The Age of Faith

VI. UNIVERSITIES OF FRANCE

The unquestioned leader of the European mind, in the medieval meridian of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was France. Its cathedral schools had from the early eleventh century achieved international renown. If these schools flowered into a great university at Paris, rather than at Chartres, Laon, or Reims, it was probably because the thriving commerce of the Seine, and the business of a capital, had brought to the city the wealth that lures the intellect and finances science, philosophy, and art.

The first known master of the cathedral school of Notre Dame was William of Champeaux (1070?–1121); it was his lectures, given in the cloisters of Notre Dame, that stirred up the intellectual movement out of which the University of Paris grew. When (c. 1103) Abélard came out of Brittany, slew William with a syllogism, and began the most famous lectures in French history, students flocked to hear him. The schools of Paris swelled their ranks, and masters multiplied. A master (magister), in the educational world of twelfth-century Paris, was a man licensed to teach by the chancellor of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The University of Paris rose by now untraceable steps from the church schools of the city, and derived its first unity from this single source of pedagogical licensing. Normally the license was given gratis to anyone who had been for an adequate period the pupil of an authorized master, and whose application was approved by that master. It was one of the charges made against Abélard that he had set himself up as a teacher without having served such an approved apprenticeship.

This conception of the teaching art in terms of master and apprentice shared in the idea and origin of the university. As the masters multiplied, they naturally formed a guild. The word universitas had for centuries been applied to any collectivity, including guilds. In 1214 Matthew Paris described a “fellowship of the elect masters” at Paris as an institution of long standing. We may assume, but cannot prove, that the “university” took form toward 1170, rather as a guild of teachers than as a union of faculties. About 1210 a bull of Innocent III—himself a graduate of Paris—recognized and approved the written statutes of this teachers’ guild; and another bull of the same Pope empowered the guild to choose a proctor to represent it at the papal court.

By the middle of the thirteenth century the Parisian masters were divided into four faculties or powers: theology, canon law, medicine, and “arts.” In contrast with Bologna, civil law had, after 1219, no place in the University of Paris; the curriculum began with the seven arts, advanced to philosophy, and culminated in theology. The arts students (who were called artistae, artists) corresponded to our “undergraduates.” As they constituted by far the greatest part of the academic population in Paris, they divided, probably for mutual aid, sociability, and discipline, into four “nations” according to their place of birth (natio) or origin: “France” (i.e., the narrow realm directly subject to the French king), Picardy, Normandy, and England. Students from southern France, Italy, and Spain were taken into the French “nation,” students from the Low Countries into “Picardy,” students from central and eastern Europe into “England.” So many students came from Germany that that country was delayed in establishing its own universities until 1347. Each “nation” was governed by a procurator or proctor, each faculty by a decanus or dean. The students—and perhaps also the masters—in the faculty of arts chose a rector as their head; gradually his functions widened until by 1255 he had become the rector of the university.

We hear of no special university buildings. Apparently, in the twelfth century, the lectures were given in the cloisters of Notre Dame, St. Genevieve, St. Victor, or other ecclesiastic structures; but in the thirteenth century we find teachers hiring private rooms for their classes. The masters, who came to be called also professores, proclaimers, were tonsured clerics, who, before the fifteenth century, lost their position if they married. Teaching was by lectures, largely for the reason that not every student could afford to buy all the texts to be studied, and could not always secure copies from the libraries. The students sat on pavement or floor, and took many notes. The burden on their memories was so severe that many mnemonic devices were contrived, usually in the form of verses pregnant with meaning and repulsive in form. University regulations forbade the teacher to read his lecture; he was required to speak extempore; he was even forbidden to “drawl.”⁴⁹ Students graciously warned newcomers not to pay for a course until they had attended three lectures. William of Conches, in the twelfth century, complained that teachers gave easy courses to gain popularity, students, and fees; and that the elective system by which each student had a wide choice among teachers and subjects was lowering the standard of education.⁵⁰

The teaching was occasionally enlivened by public disputations among the masters, advanced students, and distinguished visitors. Usually the discussion followed a set form, the scholastica disputatio: the question was stated; a negative answer was given, and was defended by scriptural and patristic quotations, and by reasoning in the form of objections; a positive answer followed, defended by quotations from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church, and by reasoned replies to the objections. This scholastica disputatio determined the finished form of the Scholastic philosophy in St. Thomas Aquinas. In addition to such formal quaestiones disputatae there were informal discussions called quodlibeta—“whatever you please”—where the disputants took up any question that might be propounded at the moment. These looser debates also created a literary form, as in the minor writings of St. Thomas. Such debates, formal or informal, sharpened the medieval mind, and gave scope for much freedom of thought and speech; in some men, however, they tended to promote a cleverness that could prove anything, or a logorrhea that piled mountains of argument on trivial points.

Most of the students lived in hospicia or guesthouses hired by organized student groups. Sometimes a hospital would board poor students at a nominal fee; so the Hôtel-Dieu, adjoining Notre Dame, set aside a room for “poor clerks.” In 1180 Jocius of London bought this apartment, and thereafter shared with the hospital in providing lodging and meals for eighteen students in it. By 1231 this group of students had taken larger quarters, but they still called themselves the Collège des dix-huit—the College of Eighteen. Other hospicia or residence halls were established by monastic orders, or churches, or philanthropists, with endowments (bursae) or annuities that reduced the cost of living for the student. In 1257 Robert de Sorbon, chaplain to St. Louis, endowed the “House of Sorbonne” for sixteen theological students; additional benefactions from Louis and others provided more accommodations, and raised the number of scholarships to thirty-six; out of this “house” grew the College of the Sorbonne.* Further “colleges”—collegia in the old sense of associations—were founded after 1300; masters came to live in them, served as tutors, heard recitations, and “read” texts with the students. In the fifteenth century the masters gave courses in the residence halls; such courses increased in number, courses given outside decreased, and the college became a hall of education as well as a student dwelling place. A similar evolution of the college out of the hospicium occurred at Oxford, Montpellier, and Toulouse. The university began as an association of teachers dealing with associations of students, and became an association of faculties and colleges.

Among the residence halls at Paris were two designed for student members or novices of the Dominican or the Franciscan Order. The Dominicans had from their inception stressed education as a means of combating heresy; they established their own system of schools, of which the Dominican studium generale at Cologne was the most renowned; and they had similar institutions at Bologna and Oxford. Many friars became masters, and taught in the halls of their orders. In 1232 Alexander of Hales, one of the ablest teachers in Paris, joined the Franciscans, and continued his public courses in their Convent of the Cordeliers. Year by year the number of friars lecturing at Paris increased, and their nonmonastic audiences grew. The secular masters mourned that they were left sitting at their desks “like lonely sparrows on the housetops”; to which the friars replied that the secular masters ate and drank too much, and became lazy and dull.⁵¹ In 1253 a student was killed in a street brawl; the city authorities arrested several students, and ignored their right and demand to be tried by the University masters or the bishop; the masters, in protest, ordered a cessation of lectures. Two Dominican teachers and one Franciscan, all members of the masters’ association, refused to obey the order to cease talk; the association suspended them from membership; they appealed to Alexander IV, who (1255) ordered the university of masters to readmit them. To avoid compliance, the masters disbanded; the Pope excommunicated them; students and populace attacked the friars in the streets. After six years of controversy a compromise was reached: the reorganized masters admitted the monastic masters, who pledged full obedience to “university” statutes thereafter; but the faculty of arts permanently excluded all monks from membership. The University of Paris, once a favorite of the popes, became hostile to the papacy, supported the kings against the pontiffs, and formed in later days the center of the “Gallican” movement that sought to separate the French Church from Rome.

No educational institution since Aristotle has rivaled the influence of the University of Paris. For three centuries it drew to itself not only the largest number of students, but the greatest dynasty of intellectually distinguished men. Abélard, John of Salisbury, Albertus Magnus, Siger of Brabant, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, William of Occam—these are almost the history of philosophy from 1100 to 1400. There must have been great teachers at Paris to produce these greater ones, and an atmosphere of mental exhilaration that comes only to the peaks of human history. Furthermore, through those centuries, the University of Paris was a power in both Church and state. It was an influential organ of opinion; in the fourteenth century a hotbed of free speculation; in the fifteenth a citadel of orthodoxy and conservatism. It cannot be said to have played “no mean role” in the condemnation of Joan of Arc.

Other universities shared in giving France the cultural leadership of Europe. Orléans had had a school of law as far back as the ninth century; in the twelfth it rivaled Chartres as a center of classical and literary studies; in the thirteenth it was second only to Bologna in the teaching of civil and canon law. Hardly less famous was the school of law at Angers, which in 1432 became one of the major universities of France. Toulouse owed its university to its heresies: in 1229 Gregory IX compelled Count Raymond to pledge himself to pay the salaries of fourteen professors—in theology, canon law, and the arts—who should be sent from Paris to Toulouse to combat the Albigensian heresy by their influence on Aquitanian youth.

The most renowned of the French universities outside of Paris was at Montpellier. Situated on the Mediterranean halfway between Marseille and Spain, that city enjoyed a stirring mixture of French, Greek, Spanish, and Jewish blood and culture, with a sprinkling of Italian merchants, and some remnants of the Moorish colony that had once held the town. Commerce was active there. Whether through the influence of Salernian or Arabic or Jewish medicine, Montpellier, at an unknown date, established a school of medicine that soon outshone Salerno; schools of law, theology, and the “arts” were added; and though these colleges were independent, their propinquity and co-operation earned for Montpellier a high repute. The university declined in the fourteenth century, but the school of medicine revived in the Renaissance; and in 1537 one François Rabelais gave there, in Greek, a course of lectures on Hippocrates.

VII. UNIVERSITIES OF ENGLAND

Oxford, like the equivalently named Bosporus, developed as a cattle crossing; the Thames narrowed and grew shallow at that point; a fortress was built there in 912, a market formed, and Kings Cnut and Harold held gemots there long before the University arose. Presumably there were schools at Oxford in Cnut’s days, but we hear of no cathedral school. About 1117 we find mention of a “master at Oxenford.” In 1133 Robert Pullen, a theologian, came from Paris and lectured at Oxford on theology.⁵² By steps now lost to history, the schools of Oxford became in the twelfth century a studium generale or university—“no man can say when.”⁵³ In 1209, according to a contemporary estimate, there were 3000 students and teachers at Oxford.⁵⁴ As at Paris there were four faculties: arts, theology, medicine, and canon law. In England the teaching of civil law escaped the universities, and lodged at the Inns of Court in London. Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Inner and the Middle Temple were the fourteenth-century descendants of the homes or chambers in which judges and teachers of the law, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, received students as apprentices.

At Oxford, as at Paris and Cambridge, the colleges began as endowed residence halls for poor students. At an early date they became also lecture halls; masters dwelt in them with the students; and by the end of the thirteenth century the aulae or halls had become the physical and pedagogical constituents of the University. About 1260 Sir John de Balliol of Scotland (father of the Scotch king of 1292), as penance for an unknown crime, established at Oxford a “House of Balliol” to maintain, by a grant of eight pence ($8) a week, certain poor scholars called socii, “fellows.” Three years later Walter de Merton founded and endowed the “House of the Scholars of Merton,” first at Maiden, soon at Oxford, to care for as many students as its income could support. These revenues were repeatedly doubled by the rise of land values, so that Archbishop Peckham in 1284 complained that the “poor scholars” were receiving additional allowances for “delicate living.”⁵⁵ In general the English colleges grew wealthy not only by fellowship grants and other gifts, but through the rise in the value of the estates with which they were endowed. About 1280 a bequest by William of Durham, Archbishop of Rouen, established University Hall, now University College; the modest beginnings of these famous colleges is shown in the terms of foundation, which provided for four masters and such scholars as might care to board with them. The masters chose one of their number as “senior fellow” to manage the hall; in time he or his successors appropriated those titles of “master” or “principal” by which the heads of the English colleges are known today. The University of Oxford in the thirteenth century was the association of these colleges under a “university” or guild of masters, themselves governed by regents and a chancellor of their own choosing, who in turn was subject to the bishop of Lincoln and the king.

By 1300 Oxford ranked next to Paris as a center of intellectual activity and influence. Its most famous graduate was Roger Bacon; other Franciscan monks, including Adam Marsh, Thomas of York, John Peckham, formed with him there a distinguished group of learned men. Their leader and inspiration, Robert Grosseteste (1175?—1253), was the finest figure in the life of Oxford in the thirteenth century. He studied law, medicine, and natural science there, graduated in 1179, took his divinity degree in 1189, and soon afterward was chosen “Master of the Oxford Schools”—the earlier form of the title of chancellor. In 1235, while still remaining head of Oxford, he became Bishop of Lincoln, and superintended the completion of the great cathedral. He energetically promoted the study of Greek and of Aristotle, and shared in the heroic effort of the thirteenth-century mind to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with the Christian faith. He wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and Posterior Analytics, summarized the science of his time in a Compendium Scientiarum, and worked for a reform of the calendar. He understood the principles of the microscope and the telescope, and opened many paths for Roger Bacon in mathematics and physics; it was probably he who acquainted Bacon with the magnifying property of the lens.⁵⁶ Many ideas that we ascribe to Bacon—on perspective, the rainbow, tides, the calendar, the desirability of experiment—were apparently suggested to him by Grosseteste; above all, the notion that all science must be based upon mathematics, since all force, in its passage through space, follows geometrical forms and rules.⁵⁷ He wrote French poetry and a treatise on husbandry, and was a lawyer and a physician as well as a theologian and a scientist. He encouraged the study of Hebrew with a view to converting the Jews; meanwhile he behaved toward them in an anomalously Christian way, and protected them as well as he could from the sadism of the mob. He was an active social reformer, always loyal to the Church, but daring to lay before Pope Innocent IV (1250) a written memorial in which he ascribed the shortcomings of the Church to the practices of the Papal Curia.⁵⁸ At Oxford he established the first “chest” to make gratuitous loans to scholars.⁵⁹ He was the first of a thousand brilliant minds whose achievements created the magnificent prestige of Oxford in the educational and intellectual world.

Today Oxford is a manufacturing center as well as a university, and makes automobiles as well as dons. But Cambridge is still a city of colleges, a medieval jewel brightened with modern wealth and British good taste; everything in it pertains to its colleges, and the medieval peace of mind survives in this loveliest of university towns. Apparently its intellectual eminence must be dated from a murder at Oxford. In 1209 a woman was killed there by a student; the townspeople raided a residence hall, and hanged two or three students. The university—i.e., the association of masters—suspended operations in protest against the action of the townsfolk; and, if we may believe the usually trustworthy Matthew Paris, 3000 students, and presumably many masters, left Oxford. A large number of them, we are told, went to Cambridge and set up halls and faculties; this is the first mention we have of anything higher there than an elementary school. A second migration—of Parisian students in 1228—swelled the ranks of the student body. Monks mendicant or Benedictine came and established colleges. In 1281 the Bishop of Ely organized the first secular college in Cambridge—St. Peter’s College, now Peterhouse. The fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries saw the foundation and embellishment of additional colleges, some of them among the masterpieces of medieval architecture. All of them together, embraced by the quiet winding Cam, constitute with their campuses one of the fairest works of man.

VIII. STUDENT LIFE

The medieval student might be of any age. He might be a curate, a prior, an abbot, a merchant, a married man; he might be a lad of thirteen, troubled with the sudden dignity of his years. He went to Bologna, Orléans, or Montpellier to become a lawyer or a physician; to other universities he went in some cases to prepare for governmental service, usually to make a career in the Church. He encountered no entrance examinations; the only requirements were a knowledge of Latin, and ability to pay a modest fee to each master whose course he took. If he was poor he might be helped by a scholarship, or by his village, his friends, his church, or his bishop. There were thousands of such cases.⁶⁰ Abbot Samson, hero of Jocelyn’s Chronicle and Carlyle’s Past and Present, owed his education to a poor priest who sold holy water to keep Samson in fees.⁶¹ A student traveling to or from a university usually received free transportation, and free food and lodging at monasteries on the way.⁶²

Arriving at Oxford, Paris, or Bologna, he would find himself one of a large crowd of happy, embarrassed, and eager students riding on a wave of intellectual enthusiasm that made philosophy—with a dash of heresy—as exciting as war, and a debate as fascinating as a tournament. At Paris he would have found, in 1300, some 7000 students, at Bologna 6000, at Oxford 3000;* in general the universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna had more students in the thirteenth century than later, probably because they had less competition. The newcomer would be received by his “nation,” and might be guided into living quarters—perhaps with some poor family; if he had the right connections he might get a bed and share a room in one of the hospicia or residence halls, where his expenses would be light. In 1374 a student at Oxford paid 104 shillings ($1040) a year for bed and board, twenty ($200) for tuition, forty for clothes.⁶⁵

No specific academic dress was enjoined upon him; however, he was requested to button his robe and not go shoeless unless his robe reached to his heels.⁶⁶ For distinction masters wore a cappa—a red or purple cope with miniver border and hood; sometimes they covered the head with a square biretta, topped with a tuft instead of a tassel. The student at Paris had the status and ecclesiastical immunities of a cleric: he was exempt from military service, state taxation, or secular trial; he was expected—not always compelled—to take the tonsure; if he married he could continue as a student, but he lost his clerical privileges, and could not take a degree. A judicious promiscuity, however, involved no such penalties. The monk Jacques de Vitry, about 1230, described the Parisian students as

more dissolute than the people. They counted fornication no sin. Prostitutes dragged passing clerics to brothels almost by force, and openly through the streets; if the clerics refused to enter, the whores called them sodomites…. That abominable vice [sodomy] so filled the city that it was held a sign of honor if a man kept one or more concubines. In one and the same house there were classrooms above and a brothel beneath; upstairs masters lectured, downstairs courtesans carried on their base services; in the same house the debates of philosophers could be heard with the quarrels of courtesans and pimps.⁶⁷

This has all the earmarks of righteous exaggeration; we may only conclude that at Paris cleric and saint were not synonyms.* Jacques goes on to tell how each national group among the students had favorite adjectives for the other groups: the English were heavy drinkers and had tails; the French were proud and effeminate; the Germans were furibundi (blusterers) and “obscene in their cups”; the Flemish were fat and greedy and “soft as butter”; and all of them, “through such backbiting, often passed from words to blows.”⁶⁹ At Paris the students were crowded at first into the island holding Notre Dame; this was the original Latin. Quarter, so called because the students were required to speak Latin even in non-scholastic converse—a rule often breached. Even when the quartier latin was extended to include the west end of the suburb south of the Seine, the students were too numerous to be easily policed. Altercations were frequent between student and student, student and master, student and townsman, secular and monk. At Oxford the bell of St. Mary’s summoned the students, and the bell of St. Martin’s called the burghers, to do battle in an intermittent war between gown and town. One riot in Oxford (1298) cost, £3,000 ($150,000) in damage to property.⁷⁰ A Paris official (1269) issued a proclamation against scholars who “by day and night atrociously wound and slay many, carry off women, ravish virgins, break into houses,” and commit “over and over again robberies and many other enormities.”⁷¹ Oxford boys may have been less given to lechery than the pupils of Paris, but homicides were frequent there, and executions were rare. If the murderer left town he was seldom pursued; and an Oxford man considered it sufficient punishment for an Oxford murderer to be compelled to go to Cambridge.⁷²

As water was hardly safe to drink, and neither tea nor coffee nor tobacco had yet reached Europe, the students reconciled themselves with wine and beer to Aristotle and heatless rooms. One of the main reasons for organizing a “university” of students was to celebrate religious or academic festivals with conspicuously virile drinking. Every step in the scholastic year was a “jocund advent” to be graced with wine. Students in many cases provided such refreshments for their examiners; and the “nations” usually consumed in the taverns whatever remained in their treasuries at the end of the scholastic year. Dicing was an added solace; some students earned excommunication by playing dice on the altars of Notre Dame.⁷³ In their more orderly moments the students amused themselves with dogs, hawks, music, dancing, chess, telling stories, and hazing newcomers. Such fledglings were styled bejauni—yellow-bills; they were bullied and hoaxed, and were made to provide a feast for their lords of a year’s advantage. Discipline relied largely on rules established by each hall of residence; violations were punished with fines or by “sconces”—whereby an offending student was mulcted in gallons of wine, to be corporately consumed. Flogging, though frequent in grammar schools, is not mentioned in university discipline till the fifteenth century. For the rest the university authorities required every student at the beginning of each year to take a solemn oath to obey all regulations. Among the required oaths at Paris was one pledging the student not to take vengeance on examiners who failed to pass him.⁷⁴ The students swore in haste and sinned at leisure. Perjury was prevalent; hell had no terrors for young theologians.

