Although many college students today couldn’t locate the Middle Ages on a historical timeline, they are nevertheless sure that the period was one of ignorance, superstition, and intellectual repression. Nothing could be further from the truth—it is to the Middle Ages that we owe one of Western civilization’s greatest—unique—intellectual contributions to the world: the university system.
The university was an utterly new phenomenon in European history. Nothing like it had existed in ancient Greece or Rome.1 The institution that we recognize today, with its faculties, courses of study, examinations, and degrees, as well as the distinction between undergraduate and graduate study, comes to us directly from the medieval world. The Church developed the university system because, according to historian Lowrie Daly, it was “the only institution in Europe that showed consistent interest in the preservation and cultivation of knowledge.”2
We cannot give exact dates for the appearance of universities at Paris and Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, since they evolved over a period of time—the former beginning as cathedral schools and the latter as informal gatherings of masters and students. But we may safely say that they began taking form during the latter half of the twelfth century.
In order to identify a particular medieval school as a university, we look for certain characteristic features. A university possessed a core of required texts, on which professors would lecture while adding their own insights. A university was also characterized by well-defined academic programs lasting a more or less fixed number of years, as well as by the granting of degrees. The granting of a degree, since it entitled the recipient to be called master, amounted to admitting new people to the teaching guild, just as a master craftsman was admitted to the guild of his own profession. Although the universities often struggled with outside authorities for self-government, they generally attained it, as well as legal recognition as corporations.3
Aside from the Church’s intellectual role in fostering the universities, the papacy played a central role in establishing and encouraging them. Naturally, the granting of a charter to a university was one indication of this papal role. Eighty-one universities had been established by the time of the Reformation. Of these, thirty-three possessed a papal charter, fifteen a royal or imperial one, twenty possessed both, and thirteen had none.4 In addition, it was the accepted view that a university could not award degrees without the approbation of pope, king, or emperor. Pope Innocent IV officially granted this privilege to Oxford University in 1254. The pope (in fact) and the emperor (in theory) possessed authority over all of Christendom, and for this reason it was to them that a university typically had to turn for the right to issue degrees. Equipped with the approval of one or the other of these universal figures, the university’s degrees would be respected throughout all of Christendom. Degrees awarded only by the approval of national monarchs, on the other hand, were considered valid only in the kingdom in which they were issued.5
In certain cases, including the universities at Bologna, Oxford, and Paris, the master’s degree entitled the bearer to teach anywhere in the world (ius ubique docendi). We first see this in Pope Gregory IX’s 1233 document pertaining to the University of Toulouse, which became a model for the future. By the end of the thirteenth century, the ius ubique docendi had become “the juridical hallmark of a university.”6 Theoretically, such scholars could freely join other faculties in Western Europe, though in practice each institution preferred to examine the candidate before admitting him.7 Still, this privilege, conferred by the popes, played a significant role in encouraging the dissemination of knowledge and fostering the idea of an international scholarly community.
TOWN AND GOWN
The papal role in the university system extended to a great many other matters. A glance at the history of the medieval university reveals that conflicts between the university and the people or government of the area were not uncommon. Local townsmen were frequently ambivalent toward university students; on one hand, the university was a boon for local merchants and for economic activity in general, since the students brought money to spend, but on the other, university students could be irresponsible and unruly. As a modern commentator puts it, inhabitants of medieval university towns loved the money but hated the students. As a result, students and their professors were often heard to complain that they were “abused by the locals, treated roughly by the police, denied what we would call due process of law and cheated over rent, food and books.”8
In this atmosphere, the Church provided special protection to university students by offering them what was known as benefit of clergy. Clergymen in medieval Europe enjoyed special legal status: it was an extraordinarily serious crime to lay a hand on them, and they had the right to have their cases heard in an ecclesiastical rather than a secular court. University students, as actual or potential clerical candidates, would also enjoy these privileges. Secular rulers often extended similar protections: in 1200, Philip Augustus of France granted and confirmed such privileges to students of the University of Paris, permitting them to have their cases heard in what would certainly be a more sympathetic court than that of the local town.9
