The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  There was no privacy in the monastery. Nor was there any oppressive rule of silence. Again moderation was the rule—not silentium but taciturnitas. The vice was not talking but talkativeness, with a ban only on “all small talk and jokes.”

  The Benedictine community, or community of communities, made a model of autonomy and self-regulation. There is no evidence that Benedict himself was ever ordained as a priest. It seems, too, that he never intended to found an “order” aimed at one special kind of work. The only preparation, the Benedictines said, was for Heaven. Unlike the Franciscans and others with a centralized international authority, each Benedictine monastery was independent, electing its own abbot (from Aramaic Abba, “Father”), who stood in Christ’s place and governed the community for life.

  Another distinctive Benedictine contribution to monastic life was stability. Benedict’s Rule begins by distinguishing the kinds of monks. Best were “the Cenobites . . . who live in a monastery waging their war under a rule and an abbot.” The Anchorites by living in a monastery “learn to fight against the devil,” preparing themselves “for the single combat of the hermit.” “The Sarabaites (the worst kind), unschooled by any rule,” lie to the world by their tonsured heads, live together in twos and threes, and whatever they wish they call holy. Finally, there are “the gyratory monks,” who wander about staying in various monasteries three or four days at a time.

  To Benedict’s community, no one was to be admitted lightly—only after a year of probation. Stability meant that once a novice had taken his vows he was committed until death to the house that had accepted his profession. This was wholesome insurance against the tendency, among Egyptian ascetics and others, to make the monastery only a way station toward the life of a hermit. And it gave each monk his own Benedictine family to replace what he had left outside. If members of one monastery were commanded by their abbot to found a new house, their vows of stability were transferred.

  Saint Benedict’s legacy has survived for fifteen hundred years as a norm for the monastic life of Western Christendom. The era from the sixth to the twelfth centuries in Europe was christened “The Benedictine Centuries” by Cardinal Newman. During these years the Benedictines were the chief religious, civilizing, and educating influence in the Western Church. Others have called this the Golden Age of Monasteries. In 817 at the Synod of Aachen, the city that Charlemagne (742-814) had made the capital of Western culture, Benedict’s Rule was adopted as the basic text for all Western monks.

  A tradition of Benedictine mysticism—Benedict’s way of seeking union with God—inspired Western Christendom in the Middle Ages. His most influential disciples were Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), who fought against the rationalist philosophy of Abelard. Thus Benedict had nourished two disparate tendencies—the inward-reaching upward-reaching and the love of learning and the book. In the libraries of the Benedictines the literary treasures of antiquity and of Christianity were preserved throughout the Middle Ages, and Benedict became the patron saint of the manuscript book. The Benedictines spread the belief that “A monastery without a library is like a castle without an armory,” and none were more effective than the Benedictines in preserving and strengthening that armory. The alliance of the monasteries with learning under the patronage of the Frankish, Visigothic, and Anglo-Saxon kings kept Western culture alive through turbulent times.

  Benedictine scholars also left their indelible marks on the vocabulary of Western learning, especially on the study of history. The Venerable Bede (672- 735), sometimes called the first Benedictine scholar, “the pattern of a Benedictine as is St. Thomas of a Dominican” (in Cardinal Newman’s phrase), set a pioneer standard of laborious accuracy in his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People). His method of dating events from the birth of Jesus Christ is said to have come into general use through the popularity of his History and his two works of chronology. A later French Benedictine scholar, Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), wrote De Re Diplomatica (1681), founding the modern science of diplomatics—the critical study of ancient official manuscripts and other formal sources of history.

  Benedict’s Rule also surprisingly provided a physical model for Western communities. The plan for the Benedictine monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, drawn by a German cleric about 820, may be the earliest document of Western urban planning. It displaced the haphazard scheme of Eastern monasteries by a functional plan. Its axial design conveniently met the needs of a self-contained monastic community—including an infirmary, guest house, kitchens, bakehouse, privies, workshops, housing for lay workers, stables for livestock, and a cemetery. This would become a norm for Western monastic architecture and also suggested the grid scheme of later urban planners. Incidentally, too, monastic libraries provided models for modern public and university libraries.

  The tenth-century Burgundian monastery of Cluny founded a centralized movement for return to the Rule of Benedict. The Cistercians, also reformers, founded in 1098 at Citeaux near Dijon, flourished under the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux and had founded 338 Cistercian abbeys by the time of Bernard’s death.

  * * *

  The late Middle Ages saw some paradoxical forms and reforms of the Christian ascetic spirit, of monasteries and the monastic movement. None was more fertile or more contradictory of the tenets of primitive monasticism than knighthood and the orders of chivalry. The Christian knight had found his own way of seeking. Like the desert hermit, he was devoted to fighting the devil—whom he saw in the infidel and the heretic. With his vow of knighthood, the knight took up the Cross. From the Christian canon, then, he adopted humility and obedience, and to the familiar Christian virtues he added valor and largess. Knights were commonly lovers of women or were married men, and the monkish virtue of chastity was astonishingly displaced by the ideal of “courtly love.” In the King Arthur legends, Galahad could have “the strength of ten” because his heart was pure. Sinful knights ended as monks. Yet the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitalers did take the vow of celibacy.

