Ideas

by Peter Watson

  An entirely different explanation for the rise of Europe, and the one with the most scholarship attached to it, relates to the Christian church and its role in the unification of the continent. At the time, the name Europe (Latin: Europa) was rarely used. It was a classical term, going back to Herodotus, and though Charlemagne called himself pater Europea, the father of Europe, by the eleventh century the more normal term was Christianitas, Christendom.

  The early aim of the Church had been territorial expansion, the second had been monastic reform, with the monasteries–dispersed throughout Christendom–leading the battle for the minds of converts. Out of all this arose a third chapter in church history, to replace dispersed localism with central–papal–control. Around AD 1000–1100 Christendom entered a new phase, partly out of the failure of the millennium to provide anything spectacular in a religious, apocalyptic sense, partly as a result of the Crusades which, in identifying a common enemy in Islam, also acted as a unifying force among Christians. All this climaxed in the thirteenth century with popes vying with kings and emperors for supreme control, even to the point of monarchs being excommunicated (covered in the next chapter).27

  Around and underneath this, however, there developed a certain cast of mind, which is the main interest here. The problems of the vast, dispersed organisation of the continent-wide church, the relations between church and monarch, between church and state–all these raised many doctrinal and legal matters. Because these matters were discussed and debated in the monasteries and the schools that were set up at this time, they became known as scholastic. The British historian R. W. S. Southern was most intimately involved in showing how scholars, as a ‘supranational entity’, aided the unification of Europe. These pages are based largely on his work.

  The role of the scholars was immediately obvious in the language they used–Latin. All over Europe, in monasteries and schools, in the developing universities and in bishops’ palaces, the papal legates and nuncios exchanged views and messages in the same language. Peter Abelard’s enemies perceived his books to be dangerous not only for their content but for their reach: ‘They pass from one race to another, and from one kingdom to another…they cross the oceans, they leap over the Alps…they spread through the provinces and the kingdoms.’28 Because of this, papal careers were notoriously international. Frenchmen might be seconded to Spain, Germans to Venice, Italians to Greece and England and then to Croatia and Hungary, as Giles of Verraccio was between 1218 and 1230. In this way there was in Europe between AD 1000 and 1300 a unification of thought, of the rules of debate, in the ways of discussing things and in agreeing what was important, that did not occur anywhere else. And it was not only in strictly theological matters, but was felt in architecture, in law, and in the liberal arts. Theology, law and the liberal arts were, according to Southern, the three props on which European order and civilisation were built during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries–‘That is to say, during the period of Europe’s most rapid expansion in population, wealth and world-wide aspirations before the nineteenth century.’ These three areas of thought each owed its coherence and its power to influence the world to the development of schools of European-wide importance. Both masters and pupils travelled from all regions of Europe to these schools and took home the sciences which they had learned.29

  Even by the year 1250 there were still very few universities in Europe: Bologna in northern Italy, Montpellier in southern France, Paris in northern France, Oxford in England. But each of them was truly international. Later on, universities became very nationalistic but not in the beginning, and not only because Latin was the universal language.30 The main groundwork of scholastic thought was laid down in the first half of the twelfth century, which brought about a new outlook on the world of nature and of organised Christian society.31 The aim may read oddly now but it was in fact a coherent view of the Creation, of the Fall and Redemption of mankind, and of the sacraments, ‘whereby the redeeming process could be extended to individuals’. Coherence was achieved because the men who created the system all used the same, ever-growing body of textbooks, and they were all familiar with similar routines of lectures, debates and academic exercises and shared a belief that Christianity was capable of a systematic and authoritative presentation.32

  What had been inherited from the ancient world was very largely unco-ordinated. The scholars’ aim now was to restore ‘to fallen mankind, so far as was possible, that perfect system of knowledge which had been in the possession or within the reach of mankind at the moment of Creation’.33 This body of knowledge, so it was believed, had been lost completely in the centuries between the Fall and the Flood, but had then been slowly restored by divinely-inspired Old Testament prophets, as well as by the efforts of a range of philosophers in the Graeco-Roman world. These achievements had, however, been corrupted once again and partly lost during the barbarian invasions which had overwhelmed Christendom in the early Middle Ages. Nevertheless, many of the important texts of ancient learning had survived, in particular Aristotle, albeit in Arabic translations and glosses, as was covered in Chapters 11 and 12. It was understood as the task of the new scholars, from about 1050 onwards, to continue the responsibility of restoring the knowledge that had been lost at the Fall.34 This responsibility included clarification, correction of errors caused either by corruption of the texts or by the partial understanding of their ancient authors, and finally systematisation, to make the new knowledge generally accessible throughout western Christendom. ‘The complete knowledge of the first parents before the Fall had gone beyond recall, and there was a profound sense in which to seek to know everything was to fall into the sin of curiosity. But what could legitimately be sought was that degree of knowledge necessary for providing a just view of God, of nature and of human conduct, which would promote the cause of mankind’s salvation…The whole programme, thus conceived, looked forward to a time not far distant, when a two-pronged programme of world-wide return to the essential endowment of the first parents of the human race would have been achieved so far as was possible for fallen mankind.’35 In the theological context of the times, there was a very practical aim to the restoration of knowledge.36 ‘The world would probably come to an end within decades or at most a few centuries, almost certainly before another millennium had passed. At all events, it would end when the perfect, but to us unknown, number of the redeemed had been accomplished, and the aim of the schools, as of the Church in general, was to prepare the world for this event, and to hasten it.’37 Southern also reminds us that the scholastic synthesis did not appear quite as daunting as it would be today, since the number of basic texts across the whole range of subjects was very small by modern standards–no more than three or four hundred volumes of moderate size would have contained all the basic material.38

