The expansion and institutionalization of education in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the most important stimulus for the sustained output of learning in this period. Scholars followed in the footsteps of those who had gone before them in more haphazard circumstances. Gerbert of Aurillac (940-1003), who went on to be Pope Sylvester II (999-1003), benefited from wealthy patronage to acquire for himself the best currently available scientific education in Muslim Spain. As archbishop of Rheims, he steered the city’s cathedral school in the direction of science. He showed his empirical bent in his own scientific writings and is known for his use of Arabic numbers, an abacus, and an astrolabe. The admiring students of Fulbert of Chartres (c.960-1028) compared Fulbert to Socrates and Pythagoras. But he warned them to rely more on faith than on their erudition to fathom the mysteries of God. The continuing interest in the eleventh century in speculative thought is marked by innovative close reading of texts that had previously been copied in monasteries engaged in the cultural revival of the Carolingian Renaissance. The reflections of scholars such as Berengar of Tours (c.1000-80), Lanfranc of Canterbury (c.1010-89), Roscelin of Compiegne (C.1050-C. U25), and Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) were inspired by their mastery of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (logic), the three subjects of the trivium* (the first tier of the classical seven liberal arts that had also lain at the heart of early medieval education). The translation of Aristotle’s On Meaning and Categories by Boethius (c.480-524) and
Porphyry’s third-century Neoplatonic introduction to Aristotelian logic, the Isagoge, together with some of Boethius’ own writings and Cicero’s Topics constituted the syllabus used to teach dialectic. This is known as the Old Logic (Logica Vetus) to distinguish it from the New Logic (Logica Nova), which comprised the logical works of Aristotle, which became known to the West after the first half of the twelfth century. Cicero was also used to teach rhetoric; Donatus (fourth-century Ars Maior) and Priscian (sixth-century Institutiones) to teach grammar. The nature of these texts prompted scholars to think hard about the meaning and status of words and the relationship between words and the subjects they named. The semantics of language coloured much of the philosophical work of this period. A major challenge these thinkers faced as a result of their reading of these non-Christian texts was to work out how much they should rely on reason (that is, human faculties not governed by faith) in their exploration of theological problems. The most important problems they confronted were the Eucharist, the Trinity, and the Incarnation.
Berengar’s study of logic and grammar caused him to challenge the Eucharistic teaching on which the Church was beginning to insist, namely that the Eucharist did not just represent the body and blood of Christ but that it really (that is, substantially or materially) was the body and blood of Christ. Lanfranc accused Berengar of relying too much on reason. Nonetheless, he himself marshalled Aristotelian arguments in support of the doctrine of Eucharistic change. Berengar was forced to recant his views definitively in 1079. Roscelin’s work on the Trinity was strongly influenced by his nominalist* convictions. As a nominalist, he did not believe that universals (for example, common nouns, that are notions that can be applied to more than one particular) were real; they were nothing more than the puff of air brought about by their utterance. This prompted him to ask how God could be one and three at the same time, if only the second person of the Trinity became incarnate. Did this not mean that certain particulars applied to the Son that did not apply to the Father and Holy Spirit? Did this mean all three persons had to become incarnate? Or was the implication that the Trinity was not as unified as Christians believed? Anselm had no patience for this kind of use of dialectic, and he admonished Roscelin to be silent if he was incapable of understanding what he, as a Christian, ought to believe. Anselm’s own work was governed by his maxim credo ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand). Much of his scholarly work reads like a prayer; seeking understanding of faith was a contemplative tool in his hands. Anselm was confident that human reason could understand a very great deal in the presence of faith.
Anselm’s ontological* proof of the existence of God, whom he defined as ‘something-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought’, is found in the Proslogion. But his most interesting work is the Cur Deus Homo? (‘Why God-Man?’), in which he sets out to prove by reason alone (sola ratione) that the Incarnation of the Son of God was both possible and necessary. It is here that he offers the satisfaction theory, a new explanation for the need for the Incarnation. Anselm did not utilize the traditional idea that Christ became man in order to snatch man from the jurisdiction of the devil, which he had rightfully held since the fall of man. To Anselm’s mind the devil had no rights over man; man’s problem was the debt he owed to God on account of the fall, which he could not pay because everything man had already belonged to God. Anselm argued that the only man who could pay this debt was ‘God-man’. In exchange for his voluntary death, Jesus Christ (that is, God-man) could thus solicit redemption from God for his human brothers.