The popes intervened on the university’s behalf on numerous occasions, as when Pope Honorius III (1216–1227) sided with the scholars at Bologna in 1220 against infringements on their liberties. When the chancellor of Paris insisted on an oath of loyalty to himself personally, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) intervened. In 1231, when local diocesan officials encroached on the institutional autonomy of the university, Pope Gregory IX issued the bull Parens Scientiarum on behalf of the masters of Paris. In this document, he effectively granted the University of Paris the right to self-government, whereby it could make its own rules pertaining to courses and studies. The pope also granted the university a separate papal jurisdiction, emancipating it from diocesan interference. “With this document,” writes one scholar, “the university comes of age and appears in legal history as a fully formed intellectual corporation for the advancement and training of scholars.”10 The papacy, writes another, “has to be considered a major force in shaping the autonomy of the Paris guild [i.e., the organized body of scholars at Paris].”11
In that same document, the pope tried to establish a just and peaceful environment for the university by granting a privilege known as cessatio—the right to suspend lectures and go on a general strike if its members were abused. Just cause included “refusal of the right to fix ceiling prices for lodgings, an injury or mutilation of a student for which suitable satisfaction had not been given within fifteen days, [or] the unlawful imprisonment of a student.”12
It became common for universities to bring their grievances to the pope in Rome.13 On several occasions, the pope even intervened to force university authorities to pay professors their salaries; Popes Boniface VIII, Clement V, Clement VI, and Gregory IX all had to take such measures.14 Little wonder, then, that one historian has declared that the universities’ “most consistent and greatest protector was the Pope of Rome. He it was who granted, increased, and protected their privileged status in a world of often conflicting jurisdictions.”15
When the university system was still young, therefore, the popes were its most consistent protectors and the authority to which students and faculty alike regularly had recourse. The Church granted charters, protected the university’s rights, sided with scholars against obnoxious interference by overbearing authorities, built an international academic community with the ius ubique docendi privilege, and (as we shall see) permitted and fostered the kind of robust and largely unfettered scholarly debate and discussion that we associate with the university. In the universities and elsewhere, no other institution did more to promote the dissemination of knowledge than the Catholic Church.
Medieval universities differed in certain major respects from their modern counterparts. In its earliest stage, the university lacked buildings or campuses of its own. The university was its faculty and students, not a particular locale. Lectures were delivered not in campus lecture halls but in cathedrals or in private halls of various kinds. Neither were there libraries. Significant collections of books would have been difficult to acquire even if the universities had possessed real estate of their own; some estimates have it that a typical volume occupied six to eight months of a scribe’s labor. (Thus even the great monastic collections were, by modern standards, rather scant and unimpressive.) Books that were absolutely necessary for students were typically rented rather than purchased.
Apparently, many medieval university students came from families of modest backgrounds, though the well-to-do were prominently represented as well. Most of the students of arts (broadly conceived) were from fourteen to twenty years of age. A great many attended university in order to prepare themselves for a career. For that reason, it is hardly surprising that the most common course of study was law. These students were also joined by many men in holy orders who either desired simply to become more knowledgeable or who had been sponsored by an ecclesiastical superior.16
The more established the universities became, the more traumatic it would be to the life of the town if a university chose to relocate. And it was not uncommon for such relocation to occur, particularly since universities in their early stages were not bound to a particular locale by their own buildings and campus. Thus the University of Padua originated from the movement of scholars away from Bologna in 1222. To keep them from seceding, secular authorities were prepared to offer these institutions a variety of attractive grants and privileges.17
What was studied at these great institutions? The seven liberal arts, for starters, along with civil and canon law, natural philosophy, medicine, and theology. As the universities took shape in the twelfth century, they were the happy beneficiaries of the fruits of what some scholars have called the renaissance of the twelfth century.18 Massive translation efforts brought forth many of the great works of the ancient world that had been lost to Western scholarship for too many centuries, including the geometry of Euclid; the logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics of Aristotle; and the medical work of Galen. Legal studies began to flourish as well, particularly at Bologna, when the Digest, the key component of the sixth-century emperor Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis (a compendium of Roman law, much admired from its origins to the present day), was rediscovered.
ACADEMIC LIFE
The distinction between undergraduate and graduate education was made in the early universities more or less as it is today. And as today, some places were especially known for academic distinction in particular subject areas—Bologna thus became renowned for the graduate study of law, as did Paris for theology and the arts.
The undergraduate, or artist (that is, a student of the liberal arts), attended lectures, took part in occasional disputations in class, and attended the formal disputations of others. His masters typically lectured on an important text, often drawn from classical antiquity. Alongside their commentaries on these ancient texts, professors gradually began to include a series of questions to be resolved through logical argument. Over time, the questions essentially displaced the commentaries. Here was the origin of the question method of scholastic argument, of the kind found in Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.
