Insight Editions · No. 67
Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers
G. R. Evans
G. R. Evans surveys fifty medieval thinkers from Augustine to Gabriel Biel, tracing how they interpreted inherited authorities and shaped theology, philosophy, and intellectual institutions.
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A Thousand Years of Authorities and Arguments
The book's argument map: five settings for one question
How the fifty fall
| Ch | Period | Thinkers | Main thread |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-6 | Late antiquity | Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Ps-Dionysius, Cassiodorus, Boethius | Founding the Latin canon: exegesis, translation, logic |
| 7-11 | Early medieval | Gregory, Isidore, Bede, Paschasius, Eriugena | Pastoral care, encyclopaedias, the first Eucharist dispute |
| 12-17 | Ninth to eleventh century | Hincmar, Remigius, Gerbert, Berengar, Damian, Anselm | Predestination, dialectic and its limits, faith seeking understanding |
| 18-28 | Twelfth-century schools | Hugh, Adelard, Ivo, Maimonides, Rupert, Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard, Havelberg, Averroes, Lombard | Reconciling texts; Sic et non; Sentences as textbook |
| 29-33 | Late twelfth to early thirteenth | John of Salisbury, Hildegard, Joachim, Francis, Grosseteste | Visions, the friars, Greek and science |
| 34-44 | Universities | Bacon, Bonaventure, Albert, Aquinas, Siger, Scotus, Dante, Llull, Eckhart, Bradwardine, Ockham | Absorbing Aristotle; condemnations of 1270 and 1277; poverty |
| 45-50 | Schism and councils | Baldus, Wyclif, d'Ailly, Gerson, Cusa, Biel | Conciliarism, Scripture alone, the road to Luther |
Writers, Readers, and Authorities
A social, cross-referring craft
Writing was social. Augustine's early dialogues were taken down by a note-taker among friends; he thought out the gurgling of night-time water pipes with Alypius and Navigius in "our school", then wrote a book on order. Anselm's Monologion grew from discussions at Bec, and a pupil's reminder of a "loose thread" on truth produced the next treatise. Novelty and originality were by-products of an effort that distrusted them: the aim was to stay faithful and to show "where the warrants could be found". Over time "this is not well-written" gave way to "this is dangerous" as the reason to avoid a book.
Ranks of authority
Scripture came first, dictated, as the iconography showed, by a dove at the evangelist's ear. Prophecy raised puzzles: Gregory the Great held that prophecy is "not primarily the prediction of the future, but ... the ability to see what is hidden", and Amos's "I am not a prophet" looked like the Cretan liar. Jerome denied that he was inspired as translator, yet readers treated his Vulgate as "the Word". Gregory's division of the literal sense from three figurative senses (tropological, allegorical, anagogical) answered the apparent contradictions of a text that God had authored.
Then came "the Fathers", a term first kept for patriarchs of the Hebrew Scriptures; Augustine may have been the first to use it of a non-bishop, Jerome. Lists fixed their standing: Jerome's De viris illustribus, Gennadius, the Decretum Gelasianum on books "to be received and not to be received", Sigebert of Gembloux (who "vaingloriously" put his own works at the end). The twelfth and thirteenth centuries added the line between antiqui and moderni: the dead were safe, the living "fair game".
The medieval ladder of authority, and its end in the sixteenth century
Flowers, chains, and contradictions
Extracts gathered like flowers (florilegia) had ancient models in Clement of Alexandria and Aulus Gellius ("much learning does not make a scholar"). Collections fed canon law (Burchard of Worms has 247 patristic texts of 1,785), the Glossa ordinaria, Peter Lombard's Sentences, and Aquinas's Catena Aurea; Charlemagne's Libri Carolini, drafted by Theodulph against a council the pope had already approved, forced Carolingians to think about authorities. The cost: extended arguments broken into pieces, and visible disagreement among authorities. Peter the Chanter resolved it by figurative readings; Grosseteste said the discord is in our hearing, "a superficial discord and a hidden harmony", or that the Spirit sometimes let the Fathers speak for themselves. Medieval writers did not share the modern notion of plagiarism: Alcuin could call extracts "haec mea dicta", and "the less a writer used his own words, the better and safer".
| Genre | Origin | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Homily, commentary | Expounding Scripture to a congregation | Augustine on the Psalms and John |
| Letter, dialogue, soliloquy | Classical literary forms | Augustine to Nebridius |
| Artes (letters, poetry, preaching) | Rhetoric, eleventh to thirteenth century | Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova |
| Encyclopaedia, summa, sentences | Ordering much knowledge | Hugh's Didascalicon; Lombard |
| Florilegium, catena | Collected extracts | Liber scintillarum; Catena Aurea |
The end of the chain
Publication meant circulating one copy; students' notes (reportatio) survive. Late in the period private libraries grew (Pico had nearly twelve hundred items), Greek returned, and vernaculars won respect (Dante's Commedia, Chaucer). Lorenzo Valla, asked to praise Aquinas in 1457, attacked late scholasticism instead. In Altenstaig's Vocabularius theologiae (1517) authors were read "more as fontes (sources) than as auctoritates". Sola Scriptura and sola fide split the camps; Ramus simplified logic. The great medieval achievement was technical precision in logic and language for weighing authorities, which could "always be marshalled on both sides".
How writing worked: conversation into books
Evans opens with two conversion-to-writing scenes that set the tone for every entry. Augustine, still young, reads Cicero's fragmentary Hortensius and is "so fired with the love of philosophy" that he wants to take the subject up; later, after conversion, Plotinus disturbs and "reroutes" him. He and friends then write on happiness with Platonist views on the table. Cassiodorus, the overworked senator, tastes the Psalms' sweetness after "unsavoury secular cares", dives into Augustine's Enarrationes, finds them too long, and decides a shorter book of his own would help other readers without presumption. The pattern is constant: interest, difficulty, a respected guide, then the temptation to write.
Writing was social. Plato's dialogues, Cicero's hoped-for retirement circle, and Augustine's Cassiciacum group (with a note-taker, Alypius asking for a read-back, Virgil and Cicero as "authorities") show talk becoming text. Augustine's Letter 3 to Nebridius has him thinking by lamplight after supper; Paulinus of Nola says reading Augustine is like daily conversation. Anselm's Monologion grew from Bec discussions; a pupil's reminder of a loose thread on truth launched the next treatises. Outsiders could mark the story, but most writers formed a concatenatio and a traditio: fidelity and visible warrants mattered more than originality, which was a by-product eyed with suspicion.
Aesthetic criticism drifted into danger-criticism. Augustine's rhetorical fastidiousness about crude Scripture ends in De doctrina Christiana; Bede's De schematibus et tropis stays with style; Sigebert boasts of improving saints' lives. Gradually "this is not well-written" yields to "this is dangerous" as the reason to avoid a book. Credentials and usable content displace pure style critique.
What an "authority" is
Peter Lombard's Sentences stage the habit: lean on catholic doctors (iuxta catholicorum doctorum auctoritates), note agreement. Ockham's De corpore Christi says the canonical Scriptures "agree" with the aforesaid writers. Augustine joins witness and authority (testimoniorum ... auctoritates). Authorities also fortify. Texts often survive as quotations (Hortensius reconstructed from citations); collected extracts can leave the full text rare.
"Authority" names either the trusted person or the cited portion (auctoritates sanctorum patrum, auctoritates doctorum authenticorum). Non-Christian sources were harder. Classical authors won school respect and seductive pleasure (Jerome: "more of a Ciceronian than a Christian"); Romans 1:18-19 excused pre-Christian reason under providence. Jews after Christ and Islamic writers could not claim that excuse, yet Hebrew help (Andrew of St Victor) and Arabic Aristotle commentary proved too valuable to refuse. Sheer usefulness overcame reservation.
Who counted as a writer
Most medieval thinkers survive as writers. Bernard of Chartres (d. c.1130) is the exception: reputation plus dwarfs on giants' shoulders, little text. Normative writers were scriptores ecclesiastici in a clerical education system after secular schools collapsed. Exceptions: royal offspring with Fulbert at Rheims; noble sons flocking to Bec under Lanfranc (Orderic Vitalis); literate Waldensians matching Bible quotations; late bourgeois demand; notable late laymen. Science (Grosseteste, Henry of Langenstein on Genesis creation) still spoke from clerical theology. The volume's selection tracks the medieval question "what should we read to improve ourselves?", not modern representativeness.
God's Word, prophecy, translation, senses
Exegesis lacked a settled Western system at first. Augustine leaned on the Donatist Tichonius. Gregory's four senses became standard: literal/historical, tropological (moral), allegorical (transferred/spiritual), anagogical (eschatological). Figurative readings dissolve anomalies that cannot exist if God authored every word.
Gregory's four senses as the Western default
Fathers, lists, antiqui and moderni
"Father" first meant Old Testament patriarchs; Augustine may first apply it to a non-bishop (Jerome). The special age after the canon raises the end-date question: twelfth-century collections place Anselm, Bernard, Hugh beside Augustine and Gregory. Grosseteste: later authors are patrum vestigia sequentes. Sheer antiquity (Augustine, Isidore) strengthens later as ad fontes; more medieval is antiqui et moderni: the dead are safe, the living fair game. Sigebert and Peter the Venerable list Ambrose/Augustine/Gregory as antiqui and Lanfranc/Guitmund/Alger as moderni; Ockham notes modern doctors contesting opinions the ancients never framed that way.
Jerome's De viris illustribus starts the trust-list; Gennadius adds ~100 fifth-century names East and West. The Decretum Gelasianum sorts books "to be received and not to be received". Sigebert "vaingloriously" ends with his own works. Honorius Augustodunensis, the anonymous De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis, and later catalogues keep the genre alive.
Flowers, chains, Carolingian shock, plagiarism
Florilegia (flowers) have models in Clement of Alexandria and Aulus Gellius ("much learning does not make a scholar"). They feed canon law (Burchard: 247 patristic texts of 1,785), the Glossa ordinaria, Lombard's Sentences, Aquinas's Catena Aurea. Charlemagne's Libri Carolini, drafted by Theodulph against a council the pope had already approved (capitulare adversus synodum), forced Carolingians to think about authorities despite the political misfire. Cost: arguments broken into pieces; visible disagreement. Peter the Chanter (De tropis loquendi) lets figurative reading slide past literal conflict; Grosseteste hears superficial discord and hidden harmony, or the Spirit letting Fathers speak for themselves. Medieval writers lacked a modern plagiarism taboo: Alcuin could call extracts haec mea dicta; the less one used one's own words, the safer.
Genres, publication, the end of the chain
Christian genres began with the exegetical homily; classical letter, dialogue, and soliloquy were adapted; artes of letter-writing, poetry (Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova), and preaching grew; encyclopaedia and summa ordered knowledge (Hugh's Didascalicon); florilegium and catena collected warrants. Dispute shaded into polemic; Lucretius's De rerum natura (printed in the book as De Rerum Naturae) has medieval philosophical-poem cousins.
Publication meant circulating a copy; reportatio (students' notes) survive. Private libraries grew (Pico nearly 1,200 items); Greek returned; vernaculars won respect (Dante, Chaucer). Lorenzo Valla (1457), asked to praise Aquinas, attacked late scholasticism. In Altenstaig's Vocabularius theologiae (1517) authors are fontes more than auctoritates. Luther's and Calvin's training opened experiment again; Ramus simplified logic. The medieval achievement Evans highlights is technical precision in logic and language for weighing authorities that "could always be marshalled on both sides".
Six rungs of safe reading- Scripture. Inspired Word; settled canon with apocrypha edges. - Prophets and senses. Hidden meaning; fourfold exegesis after Gregory. - Fathers. Roughly to Bede; lists from Jerome through Gelasian decrees. - Antiqui vs moderni. Dead are safe; living are fair game. - Useful outsiders. Classical, Jewish, Arabic texts used under reservation. - Fontes (sixteenth century). Sources to draw from, not shields to hide behind.
Timeline: authority culture- c.325-420. Nicaea to Jerome/Augustine: canon, Vulgate, Latin agenda. - Late 5th c. Gennadius continues De viris illustribus. - 6th-8th c. Gregory's senses; Bede as near end of "Fathers". - Carolingian. Libri Carolini force method on authorities. - 12th-13th c. Florilegia, Sentences, Glossa; antiqui/moderni harden. - 1457-1517. Valla's attack; Altenstaig's fontes shift; Reformation splits camps.
