The meaning of the word universitas
The half-ecclesiastical half-secular character of the University
Internal organisation according to nations and faculties
In the last lecture we witnessed the earliest manifestations of the University of Paris. Far from its being possible, as has been attempted by certain historians, to attribute these to the personal influence of a few men of genius, we saw that it was the result of more general factors, the combination of a process of evolution which continued so long without interruption that it is not possible to say at precisely what moment the University appeared, or to establish the date on which it began its existence. Once schools had been founded beyond the limits of the cathedral, a variety of different factors combined to bring about a federation of the teachers who were teaching there to organise them into an ever more effective association with one another. At what point was a degree of cohesion and unification reached, such that one can legitimately see there something resembling what was subsequently to be called a university ? This question has no clear-cut answer. It was not until 1210 that the society of teachers produced written statutes and regulations, but they quite certainly had statutes which, albeit uncodified, were sanctioned by custom; they had traditions if not a precise system of rules and regulations. Indeed, we know that round about 1170 or 1180, John de Cella, who subsequently became the Abbot of Saint-Albert, being at the time in Paris was received into the society of Parisian teachers (ad elec-torum consortium magistrorum meruit attingere). On the other hand a writer of the period, John of Salisbury, who was in France until 1149, makes not a single allusion to any grouping of this sort. We must conclude therefore it was between the period of 1150 to 1180 (that is to say, towards the end of the twelfth century) that this association began to make a sufficiently well-defined shape and to exert a sufficiently palpable influence for observers to have noted its existence.
The University began by being nothing more than a corporation of different teachers. Today we are accustomed to thinking of a university as an academic establishment which is clearly definable and specifically located, like a single school, and where different teachers teach the sum total of human knowledge. But there would have been no question in the Middle Ages of having the kind of establishment or group of common establishments which for us serves as the outward symbol, the physical manifestation of the University. There was no special building devoted to the common purposes of the University, whether academic or otherwise. The meetings took place in churches or in convents in which the teaching body enjoyed no rights and which, in any case, were not fixed once and for all but were chosen according to circumstances. It is only around the beginning of the fourteenth century that the situation begins to change. At this period we see the national groupings which made up the University beginning to hire schools collectively, and it is not until the fifteenth century that the faculties establish themselves as independent entities. Even at this period we know of no property which was common to the whole university. Even the Pré-aux-Clercs, which was situated on the present site of the rue de l’université, belonged solely to the faculty of arts. The University of the Middle Ages was thus more or less completely bereft of patrimony. It had no roots in the ground. It was constituted exclusively by a group of people who held no property in common. This poverty gave the universities their moral strength and helped considerably in their development. Whenever the University of Paris found itself in conflict with either the ecclesiastical or the secular authority, the best weapon at its disposal in order to get the better of its adversaries was the strike. It suspended all lectures and moved somewhere else or else it dispersed. Several times it had recourse to this ultima ratio, which consequently never lost its power to inspire fear. In 1259, for example, not wishing to submit itself to a papal decree, it declared itself dissolved. It was able to take such extreme measures with relatively little difficulty because it did not own anything; it was simply a group of people who could disperse as easily as they had come together and as soon as they felt the need to do so. The teachers could easily liquidate and share out the meagre amount of common property which they did possess and go off to teach wherever they could find a locale which was suitable for use as a school. There was nothing to keep them in Paris. They were leaving behind them no material goods on which either the royal taxcollectors or the Church could get their hands. There are some circumstances in which poverty provides groups with power; it gives them mobility and increases their capacity to resist.
