| The
13th Century
The 13th c. saw the development of the urban schools into universities,
an institution where knowledge was produced (and not simply transmitted);
the first universities were founded in Bologna, Paris and Oxford.
The university is an autonomous institution, structured as a guild
(or corporation) of arts, with some original characteristics such
as: the faculties, divided into broad disciplinary departments;
and the ‘nations’ (something analogous to modern colleges),
which reflected the origins and the mother-tongues of the students,
while Latin remained the official language of teaching for many
more centuries to come. The faculty of arts, that was the first
one attended by each university student, included the teaching of
philosophy, which had been codified at the end of the previous century
following the Aristotelian divisions, metaphysics,
physics and ethics;
while the three superior faculties (that perhaps now would be called
‘professional’) provided the teaching of theology, medicine,
and law (Roman and canon). The knowledge produced in this one-genedere
(male) environment is characterized by its competitive and dialogical
form (its most representative literary genre being the quaestio),
with witty elements alongside critical ones. The philosophic sources
acquired in the previous century are now assimilated through a detailed
critical works (the commentaries),
and enriched with new translations
of texts, mostly from the Greek (the commentaries on Aristotle by
Neoplatonic authors (Ammonius and Philoponus) and Byzantine authors
(Eustratius of Nicea and Michael of Ephesus), translated by Robert
of Lincoln (Grosseteste) (d. 1253); Proclus, translated by William
of Moerbeke, to whom we also owe the complete revision of the translations
of Aristotelian texts). With respect to the East, the 13th c. is
seen as a time of closing, both towards the Islamic world (1210,
1270 and 1277: condemnations
of Aristotelianism and Arabism) and towards the Greek-Byzantine
world (condemnation of the Greek notion of the beatific
vision). The large extent to which the logica
modernorum was used lead to the discovery of new arguments in
theology and science, fields that towards the end of the century
were consistently starting to create cracks in the unity of the
Aristotelian system. The birth of the mendicant orders produced
a change in the way spiritual issues were perceived, and in particular
with respect to the Dominican order, which proposed itself as the
bulwark of the Christian faith against heresies and Islam: philosophy
was even ‘recruited’ against the infidels, as Raymond
de Penyafort shows in his activity, which heavily influenced the
Summa contra Gentiles of Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274) and the entire apologetic work of Ramon
Lull (1235-1315) .
The fist half of the century is characterized by the initial condemnation
of Aristotelian philosophy, and then later on by its gradual assimilation
into the official culture. In this process it is crucial to understand
the attitudes of theologians (William
of Auxerre, d. 1131;Philip
the Chancellor, d. 1136; William
of Auvergne d. 1245), who began a scientific dialogue on theology
and its relations with metaphysics; and the attitude of the masters
of Arts, to whom we owe a new understanding of the philosophic writings
of Aristotle mediated through the use of the commentaries of Avicenna
and Averroes.
