THE UNIVERSITIES, ARISTOTLE, AND THE MENDICANTS
Intellectually, the thirteenth century in western Europe is marked by
three closely connected phenomena: the growth of Universities, the
discovery and appropriation of Aristotle, and the activities of Dominicans
and Franciscans. These movements were universal, in that the range of none
of them was limited by racial or provincial boundaries. Yet a line may
still be drawn between Italy, where law and medicine were cultivated, and
the North, where theology with logic and metaphysics were supreme.
Absorption in these subjects produced a common likeness in the
intellectual processes of men in France, England, and Germany, whose
writings were to be no longer markedly affected by racial idiosyncrasies.
This was true of the logical controversy regarding universals, so
prominent in the first part of the twelfth century. It was very true of
the great intellectual movement of the later twelfth and the thirteenth
centuries, to wit, the coming of Aristotle to dominance, in spite of the
counter-currents of Platonic Augustinianism.
The men who followed the new knowledge had slight regard for ties of home,
and travelled eagerly in search of learning. So, even as from far and wide
those who could study Roman law came to Bologna, the study of theology and
all that philosophy included drew men to Paris. Thither came the
keen-minded from Italy and from England; from the Low Countries and from
Germany; and from the many very different regions now covered by the name
of France. Wherever born and of whatever race, the devotees of philosophy
and theology at some period of their career reached Paris, learned and
taught there, and were affected by the universalizing influence of an
international aggregate of scholarship. So had it been with Breton
Abaelard, with German Hugo, and with Lombard Peter; so with English John,
hight of Salisbury. And in the following times of culmination, Albertus
Magnus comes in his maturity from Germany; and his marvellous pupil
Thomas, born of noble Norman stock in southern Italy, follows his master,
eventually to Paris. So Bonaventura of lowly mid-Italian birth likewise
learns and teaches there; and that unique Englishman, Roger Bacon, and
after him Duns Scotus. These few greatest names symbolize the centralizing
of thought in the crowded and huddled lecture-rooms of the City on the
Seine.
The origins of the great mediaeval Universities can scarcely be
accommodated to simple statement. Their history is frequently obscure, and
always intricate; and the selection of a specific date or factor as
determining the inception, or distinctive development, of these mediaeval
creations is likely to be but arbitrary. They had no antique prototype:
nothing either in Athens or Rome ever resembled these corporations of
masters and students, with their authoritative privileges, their fixed
curriculum, and their grades of formally certified attainment. Even the
Alexandria of the Ptolemies, with all the pedantry of its learned
litterateurs and their minute study of the past, has nothing to offer like
the scholastic obsequiousness of the mediaeval University, which sought to
set upon one throne the antique philosophy and the Christian revelation,
that it might with one and the same genuflection bow down before them
both. It behoves us to advert to the conditions influencing the growth of
Universities, and give a little space to those which were chief among
them.
The energetic human advance distinguishing the twelfth century in western
Europe exhibits among its most obvious phenomena an increased mobility in
all classes of society, and a tendency to gather into larger communities
and form strong corporate associations for profit or protection. New towns
came into being, and old ones grew apace. Some of them in the north of
Europe wrested their freedom from feudal lords; and both in the north and
south, municipalities attained a more complex organization, while within
them groups of men with common interests formed themselves into powerful
guilds. As strangers of all kinds--merchants, craftsmen, students--came
and went, their need of protection became pressing, and was met in various
ways.
No kind of men were more quickly touched by the new mobility than the
thousands of youthful learners who desired to extend their knowledge, or,
in some definite field, perfect their education. In the eleventh century,
such would commonly have sought a monastery, near or far. In the twelfth
and then in the thirteenth, they followed the human currents to the
cities, where knowledge flourished as well as trade, and tolerable
accommodation might be had for teachers and students. Certain towns, some
for more, some for less, obvious reasons, became homes of study. Bologna,
Paris, Oxford are the chief examples. Irnerius, famed as the founder of
the systematic study of the Roman law, and Gratian, the equally famous
orderer of the Canon law, taught or wrote at Bologna when the twelfth
century was young. Their fame drew crowds of laymen and ecclesiastics, who
desired to equip themselves for advancement through the business of the
law, civil or ecclesiastical. At the same time, hundreds, which grew to
thousands, were attracted to the Paris schools--the school of Notre Dame,
where William of Champeaux held forth; the school of St. Victor, where he
afterwards established himself, and where Hugo taught; and the school of
St. Geneviève, where Abaelard lectured on dialectic and theology. These
were palpable gatherings together of material for a University. What first
brought masters and students to Oxford a few decades later is not so
clear. But Oxford had been an important town long before a University
lodged itself there.