Such questions were also posed in what was known as the ordinary disputation. The master would assign students to argue one or the other side of a question. When their interaction had ceased, it was then up to the master to “determine,” or resolve, the question. To obtain the Bachelor of Arts degree, a student was expected to determine a question by himself to the satisfaction of the faculty. (Before being permitted to do so, however, he had to prove that he possessed adequate preparation and was fit to be evaluated.) This kind of emphasis on careful argument, on marshaling a persuasive case for each side of a question, and on resolving a dispute by means of rational tools sounds like the opposite of the intellectual life that most people associate with medieval man. But that was how the degree-granting process operated.
Once the student had “determined” a question, he was awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree. The process would typically take four to five years. At that point, the student could simply declare his education completed, as most bachelors of arts do today, and look for remunerative work (even as a teacher, perhaps in some of the lesser schools of Europe) or decide to continue his studies and pursue a graduate degree. The so-called master’s degree, to which satisfactory completion of his graduate study entitled him, would render him qualified to teach within the university system.
The prospective master had to demonstrate competence within the canon of important works of Western civilization. This was before he petitioned for his license to teach, or licentiate, which was awarded between the bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and was part of the process not only for future teachers but for those seeking desirable posts in civil or ecclesiastical service. We get some idea of the advanced student’s background from this modern historian’s overview of texts with which that student was expected to be familiar:
After his bachelorship, and before he petitioned for his license to teach, the student must have “heard at Paris or in another university” the following Aristotelian works: Physics, On Generation and Corruption, On the Heavens, and the Parva Naturalia; namely, the treatises of Aristotle On Sense and Sensation, On Waking and Sleeping, On Memory and Remembering, On the Length and Shortness of Life. He must also have heard (or have plans to hear) On the Metaphysics, and have attended lectures on the mathematical books. [Historian Hastings] Rashdall, when speaking of the Oxford curriculum, gives the following list of works, to be read by the bachelor between the period of his determination and his inception (mastership): books on the liberal arts: in grammar, Priscian; in rhetoric, Aristotle’s Rhetoric (three terms), or the Topics of Boethius (bk. iv.), or Cicero’s Nova Rhetorica or Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Poetria Virgilii; in logic, Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (three terms) or Boethius’ Topics (bks. 1-3) or the Prior Analytics or Topics (Aristotle); in arithmetic and in music, Boethius; in geometry, Euclid, Alhacen, or Vitellio, Perspectiva; in astronomy, Theorica Planetarum (two terms), or Ptolemy, Almagest. In natural philosophy the additional works are: the Physics or On the Heavens (three terms) or On the Properties of the Elements or the Meteorics or On Vegetables and Plants or On the Soul or On Animals or any of the Parva Naturalia; in moral philosophy, the Ethics or Economics or Politics of Aristotle for three terms, and in metaphysics, the Metaphysics for two terms or for three terms if the candidate had not determined.19
The process for acquiring the licentiate defies ready generalization, but it consisted of another demonstration of knowledge and a commitment to certain principles of university life. Once this process was complete, the license was officially awarded. At Ste. Geneviève, the person to be licensed knelt in front of the vice-chancellor, who said:
I, by the authority vested in me by the apostles Peter and Paul, give you the license for lecturing, reading, disputing, and determining and for exercising other scholastic and magisterial acts both in the faculty of arts at Paris and elsewhere, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.20
The precise length of time that typically passed between reception of the licentiate and reception of the master’s degree (which apparently required knowledge of a wider array of books) is difficult to determine, but one reasonable estimate is that it ranged between six months and three years. One candidate, who had perhaps already read all the required books, is recorded as having received both distinctions on the same day.21
Contrary to the general impression that theological presuppositions colored all of their investigations, medieval scholars by and large respected the autonomy of what was referred to as natural philosophy (a branch of study that concerned itself with the functioning of the physical world and particularly with change and motion in that world). Seeking natural explanations for natural phenomena, they kept their studies separate from theology. Natural philosophers in the arts faculties, writes Edward Grant in God and Reason in the Middle Ages, “were expected to refrain from introducing theology and matters of faith into natural philosophy.”22
This respect for the autonomy of natural philosophy from theology held true also among theologians who wrote about the physical sciences. Albertus Magnus, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s great teacher, was asked by his Dominican brothers to write a book on physics that would help them to understand the physical works of Aristotle. Lest they expect him in this book to intermingle theological ideas with natural philosophy, however, Albertus explicitly rejected that idea, explaining that theological ideas belonged in theological treatises, not in physical ones.