Both of these trends culminated in the works of Albert
the Great (c. 1200-1280), who was called the Doctor universalis
for his broad range of interests. His teaching produced various
doctrinal evolutions: the Averroism of Siger
of Brabant; the synthesis between Aristotle and Christianity
of Thomas
Aquinas; the Neoplatonic-Dyonisian themes and the bond between
the concepts of a philosophic
life and of mystical
experience, which define the following German philosophy and
especially the works of Eckhart
(1260-1327). Around the middle of the century, an important institutional
innovation took place: the two mendicant
orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, having been created
at the beginning of the century in response to well-defined spiritual
needs (namely, the former for the struggle against heretics, and
the latter for the desire of evangelic poverty), fully joined the
academic life, after a period of harsh polemics with the secular
masters. Albert the Great was a Dominican, as well as Thomas
and Eckhart. The Franciscan masters of Arts and theology participated
in the same process of cultural evolution, but with different positions,
being more critical and aware of the implicit risks in accepting
Aristotelian philosophy from a Christian point of view. The more
representative figures of this tendency were in the first half of
the century, Alexander
of Hales (c. 1170-1245) and John
of La Rochelle (c. 1190-1245); and in the next generation Bonaventure
of Bagnorea (1217-74) who held the Franciscan chair of theology
at the same time in which Thomas Aquinas was holding the Dominican
one, and who proposed an original reflection on the position of
the theologian at work in the context of Aristotelian philosophy,
as well as a synthesis of metaphysical and spiritual (mystic) themes,
centered on the symbolic transparency as a manifestation of God,
and in particular on the theme of light. In the context of the Faculty
of Arts, another Franciscan friar had begun his own philosophic
reflection, Roger
Bacon (c. 1215-1294), who soon developed an original and harshly
critical attitude towards his contemporaries (especially towards
Albert the Great), proposing a reform of studies that would form
the basis and the principal tool of a deep reformation of the whole
of Christendom. To this end, Bacon emphasized the need to assume
a critical attitude in the investigation of reality (scientia experimentalis),
not limiting himself to the knowledge learnt from the authoritative
texts. A different reformation proposal, focused on the intuition
of a non-Aristotelian method of demonstration, came from Ramon Lull
(1235-1315), a layman, even though holding positions near to the
Franciscans. The diffusion of philosophy outside the universities
is demonstrated by the works of Dante
Alighieri (1265-1315) and, in a different way, by the writings
of Eckhart: his German sermons, as well as Dante’s use of
Italian in the Convivio and of Lull’s use of Catalan in various
works, constitute the first examples of an original philosophic
production in the vernacular. In the final decades of the century,
these philosophic positions were refined and diversified, thus giving
way to a complex period, characterized by many important doctrinal
debates: the debate against the Averroists
(focused on two main points of dispute with Aristotelian philosophy:
the unity
of the possible intellect and the eternity
of the world); the debate for and against Thomism (which eventually
became the ‘official’ doctrine of the Dominicans only
at the beginning of 14th c.); and in particular the debate on the
unity of the substantial form, a position opposed to hylomorphism.
In the Islamic world the diffusion of Aristotelian philosophy went
on for the whole century, but without influencing Latin culture,
since none of the writers during the Mongol dynasty (Nasir al-Din
al Tusi, 1201-1274; Ibn Taymiyya, 1263-1328; and Iji, 1281-1355)
were translated into Latin. Even the dialogue with the philosophers
of al-Andalus was reduced to the letters sent by Ibn Sabin (1218-1270)
to Frederick II, in which the themes fundamental even for Scholastic
philosophy recur: the eternity of the world, the possibility of
theology, the structure of being in categories, the problem of the
individual soul and of personal immortality, and the relationship
between reason and revelation. Through the court of Frederick II
and thanks to the work of Michael
Scot, the translation of the Aristotelian commentaries of Averroes
came to be known to the Latin world. And it was in Sicily and through
the intellectual circle born around the papal court in the middle
of the century that scientific interests on optics, astronomy, and
alchemy were diffused, all of which focused on a new positive evaluation
of corporeality and on related texts. Various Scholastic authors
(above all Albert the Great and Roger Bacon) showed a strong interest
for these themes before the end of the century, when the concentration
on theological, metaphysical and logical problems and the tendency
toward specialization created a strong rupture between the ‘knowledge
of the bodies’ on the one hand, and philosophic, scientific,
and institutional research on the other. Almost absent in this period
is any philosophic exchange with Byzantium, where the prevalent
interest was still in Neoplatonic philosophy. Instead, interaction
with Jewish philosophy becomes more complex and hard to grasp, both
because of the increasing Antisemitism which rendered more difficult
relationships between the Christian and Jewish worlds, and because
Jewish philosophers active in Provence and Catalunia wrote mainly
in their own languages (Samuel ibn Tibbon, d. 1232; the group of
translators from Lunel; Shemtob ben Joseph ibn Falaqera, 1223/5-post-1291,
who translated into Hebrew the Guide of the Perplexed; the Averroist
Isaac Albalag, active in the last decades of the century; and the
Spanish Kabbalists Ezra and Azriel of Gerona, Moses Maimonides,
Jehuda Cohen, and Abraham Abulafia). However, significant exchanges
still took place among the Italian intellectual environments.
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