On January 18, 1277, Pope John XXI, to whom suspicious ideas circulating in the Parisian schools were reported, mandated the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, to conduct an investigation into these allegations. Bolstered by a commission of sixteen theologians, including the eminent secular Master Henry of Ghent, Bishop Tempier accomplished this investigative task, assigned to him by the Pope, with great diligence. He drew up a list of 219 articles that, in his eyes, were heterodoxical and, exceeding the mandate he had been granted by John XXI, on March 7, 1277, promulgated a decree condemning these articles that, in his eyes, were nothing more than ‘‘blatant and execrable errors.’’ The threat that henceforth hung over the heads of the masters of Christianity’s intellectual capital were serious, since Bishop Tempier had determined on the penalty of excommunication for any individual caught deliberately spreading forbidden doctrines, as well as any person who would attend such a lecture, unless the latter denounced the wrongdoing to the Chancellor of the University of Paris or the Bishop himself within a period of seven days. As a preface to the ‘‘syllabus’’ containing the 219 censored theses (it is worth noting that certain manuscripts transmitting the Parisian act of censorship contain 220 articles), Stephen Tempier wrote a letter to which we must pay careful attention if we want to grasp the explicit motives for the most important doctrinal condemnation of the Middle Ages. The Bishop identifies the target of his act of censorship as certain ‘‘scholars of the Arts Faculty’’ (studentes in artibus). This expression designates the professors and students in philosophy, since, throughout the thirteenth century, the teaching of liberal arts, then required to gain access to higher studies, which were in theology, law, and medicine, had expanded to include the teaching of the Graeco-Arabic corpus of philosophy, that is, essentially, the works of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, in the forefront of which could be found Avicenna and Averroes. It is important to be aware that, since the first half of the twelfth century, ‘‘multicultural teams’’ of translators, often located in Toledo, were employed to make this philosophical corpus available in Latin for western Christian scholars. That said, the episcopal letter did not name these philosophers that it accuses of teaching ideas contrary to the Catholic faith, but several medieval manuscripts show us that the philosophical movement denounced by Stephen Tempier included in its ranks the Masters Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, key figures in the Parisian Arts Faculty in the years 1260-1270. The letter-preface of Bishop Tempier went further than condemning the presumed fact that certain members of the Arts Faculty had professed or discussed in the schools a series of doctrines judged to be heterodoxical. It also reproached those who devoted themselves to such controversial teaching for having strayed beyond the boundaries of their own faculty. Thus, it demonstrates the existing tension at the time between, on one hand, the philosophy professionals of the university, whose teaching then covered all fields of knowledge, from logic to metaphysics, including physics and ethics, and, on the other hand, the theology professors, whose concern was to clearly demarcate the borders beyond which the competence of philosophers did not extend, to preserve the superiority and institutional specificity of their own discipline. The risk of a ‘‘conflict of faculties’’ was very real, since the comprehensive philosophical corpus that the Arts Masters of the 1270s were responsible for transmitting touched on subjects - for example, the causality of God in the natural world - traditionally reserved for doctors in theology. What could be done with these intersecting points where the knowledge of philosophers encountered that of theologians? The statutes promulgated in 1272 for the Parisian Arts Faculty attempted to offer a response to this question with three clauses: (1) it was forbidden for Arts Masters to discuss purely theological questions, that is subjects relating directly to the work of understanding the content of the Holy Scriptures - for example the Trinity and the Incarnation; (2) if it happened that Arts Masters encountered questions that touched upon both philosophy and the Christian faith, they absolutely had to resolve them in accordance with the teachings of the Catholic faith, under pain of being declared heretical or excluded from their faculty if they resolved them differently; and finally, (3) if the Arts Masters found themselves in the presence of philosophical doctrines contrary to the Christian faith, they had the duty to refute them, or, if they felt incapable of doing so, declare them false and erroneous or even pass over them in silence. In fact, such measures placed the Arts Masters in an untenable position, as if they had to square the circle, since it was asked of them both to never touch theology and to always take account of the imperatives of the faith in their teaching duties which, however, had to be restricted to the field of purely philosophical knowledge. This balancing act required of the philosophers of Paris could explain, amongst other factors, the presence of a crucial passage in the letter-prologue that Bishop Tempier wrote, in which he accuses the scholars of the Arts Faculty of having tried to conceal their adherence to heterodoxical ideas, in affirming that what is true according to philosophy is not true according to the Catholic faith, ‘‘as if there were two contrary truths,’’ writes the Bishop who, to avoid alienating ‘‘simple people,’’ rushes to condemn such a manner of speaking that historiography would refer to as the ‘‘doctrine of the double truth.’’ That no university philosopher of the time supported such a doctrine is no longer contested by historians of today; that Tempier interpreted the Arts Masters’ writings in this way is an archival fact which needs to be taken into account. The episcopal letter finished with a verdict condemning the De amore of Andreas Capellanus, a work of courtly literature dating from the twelfth century, as well as works dealing with the divinatory arts and other occult practices, Bishop Tempier judging them all as ‘‘contrary to the orthodox faith and good morals.’’ Thus, as was the case for the other episodes of censorship in the
Christian west, a solidarity of evil was supposed between dissident thought, libertine behavior, and occult knowledge, three themes that the Bishop of Paris subjected to the same opprobrium.
World History
