XVI
THE FAITH OF THE MIDDLE AGES
A modern student, when he passes from school to a university, soon finds that he is standing at a cross-roads: he cannot hope, like a philosopher of the sixteenth century, to ‘take all knowledge for his province’, but must choose which of the many signposts he will follow—law, classics, science, economics, chemistry, medicine, to name but a few of the more important. Mediaeval minds would have been sorely puzzled by some of these avenues of knowledge, while the rest they would denounce as mere sidetracks, leading by a devious route to the main high road of theology. Science, for instance, the patient searching after truth by building up knowledge from facts, and accepting nothing as a fact that had not been verified by proof, was a closed book in the thirteenth century.
Roger Bacon, an English friar, one of the first to attempt scientific experiments, was regarded with such suspicion on account of his researches and his sarcastic comments on the views of his day that he was believed to be in league with the devil; and even the favour of a pope more enlightened than most of his contemporaries could not save him in later years from imprisonment as a suspected magician.
Men and women hate to change the ideas in which they have been brought up; and in the thirteenth century they readily accepted as facts such fabulous stories told by early Christian writers as that of the phoenix who at five hundred years old casts herself into a sacred fire, emerging renewed in health and vigour from her own ashes, or of the pelican killing her young at birth and reviving them in three days, or of the unicorn resisting all the wiles of the hunter but captured easily by a pure maiden. The charm of such natural history lay to mediaeval minds not in its legendary quaintness but in the use to which it could be turned in pointing a moral or adorning the doctrines of theology.
Theology was the chief course of study at Paris, just as Roman law reigned at Bologna. It comprised a thorough mastery of the Scriptures as expounded by ‘Fathers of the Church’, and also of what was then known through Latin and Arabic translations of the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Although he had been a pagan, Aristotle was almost as much revered by many mediaeval theologians as St. Jerome or St. Augustine, and it was their life-work to try and reconcile his views with those of Catholic Christianity.
Scholasticism
The philosophy that resulted from the study of these very different authorities is called ‘scholasticism’, and those who gave patient years of thought to the arguments that built up and maintained its theories the ‘schoolmen’.
The first of the great Paris theologians was Peter Abelard, a Breton—handsome, self-confident, ready of tongue and brain. Having studied ‘dialectics’, that is, the system of reasoning by which the mediaeval mind constructed its philosophy, he aroused the disgust of his masters by drawing away their pupils, through his eloquence and originality, as soon as he understood the subject-matter sufficiently to lecture on his own account.
In Paris so many young men of his day crowded round his desk that Abelard has been sometimes called the founder of the university. This is not true, but his popularity may be said to have decided that Paris rather than any other town should become the intellectual centre of France. Greedily his audience listened while he endeavoured to prove by human reason beliefs that the Church taught as a matter of faith; and, though he had set out with the intention of defending her, it was with the Church that he soon came into conflict.
One of his books, called Yes and No, contained a brief summary of the views of early Christian Fathers on various theological questions. Drawn into such close proximity some of these views were found to conflict, and the Breton lecturer became an object of suspicion in ecclesiastical quarters, especially to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who believed that human reason was given to man merely that he might accept the teaching of the Church, not to raise arguments or criticisms concerning it.