Just as we must abandon all idea of the universitas as a collective academic establishment, so we must beware of taking this word to imply that the teaching given by the associated teachers was necessarily encyclopaedic, embracing the. totality of all the branches of human learning. In fact this term was borrowed from legal language and means no more than an association which has a certain unity, which is in fact a corporation. It is synonymous with societas and consortium, these different expressions are often used interchangeably. The same was originally true of the word collegium, although subsequently it came to be used to refer more specifically to a particular institution within the university whose formation we shall shortly be investigating. Nor is it only with reference to teachers that this word universitas means corporation; we find it used no less to refer to the industrial corporations and even to any grouping possessed of a certain degree of consistency and moral unity, such as the whole formed by the totality of Christians. Of its own this term had no academic or educational associations. For a long time when this special reference was intended it was necessary to specify it by the use of other expressions. Thus one said universitas magistrorum et scolarum or even universitas studii; the word stadium was indeed the one which was most frequently used to refer to the educational life developing within the bosom of the corporation.
The universitas could still less refer to the universality of knowledge, the sum total of human learning, when it was frequently used to refer merely to a fraction of what was more properly described as the university. The same word applied both to the whole and to its parts. Thus, as we shall shortly see, the group of teachers who taught the liberal arts very soon formed within the totality of the corporation a special corporation, that of the arts teachers; this group was often referred to by the word universitas. One spoke of the university of the arts teachers (universitas artistorum). There were indeed very few universities to which the word universitas could have been applied even if it really did imply encyclopaedic teaching. More than one university limited itself to the teaching of a single subject: at Montpellier only medicine was taught; at Bologna, for a long time, only law was taught. Even in Paris, the mother of the other universities, at least for a long time, civil law was not taught at all. I could go on. Whereas for us the idea of the university implies above all the idea of a group of lecturers engaged in the same pedagogic task, there were in the Middle Ages universities which had no teachers at all, universities which consisted exclusively of students. This was the case at Bologna, for example: in Bologna only law was taught; the law students were men of middle age, frequently clerics who were already furnished with livings. Such students were not prepared to be dictated to. They therefore formed a corporation, a universitas, distinct from and independent of the college of the teachers; and it was their corporation which because of its powerful organisation made the rules and imposed its will on the teachers, who were obliged to do whatever their pupils wanted. However strange this type of academic organisation may seem to us, it existed in more than one instance.
Thus the University of Paris began by being a grouping of individuals and not a grouping of teaching subjects. It expressed at first the solidarity of the teachers far more than the solidarity of the subjects they taught; the latter was only eventually a spin-off from the former. It was the association of people which was to lead to the association of studies. The teachers were forced to come together and to unite ultimately as a result of chance factors (the particular circumstances of the society of the time, which made corporative life a necessity), particularly in the face of the need to defend themselves against the chancellor of Notre-Dame. This being so, one cannot but wonder whether this academic institution which exerted such a powerful influence on the Middle Ages and on all subsequent ages, was not itself the result of transitory and parochial factors which were in no way logically connected with the effect which they produced. This concentration of branches of learning and as far as possible of all the branches of human learning, which is what constitutes the truly valuable function of universities both in the past and in the present, seems to have been an unexpected, unforeseen and somewhat tardy reaction to historical accidents, particular contingent events which coincided in a single place at a specific time. It is unquestionable that this interpretation of the facts contains some part of the truth. As against this, when one realises that the University was not the institution of a particular time or a particular country but that it has perpetuated itself right down to our own day and that the organisation which characterises it spread throughout Europe adapting itself to very different social environments (for it is well known that the Universities of Paris and Bologna, but particularly the former, provided the two prototypes upon which all the others modelled themselves with a faithfulness and a respect which are truly extraordinary) — when one remembers all that it seems impossible that it was all really caused by mere accidents, so to speak, in the history of our nation and its capital.
