Liberal Arts

The "Seven Liberal Arts" that make up a classical higher education are as follows.  The "Trivium" ("threefold path") consists of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric - the prerequisites needed to engage with the higher arts, the "Quadrivium" of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, and Music.  From Life of Constantine we learn, not surprisingly, that these were the subjects studied by Constantine.

Proclus Diadochus, a great (Pagan/Neo-Platonist) theorist of late antiquity, declared;

"Arithmetic is the Discrete At Rest, 

Astronomy is the Discrete In Motion 

Geometry is the Continuous At Rest

Music is the Continuous in Motion."

He also is reported to have said "wherever there is number, there is beauty."

This description of beauty resonates in the Memory and Life of Methodius by Kliment Ohridski, who states that "God, who has made out of non-being into being everything, both visible and invisible, has adorned his creation with every beauty which man, in contemplating it, and meditating upon it, may gradually and to an extent understand." 

Beauty, in this passage, is seen as that which draws the human mind to contemplation of the divine.  Let us contrast this with the definition of Philosophy, attributed to Constantine himself in Kliment's Life and Acts of Constantine the Philosopher as;

"The knowledge of the divine and human things which says in how far man can get nearer to God and how through deeds he can become the image and likeness of Him who is his Creator."

In these last two statements, the idea of directing the mind towards God is intertwined with higher and more abstract thinking.  This is what is meant by the two earlier quotes from Proclus Diadochus, with his heirarchy of the sciences from "discrete" to "continuous".  Proclus and Kliment seem to share the idea that beauty reveals an underlying (or, thanks to the ambiguities of language, "higher") order.  Order as it is found in nature is seen by both Pagan and Christian thinkers as manifestation of the divine will.  Therefore, observing and understanding nature's creations directs the mind to the higher source from which the creations originate - whether this be the Platonic ideal forms, or the divine Logos of Christianity.  The Platonic contrast between mundane manifestations and ideal forms is paralleled by the Christian duality of the "visible and invisible".