Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Even more important, however, was the emergence of logic, through the rediscovery of the translations of Aristotle. ‘Beginning in the 1150s, Latin editions of the rediscovered writings began to flood the libraries of Europe’s scholars.’ In the twelfth century, logic evolved as the most important discipline in the trivium one cleric went so far as to say that reason was what ‘did honour to mankind’. (The only Platonic work known then was the Timaeus and that not fully.)13 Logic, it was felt, would make it possible for man to gradually penetrate God’s mysteries. ‘Since it was believed that the principle of all ideas sprang from God veiled and concealed under terms that were obscure and sometimes even contradictory, it was incumbent on logical reasoning to dispel the clouds of confusion and clarify the contradictions. Students must take words as their basis and discover their deepest meaning.’14 At the root of logic lay doubt, because in doubt began dialectical reasoning argument, debate, persuasion (which was another basis of science). ‘We seek through doubt,’ said Abelard, ‘and by seeking we perceive the truth.’ One of the chief features of the ‘old logic’ was ‘universals’, the essentially Platonic idea that there is an ideal form of everything, ‘chairs’ or ‘horses’, say, the underlying principle being that, if these could be arranged in a systematic (logical) order, God’s purpose would be understood. The ‘new’ logic, put forward in the first place by Peter Abelard in Paris (who is described by Anders Piltz, in his study of medieval learning, as ‘the first academic’), argued that many episodes in the Bible were contrary to reason and, therefore, could not be just accepted, but should be questioned. The real way of thinking, he insisted, should reflect Aristotle’s writings and be based on syllogisms, such as: all a’s are b; c is an a; therefore c is ab. Abelard’s book Sic et Non epitomised this approach by identifying and then comparing contradictory passages in the Bible with the aim of reconciling them where he could. Alongside Abelard, Peter of Poitiers said ‘Although certainty exists, nonetheless it is our duty to doubt the articles of faith, and to seek, and discuss.’ John of Salisbury, an Englishman who had studied in numerous places, including Paris, placed logic central to understanding: ‘It was the mind which, by means of the ratio [reason], went beyond the experience of the senses and made it intelligible, then, by means of the intellectus, related things to their divine cause and comprehended the order of creation, and ultimately arrived at true knowledge, sapentia.’15 For us twelfth centuries it was far more colourful and contentious, a stage in the advent of doubt, with the questioning of authority, and offering the chance to approach God in a new way.

  But the cathedrals were themselves part of a larger change in society which encouraged not just the creation of schools but also their evolution into what we call universities. The cathedrals, as we have seen, were urban entities and the towns were places where practical as well as religious knowledge was needed. Mathematics, for example, which had been much expanded thanks to the translations of Arabic books, which were themselves versions of Greek and Hindu works, was central to the very building of the cathedrals. Flying buttresses, invented in Paris in the twelfth century, owed their conception at least in part to the science of numbers. The new towns, where more and more people lived in close proximity, also had a great need of lawyers and of doctors, and these needs also stimulated the evolution of the schools into universities.16

  Let us remind ourselves of the concept of the liberal arts.17 For the Greeks the notion of liberal studies was that of an educational system suitable for the free citizen, though there were at least two versions Plato’s, which took a philosophical and metaphysical view of education designed to imprint moral and intellectual excellence, and Isocrates’ version, which advocated a curriculum more suited to practical engagement with community and political life. This was refined first by the Romans, in particular Varro who, in the first century BC, compiled his De Novem Disciplinis, which identified nine disciplines grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music, medicine and architecture. As was described in Chapter 11, in the early fifth century, Martianus Capella compiled his strangely-entitled The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, which reduced Varro’s nine liberal arts by two, making medicine and architecture the first professions to become organised separately.18 Capella’s classification was widely adopted and over the intervening centuries it became customary to divide the seven liberal arts into the trivium grammar, logic and rhetoric and the more advanced quadrivium arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Before 1000, according to Alan Cobban, in his history of medieval universities, quadrivium subjects were relatively neglected, as they were deemed less important for the training of a body of literate clergy. ‘The need to master enough arithmetical skill to calculate the dates of movable church festivals was often the sum total of quadrivium expertise absorbed by the average student priest.’19 Education was mainly a literary experience which did not challenge the trainee-priest’s analytic abilities (writing was taught on wax tablets).20 The transition from grammar and rhetoric to logic as the main intellectual discipline was a major intellectual metamorphosis and marked the break from ‘an education system based upon the cumulative knowledge and thought patterns of the past to one deriving its strength from a forward-looking spirit of creative inquiry’. The idea that the liberal arts be regarded as a prelude to higher studies, and especially to theology, may strike us today as odd such subjects had a tangential bearing on theology at best.21 But it was part of the Greek legacy of liberal studies, reflecting the idea that the mind should be enlarged over a range of disciplines as a necessary preparation for a full life in a responsible democracy. The main difference was that theology became the crowning glory in the hierarchy of medieval education, a position which philosophy had occupied in the Greek world.