Nevertheless the students found time for lectures. There were sluggards among them; some who preferred leisure to fame favored the courses in canon law, whose sessions began at the third hour and allowed them to complete their sleep.⁷⁵ As the third hour was nine A. M., it is apparent that most classes met soon after dawn, probably at seven. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the school season lasted eleven months; by the end of the fourteenth century the “long vacation,” originating in the need for youthful hands at harvest time, ran from June 28 to August 25 or September 15. At Oxford and Paris only a few days were left free at Christmas and Easter; at Bologna, whose students were of greater age and means, and perhaps more distant provenance, ten days were allowed at Christmas, fourteen at Easter, twenty-one for the carnival preceding Lent.

There were seemingly no examinations during the scholastic course. There were recitations and disputations, and incompetent students might be weeded out en route. Toward the middle of the thirteenth century the custom arose of requiring the student, after five years of resident study, to pass a preliminary examination by a committee of his nation. This involved first a private test—a responsio to questions; second, a public disputation in which the candidate defended one or more theses against challengers, and concluded with a summation of the results (determinatio). Those who passed these preliminary trials were called baccalarii, bachelors, and were allowed to serve a master as assistant teacher or “cursory” lecturer. The bachelor might continue his resident studies for three years more; then, if his master thought him fit for the ordeal, he was presented to examiners appointed by the chancellor. Masters were expected not to present clearly unprepared candidates unless these were rich in money or dignity; in such cases the public examination was adjusted to the candidate’s capacity, or it might be dispensed with altogether.⁷⁶ Qualities of character were included as subjects for examination; moral offenses committed during his four or seven years at the university might then block the candidate’s access to a degree, for the degree attested moral fitness as well as intellectual preparation. Of seventeen failures at the examination of forty-three candidates in Vienna in 1449, all were for moral, none for intellectual, deficiency.

If the student passed this public and final examination he became a master or “doctor,” and automatically received an ecclesiastically sanctioned license to teach anywhere in Christendom. As a bachelor he had taught with uncovered head; now he was crowned with a biretta, received a kiss and a blessing from his master, and, seated in the magisterial chair, gave an inaugural lecture or held an inaugural disputation; this was his inceptio—called at Cambridge his “commencement” as a master. It was essential to such graduation that he should entertain all or a large number of the masters of the university at a banquet, and make presents to them. By these and other ceremonies he was received into the magisterial guild.

It is comforting to observe that medieval education had defects as troublesome as the educational systems of today. Only a small proportion of matriculants survived the five years required for the baccalaureate. The assumption of all the defined doctrines of the Church as binding on belief put the mind to rest instead of to work. The search for arguments to prove these beliefs, the citing of scriptural or patristic support for them, the interpretation of Aristotle to harmonize with them, trained intellectual subtlety rather than intellectual conscience. We may forgive these faults more readily if we consider that any way of life develops a similar dogmatism about the assumptions on which it rests. So today we leave men free to question the religious, but not the political, faith of their fathers; and political heresy is punished by social ostracism as theological heresy was punished by excommunication in the Age of Faith; now that the policeman labors to take the place of God, it becomes more dangerous to question the state than to doubt the Church. No system smiles upon the challenging of its axioms.

The transmission of knowledge and the training of appreciation are obviously more widespread, and seem more abundant, than in the Middle Ages; but we should not readily say the same for the education of character. Practical ability was not lacking in the medieval graduate; the universities sent forth a considerable number of able administrators, lawyers who made the French monarchy, philosophers who led Christianity out upon the high seas of reason, popes who dared to think in European terms. The universities sharpened the intellect of Western man, created a language for philosophy, made learning respectable, and ended the mental adolescence of the triumphant barbarians.

While so many other achievements of the Middle Ages crumble before the juggernaut of time, the universities, bequeathed to us by the Age of Faith in all the elements of their organization, adjust themselves to inescapable change, moult their old skins to live new lives, and wait for us to wed them to government.

CHAPTER XXXV

Abélard

1079–1142

I. DIVINE PHILOSOPHY

LET us give a separate chapter to Abélard. Not merely as a philosopher, nor as one of the creators of the University of Paris, nor as a flame that set the mind of Latin Europe afire in the twelfth century; but as, with Héloïse, part and personification of the morals and literature and highest fascination of their time.

He was born in Brittany, near Nantes, in the village of Le Pallet. His father, known to us only as Bérenger, was the seigneur of a modest estate, and could afford to give his three sons and one daughter a liberal education. Pierre (we do not know the origin of his surname Abélard) was the oldest, and could claim the rights of primogeniture; but he felt so lively an interest in studies and ideas that, on growing up, he surrendered to his brothers his claim and share in the family property, and set out to woo philosophy wherever a philosophic battle raged, or some famous teacher taught. It meant much for his career that one of his first masters was Jean Roscelin (c. 1050–c. 1120), a rebel who prefigured Abélard by drawing down upon his head the condemnation of the Church.

The controversy that Roscelin had aroused stemmed from what seemed the most harmless problem of the driest logic—the objective existence of “universals.” In Greek and medieval philosophy a universal was a general idea denoting a class of objects (book, stone, planet, man, mankind, the French people, the Catholic Church), actions (cruelty, justice), or qualities (beauty, truth). Plato, seeing the transitoriness of individual organisms and things, had suggested that the universal is more lasting, therefore more real, than any member of the class it describes: beauty more real than Phryne, justice more real than Aristides, man more real than Socrates; this is what the Middle Ages meant by “realism.” Aristotle had countered that the universal is merely an idea formed by the mind to represent a class of like objects; the class itself exists, he thought, only as its constituent members. In our time men have debated whether there is a “group mind” apart from the desires, ideas, and feelings of the individuals composing the group; and Hume argued that the individual “mind” itself is only an abstract name for the series and collection of sensations, ideas, and volitions in an organism. The Greeks did not take the problem too much to heart; and one of the last pagan philosophers—Porphyry (c. 232–c. 304) of Syria and Rome—merely phrased it without offering a solution. But to the Middle Ages the question was vital. The Church claimed to be a spiritual entity additional to the sum of her individual adherents; the whole, she felt, had qualities and powers beyond those of its parts; she could not admit that she was an abstraction, and that the endless ideas and relations suggested by the term “the Church” were nothing but ideas and feelings in her constituent members; she was the living “bride of Christ.” Worse yet: if only individual persons, things, actions, and ideas existed, what became of the Trinity? Was the unity of the three Persons a mere abstraction; were they three separate gods? We must place ourselves in his theological environment to understand the fate of Roscelin.

We know his views only through the reports of his opponents. We are told that he considered universals or general ideas to be mere words (voces), mere winds of the voice (flatus vocis); individual objects and persons exist; all else is names (nomina). Genera and species and qualities have no independent existence; man does not exist, only men; color exists only in the form of colored things. The Church would doubtless have let Roscelin alone had he not applied this “nominalism” to the Trinity. God, he is reported to have said, is a word applied to the three Persons of the Trinity, just as man is applied to many men; but all that really exists is the three Persons—in effect, three gods. This was to admit the polytheism of which Islam implicitly accused Christianity five times a day from a thousand minarets. The Church could not allow such teaching in one who was a canon of the cathedral at Compiègne. Roscelin was summoned before an episcopal synod at Soissons (1092), and was given a choice between retraction and excommunication. He retracted. He fled to England, attacked clerical concubinage there,¹ returned to France, and taught at Tours and Loches. It was probably at Loches that Abélard sat impatiently at his feet.² Abélard rejected nominalism, but it was for doubts about the Trinity that he was twice condemned. It deserves also to be noted that the twelfth century called realism “the ancient doctrine,” and gave to its opponents the name of moderni—moderns.³

The Church was ably defended by Anselm (1033–1109) in several works that seem to have deeply moved Abélard, if only to opposition. Anselm came of a patrician family in Italy; he was made Abbot of Bec in Normandy in 1078; under his rule, as under that of Lanfranc, Bec became one of the major schools of learning in the West. As perhaps ideally described by his fellow monk Eadmer in a loving biography, Anselm was a gentle ascetic who wished only to meditate and pray, and reluctantly emerged from his cell to govern the monastery and its school. To such a man, whose faith was his life, doubt was impossible; faith must come long before understanding; and how could any finite mind expect ever to understand God? “I do not seek to understand in order to believe,” he said, following Augustine, “I believe in order to understand.” But his pupils asked for arguments for use against infidels; he himself considered it “negligent if, after we are confirmed in our faith, we should not aim to understand what we have believed”;⁴ he accepted the motto fides quaerens intellectum—faith in quest of understanding; and in a series of immensely influential works he inaugurated Scholastic philosophy by attempting a rational defense of the Christian faith.

In a little treatise, Monologion, he argued for the objective existence of universals: our notions of goodness, justice, and truth are relative, and have meaning only by comparison with some absolute goodness, justice, and truth; unless this Absolute exists we have no certain standards of judgment, and our science and our morality alike are baseless and void; God—objective goodness, justice, and truth—is this saving Absolute, the necessary assumption of our lives. As if to. carry this realism to the utmost, Anselm proceeded in his Proslogion (c. 1074) to his famous ontological proof of the existence of God: God is the most perfect being that we can conceive; but if He were merely an idea in our heads He would lack one element of perfection—namely, existence: therefore God, the most perfect being, exists. A modest monk, Gaunilo, signing himself Insipiens (Fool), wrote to Anselm, protesting that we cannot pass so magically from conception to existence, and that an equally valid argument would prove the existence of a perfect island; and Thomas Aquinas agreed with Gaunilo.⁵ In another brilliant but unconvincing tract—Cur Deus homo?—Anselm sought some rational ground for the fundamental Christian belief that God had become man. Why was this incarnation necessary? An opinion defended by Ambrose, Pope Leo I, and several Fathers of the Church⁶ held that by eating the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve had sold themselves and all their progeny to the Devil, and that only the death of God become man could ransom humanity from Satan and hell. Anselm proposed a subtler argument: the disobedience of our first parents was an infinite offense, because it sinned against an infinite being, and disturbed the moral order of the world; only an infinite atonement could balance and wipe out that infinite offense; only an infinite being could offer such infinite atonement; God became man to restore the moral balance of the world.

The realism of Anselm was developed by one of Roscelin’s pupils, William of Champeaux (1070?-1121). In 1103 William began to teach dialectics in the cathedral school of Notre Dame at Paris. If we may believe Abélard, who was too good a warrior to be a good historian, William out-Platoed Plato, and held not only that universals are objectively real, but that the individual is an incidental modification of the generic reality, and exists solely by participating in the universal; so humanity is the real being, which enters into, and thereby gives existence to, Socrates. Moreover (William is reported to have taught) the whole universal is present in every individual of its class; all humanity is in Socrates, in Alexander.

To William’s school Abélard came after much scholarly wandering (1103?), aged twenty-four or twenty-five. He had a fine figure, a proud carriage, good looks,⁷ an imposing breadth of brow; and the vivacity of his spirit gave life and charm to his manners and speech. He could compose songs and sing them; his lusty humor shook the cobwebs in the dialectical halls; he was a gay and joyous youth who had discovered at the same time Paris and philosophy. His defects were those of his qualities: he was conceited, boastful, insolent, self-centered; and in the exhilaration of his conscious talent he rode with young thoughtlessness over the dogmas and sensibilities of his masters and his time. He was drunk with the “dear delight” of philosophy; this famous lover loved dialectic more than he loved Héloïse.

He was amused by the exaggerated realism of his teacher, and challenged him in open class. All humanity present in Socrates? Then, when all humanity is in Alexander, Socrates (included in all humanity) must be present in Alexander. Presumably William had meant that all the essential elements of humanity are present in each human being; we have not received William’s side of the argument. In any case Abélard would have none of it. To William’s realism, and to Roscelin’s nominalism, he opposed what came to be called conceptualism. The class (man, stone) physically exists only in the form of its constituent members (men, stones); qualities (whiteness, goodness, truth) exist only in the objects, actions, or ideas that they qualify. But the class and the quality are not mere names; they are concepts formed by our minds from elements or features observed to be common to a group of individuals, objects, actions, or ideas. These common elements are real, though they appear only in individual forms. The concepts by which we think of these common elements—the generic or universal ideas by which we think of classes of like objects—are not “winds of voice,” but the most useful and indispensable instruments of thought; without them science and philosophy would be impossible.

Abélard remained with William, he tells us, “for some time.” Then he himself began to teach, first at Melun, later at Corbeil, the one forty, the other twenty-five, miles from Paris. Some criticized him for setting up his own shop after too brief an apprenticeship, but a goodly number of students followed him, relishing his quick mind and tongue. Meanwhile William became a monk at St. Victor, and “by request” continued his lectures there. To him, after a “grievous illness,” Abélard returned as a pupil; apparently there was more meat on the bones of William’s philosophy than a hasty reading of Abélard’s brief autobiography suggests. But soon their old debates were resumed; Abélard (in Abélard’s report) forced William to modify his realism, and William’s prestige waned. His successor and appointee at Notre Dame now (1109?) offered to yield his place to Abélard; William refused consent. Abélard resumed lecturing at Melun, then on Mont Ste.-Geneviève, just outside Paris. Between him and William, and between their students, a war of logic ran its wordy course for years; and Abélard, despite his rejection of nominalism, became the leader and hero of the moderni, the ardent young rebels of the “modern” school.

While he was so embattled, his father and mother entered religious orders, presumably as a viaticum, and Abélard had to return to Le Pallet to bid them Godspeed, and perhaps to settle some problems of property. In 1115, after a term of studying theology at Laon, Abélard returned to Paris, and, apparently without opposition, established his school, or lecture course, in those very cloisters of Notre Dame where he had squatted as a student some twelve years before. He became a canon of the cathedral,⁸ though not yet a priest, and might look forward to ecclesiastical dignities if he could hold his tongue. But it was a hard condition. He had studied literature as well as philosophy, and was a master of lucid and graceful exposition; like any Frenchman he acknowledged a moral obligation to be clear; and he was not afraid to let some humor lighten the burden of his speech. Students came from a dozen countries to hear him; his classes were so large that they brought him considerable money as well as international fame.⁹ A letter written to him a few years later by the Abbé Foulques bears witness:

Rome sent you her children to instruct…. Neither distance nor mountains nor valleys nor roads infested with brigands prevented the youth of the world from coming to you. Young Englishmen crowded to your classes across a dangerous sea; all quarters of Spain, Flanders, Germany sent you pupils; and they were never tired of praising the power of your mind. I say nothing of all the inhabitants of Paris, and the most distant parts of France, which were also thirsty for your teaching, almost as if no science existed which could not be learned from you.¹⁰

From that height and splendor of success and renown why should he not move on to a bishopric (as William had done), then to an archbishopric? Why not to the papacy?

II. HÉLOÏSE

Up to this time (1117?), he doth protest, he had maintained “the utmost continence,” and “had diligently refrained from all excesses.”¹¹ But in the maiden Héloïse, niece of the cathedral canon Fulbert, there was a comeliness of person, and a flair for learning, which aroused the sensitivity of his manhood and the admiration of his mind. During those hectic years when Abélard and William fought the universal war, Héloïse had grown from infancy to girlhood as an orphan of whose parentage no certain trace remains. Her uncle sent her for many years to a convent at Argenteuil; there, falling in love with the books in the little library, she became the brightest pupil the nuns had ever had. When Fulbert learned that she could converse in Latin as readily as in French, and was even studying Hebrew,¹² he took new pride in her, and brought her to live with him in his home near the cathedral.

She was sixteen when Abélard came into her life (1117). Presumably she had heard of him long since; she must have seen the hundreds of students who crowded the cloisters and lecture rooms to hear him; perhaps, so intellectually eager, she had gone openly or furtively to see and hear the idol and paragon of the scholars of Paris. We can imagine her modest trepidation when Fulbert told her that Abélard was to live with them and be her tutor. The philosopher himself gives the frankest explanation of how it had come about:

It was this young girl whom I… determined to unite with myself in the bonds of love. And indeed the thing seemed to me very easy to be done. So distinguished was my name, and I possessed such advantages of youth and comeliness, that no matter what woman I might favor with my love, I dreaded rejection of none…. Thus, utterly aflame with passion for this maiden, I sought to discover means whereby I might have daily and familiar speech with her, thereby the more easily to win her consent. For this purpose I persuaded the girl’s uncle… to take me into his household… in return for the payment of a small sum…. He was a man keen in avarice, and… believed that his niece would vastly benefit from my teaching…. The man’s simplicity was nothing short of astounding; I should not have been more surprised if he had entrusted a tender lamb to the care of a ravenous wolf….

Why should I say more? We were united, first in the dwelling that sheltered our love, and then in the hearts that burned within us. Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love…. Our kisses outnumbered our reasoned words; our hands sought less the book than each other’s bosoms; love drew our eyes together.¹³

What had begun with his simple physical desire graduated through Héloïse’s delicacy into “a tenderness surpassing in sweetness the most fragrant balm.” It was a new experience for him, and wooed him quite from philosophy; he borrowed passion from his lectures for his love, and left them anomalously dull. His students mourned the dialectician, but welcomed the lover; they were delighted to learn that even Socrates could sin; they consoled themselves for lost jousts of argument by singing the love songs that he now composed; and Héloïse from her windows could hear on their lips the boisterous echo of his enchantment.¹⁴

Not long afterward she announced to him that she was with child. Secretly by night he stole her from her uncle’s house, and sent her to his sister’s home in Brittany.¹⁵ Half from fear and half from pity, he offered to the infuriated uncle to marry Héloïse provided Fulbert would let him keep the marriage secret. The canon agreed, and after his classes had adjourned Abélard went to Brittany to fetch a tender but unwilling bride. Their son, Astrolabe, was three days old when he arrived. Héloïse long refused to marry him. The reforms of Leo IX and Gregory VII, a generation back, had barred married men from the priesthood unless the wife became a nun; she was not ready to contemplate such a surrender of her mate and her child; she proposed to remain his mistress, on the ground that such a relationship, kept judiciously secret, would not, like marriage, close his road to advancement in the Church.¹⁶ A long passage in Abélard’s History of My Calamities (vii) ascribes to Héloïse at this point a learned array of authorities and instances against the marriage of philosophers, and an eloquent plea against “robbing the Church of so shining a light”: “Remember that Socrates was wedded, and with how sordid a case he first purged that stain on philosophy, that thereafter other men might be more prudent.” “It would be far sweeter for her,” he reports her as saying, “to be called my mistress than to be known as my wife; nay, this would be more honorable for me as well.”¹⁷ He persuaded her by promising that the marriage would be known only to an intimate few.

