by Ian Mortimer
The scale of monasticism’s expansion becomes clear if we look at the figures for England and Wales. In 1100, there had been fewer than 148 religious houses, including some 15 nunneries. Over the course of just two decades, 1135–54, the number rose from about 193 to 307: an increase of 6 every year. In 1216, there were about 700 religious houses, with another 60–70 belonging to the Hospitallers and Templars.4 The number of monks, canons and nuns increased to an even greater extent, from about 2,000 to about 12,000. If we were to extrapolate totals for the whole of Europe from these figures, there would have been 8,000–10,000 religious houses in Western Christendom at the end of the twelfth century, and about 200,000 monks, nuns and canons. However, when we take into account that England and Wales were relatively sparsely populated fringes of Christendom at this time, it becomes apparent that the actual numbers of religious men, women and houses in 1200 were much higher.
Why did this happen? What made people give away huge amounts of their wealth to support these new religious houses? To understand their motivation, we need to examine the rise of the doctrine of Purgatory – the Roman Catholic belief that the souls of the dead do not go straight to Heaven or Hell but rather to a spiritual holding bay, where they remain for a while before being sent in one direction or the other. Before this doctrine developed, those lords and ladies who founded monasteries did so in the hope that, as a result of their good works, their souls might ascend straight to Heaven when they died. If they didn’t, they would be spending the rest of eternity in Hell. Around the middle of the twelfth century, however, the question of whether your soul went to Heaven or Hell became more nuanced. At what point exactly was the soul condemned to Hell? Did this occur at the moment of death, or might prayers for the dead still assist the passage to Heaven? Theologians elaborated on the ancient idea of redemption through prayer, and conveniently decided that prayers after death could indeed help the deceased. In the 1150s, Peter Lombard declared that prayer could help both the moderately wicked, by lessening their suffering, and the reasonably good, by aiding their path to Paradise.5 People started to believe that such souls did not go straight to Heaven or Hell. By 1200, an elaborate doctrine of Purgatory had been established, and more and more people donated their wealth to monasteries and chantry chapels, hoping that prayers said for them after death might hasten their passage to eternal bliss.
You might be tempted to think that, as all these new monks and nuns were shut away in cloistered communities, they hardly affected what was going on outside – so how could they mark a major development in the history of the Western world? We need to consider the twelfth century in terms of connectedness, however. Today, in our Web-wondrous world of intercommunication, we believe that our methods of obtaining information and passing on our views are completely different from those of our forebears. Networks of information storage and transfer now exist that previous generations could not even have imagined. Monasticism, however, provided a similar connectedness. It was a layer of Christian interconnectivity – a monastic web – interwoven with the secular world of parish priests, court clerks and political bishops. From Iceland to Portugal, from Poland to Jerusalem, monks, canons and priests were crossing the boundaries of kingdoms, spreading knowledge and taking part in wider debates. Capitalising on the Latin orthodoxy introduced by Pope Gregory VII in the previous century, they did so in a common language that rendered itself internationally useful in the same way that the standard mark-up languages underpin the Internet today.
This Christendom-wide monastic web did not just spread knowledge; it was able to generate it too. Just think of all the roles that a monastery fulfilled. Building work required master masons, carvers and carpenters, so the monastic orders were major patrons of twelfth-century design and architecture, structural engineering and art. Monasteries required monks and canons to be able to read, so they spread literacy; several founded schools for the education of boys (and occasionally girls) outside the cloister, either as part of their good works or in order to raise money. In their libraries they preserved the works of earlier writers and produced new books, thus storing as well as disseminating information. The monastery of Bec in Normandy, for example, had a library of 164 books in the early twelfth century and acquired 113 more as the result of a bequest in 1164. It also opened a school for fee-paying students. In describing it, the chronicler Ordericus wrote that ‘almost every monk of Bec seemed a philosopher, and even the least learned there had something to teach the frothy grammarians’.6 When a monastery formed part of a cathedral establishment, as was common, the monks dealt with correspondence from the royal administration, which facilitated the creation of archives and the writing of chronicles. The monks themselves travelled, carrying news between monasteries across Europe. In their gardens they cultivated medicinal plants, and those monasteries that had an infirmary performed a moderate degree of physic. Some orders circulated their technologies across the continent, spreading the use of the water wheel, the heavy plough and better viticulture, and thus assisting with the exploitation of the newly cleared land.