Schools, mendicants, and the late medieval crisis
Evans's arc after the cathedral-school century is institutional: universities crystallise; Dominicans and Franciscans seize chairs; Aristotle and Arabic commentary force a new syllabus; Tempier-style condemnations try to fence Arts Faculty novelty. The fourteenth century adds poverty disputes, papal Avignon and the Schism, Calculators' mathematics, and vernacular cosmic poems. Conciliarists (d'Ailly, Gerson) treat the University of Paris as a political actor; jurists (Baldus) supply corporate theory for cities and Church; mystics (Eckhart, Cusa) stretch language for God beyond school syllogism. The fifty names are not a single school but a chain of salvage, school, summa, and crisis, each entry a node where method, office, and controversy meet.
How to read the fifty
Diagrams map causal chains (teacher → pupil, council → condemnation, Rule → studium). Tables hold periodisations and cast lists.
Augustine of Hippo
Life: from rhetoric to Hippo
Born in North Africa in 354 to a pagan father and a Christian mother, he taught rhetoric at Carthage and found Scripture crudely written. For ten years he was a Manichee, drawn by a dualism of good spirit and evil matter that seemed to solve the problem of evil, until the famous Faustus proved less learned than he was. In Milan he heard Ambrose preach on Genesis with Cappadocian sophistication. After sending away the mother of his son Adeodatus, he heard a child sing "take up and read" and opened Romans (386). Retirement with friends at Cassiciacum, baptism, a monastic community in Africa, and then, despite evasion, the see of Hippo followed.
Work and ideas
| Work | Idea that lasted |
|---|---|
| Cassiciacum dialogues, De magistro | Words are signs; truth is known by an inner, divine sense |
| De doctrina Christiana | Theory of signs; rules (adapted from Tichonius) applied to Scripture |
| De Genesi ad litteram | Exegesis as systematic theology: what are the "days"? |
| City of God (413-26) | Two invisible cities; Rome only an episode in providence |
| Anti-Pelagian works, De libero arbitrio | Original sin; evil as "nothing", an absence of good |
| De Trinitate | Memory, understanding, will: the mind as image of the Trinity |
Against Pelagius, who thought people "merely needed to work hard at being good", Augustine held that fallen humans inherit Adam's guilt; yet he also attacked those who think "faith alone" saves without amended life. His mature view: God looks for faith expressed in love. Only God knows his own, so the visible Church and the elect do not coincide. The Confessions (397-400) are "not strictly autobiography" but a theology of a life.
Three sources of Augustine's theology
Parameters and the reach of one agenda
Evans places Augustine after Nicaea (325) and Constantine's establishment of Christianity: syncretism is refused, borrowings from classical learning are managed with care, and the most educated now convert openly. His volume of writing and presence in every medieval library make him "every writer's point of reference" until the sixteenth century. Topics newly acute in Latin (especially ecclesiology and the sacraments) met a mind that "very little frightened".
Conversion path in fuller detail
After Faustus disappointed him, he sought prestige teaching in Italy. He still struggled to see Ambrose personally (crowds, silent reading). Conversion mixed intellectual shift with crisis: arranged marriage required sending away Adeodatus's mother; theatre temptations; garden sortilegium on Romans ("not in chambering nor in wantonness") became divine guidance in 386. Cassiciacum retirement, baptism, Monica's death, African monastic community, then capture for the see of Hippo.
Cassiciacum works: De beata vita, De ordine, Contra academicos. De magistro (c.389) with Adeodatus: words as signs; truth known by an inner divine sense. De doctrina Christiana develops signs and adapts Tichonius's regulae from mystical keys inside Scripture to external rules applied to it (later used by Hugh of St Victor). Preaching series on Psalms and John show hour-long applause; exegesis and homiletic fuse in episcopal duty.
Genesis, City of God, Pelagius, Trinity
De Genesi ad litteram: books 1-5 on Trinitarian vestiges and what "days", morning, and evening mean; 6-11 on body and soul; 12 on Paradise, vision types, rapture, intermediate state, Hell, Abraham's bosom, reunion of soul and body. Platonism arrives via Ambrose and the Cappadocians despite Augustine's weak Greek and early struggle with abstraction. Senectus mundi hangs over the Empire; Augustine prefers glad eschatological hope to rescue-the-world activism.
City of God (413-26) answers pagan refugees after Italy's fall: Rome is an episode in providence; two invisible cities; baptism does not guarantee election; neighbours may not be eternal fellow citizens. De utilitate credendi (c.391) and De fide et operibus refuse both "faith alone" without amended life and Pelagian self-help. Pelagius, society preacher and Paul commentator, flees Italy after 409, meets Jerome then Orosius in Palestine. Augustine clarifies inherited guilt, infant baptism under Pelagian anxiety, and that the visible Church is not coextensive with the elect: God may save the unbaptised; sinners remain inside the baptised body.
Evil after Manichee dualism: only one good omnipotent God, so evil is nothing, an absence, from free turning away (De libero arbitrio, mid-390s). Foreknowledge and freedom stay lifelong tensions; Retractationes find little to change. Confessions (397-400) interleave prayer and narrative; last three books are philosophical theology (time, memory). De Trinitate (composed across 400-421) tests natura, substantia, essentia and psychological triads (memory/understanding/will; mind/knowledge/love) as image of the three-in-one (source cites Genesis 1.28 for image-and-likeness).
Augustine's agenda for the Latin millennium
Augustine's field- Monica. Christian mother; ambition and persistence. - Adeodatus. Son and dialogue partner in De magistro. - Ambrose. Milan preacher who unlocked Genesis. - Faustus. Manichee leader who failed the test. - Pelagius / Orosius / Jerome. Grace controversy network. - Tichonius. Donatist exeegate Augustine adapted rather than discarded.
By the numbers- 354-430. Life span (heading prints "354-30"). - 10 years. Manichee adherence before Faustus. - 386. Garden conversion and Cassiciacum turn. - 413-26. Composition window of City of God. - 397-400. Confessions. - Both Reformation sides quote him on faith and works.
Authority for a thousand years
Later entries return to Augustine as default: Anselm's ascent, Prosper and predestination quarrels, Bradwardine's De causa Dei, Wyclif's realism, Jansenist afterlives beyond Evans's scope. The Confessions' restlessness, the City of God's two cities, and the Trinity's psychological analogies become the Latin West's shared grammar. Evans opens the fifty with him because nearly every later quarrel is partly an Augustinian family dispute.
Ambrose of Milan
Born at Trier about 339, a lawyer and then governor of Aemilia-Liguria, he fled the election, was brought back, and insisted on baptism by a Catholic, not an Arian. Augustine found him always busy, or "silently reading".
His exegesis used "two or three senses", before Gregory fixed four. Monographs on Paradise (the soul, its rivers the cardinal virtues), Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham (one book for beginners, one for the baptised), Naboth "against the rich who oppress the poor", Tobias on usury; nine Hexaemeron sermons made creation a base for later scientific commentary; his Luke attempts a Gospel harmony. To Theodosius: "It is not fitting for an emperor to refuse freedom of speech, or for a bishop not to say what he thinks."
What Ambrose took (left) and what he made of it (right)
Exegetical programme and ethics
Verse-by-verse commentaries and thematic monographs, usually two or three senses, before Gregory's fourfold standard. Early: On Paradise (soul and cardinal-virtue rivers, via Philo; against Manichees/Marcionites); Cain et Abel (sacrifice); unfinished De Noe (body allegory); De Abraham in two books (literal for beginners, covenant/allegory for the baptised); De Isaac et Anima; De bono mortis; De Iacob et Vita Beata (386); De Patriarchis (Genesis 49); Lenten abstinence via Basil; De Nabuthae against rich oppressors; De Tobia on usury. Hexaemeron sermons Holy Week 387-90 open scientific commentary on creation. Luke commentary c.388-9 attempts Gospel harmony (Augustine later follows). Also virginity/widows, De Paenitentia against Novatianists, Trinity (380), Holy Spirit (381), Incarnation, Creed, Sacraments; De officiis ministrorum Christianises Cicero's De officiis: virtue useful because humans owe knowledge of God.
Politics in letters
To Theodosius (Dec 388): emperor must allow freedom of speech; bishop must say what he thinks. Synodal letter after Aquileia (381): thanks Gallic unanimity; names Palladius and Secundus as lone Arian defenders duly sentenced. Influence: Latin Father cited beside Augustine.
Ambrose: administrator to Latin Father
Jerome
Life
Educated at Rome under Donatus, baptised young, Jerome founded ascetic communities that broke up, spent five years among hermits in the desert of Chalcis ("the fairest city of all"), was ordained at Antioch, met Gregory Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa at Constantinople, and became Pope Damasus's adviser on the Bible. In Rome he taught a circle of noble women (Paula, Eustochium, Marcella); Letter 22 to Eustochium is a treatise on virginity. Out of favour after Damasus died, he founded a double monastery at Bethlehem and stayed thirty-four years.
Work
He fixed the canon (rejecting Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, Tobias before about 390), learned Hebrew from a Palestinian Jewish teacher, and came to prefer the Hebrew to the Septuagint. The new Gospels (382-5) and Hebrew Scriptures from the Hebrew (391-404) met hostility, Rufinus included. Polemics against Jovinian and Rufinus show the temper; Letter 17 complains, "I sign their form of words; they do not believe me".
| Stage | Verdict on the Vulgate |
|---|---|
| Middle Ages | "Our usual version", every nuance analysed as inspired |
| Roger Bacon, 1267 | Defective |
| Nicholas of Lyra, Reuchlin | Errors against the Hebraica veritas (two hundred, says Reuchlin) |
| Council of Trent | Kept, partly for political reasons |
How Jerome's translation became the medieval Bible
Ascetic path and Roman circle
Near Aquileia; Rome under Donatus (Virgil, Cicero, Terence, Sallust). Extreme asceticism as philosopher's way plus Scripture passion; unusual early baptism before 366. Letter 22: fasts then reads Plautus; dream accusation "Ciceronian not a Christian" becomes the medieval anchor against secular seduction. Aquileia community collapses (abrasiveness); Antioch; hermit Malchus; five years at Chalcis desert under Theodosius ("fairest city of all"). Ordained by Paulinus (379); Constantinople council 382 meets Cappadocians; Rome as Damasus's biblical adviser. Noblewomen Paula, Blesilla, Eustochium, Marcella: Hebrew, prayer, psalms; Letter 22 as treatise on virginity (Ethiopian bride; fight sin; avoid pride). After Damasus, Siricius cools; Blesilla's death blamed on excess; Bethlehem joint house funded by Paula then Jerome's family money for 34 years until 420.
Influence and the Vulgate's afterlife
Medieval nostra translatio; Vincent of Beauvais credits triple-language skill. Jerome's Pentateuch preface: prophet is inspired; interpreter uses learning (eruditio et verborum copia). Readers treated every nuance as Spirit-breathed anyway. Roger Bacon (1267) doubts the text; Nicholas of Lyra and Reuchlin's De rudimentis hebraicis (200 corrections) mount Hebraica veritas critique; some ask if the text even is Jerome's (errors he himself had flagged). Trent still keeps it: investment against reformers, and the Spirit "could not" have left the Church with a bad book for a millennium. Ascetic letters keep separate influence.
Jerome: from Ciceronian to nostra translatio
Ps-Dionysius
- Celestial Hierarchy. Nine orders of angels: plain angels carry messages, archangels the important ones (Gabriel to Mary), cherubim and seraphim contemplate God, and Thrones, Virtues, Dominions, Powers and Principalities sit between, each matched by medieval readers to a human rank.
- Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and Mystical Theology. How human nature grows like God; the mystical way begins from what we cannot know, since God is known only by what he is not.
- Divine Names. How creaturely language can speak of an indescribable God, a question reborn from the late eleventh century in debates on signification.
The Platonic overflow scheme behind Ps-Dionysius
Cassiodorus
A career in the "civil service"
His Ordo generis Cassiodorum is almost an intellectual genealogy, naming Symmachus and Boethius, probably relatives, both executed in the 520s. Boethius's fluency in "both tongues" was now worth remarking, a sign of the Greek and Latin worlds drifting into two cultures. Cassiodorus kept out of the Boethius affair and succeeded him.
Works
- Chronicle and History of the Goths (c.519). His first work.
- Variae (538). Twelve books of edicts and model letters (506-38) in an ornate late antique style, used in the Middle Ages as a formulary; perhaps "a monument rather than a memorial" to a vanishing government machine.