They left Astrolabe with the sister, returned to Paris, and were married in the presence of Fulbert. To keep the marriage secret Abélard went back to his bachelor lodgings, and Héloïse lived again with her uncle; the lovers saw each other now only rarely and clandestinely. But Fulbert, anxious to redeem his prestige, and overruling his promise to Abélard, divulged the marriage. Héloïse denied it, and Fulbert “visited her repeatedly with punishments.” Abélard again stole her away; this time he sent her, much against her will, to the convent at Argenteuil, and bade her don the garb of a nun, but not to take the vows or the veil. When Fulbert and his kinsmen heard of this, says Abélard, they were convinced that now I had completely played them false, and had rid myself forever of Héloïse by forcing her to become a nun. Violently incensed, they laid a plot against me; and one night, while… I was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance upon me with a most cruel and shameful punishment… for they cut off those parts of my body whereby I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow. This done, they fled; but two of them were captured, and suffered the loss of their eyes and their genitals.¹⁸

His enemies could not have chosen a subtler revenge. It did not immediately disgrace him; all Paris, including the clergy, sympathized with him;¹⁹ his students flocked to comfort him. Fulbert shrank into hiding and oblivion, and the bishop confiscated his property. But Abélard realized that he was ruined, and that “the tale of this amazing outrage would spread to the very ends of the earth.” He could no longer think of ecclesiastical preferment. He felt that his fair fame had been “utterly blotted out,” and that he would be a butt of jokes for generations to come. He felt a certain unpoetic justice in his fall: he had been maimed in the flesh that had sinned, and had been betrayed by the man whom he had betrayed. He bade Héloïse take the veil, and he himself, at St. Denis, took the vows of a monk.

III. THE RATIONALIST

A year later (1120), at the urging of his students and his abbot, he resumed his lecturing, in a “cell” of the Benedictine priory of Maisoncelle. Presumably we have the substance of his lecture courses in his books. These, however, were composed in hectic installments, and hardly allow dating; they were revised in his final years, when his spirit was quite broken, and there is no telling how much youthful fire was quenched by the flow of time. Four minor logical works circle about the problem of universals; we need not disturb their rest. The Dialectica, however, is a 375-page treatise on logic in the Aristotelian sense: a rational analysis of the parts of speech, the categories of thought (substance, quantity, place, position, time, relation, quality, possession, action, “passion”), the forms of propositions, and the rules of reasoning; the renascent mind of Western Europe had to clarify these basic ideas for itself like a child learning to read. Dialectic was the major interest of philosophy in Abélard’s time, partly because the new philosophy stemmed from Aristotle through Boethius and Porphyry, and only the logical treatises of Aristotle (and not all of these) were known to this first generation of Scholastic philosophy. So the Dialectica is not a fascinating book; yet even in its formal pages we hear a shot or two in the first skirmishes of a Two Hundred Years’ War between faith and reason. How can we, in an age already doubtful of the intellect, recapture the glow of a time that was just discovering “this great mystery of knowledge”?²⁰ Truth cannot be contrary to truth, Abélard pleads; the truths of Scripture must agree with the findings of reason, else the God who gave us both would be deluding us with one or the other.²¹

Perhaps in his early period—before his tragedy—he wrote his Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian. “In a vision of the night,” he says, three men came to him as a famous teacher, and asked his judgment on their dispute. All three believe in one God; two accept the Hebrew Scriptures; the philosopher rejects these, and proposes to base life and morality on reason and natural law. How absurd, argues the philosopher, to cling to the beliefs of our childhood, to share the superstitions of the crowd, and to condemn to hell those who do not accept these puerilities!²² He ends unphilosophically by calling Jews fools, and Christians lunatics. The Jew replies that men could not live without laws; that God, like a good king, gave man a code of conduct; and that the precepts of the Pentateuch sustained the courage and morality of the Jews through centuries of dispersion and tragedy. The philosopher asks, How, then, did your patriarchs live so nobly, long before Moses and his laws?—and how can you believe in a revelation that promised you earthly prosperity, and yet has allowed you to suffer such poverty and desolation? The Christian accepts much that the philosopher and the Jew have said, but he argues that Christianity developed and perfected the natural law of the one and the Mosaic law of the other; Christianity raised higher than ever before the moral ideals of mankind. Neither philosophy nor scriptural Judaism offered man eternal happiness; Christianity gives harassed man such a hope, and is therefore infinitely precious. This unfinished dialogue is an amazing product for a cathedral canon in the Paris of 1120.

A like freedom of discussion found another medium in Abélard’s most famous work, Sic et non—Yes and No (1120?). The earliest known mention of it is in a letter from William of St. Thierry to St. Bernard (1140), describing it as a suspicious book secretly circulating among the pupils and partisans of Abélard.²³ Thereafter it disappeared from history until 1836, when the manuscript was discovered by Victor Cousin in a library at Avranches. Its very form must have made the mitered grieve. After a pious introduction it divided into 157 questions, including the most basic dogmas of the faith; under each question two sets of quotations were ranged in opposite columns; one set supported the affirmative, the other the negative; and each set quoted from the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, the pagan classics, even from Ovid’s Art of Loving (Ars amandi). The book may have been intended as an armory of references for scholastic disputation; but the introduction, purposely or not, impugned the authority of the Fathers by showing them in contradiction of one another, even of themselves. Abélard did not question the authority of the Bible; but he argued that its language was meant for unlettered people, and must be interpreted by reason; that the sacred text had sometimes been corrupted by interpolation or careless copying; and that where scriptural or patristic passages contradicted one another, reason must attempt their reconciliation. Anticipating the “Cartesian doubt” by 400 years, he wrote in the same prologue: “The first key to wisdom is assiduous and frequent questioning…. For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we arrive at the truth.”²⁴ He points out that Jesus Himself, facing the doctors in the Temple, plied them with questions. The first debate in the book is almost a declaration of independence for philosophy: “That faith should be founded in human reason, and the contrary.” He quotes Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory I as defending faith, and cites Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine to the effect that it is good to be able to prove one’s faith by reason. While repeatedly affirming his orthodoxy, Abélard opens up for debate such problems as Divine Providence vs. free will, the existence of sin and evil in a world created by a good and omnipotent God, and the possibility that God is not omnipotent. His free reasoning about such questions must have shaken the faith of youthful students enamored of debate. Nevertheless this method of education by the freest discussion became, probably through Abélard’s example,²⁵ the regular procedure at French universities and in philosophical or theological writing; we shall find St. Thomas adopting it without fear and without reproach. In the very birth of Scholasticism rationalism found a place.

If the Sic et non offended only a few because its circulation was limited, Abélard’s attempt to apply reason to the mystery of the Trinity could not so narrowly confine its influence and alarm, for it was the subject of his lectures in 1120, and of his book On the Divine Unity and Trinity. He wrote this, he says,

for my students, because they were always seeking for rational and philosophical explanations, asking rather for reasons they could understand than for mere words, saying that it was futile to utter words which the intellect could not possibly follow, that nothing could be believed unless it could first be understood, and that it was absurd for anyone to preach to others a thing which neither he himself, nor those whom he sought to teach, could comprehend.²⁶

This book, he tells us, “became exceedingly popular,” and people marveled at his subtlety. He pointed out that the unity of God was the one point agreed upon by the greatest religions and the greatest philosophers. In the one God we may view His power as the First Person, His wisdom as the Second, His grace, charity, and love as the Third; these are phases or modalities of the Divine Essence; but all the works of God suppose and unite at once His power, His wisdom, and His love.²⁷ Many theologians felt that this was a permissible analogy; the bishop of Paris rejected the appeal of the now aged and orthodox Roscelin to indict Abélard for heresy; and Bishop Geoffroy of Chartres defended Abélard through all the fury that now fell upon the reckless philosopher. But in Reims two teachers—Alberic and Lotulphe—who had quarreled with Abélard at Laon in 1113, stirred up the archbishop to summon him to come to Soissons with his book on the Trinity, and defend himself against charges of heresy. When Abélard appeared at Soissons (1121) he found that the populace had been roused against him, and “came near to stoning me… in the belief that I had preached the existence of three gods.”²⁸ The Bishop of Chartres demanded that Abélard be heard by the council in his own defense; Alberic and others objected, on the ground that Abélard was irresistible in persuasion and argument. The council condemned him unheard, compelled him to cast his book into a fire, and bade the abbot of St. Médard to confine him in that monastery for a year. But shortly thereafter a papal legate freed him, and sent him back to St. Denis.

After a turbulent year with the unruly monks there, Abélard secured permission from the new abbot, the great Suger, to build himself a hermitage in a lonely spot halfway between Fontainebleau and Troyes (1122). There, with a companion in minor orders, he raised with reeds and stalks a little oratory or place of prayer, which he called by the name of the Holy Trinity. When students heard that he was free to teach again they came to him and made themselves into an impromptu school; they built huts in the wilderness, slept on rushes and straw, and lived on “coarse bread and the herbs of the field.”²⁹ Here was a thirst for knowledge that would soon make and crowd universities; now, indeed, the Dark Ages were a nightmare almost forgotten. In return for his lectures the students tilled the field, raised buildings, and built him a new oratory of timber and stone, which he called the Paraclete, as if to say that the affection of his disciples had come like a holy spirit into his life just when he had fled from human society to solitude and despair.

The three years that he spent there were as happy as any that he could now know. Probably the lectures that he gave to those eager students are preserved and reshaped in two books, one called Theologia Christiana, the other simply Theologia. Their doctrine was orthodox, but an age still a stranger to most of Greek philosophy was a bit shocked to find in them so many laudatory references to pagan thinkers, and a suggestion that Plato too had in some degree enjoyed divine inspiration.³⁰ He could not believe that all these wonderful pre-Christian minds had missed salvation;³¹ God, he insisted, gives His love to all peoples, Jews and heathen included.³² Abélard impenitently returned to the defense of reason in theology, and argued that heretics should be restrained by reason rather than by force.³³ Those who recommend faith without understanding are in many cases seeking to cover up their inability to teach the faith intelligibly:³⁴ here was a barb that must have pierced some skins! In attempting a rationale of Christianity Abélard might seem to have dared no more than what Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas would essay after him; but whereas even the brave Thomas would leave the Trinity, and the creation in time, to a faith beyond or above reason, Abélard sought to embrace the most mystic doctrines of the Church within the grasp of reason.

The audacity of the enterprise, and the sharpness of his reviving wit, brought him new enemies. Probably referring to Bernard of Clairvaux, and Norbert, founder of the Premonstratensian Order, he writes:

Certain new apostles in whom the world put great faith ran hither and yon… shamelessly slandering me in every way they could, so that in time they succeeded in drawing down upon my head the scorn of many having authority…. God is my witness that whensoever I learned that a new assemblage of the clergy was convened, I believed that it was done for the express purpose of my condemnation.³⁵

Perhaps to silence such criticism he abandoned his teaching, and accepted an invitation to be the abbot of the monastery of St. Gildas in Brittany (1125?); more likely the politic Suger had arranged the transfer in the hope of quieting the storm. It was at once a promotion and an imprisonment. The philosopher found himself amid a “barbarous” and “unintelligible” population, among monks “vile and untamable,” who openly lived with concubines.³⁶ Resenting his reforms, the monks put poison in the chalice from which he drank at Mass; this failing, they bribed his servant to poison his food; another monk ate the food and “straightway fell dead”;³⁷ but Abélard is our sole authority here. He fought this battle bravely enough, for, with some interruptions, he remained in this lonely post for eleven years.

IV. THE LETTERS OF HELOÏSE

He had an interlude of moderate happiness when Suger decided to use for other purposes than a nunnery the house at Argenteuil. Since her separation from Abélard Héloïse had so devoted herself there to her duties as a nun that she had been made prioress, and had won “such favor in the eyes of all… that the bishops loved her as a daughter, the abbots as a sister, and the laity as a mother.” Learning that Héloïse and her nuns were looking for new quarters, Abélard offered them the oratory and buildings of “the Paraclete.” He went in person to help establish them there, and frequently visited them to preach to them and the villagers who had settled near by. Gossip murmured “that I, who of old could scarcely endure to be parted from her whom I loved, was still swayed by the delights of earthly lust.”³⁸

It was during his troubled abbacy at St. Gildas that he composed his autobiography—Historia calamitatum mearum (1133?). We do not know its motive; it assumed the guise of an essay in consolation offered to a plaintive friend, “so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth naught”; but apparently it was intended for the world, as both a moral confession and a theological defense. An old but unverifiable tradition says that a copy of it came to Héloïse, and that she wrote this astonishing reply:

To her master, nay father, to her husband, nay brother: his handmaid, nay daughter, his spouse, nay sister: to Abélard, Héloïse. Your letter written to a friend for his comfort, beloved, was lately brought to me by chance…. Which things I deem that no one can read or hear with dry eyes, for they renewed in fuller measure my griefs…. In His name Who still protects thee… in the name of Christ, as His handmaids and thine, we beseech thee to deign to inform us by frequent letters of those shipwrecks in which thou still art tossed, that thou mayest have us, at least, who alone have remained to thee as partners in thy grief or joy….

Thou knowest, dearest—all men know—what I have lost in thee…. Obeying thy command, I changed both my habit and my heart, that I might show thee to be the possessor of both my body and my mind…. Not for the pledge of matrimony, nor for any dowry, did I look…. And if the name of wife appears more sacred and valid, sweeter to me is ever the word friend, or, if thou be not ashamed, concubine or whore…. I call God to witness, if Augustus, ruling over the whole world, were to deem me worthy of the honor of marriage, and to confirm the whole world to me, to be ruled by me forever, dearer to me and of greater dignity would it seem to be called thy strumpet than his empress….

For who among kings or philosophers could equal thee in fame? What kingdom or city or village did not burn to see thee? Who, I ask, did not hasten to gaze upon thee when thou appearedst in public?… What wife, what maiden did not yearn for thee in thine absence, nor burn in thy presence? What queen or powerful lady did not envy me my joys and my bed?…

Tell me one thing only if thou canst: why, after our conversion [to the religious life], which thou alone didst decree, I am fallen into such neglect and oblivion with thee that I am neither refreshed by thy speech and presence, nor comforted by a letter in thine absence. Tell me one thing only, if thou canst, or let me tell thee what I feel, nay, what all suspect: concupiscence joined thee to me rather than affection…. When, therefore, what thou hadst desired ceased, all that thou hadst exhibited at the same time failed. This, most beloved, is not mine only but the conjecture of all…. Would that it seemed thus to me only, and thy love found others to excuse it, by whom my grief might be a little quieted.

Attend, I beseech thee, to what I ask…. While I am cheated of thy presence, at least by written words—whereof thou hast abundance-present the sweetness of thine image…. I deserved more from thee, having done all things for thee… I, who as a girl was allured to the asperity of monastic conversion… not by religious devotion, but by thy command alone…. No reward for this may I expect from God, for the love of Whom it is well known that I did not anything….

And so in His name to Whom thou hast offered thyself, before God I beseech thee that in whatsoever way thou canst thou restore to me thy presence by writing to me some word of comfort…. Farewell, my all.³⁹

Abélard was physiologically incapacitated from responding to such passion in kind. The reply that tradition assigns to him is a reminder of religious vows: “To Héloïse his dearly beloved sister in Christ, Abélard her brother in the same.” He counsels her to accept their misfortunes humbly, as a cleansing and saving punishment from God. He asks for her prayers, bids her assuage her grief with the hope of their reunion in heaven, and begs her to bury him, when he is dead, in the grounds of the Paraclete. Her second letter repeats her fond impieties: “I have ever feared to offend thee rather than God, I seek to please thee more than Him…. See how unhappy a life I must lead, if I endure all these things in vain, having no hope of reward in the future. For a long time thou, like many others, hast been deceived by my simulation, so as to mistake hypocrisy for religion.”⁴⁰ He answers that Christ, not he, truly loved her: “My love was concupiscence, not love; I satisfied my wretched desires in thee, and this was all that I loved…. Weep for thy Saviour, not for thy seducer; for thy Redeemer, not for thy defiler.”⁴¹ And he composes a touching prayer which he asks her to recite for him. Her third letter shows her resigned to the earthly death of his love; she asked him now only for a new rule by which she and her nuns might live properly the religious life. He complied, and drew up for them a kindly moderate code. He wrote sermons for their edification, and sent these compositions to Héloïse over a tender signature: “Farewell in the Lord to His servant, once dear to me in the world, now most dear in Christ.” In his own broken heart he still loved her.

Are these famous letters genuine? The difficulties leap to the eye. The first letter of Héloïse purports to follow upon his Historia calamitatum, which records several visits of Abélard to Héloïse at the Paraclete; yet she complains that he has ignored her. Possibly the Historia was issued in installments, and only the earlier parts preceded the letter. The bold carnality of certain passages seems incredible in a woman whose religious devotion through fourteen years had already earned her the high and general regard which we find attested by Peter the Venerable as well as by Abélard. There are artifices of rhetoric in these letters, and pedantic quotations from the classics and the Fathers, which would hardly occur to a mind sincerely feeling love or piety or remorse. The oldest manuscripts of the letters date from the thirteenth century. Jean de Meung appears to have translated them from Latin into French in 1285.⁴² We may provisionally conclude that they are among the most brilliant forgeries in history, unreliable in fact, but an imperishable part of the romantic literature of France.⁴³

V. THE CONDEMNED

We do not know when or how Abélard escaped from the dignities and trials of his abbacy. We find John of Salisbury reporting that in 1136 he had attended Abélard’s lectures on Mont Ste.-Geneviève. Nor do we know by what license he had resumed his teaching; perhaps he had asked none. It may be that some flouting of Church discipline set ecclesiastics against him, and by a devious route led to his final fall.

