The Parisian condemnation of 1277 did not arrive ex nihilo. On the contrary, we may consider it as the culmination of a series of crucial events marking the intellectual history of the thirteenth century. In 1210, a synod called by the Archbishop of Sens, Peter of Corbeil, ruled against the teaching in Paris, whether public or private, of Aristotle’s books of natural philosophy (libri naturales), as well as related commentaries. A sentence of excommunication was pronounced against whosoever contravened this directive. In 1215, the Papal Legate, Cardinal Robert of Courcon, whom Pope Innocent III had charged with reorganizing the academic curriculum in Paris, imposed a restrictive program of studies on the Faculty of Arts. In this document, which contains the earliest university statutes known by historians, a distinction is made between compulsory (grammar and logic), optional (mathematics and ethics) and forbidden subjects. Reiterating the antiAristotelian measures of 1210, that were accompanied by the same sentence of excommunication, the statutes promulgated in 1215 under the auspices of the Papal Legate forbad Arts Masters from lecturing on Aristotle’s natural philosophy writings (including the Metaphysics), as well as the Summae arising from these works. The institutional measures of 1210 and 1215 demonstrate beyond all doubt that, already at this time, certain members of high ecclesiastical rank perceived the peripatetic philosophical system as a threat to Christian thought as it had traditionally developed in the west since patristic times. A subtle change in orientation, with notable repercussions for subsequent decades, occurred in 1231, with the appearance of Pope Gregory IX’s bull Parens scientiarum (the mother of sciences). Amongst the measures in this document, considered by historians the ‘‘basic charter’’ of the University of Paris, it is important to remember the following: the Pope preserved the banning of Aristotelian libri naturales, but he mitigated it considerably by explaining that it would only last for the period during which the contentious writings were examined in order to purge them of any errors discovered. (This undertaking of intellectual purging would never end, however). Furthermore, for a period of seven years, the pope abrogated the penalty of excommunication that threatened the professors who would have contravened the teaching prohibitions, and he granted university masters the right to decide themselves on the required content of their courses. In so doing, Gregory IX opened the doors of the University of Paris to peripatetic works of philosophy which had previously been prohibited. In fact, in 1255, the Faculty of Arts issued new statutes stipulating an obligatory program of studies in which the whole of Aristotle’s translated works were included, as well as apocryphal works, such as the Book of Causes, an adaptation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, which seemed to have been composed in scholarly circles in Baghdad in the ninth century of the Christian era. In this way, the Faculty of Arts became an authentic faculty of philosophy and its professors began the vast and profound undertaking to rationally comprehend the whole of reality, an undertaking that could at any moment collide with the Christian vision of the world. Between 1267 and 1273, in a series of lectures given at the University of Paris, the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure warned his contemporaries about the danger that certain of Aristotle’s doctrines represented for the Christian faith, and the peril that a pagan philosophy sought for its own sake posed for human redemption. In 1270, while another great theologian, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas, was busy using the weapons of reason to fight this supposedly Averroist doctrine that historiography, following Leibniz, would call ‘‘monopsychism,’’ Stephen Tempier, for his part, was, for the first time, condemning the teaching of 13 philosophical theses. The content of this first doctrinal sanction issued by the Bishop of Paris prefigures in condensed form the much more developed act of censorship that he would promulgate seven years later.
World History