- De anima. Derivative, but widespread in medieval library lists.
- Expositio psalmorum. Built on Augustine's Enarrationes with more allegory, written for a "sweet gathering" (suave collegium) of friends; placed as Book XIII of the Variae to mark his conversion.
- Institutiones. Book I a syllabus of Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine (no Greek Fathers); Book II the trivium and the four mathematical arts.
The two halves of the Institutiones
The preface explains the motive: schools teemed with students of secular letters but offered no public teachers of Scripture; Cassiodorus and Pope Agapetus had raised subscriptions for Christian schools, war made that impossible, so the book would "in part take the place of a teacher". He founded a double monastery at Scyllacium: the Vivarium for cenobites and a hermitage at Mount Castellum, following Benedict's Monte Cassino (529). A sense of living in the old age of the world (senectus mundi) drove the work of rescue.
Boethius
The Consolation
In prison, Boethius talks with a personified Philosophy. He starts as a Stoic, seeing an inexorable chain of cause and effect with only an illusion of freedom, and moves to a Christian Platonism: the soul seeks the unchanging One who is the Good; providence "permits" what proves right in the end; Fortune is not to be trusted. Eternity is "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of endless life" (V.6), drawing on the first part of Plato's Timaeus. The scheme leaves out sin, redemption and eternal life.
The argument of the Consolation of Philosophy
Logic and the tractates
- Against Eutyches and Nestorius (c.513). Defines a person as "the individual substance of a rational nature" and holds Christ one person of two natures.
- On the Trinity. The categories apply differently to God: God is not "good" but goodness; only relation distinguishes the Persons.
- De hebdomadibus. Axioms on how things are good by existing without being substantial goods; a model of demonstrative method.
Gregory the Great
A turning-point pontificate
He gave his wealth away and founded seven monasteries, including St Andrew's in Rome; served as apocrisarius at Constantinople (about 578), where he expounded Job to his community; and returned to be abbot. As pope he ran Rome in practice, gaining a temporal authority that mattered for later Church-state struggles. He rejected Constantinople's "oecumenical" title and argued for the primacy of Peter's see among the five patriarchates; Rome was becoming a pilgrim's holy city rather than an imperial capital.
Ideas
- Fourfold exegesis. A literal or historical sense, plus allegorical, anagogical (the heavenly future) and tropological (moral) senses, used in the West until the sixteenth century.
- Images of Christ. Bridegroom of the Church and soul; door between this world and the next; head as model for the bishop; Judge weighing merits "with both justice and loving kindness".
- Pastoral balance. The Regula Pastoralis sets service and leadership, spiritual and practical, in balance; outward life is "distress and change", inward life a Platonist peace and illumination.
Gregory's scheme of scriptural senses
Benedict and the Rule
The Dialogues, so unlike his other writing that authenticity has been doubted, make the Life of Benedict (c.480-550) their centrepiece. Benedict fled decadent Rome for Subiaco, organised groups of twelve, and about 529 founded Monte Cassino. His Rule took about a quarter of its text from the Rule of the Master and drew on Lérins (Cassian, Caesarius of Arles). It demands "nihil asperum, nihil grave": prayer, reading and manual work, with "nothing preferred to the work of God" (ch. 43).
| Stage | Spread of the Benedictine Rule |
|---|---|
| c.529 | Monte Cassino; Subiaco |
| late 570s | Monks flee to the Lateran in Rome, spreading it |
| c.620 | Gaul; Columbanus's disciples in the Frankish Empire |
| c.700 | Oldest surviving manuscript, written in middle England |
| 12th-13th c. | Rivalled by Augustinian canons and the friars |
Prefect to monk to pope of a working Rome
Senatorial birth; Prefect of Rome 573; gives wealth, founds seven monasteries; monk at St Andrew's 574; one of seven deacons; apocrisarius at Constantinople c.578, expounds Job (Moralia) while living monastic; abbot mid-580s; Pope 590. Pastoral government as Empire declines: papacy runs Rome temporally and spiritually. Refuses Constantinople's "oecumenical" title; argues Petrine primacy among five patriarchates. Autonomy grows as East/West imperial ties fray; Rome becomes pilgrim holy city. Not an original philosopher; preacher and pastor whose Regula pastoralis and Job morals shape medieval offices. Evans's Gregory: the practical turn that makes the medieval papacy possible.
Gregory: from Roman office to papal pastorate
Isidore of Seville
- Etymologies. Leans heavily on Cassiodorus's Institutes (the nine disciplines; rhetoric as an open palm, dialectic a clenched fist); Varro's influence is debated. Braulio of Saragossa divided it into twenty books, a hint of joint authorship.
- Sententiae. A florilegium on the Creed's order: Creator, creature, Trinity, Church, Last Things; then sins and virtues; the monastic life; and life in the world, criticising clergy and princes.
- De ecclesiasticis officiis. Written between 597-8 and 615, for Bishop Fulgentius; names three authorities: Scripture, apostolic tradition, the custom of the universal Church.
How Isidore's definitions travelled into canon law
Bede
A quiet life near its books
Given at seven as an oblate to Benedict Biscop at Wearmouth (founded 674), Bede went to the sister house of Jarrow (c.681) with Ceolfrith and twenty-two monks; plague killed all but the boy and the man, who kept the Rule together. Deacon at nineteen (six years early), priest in 703, he never moved far. Biscop's imported books made a bookish life possible.
The Ecclesiastical History
Finished at fifty-nine, it names its sources: Abbot Albinus (pupil of Theodore and Hadrian) for the Augustinian mission; Nothelm, a London priest who searched the papal archives and brought back Gregory's letters; Bishop Daniel for the West Saxons and Wight; Lastingham for Mercia. Bede separated an accurate record from history as an edifying story (good examples to imitate, bad to avoid), and kept miracles beside hard political comment. "Our island and race" shows an unusual sense of national identity in a land of many kingdoms.
Why Bede's chronology mattered
Other works: Lives of Cuthbert, Felix and Anastasius; a history of his abbots; De schematibus et tropis on Scripture's figures (for "clarification" or "adornment"); De rerum natura, a Christian answer to Pliny and Seneca; and a retractatio on Acts, modelled on Augustine's.
Salvage age and Wearmouth-Jarrow
Evans places Bede after the Empire's cultural support has shut down: salvage and reconstruction, not mere protection of a living classical world. Courts can patronise (Charlemagne later legislates clerical reform and vernacular preaching); bishops build libraries (Hincmar); but the burden is monastic. Bede never travels far from north-east England; child oblate at seven to Benedict Biscop at Wearmouth; moves with the community to Jarrow. Quiet lifetime; last routinely admitted "Father" by later ages. Self-portrait at the end of the Ecclesiastical History (like Gregory of Tours): childhood, teachers, book list.
History, computus, teacher of the North
Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: conversion narrative, dating, Latin for a people new to Roman Christianity. Computus and De temporum ratione fix Easter and chronology for pastoral order. Biblical commentaries and homilies feed monastic lectio. Evans's Bede is the hinge between patristic authority and the Carolingian rebuild: English monastic learning that later continental reformers will import.
Bede: monastic salvage of Christian learning
Paschasius Radbertus
Alcuin: the network's founder
Alcuin (c.740-804), trained at York under Aelbert and Egbert, met Charlemagne about 781, built the palace library, tutored the princes, and became abbot of Tours in 796. Letters show the king's real curiosity: Easter reckoning and moon phases (Letters 144-5, 798); astronomers are inventores, not conditores of the art, since the Creator founded it (Letter 148).
- Royal duties (Letter 177, from Isidore). Govern, do justice, renew the Church, correct the people, judge fairly, defend the oppressed, make laws, comfort the exile, and show the way of equity and eternal life.
- King as preacher (Letter 41). Charlemagne wields the sword of power and the trumpet of preaching, startling because the ministry of the Word later moved firmly to the Church's side.
- Private confession (Letter 131). To the young men of Tours: confess, since "all sins are venial if confessed"; Alcuin was abreast of the shift from public penance to regular private confession.
- Rhetorica. Mostly Cicero's De inventione, yet rhetoric would not be seriously studied again for centuries.
Paschasius's own ideas
- Gospels as a quadriga. A four-wheeled chariot in which Christ "quarters the world"; each Gospel has its proprietas yet each is complete, so they coinhere rather than merely complement.
- Words and things. The Augustinian question that underlies scriptural allegory.
- The true body. There can be no doubt the verum corpus is present. A sacrament is any token of salvation where a visible thing has a different invisible effect.
Paschasius's broad definition of sacrament and the debate it framed
Carolingian mesh: Alcuin before Paschasius
Evans nests Paschasius in a Carolingian company. Alcuin (c.740-804): York under Aelbert/Egbert; master 766; meets Charlemagne c.781; palace library and tutor; Abbot of Tours 796 with school and library. Letter 144/145 (798): dating moveable feasts per campos arithmeticae artis; moon phases researched from mathematicians. Letter 148: Fredegisus (De nihilo et tenebris) as gift-bearer; astronomers are inventores not conditores; Creator founded the art. Kingship list from Isidore (Letter 177): govern, justice, renew Church, correct people, defend oppressed, laws, comfort exile, show equity and eternal life; king as Gregory's rector and praedicator with sword and trumpet (Letter 41), later ages will fence Word-ministry from lay power. Letter 131 to Tours youth: private confession replacing old public penance; all confessed-and-penanced sins venial. Rhetorica from Cicero's De inventione; De virtutibus et vitiis popular; chief influence personal stimulation of the next generation.
Hrabanus and Paschasius's office
Pupil line: Hrabanus Maurus (c.780-856) Fulda to Tours under Alcuin, master at Fulda (Walafrid Strabo his pupil), Abbot 824, resigns 842 for study, Archbishop of Mainz 847 (synods 847/848/852). Letters as magnorum virorum conamen: keep one another writing. Early Opus in laudem sanctae crucis to Hatto. Paschasius: Corbie under Adalhard; Saxony 822; Abbot c.844, resigns 853 for study; at Council of Paris 847. Eucharistic and monastic theology sit inside this letter-and-school culture where abbots resign to read and councils pull them back.
Paschasius inside the Carolingian reading company
Eucharist and the Corbie debates
Paschasius's De corpore et sanguine Domini argues real presence with realist force; Ratramnus of Corbie replies with a more symbolic line, a ninth-century rehearsal of debates Berengar and Lanfranc will reopen. Evans nests that quarrel inside abbatial resignations-for-study and synodal recall: theology is produced by monks who keep being pulled back into office. The Carolingian mesh (Alcuin → Hrabanus → Paschasius) is the condition of the sacrament argument, not a digression.
Johannes Scotus Eriugena
- Translator. Learned Greek fast to translate Ps-Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa's De hominis opificio, inviting correction of his errors.
- Predestination. Asked by Hincmar to refute Gottschalk's double predestination, he wrote De divina praedestinatione (c.850).
- Cosmology. Glossed Martianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury and used Macrobius on the Dream of Scipio.
The fourfold division of nature in the Periphyseon
Irish master at Charles the Bald's court
Among ninth-century Irish on the continent (Sedulius Scottus, Martinus of Laon); most notorious: Eriugena. Before 846, patronage of Charles the Bald; runs the palace school. Translates Ps-Dionysius (negative theology: we know God's infinity, not his immensity as a grasped attribute); Gregory of Nyssa De hominis opificio; learns Greek fast, invites correction of errors. Periphyseon (On Nature) 860-66: reasoning in early books, exegesis later; fourfold division of nature (creates/created). Originality that neither he nor others fully domesticate; later suspicion of pantheism. Evans's Eriugena: Carolingian Greek import that stretches Latin orthodoxy.
Eriugena: Greek theology for a Frankish court
Hincmar of Rheims
- The pastoral alarm (Letter 37). To the simplices of his diocese: Satan comes as an angel of light; Gottschalk teaches that some are predestined to hell whatever good they do, others to glory however badly they behave, so Christ did not die for all and baptism does not cleanse.
- Definitions. Praescientia knows beforehand; predestination is a fore-ordering by grace. To predestine to hell would make God the author of evil.
- Counter-measures. Gottschalk's two writings to be destroyed; patristic extracts supplied; Eriugena recruited, whose book caused a storm and a backlash.
How the predestination quarrel escalated
Remigius of Auxerre
- Classroom texts. Donatus, Priscian, Phocas, Cato's Distichs, Boethius's Consolation, Juvenal, Bede's Ars metrica and De schematibus.