The medieval study of logic provides additional testimony to the medievals’ commitment to rational thought. “Through their high-powered logic courses,” writes Grant, “medieval students were made aware of the subtleties of language and the pitfalls of argumentation. Thus were the importance and utility of reason given heavy emphasis in a university education.” Edith Sylla, a specialist in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century natural philosophy, logic, and theology, writes that we ought to “wonder at the level of logical sophistication that advanced undergraduates in fourteenth-century Oxford must have attained.”23
Naturally, scholars took their lead from Aristotle, a logical genius, but they also composed logic texts of their own. Who wrote the most famous of these? A future pope, Peter of Spain (John XXI), in the 1230s. His Summulae logicales became the standard text for hundreds of years and would go through some 166 editions by the seventeenth century.
THE AGE OF SCHOLASTICISM
Had the Middle Ages really been a time when all questions were to be resolved by mere appeals to authority, this commitment to the study of formal logic would make no sense. Rather, the commitment to the discipline of logic reveals a civilization that aimed to understand and to persuade. To that end, educated men wanted students to be able to detect logical fallacies and to be able to form logically sound arguments.
This was the age of Scholasticism. It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory definition of Scholasticism that would apply to all the thinkers to whom the label has been affixed. At one level, Scholasticism was the term assigned to the scholarly work done in the schools—that is, in the universities of Europe. The term is less helpfully used to describe the content of the thought of the intellectuals to which it refers than it is to identify the method that they used. The Scholastics, by and large, were committed to the use of reason as an indispensable tool in theological and philosophical study, and to dialectic—the juxtaposition of opposing positions, followed by a resolution of the matter at hand by recourse to both reason and authority—as the method of pursuing issues of intellectual interest. As the tradition matured, it became common for Scholastic treatises to follow a set pattern: posing a question, considering arguments on both sides, giving the writer’s own view, and answering objections.
Perhaps the earliest of the Scholastics was Saint Anselm (1033–1109). Anselm, who served as abbot of the monastery of Bec and later as archbishop of Canterbury, differed from most other Scholastics in that he did not hold a formal academic post. But he shared what became the characteristic Scholastic interest in using reason to explore philosophical and theological questions. For instance, his Cur Deus Homo examines from a rational point of view why it was appropriate and fitting for God to have become man.
In philosophical circles, however, Saint Anselm is better known for his rational proof for the existence of God. Known as the ontological argument, Anselm’s line of reasoning has stimulated and intrigued even those who have disagreed with it. For Anselm, the existence of God was logically implied in the very definition of God. Just as a thorough knowledge and understanding of the idea of nine implied that its square root was three, so did a thorough understanding of the idea of God imply that such a being must exist.24 Anselm posits as a working definition of God “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” (For the sake of simplicity we shall modify Anselm’s formulation to “the greatest conceivable being.”) The greatest conceivable being must possess every perfection, else it would not be the greatest conceivable being. Now existence is a perfection, said Anselm, for it is better to exist than not to exist. But suppose God existed only in people’s minds and did not exist in reality. That is to say, suppose that this greatest conceivable being existed only as an idea in our minds, and had no existence in the extramental world (the world outside our minds). Then it would not be the greatest conceivable being, since we could conceive of a greater one: one that existed both in our minds and in reality. Thus the very notion of “the greatest conceivable being” immediately implies the existence of such a being, for without existence in the real world this would not be the greatest conceivable being.
Subsequent philosophers, including Saint Thomas Aquinas, have generally not been persuaded by Anselm’s proof—although a minority of philosophers have insisted that Anselm was correct—but over the course of the next five centuries and beyond, a great many philosophers felt compelled to reckon with the saint’s arguments. More significant even than the centuries-long reverberations of Anselm’s argument is its commitment to the use of reason, which later Scholastics pursued to even greater effect.
Another important early Scholastic was Peter Abelard (1079–1142), a much-admired teacher who spent ten years of his career teaching at the cathedral school at Paris. In Sic et Non (Yes and No, c. 1120) Abelard assembled a list of apparent contradictions, citing passages from the early Church fathers and from the Bible itself. Whatever the solution would prove to be in each case, it was the task of human reason—and, more specifically, of Abelard’s students—to resolve these intellectual difficulties.