  This hope of a final synthesis did not outlast the fourteenth century but by then the early universities had come into existence and their international character produced enough masters and pupils, sharing the same approach and values, to create across Europe an entire class of learned men (mainly men) who had been trained in the same texts and commentaries, and regarded the same questions as important. As noted, all shared the view that theology, the liberal arts, and the law were what counted.39 In addition, the theory of knowledge on which the scholastic system was based–that all knowledge was a reconquest of what had been freely available to mankind in its pre-lapsarian state–brought with it the idea that a body of authoritative doctrine would slowly emerge as the years passed.40 By 1175 scholars saw themselves not only as transmitters of ancient learning, but as active participants in the development of an integrated, many-sided body of knowledge ‘rapidly reaching its peak’.41 In stabilising and promoting the study of theology and law, the scholars helped create a fairly orderly and forward-looking society. Europe as a whole was the beneficiary of this process.

  In addition to the theologians, three scholars in particular may be singled out for their contributions to the idea of
the West. The first is the Bolognese monk, Gratian. Before him, canon law did not exist as a systematic body of study. Until then, most decisions had been taken locally by bishops and it is fair to say that, by 1100, the whole system was in disarray. So, when his treatise A Concordance of Discordant Canons, aka the Decretum, appeared in 1140 it was rapturously received right across the continent.42 Gratian attempted to rethink, reorganise and rationalise ecclesiastical law (which was of course the main form of law in a totally religious society) in such a way that blind custom was done away with. He did not always succeed but, after him, the law was much more subject to the test of reasonableness, so that it could be accepted by popes and local bishops and priests with more or less equal enthusiasm. It was liberating as well as unifying.

  The second scholar was Robert Grosseteste (c. 1186–1253). A graduate of Oxford, who studied theology at Paris, Grosseteste is best known for being chancellor of Oxford. He was a translator of the classics, a biblical scholar and bishop of Lincoln. But he was also, and possibly most importantly, the inventor of the experimental method.* Roger Bacon was the first to point out, in his Compendium Studii, that ‘before other men, Grosseteste wrote about science’.43 In the half-century before Grosseteste was born, Western scholars had been translating Greek and Islamic scientific writings out of Arabic into Latin, and this in itself was a factor in the creation of the West. Grosseteste took part in the translation movement but it was he who saw that if progress beyond the classics were to be made, then the problem of scientific method had to be sorted out. There had been considerable technical advance in the West since the ninth century, when the new wheeled plough and new methods of harnessing draught animals were brought in. In addition, watermills and windmills had transformed corn-grinding and metallurgy, the compass and the astrolabe had been improved, and spectacles and the clock were invented. But, as with the law before Gratian, these were ad hoc, rule-of-thumb advances, and there was at the time no notion of how to generalise arguments, so as to establish proof, generate explanations, and provide more exact measurements and answers.

  Grosseteste’s main insight, building on Aristotle, was to develop his model of ‘induction’ and systematic testing. He said that the first stage of an inquiry was to break up the phenomenon under investigation into the principles or elements of which it was comprised–this was induction. Having isolated these principles or elements, one should recombine them systematically to build up knowledge of the phenomenon. He started with the rainbow, observing how it occurred in the sky, in the spray made by mill-wheels, by the oars of a rowing boat, by squirting water from the mouth, and by sunlight passing through a glass flask full of water. This eventually led to Theodoric of Freiburg’s idea of the refraction of light through individual spherical drops of water and in this sense is the first example of the experimental approach.44

  Grosseteste’s innovation, which initiated an interest in exactness, led in turn to a concern with measurement and this too was a profound psychological and social change, which occurred first in the West in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At the same time, the clock was invented (the 1270s). Until then, time had been seen as a flow (helped by the clepsydra, or water clock) and clocks were adjusted for the seasons, so that the twelve hours of daylight in summer were longer than the twelve hours of daylight in winter. Now clock towers began to appear in towns and villages, and workers in the field timed their hours according to the bell that sounded the hour. In this, exactitude and efficiency were combined. At the same time that Europeans’ attitudes to time changed, so did their understanding of space, where exactitude also became increasingly possible. These combined changes are discussed in Chapter 17.

