Hans Peter Broedel

The Church reform of the high middle ages was a movement of the highest significance to European culture and society.  From its beginnings as an effort to free monasteries from secular interference, the movement eventually led to a major restructuring of the relations between the institutional Church and the laity, the general population.  The effects of reform and its underpinning ideology can be seen in the growth of papal power, the rise of new religious orders, increasing concern with heresy, and the crusades.  For us, here, however, of particular importance was a newfound emphasis upon clerical education and a corresponding search for intellectually satisfying and rational bases for Christian doctrine.  Without these parallel developments within the Church, the achievements of early modern science would probably have been impossible.

Some modicum of education had always been required of Christian clergy, of course, and through the early middle ages monasteries and cathedral schools had preserved the basics of the classical Roman curriculum.  This consisted of a sequence of two courses of study. The first, the trivium, was based around language, and included the study of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The second, the quadrivium, focused on mathematics – arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.1  Together, these comprise the liberal arts, which the Romans thought all free men (liberi) should master.  With the reform movement, however, educational requirements became more uniform and more exacting.  Even parish priests were now expected to read and speak competent Latin and to compose sermons regularly.  Priests in large urban churches also had to have some understanding of biblical exegesis to ensure that their sermons were properly orthodox and to counter a rising tide of heresy.  To meet these needs, as well as to supply a growing demand for academically trained professionals in government, business, and urban society, new forms of schools arose, and, of these. by far the most important was the studium generale, the university.2

Curiously, the very first European university was an exception, for it was founded in Bologna by laymen who wanted to study Roman law.  Bologna was unusual in this as well: the students ran the school.  This makes perfect sense because they were the ones paying tuition: in order to safeguard their investment, they formed a kind of corporation, a students’ guild, which hired faculty, set the curriculum, and ensured that academic standards were maintained.3  Faculty who were late to class or droned on too long could be fined or fired.4  Thankfully for generations of professors, though, everywhere else it was a different story, and the faculty, with support from the Church and local governments, ran the show.  In all cases, however, medieval universities took the form of guilds, collective associations of teachers and students who banded together to protect their rights and privileges, set standards, and resist unwelcome interference.  Thus European universities were from the outset exceptional in that they were largely autonomous but united by a common language (Latin) and a common intellectual heritage.  Their curricula, too, was uniform.  Everywhere students began with the study of the Arts—the trivium and quadrivium—before moving on to more advanced subjects such as medicine, law, and theology.  After sufficient study, a student who had already become a Master of Arts, might achieve his doctorate, his licentia ubique docendi (his license to teach anywhere) and join the faculty at some other institution.  The universal acceptance of this credential meant that new ideas travelled quickly between schools, while promoting a uniform academic culture.5

The big, new ideas of high medieval academia were Aristotle’s.  The Romans seem never to have bothered to translate his work into Latin, for the simple reason that if a Roman were to be interested, he would certainly already know Greek.6  For this reason, Aristotle remained almost completely unknown to medieval European scholars until Latin translations from Arabic versions of his texts began to filter across the border from Spain in the twelfth century. 7 Aristotle’s thought transformed the medieval intellectual world.  His was a comprehensive philosophical system of enormous persuasive and explanatory power: through a combination of logic, empiricism, and basic principles, his system was capable of explaining almost anything.  Even better, because Aristotle explained the workings of the cosmos without reference to supernatural power (“philosophical naturalism”), his thought, for the most part, did not contradict Church teachings.  There were a few exceptions—Aristotle denied the immortality of the soul, for example—but since, as a pagan, he was not expected to be an authority in theological matters, these errors could be ignored.  Indeed, it did not take long for Christian scholars to realize that Aristotle’s philosophy could provide insight into all aspects of the natural world, even those that impinged upon religion.

For Aristotle, the goal of philosophy was explanation, which meant that natural philosophy entailed the search for the causes of natural phenomena.  Aristotle believed that inherent purpose determined the essential characteristics of all natural things.  For this reason, his philosophy is often called “teleological,” or purpose oriented, from Greek telos, meaning “end,” or “purpose.”  For example, Aristotle would argue that cats have claws because they are predators, and need to be able to catch and grasp their prey—that’s what claws are for.  Determining a phenomenon’s cause, however, could often be much more complicated and require careful observation, rigorous logic, and the appropriate application of the principles that provided the essential framework from which the Aristotelian universe depended.  This Aristotelian cosmos was composed of matter; indeed, it was filled to the brim with it; it was a plenum (a spaced filled with matter, as opposed to a vacuum) in which true emptiness was impossible.  All things were composed of varying proportions of the four basic material substances: earth, air, water, and fire. (As this arrangement makes perfectly clear, Aristotle knew that the earth was a globe, as did most everyone else in the ancient world, and medieval scholars knew this too; so let’s put to rest the old fib that prior to Columbus everyone thought the world was flat.)

Within the cosmos, these were arranged hierarchically, with earthy matter in the very center, surrounded by a watery sphere, then a sphere of air, and finally one of fire.  All matter sought to find its appropriate sphere, which is why fire always goes upward, but stones fall downward.  If something floats on water, it means simply that its substance contains more aerial and fiery matter than earth.  Beyond the sphere of fire were the celestial spheres of the seven planets—the  Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—and beyond them was the sphere of the fixed stars.  These celestial spheres were basically unknowable to humans, and so their composition and the physical laws that determined their motion were subjects for speculation, but not for science.8

For medieval scholars, this way of understanding the physical universe was the key to solving a famous riddle: it was then a doctrine of the Church, as it remains for modern Catholics, that during the Mass, the Host, which is the consecrated bread, is miraculously transformed into the literal body of Christ prior to being consumed by the faithful.  But if this is true, a cynic might ask, why does the bread still look and taste just like bread?

Aristotle’s matter theory provided the answer: the substance of the bread was transformed into the very substance of Christ, while its accidents, its externals, remained those of bread.  After a certain amount of debate, this process, called “transubstantiation,” was accepted as the necessary way to understand the Eucharist or communion.9  This was just one of the ways—although perhaps the most important—that Aristotelian philosophy was turned to the service of the medieval Church.  Similarly, theologians used Aristotle’s rules of logical deduction and physical science to prove the existence of God, to explain the divine paradox of the trinity, and to provide a rational explanation of how Christ could be both wholly human and at the same time completely divine .

In this way, Aristotelian natural philosophy became an essential bulwark of Church doctrine in addition to offering a comprehensive philosophical framework through which to understand the natural world.  Little wonder, then, that Aristotle became an integral part of the new universities’ arts curriculum, despite the fact that many within the Church remained suspicious of the Philosopher’s skepticism and pagan background.  The problem was how to make Aristotle compatible with medieval Christianity without fatally damaging the intricately interwoven strands of his thought.  This became the essential project of medieval academia, which we commonly refer to as “scholasticism”: an attempt to explicate a thoroughly rational Christianity and an acceptably Christian Aristotle, and join the two together.10  This was the all-consuming project and crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), the greatest medieval theologian and philosopher, whose masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae, created just the necessary “amalgam” to reconcile Aristotelian natural philosophy with the truth of divine revelation, using metaphysics as the necessary bridge between the two.11