The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (15 page)

By contrast with its modern successor, the medieval university was a loosely organized society where control was seized by teachers and students, depending on local opportunities. There were generally no endowments, no officials to fill an “administration” building, nor any board of trustees, nor state control. Flowing in and out, students created a varied and colorful community. The
goliardi,
or wandering scholars, not always welcomed by the masters, sang their own scurrilous anticlerical songs. On more than one occasion members of the University of Paris appealed to the king to restore order:

Priests and clerks . . . dance in the choir dressed as women, or disreputable men, or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black-puddings at the altar itself, while the celebrant is saying Mass. They play at dice on the altar. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap throughout the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres on shabby carriages and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and with scurrilous and unchaste words.

It was not easy to discipline so volatile a body of masters and scholars. Only in the later, humanistic age did these wanderers become respectable. Erasmus was one of them.

The truths of medieval scholars, we must remember, were not to be found by freely searching. These had already been revealed by authority, and Seekers could only grasp, reflect on, and confirm the beauties of revelation. “I believe in order that I may know,” explained Anselm, “I do not know in order to believe.”

It is remarkable to the modern unbelieving mind how much intellectual vigor and vitality, how much delight in discovery could be found within the revealed limits. In the thirteenth century masters were condemned, and even imprisoned, for errors of theology. The most notorious was the Condemnation of 1277, when the University of Paris was notified of thirty errors in arts. Though these were not quite heretical, they were evil enough to require the deposing of anyone who taught them. They even included condemnation of certain forms of Latin nouns and verbs. Dare we agree with C. H. Haskins and other charitable medievalists who insist that “a fence is no obstacle to those who do not desire to go outside. . . . He is free who feels himself free”?

* * *

The medieval university grew and flourished with the rise of scholasticism, the discipline of reasoning within the limits of revealed faith. It is remarkable how lively were these intellectual exercises, how relentless were the masters in challenging the propositions of faith with the faculties of reason, and how grand and elegant were the intellectual structures they erected. Despite the grandeur of these structures, we may share Bertrand Russell’s misgivings:

There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.

Russell therefore would not rank the great scholastics with the best philosophers of Greece or of modern times.

The great scholastics plainly distinguished theology from philosophy. But they had made the trouble for themselves by insisting on applying the tests of philosophy to the truths of revelation. A pioneer was Peter Abelard (1079- 1142), notorious for his ill-starred love affair with Héloïse. In the book entitled
Yes and No
(
Sic et Non
) that he compiled at the Benedictine monastery of St. Denis outside Paris, he gave a perilous new direction to Christian theology. “By doubting we come to questioning,” he declared, “and by questioning we learn truth.” Following this axiom, he answered one after another the 158 key questions in Christian theology.

Like other Seekers’ problems ever since Job, the scholastics’ problems were self-created, from their faith. If Job had not believed in a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, the sufferings of the innocent (including his own) might have posed no problem for his faith. Now the Christian scholastics, too, started with their faith and challenged philosophy to find reasons for it. Abelard’s
Sic et Non
steadily followed Aristotelian logic. As Abelard, one of the Peripatetics, wandered from school to school, he developed his own philosophy of language and immortalized his suffering by his
Historia calamitatum
(History of My Troubles). In
Sic et Non
he expounded the conflicting opinions of the Church Fathers on Church doctrine, then offered ways of resolving them, using the changing meanings of words to aid his explanation.

While only Scripture, Abelard argued, was infallible, apart from Scripture, dialectic was the sole road to truth. Yet his readiness to test the axioms of faith by the instruments of philosophy did not go unchallenged. The most powerful challenge came from the contemporary mystic Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard became his archenemy, denouncing the scholastics’ “scandalous curiosity” that degraded God’s mysteries to the level of human reason. Bernard insisted that “We discover with greater facility through prayer than through disputation.” But the mystic champions of prayer lacked a feeling both for the real world and for the needs of the speculative mind. Bernard’s sponsorship of the Second Crusade failed from his political ineptitude. And despite his affable reputation (
doctor mellifluus
) for “sweet as honey” teachings, his influence on the wide community of Christian thought was not comparable with the catalytic appeal of Abelard’s
Sic et Non.

