History's religion: a modern anxiety
Owing to certain contingencies not easily described in brief, “history of religion”—or, alternatively, “history of religions”—has become one of the standard American appellations for the study of religion conducted in the universities. Although it is now more common to designate the whole enterprise inclusively and rather vaguely as “religious studies,” before this terminological settlement there had been several loose synonyms naming more or less the same thing, or similar enough things, all dating back to the nineteenth century. Among them were “comparative religion,” “comparative history of religion” (Vergleichende Religionsgeschichte), and “science of religion” (Religionswissenschaft; science des religions). Though thus varied, this cluster of nomenclature collectively signals some self-defining characteristics of a distinctly modern kind of scholarly endeavor; that is, distinct and different from another kind, of much longer standing. This other, older sort of “religious studies,” as practitioners of the newer science are wont to aver, was predicated on altogether different principles and premises, and it flourished not in the university but rather in ecclesiastical and monastic institutions. It is pointedly asserted, moreover, that, in contrast to this fideistic scholarly exercise, the properly academic study of religion is predicated not on any creedal tenets or scriptural traditions but solely on documentary, ethnographic, archaeological, and other kinds of empirical evidence, as well as on sound reasoning and research methods commensurate with all other sciences. In effect, the aforesaid cluster of nomenclature concertedly implies that, by virtue of being rendered an object of historiographic description and documentation, religion has become for the first time an eminently suitable subject to be studied publicly by anyone; as such, this scholarship is fit for integration into a system of public education, especially at the university level, even under a stringent regime of church and state separation.
It may be thought curious that today's practitioners of the academic study of religion are not particularly keen to call this scholarship secular, except in certain specific contexts, mostly having to do with litigation or legislation.Footnote 1 This is not the place to speculate on the full gamut of reasons that might account for anyone's reticence to ascribe outright secularity to the academic study of religion.Footnote 2 That said, there is room enough to wonder just what unwelcome complications could ensue if one were to call it secular and to cite that fact as grounds for its legitimacy within the (presumably secular) academy.Footnote 3 One of the complicating factors could be the enduring presence of theology in many prominent institutions of higher learning today, often as a subfield or a subspecialty within the domain of religious studies.
But what is theology? While the appellation “religious studies” has been more or less stabilized in recent decades owing to its regular presence in the university curriculum, the term “theology” appears to be volatile, its definition up for grabs. The term is liable to turn up as a stock fighting word among religion scholars, enlisted by anyone who aims to stake out a position, pick a fight, or settle scores by weaponizing the term, pro or con, to suit whatever purpose at hand. In short, today's learned profession seems confused, at times wildly equivocal, about what theology is, or what it is supposed to have been in the past. This state of affairs is markedly dissonant with a well-known fact that an organ called “the faculty of theology” or “divinity” has been part of the university since the Middle Ages. Most commonplace accounts of the history of the university would rehearse that theology, alongside law and medicine, was one of the three “higher faculties” of the medieval university.Footnote 4 Theology was often called the first faculty, we are told, in due reverence, presumably, to its subject matter. How, then, did theology become so alienated from the very institution in which, as it is often alleged, it once reigned as queen?
Today, most denizens of the university appear to take little cognizance of theology where it is still extant; their sentiments often range from low-grade reproof to condescension, if not plain indifference. The venerable science with God as its grounding concept may be thus ignored or considered a fossil, perhaps something to do with the institution's past denominational legacy. This no doubt is one of the reasons why the self-styled modern scholar–scientists of religion are eager to differentiate their enterprise from theology as thus perceived. These scholars make a point of insisting that religion can be objectified and historicized; that is, recognized as an object defined by empirical evidence, and not as a premise or a precondition of some special kind of knowledge. But if this should be the difference between the old and the new sorts of “religious studies,” then how did the transformation from theology to science of religion, or this displacement of the fideistic study of God's revelation by the scientific “history of religion(s),” come about? Some kind of explanation is called for, and that explanation itself must be historical.