  The transmutation of the monastic, ascetic spirit was revealed in the most famous of the knightly orders, the Knights Templars. These have become known to English readers through the villainous Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. About 1119, eight or nine French knights placed their hands within those of the Patriarch of Jerusalem and vowed to devote themselves to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. The few strongholds in the hands of Crusaders and pilgrims in those days were being harassed by Muslim bands. To the knights who formed a religious community for this purpose the Crusader Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, gave a wing of the royal palace in the area of the former Jewish Temple. From this they were called Templars. They attracted followers with the aid of a Rule of seventy-two chapters that had been inspired and probably mostly written by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. This “Thaumaturgus of the West,” as we shall see, was a bitter opponent of the way of disputation—the dialectical scholasticism of the universities. He abhorred “scandalous curiosity”—the way of Abelard—and favored prayer and the fighting faith of the ill-fated Second Crusade (1147-49).

  Except for the vow of chastity, other monastic vows were part of the knight’s faith. This included the vow of obedience—the denial of self-interest in favor of God’s will expressed by the master of the order. Under Bernard’s Rule, knights had no privacy. They were not to receive letters from parents or friends without the master’s permission, nor were they even allowed locks on their chests. The monastic ideal proved remarkably adaptable to holy warfare. The Knights Templars had adopted a religio militaris, and according to Bernard’s Rule:

  This new genus religionis, as we believe, by divine providence began with you in the Holy Land, a religio in which you mingle chivalry (milicia). Thus the armed religion may advance through chivalry, and smite the enemy without incurring sin. Rightfully then we decree that you shall be called knights of the Temple and may hold houses, land
s and men, and possess serfs and justly rule them.

  Our word is directed primarily to all who despise their own wills, and with purity of mind desire to serve under the supreme and veritable King; and with minds intent choose the noble warfare of obedience, and persevere therein.

  The growth of cities in twelfth-century Europe—the century of the flourishing monastery and the fervent Crusade—provided centers for new communities of education and learning. The universities—new institutions born here—would have some of the stability of the Benedictine monastery and some of the cosmopolitanism of the adventuring Crusaders.

  The quest of spiritual Seekers that began with Saint Anthony’s lonely retreat into the desert had become an outreaching enterprise of institutions and communities. The search for self-perfection and union with God was a venture of inescapable paradox. “A monk is a man who is separated from all, and who is in harmony with all,” the Byzantine historian Evagrios observed. “When the mind raises itself up to heavenly things,” Saint Gregory insisted, “when it fixes its attention on spiritual things, when it tries to pass over all that is outwardly seen . . . it narrows itself that it may be enlarged.” The universities would offer their own enduring compromise.

  14

  The Way of Disputation: Universities

  The Church and the monasteries set the stage for universities. Just as they had known no Church, so the ancients knew no universities. Students of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, however much they learned or were inspired, did not face examinations or receive degrees. Our university, like the Church, is a legacy of the Middle Ages, and few modern institutions have so clear a genealogy. When the contrary seeking traditions of Athens and Jerusalem confronted, confuted, and enriched one another, the product of their reaching was the university.

  The word universitas in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the new institution was taking shape, did not describe the scope of knowledge to be explored. It did describe the people who came together in search. Then universitas was a general name for a corporation, a group that had a legal existence. At the two original European universities, in Paris universitas was the group of masters, while in Bologna it meant the whole body of students. From them the university emerges more plainly into the light of history.

  By the thirteenth century the rise of European cities had led to the forming of guilds. Now scholars would have their own. Attached to the great cathedrals were schools where, before the rise of universities, the body of knowledge consisted of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic or dialectic), and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music). These narrowly defined Seven Liberal Arts (artes liberales) were the disciplines appropriate for training a gentleman, a homo liber. Centuries passed before the universities would go far beyond—with advanced studies of theology, law, and medicine—and become centers of intellectual creativity.

  In 529 the Christian emperor Justinian finally closed the ancient philosophical school of Athens, the last pagan academy. It was in the same year that Saint Benedict founded the monastery of Monte Cassino as a refuge of Christian faith. And in the next centuries “university” came to mean a guild of masters and students, universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque. In Paris the university grew out of the Cathedral School. And the transfer of educational activity from monks to the “secular” clergy (who did not belong to a religious order) opened the way to a new cosmopolitanism. The curriculum was liberated from the Seven Liberal Arts. At the same time the universities themselves grew into a third power besides salvation and government—between Church and Empire. Speaking for “wisdom,” they commanded the interest and favors of popes and princes. Which explained the privileges that shrewd rulers like Frederick Barbarossa, in 1158, and Philip Augustus, in 1200, showered on scholars, freeing them from the secular authorities.