The grouping of people, the grouping of the teachers is certainly the primary fact; this is what led on to the idea of grouping together and concentrating the subject-matters which were taught and learned. On the other hand, however, the idea would never have enjoyed such good fortune, it would never have become so rapidly generalised nor sustained itself with such consistency if it had not already been in the air, if it had not responded to the aspirations of the Middle Ages and of subsequent ages. And indeed, have we not already found this idea at the basis of all the educational systems of which we have had occasion to speak? Have we not in fact, established that, more or less consciously, it was inherent in the very notion of educative teaching which appears with Christianity and from which everything that followed was but a development ? It is the idea that teaching must not be diffuse if it is to produce an educative effect; that all the branches of learning which are being taught ought to be narrowly grouped together with a single goal in view and informed by the one and the same spirit. It is precisely the same idea with which we are here dealing, albeit in a magnified form and one which has been developing over a considerably more extensive area than in the past. We are no longer dealing exclusively with a number of teachers whose association is contingent upon the fact that they are engaged in a common pedagogical enterprise, as was the case with the cathedral schools; rather, we are dealing with hundreds of teachers, making a concerted and communal attempt to organise an educational system designed to meet the needs of thousands of students. Of course, this idea would never have blossomed so dramatically if a variety of factors had not combined to bring together in a particular part of Europe a host of teachers, who were encouraged by circumstances to form themselves into groups. But on the other hand the mere existence of this association would not have sufficed on its own to generate the idea of an academic organism, as extensive as it was complex, if it had not already existed to some extent in the minds of men in a less ambitious form, but in one which was ready to expand extensively as soon as circumstances provoked it into doing so.
In some cases we can see this idea gaining ground despite the fact that circumstances at the time were not encouraging. We have shown how in the earliest conception of the universitas the need for an encyclopaedic curriculum was not necessarily implicit, and that the majority of the earliest universities were not characterised by this feature. But it is no less certain that they had a natural and spontaneous tendency to acquire this feature. If they indeed found themselves to include only one branch of learning they instinctively strove to become more comprehensive. This is recognised by one of the historians whose contribution has been greatest in showing the restricted meaning of the word universitas. ‘The theory [of De Savigny],’ he says, ‘ that the principal business of a university during the Middle Ages was not to embrace the totality of human learning, can lead to error. Although one cannot regard this encyclopaedic character as being of the essence of the university, nevertheless it was seen as a thoroughly desirable goal.’ As early as 1224 Frederic the Second wanted there to be in the studium generale which he founded in Naples representatives from all the domains of human knowledge (doctores et magistri in qualibet facultate), and in the decrees and in the papal bulls which founded the universities we invariably come across the same phrase stating that the privileges thereby granted must apply in quavis licet facilitate. The university was not imprisoned within well-defined limits; on the contrary it was encouraged to look beyond the farthest horizon. Thus was there a profound feeling from this time onwards that the university would never fulfil its true destiny, would never achieve its true identity except in so far as it comprised a plurality or even the totality of the branches of human learning. It was no more than an ideal which was rarely realised, but towards which the university strove and was expected to strive. This is what we must not overlook if we wish to understand accurately the formation and development of the university. Over and above the external factors which brought it into existence and however these contingent factors affected it, as they certainly did with respect to the organisation of the university, there was still an internal phenomenon without which they would have remained more or less sterile from an educational point of view. It is a sui generis view of education and teaching which is characteristic of Christian societies, a view which antedates the function which was performed by the corporation of teachers but which found there the means of realising itself in the most vigorous manner conceivable.
Having explained the factors which determined the formation of the universities, we must now try to get a closer look at what precisely the university corporation consisted in.
We have to begin with a question which has been passionately disputed and which we cannot pass over in silence; for, depending on the answer which one gives to it, one takes a quite different view of the university itself. Was the university a secular or an ecclesiastical body ? This problem was much debated in the seventeenth century by lawyers because it touched on matters of law; but it is also of moral and historical significance.