Of course, such explanatory narratives abound, and for the most part they follow a familiar plotline that can be called the standard secularization narrative. Whatever the variation, this narrative assumes that people in premodern times were far more religious in their outlook than we are today, and accordingly ecclesiastical authorities exercised far greater control over the society, and that temporal rulers and civil authorities were far more likely to be in alliance, be it agonistic or conniving, with religious institutions and their personnel. Hence, this narrative implies, theology qua “science of God” was an overweening presence in the medieval university, and through the offices of this preeminent faculty, the university served the needs and interests of church and state in the course of fulfilling its own intrinsic purpose. This condition began to change in the West, so the story goes, in the early modern period, when the hegemonic reign of the Roman Church was permanently lost; the ecclesiastical and political breakup of Latin Christendom, combined with the new discovery of hitherto unknown worlds and re-cognition of non-Christian traditions as other religions, ushered in a new era, in which the new science of religion was but one eventual outcome.Footnote 5
This narrative is thus both tragi-heroic and triumphal at the same time; it is about a loss and about an overcoming of what once had been. Observed on either side of the sentiment, it is a story of an irreversible break with the past. Perhaps because of the very structure of the narrative, however, there lingers a doubt, and also an anxiety. Was the break clean? Did the centuries-long process of secularization really allow academic disciplines (study of religion included) to come into their own, outgrowing servile submission to the tutelage of ecclesiastical authorities, liberating themselves from the fetters of providential teleology, and finally learning to “speak for themselves,” as it were, thus achieving their Mündigkeit? If this is the basic plot of scientific maturation, it seems inexorable that the transition from “theology” to “religious studies” was effected by the thorough historicization of its central object—that is to say, by the transformation of “religion” as an object of attention from the content of revelation to the data of history. But if so, it seems natural, and therefore easy to understand, that there should be persistent worries about the completeness of this transformation, about the possible furtive remainder: history's religion. What if some residual theology lurks in the penumbra of modern scientific historiography, if not in its very heart?
But this question already presumes too much. To examine “history's religion” critically, and to diagnose correctly the anxiety disorder associated with it, must mean more than arguing about the moment of the alleged break, its nature, its extent, or its possible illusoriness. Rather, it is the construction of a particular image of the past—a picture of “before”—that should first come under scrutiny. Here, it is not my intention to challenge the secularization narrative tout court, or any particular version thereof. The aim of this article is limited to casting a cursory glance at the medieval university and the position of theology in relation to it, in the hopes of arriving at a preliminary assessment of one of the key premises of this desolation–liberation narrative.
How wrapped up in religion were the Middle Ages? How domineering a presence was theology in the medieval university? The first question may be too nebulous; but regarding the second, some empirical bases for answering it begin to suggest themselves.
* * *
Activities that we today would call theological obviously have been going on for a long time. In the context of the western hemisphere and of Christianity in particular, we might say that these activities go back to the days of Church Fathers, when certain prominent proponents of various Jesus movements populating the Mediterranean world in the early Christian centuries were deliberating, proclaiming, and disputing among themselves. As of the fourth century, moreover, the stakes at these contestations were elevated significantly under imperial patronage, for with this privilege came added pressure, in the form of ecumenical councils and recurrent imperial mandates, to come to some kind of agreement, in the interest of arriving at a singular creed of universal orthodoxy befitting the universal empire—the goal, however, that was never to be achieved. Christian apologies and creedal justifications in the face of unbelieving opponents, and then ever more exacting articulations and specifications of what is right to believe and to profess—these discursive activities we may reasonably call theology, even if the protagonists themselves did not at the time.Footnote 6 Meanwhile, theology as an academic discipline and as a curricular component within the university—an institution new to the West beginning in the twelfth century—this is an altogether different matter.Footnote 7
The idea that academic theology evolved from those ancient discursivities naturally, organically, and intrinsically, or that theology found its preeminent position within the university curriculum from the beginning, however familiar such a storyline, is not supported by historical evidence. By the same token, the presumption that the university emerged as an institution saturated with theological interests, or that the university was founded under the sway of ecclesiastical authorities intent on doctrinal correctness, all that is demonstrably false. In fact, as we shall see in the following pages, with notable exceptions of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, theology did not constitute a regular faculty in any of the universities of medieval origin; that is, not until the late fourteenth century.
Accordingly, the strategy employed in what is to follow is, first, to sideline these commonly assumed notions about the medieval university, and, along the way, to begin to speculate why the facts to the contrary are not better known among us today. More specifically, this means recalibrating our perspective on the medieval universities, which has hitherto been focused disproportionately on the examples of Paris and its offspring, all of which were in the north, and to recognize instead Paris as an exception rather than the prototype. At the same time, we will also note that, exceptional though they were, the original trio of theology-equipped universities also exhibited some of the same tendencies observed in the more typical specimens of the medieval institution. The profiles of those other, indeed more typical, universities in the south attest that the fields of knowledge that defined the university education in those early centuries were the new sciences, philosophies, and medicine lately imported from the Greco-Arabic worlds, as well as—and arguably most importantly—law. In any case, it was not theology. And this should surprise no one if we keep in mind that the instigating factors that brought the university into existence in the first place were literally foreign to Latin Christendom; as such, the wealth of new knowledge dispensed at the university was initially dissonant with the native creedal traditions of the Western Church.