In the twelfth century, citizenship scarcely protected one beyond the city
walls. A man carried but little safety with him. Only an insignificant
fraction of the students at Bologna, and of both masters and students at
Paris and Oxford, were citizens of those towns. The rest had come from
everywhere. Paris and Bologna held an utterly cosmopolitan, international,
concourse of scholar-folk. And these scholars, turbulent enough
themselves, and dwelling in a turbulent foreign city, needed affiliation
there, and protection and support. Organization was an obvious necessity,
and if possible the erection of a _civitas_ within a _civitas_, a
University within a none too friendly town. This was the primal situation,
and the primal need. Through somewhat different processes, and under
different circumstances, these exigencies evoked a University in Bologna,
Paris, and Oxford.[523]
In Italy, where the instincts of ancient Rome never were extinguished,
where some urban life maintained itself through the early helpless
mediaeval centuries, where during the same period an infantile humanism
did not cease to stammer; where “grammar” was studied and taught by
laymen, and the “ars dictaminis” practised men in the forms of legal
instruments, it was but natural that the new intellectual energies of the
twelfth century should address themselves to the study of the Roman law,
which, although debased and barbarized, had never passed into desuetude.
And inasmuch as abstract theology did not attract the Italian temperament
or meet the conditions of papal politics in Italy, it was likewise natural
that ecclesiastical energies should be directed to the equally useful and
closely related canon law. Such studies with their practical ends could
best be prosecuted at some civic centre. In the first part of the twelfth
century, Irnerius lectured at Bologna upon the civil law; a generation
later, Gratian published his _Decretum_ there. The specific reasons
inducing the former to open his lectures in that city are not known; but a
large and thrifty town set at the meeting of the great roads from central
Italy to the north and east, was an admirable place for a civil doctor and
his audience, as the event proved. Gratian was a monk in a Bologna
convent, and may have listened to Irnerius. The publication of his
_Decretum_ from Bologna, by that time (cir. 1142) famous for
jurisprudence, lent authority to this work, whose universal recognition
was to enhance in turn Bologna’s reputation.
From the time of this inception of juristic studies, the talents of the
doctors, and the city’s fame, drew a prodigious concourse of students from
all the lands of western Europe. The Doctors of the Civil and Canon Laws
organized themselves into one, and subsequently into two, Colleges.
Apparently they had become an efficient association by the third quarter
of the twelfth century. But the University of Bologna was to be
constituted _par excellence_, not of one or more colleges of doctors, but
of societies of students. The persons who came for legal instruction were
not boys getting their first education in the Arts. They were men studying
a profession, and among them were many individuals of wealth and
consequence, holding perhaps civil or ecclesiastic office in the places
whence they came. The vast majority had this in common, that they were
foreigners, with no civil rights in Bologna. It behoved them to organize
for their protection and mutual support, and for the furtherance of the
purposes for which they had come. That a body of men in a foreign city
should live under the law of their own home, or the law of their own
making, did not appear extraordinary in the twelfth century. It was not so
long since the principle that men carried the law of their home with them,
had been widely recognized, and in all countries the clergy still lived
under the law of the Church. The gains accruing from the presence of a
great number of foreign students might induce the authorities of Bologna
to permit them to organize as student guilds, and regulate their affairs
by rules of their own, even as was done by other guilds in most Italian
cities. At Bologna the power of Guelf and Ghibeline clubs, and of
craftsmen’s guilds, rivalled that of the city magistrates.
There is some indirect evidence that these students first divided
themselves into four _Nationes_. If so, the arrangement did not last. For
by the middle of the thirteenth century they are found organized in two
_Universitates_, or corporations, a _Universitas Citramontanorum_ and a
_Universitas Ultramontanorum_; each under its own _Rector_. These two
corporations of foreign students constituted the University. The
Professors did not belong to them, and therefore were not members of the
University. Indeed they fought against the recognition of this University
of students, asserting that the students were but their pupils. But the
students prevailed, strong in their numbers, and in the weapon which they
did not hesitate to use, that of migration to another city, which cut off
the incomes of the Professors and diminished the repute and revenue of
Bologna. So great became the power of the student body, that it brought
the Professors to complete subjection, paying them their salaries,
regulating the time and mode of lecturing, and compelling them to swear
obedience to the Rectors. The Professors protested, but submitted. To make
good its domination over them, and its independence as against the city,
the student University migrated to Arezzo in 1215 and to Padua in
1222.[524]
In origin as well as organization, the University of Paris differed from
Bologna. It was the direct successor of the cathedral school of Notre
Dame. This had risen to prominence under William of Champeaux. But
Abaelard drew to Paris thousands of students for William’s hundreds (or at
least hundreds for William’s tens); and Abaelard at the height of his
popularity taught at the school of St. Geneviève, across the Seine.
Therefore this school also, although fading out after Abaelard’s time,
should be regarded as a causal predecessor of the Paris University. So,
for that matter, should the neighbouring school of St. Victor, founded by
the discomfited William; for its reputation under Hugo and Richard drew
devout students from near and far, and augmented the scholastic fame of
Paris.
It was both the privilege and duty of the Chancellor of Notre Dame to
license competent Masters to open schools near the cathedral. In the
course of time, these Masters formed an Association, and assumed the right
to admit to their Society the licentiates of the Chancellor, to wit, the
new Masters who were about to begin to teach. In the decades following
Abaelard’s death, the Masters who lectured in the vicinity of Notre Dame
increased in number. They spread with their schools beyond the island, and
taught in houses on the bridges. They were Masters, that is, teachers, in
the Arts. As the twelfth century gave way to the thirteenth, interest in
the Arts waned before the absorbing passion for metaphysical theology.