Lanfranc of Canterbury taught at the monastic school of Bec in Normandy before going on to Caen, where he became abbot of William the Conqueror’s new abbey of St Stephen’s, and then to England, as the first ‘Norman’ archbishop of Canterbury. His pupil Anselm also taught at Bec before his removal to Canterbury. Their connection with Bec gives us an excellent insight into both the opportunities and the restrictions of a monastic school. In the presence of luminaries such as Lanfranc and Anselm the school of Bec developed into a veritable centre of learning. But once these great scholars had departed, it returned to its real calling: a school catering primarily for monastic purposes—namely, prayer and prayerful study. For learning to be institutionalized, continuity and an academic sense of purpose needed to be fostered. Fertile ground for both were found in the cathedral schools of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. This is not to say that monasteries produced no scholars. The Benedictine monk Rupert of Deutz (C.1075/80-U29), the latter-day Benedictine, Honorius Augustodunensis (C.1070-C.1140), the nuns Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Elizabeth of Schonau (d. 1155), and the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (c. i090-ii53) are only a few examples that prove the opposite. Rupert, Honorius, and Bernard produced a wide range of original theological, exegetical*, and homiletical* material. Elizabeth and Hildegard are known for their fascinating mystical work. Hildegard’s interests included medicine, science, poetry, and music. But, on the whole, monastic scholars did not study the liberal arts out of academic interest alone. Their studies were part of the monastic activity of lectio divina (holy reading), and, generally, their works of theology had a devotional flavour, mirroring their own spiritual interests and experience in contrast to the more specifically rationalistic enterprise being aimed at in the schools.
The traditional purpose of cathedral schools was to train the choir and the diocesan clergy for their tasks. Diocesan education was much encouraged by Church reformers, who needed effective and well-trained clergy. But good teaching also attracted extraneous pupils who were more interested in their own education than any parochial needs and concerns. The presence of a moving population of students and masters presented opportunities for steady availability of good-quality teaching personnel and a variety of interests and methods. Those schools and cities that could teach and offer accommodation to large numbers of extraneous pupils were able by the end of the twelfth century to emancipate themselves into universities: institutionalized communities of masters and students engaged in professional study. In northern Europe Paris possessed the right combination of resources to develop into the theological centre of Europe, outflanking neighbouring schools such as Chartres and Laon, which had contributed much to the development of twelfth-century scholarship. In southern Europe Bologna held pride of place for law; Salerno and Montpellier were centres for medicine.
The contribution of the schoolmen of the latter part of the eleventh and the first half of the twelfth centuries was their passion to examine creatively what they had inherited from the past and to reorganize it. They used the tools of the trivium to analyse all available authorities and to work out which were now the most useful. They set out to learn all there was to learn and by asking new and exciting questions to harness all the knowledge they acquired to their Christian view of the world. They sought out any possible contradictions they could find in their material in order to solve these through a careful textual analysis of their disparate sources. At Laon, Anselm of Laon (teaching between 1080 and 1117) and his brother Ralph (d. 1131/3) lectured on books of the Bible. Anselm’s commentaries on the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles together with the commentaries of others like Gilbert of Auxerre (Gilbert the Universal, d. 1134) culminated in the Glossa Ordinaria, the interlinear and marginal gloss of the whole Bible, which came into being between c.1080 and c.1130. It seems that at Laon formal lectures were given in the morning; these were followed by informal meetings in the evening at which earlier points, based on close readings of especially patristic* sources, were summed up and expounded. These summings-up were called sentences and covered all kinds of questions dealing with aspects of God and creation. Before long the sentences of Anselm of Laon and other masters were gathered together by students and systematized according to subject matter. These sentence collections served as handbooks for those concerned with pastoral affairs. Their order and structure were intimately connected with the development of systematic theology: a professional discipline covering the full gamut of Christian dogma, discipline, and ethics.
