Changes in the schools and philosophies
Monastic schools
In the first place, the monastic reformers made the decision to close their schools to those who did not intend to enter upon a cloistered life. According to their idea of solitude and sanctity, recalling the words of St. Jerome, “The monk was not made to teach but to mortify himself.” Divine works were to be the only object of study and meditation, and Pierre de Celle asserted that “divine science ought to mould rather than question, to nourish conscience rather than knowledge.”
The scholarly monks completed their studies before being admitted to the monastery—the age of entrance in Benedictine houses, for instance, being fixed at 15 years at Cîteaux and 20 years at Cluny. If there were admitted a few oblates (laymen living in monasteries under modified rules), they were given an ascetic and moral education and were taught to read the Holy Writ and, what was still more desirable, to “relish” it. In the Carthusian monastery, the four steps of required spiritual exercise were reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. Thus there existed a monastic culture, but there were no truly monastic studies such as those that had existed in the 9th and 10th centuries. The rich libraries of the monasteries served only a few scholarly abbots, while the monks searched for God through prayer and asceticism.
Urban schools
In the cities, on the contrary, the schools offered to all the clergy who so desired the means of satisfying their intellectual appetite. More and more of them attended these schools, for the studies were a good means of social advancement or material profit. The development of royal and municipal administrations offered the clergy new occupations. Hence the success of the schools for notaries and the schools of law. These schools were organized under the protection of the collegiate churches and the cathedrals. The schools for secular subjects were directed by an archdeacon, chancellor, cantor, or cleric who had received the title of scholasticus, caput scholae, or magister scholarum and who was assisted by one or more auxiliary masters. The success of the urban schools was such that it was necessary, in the middle of the 12th century, to define the teaching function. Only those who were provided with the licencia docendi conferred by the bishop—or, more often, by the scholasticus—could teach. Those who were licensed taught within the limits of the city or the diocese, whose clerical leaders supervised this monopoly and intervened if a cleric set himself up as master without having the right. The popes were sufficiently concerned about licensing that the Lateran Council of 1179 gave this institution universal application.
New curricula and philosophies
The pupils who attended these urban schools learned in them their future occupation as clerics; they learned Latin, learned to sing the various offices, and studied Holy Writ. The more gifted ones extended their studies further and applied for admission to the liberal arts (the trivium, made up of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the quadrivium, including geometry, arithmetic, harmonics, and astronomy) and subsequently to philosophy. Philosophy had four branches: theoretical, practical, logical, and mechanical. The theoretical was divided into theology, physics, and mathematics; the practical consisted of morals or ethics (personal, economic, political). The logical, which concerned discourse, consisted of the three arts of the trivium. Finally, the mechanical included the work of processing wool, of navigation, of agriculture, of medicine, and so on. This was an ambitious humanistic program. In fact, the students became specialized in the study of one art or another according to their tastes or the presence of a renowned master, such as Guillaume de Champeaux at Paris and St. Victor for rhetoric and theology; Peter Abelard at Paris for dialectic and theology; Bernard de Chartres for grammar; William of Conches at Chartres for grammar, ethics, and medicine; and Thierry de Chartres for rhetoric. In particular, teachers of the “literary” arts, grammar and rhetoric, always had great success in a period of enthusiasm for the ancient authors. It may be noted that Bernard de Chartres organized his literary teaching in this fashion: grammatical explanations (declinatio), studies of authors, and each morning the correction of the exercises given the day before.
The third art of the trivium, logic (or dialectics), was nevertheless a strong competitor of the other two, grammar and rhetoric. Since the 11th century, Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, which had been translated centuries earlier by Boethius, had developed the taste for reasoning, and, by the time Abelard arrived in Paris around 1100, interest in dialectics was flourishing. The written words of the Scriptures and of the Fathers of the Church were to be subjected to the scrutiny of human reason; a healthy skepticism was to be the stepping-stone to knowledge, aided by an understanding of critical logic.
While dialectic reigned in Paris, the masters at Chartres offered a study of the whole of the quadrivium. This interest in the sciences, which had been manifest at Chartres since the early 11th century, had been favoured by the stimulus of Greco-Arabic translations. The works of Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, and other Hellenic and Hellenistic scholars, as preserved in the Arabic manuscripts, were translated in southern Italy, Sicily, and Spain and were gradually transmitted northward. The scientific revival allowed the Chartrians to Christianize Greek cosmology, to explain Genesis according to physics, and to rediscover nature.
Another revival was that of law. The conflicts in the second half of the 12th century between the church and the lay powers encouraged on both sides a new activity in the juridical field. The princes found in the Corpus Juris Civilis, the 6th-century Roman code of the emperor Justinian, the means of legitimizing their politics, and the papacy likewise used Roman sources to promote its claims.
Thomist philosophy
In the long view, the greatest educational and philosophical influence of the age was St. Thomas Aquinas, who in the 13th century made a monumental attempt to reconcile the two great streams of the Western tradition. In his teaching at the University of Paris and in his writings—particularly the Summa theologiae and the Summa contra gentiles—Aquinas tried to synthesize reason and faith, philosophy and theology, university and monastery, and activity and contemplation. In his writings, however, faith and theology ultimately took precedence over reason and philosophy because the former were presumed to give access to truths that were not available through rational inquiry. Hence, Aquinas started with assumptions based on divine revelation and went on to a philosophical explication of man and nature. The model of the educated man that emerged from this process was the Scholastic, whose rational intelligence had been vigorously disciplined for the pursuit of moral excellence and whose highest happiness was found in contemplation of the Christian God.
The Scholastic model greatly affected the development of Western education, especially in fostering the notion of intellectual discipline. Aquinas’s theological-philosophical doctrine was a powerful intellectual force throughout the West, being officially adopted by the Dominican order (of which Aquinas was a member) in the 13th century and by the Jesuits in the 17th century. Known as Thomism, this doctrine came to constitute the basis of official Roman Catholic theology from 1879. Although Aquinas made an important place in his hierarchy of values for the practical uses of reason, later Thomists were often more exclusively intellectual in their educational emphasis.