If emasculation had unmanned him there is no sign of it in the works that have transmitted to us the substance of his teaching. It is difficult to find explicit heresy in them, but easy to discover passages that must have made churchmen fret. In a book of moral philosophy entitled Scito te ipsum (Know Thyself) he argued that sin lies not in the act but in the intention; no act—not even killing—is sinful in itself. So a mother, having too little clothing to warm her babe, pressed it against her bosom and unwittingly suffocated it; she killed the thing she loved, and was properly punished by the law to make other women more careful; but in the eyes of God she was sinless. Furthermore, that there should be sin, the agent must violate his own moral conscience, not merely that of others. Hence the killing of Christian martyrs was not a sin in Romans who felt such persecution necessary to the preservation of their state or of a religion which seemed to them true. Nay, “those even who persecuted Christ or His followers, whom they considered it their duty to persecute, are said to have sinned in action; but they would have committed a graver fault if, contrary to their conscience, they had spared them.”⁴⁴ All this might be logical as well as irritating; but on such a theory the whole doctrine of sin as a violation of God’s law threatened to go up in a haze of casuistry about intentions; who but a few Pauls would admit that he had acted against his own conscience? Of the sixteen excerpts for which Abélard was condemned in 1141, six were taken from this book.

What disturbed the Church more than any specific heresy in Abélard was his assumption that there were no mysteries in the faith, that all dogmas should be capable of rational explanation. Was he not so drunk with the lees of logic that he had dared to connect it with the Logos, the Word of God, as a science almost divine?⁴⁵ Granted that this seductive teacher arrived by unorthodox methods at orthodox conclusions; how many immature minds, infected by him with the logic-chopping germ, must have been, by his specious pros and cons, unsettled on the way! If he had been the only one of his kind he might have been left untouched, in the hope that he would not take too long to die. But he had hundreds of eager followers; and there were other teachers—William of Conches, Gilbert de la Porrée, Bérenger of Tours —who were also summoning the faith to trial by reason. How long, on this procedure, could the Church maintain that unity and fervor of religious belief on which the moral and social order of Europe seemed to rest? Already one of Abélard’s pupils, Arnold of Brescia, was fomenting revolution in Italy.

Probably it was considerations like these that finally brought St. Bernard into open war with Abélard. The eager watchdog of the faith scented the wolf at the flock, and led the pack to the hunt. He had long looked with distrust upon the prowling, invading, audacious intellect; to seek knowledge except as ministering to sanctity seemed to him plain paganism; to attempt to explain the sacred mysteries by reason was impiety and folly; and the same rationalism that began by explaining those mysteries would end by desecrating them. The saint was not truculent; when (1139) William of St. Thierry, a monk of Reims, called his attention to the dangers in Abélard’s teaching, and begged him to denounce the philosopher, he put the monk off and did nothing. Abélard himself precipitated matters by writing to the archbishop of Sens, asking that at the coming church council there he should be given an opportunity to defend himself against the charges of heresy that were being circulated about him. The archbishop agreed, not unwilling to have his see become the cynosure of the Christian world; and to ensure a good fight he invited Bernard to attend. Bernard refused, saying that in the dialectical game he would be “a mere child” against an Abélard trained in logic through forty years. But he wrote to several bishops, urging them to attend and defend the faith:

Peter Abélard is trying to make void the merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason to comprehend God altogether. He ascends to the heavens and descends even to the abyss; nothing may hide from him!… Not content to see things through a glass darkly, he must behold all things face to face…. He savors of Arius when he speaks of the Trinity, of Pelagius when he speaks of grace, of Nestorius when he speaks of the person of Christ.‘ … The faith of the righteous believes, it does not dispute. But this man has no mind to believe what his reason has not previously argued.⁴⁶

Bernard’s allies, pleading their own weakness, prevailed upon him to attend. When Abélard arrived at Sens (June, 1140) he found the public mood, as at Soissons nineteen years before, so set against him by the mere presence and hostility of Bernard that he hardly dared appear in the streets. The archbishop realized his dream; for a week Sens seemed the center of the world; the king of France was present with his ceremonious court; scores of church dignitaries were on hand; and Bernard, crippled with rheumatism and stern with sanctity, overawed all. Some of these prelates had felt the sting, in person or collectively, of Abélard’s attacks upon the shortcomings of the clergy, the immorality of priests and monks, the sale of indulgences, the invention of bogus miracles. Convinced that the judgment of the council would condemn him, Abélard appeared at its first session, announced that he would accept none but the Pope as his judge, and left the assembly and the town. The council was not sure, after this appeal from it, that it could legally try Abélard; Bernard reassured it; and it proceeded to condemn sixteen propositions from Abélard’s books, including his definition of sin, and his theory of the Trinity as the power, wisdom, and love of the one God.

Almost penniless, Abélard set out for Rome to lay his case before the Pope. Age and infirmity retarded him. Reaching the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy, he was received with compassion and solicitude by Peter the Venerable, and rested there a few days. Meanwhile Innocent II issued a decree confirming the sentence of the council, imposing perpetual silence upon Abélard, and ordering his confinement in a monastery. Abélard wished nevertheless to continue his pilgrimage; Peter dissuaded him, saying that the Pope would never decide against Bernard. Weary to physical and spiritual exhaustion, Abélard yielded. He became a monk at Cluny, and hid himself in the obscurity of its walls and its ritual. He edified his fellow monks by his piety, his silence, and his prayers. He wrote to Héloïse—whom he never saw again—a touching profession of faith in the teachings of the Church. He composed, probably for her, some of the most beautiful hymns in medieval literature. One “Plaint” ascribed to him is formally a Lament of David for Jonathan, but any reader will catch tender overtones in it:

Vel confossus pariter

morerer feliciter

cum, quid amor faciat,

maius hoc non habeat,

et me post te vivere

mori sit assidue;

nec ad vitam anima

satis sit dimidia….

Do quietem fidibus;

vellem ut et planctibus

sic possum et fletibus

Laesis pulsu manibus,

raucis planctu vocibus,

deficit et spiritus.⁴⁷

If I might lie in one same grave with thee,

Happily would I die,

Since of all gifts that earthly love can give

No greater boon know I.

That I should live when thou art cold and dead

Would be unceasing death;

Nor in my wraith would half a soul suffice

To life, or half a breath.

I let the harp lie still.

Would that I might

So still my tears and plaints!

My hands are sore with striking,

Sore my throat

With grief. My spirit faints.

Soon thereafter he fell ill, and his kindly Abbot sent him to the priory of St. Marcel near Châlons for a change of air. There, on April 21, 1142, he died, aged sixty-three. He was buried in the priory chapel; but Héloïse reminded Peter the Venerable that Abélard had asked to be interred at the Paraclete. The good Abbot brought the body to her himself, tried to comfort her by speaking of her dead lover as the Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle of his time, and left with her a letter rich in Christian tenderness:

Thus, dear and venerable sister in God, him to whom you were united, after your tie in the flesh, by the better and stronger bond of divine love, and with whom… you have served the Lord, him the Lord now takes in your stead, or as another you, and warms in His bosom; and for the day of His coming, when shall sound the voice of the archangel and the trumpet descending from heaven, He keeps him to restore him to you by His grace.⁴⁸

She joined her dead lover in 1164, having lived to equal his age, and almost his fame. She was buried beside him in the gardens of the Paraclete. That oratory was destroyed in the Revolution, and the graves were disturbed and perhaps confused. What were reasonably believed to be the remains of Abélard and Héloïse were transferred to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris in 1817. There, even till our time, men and women might be seen, on a summer Sunday, bringing flowers to adorn the tomb.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The Adventure of Reason

1120–1308

I. THE SCHOOL OF CHARTRES

HOW shall we explain the remarkable outburst of philosophy that began with Anselm, Roscelin, and Abélard, and culminated in Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas? As usual, many causes conspired. The Greek East had never surrendered its classical heritage; the ancient philosophers were studied in every century in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria; men like Michael Psellus, Nicephorus Blemydes (1197?–1272), George Pachymeres (1242?–1310), and the Syrian Bar-Hebraeus (1226?–82) knew the works of Plato and Aristotle at first hand; and Greek teachers and manuscripts gradually entered the West. Even there some fragments of the Hellenic legacy had survived the barbarian storm; most of Aristotle’s Organon of logic remained; and of Plato the Meno and the Timaeus, whose vision of Er had colored Christian imaginations of hell. The successive waves of translations from the Arabic and the Greek in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the West the revelation and challenge of Greek and Moslem philosophies so different from the Christian that they threatened to sweep away the whole theology of Christendom unless Christianity could construct a counterphilosophy. But these influences would hardly have produced a Christian philosophy if the West had continued poor. What brought these factors to effect was the growth of wealth through the agricultural conquest of the Continent, the expansion of commerce and industry, the services and accumulations of finance. This economic revival collaborated with the liberation of the communes, the rise of the universities, the rebirth of Latin literature and Roman law, the codification of canon law, the glory of Gothic, the flowering of romance, the “gay science” of the troubadours, the awakening of science, and the resurrection of philosophy, to constitute the “Renaissance of the twelfth century.”

From wealth came leisure, study, schools; scholê at first meant leisure. A scholasticus was a director or professor of a school; the “Scholastic philosophy” was the philosophy taught in the medieval secondary schools or in the universities that for the most part grew out of them. The “Scholastic method” was the form of philosophical argument and exposition used in such schools. In the twelfth century, barring Abélard’s classes in or near Paris, Chartres was the most active and famous of these schools. There philosophy was combined with literature, and the graduates managed to write of abstruse problems with the clarity and grace that became an honorable tradition in France. Plato, who also had made philosophy intelligible, was a favorite there, and the quarrel between realists and nominalists was mediated by identifying the “real” universals with the Platonic Ideas, or creative archetypes, in the mind of God. Under Bernard of Chartres (c. 1117) and his brother Theodoric (c. 1140) the school of Chartres reached the height of its influence. Three of its graduates dominated the philosophical scene in Western Europe in the half century after Abélard: William of Conches, Gilbert de la Porrée, and John of Salisbury.

The widening of the Scholastic ken is startlingly revealed in William of Conches (1080?-1154). Here was a man who knew the works of Hippocrates, Lucretius, Hunain ibn Ishaq, Constantine the African, even Democritus.¹ He was fascinated by the atomic theory; all the works of nature, he concluded, originate in combinations of atoms; and this is true even of the highest vital processes of the human body.² The soul is a union of the vital principle of the individual with the cosmic soul or vital principle of the world.³ Following Abélard into a dangerous mystery, William writes: “There is in the Godhead power, wisdom, and will, which the saints call three persons.”⁴ He takes with a large grain of allegory the story that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. He answers vigorously a certain Cornificius and other “Cornificians” who condemned science and philosophy on the ground that simple faith sufficed.

Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason…. But we say that in all things a reason must be sought; if reason fails, we must confide the matter… to the Holy Ghost and faith….⁵ [They say] “We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it.” You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so….⁶ Rejoicing not in the many but in the probity of the few, we toil for truth alone.⁷

This was too strong for the stomach of William of St. Thierry; the zealous monk who had set St. Bernard to hound Abélard hastened to denounce this new rationalist to the watchful abbot of Clairvaux. William of Conches retracted his heresies, agreed that Eve had been made from Adam’s rib,⁸ abandoned philosophy as an enterprise in which the profit was not commensurate with the risk, became tutor to Henry Plantagenet of England, and retired from history.

Gilbert de la Porrée (1070–1154) managed the dangerous business more successfully. He studied and taught at Chartres and Paris, became Bishop of Poitiers, and wrote a Liber sex principiorium, or Book of Six Principles, which remained for many centuries a standard text in logic. But his Commentary on Boethius suggested that the nature of God was so far beyond human understanding that all statements about it must be taken as mere analogies, and so stressed the unity of God as to make the Trinity seem but a figure of speech.⁹ In 1148, though he was now seventy-two, he was charged with heresy by St. Bernard; he stood trial at Auxerre, baffled his opponents with subtle distinctions, and went home uncondemned. A year later he was tried again, consented to burn certain passages torn from his books, but again returned a free man to his diocese. When it was suggested that he should discuss his views with Bernard he refused, saying that the saint was too inexpert a theologian to understand him.¹⁰ Gilbert, said John of Salisbury, “was so ripe in liberal culture as to be surpassed by no one.”¹¹

John might have spoken so for himself, since of all the Scholastic philosophers he possessed the widest culture, the most urbane spirit, the most elegant pen. Born at Salisbury about 1117, he studied under Abélard at Mont Ste.-Geneviève, under William of Conches at Chartres, under Gilbert de la Porrée at Paris. In 1149 he returned to England, and served as secretary to two archbishops of Canterbury, Theobald and Thomas à Becket. He undertook for them various diplomatic missions, visited Italy six times, and stayed at the papal court eight years. He shared Becket’s exile in France, and saw him killed in his cathedral. He became bishop of Chartres in 1176, and died in 1180. It was a full and varied career, in which John learned to check logic with life, and to take metaphysics with the modesty of an atom judging the cosmos. Revisiting the schools in his later years, he was amused to find them still debating nominalism vs. realism.

One never gets away from this question. The world has grown old discussing it, and it has taken more time than the Caesars consumed in conquering and governing the world…. From whatever point a discussion starts, it is always led back and attached to that. It is the madness of Rufus about Naevia: “He thinks of nothing else, talks of nothing else; and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb.”¹²

John himself settled the question simply: the universal is a mental concept conveniently uniting the common qualities of individual beings; John, rather than Abélard, proposed “conceptualism.”

In the best Latin since Alcuin’s letters, he composed a history of Greek and Roman philosophy—an astonishing evidence of the widening medieval horizon; a Metalogicon which lightened logic with autobiography; and a Polycraticus (1159) whimsically subtitled De nugis curialium et vestigiis philosophorum—“On the Follies of Courtiers and the Vestiges of Philosophers.” This is the first important essay in political philosophy in the literature of Christendom. It exposes the errors and vices of contemporary governments, delineates an ideal state, and describes the ideal man. “Today,” he consoles us, “everything is bought openly, unless this is prevented by the modesty of the seller. The unclean fire of avarice threatens even the sacred altars…. Not even the legates of the Apostolic See keep their hands pure from gifts, but at times rage through the provinces in bacchanalian frenzy.”¹³ If we may believe his account (already quoted), he told Pope Hadrian IV that the Church shared liberally in the corruption of the times; to which the Pope in effect replied that men will be men however gowned. And John adds, wisely: “In every office of God’s household [the Church], while some fall behind, others are added to do their work. Among deacons, archdeacons, bishops, and legates I have seen some who labored with such earnestness in the harvest of the Lord that from the merits of their faith and virtue it could be seen that the vineyard of the Father had been rightly placed under their care.”¹⁴ Civil government, he thinks, is far more corrupt than the clergy; and it is good that the Church, for the protection of the people, should exercise a moral jurisdiction over all the kings and states of the earth.¹⁵ The most famous passages in the Polycraticus concern tyrannicide:

If princes have departed little by little from the true way, even so it is not well to overthrow them utterly at once, but rather to rebuke injustice with patient reproof until finally it becomes obvious that they are obstinate in their evil-doing…. But if the power of the ruler opposes the divine commandments, and wishes to make me share in its war against God, then with unrestrained voice I answer that God must be preferred before any man on earth…. To kill a tyrant is not merely lawful, but right and just.¹⁶

This was an unusually excitable outburst for John, and in a later passage of the same volume he added, “provided that the slayer is not bound by fealty to the tyrant.”¹⁷ It was a saving clause, for every ruler exacted an oath of fealty from his subjects. In the fifteenth century Jean Petit defended the assassination of Louis of Orléans by quoting the Polycraticus; but the Council of Constance condemned Petit on the ground that even the king may not condemn an accused person without summons and trial.

We “moderns” cannot always agree with the moderni to whom John belonged in the twelfth century; he talks now and then what seems to us to be nonsense; but even his nonsense is couched in a style of such tolerance and grace as we shall hardly find again before Erasmus. John too was a humanist, loving life more than eternity, loving beauty and kindness more than the dogmas of any faith, and quoting the ancient classics with more relish than the sacred page. He made a long list of dubitabilia—“things about which a wise man may doubt”—and included the nature and origin of the soul, the creation of the world, the relation of God’s foresight to man’s free will. But he was too clever to commit himself to heresy. He moved among the controversies of his time with diplomatic immunity and charm. He thought of philosophy not as a form of war but as a balm of peace: philosophia moderatrix omnium—philosophy was to be a moderating influence in all things; and “he who has by philosophy reached caritas, a charitable kindliness, has attained to philosophy’s true end.”¹⁸

II. ARISTOTLE IN PARIS

Toward 1150 one of Abélard’s pupils, Peter Lombard, published a book which was at once a compilation of Abélard’s thought purified of heresy, and a beginning of the formal Scholastic philosophy. Peter, like Anselm, Arnold of Brescia, Bonaventura, and Thomas Aquinas, was an Italian who came to France for advanced work in theology and philosophy. He liked Abélard, and called the Sic et non his breviary; but also he wanted to be a bishop. His Sententiarum libri IV, or Four Books of Opinions, applied and chastened the method of the Sic et non: he drew up under each question of theology an array of Biblical and Patristic quotations for and against; but this Peter labored conscientiously to resolve all contradictions into orthodox conclusions. He was made bishop of Paris, and his book became for four centuries so favorite a text in theological courses that Roger Bacon reproved it for having displaced the Bible itself. More than 4000 theologians, including Albert and Thomas, are said to have written commentaries on the Sentences.

As the Lombard’s book upheld the authority of the Scriptures and the Church against the claims of the individual reason, it stayed for half a century the advance of rationalism. But in that half century a strange event transformed theology. As the translation of Aristotle’s scientific and metaphysical works into Arabic had in the ninth century compelled Moslem thinkers to seek a reconciliation between Islamic doctrine and Greek philosophy; and as the impingement of Aristotle upon the Hebrew mind in Spain was in this twelfth century driving Ibn Daud and Maimonides to seek a harmony between Judaism and Hellenic thought; so the arrival of Aristotle’s works in Latin dress in the Europe of 1150–1250 impelled Catholic theologians to attempt a synthesis of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology. And as Aristotle seemed immune to scriptural authority, the theologians were forced to use the language and weapons of reason. How the Greek philosopher would have smiled to see so many world-shaking faiths pay homage to his thought!

But we must not exaggerate the influence of Greek thinkers in stimulating the efflorescence of philosophy in this period. The spread of education, the vitality of discussion and intellectual life in the schools and universities of the twelfth century, the stimulus of such men as Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Abélard, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury, the enlargement of horizons by the Crusades, the increasing acquaintance with Islamic life and thought in East and West—all these could have produced an Aquinas even if Aristotle had remained unknown; indeed the industry of Aquinas was due not to love of Aristotle but to fear of Averroës. Already in the twelfth century the Arabic and Jewish philosophers were influencing Christian thought in Spain. Al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Ibn Gabirol, Averroës, and Maimonides entered Latin Europe by the same doors that admitted Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy.