This was a higher branch of study, for which the Arts had come to be
looked on as a preparation. So the scholars of the schools of Arts became
impatient to graduate, that is, to reach the grade of Master, in order to
pass on to the higher study of theology. A result was that the course of
study in the Arts was shortened, while Masters multiplied in number. Their
Society seems to have become a definite and formal corporate body or
guild, not later than the year 1175. Herein was the beginning of the Paris
University. It had become a _studium generale_, like Bologna, because
there were many Masters, and students from everywhere were admitted to
study in their schools.
Gradually the University came to full corporate existence. From about
1210, written statutes exist, passed by the Society of Masters; at the
same date a Bull of Innocent III. recognizes the Society as a Corporation.
Then began a long struggle for supremacy, between the Masters and the
Chancellor: it was the Chancellor’s function to grant the licence to
become a Master; but it was the privilege of the Society to admit the
licentiate to membership. The action of both being thus requisite, time
alone could tell with whom the control eventually should rest. Was the
self-governing University to prevail, or the Chancellor of the Cathedral?
The former won the victory.
The Masters in Arts constituted _par excellence_ the University, because
they far outnumbered the Masters in the upper Faculties of Theology, Law,
and Medicine. They were the dominant body; what they decided on, the other
Faculties acquiesced in. These Masters in Arts, besides being numerous,
were young, not older than the law students at Bologna. With their still
younger students,[525] they made the bulk of the entire University, and
were the persons who most needed protection in their lawful or unlawful
conduct. At some indeterminate period they divided themselves into the
four _Nationes_, French, Normans, Picards, and English. They voted by
_Nationes_ in their meetings; but from a period apparently as early as
their organization, a Rector was elected for all four _Nationes_, and not
one Rector for each. There were, however, occasional schisms or failures
to agree. It was to be the fortune of the Rector thus elected to supplant
the Chancellor of the Cathedral as the real head of the University.
The vastly greater number of the Masters in Arts were actually _students_
in the higher Faculties of Theology, Law,[526] or Medicine, for which
graduation in the Arts was the ordinary prerequisite. The Masters or
Doctors of these three higher Faculties, at least from the year 1213,
determined the qualifications of candidates in their departments.
Nevertheless the Rector of the Faculty of Arts continued his advance
toward the headship of the whole University. The oath taken by the
Bachelors in the Arts, of obedience to that Faculty and its Rector, was
strengthened in 1256, so as to bind the oath-taker so long as he should
continue a member of the University.
The University had not obtained its privileges without insistence, nor
without the protest of action as well as word. Its first charter of
privileges from the king was granted in 1200, upon its protests against
the conduct of the Provost of Paris in attacking riotous students. Next,
in combating the jurisdiction of the Chancellor, it obtained privileges
from the Pope; and in 1229, upon failure to obtain redress for an attack
from the Provost’s soldiers, ordered by the queen, Blanche of Castile, the
University dispersed. Thus it resorted to the weapon by which the
University of Bologna had won the confirmation of its rights. In the year
1231 the great Papal Bull, _Parens scientiarum_, finally confirmed the
Paris University in its contentions and demands: the right to suspend
lectures was sanctioned, whenever satisfaction for outrage had been
refused for fifteen days; likewise the authority of the University to
make statutes, and expel members for a breach of them. The Chancellor of
Notre Dame and the Bishop of Paris were both constrained by the same Bull.
A different struggle still awaited the University, in which it was its
good fortune not to be altogether successful; for it was contending
against instruments of intellectual and spiritual renovation, to wit, the
Mendicant Orders. The details are difficult to unravel at this distance of
time. But the Dominicans and Franciscans, in the lifetime of their
founders, established themselves in Paris, and opened schools of theology.
Their Professors were licensed by the Chancellor, and yet seem to have
been unwilling to fall in with the customs of the University, and, for
example, cease from teaching and disperse, when it saw fit to do so. The
doctors of the theological Faculty became suspicious, and opposed the
admission of Mendicants to the theological Faculty. The struggle lasted
thirty years, until the Dominicans obtained two chairs in that Faculty,
and the Franciscans perhaps the same number, on terms which looked like a
victory for the Orders, but in fact represented a compromise; for the
Mendicant doctors in the end apparently submitted to the statutes of the
University.[527]
The origin of Oxford University was different, and one may say more
adventitious than that of Paris or Bologna. For Oxford was not the capital
of a kingdom, nor is it known to have been an ancient seat of learning.