Early twelfth-century scholars were also interested in the natural world. This work is usually associated with the cathedral school at Chartres, but some have claimed that it too originated in Paris. William of Conches (C.1080-C.1154) and Thierry of Chartres (c.1110-c.1155/6) both used Calcidius’ fourth-century truncated translation of Plato’s cosmological work, the Timaeus, for their studies; William nurtured his medical interests with ancient Greek medical material translated from Arabic by Constantine the African, a monk from Monte Cassino (d. 1087). He and Thierry wrote extensively about the origins of the world. Thierry also produced texts on all seven of the liberal arts: the trivium together with mathematics, astronomy, music, and geometry, which constituted the quadrivium*. In his scientific work Philosophia Mundi (‘Philosophy of the World’) William struggled to come to a Christian understanding of Plato’s world soul, the universal spirit that acts as an organizing principle for the world. William looked for similarities between world soul and the workings of the Holy Spirit. But he had to abandon his ideas because they were considered to be unorthodox. Another scholar of the natural sciences was the Englishman Adelard of Bath (c.1070-after 1146), who travelled to Sicily and Antioch to collect Arabic translations of Greek science and transmit them to the West. In his Questiones Natu-rales (‘Questions on Nature’) he defends man’s power to use his reason to discover the laws of nature.
The Jewish convert to Christianity Peter Alfonsi (fl. 1106-26) brought Greek and Arabic knowledge of astronomy with him when he travelled from Aragon to England and France in 1106. He promoted the study of medicine and advocated the importance of personal observation. His Disciplina Clericalis, a didactic collection of stories, introduced the West to the fables and tales of the Orient. In his Christian-Jewish disputation, Dialogues between Moses the Jew and Peter the Christian, he offered north-western Latin Christendom an introduction to Islam and rabbinic writings. More positive than Peter Alfonsi’s starkly negative portrayal of Jewish thought was the use made by biblical exegetes like Andrew of Saint-Victor (d. 1175) of the school of Saint-Victor near Paris of rabbinical explanations of the meaning of the Hebrew words of the Old Testament. Important centres of Jewish exegesis of the Bible and the Talmud developed in France in the wake of the illuminating work of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi, d. 1104) in Troyes.
Another Englishman, John of Salisbury (c. n15-n8o), was renowned for his breadth of learning. John’s many works display his concern to apply what he studied in Paris (and perhaps Chartres) to the practicalities of communal life and government and administration. John served Archbishops Theobald and Thomas Becket of Canterbury and was closely involved in the controversy between Becket and Henry II. John later became bishop of Chartres (1176-80). His Metalogicon is an impassioned defence of the importance of the skills engendered by the study of the trivium for enabling communities to function harmoniously. The Policraticus (the so-called Statesman’s Handbook) perceives political communities as organic bodies, whose health depends on constructive interaction of all its members. A later example of someone who used his scholastic training for public life is Peter of Blois (d. 1211/12). Peter, like John, served in the households of successive archbishops of Canterbury and likewise had connections with the Angevin court, and left an enormous collection of letters that touched on every imaginable topic. The collection became the letter-writing textbook par excellence for many centuries to come.
One of most colourful figures of the Parisian schools that John frequented was Peter Abelard (c.1079-c.1142). During the course of a tumultuous career he did his most important teaching at
Mont-Sainte-Genevieve in Paris. Abelard’s forte was dialectic in which he did interesting work on universals. He applied logic to theology in his search for a rational explanation of the Trinity. He discussed the Persons of the Trinity as the triunity of Power, Wisdom, and Benignity. His views were thought to conflict with the concept of the equality of the three persons of the Trinity, and they met condemnation in 1121 at Soissons. Abelard had the highest regard for the classical past, arguing that close reading of Plato’s Timaeus revealed the truth of the Trinity, just as did an allegorical reading of the Hebrew Bible. In 1140 at Sens, Abelard was roundly condemned by Bernard of Clairvaux, who blamed him for relying far too heavily on reason. Abelard’s most innovative work probably lies in the area of ethics, where he studied intention, virtue, and love. He taught that acts in themselves were morally neutral; their underlying intention defined how they should be judged. Moving beyond Anselm of Canterbury’s satisfaction theory, he argued that the redemption of Christ had made man better than he had been before the Fall, because Christ’s sacrifice unleashed in man unprecedented love for God. In addition, in Jesus, humanity had the perfect example for right living and loving. His Sic et Non (‘Yes and No’), a collection of contradictory authorities (mostly patristic), reveals his interest in discerning rationally between them. In its prologue he wrote: ‘by doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we perceive the truth.’ His correspondence with his one-time pupil, lover, and wife, Heloise, contains a rule for her nuns at the Paraclete, which displays a genuine interest in the special needs of female monastics. Heloise was a remarkable woman. She was already very learned when Abelard became her tutor. It is very likely that Heloise’s own erudition influenced Abelard’s development as a scholar.