  Another aspect of that legacy was the buoyant optimism in the schools. All the masters shared the view that man, even in his fallen state, was ‘capable of the fullest intellectual and spiritual enlargement’, that the universe was ordered and therefore accessible to rational inquiry, and that man’s mastery of his environment through his intellect, cumulative knowledge and experience was possible.22 Outside the realm of revealed truth, it was believed, man’s capacity for knowledge and understanding was almost unlimited. This, as Alan Cobban puts it, was a major reorientation in the thinking of western Europe. It was shown clearly by the encounter between the Italian Anselmo, better known as St Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the monk Gaunilo. Anselm had sought proof–logical proof for the existence of God in the fact that, because we can imagine a perfect being, that perfect being God–must exist. Otherwise, if it did not, there would be a being more perfect than the one we have conceived. This seems mere wordplay to us, as it did to Gaunilo, who dryly pointed out that we can imagine an island more perfect than any that exists, but that doesn’t mean that the island actually exists. The point about the exchange, however, is that Anselm, a senior figure compared to the monk, published Gaunilo’s response, together with his own rejoinder. The debate assumed that one could talk about God in terms that were ‘reasonable’, that God could be treated like anything else, and that rank had little to do with authority.23 This was new.

  The four areas of inquiry which propelled the early universities were medicine, law, science and mathematics. Medicine and law became very popular in the High Middle Ages.24 They were practical, offering well-paid careers with a stable position in the community. The ars dictaminis or dictamen, the art of composing letters and formal documents, became a specialised offshoot of law and rhetoric, and together the applied subjects of law, medicine and dictamen soon became the natural enemies of literary humanism, since they reflected the practical side of the emergent universities, in strong contrast to the quiet and disengaged nature of the study of classical antiquity. Thus the earliest universities were not planned their vocational nature arose out of practical needs. So far as science was concerned, however, the universities had an uncertain birth owing to persistent clerical distrust of pagan a
uthors. For example, Peter Comestor, chancellor of Notre Dame of Paris from 1164, preached that the classical authors might be useful background in the study of scripture but that many of their ‘outpourings’ were to be avoided. Around 1200, Alexander of Villedieu vilified the cathedral school of Orléans, an important centre of humanist studies before the mid-thirteenth century, dismissing it as a ‘pestiferous chair of learning…spreading contagion among the multitude’. He insisted that ‘nothing should be read which is contrary to the scriptures’.25

  This attitude spread and in the early years of the thirteenth century, Aristotle himself came under attack. From the early studies of logic, Aristotle’s books had been translated in growing numbers, especially his ‘nature’ books, about science, until his works formed what amounted to a complete philosophy and synthesis, compiled without any input from Christian beliefs. One historian says that the recovery of Aristotle’s works was a‘turning point in the history of Western thought paralleled only by the later impact of Newtonian science and Darwinism’.26 At the University of Paris, certainly, the most intellectually exciting and troublesome community was the liberal arts faculty, where ‘philosophy was king’, where ‘the masters of arts were the permanent element of intellectual unrest and the driving force of intellectual revolutions’.27 In fact, the liberal arts faculty almost became a university within a university, and as Aristotle’s works became available in Latin, the masters modified the curriculum to take account of this. Integrating the Philosopher’s works on logic was one thing, but problems soon loomed with his books on ‘nature’. In 1210 a local synod of bishops in Paris commanded that all study of Aristotle at Paris be halted. He was to be read neither privately nor taught publicly, ‘under penalty of excommunication’.28 The pope supported this ban, in 1231 and again in 1263, and the bishop of Paris added his voice once more in 1277. Later, private study was allowed but not public instruction. The ban that the church tried to exercise over Aristotle was yet another aspect of thought-control to add to those described in the previous chapter.