In order to reset our perspective, then, we shall begin by rehearsing the early history of the medieval universities with due attention to the overall circumstances of their arising in the twelfth century. Facts pertaining to this history are well known to many medievalists, though their individual accounts tend to be rather particularly focused in accordance with their respective specialties, and, on the whole, heavily weighted toward the northern institutions modeled after Paris.Footnote 8 We in turn aim to bring into view a rough sketch of the whole, by sampling from this sprawling and disjointed collection of the regionally delimited, often institution-specific, and at times somewhat solipsistic accounts. It will be noted that there was a great deal of divergence between the Paris-centered north and the Italianate south,Footnote 9 especially with regard to the university's internal organization, as well as its relation to external authorities, be they municipal, royal, imperial, or ecclesiastical.
Origin of the university
As pioneering American medievalist Charles Homer Haskins famously put it, universities were among those medieval things that “had no founder or fixed date of beginning but instead ‘just grew,’ arising slowly and silently without definite record.”Footnote 10 The university at first was but a spontaneous “swarming” of people: on the one hand, those desiring to acquire some new knowledge that was not locally available (students, or “scholars” in the earlier terminology), and on the other, those who already possessed something of that knowledge and were willing to impart it to others (professors, or “masters”). In effect, what constituted the medieval university—or studium generale, as it was more commonly called at the beginning—was the self-formation of a guild. Despite the significance attributed to various sanctions that came in the form of papal bulls and royal or imperial charters, what defined the character of the medieval university was not those official permissions and benedictions but something that took place before them.Footnote 11 Elaborating further, Haskins explains that the word “university” meant “a group or corporation in general, and only in time did it come to be limited to guilds of masters and students, universitas societas magistrorum discipulorumque.”Footnote 12 “Historically,” he asseverates, dispelling a common misconception, “the word university has no connection with the universe or the universality of learning; it denotes only the totality of a group, whether of barbers, carpenters, or students did not matter.”Footnote 13
As with all trade-specific unions, the university first came to organize itself in order to protect the interests of those who thus gathered from afar for shared purposes. Broadly speaking, there were two types of guild: one epitomized by the University of Bologna and other southern universities, where the guild of scholars was primary, and the other type exemplified by the University of Paris and its northern progeny, where the guild of masters was predominant. Either way, the guild aimed to curb undue interference into university affairs by the local authorities, be they magistrates or bishops. And it was to these purposes of collective defense and protection that the charters issued by a loftier authority were especially meaningful. In sum, as James Brundage more recently put it, “All universities relied on recognition by outside authorities, such as kings, popes, and municipal governments, to legitimize and protect the rights and privileges that their members coveted, but the earliest universities emerged in consequence of spontaneous actions by students (as at Bologna) or masters (as at Paris and Oxford), without the intervention of any outside authority.”Footnote 14 As we shall see presently, these two types of the guild formation led to further divergence among European universities, diversifying the university's relation to the church and to the state.
With regard to its beginning, then, no pope, king, or emperor founded a university as part of his own dominion.Footnote 15 On the contrary, the effect of the charter was to render the university its own domain of power (studium), distinct from both church (sacerdotium) and state (regium or imperium).Footnote 16 And it was only after the universities proved important nurturing grounds for legal and administrative expertise, much needed for both the church and royal courts, that the ecclesiastical and terrestrial rulers began to establish new universities under their own auspices, sometimes in competition with one another.Footnote 17 Yet even in those instances of imperial or papal founding, studium was recognized as a distinct domain, and never coeval with church or state.