Not every monastery in Europe had a library full of wonderful texts, of course, and not every monastery had a school. But many had both. ‘A monastery without a library is like a castle without an armoury’ ran a saying at the time.7 Monasteries opened eyes, instructed minds, and encouraged the young who attended their schools to seek further knowledge – not just in their own monastic libraries but also further afield.
The intellectual renaissance
If you were to play a game of word association with a group of medieval historians, the response to the words ‘twelfth century’ would undoubtedly be ‘renaissance’. This does not relate to the Italian Renaissance of the mid-fourteenth to sixteenth centuries but an earlier phenomenon, identified in 1927 by the American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins. He demonstrated that the twelfth century saw an unprecedented revival in scholarship. Two strands are particularly important in our survey: first, the dialectical method, arising from the pioneering thinking of Peter Abelard and the rediscovery of the works of Aristotle; and second, the wealth of translations from the Arabic that allowed the recovery of so much knowledge from the ancient world.
Peter Abelard was the eldest son of a Breton knight who encouraged his sons to learn to read before they could wield a sword. Inspired by the few Aristotelian texts that had survived in a sixth-century translation by Boethius, Abelard advanced quickly in the study of logic. Soon he ‘wielded no other weapon but words’. But this did not make him a pacifist: Abelard’s words were sharper and more dangerous than most men’s swords. He studied under William of Champeaux at the school of St Victor in Paris, but was soon defeating his master in debate. His fame as a scholar quickly spread and by 1115 he was lecturing at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame, where hundreds flocked to hear him speak. He was the academic sensation of the age.
It was then, at the height of his fame, that he fell in love with Héloise, the niece of Fulbert, a fellow canon of the cathedral. He seduced her and she fell pregnant. Fulbert did not take the news well: he had Abelard barbarously castrated. Humiliated, Abelard took refuge in the Abbey of Saint-Denis to the north of Paris. Here, when he was not antagonising his fellow monks, he wrote his first theological work, on the Holy Trinity. Unfortunately, it resulted in him being charged with heresy by a provincial synod at Soissons in 1121. When he was found guilty and forced to burn his book, he decided to become a hermit. He founded an oratory, the Paraclete, and withdrew from the world. But the world did not withdraw from him. Soon students set up tents around the Paraclete. Twenty years after his first condemnation for heresy, when he was in his early sixties, Abelard came up hard against Bernard of Clairvaux, who wanted to stamp on his dangerous teaching. At Abelard’s instigation, in the hope of clearing his name, a debate was arranged at Sens between the two great speakers. But the night before the debate, Bernard privately addressed the bishops who formed part of the council assembled to judge proceedings. After that,
Abelard refused even to speak in his own defence. He was found guilty of heresy again and died the following year, under the protection of the Abbot of Cluny.
