It certainly could be argued that some cumulative moral and social benefits accrued to the pagan and barbarian peoples who converted to Christianity, and who were instructed week after week, year after year, to place new value on the sanctity of individual life, on concern for the welfare of others, on patience, humility, forgiveness, and compassion. While in classical times the introspective life was characteristic of a few philosophers, the Christian focus on personal responsibility, awareness of sin, and withdrawal from the secular world all encouraged an attentiveness to the inner life among a much wider population. And in contrast to the previous centuries of often distressing philosophical uncertainty and religious alienation, the Christian world view offered a stable, unchanging womb of spiritual and emotional nourishment in which every human soul was significant in the greater scheme of things. An unquestioned sense of cosmic order prevailed, and it would be difficult to overestimate the tremendous charismatic potency contained in the supreme figure of Jesus Christ, binding together the entire Christian universe. Whatever limitations medieval Christians may have felt would seem to have been compensated by an intense consciousness of their sacred status and potential for spiritual redemption. Although human life might be a trial now, the divine plan of history was bringing about a progressive movement of the faithful toward final reunion with God. Indeed, the ultimate power of faith, hope, and love was such that, in principle, nothing was impossible in the Christian universe. In a long era that was often dark and chaotic, the Christian world view held out the reality of an ideal spiritual realm in which all believers, the children of God, might find sustenance.
Viewing now in retrospect the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in the high Middle Ages—with virtually all of Europe Catholic, with the entire calendar of human history now numerically centered on the birth of Christ, with the Roman pontiff regnant over the spiritual and often the temporal as well, with the masses of the faithful permeated with Christian piety, with the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, the monasteries and abbeys, the scribes and scholars, the thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, the widespread care for the sick and poor, the sacramental rituals, the great feast days with their processions and festivals, the glorious religious art and Gregorian chant, the morality and miracle plays, the universality of the Latin language in liturgy and scholarship, the omnipresence of the Church and Christian religiosity in every sphere of human activity—all this can hardly fail to elicit a certain admiration for the magnitude of the Church’s success in establishing a universal Christian cultural matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission.19 And whatever Christianity’s actual metaphysical validity, the living continuity of Western civilized culture itself owed its existence to the vitality and pervasiveness of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe.
But perhaps above all, we must be wary of projecting modern secular standards of judgment back onto the world view of an earlier era. The historical record suggests that for medieval Christians, the basic tenets of their faith were not abstract beliefs compelled by ecclesiastical authority but rather the very substance of their experience. The workings of God or the devil or the Virgin Mary, the states of sin and salvation, the expectation of the Kingdom of Heaven—these were living principles that effectively underlay and motivated the Christian’s world. We must assume that the medieval experience of a specifically Christian reality was as tangible and self-evident as, say, the archaic Greek experience of a mythological reality with its gods and goddesses, or the modern experience of an impersonal and material objective reality fully distinct from a private subjective psyche. It is for this reason we must attempt to view the medieval world view from within if we are to approach an understanding of our cultural psyche’s development. In a sense, we are talking here of a world as much as of a world view. And, as with the Greeks, we are talking of a world view that the West elaborated and transformed, criticized and negated, but never altogether left.
Indeed, it was the profound contraries within the Christian vision itself—the numerous inner tensions and paradoxes rooted both in Christianity’s multiple sources and in the dialectical character of the Christian synthesis—that would constantly subvert the Christian mind’s tendency toward monolithic dogmatism, thereby ensuring not only its great historical dynamism, but also, eventually, its radical self-transformation.
IV
The Transformation of the Medieval Era
We now engage one of our central tasks: to follow the complex evolution of the Western mind from the medieval Christian world view to the modern secular world view, a long and dramatic transformation in which classical thought would play a pivotal role.
The glories of classical civilization and the Roman Empire were a distant memory for the early medieval West. The barbarian migrations had not only destroyed the West’s system of civil authority, but had largely eliminated any higher cultural life and, especially after the Islamic expansion, cut off its access to the original Greek texts. Despite an awareness of their specially graced spiritual status, intellectually conscious Christians of the early Middle Ages knew themselves to be living in the dim aftermath of a golden age of culture and learning. But in the Church’s monasteries, a few kept alive the classical spark. In that politically and socially unsettled era, it was the Christian cloister that provided a protected enclosure within which higher pursuits could be safely sustained and developed.
Cultural progress for the medieval mind above all signified, and required, the recovery of the ancient texts and their meaning. The ancient Christian fathers had established an effective tradition according to which the classical pagan achievements were not entirely rejected, but could be reinterpreted and comprehended within the framework of Christian truth, and it was on this basis that the early medieval monks continued some semblance of scholarship. In monasteries, the copying of old manuscripts by many hands became a typical form of manual labor. Boethius, a Christian aristocratic statesman and philosopher in the dying hours of ancient Rome, attempted to preserve the classical intellectual heritage for posterity, and partially succeeded. After his death in the early sixth century, his Latin works and digests—of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy as well as Christian theology—were passed into the monastic tradition and studied by generations of medieval scholars.1 Similarly, Charlemagne, after having united much of Europe by military conquest to form a Western Christendom in the late eighth century, encouraged a cultural renascence of scholarship that rested as much on classical ideals as Christian.