The city was not even a bishop’s seat, a fact which had a marked effect
upon the constitution of the University. The old town lay at the edge of
Essex and Mercia, and its position early gave it importance politically,
or rather strategically, and as a place of trade. How or whence came the
nucleus of Masters and students that should grow into a University is
unknown. An interesting hypothesis[528] is that it was a colony from
Paris, shaken off by some academic or political disturbance. This surmise
has been connected with the year 1167. Some evidence exists of a school
having existed there before. Next comes a distinct statement from the year
1185, of the reading of a book before the Masters and students.[529]
After this date the references multiply. In 1209, one has a veritable
“dispersion,” in protest against the hanging of some scholars. A charter
from the papal legate in 1214 accords certain privileges, among others
that a clerk arrested by the town should be surrendered on demand of the
Bishop of Lincoln[530] or the Archdeacon, or the Chancellor, whom the
Bishop shall set over the scholars. This document points to the beginning
of the chancellorship. The title probably was copied from Paris; but in
Oxford the office was to be totally different. The Paris Chancellor was
primarily a functionary of a great cathedral, who naturally maintained its
prerogatives against the encroachments of university privilege. But at
Oxford there was no cathedral; the Chancellor was the head of the
University, probably chosen from its Masters, and had chiefly its
interests at heart.
Making allowance for this important difference in the Chancellor’s office,
the development of the University closely resembled that of Paris. Its
first extant statute, of the year 1252, prescribes that no one shall be
licensed in Theology who has not previously graduated in the Arts. To the
same year belongs a settlement of disputes between the Irish and northern
scholars. The former were included in the _Australes_ or southerners, one
of the two _Nationes_ composing the Faculty of Arts. The _Australes_
included the natives of Ireland, Wales, and England south of the Trent;
the other _Natio_, the _Boreales_, embraced the English and Scotch coming
from north of that river. But the division into _Nationes_ was less
important than in the cosmopolitan University of Paris, and soon ceased to
exist. The Faculty of Arts, however, continued even more dominant than at
Paris. There was no serious quarrel with the Mendicant Orders, who
established themselves at Oxford--the Dominicans in 1221, and the
Franciscans three years later.
The curriculum of studies appears much the same at both Universities, and,
as followed in the middle of the thirteenth century, may be thus
summarized. For the lower degree of Bachelor of Arts, four or five years
were required; and three or four years more for the Master’s privileges.
The course of study embraced grammar (Priscian), also rhetoric, and in
logic the entire _Organon_ of Aristotle, preceded by Porphyry’s _Isagoge_,
and with the _Sex principia_ of Gilbert de la Porrée added to the course.
The mathematical branches of the Quadrivium also were required:
arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. And finally a goodly part of
the substantial philosophy of Aristotle was studied, with considerable
choice permitted to the student in his selection from the works of the
philosopher. At Oxford he might choose between the _Physics_ or the _De
coelo et mundo_, or the _De anima_ or the _De animalibus_. The
_Metaphysics_ and _Ethics_ or _Politics_ were also required before the
Bachelor could be licensed as a Master.
In Theology the course of study was extremely lengthy, especially at
Paris, where eight years made the minimum, and the degree of Doctor was
not given before the candidate had reached the age of thirty-five. The
chief subjects were Scripture and the _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard.
Besides which, the candidate had to approve himself in sermons and
disputations. The latter might amount to a trial of nerve and endurance,
as well as proficiency in learning, since the candidate was expected to
_militare in scholis_, against a succession of opponents from six in the
morning till six in the evening, with but an hour’s refreshment at
noon.[531]
In spite of the many resemblances of Oxford to Paris in organization and
curriculum, the intellectual tendencies of the two Universities were not
altogether similar. At Paris, speculative theology, with metaphysics and
other branches of “philosophy,” regarded as its adjuncts, were of
absorbing interest. At Oxford, while the same matters were perhaps
supreme, a closer scholarship in language or philology was cultivated by
Grosseteste, and his pupils, Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. The genius of
observation was stirring there; and a natural science was coming into
being, which was not to repose solely upon the authority of ancient books,
but was to proceed by the way of observation and experiment. Yet Roger
Bacon imposed upon both his philology and his natural science a certain
ultimate purpose: that they should subserve the surer ascertainment of
divine and saving truth, and thus still remain handmaids of theology, at
least in theory.
* * * * *
The year 1200 may be taken to symbolize the middle of a period notable for
the enlargement of knowledge. If one should take the time of this increase
to extend fifty years on either side of the central point, one might say
that the student of the year 1250 stood to his intellectual ancestor of
the year 1150, as a man in the full possession and use of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ would stand toward his father who had saved up
the purchase money for the same. The most obvious cause of this was an
increasing acquaintance with the productions of the so-called Arabian
philosophy, and more especially with the works of Aristotle, first through
translations from the Arabic, and then through translations from the
Greek, which were made in order to obviate the insufficiency of the
former.
It would need a long _excursus_ to review the far from simple course of
so-called Arabian thought, philosophic and religious. It begins in the
East, and follows the setting sun. Even before the Hegira (622) the Arabs
had rubbed up against the inhabitants of Syria, Christian in name, eastern
or Hellenic in culture and proclivity. Then in a century or two, when the
first impulsion of Mohammedan conquest was spent, the works of Aristotle
and his later Greek commentators were translated into Arabic from Syrian
versions, under the encouragement of the rulers of Bagdad. The Syrian
versions, as we may imagine, were somewhat eclecticized and, more
especially, Neo-Platonized. So it was not the pure Aristotle that passed
on into Arabic philosophy, but the Aristotelian substance interpreted
through later phases of Greek and Oriental thought. Still, Aristotle was
the great name, and his system furnished the nucleus of doctrine
represented in this Peripatetic eclecticism which was to constitute, _par
excellence_, Arabic philosophy. Also Greek mathematical and medical
treatises were translated into Arabic from Syrian versions. El-Farabi (d.
