tradition began in Cicero’s attempt to formulate an educational ideal for young Roman leaders that would use the self-transcendence of Greek philosophical speculation, exemplified in the contemplation of the starry sky, to renew the civic virtue of traditional Roman mos maiorum, the customs of the ancestors, which was based upon another kind of self-transcendence, an ethic of public service and non-violent competition among aristocrats for public office. For Cicero, the affirmation that symmetry, proportion and harmony—beauty, in short—exists in the cosmos establishes the hope that it can exist also in human society, where justice is understood as harmony between social orders, arising from a kind of symmetry between human beings.¹ If beauty is symmetry, and symmetry is the essence of nature, then violence is unnatural.
 

Sir John Summerson, in The Classical Language of Architecture, called the classical forms a “‘uniform’ worn by a certain category of buildings” that are composed of formal elements developed from those that were first used in the “classical” (his word, and his inverted commas) world of ancient Greece and Rome.¹ In his second chapter, he presents the “grammar” that guides the disposition of the formal elements. In his last chapter, “Classical into Modern,” he explains that the principles are based on rationality, not tradition, and adds that Le Corbusier, “the most inventive mind in the architecture of our time . . . , in a curious way, [is] one of the most classical minds.” Principles based on rationality, not traditional forms, make the classical. Summerson sought nothing more than pleasure from a building. For Rudolf Wittkower, classical architecture also offered meaning. The Italian Renaissance architects used “the classical apparatus of forms” to carry “symbolical value or, at least, . . . a particular meaning which the pure forms as such do not contain.” ² In the eighteenth century, critics found themselves catching up with John Donne’s prescient observation from 1611: “And new Philosophy calls all in doubt . . . / ‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone.” ³