But throughout the first half of the Middle Ages, scholars were rare, resources for culture scarce, and original classical texts largely unavailable. Under these conditions, intellectual progress for the newly amalgamated Western peoples was a slow and painstaking process. Just learning the vocabulary and grammar of the conquered empire’s language, mastering its already highly developed modes of thinking, and establishing a sound didactic methodology were considerable tasks requiring centuries of scholastic effort.
Nor were these the only impediments, for the absolute primacy of Christian faith over secular concerns discouraged any extensive involvement with classical thought and culture on their own terms. The intellectual energies of the leading monks were absorbed in meditation upon Holy Scripture, whereby the mind could grasp the spiritual meaning of the Word, moving the soul toward mystical union with the divine. This monastic quest and discipline, rooted in the theology of the ancient Church fathers, created little centrifugal desire for other intellectual pursuits that could only have intruded upon the cloister of interior contemplation. The demands of the next world occupied the attention of devout Christians, and so deterred any compelling interest in nature, science, history, literature, or philosophy for their own sake. Because the truths of Scripture were all-comprehensive, the development of human reason was sanctioned and encouraged solely for the purpose of better understanding the mysteries and tenets of Christian doctrine.
But at the midpoint of the medieval period, around the y
ear 1000, with Europe finally attaining a measure of political security after centuries of invasion and disorganization, cultural activity in the West began to quicken on many fronts: population increased, agriculture improved, trade within and beyond the continent grew, contacts with the neighboring Islamic and Byzantine cultures became more frequent, cities and towns emerged along with a literate upper class, guilds of workmen formed, and a general rise in the desire for learning led to the founding of universities. The fixed world of the old feudal order was giving way to something new.
The new social formations—guilds, communes, fraternities—were based on horizontal and fraternal lines rather than the earlier vertical and paternalistic authority of lords and vassals, and their rites of agreement were based on democratic consensus rather than the Church-sanctioned oaths of feudal vassalage. Political rights and institutions were redefined, taking on a more secular cast. Legal procedures moved toward rational proof rather than trial by ordeal. The world of nature took on increased reality for the medieval mind, visible as much in the new eroticism and realism of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose as in theologians’ widespread use of the word universitas to signify the concrete universe as a single homogeneous ensemble, a divine harmony of natural diversity. Ancient literature and thought, from Plato’s Timaeus to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, found appreciative audiences. Troubadors and court poets celebrated a new ideal of soul-transfiguring romantic love between free individuals, in implicit rebellion against the widespread feudal convention of marriage as a social-political arrangement ratified by the Church. A more profound sense of history and historical dynamism was awakened, expressed not only in the new chroniclers’ accounts of contemporary political events, but also in the theologians’ new awareness of Christianity’s evolutionary progress over time. On many planes at once, the medieval horizons were rapidly expanding.
Of particular importance in this cultural revolution was the emergence of several major technical innovations in agriculture and the mechanical arts, above all the harnessing of new power sources (windmill, water-wheel, horse collar, stirrup, heavy plow). With such inventions, the natural environment began to be exploited with unprecedented skill and energy. Technical advances highlighted the value of human intelligence for mastering the forces of nature and acquiring useful knowledge. The world seemed to be humanized by such use of the intellect, and Europeans showed themselves to be extraordinarily resourceful in this realm. The resulting increased productivity spurred the growth of a rudimentary agrarian society with a subsistence economy into the dynamic and progressive culture of the European high Middle Ages. The young and barbarian Christian West was emerging, through its own enterprise, as a vigorous center of civilization.
The Scholastic Awakening
As Western culture as a whole transformed itself, the Catholic Church’s attitude toward secular learning and pagan wisdom also underwent a fundamental change. Christianity’s earlier need to distinguish and strengthen itself by a more or less rigid exclusion of pagan culture lost some of its urgency. With most of the European continent now Christian, the Church’s spiritual and intellectual authority was supreme. Other sources of learning and culture no longer posed such a threat, particularly if the Church could integrate them into its own all-encompassing structure. Moreover, with Europe’s increased prosperity, the Church clergy found more time to pursue intellectual interests, which were in turn further stimulated by increased contacts with the older Eastern centers of learning—the Byzantine and Islamic empires—where the ancient manuscripts and Hellenic heritage had been preserved during Europe’s darker ages. Under these new circumstances, the Church began to sponsor a tradition of scholarship and education of extraordinary breadth, rigor, and profundity.
