The university is born
Paris, Oxford, Bologna — the great schools rise
The twelfth century produces one of the most consequential institutions in Western history, and the church produces it.
The cathedral schools that have been educating clergy since the Carolingian era begin to attract students from across Europe — not just clergy in training but anyone who can pay or beg or work their way to Paris or Bologna or Oxford to learn. The schools grow. Teachers gather. Guilds of masters and students form to regulate the curriculum and protect their interests.
By the late twelfth century these gatherings have become universities — from the Latin universitas, a guild or corporation. The University of Bologna, the oldest, specializes in law. The University of Paris, the greatest intellectual center of the medieval world, specializes in theology. Oxford grows from the overflow of Paris.
The university is a medieval Christian invention. Its structure — the bachelor's degree, the master's degree, the doctorate, the disputation, the lecture — is a product of the church's need to train educated clergy and its conviction that reason and revelation are compatible.
The same institution that produces Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus will produce Roger Bacon's empirical experiments and the foundations of Western science. The same method — the structured disputation, the careful examination of objections — will produce the Reformation's theological arguments.
The monks saved the books. The university taught the world to argue about them. Both were forms of worship.
“The pursuit of wisdom is the most perfect, the most sublime, the most profitable, and the most delightful of all human pursuits.”
— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.2, c. 1264 AD
“Wisdom is supreme. Get wisdom. Yes, though it costs all your possessions, get understanding.”
The university was built by the church because the church believed that careful thinking honored God — that the mind given to understanding creation and scripture was doing a form of worship.
This is a foundational conviction of the Christian intellectual tradition, and it is fragile in every generation. The church has sometimes treated intellectual rigor as the enemy of faith. The university has sometimes treated faith as the enemy of intellectual rigor.
Both are wrong. The tradition of Anselm and Aquinas and the cathedral schools insists that faith and reason are not enemies but companions — that the same God made the human mind and revealed himself in scripture, and that these two cannot ultimately contradict each other.
Does your faith make you more curious, more rigorous, more willing to follow an argument wherever it leads? If not, what is inhibiting it?