Such an invasion by alien thought was a mental shock of the first order to the immature West. We need not wonder that it was met at first with an attempt at repression or delay; we must marvel rather at the astonishing feat of adaptation by which the old-new knowledge was absorbed into the new faith. The initial impact of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, and of Averroës’ commentaries, which reached Paris in the first decade of the thirteenth century, shook the orthodoxy of many students; and some scholars, like Amalric of Bène and David of Dinant, were moved to attack such basic doctrines of Christianity as creation, miracles, and personal immortality. The Church suspected that the seeping of Arabic-Greek thought into south France had loosened orthodoxy among the educated classes, and had weakened their will to control the Albigensian heresy. In 1210 a Church council at Paris condemned Amalric and David, and forbade the reading of Aristotle’s “metaphysics and natural philosophy,” or of “comments”—commentaries—thereon. As the prohibition was repeated by a papal legate in 1215 we may assume that the decree of 1210 had stimulated the reading of these otherwise forbidding works. The Fourth Council of the Lateran allowed the teaching of Aristotle’s works on logic and ethics, but proscribed the rest. In 1231 Gregory IX gave absolution to masters and scholars who had disobeyed these edicts, but he renewed the edicts “provisionally, until the books of the Philosopher had been examined and expurgated.” The three Parisian masters appointed to attend to this fumigation of Aristotle seem to have abandoned the task. The prohibitions were not long enforced, for in 1255 the Physics, Metaphysics, and other works of Aristotle were required reading at the University of Paris.¹⁹ In 1263 Urban IV restored the prohibitions; but apparently Thomas Aquinas assured him that Aristotle could be sterilized, and Urban did not press his vetoes. In 1366 the legates of Urban V at Paris required a thorough study of the works of Aristotle by all candidates for the arts degree.²⁰

The dilemma presented to Latin Christendom in the first quarter of the thirteenth century constituted a major crisis in the history of the faith. The rage for the new philosophy was an intellectual fever that could hardly be controlled. The Church abandoned the effort; instead, she deployed her forces to surround and absorb the invaders. Her loyal monks studied this amazing Greek who had upset three religions. The Franciscans, though they preferred Augustine to Aristotle, welcomed Alexander of Hales, who made the first attempt to harmonize “the Philosopher” with Christianity. The Dominicans gave every encouragement to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas in the same enterprise; and when these three men had finished their work it seemed that Aristotle had been made safe for Christianity.

III. THE FREETHINKERS

To understand Scholasticism as no vain accumulation of dull abstractions, we must see the thirteenth century not as the unchallenged field of the great Scholastics, but as a battleground on which, for seventy years, skeptics, materialists, pantheists, and atheists contested with the theologians of the Church for possession of the European mind.

We have noted the presence of unbelief in a small minority of the European population. Contact with Islam through the Crusades and the translations extended this minority in the thirteenth century. The discovery that another great religion existed, and had produced fine men like Saladin and al-Kamil, philosophers like Avicenna and Averroës, was in itself a disturbing revelation; comparative religion does religion no good. Alfonso the Wise (1252–84) reported a common disbelief in immortality among the Christians of Spain;²¹ perhaps Averroism had trickled down to the people. In southern France there were in the thirteenth century rationalists who argued that God, after creating the world, had left its operation to natural law; miracles, they held, were impossible; no prayer could change the behavior of the elements; and the origin of new species was due not to special creation but to natural development.²² At Paris some freethinkers—even some priests—denied transubstantiation;²³ and at Oxford a teacher complained that “there is no idolatry like that of the sacrament of the altar.”²⁴ Alain of Lille (1114–1203) remarks that “many false Christians of our time say there is no resurrection, since the soul perishes with the body”; they quoted Epicurus and Lucretius, adopted atomism, and concluded that the best thing to do is to enjoy life here on earth.²⁵

The urban industrialism of Flanders seems to have promoted unbelief. At the beginning of the thirteenth century we find David of Dinant, and near its end Siger of Brabant, leading a strongly skeptical movement. David (c. 1200) taught philosophy at Paris, and entertained Innocent III with his subtle disputations.²⁶ He played with a materialistic pantheism in which God, mind, and pure matter (matter before receiving form) all became one in a new trinity.²⁷ His book, Quaternuli, now lost, was condemned and burned by the Council of Paris in 1210. The same synod denounced the pantheism of another Parisian professor, Amalric of Bène, who had argued that God and the creation are one. Amalric was compelled to retract, and died, we are told, of mortification (1207).²⁸ The Council had his bones exhumed, and burned them in a Paris square as a hint to his many followers. They persisted nevertheless, and enlarged his views to a denial of heaven and hell and the power of the sacraments. Ten of these Amalricians were burned at the stake (1210).²⁹

Free thought flourished in the southern Italy of Frederick II, where St. Thomas grew up. Cardinal Ubaldini, friend of Frederick, openly professed materialism.³⁰ In northern Italy the industrial workers, the business classes, the lawyers, and the professors indulged in a measure of skepticism. The Bolognese faculty was notoriously indifferent to religion; the medical schools there and elsewhere were centers of doubt; and an adage arose that ubi tres medici, duo athei—“where there are three physicians two of them are atheists.”³¹ About 1240 Averroism became almost a fashion among the educated laity of Italy.³² Thousands accepted the Averroistic doctrines that natural law rules the world without any interference by God; that the world is co-eternal with God; that there is only one immortal soul, the “active intellect” of the cosmos, of which the individual soul is a transitory phase or form; and that heaven and hell are tales invented to coax or terrify the populace into decency.³³ To appease the Inquisition, some Averroists advanced the doctrine of twofold truth: a proposition, they argued, might seem true in philosophy or according to natural reason, and yet be false according to Scripture and the Christian faith; they professed at the same time to believe according to faith what they doubted according to reason. Such a theory denied the basic assumption of Scholasticism—the possibility of reconciling reason and faith.

Towards the end of the thirteenth, and throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the University of Padua was a turbulent center of Averroism. Peter of Abano (c. 1250–1316), professor of medicine at Paris and then of philosophy at Padua, wrote in 1303 a book, Conciliator controversiarum, designed to harmonize medical and philosophical theory. He earned a place in the history of science by teaching that the brain is the source of the nerves, and the heart of the vessels, and by measuring the year with remarkable accuracy as 365 days, six hours, and four minutes.³⁴ Convinced of as-crology, he reduced almost all causation to the power and movement of the stars, and practically eliminated God from the government of the world.³⁵ Inquisitors accused him of heresy, but Marquis Azzo d’Este and Pope Honorius IV were among his patients, and protected him. He was accused again in 1315, and this time escaped trial by dying a natural death. The inquisitors condemned his corpse to be burned at the stake, but his friends so well concealed his remains that the judgment had to be executed in effigy.³⁶

When Thomas Aquinas went from Italy to Paris he discovered that Averroism had long since captured a part of the faculty. In 1240 William of Auvergne noted that “many men” at the University “swallow these [Averroistic] conclusions without investigation”; and in 1252 Thomas found Averroism flourishing among the University youth.³⁷ Perhaps alarmed by Thomas’ report, Pope Alexander IV (1256) charged Albertus Magnus to write a treatise On the Unity of the Intellect Against Averroës. When Thomas taught at Paris (1252–61, 1269–72) the Averroistic movement was at its height; its leader in France, Siger of Brabant, taught in the University from 1266 to 1276. For a generation Averroism and Catholicism made Paris their battlefield.

Siger (1235?–? 1281), a secular priest,³⁸ was a man of learning: even the surviving fragments of his works quote al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, Avicenna, Avempace, Avicebron, Averroës, and Maimonides. In a series of commentaries on Aristotle, and in a controversial tract Against Those Famous Men in Philosophy, Albert and Thomas, Siger argued that Albert and Thomas falsely—Averroës justly—interpreted the Philosopher.³⁹ He concluded with Averroës that the world is eternal, that natural law is invariable, and that only the soul of the species survives the individual’s death. God, said Siger, is the final, not the efficient, cause of things—He is the goal, not the cause, of creation. Led like Vico and Nietzsche by the fascination of logic, Siger played with the dismal doctrine of eternal recurrence: since (he argued) all earthly events are ultimately determined by stellar combinations, and the number of these possible combinations is finite, each combination must be exactly repeated again and again in an infinity of time, and must bring in its train the same effects as before; “the same species” will return, “the same opinions, laws, religions.”⁴⁰ Siger was careful to add: “We say this according to the opinion of the Philosopher, but without affirming that it is true.”⁴¹ To all his heresies he appended a similar caution. He did not profess the doctrine of two truths; he taught certain conclusions as, in his judgment, following from Aristotle and reason; when these conclusions contradicted the Christian creed he affirmed his belief in the dogmas of the Church, and applied only to them, not to philosophy, the label of truth.⁴²

That Siger had a large following at the University is evident from his candidacy for the rectorship (1271), though it failed. Nothing could better prove the strength of the Averroistic movement in Paris than its repeated denunciation by the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier. In 1269 he condemned as heresies thirteen propositions taught by certain professors in the University:

That there is only one intellect in all men…. That the world is eternal…. That there never was a first man…. That the soul is corrupted with the corruption of the body…. That the will of man wills and chooses from necessity…. That God does not know individual events…. That human actions are not ruled by Divine Providence’.⁴³

Apparently the Averroists continued to teach as before, for in 1277 the Bishop issued a list of 219 propositions which he officially condemned as heresies. These, according to the Bishop, were doctrines taught by Siger, or Boethius of Dacia, or Roger Bacon, or other Parisian professors, including St. Thomas himself. The 219 included those condemned in 1269, and others of which the following are samples:

That creation is impossible…. That a body once corrupted [in death] cannot rise again as the same body’…. That a future resurrection should not be believed by a philosopher, since it cannot be investigated by reason…. That the words of theologians are founded on fables…. That nothing is added to our knowledge by theology…. That the Christian religion impedes learning…. That happiness is obtained in this life, not in another…. That the wise men of the earth are philosophers alone…. That there is no more excellent condition than to have leisure for philosophy.⁴⁴

In October, 1277, Siger was condemned by the Inquisition. He passed his last years in Italy as a prisoner of the Roman Curia, and was murdered at Orvieto by a half-mad assassin.⁴⁵

IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTICISM

To meet this frontal attack upon Christianity it was not enough to condemn the heretical propositions. Youth had tasted the strong wine of philosophy; could it be won back by reason? As the mutakallimun had defended Mohammedanism from the Mutazilites, so now Franciscan and Dominican theologians, and secular prelates like William of Auvergne and Henry of Ghent, came to the defense of Christianity and the Church.

The defense divided itself into two main camps: the mystic-Platonic, mostly Franciscans; and the intellectual-Aristotelian, mostly Dominicans. Benedictines like Hugh and Richard of St. Victor felt that the best defense of religion lay in man’s direct consciousness of a spiritual reality deeper than all intellectual fathoming. “Rigorists” like Peter of Blois and Stephen of Tournai argued that philosophy should not discuss the problems of theology, or, if it did, it should speak and behave as a modest servant of theology—ancilla theologiae.⁴⁶ It should be noted that this view was held by only a sector of the Scholastic front.⁴⁷

A few Franciscans, like Alexander of Hales (1170?–1245), adopted the intellectual approach, and sought to defend Christianity in philosophical and Aristotelian terms. But most Franciscans distrusted philosophy; they felt that the adventure of reason, whatever strength and glory it might bring to the Church for a time, might later elude control, and lead men so far from faith as to leave Christianity weak and helpless in an unbelieving and unmoral world. They preferred Plato to Aristotle, Bernard to Abélard, Augustine to Aquinas. They defined the soul, with Plato, as an independent spirit inhabiting, and thwarted by, the body, and they were shocked to hear Thomas accepting Aristotle’s definition of the soul as the “substantial form” of the body. They found in Plato a theory of impersonal immortality quite useless for checking the bestial impulses of men. Following Augustine, they ranked will above intellect in both God and man, and aimed at the good rather than the true. In their hierarchy of values the mystic came closer than the philosopher to the secret essence and significance of life.

This Platonic-Augustinian division of the Scholastic army dominated orthodox theology in the first half of the thirteenth century. Its ablest exponent was the saintly Bonaventura—a gentle spirit who persecuted heresy, a mystic writing philosophy, a scholar who deprecated learning, a lifelong friend and opponent of Thomas Aquinas, a defender and exemplar of evangelical poverty under whose ministry the Franciscan Order made great gains in corporate wealth. Born in Tuscany in 1221, Giovanni di Fidanza came for some unknown reason to be called Bonaventura—Good Luck. He nearly died of a childhood malady; his mother prayed to St. Francis for his recovery; Giovanni thereafter felt that he owed his life to the saint. Entering the Order, he was sent to Paris to study under Alexander of Hales. In 1248 he began to teach theology in the University; in 1257, still a youth of thirty-six, he was chosen minister-general of the Franciscans. He did his best to reform the laxity of the Order, but was too genial to succeed. He himself lived in ascetic simplicity. When messengers came to announce that he had been made a cardinal they found him washing dishes. A year later (1274) he died of overwork.

His books were well written, clear, and concise. He pretended to be a mere compiler, but he infused order, fervor, and a disarming modesty into every subject that he touched. His Breviloquium was an admirable summary of Christian theology; his Soliloquium and Itinerarium mentis in Deum (Journey of the Mind to God) were jewels of mystic piety. True knowledge comes not through perception of the material world by the senses, but through intuition of the spiritual world by the soul. While loving St. Thomas, Bonaventura frowned upon the reading of philosophy, and freely criticized some of Aquinas’ conclusions. He reminded the Dominicans that Aristotle was a heathen, whose authority must not be ranked with that of the Fathers; and he asked could the philosophy of Aristotle explain a moment’s movements of a star?⁴⁸ God is not a philosophical conclusion but a living presence; it is better to feel Him than to define Him. The good is higher than the true, and simple virtue surpasses all the sciences. One day, we are told, Brother Egidio, overwhelmed by Bonaventura’s learning, said to him: “Alas! what shall we ignorant and simple ones do to merit the favor of God?” “My brother,” replied Bonaventura, “you know very well that it suffices to love the Lord.” “Do you then believe,” asked Egidio, “that a simple woman might please him as well as a master in theology?” When the theologian answered in the affirmative, Egidio rushed into the street and cried out to a beggar woman: “Rejoice, for if you love God, you may have a higher place in the Kingdom of Heaven than Brother Bonaventura!”⁴⁹

Obviously it is a mistake to think of “the” Scholastic philosophy as a dreary unanimity of opinion and approach. There were a hundred Scholastic philosophies. The same university faculty might harbor a Thomas honoring reason, a Bonaventura deprecating it, a William of Auvergne (1180–1249) following Ibn Gabirol into voluntarism, a Siger teaching Averroism. The divergences and conflicts within orthodoxy were almost as intense as between faith and unbelief. A Franciscan bishop, John Peckham, would denounce Aquinas as sternly as Thomas denounced Siger and Averroës; and Albertus Magnus, in an unsaintly moment, wrote: “There are ignorant men who would fight by every means the employment of philosophy; and particularly the Franciscans—brutish beasts who blaspheme that which they do not know.”⁵⁰

Albert loved knowledge, and admired Aristotle this side of heresy. It was he who first among the Scholastics surveyed all the major works of the Philosopher, and undertook to interpret them in Christian terms. He was born at Lauingen, Swabia, about 1201, son of the rich count of Bollstädt. He studied at Padua, joined the Dominican Order, and taught in Dominican schools at Hildesheim, Freiburg, Ratisbon, Strasbourg, Cologne (1228–45), and Paris (1245–8). Despite his preference for the scholastic life he was made Provincial of his Order for Germany, and Bishop of Ratisbon (1260). Tradition claims that he walked barefoot on all his journeys.⁵¹ In 1262 he was allowed to retire to a cloister at Cologne. He left its peace when he was seventy-six (1277) to defend the doctrine and memory of his dead pupil Thomas Aquinas at Paris. He succeeded, returned to his monastery, and died at seventy-nine. His devoted life, unassuming character, and vast intellectual interests show medieval monasticism at its best.

Only the quiet routine of his monastic years, and the massive diligence of German scholarship, can explain how a man who spent so much of his time in teaching and administration could write essays on almost every phase of science, and substantial treatises on every branch of philosophy and theology.* Few men in history have written so much, or borrowed so much, or so frankly acknowledged their debts. Albert bases his works almost title for title on Aristotle; he uses Averroës’ commentaries to interpret the Philosopher; but he corrects both of them manfully when they differ from Christian theology. He draws on the Moslem thinkers to such an extent that his works are an important source for our knowledge of Arabic philosophy. He cites Avicenna on every other page, and occasionally Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed. He recognizes Aristotle as the highest authority in science and philosophy, Augustine in theology, the Scriptures in everything. His immense mound of discourse is poorly organized, and never becomes a consistent system of thought; he defends a doctrine in one place, attacks it in another, sometimes in the same treatise; he had no time to resolve his contradictions. He was too good a man, too pious a soul, to be an objective thinker; he was capable of following a commentary on Aristotle with a long treatise in twelve “books” In Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which he argued that Mary had a perfect knowledge of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

What, then, was his achievement? Above all, as we shall see, he contributed substantially to the scientific research and theory of his time. In philosophy he “gave Aristotle to the Latins”—which was all that he aimed to do; he promoted the use of Aristotle in the teaching of philosophy; he accumulated the storehouse of pagan, Arabic, Jewish, and Christian thought and argument from which his famous pupil drew for a more lucid and orderly synthesis. Perhaps without Albert, Thomas would have been impossible.

V. THOMAS AQUINAS

Like Albert, Thomas came of lordly stock, and gave up riches to win eternity. His father, Count Landulf of Aquino, belonged to the German nobility, was a nephew of Barbarossa, and was among the highest figures at the Apulian court of the impious Frederick II. His mother was descended from the Norman princes of Sicily. Though born in Italy, Thomas was on both sides of northern origin, essentially Teutonic; he had no Italian grace or deviltry in him, but grew to heavy German proportions, with large head, broad face, and blond hair, and a quiet content in intellectual industry. His friends called him “the great dumb ox of Sicily.”⁵²

He was born in 1225 in his father’s castle at Roccasecca, three miles from Aquino, and halfway between Naples and Rome. The abbey of Monte Cassino was near by, and there Thomas received his early schooling. At fourteen he began five years of study at the University of Naples. Michael Scot was there, translating Averroës into Latin; Jacob Anatoli was there, translating Averroës into Hebrew; Peter of Ireland, one of Thomas’ teachers, was an enthusiastic Aristotelian; the University was a hotbed of Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew influences impinging upon Christian thought. Thomas’ brothers took to poetry; one, Rainaldo, became a page and falconer at Frederick’s court, and begged Thomas to join him there. Piero delle Vigne and Frederick himself seconded the invitation. Instead of accepting, Thomas entered the Dominican Order (1244). Soon thereafter he was sent to Paris to study theology; at the outset of his journey he was kidnaped by two of his brothers at their mother’s urging; he was taken to the Roccasecca castle, and was kept under watch there for a year.⁵³ Every means was used to shake his vocation; a story, probably a legend, tells how a pretty young woman was introduced into his chamber in the hope of seducing him back to life, and how, with a flaming brand snatched from the hearth, he drove her from the room, and burned the sign of the cross into the door.⁵⁴ His firm piety won his mother to his purposes; she helped him to escape; and his sister Marotta, after many talks with him, became a Benedictine nun.