Characteristic of this change in intellectual climate was the development of a school in early twelfth-century Paris at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint-Victor. Although working wholly within the tradition of monastic mysticism and Christian Platonism, Hugh of Saint-Victor proposed the radical educational thesis that secular learning, focused on the reality of the natural world, constituted a necessary foundation for advanced religious contemplation and even mystical ecstasy. “Learn everything,” Hugh declared; “later you will see that nothing is superfluous.” The purpose of the seven liberal arts—the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy)—was “to restore God’s image in us.” From this new commitment to learning arose the composition of the great medieval summae, encyclopedic treatises aimed at comprehending the whole of reality, of which Hugh wrote the first.2 This same educational conception became the basis for the development of universities throughout Europe, among which the University of Paris (founded c. 1170) would be preeminent. The Greek paideia was again springing forth in a new incarnation.
The West’s increasing interest in the natural world and in the human mind’s capacity to understand that world thus found congenial institutional and cultural support for its new enterprise. In this unprecedented context of Church-sponsored learning, and under the impact of the larger forces invigorating the cultural emergence of the West, the stage was set for a radical shift in the philosophical underpinnings of the Christian outlook: Within the womb of the medieval Church, the world-denying Christian philosophy forged by Augustine and based on Plato began giving way to a fundamentally different approach to existence, as the Scholastics in effect recapitulated the movement from Plato to Aristotle in their own intellectual evolution.
That shift was sparked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the West’s rediscovery of a large corpus of Aristotle’s writings, preserved by the Moslems and Byzantines and now translated into Latin. With these texts, which included the Metaphysics, the Physics, and De Anima (On the Soul), came not only learned Arabic commentaries, but also other works of Greek science, notably those of Ptolemy. Medieval Europe’s sudden encounter with a sophisticated scientific cosmology, encyclopedic in breadth and intricately coherent, was dazzling to a culture that had been largely ignorant of these writings and ideas for centuries. Yet Aristotle had such extraordinary impact precisely because that culture was so well prepared to recognize the quality of his achievement. His masterly summation of scientific knowledge, his codification of the rules for logical discourse, and his confidence in the power of the human intelligence were all exactly concordant with the new tendencies of rationalism and naturalism growing in the medieval West—and were attractive to many Church intellectuals, men whose reasoning powers had been developed to uncommon acuity by their long scholastic education in the logical disputation of doctrinal subtleties. The arrival of the Aristotelian texts in Europe thus found a distinctly receptive audience, and Aristotle was soon referred to as “the Philosopher.” This shift in the wind of medieval thought would have momentous consequences.
Under the Church’s auspices, the universities were evolving into remarkable centers of learning where students gathered from all over Europe to study and hear public lectures and disputations by the masters. As learning developed, the scholars’ attitude toward Christian belief became less unthinking and more self-reflective. The use of reason to examine and defend articles of faith, already exploited in the eleventh century by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the discipline of logic in particular, championed by the fiery twelfth-century dialectician Abelard, now rapidly ascended in both educational popularity and theological importance. With Abelard’s Sic et Non (Yes and No), a compilation of apparently contradictory statements by various Church authorities, medieval thinkers became increasingly preoccupied with the possible plurality of truth, with debate between competing arguments, and with the growing power of human reason for discerning correct doctrine. It is not that Christian truths were called into question; rather, they were now subject to analysis. As Anselm stated, “It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.”
Moreover, after long struggle with
local religious and political authorities, the universities won the right from king and pope to form their own communities. With the University of Paris’s receipt of a written charter from the Holy See in 1215, a new dimension entered European civilization, with the universities now existing as relatively autonomous centers of culture devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. Although Christian theology and dogma presided over this pursuit, these were in turn increasingly permeated by the rationalist spirit. It was into this fertile context that the new translations of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators were introduced.
Initially some ecclesiastical authorities resisted the sudden intrusion of the pagan philosophers, especially their writings on natural philosophy and metaphysics, lest Christian truth be violated. But their early bans on teaching Aristotle quickened scholars’ curiosity and provoked deeper study of the censored texts. Aristotle could not in any case be easily dismissed, for his already known works on logic, passed on by Boethius, had been considered authoritative since the beginning of the Middle Ages, forming one of the bases of Christian culture. Despite the misgivings of conservative theologians, the culture’s intellectual interests were increasingly Aristotelian in character if not yet in content, and in time the Church’s strictures became lax. But the new attitudes were to transform drastically the nature and direction of European thought.
The principal occupation of medieval philosophy had long been the joining of faith with reason, so that the revealed truths of Christian dogma could be explicated and defended with the aid of rational analysis. Philosophy was the handmaid of theology, as reason was faith’s interpreter. Reason was thus subordinate to faith. But with the introduction of Aristotle and the new focus on the visible world, the early Scholastics’ understanding of “reason” as formally correct logical thinking began to take on a new meaning: Reason now signified not only logic but also empirical observation and experiment—i.e., cognition of the natural world. With the increasingly extended scope of the philosopher’s intellectual territory, the tension between reason and faith was now radically heightened. A constantly growing multiplicity of facts about concrete things had to be integrated with the demands of Christian doctrine.
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