The prologue to Sic et Non contains a beautiful testimony to the importance of intellectual activity and the zeal with which it should be pursued:
I present here a collection of statements of the Holy Fathers in the order in which I have remembered them. The discrepancies which these texts seem to contain raise certain questions which should present a challenge to my young readers to summon up all their zeal to establish the truth and in doing so to gain increased perspicacity. For the prime source of wisdom has been defined as continuous and penetrating inquiry. The most brilliant of all philosophers, Aristotle, encouraged his students to undertake this task with every ounce of their curiosity. . . . [H]e says: “It is foolish to make confident statements about these matters if one does not devote a lot of time to them. It is useful practice to question every detail.” By raising questions we begin to enquire, and by enquiring we attain the truth, and, as the Truth has in fact said: “Seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He demonstrated this to us by His own moral example when He was found at the age of twelve “sitting in the midst of the doctors both hearing them and asking them questions.” He who is the Light itself, the full and perfect wisdom of God, desired by His questioning to give His disciples an example before He became a model for teachers in His preaching. When, therefore, I adduce passages from the scriptures it should spur and incite my readers to enquire into the truth and the greater the authority of these passages, the more earnest this enquiry should be.25
Although his work on the Trinity earned him ecclesiastical censure, Abelard was very much in keeping with the intellectual vitality of his day, and he shared its confidence in the powers of man’s God-given reason. Abelard was a faithful son of the Church; modern scholars reject the suggestion that he was a thoroughgoing rationalist of the eighteenth-century variety who would have used reason to try to undermine the faith. His work was always aimed at building up and providing additional support for the great edifice of truth that the Church possessed. He once said that he did not “wish to be a philosopher if it meant rebelling against [the Apostle] Paul, nor an Aristotle if it meant cutting [himself] off from Christ.”26 Heretics, he said, used arguments from reason to assault the faith, and thus it was most fitting and appropriate for the Church’s faithful to make use of reason in defense of the faith.27
Although Abelard raised some eyebrows in his day, his use of reason to reckon with theological issues would be taken up by later Scholastics, culminating in the following century with Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the shorter run, something of Abelard’s influence is evident in the case of Peter Lombard (c. 1100–1160), who may have been his student. Peter Lombard, who served a brief term as archbishop of Paris, wrote the Sentences—which, next to the Bible, became the central textbook for students of theology for the next five centuries. The book is a systematic exposition of the Catholic faith, including discussion of everything from God’s attributes to such topics as sin, grace, the Incarnation, redemption, the virtues, the sacraments, and the Four Last Things (death, judgment, heaven, and hell). Significantly, it sought to combine a reliance on authority with a willingness to employ reason in the explanation of theological points.28
The greatest of the Scholastics, and indeed one of the great intellects of all time, was Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). His towering achievement, the Summa Theologiae, raised and answered thousands of questions in theology and philosophy, ranging from the theology of the sacraments to the justice of war to whether all vices should be criminalized (Saint Thomas said no). He showed that Aristotle, whom he and many of his contemporaries considered the best of secular thought, could be readily harmonized with Church teaching.
The Scholastics discussed a great many issues of significance, but in the cases of Anselm and Aquinas I have chosen to focus on the existence of God, perhaps the classic example of the use of reason in defense of the faith. (The existence of God belonged to that category of knowledge that Saint Thomas believed could be known through reason as well as by divine revelation.) We have already seen Anselm’s argument; Aquinas, for his part, developed five ways for demonstrating God’s existence in his Summa Theologiae, and described them at greater length in the Summa Contra Gentiles. To give the reader some idea of the character and depth of Scholastic argument, we shall consider Aquinas’s approach to this question by looking at what is technically referred to as his argument from efficient causality, borrowing a bit from the argument from contingency and necessity.29
Saint Thomas’s views are best understood if we begin with thought experiments from the secular world. Suppose you want to purchase a pound of turkey at the deli counter. Upon arrival there, you find that you must take a number before you can place your order. Just as you are about to take a number, however, you find that you are required to take a number before you can take a number. And just as you are about to take that number, you find that you must first take yet another number. Thus you must take a number to take a number to take a number to be able to place your order at the deli counter.
Suppose further that the series of numbers you are required to take is infinite. Every single time you are about to take a number, you discover that there exists a prior number you must first take before you can take the next number. You will never get to the deli counter under such conditions. From now until the end of time you will be forever taking numbers.
Now if you were to come across someone in the grocery store walking around with half a pound of roast beef that he had purchased at the deli counter, you would instantly know that the series of numbers must in fact not go on forever. We have seen that with an infinite series of numbers no one could ever reach the deli counter. But the person with the roast beef must somehow have managed to get to the counter. Thus the series cannot be infinite.
Consider another example. Suppose you wish to register for a college course, and you therefore pay a visit to the registrar, Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith tells you that in order to register for that particular course, you must see Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, in turn, instructs you to see Mr. Young. Mr. Young sends you to Mr. Brown. If this series went on infinitely—if there were always another person you had to see before you could register—it is abundantly clear that you would never be able to register for the course.