The very way in which the University of Paris came into being scarcely supports the idea that it could have been a genuinely ecclesiastical body. Indeed it came into being outside the ambit of religion; it only became a possibility once schools had been established outside the cathedral precincts. From its beginning it found in the clergy, both secular and monastic, two implacable adversaries. First of all, there was the great struggle against the chancellor, which was, at least, finally crowned with success. It was somewhat later, around 1250, that another struggle took place which lasted less long, but whose outcome was less fortunate. This was waged against two monastic orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, who were surreptitiously seeking to monopolise theology teaching while claiming the right of immunity to the rules and customs of the University. The Papacy showed greater indulgence towards these two powerful orders than it had shown towards the authority of the bishop; it sided with the brothers, and the University had to give way on several points. The University retained, as a result of this struggle, not only an attitude of hostility towards the monastic clergy which had in any case existed before, but also a certain attitude of mistrust with respect to its former ally the Holy See, which had in this case gone over to the enemy. It is to this moment in time that we can trace back to its source the gallicanism which was always the mark of University theology. Not only was the cast of mind of the University not essentially clerical, but in addition it included a more or less substantial number — precise figures are difficult to establish — of laymen. Laymen were allowed to teach all the subjects except theology, and theology played a very small part in the totality of the university. At one time there were only eight teachers of theology. Nor is this all: there was at least one branch of learning from which all priests were excluded, whether secular or monastic; and two others (one of which was the most important in the whole University) from which the monastic clergy was excluded: these were law and the liberal arts. The teachers when they took their oath were obliged to swear that they would not admit any religious to any examination whatsoever (Nullum religiosum cujuscumque fuerit prqfessionis recipietis in aliqua examinatione). On the other hand, although the University was in opposition to the Church, it had nevertheless emerged from it. It was ultimately due to a sort of exodus which had begun in the cloister of Notre Dame. Although it established itself outside the cathedral it nevertheless remained for a long time in its shadow; it was only at a fairly late date that it was bold enough to leave the site, to cross the bridges and to set itself up on the Left Bank of the Seine. It was therefore impossible that it should not remain profoundly imbued with the spirit which until that time had dominated academia exclusively. Even the struggle against the Canon of Notre-Dame, although it resulted in liberating the teachers from their most immediate religious bondage, from another point of view rendered them dependent on the Holy See. For by invoking the authority of the Papacy they implicitly gave it recognition; by the very fact of having relied on papal power to protect them they became subordinated to it. Of course, the power upon which they found themselves dependent in this way was much more remote, the subordination was less restrictive and gave them a greater degree of freedom; nevertheless they had become an institution of the universal Church no less than the monastic orders, albeit for different reasons and in a different way. The teachers no less than the students had a vested interest in not completely breaking the bonds which united them to the Church; for the Church and all those who were a part of it, in whatever capacity, enjoyed certain important privileges. Whoever belonged to the Church, provided it was in the capacity of a servant, regardless of whether he was in Holy Orders or not, was immune from secular justice, and could only be tried by ecclesiastical tribunals. It is not difficult to imagine how reluctant the emergent corporation would have been to give up such valuable immunities.
This explains the eagerness with which the corporation of teachers sought to retain something from the ecclesiastical situation. Hence the use of academic dress and of the tonsure, tonsura clericalis, which, however, in no wise implied that those who wore it had been ordained to the minor orders. Hence above all the obligatoriness of celibacy, which was at first absolute and universal within the University and which remained in force until the middle of the fifteenth century; and even then it was only waived in the case of members of the faculty of medicine. This was because the lay servants or employees of the Church could only continue to enjoy ecclesiastical immunities on condition that they remained unmarried.
What was the outcome of all these conflicting phenomena? This question is not susceptible of a simple one-word answer. The University was neither an exclusively secular body, nor was it an exclusively ecclesiastical one. It had characteristics of both at one and the same time. It was made up of laymen who had to some extent retained the appearance of clerics, and of clerics who had become secularised. Henceforth the body of the Church was con-fronted with a different body, but one which had shaped itself partially in its own image, and to which it was in opposition. This also explains the diversity of the accounts which have been given of the University and which, although they contradict one another, are all equally true and equally false. This complexity in the organic constitution of the University is a magnificent expression of the system of ideas which was its soul. Indeed, we ought already to have caught a glimpse of what we shall see more clearly in what follows: that the University was the institution in which that particular philosophy flourished which has been called scholastic philosophy. What is characteristic of scholastic philosophy is the mutual interpenetration of reason and faith within a single system of ideas which renders them inseparable from one another. I used the word ‘interpenetration’, for it is this which enables us to distinguish very clearly between scholastic philosophy and the philosophy of the seventeenth century, which also undertook to bring together reason and faith, but in quite a different way. For the seventeenth century religion didn’t exclude philosophy but was clearly distinct from it. Reason did not contradict faith, but the domain of the one was totally independent of the domain of the other. The former was a continuation of the latter, but there was no possibility of confusing them. For the philosophy which dominated the mediaeval university, for Scholastic philosophy by contrast, these two were but a single unity. It was not a question of juxtaposing reason and doctrine but rather of introducing reason into doctrine, of rendering faith rational. It is this inextricable mixture which reflects so accurately the parallel mixture of the secular and the ecclesiastical which we have found to be a mark of the external organisation of the University.