- Martianus Capella. A literal reading in which Mercury gives his bride Philology the seven liberal arts as handmaids.
- Genesis. Slices from Adrevald of Fleury and Angelomus of Luxeuil, mostly Hrabanus; sources are integrated, named only when unusual.
From Carolingian classroom notes to the standard gloss
Gerbert of Aurillac
Career and context
He studied at the cathedral school of Vic, where the quadrivium was taken seriously, near Ripoll's scientific library; met Pope John XIII in Rome (970); and worked at Rheims (972-80, 983-9) under Archbishop Adalbero. His election as pope echoed Sylvester I, Constantine's pope, as the year 1000 approached.
- The abacus. Counters in columns of hundreds, tens and units, now marked with Arabic numerals, with a blank disc, the sipos, for nought; abacists were slow to drop Roman numerals.
- Geometry. Third after arithmetic and music; born of Egyptian field measurement, then studied for pleasure (exercitio iocunda); justified by Wisdom 11.21, God made all "in number, measure and weight".
How Arabic number reached the Latin schools through Gerbert
Aurillac, Spain, Rheims, papacy as Sylvester II
Born c.940 Aurillac; monastic education; Spain (Catalonia) for advanced quadrivium (abacus, Arabic numerals influence); Italy; then Rheims under Archbishop Adalbero as schoolmaster. Famous for abacus, spheres, organ-building, and dialectic. Tutor to imperial heirs; Archbishop of Rheims (contested); Ravenna; Pope Sylvester II (999-1003) with Otto III. Letters show mathematical curiosity and political entanglement. Symbol of the year-1000 intellectual: monastic talent rising to the papacy on the strength of the liberal arts and court service.
Gerbert: abacus monk to millennium pope
Arts as power: letters and instruments
Beyond the career ladder: Gerbert's letters document instrument-making (spheres, organ), abacus teaching, and requests for manuscripts across the millennium courts. Rheims school reputation draws pupils; contested archbishopric shows how mastery of the quadrivium became a ticket into Ottonian politics. As Sylvester II he embodies the hope that a learned pope and a young emperor (Otto III) might renew Christian Rome, a hope that dies with them but leaves the legend of the mathematician-pope.
Gerbert: instruments, letters, imperial papacy
Berengar of Tours
- Accusations (Theoduin of Liège to Henry I). Reviving "ancient heresies", undermining marriage and infant baptism, the sacraments' efficacy, and the authority conveyed by the episcopal staff.
- Conscience against consensus. Hugh of Langres said no one should singulariter sentire; Berengar answered that he spoke as his conscience made him, a road leading to the Reformation.
- Rome, 1059. Made to swear Cardinal Humbert's confession; his writings burnt; he replied that an oath under duress does not bind, and attacked pope and Humbert.
How Berengar's challenge produced the doctrine of transubstantiation
Chartres circle and eucharistic storm
Canons of St Martin's, Tours in the family; possible Chartres schooling under Fulbert (evidence mixed: busy bishop from 1006, schoolmaster tradition older). Guitmund: Berengar as frivolous pupil. Adelman of Liège: collectaneum under "venerable Socrates" Fulbert; garden evening exhortations. Opponents later include Hugh of Langres. Berengar's eucharistic theology (symbolic emphasis, dialectic over bare authority) draws Lanfranc's reply and repeated councils; forced oaths; lingering suspicion until death 1088. Evans embeds him in Fulbert's network to show how cathedral reputation and dialectical daring ignite the century's sacrament debates.
Peter Damian
- Monastic writer. Letters, sermons, Lives, prayers, poems; on simony (a venom-spewing dragon) and clerical celibacy; Letter 1 to Honestus, an early dialogue with the Jews.
- The schools' teaser. Can an omnipotent God restore lost virginity?
- Against Berengar. At the 1059 confession he stood for sacramental realism.
Peter Damian against the dialecticians
Anselm of Canterbury
Bec and Canterbury
Under Anselm the Bec school turned internal again but bred monks whom Orderic called "seeming philosophers", taught by Socratic debate. As archbishop he refused William Rufus's demand to recognise the anti-pope over Urban II, a breach of rectus ordo, and went into exile; disputes with Henry I followed.
| Work | Occasion | Core move |
|---|---|---|
| Monologion | Meditation for pupils; Lanfranc wanted more Augustine quoted | Climb from goods we know to the Highest Good |
| Proslogion | Dislike of "a chain of many arguments" | A single argument for God and all his attributes |
| On the Incarnation of the Word | Roscelin's charge of heresy | Rebuttal, needing several drafts |
| Cur Deus Homo | Winter at Westminster with Gilbert Crispin (1092-3) | Only a God-man could pay the debt |
| On the Procession of the Holy Spirit | Council of Bari, 1098 | Trinitarian symmetry supports the filioque |
The debt argument of Cur Deus Homo
- Heaven continues earth's joys. Proslogion 24-6: a fast runner will still enjoy running fast.
- Exegesis as method. He taught alertness to language and logic, not the gloss-building that became the Glossa ordinaria.
- Filioque by symmetry. Each Person has one attribute of his own and shares one with each other Person.
Bec school and reluctant archbishop
Aosta 1033; after father's death wanders Burgundy ~three years; Bec under fellow Italian Lanfranc (Pavia), whose open monastic school teaches logic, rhetoric, Bible to noble sons (unusual vs internal opus Dei / lectio divina schools). Chooses Bec over Cluny's rigor without intellectualism. When Lanfranc leaves for Caen then Canterbury, Anselm's internal school makes monks "seeming philosophers" (Orderic Vitalis) via Socratic debate; deep Augustine reading. Abbot, then Archbishop; no taste for Rufus/Henry I politics. Rufus wants anti-pope acknowledgment; Anselm keeps loyalty to Urban II as rectus ordo; exile and further clash with Henry I.
Monologion to Cur Deus Homo
Monologion: Augustinian ascent from experienced goods to Highest Good; sends to Lanfranc, who wants more Augustine quotation and less own words; Anselm circulates it unchanged. Proslogion: seeks one argument replacing the Monologion's "chain of many"; ontological proof (Aquinas later classes it via self-evidence of God's existence); same reasoning yields attributes; heaven continues legitimate earthly joys (fast running still enjoyed). Bible method: language-and-logic alertness, not the later Glossa ordinaria. First harsh controversy: Roscelin spreads heresy rumour; On the Incarnation of the Word takes several rattled drafts. Winter with Gilbert Crispin at Westminster (1092-3) while dodging preferment; Crispin's Jew-Christian disputation prompts Cur Deus Homo: Fall diminishes God's "honour" (feudal colouring); God cannot merely forgive; Incarnation uniquely saves mankind and honour. Draft into exile.
Anselm: monastic dialogue to public storm
Hugh of St Victor
- For beginners. He shows how to memorise the Psalms by their coloured initials; the Didascalicon packs arts and Scripture study into one compass, using Augustine's summary of Tyconius.
- Spirituality. Two works on Noah's Ark, De vanitate mundi, On Contemplation, and the Scala caeli of fifteen rungs; Richard of St Victor carried this on.
- Dionysius. Unusually, a commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy via Eriugena's version.
| Opus creationis | Opus restaurationis |
|---|---|
| Being of God, making of the world (Boethius's theologia) | Why Christ became incarnate and died; salvation |
| Open to reason | Known by revelation, historical events |
| Philosophical treatment | Leads into Church and sacraments, a remedy for sickness |
Hugh's courtroom of redemption
Victorine programme and Didascalicon
Hugh of St Victor (c.1096-1142): Augustinian canons of St Victor, Paris. Didascalicon: map of all learning toward wisdom; reading order; seven liberal arts as tools for Scripture. Contemplative ascent from the works of creation and restoration. Biblical commentaries and De sacramentis organise salvation history. Victorine school as rival and complement to Abelard's logic: meditation, allegory, and ordered curriculum. Evans stresses Hugh as the architect of a whole course of study when universities are still crystallising.
Hugh: curriculum for wisdom
Creation, restoration, sacraments
Hugh's pair of works of God, creation and restoration, structures De sacramentis as salvation history in two acts. Reading is a moral as well as cognitive act: the Didascalicon orders arts so the reader is repaired, not merely informed. Victorines thus answer Abelard's Sic-et-Non sharp edges with a curriculum of contemplation. Evans's Hugh is the positive programme behind twelfth-century school reform.
Adelard of Bath
The English comparator
Evans sets him against Aelfric (c.955-c.1020), monk of Winchester under Aethelwold and abbot of Eynsham from 1005, who made modest learning accessible: the Hebrew Scriptures and Bede's De temporibus in English, the Colloquy for Latin practice, alliterative saints' lives and apocalyptic homilies alongside Adso's letter on Antichrist.
| Aelfric | Adelard | |
|---|---|---|
| World | One monastery, peaceful Edgar's reign | Tours, Laon, Sicily, Antioch |
| Aim | Simple aids in the vernacular | Fill gaps in content and method |
| Sources | Bede, Alcuin, Abbo of Fleury | Arabic science, Euclid |
| Later life | Abbot | Unknown; perhaps the Exchequer |
Adelard's journey from Tours to new science
- The four elements questioned. "No one has ever touched 'earth' or 'water'": we perceive composites made from elements, never the elements.
- Old frame, new tools. The Questions keep the old "nature of things" format of Pliny, Bede and Hrabanus, with the supernatural inside the scientist's frame.
- On the Same and the Different. For William, Bishop of Syracuse: Philocosmia against Philosophia, modelled on Boethius.
English schooling before Adelard: Aelfric's modest Latin
Evans frames Adelard against the thin English century before him. Aelfric (c.955-c.1020): Winchester under Aethewold, Abbot of Eynsham 1005; vernacular Pentateuch/Joshua, Alcuin on Genesis, Bede De temporibus into Anglo-Saxon; Colloquy as job-vocabulary Latin; grammar and glossary far from classical; alliterative Lives of the Saints; Homilies on apocalypse (millennium anxiety shared with Adso's Antichrist letter). Modest monastic aids, not international science. Adelard of mixed English-Norman descent, name linked to Bath, begins teaching in England when institutional schools are hard to identify, so his later Arabic and Greek mathematical outreach looks like a leap from Aelfric's world.
Journey, Quaestiones naturales, Arabic mathematics
Travels to France and the Latin East/Mediterranean circuit; returns with Arabic learning. Quaestiones naturales: nephew's scholastic questions vs Adelard's travel answers (reason and experience over bare authority). Translates Euclid and Arabic astronomical/astrological material into Latin for northern schools. Dialogues stage curiosity against school habit; the English contribution is to import the scientific curriculum that Chartres and Paris will absorb.
Adelard: from thin English Latin to imported science
Ivo of Chartres
- The problem. Gregory VII's reforms on simony, celibacy and lay investiture raised legal questions, yet sources were uncertain, including the forged Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals.
- The collections. Decretum (much from Burchard of Worms), Panormia and Tripartita, arranged by topic from papal letters, councils, Fathers and secular law; over 300 letters show law in practice.
- Dispensation. Laws are immobiles or mobiles; mobile laws may be dispensed without changing the law, guided by the Church's utilitas and by love as fulfilment of the law.
Ivo's method for reconciling canon law texts
Moses Maimonides
| Work | What it did |
|---|---|
| Early logic treatise | Written as a boy; Aristotle later only one ingredient |
| Siraj (Mishnah commentary) | Finished in early adulthood |
| Code (c.1180) | Ordered beliefs and interpretations, like Lombard's Sentences |
| Guide for the Perplexed (c.1190) | Arabic philosophy for the troubled educated Jew: God's existence, theological language, attributes, purpose of law and of life |
Where the tension lies (Guide III.27-8)
- Parable of the palace (Guide III.51-4). Some subjects are in the city seeking the Ruler, some outside the gates seeking a way in; reaching his presence needs a new kind of effort.
- Influence. Considerable on Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.
Rupert of Deutz
Rupert's career of disputes
- The charge. Called a heretic for saying "Augustine was not in the canon", and accused of impanation: Christ present "inside" the bread rather than transforming it.
- Escape. He sided with "the Church" and cast his challengers as its enemies.