Why did a spontaneous swarming of knowledge seekers and knowledge dispensers take place at this particular moment in multiple locations in the Latin West? Haskins's answer, issued a century ago, has since become his signature concept: the Renaissance of the twelfth century. He postulated that there was a sudden and massive increase in available knowledge at this time, which perforce changed the landscape of institutions of learning.Footnote 18 The headwaters of the new learning were outside the Latin West. As Haskins itemized specifically,
Between 1100 and 1200 … there came a great influx of new knowledge into Western Europe, partly through Italy and Sicily, but chiefly through the Arab scholars of Spain—the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and the Greek physicians, the new arithmetic, and those texts of the Roman law which had lain hidden through the Dark Ages … This new knowledge burst the bonds of the cathedral and monastery schools and created the learned professions; it drew over mountains and across the narrow seas eager youths … to form in Paris and Bologna those academic gilds [sic] which have given us our first and our best definition of a university, a society of masters and scholars.Footnote 19
The cerebral goods of science and philosophy did not one day set sail on their own accord. Their massive flow came on the back of an enormous expansion of more material kinds of traffic, peaceable as well as bellicose. Beginning in the eleventh century, Western Europe's commercial and political contact with the Greek–Byzantine–Levantine as well as Arab–‘Abbāsid–al-Andalusian culture zones greatly increased. This was also the age of the crusades—part pilgrimage, part warfare, and part trading expedition. In enumerating the remarkable transformations that occurred “from the late eleventh century to the taking of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204,” Haskins wrote,
The century begins with the flourishing age of the cathedral schools and closes with the earliest universities already well established at Salerno, Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, and Oxford. It starts with only the bare outlines of the seven liberal arts and ends in possession of the Roman and canon law, the new Aristotle, the new Euclid and Ptolemy, and the Greek and Arabic physicians, thus making possible a new philosophy and a new science.Footnote 20
The year 1204 was the year of the Fourth Crusade, whose pretext—to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslim infidels—was soon abandoned, and resulted in a devastating sacking of Christian Constantinople instead. Thenceforward, the Byzantine Empire never regained the full political power of former times, and some of its learned elites who left the realm in the years to follow went westward, carrying with them books, knowledge, and expertise.Footnote 21 The Latin West in turn went from strength to strength, only to find itself threatened as of the fifteenth century by the rising Ottomans, who were destined to finish off the last remnants of the Roman Empire in 1453, when they took down Constantinople, now to be called Istanbul. Back in the twelfth century, however, the expansion of traffic of the whole Mediterranean region exponentially increased the demand in the West for more robust financial instruments and more sophisticated legal expertise to handle them, all necessary for high-risk commercial enterprises involving travel to faraway places.
The new knowledge from the East and the South was palpably more advanced and systematic, with vastly richer lettered sources; it was something over and above the familiar gamut of traditional instruction hitherto offered in monastic and cathedral schools of the West. Once the university emerged, the older forms of learning were not entirely abandoned but rather became enmeshed, enhanced, and enlivened by new philosophy and science, and became subsumed as a preliminary stage preparatory to the higher echelon of new sciences.Footnote 22 Thence came the distinction between the lower faculty (liberal arts, all told) and the higher faculties, which came to be consolidated into three: theology, law (subdivided into civil law and canon law), and medicine.Footnote 23
In sum, what began as a voracious importation of Greek–Byzantine and Arab–Islamic cultural legacies galvanized the Latins, and their acquisition and assimilation proved so thoroughly successful that they would eventually come to claim the imports as their own.Footnote 24 The consolidation of the appropriated legacies as the very core of “European knowledge” can be traced back to this historic juncture. The new institution, the university, functioned as a vital organ of this transformative process, and in due course it came to be recognized, for good reason, as a quintessentially European institution.Footnote 25
The university and the church
What, then, was the Latin Church's relation to the third realm of power: the studium? The church had a vested interest in the emerging universities, but not for the purpose of refining its theology or fortifying its doctrinal positions. This much is immediately clear.
Among various domains of new knowledge that caused the university to come into existence, by far the most profoundly consequential for the future of Latin Christendom—and not only for the church—was Roman civil law, rediscovered.Footnote 26 As is well known, Roman jurisprudence was one of the great legacies of the classical Mediterranean civilization. In late antiquity, something of this legal tradition had passed on to the then emerging Christian Church, just at the time Christianity was to become the officially sanctioned religion of the state, and shortly before the political demise of the western half of the empire. The resulting ecclesiastical law, or canon law, was to be instrumental in shaping the Latin Church's system of governance, but it was not until the twelfth-century Renaissance—when the legendary jurist Gratian systematized canon law for the first time in the West—that it came to acquire its overwhelming significance.Footnote 27 In the political spheres outside the church, on the other hand, the erstwhile imperial legal system had become fragmented and dissipated after the fall of the Western Empire, as it was largely overridden by various tribal customary laws, or so-called “Germanic” or “barbarian laws.” This state of decline and dissipation persisted in the West until the aforesaid rediscovery of ius civile (civil law) sometime in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. Meanwhile in the East—that is, in the surviving half of the Roman Empire centered in Constantinople—the governing force of the imperial Roman law had not slackened. The legal corpus continued to be elaborated and brought up to date with full imperial backing; it was first systematized during the reign of Theodosius II in the fifth century, and then more famously by Justinian I in the sixth. It would be hardly an exaggeration to say that the Latin West's discovery of this latter, “Justinian Code” in shorthand, instigated the rise both of the university and of the legal profession, together changing dramatically the very fabric of the sociopolitical organization of the entire region.Footnote 28 The robust growth of the Roman Church at this time was fundamentally and inextricably tied to this dramatic advance in legal culture and expertise. Nor was it a mere coincidence that the first university to come into prominence was Bologna, the center of this revival, which from that point onward became the alma mater of countless bishops, cardinals, and popes.Footnote 29