These examples may appear quite remote from the question of God’s existence, but they are not; Saint Thomas’s proof is in a certain way analogous to them both. He begins with the idea that every effect requires a cause, and that nothing that exists in the physical world is the cause of its own existence. This is known as the principle of sufficient reason. When we encounter a table, for example, we know perfectly well that it did not come into existence spontaneously. It owes its existence to something else: a builder and previously existing raw materials.
An existing thing Z owes its existence to some cause Y. But Y itself, not being self-existing, is also in need of a cause. Y owes its own existence to cause X. But now X must be accounted for. X owes its existence to cause W. We are faced, as with the examples of the deli counter and the college course, with the difficulties posed by an infinite series.
In this case, we are faced with the following problem: Every cause of a given effect itself demands a cause in order to account for its own existence; this cause in turn requires a cause, and so on. If we have an infinite series on our hands, in which each cause itself requires a cause, then nothing could ever have come into existence.
Saint Thomas explains that there must, therefore, be an Uncaused Cause—a cause that is not itself in need of a cause. This first cause can therefore begin the sequence of causes. This first cause, Saint Thomas says, is God. God is the one self-existing being whose existence is part of His very essence. No human being must exist; there was a time before each one came into existence, and the world will continue to exist after each one perishes. Existence is not part of the essence of any human being. But God is different. He cannot not exist. And He depends on nothing prior to Himself in order to account for His existence.
This kind of philosophical rigor characterized the intellectual life of the early universities. Little wonder that the popes and other churchmen ranked the universities among the great jewels of Christian civilization. It was typical to hear the University of Paris described as the “new Athens”30—a designation that calls to mind the ambitions of the great Alcuin from the Carolingian period of several centuries earlier, who sought through his own educational efforts to establish a new Athens in the kingdom of the Franks. Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254) described the universities as “rivers of science which water and make fertile the soil of the universal Church,” and Pope Alexander IV (1254–1261) called them “lanterns shining in the house of God.” And the popes deserved no small share of the credit for the growth and success of the university system. “Thanks to the repeated intervention of the papacy,” writes historian Henri Daniel-Rops, “higher education was enabled to extend its boundaries; the Church, in fact, was the matrix that produced the university, the nest whence it took flight.”31
As a matter of fact, among the most important medieval contributions to modern science was the essentially free inquiry of the university system, where scholars could debate and discuss propositions, and in which the utility of human reason was taken for granted. Contrary to the grossly inaccurate picture of the Middle Ages that passes for common knowledge today, medieval intellectual life made indispensable contributions to Western civilization. “[S]cholars of the later Middle Ages,” concludes David Lindberg in The Beginnings of Western Science (1992), “created a broad intellectual tradition, in the absence of which subsequent progress in natural philosophy [the natural sciences, essentially] would have been inconceivable.”32
Christopher Dawson, one of the great historians of the twentieth century, observed that from the days of the earliest universities “the higher studies were dominated by the technique of logical discussion—the quaestio and the public disputation which so largely determined the form of medieval philosophy even in its greatest representatives. ‘Nothing,’ says Robert of Sorbonne, ‘is known perfectly which has not been masticated by the teeth of disputation,’ and the tendency to submit every question, from the most obvious to the most abstruse, to this process of mastication not only encouraged readiness of wit and exactness of thought but above all developed that spirit of criticism and methodic doubt to which Western culture and science have owed so much.”33
Historian of science Edward Grant concurs with this judgment:
What made it possible for Western civilization to develop science and the social sciences in a way that no other civilization had ever done before? The answer, I am convinced, lies in a pervasive and deep-seated spirit of inquiry that was a natural consequence of the emphasis on reason that began in the Middle Ages. With the exception of revealed truths, reason was enthroned in medieval universities as the ultimate arbiter for most intellectual arguments and controversies. It was quite natural for scholars immersed in a university environment to employ reason to probe into subject areas that had not been explored before, as well as to discuss possibilities that had not previously been seriously entertained.34
The creation of the university, the commitment to reason and rational argument, and the overall spirit of inquiry that characterized medieval intellectual life amounted to “a gift from the Latin Middle Ages to the modern world . . . though it is a gift that may never be acknowledged. Perhaps it will always retain the status it has had for the past four centuries as the best-kept secret of Western civilization.”35 It was a gift of the civilization whose center was the Catholic Church.