Abelard’s contemporary Gilbert of Poitiers (c.1080-1154) also attempted to use Aristotelian logic to explicate the Trinity. Like Abelard he was accused of heresy by Bernard of Clairvaux and others; unlike Abelard he could command enough support from fellow masters to escape condemnation. Far less controversial than Abelard or Gilbert was Peter Lombard (1095/1100-1160), who produced the first really successful overview of systematic theology. Peter’s Sentences consist of four books; they are the product of many years of teaching and display his deep knowledge of not only Abelard’s and Gilbert’s work but also of two works of Hugh of Saint-Victor (c.1096-1141), the highly influential theological overview Liber de Sacramentis (‘Book on the Sacraments’) and the Summa Sententiarum, a sentence collection that encapsulated Victorine responses to the school of Abelard. Peter managed to organize his material without the repetitions and inconsistencies of his predecessors. Using the skills of the trivium, he carefully assembled and made sense of a vast array of source material. He also made plain what man could know about God using reason. Extrapolating from sensible evidence, man could use his reason to know that God exists and that his nature is three and one. But, although philosophy could prove the existence of God and illuminate some of the most basic attributes of God (for example, eternity, omnipotence, and goodness), it could not do more than provide analogies for the Trinity. Peter stressed the transcendence of God but also maintained that God gave his creatures their own sphere in which to function naturally. This means that the workings of the natural world were open to philosophical enquiry. Peter too was passionately interested in Jesus’ humanity. He stressed Jesus’ humility, citing the crucifixion as particularly important on account of the response it elicited from the faithful. Peter’s Sentences became the theology textbook at Paris par excellence, but it was used much further afield. In Alsace, Abbess Herrad of Hohenbourg (d. after 1196) quoted extensively from the Sentences in her Hortus Deliciarum (‘Garden of Delights’), the encyclopaedic work she put together for the erudition of her nuns at the end of the twelfth century. The other authors Herrad used most heavily were Rupert of Deutz, Honorius Augustodunensis, and also Peter Comestor (d. 1187), who was a pupil of Peter Lombard and who compiled the widely read Historia Scholas-tica (‘Scholastic History’), a summary of the history of the Old Testament.
Pupils of Peter Lombard who had assimilated newly available works on logic by Aristotle (the so-called New Logic) applied logic to theological conundrums like the union of the human and divine natures in Christ. Very interesting is the work on socio-ethical questions such as the morally right price (the so-called just price) of commodities and the issue of usury by the circle of Peter the Chanter (d. 1197). This demonstrates how keen Peter the Chanter’s circle was to apply their scholarship in a practical way to contemporary social issues. Preaching was a major component of their programme. Preaching was also a concern of Alan of Lille (c.1120-1202/3), who studied in Chartres, Paris, and Montpellier. Alan was a prolific writer and an outstanding poet. One of his poems is The Plaint of Nature, which dwells on the authority of Nature within her own realm of activity and berates humanity for breaking her laws by acts of sexual impropriety. In another, The Anticlaudianus, Nature seeks God’s help and together they create the perfect man. Another outstanding Latin poet of the second half of the twelfth century was Walter of Chatillon (u3os-u8o or 1202/3), who studied at Paris and Rheims. He is the author of the hugely popular Alexandreis, a grand epic in ten books recounting the history of Alexander the Great.
World History