The circumstance was roughly as follows. The papal court in Rome, no less than princely courts of kings and emperors, was among the greatest beneficiaries of the new breed of legal experts trained in the university. For, by then, the Latin Church, increasingly centralized in Rome, not only held sway over the vast spread of bishoprics and other churchly dominions, but also was gaining the upper hand in relation to the rulers of kingdoms and the nominal imperial order of the West, styled the Holy Roman Empire.Footnote 30 Accordingly, the Latin Church's role increased enormously, as the adjudicator and the final court of appeal for many major suits concerning succession, inheritance, property, and contracts, as well as matters pertaining to the fast-growing business and commercial transactions. A veritable legion of university-trained canon lawyers became the mainstay of church organization.Footnote 31 It stands to reason, then, that the principal concern of the Roman Curia, and the expertise particularly desired and expected from the university, was not liturgical, doctrinal, or theological in nature, but above all juridical and administrative.Footnote 32 The church could never have enough lawyers. Conversely, the Latin Church's institutional maturity helped the emerging university multiply and prosper, not, however, on account of instruction given in theology, but because of the all-important faculty of law.Footnote 33
If this be the principal positive reason why law, and not theology, was the most prestigious faculty of the medieval university, then one could speculate on another aspect of the relative insignificance of theology. For, considering its origin, the university by nature had little to offer in the way of abstract theological ideas or doctrinal designs that would be immediately useful for the Latin Church. After all, the contents of the university curricula, as Haskins's list makes clear, were derived from pagan, infidel, or heretical sources. Be it Aristotle, Galen, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, or some Byzantine, Syriac, or other theologians of Eastern churches, with whom the Latins had had much to quarrel about for centuries, this treasury of wisdom did not speak the language of the Western Church.Footnote 34
This, to be sure, is not to deny that very significant work that we today would call theological was being produced in the Latin West, both during the centuries that used to be called “dark,” and at the height of the medieval Renaissances as well. Medievalists today agree, however, that during this period the primary location for deeply metaphysical, devotional, and contemplative activities—if that is what we think theology is—was not the university but the monastic foundations, especially those newly chartered mendicant orders. The first among these was the Cistercians, a group of breakaway reformists emerging from the Benedictine order, who warily kept the university at arm's length. The distance and enmity between the monastic institutions and the emerging university can be seen among the medieval “theologians” themselves. The acrimony is epitomized by the epic confrontation between Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), the towering Cistercian, and Peter Abelard (c.1079–1142), the paragon of the university theologian avant la lettre.Footnote 35 A century or more later, when the erstwhile Greco-Arabic resources (Aristotelian logic in particular) finally began to do some serious work for theology in the university—thus leading to the formation of the first bona fide academic theology, or scholasticism—much of the production was concentrated in Paris and Oxford, and still later in some other northern universities modeled after Paris.Footnote 36 As a rule, these northern universities came to be closely, though sometimes contentiously, associated with some of the new mendicant foundations, such as the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians, and still later the Jesuits.Footnote 37
An altogether different condition obtained in the Italian universities. As Paul Oskar Kristeller memorably noted nearly half a century ago, in Italy theology was not taught within the university at all.Footnote 38 More recently Paul Grendler has documented in great detail how theology never gained much foothold in any of the Italian universities. And if it did, it was just that: a bit of extraterritoriality granted to an outside entity wedged into an institution foreign to it. In sum, according to Grendler, “Theology arrived late, had few instructors, and remained peripheral to the main purposes of the university.” It was actually mendicant orders of one sort or another, “located in university towns but separate from the university,” that did the duty of teaching theology, mainly to their own kind. Gradually, limited incorporation of theology into the university curricula took place when “one or two friars” from the mendicant schools began to be appointed to theological professorships. Even so, the faculty of theology remained “a kind of confederation of the studia monastica under the name of the civic university but with limited participation by the latter”; on the whole, “other members of the university community did not respect” the theologians.Footnote 39 In medieval Italy, then, theology alone, and no other discipline, had this exceptional status and this anomalous history of incomplete integration into the university, and theology never outgrew the fundamental alienness of its origin.Footnote 40
Why this should have been so, one could state first, following Kristeller, that Italian universities began as schools of law and medicine, not of theology. But this should be couched in a broader question: how would any university begin otherwise, given its general origin story as described above? To our detriment, this is a question seldom asked. Today, the story of Italian universities seems to us merely eccentric, not normative. This is no doubt because we have been accustomed to thinking of the medieval university according to another model, namely Paris. But if we are to consider the matter more historically, it is not the oddity of Bologna that needs an explanation.Footnote 41 On the contrary, what calls for accounting is, first, how Paris turned into something so exceptionally different and, second, how Paris and its northern offspring came to dominate our imagination when we call to mind “the medieval university.” Addressing the second of these questions seriously would require a historical investigation of a much larger scope than the present occasion would allow. In the remainder of this article, I aim to delineate some of the factors that made Paris distinct from the universities in the South.