The reason why Abelard infuriated so many churchmen was not simply because of his combative nature and his seduction of a canon’s niece. Nor was it because of his application of the logic of Aristotle. It was because of his own advances in logic and dialectic, and because he used these forms of reasoning to investigate matters of faith. At the time, the consensus was that reasoning was fine – unless it was applied to religion. Abelard tackled this prejudice fearlessly. In his book Sic et non (Yes and no), he examined 158 apparent contradictions in the writings of the Church Fathers, looking at each one from two conflicting points of view and drawing out many radical points for debate. For example, his very first principle in Sic et non is that ‘faith is built up by reason, and that it is not’. In considering whether logic supports faith or detracts from it, he directly challenged the Biblical dictum that ‘without faith, there is no understanding’. To us Abelard’s approach seems straightforward: we tend to believe that what we think is reasonable; conversely, we cast aspersions on those who say something is reasonable purely on the strength of their belief. But until Abelard’s time, faith itself was the way to understanding. It was Abelard who laid down the dictum that ‘doubt leads to enquiry and enquiry leads to truth’. And he gave his application of logic to religion a name – ‘theology’.8
Sic et non shows just how fearless Abelard was, how far beyond the brink of orthodoxy he was prepared to push his theology. Using his dialectical technique – looking at a question from two opposing points of view in order to identify and resolve the contradictions between them and thereby to answer the initial question more exactly – he postulated some ideas that, for the time, were simply dangerous. For example, when he put forward the proposition that ‘God can know everything’, he implied that it was possible that God did not know everything. He similarly proposed ‘that all things are possible to God, and that they are not’. Suggesting in the twelfth century that God might not be omnipotent was scandalous. There was even the suggestion in Sic et non ‘that God might be the cause or author of evil things, or not’. Typically, Abelard did not come down decisively on the side of divine infallibility as Bernard of Clairvaux would have done; he left the matter open for people to draw their own conclusions. Indeed, he argued that all views, even those of the revered Church Fathers, were merely opinions, and thus fallible. This was taking rationalism too far for many of his contemporaries, for whom questioning the holy writers was touching on heresy. But Abelard did not stop there. Whereas traditionalists glossed over the problem of whether God was a divisible or indivisible trinity of beings with talk of a mystical union, he poured scorn on them. It was ridiculous to propose that God the Father might be the same being as the Son, he maintained, for how could anything give birth to itself? At a time when most commentators wanted to reconcile opposing views among the Church Fathers who had shaped medieval theology, Abelard was determined to exploit their differences.
When it came to ethics, Abelard advocated similarly dangerous ways of thinking. He argued that intention was all-important in determining culpability. In short, if you committed a wrongdoing accidentally, then you were less guilty than someone who consciously committed that act. Your (minor) guilt lay in your negligence, not in your criminal intention. Indeed, in certain circumstances, intention could be the only factor determining guilt or innocence. If a brother and sister who had been separated at birth and did not know of one another met again later in life, married and had a child, then although they were clearly guilty of incest, they should not be punished for they were completely unwitting of their crime. The trouble was that the principle underlying this point implied that lords, bishops and judges could not punish all crimes in the same way without themselves committing an injustice. Not only did Abelard challenge the moral codes promulgated by the Church indirectly, he did so directly too. For example, he reasoned that the pleasure of sexual intercourse was the same within marriage as it was outside. Therefore, if that pleasure was sinful outside marriage (as the Church taught), then it was sinful inside marriage too, as the act of marrying did not wipe away that sin. But as copulation within marriage was essential for the human race, surely God would not have made its survival dependent on sin? Therefore the sinfulness of extramarital sex was clearly open to question. Even more controversially, he argued that those who had crucified Christ were not sinful because they had had no way of knowing about Christ’s divinity and were only acting in accordance with what they believed was right. You can see why he got into trouble.