Abelard’s rational Aristotelian instruments would be monumentally productive in the hands of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1224-1275). In this greatest of Catholic theologians we see both the possibilities and the limits of human reason in support of divine revelation. Saint Thomas’s first essential task was to mark the distinction between philosophy and theology and so show how reason could serve Christian revelation, yet not menace it. His work was the enduring product of the new cosmopolitan community of Seekers in universities. New institutions (the Church, the monasteries, and the universities) nurtured a Christian synthesis—of the Hebrew prophetic tradition and the Greek philosophic tradition—defined by revelation and defended by reason. It is remarkable that a work of Saint Thomas’s vast reach could arise from his narrowly academic experience. His achievement demonstrated the distinctive productivity of the new community of universities.

Thomas was born at Roccasecca near Aquino on the road from Rome to Naples. From boyhood he experienced the battle between the pope and the emperor, for his family, of the minor nobility, had served under Emperor Frederick II against the pope, and held a small feudal domain on the boundary between the two powers. When Thomas was only five, his family deposited him as an oblate at the nearby Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino “therein to be instructed in holy matters and to prepare himself for God’s illumination.” His family had more worldly motives. They hoped that Thomas might someday become abbot, and so give the family a share in the revenues of the monastery, besides the power of an additional feudal lordship. After nine years, when Thomas was only fourteen, the emperor expelled the monks for their loyalty to the pope and the family hopes were frustrated.

Meanwhile, Thomas had begun his education and made his first acquaintance with the
Rule
of Saint Benedict. At Monte Cassino he learned calligraphy and grammar and read works in Italian (the
volgare
) as well as Latin. Devout biographers note his progress “in logicalibus et naturalibus.” At the early age of fourteen Thomas was sent to Naples to study at the university recently (1224) founded by Emperor Frederick II, king of Jerusalem, to keep his intellectuals from going abroad. There he studied philosophy, which the emperor had ordered to be based on the texts of Aristotle and his commentators, many newly available in translations from Greek and Arabic.

At Naples, Thomas was attracted to the Dominican order, founded only thirty years before. In the rising cities the Dominican Seekers pursued a path different from that of the old monastic orders. Retreating into the hills (as at Monte Cassino) the monks had pursued personal salvation and perfection in obedience to their abbot. And some of these monasteries had accumulated great wealth. It was in protest against their worldliness that Saint Dominic (1170-1221) founded his order of preaching friars (later indicated by “O.P.”). Their mission to preach Christian doctrine was formerly assigned to bishops and their delegates. To accomplish their preaching mission, unlike the Benedictines, they were not a collection of autonomous houses, but went wherever they were needed, preaching the true doctrine and pursuing their studies. Dominican friars were encouraged to be scholars. Dominic established houses in large cities, favoring those with universities. They became relentless champions of orthodoxy, and would eventually administer the Inquisition. Required to renounce all personal or community property, they took vows of poverty and had to beg to support themselves. So they came to be called mendicant friars (from
mendicare,
“to beg”).

Thomas’s Dominican superiors, assuming that his family would oppose his new interests, assigned him at once to Paris to put him out of the family’s reach. There, in the university center of Europe, he could pursue his Dominican studies. Thomas’s ambitious mother, Theodora, not so easily outwitted, enlisted her other sons and soldiers of the emperor to capture the fugitive Thomas. Trying to strip him of his Dominican habit, they imprisoned him under strong guard at a family castle near Aquino, where the family used all their wiles to dissuade him from his Dominican vows. When they attacked his chastity by sending a girl into his cell, the steadfast Thomas seized a firebrand from the hearth and put her to flight. Then reportedly he used the same firebrand to trace a large cross on the wall, before falling to the floor in prayer. The family’s two-year effort (1244-45) to break his faith was unsuccessful. His fellow Dominicans, according to his first biographer and adoring disciple, aided his midnight escape, like Saint Paul’s flight from Damascus, by letting him down from a window by a rope.