950) and Avicenna (980-1036) were the chief glories of the Arabic
philosophy of Bagdad. These two gifted men were commentators upon the
works of the Stagirite, and authors of many interesting lucubrations of
their own.[532] Arabian philosophy declined in the East with Avicenna’s
death; but only to revive in Mussulman Spain. There its great
representative was Averroes, whose life filled the last three quarters of
the twelfth century. So great became his authority as an Aristotelian,
with the Scholastics, that he received the name of Commentator, _par
excellence_, even as Aristotle was _par excellence_, Philosophus. We need
not consider the ideas of these men which were their own rather than the
Stagirite’s; nor discuss the pietistic and fanatical sects among the
Mussulmans, who either sought to harmonize Aristotle with the Koran, or
disapproved of Greek philosophy. One readily perceives that in its task of
acquisition and interpretation, with some independent thinking, and still
more temperamental feeling, Arabic philosophy was the analogue of
Christian scholasticism, of which it was, so to speak, the collateral
ancestor.[533]
And in this wise. The Commentaries of Averroes, for example, were
translated into Latin; and, throughout all the mediaeval centuries, the
Commentary tended to supplant the work commented on, whether that work was
Holy Scripture or a treatise of Aristotle. By the middle of the thirteenth
century all the important works of Averroes had been translated into
Latin, and he had many followers at Paris; and before then, from the
College of Toledo, had come translations of the principal works of the
other chief Arabian philosophers. Of still greater importance for the
Christian West was the work of Jews and Christians in Spain and Provence,
in translating the Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin, sometimes
directly, and sometimes first into Hebrew and then into Latin. They
attempted a literal translation, which, however, frequently failed to give
the significance even of the Arabic version. These Arabic-Latin
translations were of primary importance for the first introduction of
Aristotle to the theologian philosophers of Christian Europe.
They were not to remain the only ones. In the twelfth century, a number of
Western scholars made excursions into the East; and the capture of
Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 enlarged their opportunities of
studying the Greek language and philosophy. Attempts at direct translation
into Latin began. One of the first translators was the sturdy Englishman,
Robert Grosseteste. He was born in Suffolk about 1175; studied at Lincoln,
then at Oxford, then at Paris, whence he returned to become Chancellor of
the University of Oxford. He was made Bishop of Lincoln in 1236, and died
seventeen years later. It was he who laid the foundation of the study of
Greek at Oxford, and Roger Bacon was his pupil. But the most important and
adequate translations were the work of two Dominicans, the Fleming,
William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant, who translated the works of
Aristotle at the instance of Thomas Aquinas, possibly all working together
at Rome, in 1263 and the years following. Aquinas recognized the
inadequacy of the older translations, and based his own Aristotelian
Commentaries upon these made by his collaborators, learned in the Greek
tongue. The joint labour of translation and commentary seems to have been
undertaken at the command of Pope Urban IV., who had renewed the former
prohibitions put upon the use of Aristotle at the Paris University, in the
older, shall we say, Averroistic versions.
If these prohibitions, which did not touch the logical treatises, were
meant to be taken absolutely, such had been far from their effect. In 1210
and again in 1215, an interdict was put upon the _naturalis philosophia_
and the _methafisica_ of the Stagirite. It was not revoked, but rather
provisionally renewed, in 1231, until those works should be properly
expurgated. A Commission was appointed which accomplished nothing; and the
old interdict still hung in the air, unrescinded, yet ignored in practice.
So Pope Urban referred to it as still effective--which it was not--in
1263. For Aristotle had been more and more thoroughly exploited in the
Paris University, and by 1255 the Faculty of Arts formally placed his
works upon the list of books to be studied and lectured upon.[534]
So the founding of Universities and the enlarged and surer knowledge
brought by a study of the works of Aristotle were factors of power in the
enormous intellectual advance which took place in the last half of the
twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century. Yet these factors
could not have operated as they did, but for the antecedent intellectual
development. Before the first half of the twelfth century had passed, the
patristic material had been mastered, along with the current notions of
antique philosophy, for the most part contained in it. Strengthened by
this discipline, men were prepared for an extension and solidifying of
their knowledge of the universe and man. Not only had they appropriated
what the available sources had to offer, but, when we think of Abaelard
and Hugo of St. Victor, we see that organic restatements had been made of
what had been acquired. Still, men really knew too little. It is very well
to exploit logic, and construct soul-satisfying schemes of cosmogonic
symbolism, in order to represent the deepest truth of the material world.
But the evident sense-realities of things are importunate. The minds even
of spiritual men may, in time, crave explanation of this side of their
consciousness. Abaelard seems to have been oblivious to natural phenomena;
Hugo recognizes them in order to elicit their spiritual meaning; and
Alanus de Insulis, a generation and more afterwards, takes a poet’s view
of Nature. Other men had a more hard-headed interest in these phenomena;
but they knew too little to attempt seriously to put them together in
some sense-rational scheme. The natural knowledge presented by the
writings of the Church Fathers was little more than foolishness; the early
schoolmen were their heirs. They observed a little for themselves; but
very little.