North and South
While the seat of the Latin Church was officially still in Rome, another center of the medieval Latin civilization lay farther to the northwest. Paris, the royal seat of the kingdom of France, developed a distinct power base most recently under Capetian rule, with a sociocultural complexion measurably different from the cities flourishing in the South oriented toward the Mediterranean. With a robust religio-clerical ethos of its own, situated in a locale less exposed to the currents flowing from the East and South, Paris and the surrounding region of northern France turned into an alternative sphere of influence, increasingly more dominant. Already in the early decades of the twelfth century, renowned logician–theologian–metaphysicians of the day—Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Hugh of Saint Victor among them—were offering instruction at several schools housed in the cathedral and various abbeys in the city, attracting students from all over the Latin world. Paris of the twelfth century was no doubt an unparalleled dispensary of cutting-edge philosophy of this description, and this expertise in particular came to constitute a kernel of the university. It would go on to become the defining feature of Paris in the centuries to come.Footnote 42 This distinctly Parisian profile of the university soon traveled still farther north to the British Isles and took root in Oxford, England, and shortly thereafter in Cambridge.
This well-known chronicle should not lead us to conjecture, however, that it was inevitably theology that initiated the emergence of the university at Paris, or that the preeminence of the theological faculty in Paris was unchallenged throughout its history. Nor is it warranted to imagine that this university in its formative years was unaffected by the historical dynamics that brought other universities in the south into existence. Indeed, once the university began to take shape in Paris, it appears to have exhibited much the same tendency as everywhere else, most notably a surge in the number of law students, so much so that, Brundage reports, “by the 1170s and 1180s, people were beginning to complain that law was gaining ascendency at Paris and Oxford as well.”Footnote 43 Whoever those “people” were, the source of their complaint undoubtedly was the fact that a torrent of able young men were seeking university training in law in the hopes of taking up the abundant opportunities for lucrative legal practice, especially in civil and commercial spheres, instead of entering into the service of the church. This, above all, was irksome to the church.
Nothing testifies to this contemporary reality more clearly than the preemptive measure Pope Honorius III took in 1219, in an apparent attempt to stop this medieval brain drain. The bull he issued, called Super Specula, prohibited any instruction in civil law at the University of Paris; it also forbade the same “in several cities in the vicinity,” at the pain of excommunication by the local bishops, and also at the cost of being “excluded from participating as an advocate in the ecclesiastical courts for a while.”Footnote 44
Did the Pope intend to promote theology by suppressing law? Or did he rather want more canonists to be graduating, and fewer civilians? Today's medievalists tend to say that his motives are debatable.Footnote 45 The bull itself mentions as its rationale, first, that “laymen in France and several other provinces do not use the [secular] laws of the emperors,” and second, that there is hardly any law case that cannot be resolved by the ecclesiastical court. This seems to suggest that it was all about law, about jurisdiction. The underlying argument may amount to this: knowledge of civil law is unnecessary in France because the kingdom of France is not ruled by imperial law (since it lies outside the Holy Roman Empire), and because canon law can (and should) adjudicate everything in the realm.Footnote 46 But if such was the basic thrust of this bull, the Pope's strategy was disastrously shortsighted, and bound to fail.