Abelard was not the only one seeking new truths. Across southern Europe, scholars were becoming aware that a treasure trove of knowledge from the ancient world had not perished with the Roman Empire, as they had previously believed; but remained locked up in the Arabic libraries of Spain and North Africa. Slowly the Reconquista was retaking territory from the Muslims and winning back access to the literature and knowledge of the distant past. Toledo fell to the Christians in 1085 and Saragossa in 1118. Soon a small army of translators from all over Europe, working in the cities of Spain and southern France, was seeking the truths hidden in Arabic literature – with all the fire of a bunch of grave robbers ransacking treasure-laden tombs. There were Adelard of Bath, Robert of Ketton and Robert of Chester from England; Gerard of Cremona and Plato of Tivoli from Italy; Hermann of Carinthia from Austria and Rudolf of Bruges from the Low Countries; as well as many Spanish Jews who facilitated the work. Encouraged by Raymond, bishop of Toledo, and Michael, bishop of Tarazona, they translated whole libraries of philosophical, astronomical, geographical, medical and mathematical works. As we have already seen, once translated into Latin, these texts could be copied and read by scholars throughout the West. Along with the thought of the ancient world, they also gave Christendom the works of the great Islamic mathematicians. In 1126, Adelard of Bath translated al-Khwarizmi’s Zij al-Sindhind, which introduced Arabic numerals, the decimal point and trigonometry to the West. In 1145, Robert of Chester translated the same author’s Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala, rendering it in Latin as Liber algebrae et almucabola, thereby introducing the term ‘algebra’ and the means of solving quadratic equations. Foremost of all the translators was Gerard of Cremona, who by the time of his death in 1187 had rendered at least 71 ancient texts into Latin. These included Ptolemy’s Almagest, Euclid’s Elements, Theodosius’s Spherics and many philosophical and medical works by Aristotle, Avicenna, Galen and Hippocrates.9
Alongside the Spanish and southern French cities where these translators were hard at work, two other centres made long-lost texts available to European scholars. In Constantinople, many of the ancient works had survived in their original Greek forms. It was there, in 1136, that James of Venice translated the Posterior analytics of Aristotle, the ‘new logic’ – so named in order to distinguish it from the ‘old logic’ that Boethius had translated centuries before. In the Norman kingdom of Sicily, Greek scrolls were found from the days when the Byzantine Empire had controlled the region. Arabic books were found there too, from the time when Sicily had been under Muslim control. To please the intellectual kings of Sicily, Roger II and his son William I, court translators in Palermo produced Latin versions of Plato’s Meno and Phaedo, Aristotle’s Meteorology, various works by Euclid, and Ptolemy’s Optics and Almagest. They also translated Mohammed Ai-Idrisi’s great geographical compendium, which included a world map stretching from Iceland to Asia and North Africa.
Did all these discoveries really mark a change for Christendom as a whole? How did the intellectual advances of the twelfth century affect the proverbial peasant in central France? Not directly, perhaps, and certainly not as much as his ability to clear a few more acres of land and feed a larger family. However, to look for every change having a direct and immediate impact on the whole population would be both unrealistic and simplistic. It would be like asking whether Einstein�
�s Special Theory of Relativity affected contemporary factory workers: it may not have had an impact in 1905, the year it was published, but it certainly shook the world in 1945, when its explosive implications brought the Second World War to an end. In the case of the intellectual renaissance of the twelfth century, Aristotle’s new logic slowly filtered through to affect the whole of society. It led to a new approach to knowledge. It taught people who had hitherto compiled larger and larger encyclopedias that knowledge was not just a matter of accumulating more and more facts: the quality of those facts was equally important. Writers like John of Salisbury, who attended Abelard’s lectures in 1136 and eventually became bishop of Chartres, was just one of many intellectuals of the age profoundly affected by the new reasoning. To paraphrase one of his most famous observations: it did not matter which three pilgrimage sites claimed to have the relic of the head of John the Baptist; the important thing was which church possessed the true head. You only have to remember that the figures we use for numbers today are Arabic to realise how much we owe to Muslim mathematicians whose works were translated in the twelfth century. Have you ever tried multiplying figures or dividing fractions in Roman numerals? Have you ever considered how you might multiply the number π (3.1415926536 . . .) using Roman numerals? Even more significantly, prior to the translation of treatises from the Arabic, there was no concept of zero. But zero is an enormous round hole out of which tumbles an endless amount of later mathematical thinking. The quest for new knowledge might have gone way over the head of the peasant in the field and only slowly seeped through to the man in the street, but without it the future of Europe would have been very different.