- Hermannus. His conversion account says Christians read Scripture for the kernel, Jews for the literal husk.
| Age | Scriptural span | Later echo |
|---|---|---|
| Father | Hebrew Scriptures | Pushed further, more contentiously, by Joachim of Fiore |
| Son | Gospels and Epistles | |
| Holy Spirit | Present history to the eschaton |
Oblate, refused orders, public disputations
Born Liège c.1075; oblate St Laurence; professed 1091; house becomes Cluniac c.1100-05. Refuses ordination at age (1105-08): wants the monk's life, not the priest's. Still a disputant: Eucharist debate with Alger of Liège (1113-15), echoed in De sancta Trinitate XII (c.1113-14); predestination debates 1114-16; exile at Siegburg 1116-17 writing De omnipotentia dei; then Laon masters and Bishop William of Châlon. Academic "theatre": Alger as bishop's secretary for a decade; crowds watch; reputation risk. Rupert reports being called a heretic for saying Augustine was "not in the canon" (In quaedam capitula Regulae). Polemic vs Anselm of Laon on the will of God escalates the show-down. Later Abbot of Deutz; vast biblical and Trinitarian corpus; monastic commentator who would not stay silent in the schools' age of public contest.
Rupert: monk who refused orders but not debate
Peter Abelard
A career of collisions
Abelard's path from student to condemned master
He found Anselm of Laon "a tree whose leaves have fallen". At St Denis he questioned the abbey's founding legend, fled to Count Thibaud, founded the Paraclete at Nogent (later Heloise's convent), went to St Gildas in Brittany (c.1125-6), returned to Paris about 1133 with Arnold of Brescia, and died under Peter the Venerable's protection in 1142.
Work and ideas
- Sic et Non. Opposed patristic extracts for students to reconcile; its preface sees that word meanings shift over time. Catenas behind it suggest a later date than Theologia "Summi boni".
- Commentary into disputation. His Romans commentary digresses for pages on Cur Deus Homo, a gloss straining to carry debate.
- Scito te ipsum. Ethics, not spirituality: an act is good because it proceeds from a good intention, truly and not apparently good under God's eye; sin is acting against conscience. This came before Aristotle's Ethics reached the West.
| View | Why Christ died | Abelard's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| School of Laon | To wrest humanity from Satan, who won it at the Fall | Satan has no rights |
| Anselm of Canterbury | To repay God's offended honour | Such a death would anger God more |
| Abelard | God's love: a loving example that changes man's response | God can forgive by grace alone |
Peripatetic master and Heloise
Born near Nantes 1079; wandering-scholar philosophus / "Peripatetic". Pupil of Roscelin at Loches c.1093-9, then William of Champeaux at Paris; lectures logic; by c.1108 drives William from Mont Ste Geneviève into Victorine peace. Turns logic onto studium sacrae scripturae; 1113 at Laon finds Anselm of Laon a leafless tree; announces Ezekiel lectures (hard book) at Laon and Paris. Notre Dame master 1114; tutors Heloise for canon Fulbert; son 1118; castration by Fulbert's kin; Soissons condemnation 1121. Theologia 'Summi boni' answers Roscelin's tritheism (Soissons 1092) or, in Historia Calamitatum, simply teaches students. Roscelin presses Bishop Gilbert; Abelard wants witnessed disputation (Letter 14). Otto of Freising: Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf of Lombardy instigate; charge Sabellianism. Book burned; brief St Médard imprisonment; monk at St Denis; authenticity quarrel 1121; flees to Thibaud of Champagne; peace with Suger 1122; cell at Nogent (Paraclete) left to Heloise's nuns c.1125-6; St Gildas; letters (authenticity debated; content argues genuine); Historia as epistola consolatoria. Back to Paris c.1133 with Arnold of Brescia; Sens 1140; Innocent II condemns; Cluny under Peter the Venerable; dies 1142.
Logic, Sic et Non, theology under fire
Logica ingredientibus and early Dialectica at the cutting edge, soon overtaken by later twelfth-century technique. Sic et Non sets opposed authorities for students to reconcile. Theologia 'Scholarium' attacked by Bernard's circle at Sens. The pattern: logic applied to sacred study, public disputation as theatre, and councils as the era's imperfect substitute for settling novelty.
Abelard: schools, love, repeated condemnation
William of Conches
- Sources. Diffused Platonism plus Chalcidius on the Timaeus ("the lips of Plato"); Cicero on eloquence without wisdom; a Scriptural "true comprehension" of things seen and unseen.
- Atoms of a kind. Elements are in the body but invisible as simplae et minimae particulae; tides, winds, comets and stars follow Bede.
- Dragmaticon. A simplified Philosophia written in the Duke of Normandy's household; a link to Catalan and Ramon Llull.
The order of topics in the Philosophia
Chartres Platonism and early retirement
Born c.1080; possible pupil of Bernard of Chartres; teaches John of Salisbury; Cornifician dispute (compact vs expanded syllabus); retires early from school fray. Young teacher c.1120: glosses on Boethius Consolation, Macrobius on Scipio's dream, maybe Martianus; Philosophia; Priscian glosses. Literary-philosophical set, not Abelard's hard logic or Adelard's Arabic science. Diffused Platonism via Chalcidius on Timaeus. Philosophia: Cicero on eloquence without wisdom; Scripture on true comprehension of things seen and unseen; from prima causa through Trinity toward mankind, proto-systematic order before Lombard/Aquinas. Evans's Conches: Chartres natural philosophy stepping toward summa-shaped curriculum.
William of Conches: literary Platonism in the schools
Bernard of Clairvaux
Bernard in public life
- Spirituality. The Steps of Humility and Pride (once the first downhill step is taken, the rest come easier), On Loving God, Precept and Dispensation.
- Preacher. 86 sermons on the Song of Songs without finishing it; Scripture so absorbed that he could scarcely write except in its words.
- On Consideration. For Eugenius III, swamped by appeals: on Gregory's Pastoral Rule, a balance of contemplative and active; after the Crusade failed, God's larger purpose; the pope above every secular and Church power.
Cistercian firebrand: Templars, papacy, Abelard
Born 1090 near Dijon; canons' school; enters Cîteaux 1113 with two dozen kin/friends; Abbot of Clairvaux two years later; illness eased by William of St Thierry. Traveller-diplomat from 1128 (Council of Troyes, Templar recognition: monk-soldiers for pilgrims). 1130s supports Innocent II; Cistercian favour peaks when Eugenius III (ex-Cistercian) becomes pope (1145). 1140 Sens: engineers Abelard's condemnation though no dialectical match. Preaches Second Crusade (1146); failure damages prestige. Sermons on Song of Songs: bridal mysticism. Evans's Bernard is monastic charisma steering Church politics and policing school novelty.
Bernard: Cistercian power in a debating age
Anselm of Havelberg
| Issue since 1054 | Latin | Greek |
|---|---|---|
| Primacy | Rome primate of all | Not over the Eastern patriarchates |
| Eucharistic bread | Unleavened | Leavened |
| Creed | Added filioque | Disputed and in any case an innovation |
The seven ages of the Church, read from the seven seals
- Unity and novelty. One Church, Saviour and economy, as in Bernard's contemporary On Consideration; new orders like the Premonstratensians can be good novelties if they fit history.
- Variety of sacrifices. From Abel on God accepted many; the antiqui patres were saved by faith in what was to come.
- Career. Disgraced c.1149 between Conrad III and the papacy; restored under Barbarossa; died at the siege of Milan, 1158.
Premonstratensian diplomat and East-West dialogue
Anselm of Havelberg (c.1100-58): Premonstratensian; bishop; imperial envoy to Constantinople. Anticimenon (dialogues with Greek archbishop Nicetas): records debates on filioque, azymes, papal primacy, rare Latin report of polite theological encounter. Historical scheme of ages of the Church; defence of religious orders' novelty against conservatives. Evans values him as witness that twelfth-century "theatre" of dispute could also be diplomatic conversation across the schism.
Anselm of Havelberg: dispute as diplomacy
Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
Averroes in the Latin universities
- The trouble. God as Prime Mover removed from the world, with no providence: alien to Islam and Christianity alike.
- Figurative reading. As a Muslim he could read the Koran figuratively, yet the question remained: philosophy and theology, partners or incompatible?
Peter Lombard
- Commentaries. Psalms (before 1138) and Pauline Epistles (the Collectanea, 1139-41, revised 1155-8), indebted to Gilbert of Poitiers and to Florus of Lyons's Augustine anthology on Paul.
- Sources. Borrowed collections, as did Ivo, Abelard and the Gloss; directly from Augustine perhaps only four works; a new authority in John Damascene, via Burgundio of Pisa.
- Method. Arguments set out "on either side", as in the rising disputatio (Simon of Tournai), with divisio: four things to ask about sacraments (IV d.1.1).
From patristic opinions to the universities' textbook
| Question | Where | What it opens |
|---|---|---|
| Was the incarnate Christ an adopted Son? | III d.10.2 | No: Son by nature; authorities from Augustine, Jerome, Hilary, Ambrose |
| What remedy for sin before Christ, and for women, who were not circumcised? | IV d.1.8 | Justification by faith, works, circumcision or sacrifice? |
| Why only bishops confirm | IV d.7.2 | Distinct ministries, using Ivo and Gratian |
From Rheims recommendation to Paris textbook
Born Lombardy c.1100; Bologna?/Rheims; Bernard's letter 1134-5 to St Victor's prior recommends him; Pisa 1133 (Innocent II circles?); Paris again 1136; knows Hugh's De sacramentis. Notre Dame canon; teaches 1143-4; theological expert at Rheims 1148 for Eugenius; Bishop of Paris 1159. Rise possibly without family connections, merit and regard. Psalms commentary before 1138; Pauline Collectanea 1139-41, revised 1155-8; debt to Gilbert of Poitiers and Florus of Lyons. Sentences: four books organising authorities into a teachable grid; the thirteenth century's standard theology textbook. Evans's Lombard: the organiser whose lack of flash becomes the schools' spine.
Lombard: authorities arranged for every bachelor
John of Salisbury
From the schools to high office: John's career
- Letters. Two collections (the first to Theobald's death in 1161), including a lifelong friendship with Peter of Celle.
- Historia Pontificalis. Recent papal history from inside knowledge; at Rheims (1148) he watched Bernard move against his old master Gilbert.
- Metalogicon. Against the "Cornificians", novi doctores who would cut the arts course, like Peter Ramus later.
| Prince | Tyrant |
|---|---|
| Keeps to and rules by law | Acts against his subjects' interests |
| Sees himself as the people's servant | Damages public utilitas |
| Head of a body whose members serve each other | Usurper: power by improper means |
Perpetual student, curia, Becket
English village school with one companion; priest-master tries to lure him into magic (Policraticus ii.28); John refuses. Dozen years in northern France (1135-6 onward): Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, Abelard, Gilbert of Poitiers. Papal curia 1148-52; at Rheims 1148 watches Bernard prepare Gilbert's condemnation. Secretary to Archbishop Theobald, then to Becket; writes the controversy. Bishop of Chartres near life's end. Policraticus and Metalogicon: court satire, tyrannicide hints, defence of the liberal arts against Cornificians. Nearest twelfth-century approach to later "humanist": classicising prose in Church-state service.
John of Salisbury: student to bishop
Hildegard of Bingen
How the Scivias is built
- Structure. Close to Hugh's creation and restoration, and closer still to the Trinitarian ages of Rupert, Anselm of Havelberg and Joachim.
- Message. No millenarianism and no Age of the Spirit: judgement follows inescapably on human acts.
- Range. Simple and composite medicine (animals, herbs, gems), two saints' lives, and seventy liturgical songs.
Joachim of Fiore
| Status | Person | Scripture | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Father | Hebrew Scriptures | Law |
| Second | Son | Gospels and Epistles | Grace |
| Third | Holy Spirit | New orders of spiritual men | Spirit and Love |
Joachim's ideas from source to afterlife
- Trinity. Perhaps in a lost De essentia (c.1179) he accused Peter Lombard of overstressing unity, himself nearly making the Persons distinct substances.
- Imitators. The pseudo-Joachite Commentary on Jeremiah attacked Frederick II and made the Cistercians the Pharisees; in parts of Calabria his return is still awaited.
- Dante. The Liber figurarum gave him symbols such as the dog for the clergy and circles of the Trinity.