  Other techniques of control were added. In 1231 it became a punishable offence to discuss scientific subjects in vernacular languages the church did not want ordinary people exposed to such ideas. But no ban could be total after all, for some people banning works only made them more alluring. And Aristotle was not banned elsewhere Toulouse, for example, or Oxford. The ban began to break down more comprehensively after 1242 when Albertus Teutonicus, remembered today as Albertus Magnus–Albert the Great became the first German to occupy a chair of theology at Paris. A strong opponent of heresy, Albert was nonetheless very interested in Aristotle’s ideas he thought the whole corpus should be available across Europe. For Albert, there were three ways to the truth: scriptural interpretation, logical reasoning and empirical experience. The latter two were of course both Aristotelian approaches, but Albert went one further: while allowing the Creator a role in the creation of the universe, he insisted that research (as we would say) into natural processes should be unhindered by theological considerations because, so far as these natural processes were concerned, ‘only experience provides certainty’.29 ‘The proper concern of natural science is not what God could do if he wished, but what he has done; that is, what happens in the world “according to the inherent causes of nature”.’30 Aristotle had said that ‘to know is to understand the causes of things’.31

  We see here, in Albertus, the first glimmerings of the separation of different ways of thinking. Albertus had a strong faith and it was that strong faith which allowed him to consider what Aristotle could add to orthodox belief to enrich understanding.

  Others, however, were more radical. For example, one very controversial effect of this devotion to Aristotle was the so-called ‘double truth’ theory of the two scholars Siger of Brabant (d. 1284) and the Dane Bo, or in Latin, Boethius of Dacia. The ban on Aristotle at Paris University did not apply elsewhere in the city and this enabled the development of philosophy based on the Greek master’s ideas. The most important innovation of these two men, which anticipated the great divide which was to come, was to consider the possibility–radical for the time, for any time that one thing could be true in philosophy, and another in theology. Boethius in particular argued that the philosopher should enjoy the fruits of his intelligence, to explore the world of nature this world but that these skills did not entitle him to explore, say, the origin of the world, or the beginning of time, or the mystery of creation, how something can come from nothing. These matters, like what happens at the Day of Judgement, matters of revelation, not reason, are therefore outside the realm of the philosopher there are two sets of truth, those of the natural philosopher and those of the theologian. As with Albertus, this was a distinction between two areas of thought that represents a stage in the development of ideas about a secular world.

  Many in the church, however, found Siger even more troublesome, and this was because he seems to have relished the more disconcerting aspects of Aristotle’s teaching: that the world and the human race are eternal, that the behaviour of objects is governed by their nature, that free will is limited by necessity, that all humans share a single ‘intellective principle’. In his teaching he refused to spell out the implications of all this but it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines: no Creation, no Adam, no Last Judgement, no Divine Providence, no Incarnation, Atonement or Resurrection.32 This, of course, is what the orthodox clerics were worried about, this is why Aristotle had been banned, for where it might lead. In particular, Giovanni di Fidenza, who took the name Bonaventure and was another professor of theology at Paris, was disturbed by Aristotle’s insistence that, although God is the first cause of everything that exists, natural beings have their own causes and effects, which operate without divine intervention.33 To Bonaventure, and many like him, such reasoning pointed to a Godless world and he therefore tried to amend Aristotle so that, for example, when a tree’s leaves turned brown, this was, he said, not due to some natural process but due instead to certain qualities built into the tree by God.

