The University

Initially, these were schools associated with churches and cathedrals in the towns. Instruction was given by the so-called “secular clergy,” priests and canons, who read books very differently from monks. In the freer atmosphere of the town, an active mind was free to explore. And some daring minds emerged. The students were a mobile population and sought out the most learned or clever master. Soon intellectual activity was focused in a few major centers where students could hear lessons given by several professors.

By 1150 Paris was by far the most important such center, partly due to Peter Abelard (d. 1142), the most brilliant teacher of his day. Hundreds of students were pouring into the city in this period, not only from the region around Paris but from Normany, the Germanic regions, and England. Teaching was still done in the cloister of Notre Dame but small centers of learning were cropping up on the Left Bank of the Seine. More independent-minded masters were renting stalls, and eventually an entire district of Paris was devoted to study. Paris had become not only a royal and merchant city, but a “university” city. And the spirit of commerce unquestionably influenced the spirit of learning. The same seeking spirit that led men into commercial ventures lured young clergymen into mental conquests. They not only read and meditated, in monkish fashion, they debated. Masters and students faced each other in mental jousts.

The content of study at the universitas also differed from that of the monasteries. The primary aim of reading was to scrutinize the meaning of words – Latin words. So the masters would read to their beginning pupils the classic texts of Latin civilization on which the Cluniac cloisters looked with mistrust: Cicero, Ovid, Virgil. In this way teaching leaned to classicism, and a new taste for antiquity was formed.

While the monks valued mainly grammar among the disciplines of the Carolingian trivium of verbal arts, shunning rhetoric and logic, in the cathedral schools logic became the major branch of the trivium. Students must take words as their basis and discover their deepest meaning, but not by letting themselves be drawn along in dreamy meditation, as in the cloisters of Cluny. They must begin by doubting. “We seek through doubt, and by seeking we perceive truth” – thus Abelard, comparing contradictory passages of Scripture. Abelard would tackle a passage, interpret it one way or another, call these interpretations into question, discuss them, and come to a conclusion. “My students,” he said, “…maintained that there was no point in talking if one did not indicate the reasons for his opinions and that no one could believe something which he had not first understood.”

In part, interest in the “new” method was an indirect result of the Crusades and Reconquista. After Toledo was reconquered from the Muslims in 1085, teams of Latin clerics and Jews immediately began to translate the Arab books, including Greek texts. The French schools welcomed these new texts, and through them began to assimilate Greek intellectual traditions. The texts included Aristotle’s treatises on logic, which until then the monks of the West possessed only in a diluted and distorted form. At the same time that Peter Lombard in Paris was outlining the first logical analysis of biblical texts, Peter of Poitiers was boldly stating, “Although certainty exists, nonetheless it is our duty to doubt the articles of faith, and to seek, and discuss.”

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