Florensians and three ages
Benedictine at Corazzo after 1171; abbot before 1177; pushes Cistercian habits, then leaves 1192 for stricter Florensians (Celestine III approval 1196; Gregory IX calls them a "pillar" 1234). Prophetic history with political satire; Dante draws symbols from Liber figurarum (disciples): dog as clergy of the new age; Trinitarian circles. Line of time from Rupert and Havelberg: Age of the Father (Law / OT), Son (Grace / NT), Spirit (Love) still to come. Trinity symbolism inseparable from historiography. Evans flags how speculative history, safer than speculative doctrine in some eyes, still unsettles institutions awaiting the third age.
Joachim: three ages that outlive their abbot
Francis of Assisi
From a call to an Order
- Preaching revival. After the Fathers, little new preaching until Alain of Lille's manual and the aids of the 1230s; Peter the Chanter and Thomas of Chobham set preaching in rhetoric: "more useful than subtle".
- Dictation. Francis dictated his Admonitions, raising the question how far his scribe adjusted the text.
- Theology in advice. "Good works must follow knowledge" (VII); self-will as eating of the tree of knowledge (II); creation praising its maker in the Canticle.
Repair my house, Rules, licensed preaching
1206 San Damiano: Christ says "Go, Francis, and repair my house" (Thomas of Celano); thereafter "busy with Christ"; renounces wealth; imitates Gospel life. Legend of the Three Companions: admonitions; apostolic wandering preaching. Papal approval: Rule under Innocent III 1209; second Rule, Honorius III Bull 1223. Chapter 9: no preaching if the bishop objects; no friar preaches unless examined and commissioned by the Minister General. Preaching revival context: after patristic applause-sermons, monasteries mostly read old homilies; Francis and Dominic restore living Word ministry, which forces education so preaching is sound and licence-worthy. Evans's point: simplicity births a learned Order because the apostolate demands it.
Francis: poverty that required schools
Robert Grosseteste
| Field | Work | Move |
|---|---|---|
| Creation and science | Hexaemeron (after 1225) | Six days as pegs for optics, light, tides; creation ex nihilo; astrology "a deceit of the demons" |
| Bible study | Proemium on Jerome's Letter 53 | Every art needs a teacher |
| Law | De cessatione legalium; De decem mandatis | Did the Law end with Christ? Love in practice reads Scripture |
| Greek sources | Galatians (early 1230s) | Damascene, Chrysostom, Theophylact |
| Reference | Tabula | Nine distinctiones with invented signs |
The demonstrative method Grosseteste took from the Posterior Analytics
Late visibility, Oxford, Lincoln
Born c.1170; first fifty-five years almost invisible (Paris or Oxford study possible). From 1225 leading secular master at young Oxford; to 1235 as Franciscan collaborator (Franciscan learning acceptable from his first contact). Life of Friar Hubert: smooth manners, hospitality. Bishop of Lincoln 1235-53 (eighteen years). Mendicant chairs later squeeze seculars; Grosseteste shows the Franciscan learned life from the start, not as a later compromise.
Greek, Hexaemeron, light science
Translates from Greek when few can; Bible study up to date (glossa ordinaria, Lombard on Paul, Origen via Jerome). Polymath: optics, light, astronomy, meteorology, tides from Genesis questions. Hexaemeron after 1235 (as bishop? dating debated in the literature Evans cites). Light metaphysics links creation, knowledge, and pastoral reform of his vast diocese. Experimental curiosity plus episcopal rigour: the English bishop who imports Greek and natural philosophy into Franciscan and diocesan practice.
Grosseteste: late-appearing polymath bishop
Roger Bacon
- Purpose of study. Philosophy's utilitas is for theology and the conversion of unbelievers; yet geology, metallurgy and the sciences of origins are wrongly neglected.
- Systematiser. He wanted an encyclopaedia for beginners because the mind moves from the general to the particular, but he was prolix.
- Languages. He insisted on learning languages, beyond grammar and signification, perhaps challenged by Grosseteste's Greek.
| Aquinas | Bacon | |
|---|---|---|
| Errors of faith | Collects and answers them | Seeks their causes: weak authority, long custom, the mob's opinion |
| Disputed questions | Orders them in a framework | Abandon them; return to Scripture |
| Children's reading | Not discussed | Simple, moral Scripture, not Ovid |
Why experiment was a radical claim
Franciscan reform of learning for the papacy
Roger Bacon (c.1214/20-92): Oxford and Paris arts; Franciscan; experimental science, languages, and calendar reform. Opus Maius, Opus Minus, Opus Tertium for Clement IV; Compendium Studii Theologiae (1292). Utility of philosophy: convert unbelievers and reprove the unconverted; yet mathematics, optics, and scientia experimentalis are intrinsic goods for theology. Critic of scholastic vanity and corrupt clergy; possible periods of constraint within the Order. Evans presents him as the Franciscan who demands a new curriculum, not only a new Aristotle commentary.
Bacon: experimental curriculum for the Pope
Bonaventure
Six wings, six steps of illumination in the Itinerarium
- Works. Sentences commentary (1250-5), Breviloquium (1255-7), On the Mystery of the Trinity, Itinerarium (1259), Collationes in Hexaemeron (1273), and the Legenda Maior of Francis.
- Against an eternal world. Scripture says God created it, against Averroist readings condemned in 1270 and 1277.
- Anselmian ascent. Happiness is enjoyment of the highest good; the six steps mirror six days before the seventh's rest.
Paris mendicant doctor and Minister General
Born c.1217 Bagnorea; Franciscan in late teens; Paris under Alexander of Hales before 1245; theology lectures from 1248. Mendicant battle: Alexander IV (1256) orders Paris to accept Bonaventure and Aquinas as doctors. Minister General; Cardinal-Bishop of Albano 1273; dies Lyons 1274. Writing peaks 1250-9 (Sentences, Breviloquium, De mysterio Trinitatis, De scientia Christi, Itinerarium 1259) and 1267 to death (Collationes in Hexaemeron 1273). Against eternity of the world and Averroist threats (1270/1277 climate): contains Aristotle rather than Dominicans' full synthesis. Mystical itinerary from vestiges to God; Franciscan wisdom over pure philosophy.
Bonaventure: Franciscan ascent amid Aristotle wars
Albertus Magnus
The expanding syllabus
Logic moved from the logica vetus through the nova to the moderna; Aristotle's science arrived with Arabic commentators such as Avicenna. Paris statutes of 1274 required medical candidates to hold the arts licence and attend five and a half years of lectures (Hippocrates, Galen via the Arabs, Avicenna's Canon).
Albert's career
- Gaps filled. Falconry; a vain search for Aristotle on alchemy, using pseudo-Avicenna on transmuting metals; action at a distance.
- Place. Is place real, a receptaculum distinct from what it holds?
- The individual. The species is "the whole being of individuals"; man is studied as an animal, in De animalibus (c.1258-62), with experiments on bivalves.
| Cause | Traditional Trinitarian reading |
|---|---|
| Final | Linked with Father, Son and Holy Spirit |
| Formal | |
| Efficient | |
| Material | Matter created from nothing; Aristotle reopened the eternity of the world |
Recruitment, syllabus expansion, encyclopaedic age
Swabian knightly family; Padua arts; Jordan of Saxony recruits ~ten including two German counts' sons (almost certainly Albert among them); Dominican 1223. Universities institutionalise; Dominicans push formal syllabus beyond John of Salisbury's pick-your-lecturer habit. Logic: logica vetus to nova to moderna as new Aristotle arrives; natural science and Arabic commentary (Avicenna on De anima, dedicated to Toledo's archbishop) upset Christian assumptions yet draw curiosity. Higher degrees taught (Paris 1274 medicine statutes: arts licence plus 5.5 years); Hippocrates, Galen via Arabs, Avicenna's canon, Ars medicina. Dominicans also popularise: Vincent of Beauvais (Speculum maius, late 1250s) remedies ignorance, concupiscence, infirmity across naturale, historiale, doctrinale.
Career footprint
Lector in German houses by 1228 (Hildesheim, Freiburg, Regensburg, Strasbourg); Paris theology 1241; Master 1245; Dominican chair 1245-8; of Aquinas: "dumb ox" whose bellow will be heard worldwide. Cologne studium generale rector 1248 with Aquinas; Prior Provincial Teutonic province 1254 (Holland to Hungary), walking the roads (natural history); Anagni 1256 defends mendicants, lectures NT, refutes Averroes; 1259 studies working party; Bishop of Regensburg 1260 (poor, on foot); after Alexander IV's death (1261) resigns episcopal life, preaches crusade, teaches Würzburg/Strasbourg, Cologne 1271; dies 1280, outliving Aquinas. Synthesis of Aristotle with Christian tradition is the task Aquinas inherits and sharpens.
Albertus: province, studium, pupil Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
A contested career
Aquinas's career
He came to Paris amid the mendicant controversy: after the strike of 1229 the friars held three of about a dozen chairs, were suspected of serving papal policy, and the Dominicans' second chair was cut. In Rome (1265-8), at forty, he ran a studium with perhaps a bachelor and a lecturer to help. Bernard Gui says he dictated to three or four secretaries at once.
Authorities old and new
- Doctors, not Fathers. Fathers can slip into the contrary error before a matter is aired; "in things which do not belong to the faith we may have different opinions".
- Aristotle in full. Commentaries from De interpretatione to the Ethics and Politics taught teleology, and showed where Aristotle could not be followed.
- Detection. From Moerbeke's translation of Proclus he saw that the Liber de causis was not Aristotle; he answered the unity of intellect in De unitate intellectus.
| Summa theologiae (begun 1266) | Summa contra Gentiles | |
|---|---|---|
| Reader | Mature beginners in theology | The teacher facing unbelievers' errors |
| Order | Exitus from God and reditus to God | Errors by theme, not by sect |
| Fixes | Proliferating questions; Bible and Sentences not systematic | Dominicans as preachers against heresy |
Against the Cathars: the argument on evil in Contra Gentiles III
Family, Albert, mendicant chairs
Good family, Monte Cassino then Naples; joins Dominicans early 1240s; family waylays him en route to Paris (ambition: abbot of Monte Cassino); year of imprisonment. Paris under Albert (1246) during Aristotle synthesis; Cologne 1248-52; return 1252 into mendicant controversy. Secular strike 1229, return 1231 finds two Dominicans lecturing; resentment grows though mendicants hold only three of ~twelve chairs (plus Notre Dame canons). Aquinas finds the second Dominican chair gone (allocation cut to one); pamphlet war; Sentences commentary and De veritate. Master 1256; Paris to 1259 begins Summa contra Gentiles; Naples 1260; Orvieto 1261-4 (Urban IV); Rome 1265-8 founding Dominican studium largely alone (maybe a responding bachelor and a Scripture lecturer); imitates Albert's Cologne/Paris mix of lectures and disputations. Only Church-state book: De regimine principum. Third Paris stay 1269-72 against Averroists; Metaphysics and Scripture commentaries. Summa theologiae begun 1266; Part II in second regency; rest at Naples until 6 December 1273, when he stops ("like straw"); others finish to his plan. Bernard Gui: three or four secretaries at once, even dictating asleep. Dies 1274 en route to Lyons.
Authorities, adiaphora, method
Stock-taking after pioneering twelfth/early-thirteenth work, with a Thomist angle beyond Albert's preliminary Aristotle synthesis. The hard question: where to put new texts on the reliability ladder. He says doctores / sancti doctores, not patres ecclesiae; Fathers extend past the first centuries. Preface to Contra errores Graecorum: dubious patristic statements can occasion error; explain the uncertainty, then use it for the faith. Adiaphora: in things not of the faith, opinions may differ (Quodlibeta XII). Old doctors, eager to rebut error, can seem to slip into the contrary before a matter is defined. Comments (unusually) on Boethius's De Trinitate. Pedagogy and disputed-question form organise the Summae as teaching instruments for the Order.
Aquinas: vocation, chairs, unfinished Summa
Siger of Brabant
Aristotle and the Paris Arts Faculty
| Charge | Claim |
|---|---|
| Providence | Limited divine governance |
| Eternity of the world | No creation in time ex nihilo |
| Unicity of intellect | One intellect for all, from Averroes on De anima 430a |
| Moral freedom | Choice placed under necessity |
Arts Faculty Averroism and Tempier
Secular (non-mendicant) Arts master; Paris c.1255-60 as Aristotle and Arabic commentary flood in. 1210 synod bans Arts commentary on libri naturales into early 1250s; resistance; English nation adds De anima 1252. 1270 thirteen articles condemned by Stephen Tempier; 1277 wider syllabus of errors. Siger (Picard nation) first heard 1266; keen Aristotle seeming to threaten faith (monopsychism, eternity of world). Containment strategy: redefine philosophy's scope vs theology (Aquinas's opening move in ST). Evans's Siger stands for the Arts Faculty crisis the mendicant doctors try to master or police.
