Cathedrals, Universities and Scholastics

A twelfth-century renaissance

Around 1100, Western Europe experienced an extraordinary burst of energy. Population and trade grew. Towns expanded. The Gregorian Reform had energized the church. Contact with the Islamic and Byzantine worlds brought new texts. Historians speak of a "twelfth-century renaissance." At its heart was a new confidence in human reason as a tool for understanding God and the world.

Anselm: faith seeking understanding

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), an Italian monk who became abbot of Bec in Normandy and then archbishop of Canterbury, is often called the father of scholasticism. His motto was fides quaerens intellectum, "faith seeking understanding." He did not use reason to reach faith. He began with faith and used reason to explore it. "I do not seek to understand so that I may believe," he wrote, "but I believe so that I may understand."

Anselm is famous for two ideas:

• The ontological argument (in the Proslogion, 1078): God is "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Something that exists in reality is greater than something that exists only in the mind. So if we can conceive of God, God must exist. Philosophers have argued about this ever since.
• Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo, 1098): Human sin dishonored God's infinite majesty, a debt humans owe but cannot pay. Only God can pay it. So only one who is both God and human could make "satisfaction" for sin. This explanation of the cross, the "satisfaction theory" of Atonement, deeply shaped Western Catholic and later Protestant thinking.

Abelard: "Yes and No"

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) was the most dazzling and controversial teacher in Paris. Students flocked to hear him demolish his own teachers in debate. His book Sic et Non ("Yes and No") collected 158 questions on which the Bible and church fathers seemed to contradict each other, without resolving them. The point was to train students to reason their way to answers. "By doubting we come to inquiry," he wrote, "and by inquiry we perceive the truth."

Abelard's life became a famous tragedy. He fell in love with his brilliant student Heloise. They had a son and married secretly. Her outraged uncle had Abelard castrated. Both entered religious life, she as an abbess, and their later letters are among the most moving of the Middle Ages. Abelard's theology was attacked by Bernard of Clairvaux of Clairvaux, who distrusted his rationalism, and condemned in 1141.

The universities

Around 1200 the cathedral schools of Paris grew into something new: the university. The word comes from universitas, a guild or corporation of masters and students with its own rights. Paris (theology), Bologna (law) and Oxford were the earliest. Cambridge, Salamanca, Padua and dozens more followed. Students, all male and all technically clergy, studied the "liberal arts" first, then could go on to the higher faculties of law, medicine or theology. Theology, the "queen of the sciences," could take fifteen years.

Teaching used the scholastic method. A question was posed ("Whether God exists"). Objections were listed, then a counter-authority was cited. The master gave his answer, then replied to each objection. The standard textbook of theology was the Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1150), a topically arranged collection of the church fathers' opinions. Every theology student wrote a commentary on it, including Luther. Lombard also fixed the number of sacraments at seven: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, last anointing, ordination and marriage.

How a scholastic argument works

The Aristotle crisis

In the 1100s and 1200s, Latin translations of Aristotle's complete works arrived from Muslim Spain and Sicily, often with commentaries by the great Muslim philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) and the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) (see The Challenge of Islam). It was like receiving a complete, rigorous scientific account of the universe: physics, biology, psychology, ethics and metaphysics.

It was also dangerous. Aristotle seemed to teach that the world is eternal (no creation), and that there is no personal immortality. As interpreted by some followers of Averroes, he suggested that what is true in philosophy might be false in theology. Church authorities tried to ban Aristotle's natural philosophy at Paris in 1210 and 1215, without success. What should Christians do with this powerful new knowledge?

Thomas Aquinas: the great synthesis

The answer came from Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), son of a noble family near Naples. When he joined the new Dominican friars, his family kidnapped him and held him in a castle for a year to change his mind. Legend says they even sent a prostitute to tempt him. He did not change his mind. A big, quiet man, nicknamed "the Dumb Ox" by fellow students, he studied under the great scientist-theologian Albert the Great, who predicted that the ox's bellowing would be heard throughout the world.

Aquinas's conviction was simple and profound: truth cannot contradict truth. Faith and reason both come from God, so properly understood they cannot conflict.

• Reason can discover some truths about God by itself: that God exists, that God is one, that God is good. Aquinas offered "Five Ways," arguments for God's existence from motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and design.
• Revelation adds truths beyond reason's reach: the Trinity, the incarnation, the sacraments. These are above reason, not against it.
• "Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it." Human nature, reason and the natural world are good. God's grace builds on them and lifts them up.

His masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae ("Summary of Theology"), runs to thousands of pages and covers God, creation, human nature, ethics, law, Christ and the sacraments in thousands of tightly argued articles. It is one of the great intellectual achievements of humanity. In December 1273, after an experience during Mass, Aquinas stopped writing, leaving the Summa unfinished. "All that I have written seems like straw," he said, "compared to what I have seen." He died the following year, aged about 49.

Aquinas was controversial at first. Some of his propositions were caught up in a sweeping condemnation of Aristotelian ideas by the bishop of Paris in 1277. But he was made a saint in 1323. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII made his thought the official foundation of Catholic theology.

Other voices

Scholasticism was not one school. The Franciscan Bonaventure (1221–1274) followed Augustine and stressed love and mystical ascent over Aristotle. John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), "the Subtle Doctor," emphasized God's freedom and will. (His followers, "Dunsmen," were later mocked by Renaissance humanists, giving us the word "dunce.") William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) taught that we cannot prove much about God by reason at all and should not multiply explanations unnecessarily, the principle known as "Ockham's razor." This "nominalist" theology, which stressed God's absolute power and will, formed the background of Luther's education.

Cathedrals: theology in stone

The same age built the great Gothic cathedrals. In 1144 Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis of Saint-Denis near Paris rebuilt his abbey church's choir with pointed arches, ribbed vaults and huge windows. He was inspired by a theology of light: God is light, and material beauty can lift the mind to God. Over the next two centuries, cathedrals rose across Europe: Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims, Amiens, Canterbury, Salisbury, Cologne.

Gothic engineering of pointed arches, ribbed vaults and flying buttresses let walls rise higher and open up into vast windows of stained glass. These told Bible stories and saints' lives in color, a "Bible for the poor" who could not read. Some historians have compared a Gothic cathedral to a Summa in stone: an ordered, complete picture of the universe, with everything in its place, pointing upward to God. Building one took generations and involved the whole community.