The papal interdiction specifically targeted the faculty of civil law, but the law as a whole, civilian and canonist alike, was negatively affected at Paris. For, as Brundage explains, “notwithstanding Honorius III's curious claim to the contrary,” instruction in canon law without civil law was at best seriously deficient because “canon law and Roman law depended on one another both intellectually and institutionally.”Footnote 47 Aspiring law students presumably understood this quite well, so they shunned Paris and flocked to the school in nearby Orleans instead, causing the Paris law faculty to contract precipitously. The school in Orleans, in turn, quickly attained university status and, for all intents and purposes, turned into a satellite-campus law school of the University of Paris.Footnote 48 Indeed, Orleans's meteoric rise was such that, within a matter of a few decades, it became “a serious rival of Bologna.” This turn of events is yet another indication that Honorius's decree failed to achieve even its explicitly stated purpose, namely that instruction in civil law should be prohibited not only in Paris but also in “other cities or places nearby.” And even in Paris, the ban on teaching civil law apparently could never be fully implemented. In any event, a succession of popes that followed Honorius had effectively dismantled his policy by the century's end.Footnote 49
Despite its general failure and backpedaling, the papal order of 1219 had a lasting consequence for the University of Paris. Whether or not some theologians initially had a hand in Honorius's action, as some historians suspect, Paris theologians had reason for new optimism in the wake of the bull.Footnote 50 The atrophy of the law faculty allowed the theological faculty to be ever more prominent, and Paris became unusual among medieval universities in that the law faculty did not claim a numerical majority.Footnote 51 And in this sense at least, this turn of events benefited the theologians. At the same time, this also meant that the Roman Curia had an especial reason to be vigilant in monitoring the activities of the masters and scholars at the University of Paris, which, for that reason, “was far more tightly linked to the church than Bologna,” or anywhere else.Footnote 52
Several conditions made Paris particularly vulnerable to direct ecclesiastical meddling in university affairs. The most fundamental among them was, again, the very presence of the prominent theological faculty itself. To put this in perspective, it is useful to consider the general layout of academic specialization in the universities at the time, described here by Brundage:
Every medieval university offered degrees in canon law. Because some acquaintance with Roman law was essential for canonists, moreover, most universities provided some teaching in Roman law, although not all offered degrees in it. Nearly all universities taught the liberal arts and many could boast a medical faculty as well. Very few, however, offered organized teaching in theology: Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge were the only universities authorized to confer theology degrees before 1300.Footnote 53
The only office that could authorize a theological faculty was the church, and the sharply limited number of the universities with an accredited theology faculty almost certainly reflected the church's interest in keeping a tight rein on what was to be professed, learned, and publicly disseminated. No compelling evidence seems to have surfaced, in any case, suggesting that the Roman Curia was interested in proliferating degree-granting theology faculties, or bolstering the size of the already existing ones. On the contrary, the primary concerns were unmistakably in the direction of containment, quality control, and, no doubt, enforcing compliance.Footnote 54
In effect, in medieval times, doctorates in theology were rare. It is plausible, perhaps very likely, that some Parisian theologians were eager to claim this rarity and exclusivity as a mark of distinction and superiority; and, in view of the long and arduous course of study prescribed for theological doctorates at Paris, such a claim would not be entirely without merit.Footnote 55 On the other hand, if lawyers were legion, fast-moving, and ubiquitous, they seemed no worse off for that. Their employment opportunities were nearly endless, and on the whole both canonists and civilians were well placed, well paid, and many of them powerfully positioned.Footnote 56 And they were a multitude. So the sheer numbers were against the coterie of rarified “speculative theologians,” just as, in reality, the practical exigencies of running the church organization—no less than the business of running the state—gained the upper hand and overwhelmed such ideals as apostolic poverty, contemplative quietude, cure of the soul, and the like.Footnote 57
What was more, those speculative theologians were far more likely to be in a precarious position, treading the uncertain boundaries of correct church doctrines at every new scholarly pronouncement, whereas canonists—styled “practical theologians”—enjoyed much greater leeway in their academic pursuits, pushing the envelope in all directions.Footnote 58 It is, of course, not surprising that theologians were more liable to meet ecclesiastical censure than their colleagues in other faculties, who could conceivably be, but rarely were, in trouble with the church on account of something inferred from their medical or legal theories. For theologians, the heavy hand of the church hovering over them was an occupational hazard, and it requires no imagination to understand why universities celebrated for their theological faculty, such as Paris and Oxford, should be tightly in the grip of the authorities, both of the state and of the church.Footnote 59
* * *
Exceptional though Paris was, there were some important institutional features that originated there and subsequently spread to many other universities, particularly in the North, beginning in the thirteenth century. One such innovation of considerable significance was the very idea, the term, and the structure of academic faculties. Footnote 60
Following the customary practice in today's scholarship, and also for the reason of expediency, I have been employing the term faculty to refer to each of the distinct units or fields of academic study, or discipline. This conventional use of the term—the first documented instance of the term facultas used in relation to the university is said to be in the thirteenth century or possibly earlierFootnote 61—might impart an impression that the oft-repeated list of four faculties, comprising one lower and three higher faculties, was an all but preordained structure of the emerging university everywhere. On the strength of this suggestion, moreover, it is sometimes asserted—evidently based on an erroneous assumption that university had something to do with the universality of knowledge—that a university by definition must be outfitted with most if not all of these fields of study.Footnote 62 But that is not how the university began. Historians of the medieval university appear to be in general agreement that the quadripartite organization of the masters’ guild—wherein each of the four faculties exercised the right to self-govern, set curricular standards, confer degrees, etc.—originated in Paris and nowhere else, and that this organizational structure was variously adopted by the universities established later in Northwestern and Central Europe.Footnote 63
Southern universities, epitomized by Bologna, were differently constituted. Unlike Paris, Bologna emerged as a guild of scholars (i.e. students); therefore the difference between Paris and Bologna was not only about how the disciplines were demarcated. To be more precise, we should say, here borrowing the words of Aleksander Gieysztor, that Bologna was actually “a cluster of universities, each for students of only one discipline.” There were two such disciplines, namely “the universitas legistarum, which can be called the law faculty, and the universitas artistarum et medicorum (faculty of arts and medicine).” Each of these student universities was further divided into two “nations” (nationes), one “each for students of a particular geographical origin,” the Alps being the dividing line.Footnote 64 Furthermore, masters (i.e. professors) had their own corporation “completely distinct” from those of the students, and each of these professorial corporations was also specific to a discipline, and was called collegium doctorum, or “college of doctors.” This professorial collegium—not to be confused with the residential college—effectively corresponded to “faculty” of the Parisian system; each collegium was empowered to set academic standards and to confer degrees and licenses.