Siger: Arts Faculty under condemnation
John Duns Scotus
Scotus across four universities
| Step | Argument on whether God's existence is known per se (I d.2) |
|---|---|
| For | Damascene: knowledge of God implanted by nature; Anselm: that than which no greater can be thought |
| Against | The Fool denies God, so it is not self-evident (close to Aquinas) |
| Refinement | A self-evident proposition holds by its own terms (Posterior Analytics) |
| Saving the authorities | Damascene means a natural power to infer from creatures; Anselm meant something subtly different |
- One God only. Proofs must show one God, not many, though some held unicity only of faith.
- Attributes. Intellect and will are absolute properties; in God an attribute is his essence (Augustine, Boethius).
- Natural knowledge. No direct vision in this life, yet concepts of God held "properly", beyond mere comparison.
Franciscan subtle doctor: Oxford, Paris, Cologne
Born c.1265 (Duns, Scotland); Franciscan; Oxford then Paris; exile in 1303 royal-papal clash (refuses to side with Philip IV against Boniface VIII); returns; Cologne 1307-8; dies 1308. Ordinatio / Lectura on the Sentences; Quodlibeta. Univocity of being; formal distinction; haecceitas (thisness); Immaculate Conception defence; voluntarist ethics (will's primacy tempered by right reason). Evans contrasts Scotus's dense technicality with Ockham's later razor: Scotus multiplies formalities to save realism and freedom; critics call him obscure, admirers "Subtle Doctor."
Scotus: subtle distinctions under pressure
Dante Alighieri
Life and politics
The nobles were disenfranchised in 1284 and could regain rights through a guild. When the Guelfs split, the Blacks called on the pope and got Charles of Valois; the Whites lost property and went into exile. Hopes raised by Henry VII's siege of Florence died with him, and the sentence was renewed in 1315.
Dante's cosmos, from God to the centre of the earth
- Guides. Virgil, who described the underworld in Aeneid VI, leads through hell and purgatory; Beatrice takes over at the threshold of heaven (Purgatorio XXVII).
- Creation. From nothing, against the Timaeus craftsman; a hierarchy of being from matter to angels; even hell has beauty.
- Purgatory. Largely a twelfth-century creation of the penitential system, giving ordinary sinners hope.
| Work | Language | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Vita Nuova (c.1294) | Italian | Love story built on nines, rich in symbol |
| Divina Commedia | Italian | Journey through hell, purgatory, heaven |
| Convivio | Italian | Wisdom; when to use Latin (lasting, abstract) or vernacular |
| Monarchia (1320) | Latin | World empire; forty copies; used for Ludwig of Bavaria in 1329 |
Exile, vernacular epic, political theology
Florence 1265; White Guelf faction; priorate then exile after Black coup (1302); never returns; dies Ravenna 1321. Vita Nuova (Beatrice); Convivio; De vulgari eloquentia (defence of Italian); Monarchia (universal emperor under God, papal spiritual sphere distinct). Commedia: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso as moral map of cosmos and city. Evans places him among thinkers because the poem systematises scholastic cosmology, ethics, and papal-imperial theory for a lay vernacular audience. Political hope in Henry VII's Italian descent; bitterness when empire fails. Not a university master, yet the century's most influential synthesis of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustinian pilgrimage for readers outside the schools.
Dante: exile, empire, vernacular cosmos
Monarchia and the failed emperor
Monarchia: temporal monarchy under God frees the world for peace so intellects can flourish; pope guides to eternal life, emperor to temporal happiness, two suns, not moon-under-sun. Hope pinned on Henry VII; failure sharpens the Commedia's judgment scenes. Evans includes Dante among "thinkers" because the poem and the tract together teach scholastic cosmology and Church-empire theory to readers who will never open a Sentences commentary.
Ramon Llull
Llull's method in the Principia philosophiae
- Categories reworked. Nine rather than ten: what, whence, why, how big, what kind, when and where, how, in what company.
- Catalan. He used the vernacular for philosophy in a pioneering way.
- Paradox. "Love is an ocean... it has no port or shore": one verse for each day of the year.
Meister Eckhart
Eckhart's career
- Beguines. Lower-class women seeking a religious life outside the system of aristocratic abbeys, often near friaries; Mechthild of Magdeburg is one.
- Martha before Mary. Mary had to learn to serve before she was Mary in nature.
- Birth of the Word. In a stilled mind God acts in the passive intellect and is begotten there.
| Stage | Charge |
|---|---|
| Inquisition, 1326 | 150 propositions; pantheism or antinomianism suspected |
| Papal commission | 28 propositions, heretical "prout verba sonant" |
| Example | "Even he who blasphemes against God praises God" |
Dominican preacher under suspicion
Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327/8): Dominican; Paris master; German vernacular sermons and Latin academic works. Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), birth of the Word in the soul, Godhead beyond God-as-named. Papal process under John XXII; bull In agro dominico condemns propositions after his death. Evans sets him with the late medieval tension between university theology and popular preaching: speculative mysticism that courts misunderstanding when heard outside the schools. Bridge toward Cusa's learned ignorance and later German mysticism.
Eckhart: school Latin and risky vernacular
Thomas Bradwardine
Oxford mathematics
The pre-1350 statutes prescribed Boethius's Arithmetica, Euclid, the Compotus, the Algorismus and Sacrobosco's De Sphaera. Euclid's demonstrative method, running from self-evident truths to necessary conclusions, looked better than mere probable syllogisms, and Bradwardine linked it with Posterior Analytics I.2.
- Geometria speculativa (1320s). A fresh treatise, not a commentary; Euclid's 32nd proposition in five steps; star polygons; new theorems.
- De proportionibus (1328). Mechanics from Gerard of Brussels' Liber de motu; Aristotle's forces, times and distances found mathematically inconsistent.
From Aristotle's rule of motion to Bradwardine's
Grace and the cause of God
Romans 9.16 drew him into a revived Pelagian debate; the De causa Dei was finished in 1344.
| Question | Bradwardine's answer |
|---|---|
| Foreknowledge and freedom | God's prescience can be necessary without coercion; we are moved unawares and act freely |
| Past/future split ("Ockhamist") | Resisted; the problem goes back to De interpretatione and Boethius |
| Cause of predestination | A free gift, since dependence on works would make it uncertain |
| Despair | Rejects "Cainites" (sins too grave) and "Judaeans" (sins too many) |
Merton Calculator, grace, Black Death
Thomas Bradwardine (c.1295-1349): Merton College, Oxford; one of the Calculators applying mathematics to motion and proportion. De causa Dei against Pelagianism: radical priority of divine will and grace. Chaplain and confessor to Edward III; Archbishop of Canterbury 1349; dies of plague within weeks. Evans links mathematical theology and pastoral/political service: Oxford technique serving Augustinian soteriology at the eve of the Black Death.
Bradwardine: mathematics, grace, brief primacy
Mathematics serving Augustine
De causa Dei is not a side project to the Calculators' kinematics: Bradwardine uses proportion theory to argue that grace and divine will admit no Pelagian bargaining. Court chaplaincy to Edward III puts the same mind next to royal power; the 1349 primacy lasting weeks under plague stamps the entry with contingency. Evans's juxtaposition: Oxford's hardest technical culture and the oldest anti-Pelagian polemic arrive together at Canterbury's brief summit.
William of Ockham
From Oxford to Munich
Ockham's path from schoolman to exile
The Franciscans under Michael of Cesena rejected John XXII's rulings on whether Christ and the apostles owned property (Cum inter nonnullos; Quia quorundam, 1324). Ockham saw that John contradicted earlier popes. Excommunicated in 1328, the group kept the order's seal. After Ludwig's death in 1347 a submission was sent in his name.
Guiding principles (after Boehner)
- Omnipotence. God can do all that involves no contradiction, and directly whatever he does through secondary causes: an oak with or without an acorn.
- Evidence. Hold nothing true unless self-evident, revealed, known from experience, or deduced from these; this, says Boehner, is the real razor.
- Causation. Against Scotus's chain of causes, an embedding of effects within causes; creatures are always contingent.
- Ethics. An act is good or bad solely by God's will; a command to hate God would be an ethical, not logical, impossibility.
| Work | Target | Claim |
|---|---|---|
| Opus nonaginta dierum (1332-4) | John XXII on poverty | Use versus lordship; Adam's dominium before the Fall |
| Letter to the Friars Minor (1334) | John XXII | Four years to "see through" a false pope |
| Contra Benedictum (1338 on) | Benedict XII | A pope's declaration does not make truth |
| Dialogus | Councils, Scripture | Whoever errs against Scripture is the heretic; councils guided but not blindly |
| Breviloquium | Two swords | One ruler best for the Church; temporal power not all from the pope |
Avignon, poverty, Munich
Franciscan from youth; subdeacon Southwark 1306; Oxford theology c.1309-15; Scripture lectures 1315-17, Sentences 1317-19. University politics may have blocked a Regent Mastership and chair. London studium years for non-political works. Lutterell, deposed Oxford chancellor and Thomist, becomes enemy; Edward II (1322) first refuses him leave to air quarrels abroad, then allows Avignon (1323). Fifty-six theses before the pope; Ockham summoned c.1324; commission 1328 on Sentences teaching; 51 of 56 open to censure, no formal condemnation. At Avignon he joins Michael of Cesena against John XXII on evangelical poverty (Inter nonnullos; Quia quorundam 1324). Flees 1328 to Emperor Ludwig (elected 1314, excommunicated 1324, invades Italy 1327). Munich excommunication by pope and Order; they keep the Order's seal; after Michael's death (1342) Ockham holds it, writing Church-state tracts. Ludwig dies 1347; Ockham seeks reconciliation, returns the seal, signs (or is said to sign) that the Emperor cannot depose the Pope and that former teaching was heretical (Oxford work omitted); dies almost at once.
Guiding principles and the razor
Boehner's cluster: (1) God can do all but contradiction (Quodlibeta VI q.6); (2) what God does by secondary causes he can do immediately (oak from acorn or directly); (3) any reality can be made apart from any other (Reportatio II); (4) hold truths only if self-evident, revealed, experienced, or deduced from revelation/observation (Ordinatio d.30). That last is the real "razor": frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora. Few propositions about God are demonstrable; existence is among them. Against Scotus's infinite regress of efficient causes, Ockham prefers causation as container (embedding, not Aristotelian chain). With Scotus: some attributes are necessary to God (intellectual nature); creatures are unavoidably contingent. Ethics: act good or bad solely by God's will; God cannot will evil because what he wills is good by definition; rational creatures obey.
Ockham: from logic to Church and empire
Baldus of Ubaldis
Baldus's layers of authority
- Legitimising power. City-states rushed to buy privileges from Charles IV in 1355; imperial sovereignty legitimised more than it ruled.
- Corporation. Accursius said a corporation is "nothing other than the men who are there"; Baldus inclined to a corpus mysticum, joined with Aristotle's political man.
Consilia, cities, corporate person
Born c.1327 Perugia (Evans: c.1319 in headword; son of a doctor). Studies Perugia/Pisa; Roman law under Bartolus; canon law under Petruccius. Lectures Perugia from c.1351; Pisa 1357-8; Florence 1359-64; Perugia 1365-76; Padua; Pavia from 1390; dies 1400. Retained advocate of Perugia's guild-republic; ambassador to the Emperor; moves in Schism years. More consilia survive than for any other medieval jurist; political thought emerges from cases, not tracts. Corporate person (many bodies, one legal body) meets Aristotelian natural polity: law as practical political theory for Italian cities.
Baldus: case-law politics for cities
John Wyclif
Life
Wyclif's rise and fall
Oxford had a habit of dissent: Richard Fitzralph, later a "Lollard saint", whose De pauperie salvatoris shaped Wyclif on poverty, Bradwardine and Buckingham. Without ecumenical councils, a disputed opinion was hard to settle.
The Kenningham debate
| Kenningham | Wyclif |
|---|---|
| Wyclif makes antiquity the cause of Scripture's authority | Antiquity means God's eternity, where past and future are present |
| Old poets forgotten, later philosophers valued | "I sit" and "John speaks" are eternally true too |
| Older charters prove nothing; an analogy too weak | A theologian should study the Word, not defend charters |
| Is all Scripture true de virtute sermonis? | Scripture is the divine exemplar, existing before it was written |
- Dominion. No true dominion in mortal sin; Christ forbids clergy civil power, as the Waldensians said.
