The Schools Become Universities

Peter Abelard says that as a young man he went wherever he heard that the study of logic flourished (Abelard, History of My Calamities 1). He came to Paris because the art of dialectic flourished there above all, studied under William of Champeaux, quarrelled with him, and set up his own school on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève outside the city (Abelard, History of My Calamities 2). His students, he writes, wanted reasons they could understand and not mere words. The tract on the Trinity that he wrote for them was condemned at a council at Soissons and burned (Abelard, History of My Calamities 9–10).

In Sic et Non Abelard collected sayings of the Fathers that seem to contradict one another, and in the prologue gave rules for dealing with them: words are used in different senses, copies are faulty, authors change their minds, and where a conflict remains the weightier authority is to be preferred. Scripture alone he placed beyond error. The purpose, he says, is to provoke readers to seek the truth (Abelard, Sic et Non prologue). In J. H. Robinson’s abridged rendering of 1904: “By doubting we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth” (Abelard, Sic et Non prologue (Robinson’s abridgement)).

Two other books gather authorities in a similar way, one for law and one for theology. The collection of church law that goes under the name of Gratian (canonist) is titled A Harmony of Discordant Canons and begins by distinguishing natural law from custom (Gratian, Decretum title) (Gratian, Decretum D. 1, opening). Peter Lombard says that he gathered the opinions of the Fathers into one short volume in four books so that the student need not search through many (Peter Lombard, Sentences prologue). His fourth book defines a sacrament as a sign of grace that also causes what it signifies, and lists seven: baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, penance, extreme unction, orders and marriage (Peter Lombard, Sentences 4.1.2–4) (Peter Lombard, Sentences 4.2.1).

Rulers meanwhile gave scholars a legal standing of their own. In 1158 the emperor Frederick I took under his protection all who travel for the sake of study and allowed them, if sued, to be judged by their own teachers or by the bishop (Frederick I, Authentica Habita Munro, pp. 2–4). Its translator notes that the law is generally said to have been made for Bologna, though it names no city (Frederick I, Authentica Habita Munro’s introductory note, p. 2). In 1200, after five people had been killed in Paris, King Philip II ordered that a student arrested by his officers be handed to the church’s judge (Philip II, privilege for the scholars of Paris (1200) Munro, pp. 4–7). In 1215 the papal legate Robert of Courçon fixed the age and years of study required of masters of arts and of theology, prescribed Aristotle’s logic and forbade lectures on his Metaphysics and natural philosophy, and allowed masters and scholars to bind themselves by sworn agreements. His statutes, in their translation, speak of the masters and scholars together as a “university” (Robert of Courçon, Statutes for Paris (1215)).

In 1231 Pope Gregory IX, calling Paris “the mother of the sciences”, granted the masters and students the right to make their own statutes and to suspend lectures if they were wronged, and told the theologians to dispute only on questions that the theological books and the Fathers could settle (Gregory IX, Parens scientiarum).