  Paris—the Rome of the university world—revealed this new energy of the world of learning. The first papal recognition of the university there was a bull of Innocent III about 1210, followed by other grants of authority to the guild of masters and students. And the welcoming outreach of the university, in splendid contrast to the inwardness of the new world of monasteries, created a kind of pedagogical United Nations. At Paris the student body and the administration were divided into four “Nations,” according to the places from which the students came: the French, the Normans, the Picards, and the English. In fact the student body came from all over Europe. For this purpose the “Nation” of Picardy included all the Low Countries, while the French embraced all the Latin countries, and with the English were the Germans and others from the north and east of Europe. Students had to be Masters of Arts in order to be members of their “Nation,” headed by a proctor. The university claimed the right to grant licenses for teaching in any part of the world.

  In the early thirteenth century, when the population of Paris was about 150,000, the academic population of the city may have been around 3,500. Students became important to the economic life of the city. The students at Bologna organized against gouging by landlords and food vendors. In the beginning the “universitas” had no buildings, which left disgruntled students free to move (or threaten to move) away in a body. On several occasions they actually migrated, to the despair of local businessmen. These threats gave them power to fix the price of books and lodgings. Masters, like the local businessmen, lived on the fees of students and in fear of their displeasure. The earliest statutes in Bologna aiming to guarantee students their money’s worth forbade professors to be absent without leave, and required that a master who departed the city should give a deposit to ensure his return. It was an age of famous and popular professors, when scholars would cross the continent to study with an Abelard or a Thomas.

  The University of Paris had three faculties—theology, law, and arts—but the Faculty of Arts considered itself the mother of the others. There most of the reading was in Aristotle, with an emphasis that varied with the changing dogmas of the Church. Surprisingly, there were relatively few students in theology, since theological training for the priesthood did not come until the Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century.

  In the thirteenth century the University of Paris was a lively and often turbulent place. Since texts were scarce and costly to rent, a distinctive technique of interactive teaching developed, with lectures and disputations. Lectures (from Latin legere, “to read”) were readings from the prescribed text with commentary by the lecturer and, often, opportunity for questions. The increasingly important disputations became the distinctive feature of the medieval university, and gave a special character to scholastic thought. Founded in Aristotle’s logic, dialectics was a way of subjecting the propositions of Christian belief to rigorous objections in search of satisfying answers.

  For a formal disputation, the master offered a thesis. Objections would then be raised by the master, by students, or by anyone else present. A younger teacher (baccalarius) would uphold the thesis and answer the question. At the next lecture the master would resume the subject, restate the thesis, select the arguments against it, and offer his own decision, while refuting objections. Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, a model of the disputatious technique, was not a set of dogmatic assertions but a series of questions with objections and answers. He began by asking, “Whether, besides the philosophical sciences, any further doctrine is required?” Two well-stated objections are posed against the necessity of “sacred doctrine,” then each is refuted in turn. Then the next question, “Whether Sacred Doctrine is a Science?” More than a hundred questions, each with objections and answers, proceed in rigorous order—from God and the Order of Creation through the whole of Christian doctrine. In addition to disputations held by each master for his students, there were public disputations during the second week of Advent and the third or fourth week of Lent, when anybody could submit a question on any subject. To become a master, a typical career at Paris required six years of study and twenty-one years of age for the liberal arts and eight year
s of study and thirty-four years of age for a master of theology. Scholasticism—the name for the writing and teaching that grew out of this technique of questioning (and answering)—produced a “scholastic philosophy” in the Faculty of Arts and a “scholastic theology” in the Faculty of Theology.

  The lectures—which would begin around six or seven A.M. when the clergy recited the Divine Office and lasted till about nine—were relieved by questions. But the disputations were especially lively. After the master offered the topic to be disputed and opened the discussion, anyone present, in order of seniority, could raise an argument for or against. After the last objection, the master gave his own solution (determinatio) on the morning following. For the quodlibet (from quodlibetum, “whatever you wish”) disputations of the faculty of theology, while the master was free to reject politically dangerous questions, there were no other restrictions and anyone could propose a subject. Thomas Aquinas would be known for specially favoring these “quodlibetal” exercises.

  By contrast with its modern successor, the medieval university was a loosely organized society where control was seized by teachers and students, depending on local opportunities. There were generally no endowments, no officials to fill an “administration” building, nor any board of trustees, nor state control. Flowing in and out, students created a varied and colorful community. The goliardi, or wandering scholars, not always welcomed by the masters, sang their own scurrilous anticlerical songs. On more than one occasion members of the University of Paris appealed to the king to restore order:

  Priests and clerks . . . dance in the choir dressed as women, or disreputable men, or minstrels. They sing wanton songs. They eat black-puddings at the altar itself, while the celebrant is saying Mass. They play at dice on the altar. They cense with stinking smoke from the soles of old shoes. They run and leap throughout the church, without a blush at their own shame. Finally they drive about the town and its theatres on shabby carriages and carts, and rouse the laughter of their fellows and the bystanders in infamous performances, with indecent gestures and with scurrilous and unchaste words.