- Ministry. Preaching comes first; the old unworthy minister question reopens.
- "Sects". Monks, canons and friars are "newe mannys ordres" that split Christ's order.
Politics, bulls, and the late works
Teaching from the 1350s; logic 1361-71. Evans claims Schism distraction at Avignon let radical work pass (A closer look: Avignon papacy vs Schism from 1378). Royal service 1371/2; Gaunt calls him to London 1376 against Wykeham and the Good Parliament; Bishop of London summons 1377; king dies, Richard II resets attention. Bulls of Gregory XI (source: Gregory IX) list 19 errors (1377); English condemnation attempts fail 1378. That year: De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, De ecclesia; 1379: De officio regis, De potestate papae, De Eucharistia. Oxford Eucharistic commission 1380 drives him out; Lutterworth from 1381. Blackfriars 1382 condemns propositions (entry: ten; often counted twenty-four with ten heretical); followers flee; Trialogus 1382; Opus Evangelicum finished 1384.
Metaphysics into Bible: Kenningham continued
Moderate-to-extreme realist: all that exists has intelligible being God eternally knows; actual things have ideal being eternally present to God. Kenningham (Carmelite, 1371-3) attacks antiquity-as-authority; cites forgotten old poets vs valued later philosophers. Wyclif: God sees past/present/future as present, so what was and will be "is" for God; "antiquity" means eternity, not Augustine's age-in-time; present-tense truths ("I sit") are eternal too. Charter analogy for older instruments; Kenningham: insufficient likeness; Laurence did not die of "antiquity". Wyclif refuses the sidetrack: theologian's job is the Word living through ages. Principale propositum: is all Scripture true de virtute sermonis? Amos paradox returns via Gregory. Suggested extreme fundamentalism: Bible as material Word and divine exemplar before writing; dislikes "sensory"/figurative lightness (impertinencia); papal law is "mannis law". Yet he asks why Scripture uses tropes; Kenningham lists eternity, certainty, or translator whim. Late stance: what is not in Scripture directly or by inference is Antichrist's teaching. Postilla (1375-6) sets early-Church poverty as standard.
Dominion, ministry, sects, Eucharist fall
De civili dominio (1376-8): no true dominion in mortal sin (factual control may remain); Christ forbids clerical civil power (Waldensian echo); unworthy-minister question reopens against patristic settlement. Ministry is spiritual: feed with the Word; preaching primary; choose by God's law not princes or money; simony and power-lust mark wrong appointments. "Sects" (monks, canons, friars) are newe mannys ordres: human invention, extra requirements, habits as slavery, division of Christ's one order into quarreling diversities. William Barton's twelve-doctor commission engineers public Eucharistic condemnation (1380-1).
Influence
Returns Bible to Oxford's centre; Purvey, Hereford, Repton, Aston spread a popular movement; vernacular Bible association; Prague manuscripts show Hussite reading. Long controversy category: academic dissent without ecumenical councils after East-West split, Lateran meetings only Western, Schism and struggling conciliarism making a Wyclif hard to settle.
From Oxford logic to popular dissent
Pierre d'Ailly
D'Ailly from schoolman to cardinal
- Insolubles. Liar paradoxes and Amos's "I am not a prophet"; one answer is that such a sentence says nothing.
- Mental language. For Ockham's followers its terms are concepts and its sentences judgements; nominalism struggles to explain shared knowledge.
| D'Ailly against Chancellor Blanchard (c.1386) | |
|---|---|
| Charge | Fees raised, levied systematically, new fines invented |
| Two scandals | Selling the "free gift of knowledge"; calling that acceptable |
| Principle | The power to license is like the power to prophesy: not for sale |
| Benefice | Already paid to license, a fee-seeking chancellor lives dishonestly |
Navarre, Schism, conciliarist rise
College of Navarre 1364-78; BA 1367; first theology year (1368-9) while lecturing arts; synod of Paris sermon 1374, Navarre 1377. 1378-84 build-up to Great Schism: keen General Council defender. Epistola diaboli Leviathan: Satan's letter against calling a council (irony as diatribe). May 1381 four Faculties meet; support council; d'Ailly chosen to tell the Court (later delegation politics complicate the mission). Chancellor of Paris; Bishop of Cambrai; cardinal. Pisa and Constance architect among Paris masters; astronomy and astrology interests (Imago mundi later read by Columbus tradition) sit beside ecclesial politics. Patron of Gerson. Career shows university as royal and papal actor when the papacy itself splits.
d'Ailly: Paris master turned conciliar cardinal
Jean Gerson
Gerson's career
- The King's daughter. The University was the crown's adviser, "daughter of the King, fountain of knowledge".
- Reform programme. Stop frivolous argument; read the Bible, Anselm, Bernard, Richard of St Victor, Bonaventure and Aquinas.
- Plain speech. Vernacular works for simples gens: the Mountain of Contemplation, the Commandments, sin.
| Power of the soul (De mystica theologia) | Function |
|---|---|
| Simple intelligence | Illumination direct from God |
| Reason | Conclusions from premises |
| Sense | Uses bodily senses |
| Synderesis | Appetite inclined to good |
| Rational and sensual appetite | All distorted by sin |
Navarre, University as King's daughter, Schism diplomacy
Born 1363 Ardennes/Champagne; local priory then Abbey of Saint-Rémy, Rheims; College of Navarre 1377 (early French humanism); meets Pierre d'Ailly as master. BA 1381, BTh 1387, DTh 1394; Proctor of the French Nation 1383-4. Paris University's royal protection and counsel role frame his career: chaplain to the Duke of Burgundy from 1393. He writes in French for a rectorial delegation: la piteuse et très miserable complainte de la fille du roi ma mere, l'université de Paris, the University as king's daughter by royal adoption seeking customary protection. At twenty-four (1388) he joins a university embassy; d'Ailly's patronage opens court doors. Chancellor of Notre-Dame and of the University 1395; resigns the college rectorship but keeps the chancellor's spiritual and academic hold. Great Schism politics: university assemblies on ending the schism; conciliarist pressure toward Pisa (1409) and Constance (1414-18); Gerson as theological voice for unity without surrendering reform of papal and university life.
Mystical theology and pastoral reform
Alongside politics he writes on mystical theology (De mystica theologia), distinguishing speculative and affective paths; condemns false claims of rapture and quietism while defending genuine contemplation. Sermons and vernacular tracts aim at clergy and laity; Paris pastoral care and confession practice sit beside conciliar diplomacy. After Constance he spends later years partly in exile/retreat (Lyons), still writing on Church reform and the spiritual life until 1429.
Gerson: university power and spiritual counsel
Nicholas of Cusa
Unity across Cusa's ecclesiology, interfaith work and mysticism
- Concordantia catholica (1432-3). Grace flows from Christ; the pope is answerable to a council; obedience needs consent.
- Learned ignorance. In the line of Ps-Dionysius, Proclus, Eriugena and Eckhart: one of the first to suggest the earth moves; God the sphere whose centre is everywhere, used six times.
From Basle minority to papal unity
Brothers of the Common Life, Deventer; Heidelberg 1416; Padua canon law 1418 (scientific centre); doctor decretorum 1423; Rome; Cologne theology 1425 (Aquinas under Hymeric Van den Velde) on a Trier benefice. Legal work for Cologne chapter draws Cardinal Giordano Orsini; meets Poggio and Loschi. 1437 Basle minority envoy toward Greek reunion at Ferrara; 1438 breaks with conciliarism for the papal party. Early De concordantia catholica: Church as corporation/guild run by members; later Docta ignorantia: learned ignorance, coincidence of opposites. Lifetime spans Schism aftermath to Hussite crisis. Evans's Cusa: conciliar democrat who becomes the century's theorist of mystical unity under Rome.
Cusa: corporation ecclesiology into learned ignorance
Gabriel Biel
Conciliarism in decline around Biel
- Church's word. What the Church defines "must be believed with the same reverence as though it were stated in Scripture".
- Bounded plenitude. He quotes Bernard's plenitudo potestatis, yet papal power exists only for the Church's edification.
Via moderna, Brethren, Tübingen
Born Speyer; ordained while in Heidelberg Arts; teaches nine years; Erfurt briefly 1442/3, returns 1451 for theology; linked to both via antiqua and via moderna; theology licence by 1474. Brethren of the Common Life (devotio moderna) 1460-84; Marienthal; General Chapter of upper-Rhine houses by 1471; Mainz cathedral preacher (sermons survive); flees local Church politics. Tübingen theology faculty 1484; rector 1485-9; retires Einsiedel St Peter's (nobility, clergy, burgesses together); dies 1495. Defensorium obedientie apostolice (1462): against archbishop-elect's attack on the papal see as conciliarism wanes after Execrabilis (1460). Nominalist Sentences commentary feeds later schoolmen (including young Luther's world). Evans closes the fifty with a teacher who holds modern devotion, university faction, and residual papalism together.
Biel: devotion, obedience, last scholastic bridge
What Fifty Medieval Thinkers Teach
Takeaways
- Authority is ranked, not flat. From Augustine's rules to Aquinas's "doctors", readers sorted texts by reliability before using them.
- Contradiction is a method. Abelard's Sic et non, Ivo's prologue and Lombard's Sentences turn clashing texts into questions.
- Context explains dissent. Ivo and Aquinas both saw that a Father could err before a matter was aired.
- Dialectic has limits. Berengar and Damian fought over whether logic may judge sacraments and omnipotence.
- Faith seeks understanding. Anselm's programme set reason inside belief, not against it.
- Translation reshapes thought. Boethius, Eriugena, Grosseteste and Moerbeke changed what Latin readers could know.
- New texts cause crises. Aristotle and Averroes brought the eternity of the world and one shared intellect.
- Containment beats prohibition. The 1210 ban failed; Albert and Aquinas absorbed Aristotle instead.
- Condemnation is blunt. Tempier's 1277 list caught Aquinas alongside Siger.
- Experiment enters. Adelard's reason before authority, Grosseteste's optics and Bacon's scientia experimentalis.
- Mathematics enters physics. Bradwardine wrote a law of motion with real mathematics.
- Visions carry authority. Hildegard, Joachim and Francis spoke outside the schools and were heard.
- Poverty is political. The Franciscan dispute made Ockham a critic of papal power.
- Truth is not declared. Ockham: a pope's statement does not make a doctrine true.
- Dominion needs legitimacy. Wyclif tied lawful power to grace; Baldus tied law to the people's consent.
- Councils as a check. D'Ailly, Gerson and Cusa sought to make the pope answer to a council.
- Unity can cut both ways. Cusa used it for councils; Biel used it for Rome.
- The vernacular widens the audience. Dante, Llull, Eckhart and Gerson wrote for those outside Latin.
- Fame is made later. Aquinas became central only when his order and the sixteenth century adopted him.
How the question of authority moved across the book
Frameworks
| Framework | Thinker | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Sic et non | Abelard | Sets authorities against each other to force analysis |
| Exitus and reditus | Aquinas | Orders theology from God and back to God |
| Six steps of ascent | Bonaventure | Maps contemplation from senses to the Good |
| Three ages | Joachim | Reads history as Father, Son, Spirit |
| Ockham's razor | Ockham | Asks for evidence before multiplying claims |
| Dominion by grace | Wyclif | Tests power by the holder's state |
| Corporation and consent | Baldus | Grounds law in the people as a legal person |
| Learned ignorance | Cusa | Approaches God through what cannot be known |
Who's who
| Role | Thinkers |
|---|---|
| Founders of the canon | Augustine, Jerome, Boethius, Ps-Dionysius |
| Compilers | Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bede, Lombard, Vincent of Beauvais |
| Dialecticians | Berengar, Anselm, Abelard, Ockham |
| Scientists | Gerbert, Adelard, Grosseteste, Bacon, Albert, Bradwardine |
| Mystics and visionaries | Hildegard, Joachim, Bonaventure, Eckhart, Llull |
| Lawyers and church politicians | Hincmar, Ivo, Baldus, d'Ailly, Gerson, Cusa, Biel |
| Beyond Latin Christendom | Maimonides, Averroes |
About this book
Fifty Key Medieval Thinkers by G. R. Evans, 2002. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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