Now Thomas began his academic odyssey. The master of his order, John the Teutonic, took him to Paris in October 1245 to the priory of Saint-Jacques, the great university center for Dominicans. There he became the disciple of Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280), with whom he had a natural kinship. For Albert, too, had fought his own family to join the Dominicans. After three years Thomas accompanied Albertus to Cologne, where a new Dominican university community (
studium generale
) was being founded for students from all over. At Cologne he remained Albertus’ disciple for four years.

Never was there a happier coincidence than that which brought Thomas from southern Italy to be the disciple of Albert. Their works would be an enduring monument to the medieval university—a forum for the best restless minds. The temperaments and interests of Albert and Thomas proved wonderfully complementary. With different emphasis, they explored the same rich resources that the twelfth-century renaissance had providentially offered them. The rediscovered prodigious works of Aristotle and of Greek and Arabic philosophy and science provided materials for both these giants of scholasticism. Albertus Magnus aimed to make all Aristotle’s encyclopedic works “intelligible to the Latins” by paraphrase and explanation. After twenty years he completed the work that survives in forty edited volumes.

Thus Albert brought the study of nature (through Aristotelian texts) into the Christian universities. He introduced his own notion of “experiment” and insisted on the value of observation as a source of knowledge, for he believed reason and faith were inevitably in harmony. Albert made his own observations on the causes of sound and light and on the thermal effects of the sun. Correcting Aristotle’s statement that the lunar rainbow occurs only twice in fifty years, he noted that he had observed two in a single year. Even without a telescope, he suggested that the Milky Way might be composed of stars and that the dark spots on the moon might be features of its surface. He pioneered ways of classifying plants and animals and even hinted at the mutability of species.

In 1252 Thomas was sent to Paris, where he became a Master of Theology in 1256 and was appointed to a chair reserved for mendicant friars. During these years he began his own great work, more original and destined to be more influential than that of his teacher. Aristotle’s work had made the achievement of both of them possible. Albert provided for the Latin Middle Ages a complete paraphrase of Aristotle’s encyclopedic works. He was so eager that no part of nature remain uncovered that he even filled out a botanical work of dubious authorship to ensure that this aspect of the Aristotelian world was fully treated. Albert has been praised as the greatest “purveyor of a knowledge not his own,” but Thomas made Aristotle his own. Thomas did more than simply “baptize” Aristotle. He assimilated Aristotle’s work into the Christian arsenal, and for future generations would make Aristotle a prop of Christian faith. Albert was an acolyte of Aristotle. Thomas made Aristotle into an acolyte of Christianity.

During these years in Paris (1252-59) Thomas began his two great summaries of Catholic theology, first his
Summa contra gentiles,
followed by his
Summa theologiae.
If it was an age of faith, it was also an age of lively controversy that stimulated the great systematic works of theology. Believers became alert to the arguments that menaced their doctrine and ingenious at making works of pagan philosophy and science serve their faith. Thomas’s lifetime was a simmering crucible. With solvent ideas came a new threat to newly established Christian institutions. Thomas enlisted both to give a new life to Christian doctrine. In the early Middle Ages, Aristotle was known as the author of works on logic translated by Boethius. Surprisingly, Plato was then the most cited ancient authority on nature. The Church Fathers had drawn heavily on Platonic ideas. But the renaissance of the twelfth century had brought new manuscripts of Aristotle and his Arab commentators, with the spread of Islam into Spain. For the first time the Church seemed threatened by a body of scientific learning, fathered by Aristotle. The study of nature and the instruments of reason challenged the articles of faith, which led the Church authorities to try to stem the Aristotelian tide. Albert tried to encompass the newfound treasures of Aristotelian thought. Thomas went further, using Aristotle’s emphasis on reason to make his works the ally of revelation.