We must beware of seeing this mixed, and indeed one might say contradictory, state of affairs in the early University as a sign of inferiority. In time the character of the University was to become much more specific; of the two elements which went to make up the form which it took in the beginning, only one was to survive. From the sixteenth century onwards and above all in the seventeenth century it was to be considered as a purely secular body. One may well ask, however, whether by becoming a specifically lay institution, the University was not in fact impoverished; for this greater degree of specificity was only obtained at the cost of a lamentable restriction in the University’s field of operations. If the University became purely secular it was because spiritual matters had been wholly removed from the province of its concern and taken over exclusively by the Church. Secular studies were liberated ; but they became alienated from all the questions which were raised by religion and they took no interest in them. We shall have to investigate how this dissociation came about, which was a prelude to the thoroughly mediocre kind of eclecticism, whereby the seventeenth century, as I was saying a moment ago, thought that it could reconcile reason and faith simply by keeping them at a distance from one another, by establishing bulkheads between them which were intended to prevent any sort of communication between these two worlds. How much more interesting was the age which we are at present studying, when no one was yet trying to separate these two inseparable aspects of human life, when no one had yet attempted to channel and to build a dam between these two great intellectual and moral streams as if it were possible to prevent them from running into one another! How much more vital was this general, tumultuous melee of beliefs and feelings of every kind than the state of calm, which was artificial and only apparent, which was characteristic of succeeding centuries! In order to understand what constituted the University it is not enough to consider it in this way at a glance and as a whole, in such a way as to pick out only the most general features. It was a complex body made up of separate parts which were harmonised within a single organism. We must therefore seek out these parts and examine their nature and relationship with one another. In the course of such an analysis we shall encounter that part of the body of the University which is of most particular interest to us: I refer to that part which corresponds to secondary education. The University, as it appears to the observer at a period when it is an indubitably established institution, has a double organisational structure. On the one hand, students and teachers formed four distinct groups, enjoying a certain degree of autonomy depending upon the nature of their studies: these were the four faculties of theology, law, medicine and the liberal arts. Running concurrently with this division of the University population there was another which had a totally different basis. Teachers and students were grouped according to their nationality, according to their ethnic and linguistic affinities. They were known as the four nations whose names were ‘ the French’; by this was meant the inhabitants of the Ile de France and neighbouring provinces, the Picardians, the Normans and the English. Each one of these titles included a host of nationalities: amongst the French were numbered all those from countries where Romance languages were spoken; amongst the English were numbered all those from Germanic countries, so much so that towards the middle of the fifteenth century the word ‘Germanie’ had replaced that of ‘ Angleterre’; to Picardy were attached the peoples of the Low Countries. In the course of time each of these great divisions became subdivided into particular provinces, or, as was also said, into tribes; but there is no point in our entering into the details of the subdivisions, which hold no interest for us. What it is important for us to take note of is the fact that these two types of organisation did not completely overlap: the first, into faculties, covered the whole of the University; the second, into nations, applied only to the faculty of arts and thus excluded from its ranks the theological, the legal and the medical faculties.