At Paris he had Albert the Great as one of his teachers (1245). When Albert was transferred to Cologne Thomas followed him, and continued to study with him there till 1252. At times Thomas seemed dull, but Albert defended him, and prophesied his greatness.⁵⁵ He returned to Paris to teach as a bachelor in theology; and now, following in his master’s steps, he began a long series of works presenting Aristotle’s philosophy in Christian dress. In 1259 he left Paris to teach at the studium maintained by the papal court now in Anagni, now in Orvieto, now in Viterbo. At the papal court he met William of Moerbeke, and asked him to make Latin translations of Aristotle directly from the Greek.

Meanwhile Siger of Brabant was leading an Averroistic revolution at the University of Paris. Thomas was sent up to meet this challenge. Reaching Paris, he brought the war into the enemy’s camp with a tract On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists (1270). He concluded it with unusual fire:

Behold our refutation of these errors. It is based not on documents of faith but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves. If, then, there be anyone who, boastfully taking pride in his supposed wisdom, wishes to challenge what we have written, let him not do it in some corner, nor before children who are powerless to decide on such difficult matters. Let him reply openly if he dare. He shall find me here confronting him, and not only my negligible self, but many another whose study is truth. We shall do battle with his errors, and bring a cure to his ignorance.⁵⁶

It was a complex issue, for Thomas, in this his second period of teaching at Paris, had not only to combat Averroism, but also to meet the attacks of fellow monks who distrusted reason, and who rejected Thomas’ claim that Aristotle could be harmonized with Christianity. John Peckham, successor to Bonaventura in the Franciscan chair of philosophy at Paris, upbraided Thomas for sullying Christian theology with the philosophy of a pagan. Thomas—Peckham later reported—stood his ground, but answered “with great mildness and humility.”⁵⁷ Perhaps it was those three years of controversy that undermined his vitality.

In 1272 he was called back to Italy at the request of Charles of Anjou to reorganize the University of Naples. In his final years he ceased writing, whether through weariness or through disillusionment with dialectics and argument. When a friend urged him to complete his Summa theologica he said: “I cannot; such things have been revealed to me that what I have written seems but straw.”⁵⁸ In 1274 Gregory X summoned him to attend the Council of Lyons. He set out on the long mule ride through Italy; but on the way between Naples and Rome he grew weak, and took to his bed in the Cistercian monastery of Fossanuova in the Campagna. There, in 1274, still but forty-nine, he died.

When he was canonized witnesses testified that he “was soft-spoken, easy in conversation, cheerful and bland of countenance… generous in conduct, most patient, most prudent; radiant with charity and gentle piety; wondrous compassionate to the poor.”⁵⁹ He was so completely captured by piety and study that these filled every thought and moment of his waking day. He attended all the hours of prayer, said one Mass or heard two each morning, read and wrote, preached and taught, and prayed. Before a sermon or a lecture, before sitting down to study or compose, he prayed; and his fellow monks thought that “he owed his knowledge less to the effort of the mind than to the virtue of his prayer.”⁶⁰ On the margin of his manuscripts we find, every now and then, pious invocations like Ave Maria!⁶¹ He became so absorbed in the religious and intellectual life that he hardly noticed what happened about him. In the refectory his plate could be removed and replaced without his being aware of it; but apparently his appetite was excellent. Invited to join other clergymen at dinner with Louis IX, he lost himself in meditation during the meal; suddenly he struck the table with his fist and exclaimed: “That is the decisive argument against the Manicheans!” His prior reproved him: “You are sitting at the table of the King of France”; but Louis, with royal courtesy, bade an attendant bring writing materials to the victorious monk.⁶² Nevertheless the absorbed saint could write with good sense on many matters of practical life. People remarked how he could adjust his sermons either to the studious minds of his fellow monks, or to the simple intellects of common folk. He had no airs, made no demands upon life, sought no honors, refused promotion to ecclesiastical office. His writings span the universe, but contain not one immodest word. He faces in them every argument against his faith, and answers with courtesy and calm.

Improving upon the custom of his time, he made explicit acknowledgments of his intellectual borrowings. He quotes Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Averroës, Isaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol, and Maimonides; obviously no student can understand the Scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth century without considering its Moslem and Jewish antecedents. Thomas does not share William of Auvergne’s affection for “Avicebron,” but he has a high respect for “Rabbi Moyses,” as he calls Moses ben Maimon. He follows Maimonides in holding that reason and religion can be harmonized, but also in placing certain mysteries of the faith beyond the grasp of reason; and he cites the argument for this exclusion as given in the Guide to the Perplexed.⁶³ He agrees with Maimonides that the human intellect can prove God’s existence, but can never rise to a knowledge of His attributes; and he follows Maimonides closely in discussing the eternity of the universe.⁶⁴* In logic and metaphysics he takes Aristotle as his guide, and quotes him on almost every page; but he does not hesitate to differ from him wherever the Philosopher strays from Christian doctrine. Having admitted that the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the Last Judgment cannot be proved by reason, he proceeds on all other points to accept reason with a fullness and readiness that shocked the followers of Augustine. He was a mystic in so far as he acknowledged the suprarationality of certain Christian dogmas, and shared the mystic longing for union with God; but he was an “intellectualist” in the sense that he preferred the intellect to the “heart” as an organ for arriving at truth. He saw that Europe was bound for an Age of Reason, and he thought that a Christian philosopher should meet the new mood on its own ground. He prefaced his reasonings with Scriptural and Patristic authorities, but he said, with pithy candor: Locus ab auctoritate est infirmissimus—“the argument from authority is the weakest.”⁶⁶ “The study of philosophy,” he wrote, “does not aim merely to find out what others have thought, but what the truth of the matter is.”⁶⁷ His writings rival those of Aristotle in the sustained effort of their logic.

Seldom in history has one mind reduced so large an area of thought to order and clarity. We shall find no fascination in Thomas’ style; it is simple and direct, concise and precise, with not a word of padding or flourish; but we miss in it the vigor, imagination, passion, and poetry of Augustine. Thomas thought it out of place to be brilliant in philosophy. When he wished he could equal the poets at their own game. The most perfect works of his pen are the hymns and prayers that he composed for the Feast of Corpus Christi. Among them is the stately sequence Lauda Sion salvatorem, which preaches the Real Presence in sonorous verse. In the Lauds is a hymn beginning with a line from Ambrose—Verbum supernum prodiens—and ending with two stanzas—O salutaris hostia—regularly sung at the Benediction of the Sacrament. And in the Vespers is one of the great hymns of all time, a moving mixture of theology and poetry:

Pange, lingua, gloriosi

corporis mysterium

sanguinisque pretiosi,

quem in mundi pretium

fructus ventris generosi,

rex effudit gentium.

Nobis datus, nobis nacus

ex intacta virgine,

et in mundo conversatus,

sparso verbi semine,

sui moras incolatus

miro clausit ordine.

In supremae nocte cenae

recumbens cum fratribus,

observata lege plene

cibis in legalibus,

cibum turbae duodenae

se dat suis manibus.

Verbum caro panem verum

verbo carnem efficit,

fitque sanguis Christi merum,

et, si sensus deficit,

ad firmandum cor sincerum

sola fides sufficit.

Tantum ergo sacramentum

veneremur-cernui,

et antiquum documentum

novo cedat ritui;

praestet fides supplementum

sensuum defectui.

Genitori genitoque

laus et iubilatio

salus, honor, virtus quoque

sit et benedictio;

procedenti ab utroque

compar sit laudatio.*

Sing, O tongue, the mystery

of the body glorious,

and of blood beyond all price,

which, in ransom of the world,

fruit of womb most bountiful,

all the peoples’ King poured forth.

Given to us and born for us

from an untouched maid,

and, sojourning on the planet,

spreading seed of Word made flesh,

as a dweller with us lowly,

wondrously He closed His stay.

In the night of the Last Supper,

with apostles while reclining,

all the ancient law observing

in the food by law prescribed,

food He gives to twelve assembled,

gives Himself with His own hands.

Word made flesh converts true bread

with a word into His flesh;

wine becomes the blood of Christ,

and if sense should fail to see,

let the pure in heart be strengthened

by an act of faith alone.

Therefore such great sacrament

venerate we on our knees;

let the ancient liturgy

yield its place to this new rite;

let our faith redeem the failure

of our darkened sense.

To Begetter and Begotten

praise and joyful song,

salutation, honor, power,

blessings manifold;

and to Him from both proceeding

let our equal praise be told.

Thomas wrote almost as much as Albert, in a life little more than half as long. He composed commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, on the Gospels, Isaiah, Job, Paul; on Plato’s Timaeus, on Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius; on Aristotle’s Organon, Of Heaven and Earth, Of Generation and Corruption, Meteorology, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, Politics, Ethics-, quaestiones disputatae—On Truth, On Power, On Evil, On the Mind, On Virtues, etc.; quodlibeta discussing points raised at random in university sessions; treatises On the Principles of Nature, On Being and Essence, On the Rule of Princes, On the Occult Operations of Nature, On the Unity of the Intellect, etc.; a four-volume Summa de vertíate catholicae fidei contra Gentiles (1258–60), a twenty-one-volume Summa theologica (1267–73), and a Compendium theologiae (1271–3). Thomas’ published writings fill 10,000 double-column folio pages.

The Summa contra Gentiles, or Summary of the Catholic Faith Against the Pagans, was prepared at the urging of Raymond of Peñafort, General of the Dominican Order, to aid in the conversion of Moslems and Jews in Spain. Therefore Thomas in this work argues almost entirely from reason, though remarking sadly that “this is deficient in the things of God.”⁶⁸ He abandons here the Scholastic method of disputation, and presents his material in almost modern style, occasionally with more acerbity than befitted him whom posterity would call doctor angelicus and seraphicus. Christianity must be divine, he thinks, because it conquered Rome and Europe despite its unwelcome preaching against the pleasures of the world and the flesh; Islam conquered by preaching pleasure and by force of arms.⁶⁹ In Part IV he frankly admits that the cardinal dogmas of Christianity cannot be proved by reason, and require faith in the divine revelation of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

Thomas’ most extensive work, the Summa theologica, is addressed to Christians; it is an attempt to expound and to defend—from Scripture, the Fathers, and reason—the whole body of Catholic doctrine in philosophy and theology.* “We shall try,” says the Prologue, “to follow the things that pertain to sacred doctrine with such brevity and lucidity as the subject matter allows.” We may smile at this twenty-one-volume brevity, but it is there; this Summa is immense, but not verbose; its size is merely the result of its scope. For within this treatise on theology are full treatises on metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and law; thirty-eight treatises, 631 questions or topics, 10,000 objections or replies. The orderliness of argument within each question is admirable, but the structure of the Summa has received more praise than its due. It cannot compare with the Euclidean organization of Spinoza’s Ethics, or the concatenation of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy. The treatise on psychology (Part I, QQ. 75–94) is introduced between a discussion of the six days of creation and a study of man in the state of original innocence. The form is more interesting than the structure. Essentially it continues, and perfects, the method of Abélard as developed by Peter Lombard: statement of the question, arguments for the negative, objections to the affirmative, arguments for the affirmative from the Bible, from the Fathers, and from reason, and answers to objections. The method occasionally wastes time by putting up a straw man to beat down; but in many cases the debate is vital and real. It is a mark of Thomas that he states the case against his own view with startling candor and force; in this way the Summa is a summary of heresy as well as a monument of dogma, and might be used as an arsenal of doubt. We may not always be satisfied with the answers, but we can never complain that the Devil has had an incompetent advocate.

VI. THE THOMIST PHILOSOPHY

1. Logic

What is knowledge? Is it a divine light infused into man by God, without which it would be impossible? Thomas parts company at the very outset from Augustine, the mystics, the intuitionists: knowledge is a natural product, derived from the external corporeal senses and the internal sense called consciousness of the self. It is an extremely limited knowledge, for up to our time no scientist yet knows the essence of a fly;⁷⁰ but within its limits knowledge is trustworthy, and we need not fret over the possibility that the external world is a delusion. Thomas accepts the Scholastic definition of truth as adequatio rei et intellectus—the equivalence of the thought with the thing.⁷¹ Since the intellect draws all its natural knowledge from the senses,⁷² its direct knowledge of things outside itself is limited to bodies—to the “sensible” or sensory world. It cannot directly know the super-sensible, meta-physical world—the minds within bodies, or God in His creation; but it may by analogy derive from sense experience an indirect knowledge of other minds, and likewise of God.⁷³ Of a third realm, the supernatural—the world in which God lives—the mind of man can have no knowledge except through divine revelation. We may by natural understanding know that God exists and is one, because His existence and unity shine forth in the wonders and organization of the world; but we cannot by unaided intellect know His essence, or the Trinity. Even the knowledge of the angels is limited, for else they would be God.

The very limitations of knowledge indicate the existence of a supernatural world. God reveals that world to us in the Scriptures. Just as it would be folly for the peasant to consider the theories of a philosopher false because he cannot understand them, so it is foolish for man to reject God’s revelation on the ground that it seems at some points to contradict man’s natural knowledge. We may be confident that if our knowledge were complete there would be no contradiction between revelation and philosophy. It is wrong to say that a proposition can be false in philosophy and true in faith; all truth comes from God and is one. Nevertheless it is desirable to distinguish what we understand through reason and what we believe by faith;⁷⁴ the fields of philosophy and ideology are distinct. It is permissible for scholars to discuss among themselves objections to the faith, but “it is not expedient for simple people to hear what unbelievers have to say against the faith,” for simple minds are not equipped to answer.⁷⁵ Scholars and philosophers, as well as peasants, must bow to the decisions of the Church; “we must be directed by her in all things”;⁷⁶ for she is the divinely appointed repository of divine wisdom. To the pope belongs the “authority to decide matters of faith finally, so that they may be held by all with unshaken belief.”⁷⁷ The alternative is intellectual, moral, and social chaos.

2. Metaphysics

The metaphysics of Thomas is a complex of difficult definitions and subtle distinctions, on which his theology is to rest.

1. In created things essence and existence are different. Essence is that which is necessary to the conception of a thing; existence is the act of being. The essence of a triangle—that it is three straight lines enclosing a space—is the same whether the triangle exists or is merely conceived. But in God essence and existence are one; for His essence is that He is the First Cause, the underlying power (or, as Spinoza would say, substantia) of all things; by definition He must exist in order that anything else should be.

2. God exists in reality; He is the Being of all beings, their upholding cause. All other beings exist by analogy, by limited participation in the reality of God.

3. All created beings are both active and passive—i.e., they act and are acted upon. Also, they are a mixture of being and becoming: they possess certain qualities, and may lose some of these and acquire others—water may be warmed. Thomas denotes this susceptibility to external action or internal change by the term potentia—possibility. God alone has no potentia or possibility; He cannot be acted upon, cannot change; He is actus purus, pure activity; pure actuality; He is already everything that He can be. Below God all entities can be ranged in a descending scale according to their greater “possibility” of being acted upon and determined from without. So man is superior to woman because “the father is the active principle, while the mother is a passive and material principle; she supplies the formless matter of the body, which receives its form through the formative power that is in the semen of the father.”⁷⁸

4. All corporeal beings are composed of matter and form; but here (as in Aristotle) form means not figure but inherent energizing, characterizing principle. When a form or vital principle constitutes the essence of a being, it is a substantial or essential form; so the rational soul—i.e., a life-giving force capable of thought-is the substantial form of the human body, and God is the substantial form of the world.

5. All realities are either substance or accident: either they are separate entities, like a stone or a man; or they exist only as qualities in something else, like whiteness or density. God is pure substance, as the only completely self-existent reality.

6. All substances are individuals; nothing but individuals exists except in idea; the notion that individuality is a delusion is a delusion.

7. In beings composed of matter and form, the principle or source of individuation—i.e., of the multiplicity of individuals in a species or class—is matter. Throughout the species the form or vital principle is essentially the same; in each individual this principle uses, appropriates, gives shape to, a certain quantity and figure of matter; and this materia signata quantitate, or matter marked off by quantity, is the principle of individuation—not of individuality but of separate identity.

3. Theology

God, not man, is the center and theme of Thomas’ philosophy. “The highest knowledge we can have of God in this life,” he writes, “is to know that He is above all that we can think concerning Him.”⁷⁹ He rejects Anselm’s ontological argument,⁸⁰ but he comes close to it in identifying God’s existence with His essence. God is Being itself: “I am Who am.”

His existence, says Thomas, can be proved by natural reason. (1) All motions are caused by previous motions, and so on either to a Prime Mover unmoved, or to an “infinite regress,” which is inconceivable. (2) The series of causes likewise requires a First Cause. (3) The contingent, which may but need not be, depends upon the necessary, which must be; the possible depends upon the actual; this series drives us back to a necessary being who is pure actuality. (4) Things are good, true, noble in various degrees; there must be a perfectly good, true, and noble source and norm of these imperfect virtues. (5) There are thousands of evidences of order in the world; even inanimate objects move in an orderly way; how could this be unless some intelligent power exists who created them?*⁸¹

Aside from the existence of God, Thomas is almost an agnostic in natural theology. “We cannot know what God is, but only what He is not”⁸²—not movable, multiple, mutable, temporal. Why should infinitesimal minds expect to know more about the Infinite? It is hard for us to conceive an immaterial spirit, said Thomas (anticipating Bergson), because the intellect is dependent upon the senses, and all our external experience is of material things; consequently “incorporeal things, of which there are no images, are known to us by comparison with sensible bodies, of which there are images.”⁸³ We can know God (as Maimonides taught) only by analogy, reasoning from ourselves and our experience to Him; so if there is in men goodness, love, truth, intelligence, power, freedom, or any other excellence, these must be also in man’s Creator, and in such greater degree in Him as corresponds to the proportion between infinity and ourselves. We apply the masculine pronouns to God, but only for convenience; in God and the angels there is no sex. God is one because by definition He is existence itself, and the unified operation of the world reveals one mind and law. That there are three Persons in this divine unity is a mystery beyond reason, to be held in trusting faith.

Nor can we know whether the world was created in time, and therefore out of nothing, or whether, as Aristotle and Averroës thought, it is eternal. The arguments offered by the theologians for creation in time are weak, and should be rejected “lest the Catholic faith should seem to be founded on empty reasonings.”⁸⁴ Thomas concludes that we must believe on faith in a creation in time; but he adds that the question has little meaning, since time had no existence before creation; without change, without matter in motion, there is no time. He struggles manfully to explain how God could pass from noncreation to creation without suffering change. The act of creation, he says, is eternal, but it included in its willing the determination of the time for its effect to appear⁸⁵—a nimble dodge for a heavy man.

The angels constitute the highest grade of creation. They are incorporeal intelligences, incorruptible and immortal. They serve as ministers of God in the government of the world; the heavenly bodies are moved and guided by them;⁸⁶ every man has an angel appointed to guard him, and the archangels have the care of multitudes of men. Being immaterial, they can travel from one extremity of space to another without traversing the space between. Thomas writes ninety-three pages on the hierarchy, movements, love, knowledge, will, speech, and habits of the angels—the most farfetched part of his far-flung Summa, and the most irrefutable.

