Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series I/Volume II/On Christian Doctrine/Book II/Chapter 30

Chapter 30.—What the Mechanical Arts Contribute to Exegetics.

47.&#160; Further, as to the remaining arts, whether those by which something is made which, when the effort of the workman is over, remains as a result of his work, as, for example, a house, a bench, a dish, and other things of that kind; or those which, so to speak, assist God in His operations, as medicine, and agriculture, and navigation; or those whose sole result is an action, as dancing, and racing, and wrestling;—in all these arts experience teaches us to infer the future from the past.&#160; For no man who is skilled in any of these arts moves his limbs in any operation without connecting the memory of the past with the expectation of the future.&#160; Now of these arts a very superficial and cursory knowledge is to be acquired, not with a view to practising them (unless some duty compel us, a matter on which I do not touch at present), but with a view to forming a judgment about them, that we may not be wholly ignorant of what Scripture means to convey when it employs figures of speech derived from these arts.