For a long time it was thought that these two organisations corresponded to succeeding phases in the history of the University. Originally the faculty of arts was supposed to have existed on its own; that is to say, the ‘maitresès arts’ were supposed to have been alone in forming themselves into a corporate group. It was said that they stood to suffer more than the others from the supremacy of the chancellor; they thus had a greater interest in uniting in order to resist. For another thing, they were very numerous; they formed by far the greater part of the teaching personnel; they were thus best equipped to organise resistance. On this view their corporation was the first to be established; but at the same time and as a result of its very vastness it was rapidly subdivided into groups according to the nationality of its members. Then, at a later date, the members of the other faculties (the teachers of the other subjects) are supposed to have followed the example which had been set them. They too formed associations and corporations (in law, in medicine, and in theology), which once they had become established entered into federation with the initial corporation of arts teachers. Thus the University as a whole allegedly resulted not from a massive concentration of people, which enveloped in one and the same system all the elements of the education which was given inside the ile, all the specialisms which were taught there; but rather from the federation of distinct corporations which had been previously established.
Denifle has proved beyond doubt that this view of the matter is contradicted by the facts. First of all, it is quite certain that the faculties did not become established separately, only to federate later on. The word facultas, with the meaning of an academic group devoted towards the teaching of a particular subject-matter, does not appear before the thirteenth century; up till then facultas was simply a synonym for scientia and referred to any particular branch of learning. By contrast the consortium magistrorum (the corporation of teachers) dates from the second half of the twelfth century. On the occasions when this corporation is spoken of in its earliest days it is presented as a society of individuals and not as a federation of particular and distinct groups. What existed first was a vast society which included the entire teaching body, regardless of specialism. Then gradually, within the bosom of this association, more restrictive groups were formed on the basis of affinities resulting from a community of interest in particular studies. It is clear that theologians had ideas and interests which were different from those of the arts teachers or the lawyers. In the course of time these restricted groups increased in stability and acquired ever greater autonomy within the group as a whole; this is how the faculties were formed. They do not constitute a primary phenomenon, they result from a process of differentiation which took place within the primary community of teachers of every sort. Consequently there is no justification for making the faculty of arts the central nucleus around which the other faculties are supposed to have successively gathered. There was never a moment when the faculty of arts was the University itself; and this has the further corollary that the organisation into nations did not antedate the organisation into faculties. We know today that the division of the arts teachers into four nations only took place between the years 1219 and 1221, that is to say at a time when the University had already existed for more than half a century.
How then are we to explain this double organisation ? Why this double structuring of the system ? Are we to say that it was natural for the pupils and teachers in the faculty of arts, while remaining united in one and the same corporation by reason of the community of their studies, nevertheless to divide into distinct groups according to their nationality ? In that case why did the same subdivisions not also take place in the other faculties ? Why should the arts teachers be special from this point of view ? After all, the same national affinities were just as strong amongst members of the faculties of law, medicine and theology. In addition, the faculty of arts and the body which was composed of the four nations, at least at the beginning, constituted two quite separate organisms, even though both were formed from the same ingredients. They were like two different personalities. Denifle cites a very revealing example of this duality: the faculty of arts had no seal of its own, whereas each of the nations had theirs. On one occasion when it was obliged to seal an act which it had drawn up independently of the rest of the University, it used the seals of the four nations; but only with their consent, consensu earum. To say that the faculty was obliged to ask for the seals from the four nations clearly involves a recognition that the two groups were not identical. They must each have had a separate function. This is what the difference consisted in: the faculty had established itself with a view to running strictly academic affairs, organising teaching and defending itself from the encroachments of Notre-Dame; but non-academic life was beyond its province. However, apart from his studies, a scholar’s life needed a structure in which he could be sustained and watched over; he had to find a suitable lodging, he had to avoid being exploited. He had to be protected against all the risks of life in Paris. It was this need which was met by organising students into nations. So we can explain why it was peculiar to the faculty of arts. It was because this included, as we can see, some very young students, mere children who could not possibly be abandoned to themselves. The organisation of the nations bears witness, together with emergence of the University, to the fact that pupils were recruited from a considerably more extensive geographical area. As long as they had been grouped around the cathedral schools they lived for the most part in the vicinity; those who came from afar were certainly rare and constituted no difficulty. Now they were legion. They were to be numbered in hundreds. That is why they had to be organised into the nations: a novel solution and one which we shall see was only provisional.