As there are angels, so there are demons, little devils doing Satan’s will. They are no mere imaginings of the common mind; they are real, and do endless harm. They may cause impotence by arousing in a man a repulsion for a woman.⁸⁷ They make possible various forms of magic; so a demon may lie under a man, receive his semen, carry it swiftly through space, cohabit with a woman, and impregnate her with the seed of the absent man.⁸⁸ Demons can enable magicians to foretell such events as do not depend upon man’s free will. They can communicate information to men by impressions on the imagination, or by appearing visibly or speaking audibly. Or they may co-operate with witches, and help them to hurt children through the evil eye.⁸⁹

Like nearly all his contemporaries, and most of ours, Thomas allowed considerable truth to astrology.

The movements of bodies here below… must be referred to the movements of the heavenly bodies as their cause…. That astrologers not infrequently forecast the truth by observing the stars may be explained in two ways. First, because a great number of men follow their bodily passions, so that their actions are for the most part disposed in accordance with the inclination of the heavenly bodies; while there are few—namely, the wise alone—who moderate these inclinations by their reason…. Secondly, because of the interference of demons.⁹⁰

However, “human actions are not subject to the action of heavenly bodies save accidentally and indirectly”;⁹¹ a large area is left to human freedom.

4. Psychology

Thomas considers carefully the philosophical problems of psychology, and his pages on these topics are among the best in his synthesis. He begins with an organic, as against a mechanical, conception of organisms: a machine is composed of externally added parts; an organism makes its own parts, and moves itself by its own internal force.⁹² This internal formative power is the soul. Thomas expresses the idea in Aristotelian terms: the soul is the “substantial form” of the body—i.e., it is the vital principle and energy that gives existence and form to an organism. “The soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, movement, and understanding.”⁹³ There are three grades of soul: the vegetative—the power to grow; the sensitive—the power to feel; the rational—the power to reason. All life has the first, only animals and men have the second, only men have the third. But the higher organisms, in their corporeal and individual development, pass through the stages in which the lower organisms remain; “the higher a form is in the scale of being… the more intermediate forms must be passed through before the perfect form is reached”⁹⁴—an adumbration of the nineteenth-century theory of “recapitulation,” that the embryo of man passes through the stages by which the species developed.

Whereas Plato, Augustine, and the Franciscans thought of the soul as a prisoner within the body, and identified the man with the soul alone, Thomas boldly accepts the Aristotelian view, and defines man—even personality—as a composite of body and soul, matter and form.⁹⁵ The soul, or life-giving, form-creating inner energy, is indivisibly in every part of the body.⁹⁶ It is bound up with the body in a thousand ways. As vegetable soul it depends upon food; as sensitive soul it depends upon sensation; as rational soul it needs the images produced by, or compounded from, sensation. Even intellectual ability and moral perceptions depend upon a body reasonably sound; a thick skin usually implies an insensitive soul.⁹⁷ Dreams, passions, mental diseases, temperament, have a physiological basis.⁹⁸ At times Thomas speaks as if body and soul were one unified reality, the inward energy and outward form of an indivisible whole. Nevertheless it seemed obvious to him that the rational soul—abstracting, generalizing, reasoning, charting the universe—is an incorporeal reality. Try as we will, and despite our tendency to think of all things in material terms, we can find nothing material in consciousness; it is a reality all the world unlike anything physical or spatial. This rational soul must be classed as spiritual, as something infused into us by that God Who is the psychical force behind all physical phenomena. Only an immaterial power could form a universal idea, or leap backward and forward in time, or conceive with equal ease the great and the small.⁹⁹ The mind can be conscious of itself; but it is impossible to conceive a material entity as conscious of itself.

Therefore it is reasonable to believe that this spiritual force in us survives the death of the body. But the soul so separated is not a personality; it cannot feel or will or think; it is a helpless ghost that cannot function without its flesh.¹⁰⁰ Only when it is reunited, through the resurrection of the body, with the corporeal frame of which it was the inward life, will it constitute with that body an individual and deathless personality. It was because Averroës and his followers lacked faith in the resurrection of the body that they were driven to the theory that only the “active intellect,” or soul of the cosmos or species, is immortal. Thomas deploys all the resources of his dialectic to refute this theory. To him this conflict with Averroës over immortality was the vital issue of the century, beside which such mere shiftings of boundaries and titles as physical battles brought were a trivial lunacy.

The soul, says Thomas, has five faculties or powers: vegetative, by which it feeds, grows, and reproduces; sensitive, by which it receives sensations from the external world; appetitive, by which it desires and wills; locomotive, by which it initiates motions; and intellectual, by which it thinks.¹⁰¹ All knowledge originates in the senses, but the sensations do not fall upon an empty surface or tabula rasa; they are received by a complex structure, the sensus communis, or common sensory center, which co-ordinates sensations or perceptions into ideas. Thomas agrees with Aristotle and Locke that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses”; but he adds, like Leibniz and Kant, “except the intellect itself” —an organized capacity to organize sensations into thought, at last into those universals and abstract ideas which are the tools of reason and, on this earth, the exclusive prerogative of man.

Will or appetition is the faculty by which the soul or vital force moves toward that which the intellect conceives as good. Thomas, following Aristotle, defines the good as “that which is desirable.”¹⁰² Beauty is a form of the good; it is that which pleases when seen. Why does it please? Through the proportion and harmony of parts in an organized whole. Intellect is subject to will in so far as desire can determine the direction of thought; but will is subject to the intellect in so far as our desires are determined by the way we conceive things, by the opinions we (usually imitating others) have of them; “the good as understood moves the will.” Freedom lies not really in the will, which “is necessarily moved” by the understanding of the matter as presented by the intellect,¹⁰³ but in the judgment (arbitrium); therefore freedom varies directly with knowledge, reason, wisdom, with the capacity of the intellect to present a true picture of the situation to the will; only the wise are really free.¹⁰⁴ Intelligence is not only the best and highest, it is also the most powerful, of the faculties of the soul. “Of all human pursuits the pursuit of wisdom is the most perfect, the most sublime, the most profitable, the most delightful.”¹⁰⁵ “The proper operation of man is to understand.”¹⁰⁶

5. Ethics

The proper end of man, therefore, is in this life the acquisition of truth, and in the afterlife to see this Truth in God. For assuming, with Aristotle, that what man seeks is happiness, where shall he best find it? Not in bodily pleasures, nor in honors, nor in wealth, nor in power, nor even in actions of moral virtue, though all of these may give delight. Let us grant, too, that “perfect disposition of the body is necessary… for perfect happiness.”¹⁰⁷ But none of these goods can compare with the quiet, pervasive, continuing happiness of understanding. Perhaps remembering Virgil’s Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas—“happy he who has been able to know the causes of things”—Thomas believes that the highest achievement and satisfaction of the soul—the natural culmination of its peculiar rationality—would be this, “that on it should be inscribed the total order of the universe and its causes.”¹⁰⁸ The peace that passeth understanding comes from understanding.

But even this supreme mundane bliss would leave man not quite content, still unfulfilled. Vaguely he knows that “perfect and true happiness cannot be had in this life.” There is that in him which undiscourageably longs for a happiness and an understanding that shall be secure from mortal vicissitude and change. Other appetites may find their peace in intermediate goods, but the mind of the full man will not rest except it come to that sum and summit of truth which is God.¹⁰⁹ In God alone is the supreme good, both as the source of all other goods, and as the cause of all other causes, the truth of all truths. The final goal of man is the Beatific Vision—the vision that gives bliss.

Consequently all ethics is the art and science of preparing man to attain this culminating and everlasting happiness. Moral goodness, virtue, may be defined as conduct conducive to the true end of man, which is to see God. Man naturally inclines to the good—the desirable; but what he judges to be good is not always morally good. Through Eve’s false judgment of the good, man disobeyed God, and now bears in every generation the taint of that first sin.* If at this point one asks why a God who foresees all should have created a man and a woman destined to such curiosity, and a race destined to such heritable guilt, Thomas answers that it is metaphysically impossible for any creature to be perfect, and that man’s freedom to sin is the price he must pay for his freedom of choice. Without that freedom of will man would be an automaton not beyond but below good and evil, having no greater dignity than a machine.

Steeped in the doctrine of original sin, steeped in Aristotle, steeped in monastic isolation and terror of the other sex, it was almost fated that Thomas should think ill of woman, and speak of her with masculine innocence. He follows the climactic egotism of Aristotle in supposing that nature, like a medieval patriarch, always wishes to produce a male, and that woman is something defective and accidental (deficiens et occasionatum); she is a male gone awry (mas occasionatum); probably she is the result of some weakness in the father’s generative power, or of some external factor, like a damp south wind.¹¹¹ Relying on Aristotelian and contemporary biology, Thomas supposed that woman contributed only passive matter to the offspring, while the man contributed active form; woman is the triumph of matter over form. Consequently she is the weaker vessel in body, mind, and will. She is to man as. the senses are to reason. In her the sexual appetite predominates, while man is the expression of the more stable element. Both man and woman are made in the image of God, but man more especially so. Man is the principle and end of woman, as God is the principle and end of the universe. She needs man in everything; he needs her only for procreation. Man can accomplish all tasks better than woman—even the care of the home.¹¹² She is unfitted to fill any vital position in Church or state. She is a part of man, literally a rib.¹¹³ She should look upon man as her natural master, should accept his guidance and submit to his corrections and discipline. In this she will find her fulfillment and her happiness.

As to evil, Thomas labors to prove that metaphysically it does not exist. Malum est non ens, evil is no positive entity; every reality, as such, is good;¹¹⁴ evil is merely the absence or privation of some quality or power that a being ought naturally to have. So it is no evil for a man to lack wings, but an evil for him to lack hands; yet to lack hands is no evil for a bird. Everything as created by God is good, but even God could not communicate His infinite perfection to created things. God permits certain evils in order to attain good ends or to prevent greater evils, just “as human governments… rightly tolerate certain evils”—like prostitution—“lest… greater evils be incurred.”¹¹⁵

Sin is an act of free choice violating the order of reason, which is also the order of the universe. The order of reason is the proper adjustment of means to ends. In man’s case it is the adjustment of conduct to win eternal happiness. God gives us the freedom to do wrong, but He also gives us, by a divine infusion, a sense of right and wrong. This innate conscience is absolute, and must be obeyed at all costs. If the Church commands something against a man’s conscience he must disobey. If his conscience tells him that faith in Christ is an evil thing, he must abhor that faith.¹¹⁶

Normally conscience inclines us not only to the natural virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, but also to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. These last three constitute the distinguishing morality and glory of Christianity. Faith is a moral obligation, since human reason is limited. Man must believe on faith not only those dogmas of the Church that are above reason, but those too that can be known through reason. Since error in matters of faith may lead many to hell, tolerance should not be shown to unbelief except to avoid a greater evil; so “the Church at times has tolerated the rites even of heretics and pagans, when unbelievers were very numerous.”¹¹⁷ Unbelievers should never be allowed to acquire dominion or authority over believers.¹¹⁸ Tolerance may especially be shown to Jews, since their rites prefigured those of Christianity, and so “bear witness to the faith.”¹¹⁹ Unbaptized Jews should never be forced to accept Christianity.¹²⁰ But heretics—those who have abandoned faith in the doctrines of the Church—may properly be coerced.¹²¹ No one should be considered a heretic unless he persists in his error after it has been pointed out to him by ecclesiastical authority. Those who abjure their heresy may be admitted to penance, and even restored to their former dignities; if, however, they relapse into heresy “they are admitted to penance, but are not delivered from the pain of death.”¹²²

6. Politics

Thomas wrote thrice on political philosophy: in his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, in the Summa theologica, and in a brief treatise De regimine principum —On the Rule of Princes* A first impression is that Thomas merely repeats Aristotle; as we read on we are astonished at the amount of original and incisive thought contained in his work.

Social organization is a tool that man developed as a substitute for physiological organs of acquisition and defense. Society and the state exist for the individual, not he for them. Sovereignty comes from God, but is vested in the people. The people, however, are too numerous, scattered, fickle, and uninformed to exercise this sovereign power directly or wisely; hence they delegate their sovereignty to a prince or other leader. This grant of power by the people is always revocable, and “the prince holds the power of legislating only so far as he represents the will of the people.”¹²³

The sovereign power of the people may be delegated to many, to a few, or to one. Democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy may all be good if the laws are good and well administered. In general a constitutional monarchy is best, as giving unity, continuity, and stability; “a multitude,” as Homer said, “is better governed by one than by several.”¹²⁴ The prince or king, however, should be chosen by the people from any free rank of the population.¹²⁵ If the monarch becomes a tyrant he should be overthrown by the orderly action of the people.¹²⁶ He must always remain the servant, not the master, of the law.

Law is threefold: natural, as in the “natural laws” of the universe; divine, as revealed in the Bible; human or positive, as in the legislation of states. The third was made necessary by the passions of men and the development of the state. So the Fathers believed that private property was opposed to natural and divine law, and was the result of the sinfulness of man. Thomas does not admit that property is unnatural. He considers the arguments of the communists of his time, and answers like Aristotle that when everybody owns everything nobody takes care of anything.¹²⁷ But private property is a public trust. “Man ought to possess external things not as his own but as common, so that he is ready to communicate them to others in their need.”¹²⁸ For a man to desire or pursue wealth beyond his need for maintaining his station in life is sinful covetousness.¹²⁹ “Whatever some people possess in superabundance is due by natural law to the purpose of succoring the poor”; and “if there is no other remedy it is lawful for a man to succor his own need by means of another’s property, by taking it either openly or secretly.”¹³⁰

Thomas was not the man to make economics a dismal science by divorcing it from morality. He believed in the right of the community to regulate agriculture, industry, and trade, to control usury, even to establish a “just price” for services and goods. He looked with suspicious eye upon the art of buying cheap and selling dear. He condemned outright all speculative trading, all attempts to make gain by skillful use of market fluctuations.¹³¹ He opposed lending at interest, but saw no sin in borrowing “for a good end” from a professional moneylender.¹³²

He did not rise above his time on the question of slavery. Sophists, Stoics, and Roman legists had taught that by “nature” all men are free; the Church Fathers had agreed, and had explained slavery, like property, as a result of the sinfulness acquired by man through Adam’s Fall. Aristotle, friend of the mighty, had justified slavery as produced by the natural inequality of men. Thomas tried to reconcile these views: in the state of innocence there was no slavery; but since the Fall it has been found useful to subject simple men to wise men; those who have strong bodies but weak minds are intended by nature to be bondmen.¹³³ The slave, however, belongs to his master only in body, not in soul; the slave is not obliged to give sexual intercourse to the master; and all the precepts of Christian morality must be applied in the treatment of the slave.

7. Religion

As economic and political problems are ultimately moral, it seems just to Thomas that religion should be ranked above politics and industry, and that the state should submit, in matters of morals, to supervision and guidance by the Church. Authority is nobler, the higher its end; the kings of the earth, guiding men to earthly bliss, should be subject to the pope, who guides men to everlasting happiness. The state should remain supreme in secular affairs; but even in such matters the pope has the right to intervene if rulers violate the rules of morality, or do avoidable injury to their peoples. So the pope may punish a bad king, or absolve subjects from their oath of allegiance. Moreover, the state must protect religion, support the Church, and enforce her decrees.¹³⁴

The supreme function of the Church is to lead men to salvation. Man is a citizen not alone of this earthly state but of a spiritual kingdom infinitely greater than any state. The supreme facts of history are that man committed an infinite crime by disobeying God, thereby meriting infinite punishment; and that God the Son, by becoming man and suffering ignominy and death, created a redeeming store of grace by which man can be saved despite original sin. God gives of this grace to whom He will; we cannot fathom the reasons of His choice; but “nobody has been so insane as to say that merit is the cause of divine predestination.”¹³⁵ The terrible doctrine of Paul and Augustine recurs in the gentle Thomas:

It is fitting that God should predestine men. For all things are subject to His Providence…. As men are ordained to eternal life through the Providence of God, it likewise is part of that Providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation…. As predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory, so also reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin…. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.”¹³⁶

Thomas struggles to reconcile divine predestination with human freedom, and to explain why a man whose fate is already sealed should strive to virtue, how prayer can move an unchangeable God, or what the function of the Church can be in a society whose individuals have already been sorted out into the saved and the damned. He answers that God has merely foreseen how each man would freely choose. Presumably all pagans are among the damned except possibly a few to whom God vouchsafed a special and personal revelation.*¹³⁷

The chief happiness of the saved will consist in seeing God. Not that they will understand Him; only infinity can understand infinity; nevertheless, by an infusion of divine grace, the blessed will see the essence of God.¹³⁹ The whole creation, having proceeded from God, flows back to Him; the human soul, gift of His bounty, never rests until it rejoins its source. Thus the divine cycle of creation and return is completed, and Thomas’ philosophy ends, as it began, with God.

8. The Reception of Thomism

It was received by most of his contemporaries as a monstrous accumulation of pagan reasonings fatal to the Christian faith. The Franciscans, who sought God by Augustine’s mystic road of love, were shocked by Thomas’ “intellectualism,” his exaltation of intellect above will, of understanding above love. Many wondered how so coldly negative and remote a God as the Actus Purus of the Summa could be prayed to, how Jesus could be part of such an abstraction, what St. Francis would have said of—or to—such a God. To make body and soul one unity seemed to put out of court the incorruptible immortality of the soul; to make matter and form one unity was, despite Thomas’ denials, to fall into the Averroistic theory of the eternity of the world; to make matter, not form, the principle of individuation seemed to leave the soul undifferentiated, and to fall into the Averroistic theory of the unity and impersonal immortality of the soul. Worst of all, the triumph of Aristotle over Augustine in the Thomist philosophy seemed to the Franciscans the victory of paganism over Christianity. Were there not already, in the University of Paris, teachers and students who put Aristotle above the Gospels?

Just as orthodox Islam, at the end of the twelfth century, denounced and banished the Aristotelian Averroës, and orthodox Judaism, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, burned the books of the Aristotelian Maimonides, so in the third quarter of that century Christian orthodoxy defended itself against the Aristotelian Thomas. In 1277, at the prompting of Pope John XXI, the bishop of Paris issued a decree branding 219 propositions as heresies. Among these were three expressly charged “against Brother Thomas”: that angels have no body, and constitute each of them a separate species; that matter is the principle of individuation; and that God cannot multiply individuals in a species without matter. Anyone holding these doctrines, said the bishop, was ipso facto excommunicated. A few days after this decree Robert Kilwardby, a leading Dominican, persuaded the masters of the University of Oxford to denounce various Thomistic doctrines, including the unity of soul and body in man.

Thomas was now three years dead, and could not defend himself; but his old teacher Albert rushed from Cologne to Paris, and persuaded the Dominicans of France to stand by their fellow friar. A Franciscan, William de la Mare, joined the fray with a tract called Correctorium fratris Thomae, setting Thomas right on 118 points; and another Franciscan, John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, officially condemned Thomism, and urged a return to Bonaventura and St. Francis. Dante entered the lists by making a modified Thomism the doctrinal framework of The Divine Comedy, and choosing Thomas to guide him on the stairway to the highest heaven. After half a hundred years’ war the Dominicans convinced Pope John XXII that Thomas had been a saint; and his canonization (1323) gave the victory to Thomism. Thereafter the mystics found in the Summa¹⁴⁰ the deepest and clearest exposition of the mystic-contemplative life. At the Council of Trent (1545–63) the Summa theologica was placed upon the altar together with the Bible and the Decretals.¹⁴¹ Ignatius Loyola imposed upon the Jesuit Order the obligation to teach Thomism. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII, and in 1921 Pope Benedict XV, while not pronouncing the works of St. Thomas free from all error, made them the official philosophy of the Catholic Church; and in all Roman Catholic colleges that philosophy is taught today. Thomism, though it has some critics among Catholic theologians, has won new defenders in our time, and now rivals Platonism and Aristotelianism as one of the most enduring and influential bodies of philosophical thought.