  The third scholar who helped to lay the fundamentals of the West was Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). His attempt to reconcile Christianity with Aristotle, and the classics in general, was a hugely creative and mould-breaking achievement, which is considered in more detail also in Chapter 17. Before Aquinas the world had neither meaning nor pattern except in relation to God. What we call the Thomistic revolution created, at least in principle, the possibility of a natural and secular outlook, by distinguishing, as Colin Morris puts it, ‘between the realms of nature and supernature, of nature and grace, of reason and revelation. From [Aquinas] on, objective study of the natural order was possible, as was the idea of the secular state.’ Aquinas insisted there is a natural, underlying order of things, which appeared to deny God’s power of miraculous intervention. There is, he said, a ‘natural law’, which reason can grasp.45 Reason was at last re-emerging from the shadow of revelation.

  Aquinas was a hinge figure too, in one way the culmination of a particular strand of thinking, and in other ways the start of a totally new way of looking at the world. The strand of thought of which Thomas was the culmination was first made explicit by Hugh of Saint-Victor (St Victor being an Augustinian abbey in twelfth-century Paris), who proposed that secular learning–focused on the sheer reality of the natural world–was a necessary grounding for religious contemplation. ‘Learn everything,’ was his motto, ‘later you will see that nothing is superfluous.’ From this attitude grew the medieval practice of writing summae, encyclopaedic treatises aimed at synthesising all knowledge. Hugh wrote the first summa and Aquinas, arguably, the best. This attitude was also helped by Abelard’s Sic et Non (Yes and No), a compilation of apparently contradictory statements by religious authorities. Though ostensibly negative in approach, its positive side was to draw attention to the fact that logical argument, by questioning contradictions and exploring syllogisms, can investigate beneath the apparent surface of knowledge.46

  The recovery of the classics could not help but be influential, even though that recovery was made within a context where belief in God was a given. Anselm summed up this changing attitude to the growing power of reason when he said, ‘It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.’ At much the same time, a long tussle between religious and political authorities climaxed when the University of Paris won a written charter from the pope in 1215, guaranteeing its independence in the pursuit of knowledge. It was a scholar at Paris, and Aquinas’ teacher, Albertus Magnus, who was the first medieval thinker to make a clear distinction between knowledge derived from theology and knowledge derived from science. In asserting the value of secular learning, and the need for empirical observation, Albertus set loose a change in the world, the power of which he couldn’t have begun to imagine.

  Aquinas accepted the distinction as set out by his teacher, and also agreed with Albertus in believing that Aristotle’s philosophy was the greatest achievement of human reason to be produced without the benefit of Christian inspiration. To this he added his own idea that nature, as described in part by Aristotle, was valuable because God gave it existence. This meant that philosophy was no longer a mere handmaiden of theology. ‘Human intelligence and freedom received their reality from God himself.’47 Man could only realise himself by being free to pursue knowledge wherever it led. He should not fear or condemn the search, as so many seemed to, said Aquinas, because God had designed everything, and secular knowledge could only reveal this design more closely–and therefore help man to know God more intimately. ‘By expanding his own knowledge, man was becoming more like God.’48

  Thomas’ strong belief that faith and reason could be united at first drew condemnation from the church, and then support. But, like Albertus before him, he too had unleashed more than he knew. Other contemporaries at Paris, Siger of Brabant, for example, argued that philosophy and faith could not be reconciled, that in fact they contradicted one another and so, if this were the case, ‘the realm of reason and science must be in some sense outside the sphere of theology’.49 For a time, this was ‘resolved’ (if that is the word) by positing a ‘double truth’ universe. The church refused to accept this situation and communication was severed between traditional theologians and the scientific thinkers. But it was
too late. Even now, the independent-minded scientist/philosophers still had faith, but they were more than ever concerned to follow reason wherever it led.

  Aquinas had partially succeeded in amalgamating Aristotle and Christianity. This made Aristotle accepted where he hadn’t been accepted before. In Christianising Aristotle, Aquinas eventually succeeded in Aristotelianising Christianity. A secular way of thinking was introduced into the world, which would eventually change man’s understanding for all time. It is essentially the dominant theme underlying the next section of this book.

  The scientific method, exact measurement, an efficient, intellectually unified, secular world: any definition of Western modernity would certainly include these as fundamental elements. Less tangible than all that, but more intriguing, is the notion that a basic psychological change, a certain form of individuality, was born in Europe some time between 1050 and 1200, and that this accounts most of all for the Western mentality and its surge ahead in all the matters reported above. If individuality is really what counts, then all the other advances–in science, in scholarship, in exactness, in the secular life, etc.–may be symptoms rather than causes.