There is an abysmal difference in the amount of natural knowledge
exhibited by any writing of the twelfth century, and the works of Albertus
Magnus belonging say to the middle of the thirteenth. The obvious reason
of this is, that the latter had drawn upon the great volume of natural
observation and hypothesis which for the preceding five hundred years had
been actually closed to western Europe, and for five hundred years before
that had been spiritually closed, because of the ineptitude of men to read
therein. That volume was of course the encyclopaedic Natural Philosophy of
Aristotle, completed, and treated in its ultimate causal relationships, by
his Metaphysics. The Metaphysics, the First Philosophy, gave completeness
and unity to the various provinces of natural knowledge expounded in his
special treatises. For this reason, one finds in the works of Albertus a
fund of natural knowledge solid with the solidity of the earth upon which
one may plant his feet, and totally unlike the beautiful dreaming which
drew its prototypal origins from the skyey mind of Plato.
The utilization of Aristotle’s philosophy by the Englishman, Alexander of
Hales, who became a Franciscan near the year 1230, when he had already
lectured for some thirty years at Paris; its far more elaborate and
complete exposition by the very Teutonic Dominican, Albertus Magnus; and
its even closer exposition and final incorporation within the sum of
Christian doctrine, by Thomas,--this three-staged achievement is the great
mediaeval instance of return to a genuine and chief source of Greek
philosophy. These three schoolmen went back of the accounts and views of
Greek philosophy contained in the writings of the Fathers. And in so doing
they also went back of what was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boëthius
and other “transmitters.”[535]
But the achievement of these schoolmen had other import. Their work
represents the culmination of the third stage of mediaeval thought: that
of systematic and organic restatement of the substance of the patristic
and antique, with added elements; for there can be no organic restatement
which does not hold and present something from him who achieves it. The
result, attained at least by Thomas, was even more than this. Based upon
the data and assumptions of scholasticism, it was a complete and final
statement of the nature of God so far as that might be known, of the
creature world, corporeal and incorporeal, and especially of man, his
nature, his qualities, his relationship to God and final destiny. And
herein, in its completeness, it was satisfying. The human mind in seeking
explanation of the phenomena of its consciousness--presumably a reflex of
the universe without--tends to seek a unity of explanation. A unity of
explanation requires a completeness in the mental scheme of what is to be
explained. Thoughtful men in the Middle Ages craved a scheme of life
complete even in detail, which should educe life’s currents from a primal
Godhead, and project them compacted, with none left straying or pointing
nowhither, on toward universal fulfilment of His will.
Mediaeval thought had been preceded by whole views, entire schemes of
life. Greek philosophy had held only such from the time when Thales said
that water was the cause of all things. Plato’s view or scheme also was
beautiful in its ideally pyramided structure, with the Idea of the Good at
the apex. For Aristotle, knowledge was to be a syllogistic, or at least
rational and jointed, encyclopaedia, rounded, unified, complete. After the
pagan times, another whole scheme was that of Augustine, or again, that of
Gregory the Great, though barbarized and hardened. Thus as patterns for
their own thinking, mediaeval men knew only of entire schemes of thought.
Their creed was, in every sense, a symbol of a completed scheme. And no
mediaeval philosopher or theologian suspected himself of fragmentariness.
Yet, in fact, at first they did but select and compile. After a century
and more of this, they began to make organic statements of parts of
Christian doctrine. So we have Anselm’s _Proslogium_ and _Cur Deus Homo_.
Abaelard’s _Theologia_ is far more complete; and so is Hugo’s _De
sacramentis_, which offers an entire scheme, symbolical, sacramental,
Christian, of God and the world and man. Hugo’s scheme might be ideally
satisfying; but little concrete knowledge was represented in it. And when
in the generations following his death, the co-ordinated Aristotelian
encyclopaedia was brought to light and studied, then and thereafter any
whole view of the world must take account of this new volume of argument
and concrete knowledge. Alexander of Hales begins the labour of using it
in a Christian _Summa_; Albertus makes prodigious advance, at least in the
massing and preparation of the full Aristotelian material. Both try for
whole views and comprehensive results. Then Thomas, most highly favoured
in his master Albert, and gifted with a genius for acquisition and
synthetic exposition, incorporates Aristotle, and Aristotle’s whole views,
into the whole view presented by the Catholic Faith.
Thomas’s view, to be satisfying, had to be complete. It was knowledge
united and amalgamated into a scheme of salvation. But a scheme of
salvation is a chain, which can hold only in virtue of its completeness;
break one link, and it snaps; leave one rivet loose, and it may also snap.
A scheme of salvation must answer every problem put to it; a single
unanswered problem may imperil it. The problem, for example, of God’s
foreknowledge and predestination--that were indeed an open link, which
Thomas will by no means leave unwelded. Hence for us modern men also,
whose views of the universe are so shamelessly partial, leaving so much
unanswered and so much unknown, the philosophy of Thomas may be restful,
and charm by its completeness.
