The Age of Faith

  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.