  As these paragraphs show, the mid-thirteenth century was the high point of scholastic theology at Paris University, the high point of scholastic thinking in many ways, and it culminated in the great syntheses of Thomas Aquinas, the man who has been called ‘the most powerful western thinker between Augustine and Newton’. Aquinas’ great contribution was his attempt to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity, though as we shall see throughout the rest of this book, his Aristotelianisation of Christianity was more influential than his Christianisation of Aristotle. Born between Rome and Naples, the son of a count, Aquinas was a big man, deliberate in his movements and his thoughts and, at least to begin with, easy to underestimate. But Albertus, his teacher and master, appreciated his gifts and the big man did not disappoint.

  In Aquinas’ view, there were only three truths that could not be proved by natural reason and therefore must be accepted. These were the creation of the universe, the nature of the Trinity, and Jesus’ role in salvation.34 Beyond this, and more controversially and more influentially, Aquinas took Aristotle’s side against Augustine. Traditionally, as Augustine had argued, because of the Fall men and women are born to suffer in this world, and our only real hope for happiness is in heaven. Aristotle, on the other hand, had argued that this world, this life, offers countless opportunities for joy and happiness, ‘the most lasting and reliable of which is the joy of using our reason to learn and understand’.35 Thomas amended this to say that we can use our reason to have a ‘foretaste’ of the afterlife with relative happiness right here on earth. The natural world, he said, ‘is not in any respect evil’.36 How, he asked, could the body be evil when God had sanctified it with the incarnation of His Son? Moreover, Thomas thought that the body and soul were intimately linked. The soul was not a ghost in the machine, but took its form from the body as, say, a metal sculpture takes its form from the mould. This last was perhaps the most mystical aspect of his thinking.

 
In his day Aquinas was not seen as a radical, like Siger. For many, however, that made him more dangerous, not less. His was the reasonable face of medieval Aristotelianism, in particular his idea that this life was more important–because capable of more enjoyment than traditionalists allowed and because Aristotle had so much to say about how this life might be enjoyed. By implication Aquinas downplayed the relative importance of the afterlife and clearly, over the ensuing decades and centuries, that had a big effect on the weakening authority of the church.

  To some extent, the universities were anticipated by the philosophical schools of Athens, dating from the fourth century BC, by the law school of Beirut, which flourished between the third and sixth centuries, and by the imperial university of Constantinople, founded in 425 and continuing intermittently until 1453. Medieval scholars were aware of these institutions and Alan Cobban says there was a notion of the translatio studii, which appeared in the Carolingian age, and which held that the centre of learning had passed from Athens, to Rome, to Constantinople, to Paris. ‘In this scheme the new universities were also the embodiment of the studium, one of three great powers by which Christian society was directed, the others being the spiritual (Sacerdotium) and the temporal (Imperium).’37

  The modern term ‘university’ appears to have been introduced accidentally, taken from the Latin universitas. But in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this word was used ‘to denote any aggregate or body of persons with common interests and independent legal status’ it could be a craft guild or a municipal congregation, often with dress requirements.38 It was not until the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that universitas came to be used in the sense we understand it today. Instead, the equivalent medieval term was studium generale. Studium meant a school with facilities for study, whereas generale referred to the ability of the school to attract students from beyond the local region. The term was first used in 1237 and the first papal document to employ the phrase dates from 1244 or 1245, in connection with the founding of the University of Rome.39 Other terms in use were studium universale, studium solemne and studium commune but by the fourteenth century studium generale was used in connection with Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Padua, Naples, Valencia and Toulouse. The Siete Partidas (12561263), the legislative code of Alfonso X of Castile, lays out the legal basis of the early studium generale. Schools must have masters in each of the seven arts, for canon and civil law, and authority for the school could be granted only by the pope, the emperor or the king.40 There was no mention of what later came to be regarded as a further requirement: faculties of theology, law and medicine as postgraduate centres of excellence. At the turn of the thirteenth century only Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Salerno offered consistent teaching in the higher disciplines.41