It is of great interest to observe the apparently unlikely agencies by
which this new volume of knowledge was made generally available. In fact,
it was the new knowledge and the demand for it that forced these agencies
to fulfil the mission of exploiting it. For they had been created for
other purposes, which they also fulfilled. Verily it _happened_ that the
chief means through which the new knowledge was gained and published were
the two new unmonastic Orders of monks, friars rather we may call them.
Francis of Assisi was born in 1182 and died in 1226; Dominic was born in
1177 and died in 1221. The Orders of Minorites and Preachers were founded
by them respectively in 1209 and 1215. Neither Order was founded to
promote secular knowledge. Francis organized his Minorites that they might
imitate the lives of Christ and His apostles, and preach repentance to the
world. Dominic founded his Order to save souls through preaching: “For our
Order is known from the beginning to have been instituted especially for
preaching and the saving of souls, and our study (_studium nostrum_)
should have as the chief object of its labour to enable us to be useful to
our neighbours’ souls (_ut proximorum animabus possimus utiles
esse_).”[536]
Within an apparent similarity of aim, each Order from the first reflected
the temper of its founder; and the temper of Francis was not that of
Dominic. For our purpose here, the difference may perhaps be symbolized by
the Dominican maxim to preach the Gospel throughout the world equally by
word and example (_verbo pariter et exemplo_); and the Franciscan maxim,
to exhort all _plus exemplo quam verbo_.[537] A generation later St
Bonaventura puts it thus: “Alii (scilicet, Praedicatores) principaliter
intendunt speculationi ... et postea unctioni. Alii (scilicet, Minores)
principaliter unctioni et postea speculationi.”[538]
It is safe to say that St Francis had no thought of secular studies; and
as for the Order of Preachers, the Constitutions of 1228 forbade the
Dominicans to study _libros gentilium and seculares scientias_. They are
to study _libros theologicos_.[539] Francis, also, recognized the
necessity of Scriptural study for those Minorites who were allowed to
preach. In these views the early Franciscans and Dominicans were not
peculiar; but rather represented the attitude of the older monastic Orders
and of the stricter secular clergy. The Gospel teaching of Christ had
nothing to do with secular knowledge--explicitly. But the first centuries
of the Church perceived that its defenders should be equipped with the
Gentile learning, into which indeed they had been born. And while Francis
was little of a theologian, and Dominic’s personality and career remain
curiously obscure, one can safely say that both founders saw the need of
sacred studies, and left no authoritative expression prohibiting their
Orders from pursuing them to the best advantage for the cause of Christ.
Yet we are not called on to suppose that either founder, in founding his
Order for a definite purpose, foresaw all the means which after his death
might be employed to attain that purpose--or some other!
The new Order cometh, the old rusteth. So has it commonly been with
Monasticism. Undoubtedly these uncloistered Orders embodied novel
principles of efficiency for the upholding of the Faith: their soldiers
marched abroad evangelizing, and did not keep within their fastnesses of
holiness. The Mendicant Orders were still young, and fresh from the
inspiration of their founders. In those years they moved men’s hearts and
drew them to the ideal which had been set for themselves. The result was,
that in the first half of the thirteenth century the greater part of
Christian religious energy girded its loins with the cords of Francis and
Dominic.
At the commencement of that century, when the Orders of Minorites and
Preachers were founded, the world of Western thought was prepared to make
its own the new Aristotelian volume of knowledge and applied reason. Once
that was opened and its contents perceived, the old
Augustinian-Neo-Platonic ways of thinking could no longer proceed with
their idealizing constructions, ignoring the pertinence of the new data
and their possible application to such presentations of Christian doctrine
as Hugo’s _De sacramentis_ or the Lombard’s _Sentences_. The new
knowledge, with its methods, was of such insistent import, that it had at
once to be considered, and either invalidated by argument, or accepted,
and perhaps corrected, and then accommodated within an enlarged Christian
Philosophy.
The spiritual force animating a new religious movement attracts the
intellectual energies of the period, and furnishes them a new reality of
purpose. This was true of early Christianity, and likewise true of the
fresh religious impulse which proceeded from Francis’s energy of love and
the organizing zeal of Dominic. From the very years of their foundation,
1209 and 1215, the rapid increase of the two Orders realized their
founders’ visions of multitudes hurrying from among all nations to become
Minorites or Preachers. And more and more their numbers were recruited
from among the clergy. The lay members, important in the first years of
Francis’s labours, were soon wellnigh submerged by the clericals; and the
educated or learned element became predominant in the Franciscan Order as
it was from the first in the Dominican.
Consider for an instant the spread of the former. In 1216, Cardinal
Jacques of Vitry finds the Minorites in Lombardy, Tuscany, Apulia, and
Sicily. The next year five thousand are reported to have assembled at the
general meeting of the Order. Two years later Francis proceeds to carry
out his plan of world-conquest by apportioning the Christian countries,
and sending the brethren into France, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and
throughout Italy.[540] It was a period when in the midst of general
ignorance on the part of the clergy as well as laity, Universities
(_generalia studia_) were rising in Italy, France, and England. The popes,
Innocent III. (died 1216), Honorius III. (died 1221), and Gregory IX.