It is a simple matter for one who stands on the shoulders of the last 700 years to point out in the work of Aquinas those elements that have ill borne the test of time. It is both a defect and a credit that he relied so much on Aristotle: to that degree he lacked originality, and showed a courage that cleared new paths for the medieval mind. Carefully securing direct and accurate translations, Thomas knew Aristotle’s philosophical (not the scientific) works more thoroughly than any other medieval thinker except Averroës. He was willing to learn from Moslems and Jews, and treated their philosophers with a self-confident respect. There is a heavy ballast of nonsense in his system, as in all philosophies that do not agree with our own; it is strange that so modest a man should have written at such length on how the angels know, and what man was before the Fall, and what the human race would have been except for Eve’s intelligent curiosity. Perhaps we err in thinking of him as a philosopher; he himself honestly called his work theology; he made no pretense to follow reason wherever it should lead him; he confessed to starting with his conclusions; and though most philosophers do this, most denounce it as treason to philosophy. He covered a wider range than any thinker except Spencer has dared to do again; and to every field he brought the light of clarity, and a quiet temper that shunned exaggeration and sought a moderate mean. Sapientis est ordinare, he said—“the wise man creates order.”¹⁴² He did not succeed in reconciling Aristotle and Christianity, but in the effort he won an epochal victory for reason. He had led reason as a captive into the citadel of faith; but in his triumph he had brought the Age of Faith to an end.

VII. THE SUCCESSORS

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend. We must not think of Scholasticism as an abstraction purged of a thousand individual peculiarities, but as a lazy name for the hundreds of conflicting philosophical and theological theories taught in the medieval schools from Anselm in the eleventh century to Occam in the fourteenth. The historian is miserably subject to the brevity of time and human patience, and must dishonor with a line men who were immortal for a day, but now lie hidden between the peaks of history.

One of the strangest figures of the many-sided thirteenth century was Ramon Lull—Raymond Lully (1232?—1315). Born in Palma of a wealthy Catalan family, he found his way to the court of James II at Barcelona, enjoyed a riotous youth, and slowly narrowed his amours to monogamy. Suddenly, at the age of thirty, he renounced the world, the flesh, and the Devil to devote his polymorphous energy to mysticism, occultism, philanthropy, evangelism, and the pursuit of martyrdom. He studied Arabic, founded a college of Arabic studies in Majorca, and petitioned the Council of Vienne (1311) to set up schools of Oriental languages and literature to prepare men for missionary work among Saracens and Jews. The Council established five such schools—at Rome, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca—with chairs of Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic. Perhaps Lully learned Hebrew, for he became an intimate student of the Cabala.

His 150 works defy classification. In youth he founded Catalan literature with several volumes of love poetry. He composed in Arabic, and then translated into Catalan, his Libre de contemplado en Deu, or Book of Contemplation on God—no mere mystic revery but a million-word encyclopedia of theology (1272). Two years later, as if with another self, he wrote a manual of chivalric war—Libre del orde de cavalyeria; and almost at the same time a handbook of education—Liber doctrinae puerilis. He tried his hand at philosophical dialogue, and published three such works, presenting Moslem, Jewish, Greek Christian, Roman Christian, and Tatar points of view with astonishing tolerance, fairness, and kindliness. About 1283 he composed a long religious romance, Blanquerna, which patient experts have pronounced “one of the masterpieces of the Christian Middle Ages.”¹⁴³ At Rome in 1295 he issued another encyclopedia, the Arbre de sciencia, or Tree of Science, stating 4000 questions in sixteen sciences, and giving confident replies. During a stay in Paris (1309–11) he fought the lingering Averroism there with some minor theological works, which he signed, with unwonted accuracy, Phantasticus. Throughout his long life he poured forth so many volumes on science and philosophy that even to list them would empty the pen.

Amid all these interests he was fascinated by an idea that has captured brilliant minds in our own time—that all the formulas and processes of logic could be reduced to mathematical or symbolical form. The ars magna, or “great art” of logic, said Raymond, consists in writing the basic concepts of human thought on movable squares, and then combining these in various positions not only to reduce all the ideas of philosophy to equations and diagrams, but to prove, by mathematical equivalence, the truths of Christianity. Raymond had the gentleness of some lunatics, and hoped to convert Mohammedans to Christianity by the persuasive manipulations of his ars. The Church applauded his confidence, but frowned upon his proposal to reduce all faith to reason, and to put the Trinity and the Incarnation into his logical machine.¹⁴⁴

In 1292, resolved to balance the loss of Palestine to the Saracens by peaceably converting Moslem Africa, Raymond crossed to Tunis, and secretly organized there a tiny colony of Christians. In 1307, on one of his missionary trips to Tunisia, he was arrested and brought before the chief judge of Bougie. The judge arranged a public disputation between Raymond and some Moslem divines; Raymond, says his biographer, won the argument, and was thrown into jail. Some Christian merchants contrived his rescue, and brought him back to Europe. But in 1314, apparently longing for martyrdom, he crossed again to Bougie, preached Christianity openly, and was stoned to death by a Moslem mob (1315).

To pass from Raymond Lully to John Duns Scotus is like emerging from Carmen into the Well-Tempered Clavichord. John’s middle and last names came from his birth (1266?) at Duns in Berwickshire (?). He was sent at eleven to a Franciscan monastery at Dumfries; four years later he entered the Order. He studied at Oxford and Paris, and then taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. Then, still a youth of forty-two, he died (1308), leaving behind him a multiplicity of writings, chiefly on metaphysics, distinguished by such obscurity and subtlety as would hardly appear again in philosophy before the coming of another Scot. And indeed the function of Duns Scotus was very much like that of Kant five centuries later—to argue that the doctrines of religion must be defended by their practical-moral necessity rather than their logical cogency. The Franciscans, willing to jettison philosophy to save Augustine from Dominican Thomas, made their young Doctor Sub-tilis their champion, and followed his lead, alive and dead, through generations of philosophical war.

This Duns was one of the keenest minds in medieval history. Having studied mathematics and other sciences, and feeling the influence of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon at Oxford, he formed a severe notion of what constituted proof; and applying that test to the philosophy of Thomas, he ended, almost in its honeymoon, the rash marriage of theology with philosophy. Despite his clear understanding of the inductive method, Duns argued —precisely contrary to Francis Bacon—that all inductive or a posteriori proof—from effect to cause—is uncertain; that the only real proof is deductive and a priori—to show that certain effects must follow from the essential nature of the cause. For example, to prove the existence of God, we must first study metaphysics—i.e., study “being as being,” and by strict logic arrive at the essential qualities of the world. In the realm of essences there must be one which is the source of all the rest, the Primus; this First Being is God. Duns agrees with Thomas that God is Actus Purus, but he interprets the phrase not as Pure Actuality but as Pure Activity. God is primarily will rather than intellect. He is the cause of all causes, and is eternal. But that is all that we can know of Him by reason. That He is a God of Mercy, that He is Three in One, that He created the world in time, that He watches over all by Providence—these and practically all the doctrines of the Christian faith are credibilia; they should be believed on the authority of the Scriptures and the Church, but they cannot be demonstrated by reason. Indeed, the moment we begin to reason about God we run into baffling contradictions (the Kantian “antinomies of pure reason”). If God is omnipotent He is the cause of all defects, including all evil; and secondary causes, including the human will, are illusory. In view of these ruinous conclusions, and because of the necessity of religious belief for our moral life (Kant’s “practical reason”), it is wiser to abandon the Thomistic attempt to prove theology by philosophy, and to accept the dogmas of the faith on the authority of the Bible and the Church.¹⁴⁵ We cannot know God, but we can love Him, and that is better than knowing.¹⁴⁶

In psychology Duns is a “realist” after his own subtle fashion: universals are objectively real in the sense that those identical features, which the mind abstracts from similar objects to form a general idea, must be in the objects, else how could we perceive and abstract them? He agrees with Thomas that all natural knowledge is derived from sensation. For the rest he differs from him all along the psychologic line. The principle of individuation is not matter but form, and form only in the strict sense of thisness (haecceitas)—the peculiar qualities and distinguishing marks of the individual person or thing. The faculties of the soul are not distinct from one another, nor from the soul itself. The basic faculty of the soul is not understanding but will; it is the will that determines to what sensations or purposes the intellect is to attend; only the will (voluntas), not the judgment (arbitrium), is free. Thomas’ argument that our hunger for continuance and for perfect happiness proves the immortality of the soul proves too much, for it could be applied to any beast in the field. We cannot prove personal immortality; we must simply believe.¹⁴⁷

As the Franciscans had claimed to see in Thomas the victory of Aristotle over the Gospels, so the Dominicans might have seen in Duns the triumph of Arabic over Christian philosophy: his metaphysic is Avicenna’s, his cosmology is Ibn Gabirol’s. But the tragic and basic fact in Scotus is his abandonment of the attempt to prove the basic Christian doctrines by reason. His followers carried the matter further, and removed one after another of the articles of faith from the sphere of reason, and so multiplied his distinctions and subtleties that in England a “Dunsman” came to mean a hairsplitting fool, a dull sophist, a dunce. Those who had learned to love philosophy refused to be subordinated to theologians who rejected philosophy; the two studies quarreled and parted; and the rejection of reason by faith issued in the rejection of faith by reason. So ended, for the Age of Faith, the brave adventure.

Scholasticism was a Greek tragedy, whose nemesis lurked in its essence. The attempt to establish the faith by reason implicitly acknowledged the authority of reason; the admission, by Duns Scotus and others, that the faith could not be established by reason shattered Scholasticism, and so weakened the faith that in the fourteenth century revolt broke out all along the doctrinal and ecclesiastical line. Aristotle’s philosophy was a Greek gift to Latin Christendom, a Trojan horse concealing a thousand hostile elements. These seeds of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were not only “the revenge of paganism” over Christianity, they were also the unwitting revenge of Islam; invaded in Palestine, and driven from nearly all of Spain, the Moslems transmitted their science and philosophy to Western Europe, and it proved to be a disintegrating force; it was Avicenna and Averroës, as well as Aristotle, who infected Christianity with the germs of rationalism.

But no perspective can dim the splendor of the Scholastic enterprise. It was an undertaking as bold and rash as youth, and had youth’s faults of over-confidence and love of argument; it was the voice of a new adolescent Europe that had rediscovered the exciting game of reason. Despite heresy-hunting councils and inquisitors, Scholasticism enjoyed and displayed, during the two centuries of its exaltation, a freedom of inquiry, thought, and teaching hardly surpassed in the universities of Europe today. With the help of the jurists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it sharpened the Western mind by forging the tools and terms of logic, and by such subtle reasoning as nothing in pagan philosophy could excel. Certainly this facility in argument ran to excess, and generated the disputatious verbosity and “scholastic” hairsplitting against which not only Roger and Francis Bacon, but the Middle Ages themselves, rebelled.* Yet the good of the inheritance far outweighed the bad. “Logic, ethics, and metaphysics,” said Condorcet, “owe to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients themselves”; and “it is to the Schoolmen,” said Sir William Hamilton, “that the vulgar languages are indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they possess.”¹⁴⁹ The peculiar quality of the French mind—its love of logic, its clarity, its finesse—was in large measure formed by the heyday of logic in the schools of medieval France.¹⁵⁰

Scholasticism, which in the seventeenth century was to be an obstacle to the development of the European mind, was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a revolutionary advance, or restoration, in human thought. “Modern” thought begins with the rationalism of Abélard, reaches its first peak in the clarity and enterprise of Thomas Aquinas, sustains a passing defeat in Duns Scotus, rises again with Occam, captures the papacy in Leo X, captures Christianity in Erasmus, laughs in Rabelais, smiles in Montaigne, runs riot in Voltaire, triumphs sardonically in Hume, and mourns its victory in Anatole France. It was the medieval dash into reason that founded that brilliant and reckless dynasty.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Christian Science

1095–1300

I. THE MAGICAL ENVIRONMENT

THE Romans at their Imperial height had valued applied science, but had almost forgotten the pure science of the Greeks. Already in the Natural History of the elder Pliny we find supposedly medieval superstitions on every other page. The indifference of the Romans co-operated with that of the Christians to almost dry up the stream of science long before the barbarian invasions littered the routes of cultural transmission with the debris of a ruined society. What remained of Greek science in Europe was buried in the libraries of Constantinople, and that remnant suffered in the sack of 1204. Greek science migrated through Syria into Islam in the ninth century, and stirred Moslem thought to one of the most remarkable cultural awakenings in history, while Christian Europe struggled to lift itself out of barbarism and superstition.

Science and philosophy, in the medieval West, had to grow up in such an atmosphere of myth, legend, miracle, omens, demons, prodigies, magic, astrology, divination, and sorcery as comes only in ages of chaos and fear. All these had existed in the pagan world, and exist today, but tempered by a civilized humor and enlightenment. They were strong in the Semitic world, and triumphed after Averroës and Maimonides. In Western Europe, from the sixth to the eleventh century, they broke the dikes of culture, and overwhelmed the medieval mind in an ocean of occultism and credulity. The greatest, most learned men shared in this credulity: Augustine thought that the pagan gods still existed as demons, and that fauns and satyrs were real;¹ Abélard thought that demons can work magic through their intimate acquaintance with the secrets of nature;² Alfonso the Wise accepted magic, and sanctioned divination by the stars;³ how, then, should lesser men doubt?

A multitude of mysterious and supernatural beings had descended into Christianity from pagan antiquity, and were still coming into it from Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland as trolls, elves, giants, fairies, goblins, gnomes, ogres, banshees, mysterious dragons, blood-sucking vampires; and new superstitions were always entering Europe from the East. Dead men walked the air as ghosts; men who had sold themselves to the Devil roamed woods and fields as werewolves; the souls of children dead before baptism haunted the marshes as will-o’-the-wisps. When St. Edmund Rich saw a flight of black crows he recognized them at once as a flock of devils come to fetch the soul of a local usurer.⁴ When a demon is exorcised from a man, said many a medieval story, a big black fly—sometimes a dog—could be seen issuing from his mouth.⁵ The population of devils never declined.

A hundred objects—herbs, stones, amulets, rings, gems—were worn for their magic power to ward off devils and bring good luck. The horseshoe was lucky because it had the shape of the crescent moon, which had once been a goddess. Sailors, at the mercy of the elements, and peasants, subject to all the whims of earth and sky, saw the supernatural at every turn, and lived in a vital medium of superstitions. The attribution of magic powers to certain numbers came down from Pythagoras through the Christian Fathers: three, the number of the Trinity, was the holiest number, and stood for the soul; four represented the body; seven, their sum, symbolized the complete man; hence a predilection for seven—ages of man, planets, sacraments, cardinal virtues, deadly sins. A sneeze at the wrong time was a bad omen, and had better be disarmed with a “God bless you” in any case. Philters could be used to create or destroy love. Conception could be avoided by spitting thrice into the mouth of a frog, or holding a jasper pebble in the hand during coitus.⁶ The enlightened Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons in the ninth century, complained that “things of such absurdity are believed by Christians as no one ever aforetime could induce the heathen to believe.”⁷

The Church struggled against the paganism of superstition, condemned many beliefs and practices, and punished them with a gradation of penances. She denounced black magic—resort to demons to obtain power over events; but it flourished in a thousand secret places. Its practitioners circulated privately a Liber perditionis, or Book of Damnation, giving the names, habitats, and special powers of the major demons.⁸ Nearly everybody believed in some magical means of turning the power of supernatural beings to a desired end. John of Salisbury tells of magic used by a deacon, a priest, and an archbishop.⁹ The simplest form was by incantation; a formula was recited, usually several times; by such formulas a miscarriage might be averted, a sickness healed, an enemy put out of the way. Probably the majority of Christians considered the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ave Maria as magic incantations, and used holy water and the sacraments as magic rites bringing miraculous effects.

Belief in witchcraft was next to universal. The Penitential Book of the bishop of Exeter condemned women “who profess to be able to change men’s minds by sorcery and enchantments, as from hate to love or from love to hate, or to bewitch or steal men’s goods,” or who “profess to ride on certain nights and on certain beasts with a host of demons in women’s shape, and to be enrolled in the company of such”¹⁰—the “Witches’ Sabbath” that became notorious in the fourteenth century. A simple witchery consisted in making a wax model of an intended victim, piercing it with needles, and pronouncing formulas of cursing; a minister of Philip IV was accused of hiring a witch to do this to an image of the King. Some women were believed able to injure or kill by a look of their “evil eye.” Berthold of Regensburg thought that more women than men would go to hell because so many women practiced witchcraft—“spells for getting a husband, spells for the marriage, spells before the child is born, spells before the christening… it is a marvel that men lose not their wits for the monstrous witchcrafts that women practice on them.”¹¹ Visigothic law accused witches of invoking demons, sacrificing to devils, causing storms, etc., and ordered that those convicted of such offenses should have their heads shaved and receive two hundred stripes.¹² The laws of Cnut in England recognized the possibility of slaying a person by magic means. The Church was at first lenient with these popular beliefs, looking upon them as pagan survivals that would die out; on the contrary they grew and spread; and in 1298 the Inquisition began its campaign to suppress witchcraft by burning women at the stake. Many theologians sincerely believed that certain women were in league with demons, and that the faithful must be protected from their spells. Caesarius of Heister-bach assures us that in his time many men entered into pacts with devils;¹³ and it is alleged that such practitioners of black magic so disdained the Church that they travestied her rites by worshiping Satan in a Black Mass.¹⁴ Thousands of sick or timid people believed themselves to be possessed by devils. The prayers, formulas, and ceremonies of exorcism used by the Church may have been intended as psychological medicine to calm superstitious minds.

Medieval medicine was in some measure a branch of theology and ritual. Augustine thought that the diseases of mankind were caused by demons, and Luther agreed with him; it seemed logical, therefore, to cure illness with prayer, and epidemics by religious processions or building churches. So Santa Maria della Salute at Venice was raised to check a plague, and the prayers of St. Gerbold, Bishop of Bayeux, cured that city of an epidemic of dysentery.¹⁵ Good physicians welcomed the aid of religious faith in effecting cures; they recommended prayer, and the wearing of amulets.¹⁶ As far back as Edward the Confessor we find English rulers blessing rings for the cure of epilepsy.¹⁷ Kings, having been consecrated by religious touch, felt that they might cure by imposition of hands. Persons suffering from scrofula were supposed to be especially amenable to the royal touch; hence the name “king’s evil” for that ailment. St. Louis labored assiduously with such impositions; and Philip of Valois is said to have “touched” 1,500 persons at one sitting.¹⁸