(died 1241), were seeking to raise the education and even the learning of
the Church. Their efforts found in the zeal of the Mendicants a ready
response which was not forthcoming from the secular clergy. The Mendicants
were zealous for the Faith, and loyal liegemen of the popes, who were
their sustainers and the guarantors of their freedom from local
ecclesiastical interference. What more fitting instruments could be found
to advance the cause of sacred learning at the Universities, and enlarge
it with the new knowledge which must either serve the Faith or be its
enemy. If all this was not evident in the first decades of the century, it
had become so by the middle of it, when the Franciscan Bonaventura and
the Dominicans Albertus and Thomas were the intellectual glories of the
time. And thus, while the ardour of the new Orders drew to their ranks the
learning and spiritual energy of the Church, the intellectual currents of
the time caught up those same Brotherhoods, which had so entrusted their
own salvation to the mission of saving other souls abroad in the world,
where those currents flowed.
The Universities, above all _the_ University _par excellence_, were in the
hands of the secular clergy; and long and intricate is the story of their
jealous endeavours to exclude the Mendicants from Professors’ chairs. The
Dominicans established themselves at Paris in 1217, the Franciscans two
years later. The former succeeded in obtaining one chair of theology at
the University in 1229, and a second in 1231; and about the same time the
Franciscans obtained their first chair, and filled it with Alexander of
Hales. When he died an old man, fifteen years later, they wrote upon his
tomb:
“Gloria Doctorum, decus et flos Philosophorum,
Auctor scriptorum vir Alexander variorum,”
closing the epitaph with the words: “primus Doctor eorum,” to wit, of the
Minorites. He was the author of the first _Summa theologiae_, in the sense
in which that term fits the work of Albert and Thomas. And there is no
harm in repeating that this _Summa_ of Alexander’s was the first work of a
mediaeval schoolman in which use was made of the physics, metaphysics, and
natural history, of Aristotle.[541] He died in 1245, when the Franciscans
appear to have possessed two chairs at the University. One of them was
filled in 1248 by Bonaventura, who nine years later was taken from his
professorship, to become Minister-General of his Order. It was indeed only
in this year 1257 that the University itself had been brought by papal
injunctions formally to recognize as _magister_ this most eloquent of the
Franciscans, and the greatest of the Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas. The
latter’s master, Albert, had been recognized as _magister_ by the
University in 1245.
Before the intellectual achievements of these two men, the Franciscan fame
for learning paled. But that Order went on winning fame across the
Channel, which the Dominicans had crossed before them. In 1224 they came
to Oxford, and were received as guests by an establishment of Dominicans:
this was but nine years after the foundation of the preaching Order!
Perhaps the Franciscan glories overshone the Dominican at Oxford, where
Grosseteste belongs to them and Adam of Marsh and Roger Bacon. But
whichever Order led, there can be no doubt that together they included the
greater part of the intellectual productivity of the maturing thirteenth
century. Nevertheless, in spite of the vast work of the Orders in the
field of secular knowledge, it will be borne in mind that the advancement
of _sacra doctrina_, theology, the saving understanding of Scripture, was
the end and purpose of all study with Dominicans and Franciscans, as it
was universally with all orthodox mediaeval schoolmen; although for many
the nominal purpose seems a mere convention. Few men of the twelfth or
thirteenth century cared to dispute the principle that the _Carmina
poetarum_ and the _Dicta philosophorum_ “should be read not for their own
sake, but in order that we may learn holy Scripture to the best advantage:
I say they are to be offered as first-fruits, for we should not grow old
in them, but spring from their thresholds to the sacred page, for whose
sake we were studying them for a while.”[542]
Within the two Orders, especially the Franciscan, men differed sharply as
to the desirability of learning. So did their contemporaries among the
secular clergy, and their mediaeval and patristic predecessors as far back
as Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. On this matter a large variance
of opinion might exist within the compass of orthodoxy; for Catholicism
did not forbid men to value secular knowledge, provided they did not
cleave to opinions contradicting Christian verity. This was heresy, and
indeed was the sum of what was called Averroism, the chief intellectual
heresy of the thirteenth century. It consisted in a sheer following of
Aristotle and his infidel commentator, wheresoever the opinions of the
Philosopher, so interpreted, might lead. They were not to be corrected in
the interest of Christian truth. A representative Averroist, and one so
important as to draw the fire of Aquinas, as well as the censures of the
Church, was Siger de Brabant. He followed Aristotle and his commentator in
maintaining: The universal oneness of the (human) intelligence, the _anima
intellectiva_, an opinion which involved the denial of an individual
immortality, with its rewards and punishments; the eternity of the visible
world,--uncreated and everlasting; a rational necessitarianism which
precluded freedom of human action and moral responsibility.
It would be hard to find theses more fundamentally opposed to the
Christian Faith. Yet Siger may have deemed himself a Christian. With other
Averroists, he sought to preserve his religious standing by maintaining
that these opinions were true according to philosophy, but not according
to the Catholic Faith: “Dicunt enim ea esse vera secundum philosophiam,
sed non secundum fidem catholicam.”[543] With what sincerity Siger held
this untenable position is hard to say.