Whatever the extent of the analogy or affinity between the French faculties and the Italian collegia, there is no denying that Bologna's studium as a whole had a strikingly composite character, in contrast to the streamlined system tending toward centralization that is characteristic of Paris. And it is this composite constitution of the university system as a whole that goes some distance in explaining how instruction in theology in Italian universities could be maintained in an ad hoc manner, occupying an extraneous position throughout the Middle Ages, and even well beyond. In short, in Bologna, theology teaching was conducted within the city or its vicinity, but outside the university, only tangentially associated with the new institution.
Whence comes this structural difference between Paris and Bologna as regards the position and status of theology? It may be remembered here that, in the South and the North alike, the intellectual enterprise that we today call theology had long been carried out in monastic institutions and, especially since the twelfth century, by mendicant orders. “Teaching of theology” in this broad sense preexisted the advent of the university, and for the most part it continued to thrive outside the university. When the university corporations were forming in Paris—predictably, it was the law faculty that was the first to organize itself—those mendicant teachers of theology around the city, too, began to form a guild. By the time the first extant university statutes of Paris were being drawn up (1215),Footnote 65 theology had already established itself as one of the four disciplines, or faculties.
This, however, did not happen elsewhere. In all other early universities—again, with the notable exception of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which are said to have been directly influenced by Paris—theology never worked its way into the university system in the formative years as it did in Paris. In Bologna, as we have seen above, there emerged not four but two disciplines: law on one hand, and arts and medicine on the other, each of these disciplines comprising a guild of students and a guild of teachers. In this bicameral constitution of the university at Bologna, there was no place for theology. The teaching of theology conducted in the city of Bologna or in the nearby monasteries did not become integrated into the university. This outcome is not altogether surprising.
To begin, unlike law students or arts and medicine students, who formed their own respective universitas, the students of theology had no corporate body to represent them, hence no rector could be elected by them. Instead, their identity remained tied to one or the other of the mendicant orders to which most of them belonged, just as their teachers did. Furthermore, even though theology students could be granted a doctoral degree at the completion of their studies by the authority of the collegium doctorum of theology, this latter body—which had the power equivalent to the collegia of the other two disciplines—was not a guild of teachers of theology. Instead, the theological collegium was composed of learned townsmen who presumably had done some advanced study of the subject somewhere and thus were considered qualified to exercise this power. This collegium might include some of the teachers, but it was not coextensive with a teachers’ collective, and it almost certainly included religious officeholders. In short, in the Italianate universities, theology had neither a scholars’ guild nor a masters’ guild. Instruction was given by monks and friars in their own premises to young men mostly destined for the same career; their doctorates were not conferred by a professoriate. All in all, teachers and students of theology were all but invisible. The situation did not significantly change even after “one or two friars” were appointed to professorships in the university, as happened in some of the Italian universities.Footnote 66
This seems to amply justify Kristeller's statement that the medieval Italian university did not teach theology. For this reason, it might be reasonable to suggest that Bologna and many of the southern universities retained the original character of the university as an institution to foster new knowledge of foreign origin, whereas in Paris an infusion of the more native-grown monastic and mendicant traditions into the newly emerging university occurred at a very early stage, and theology thus became an integral part of the institution as one of its faculties.
* * *
The Paris–Oxford–Cambridge monopoly of doctorates in theology began to erode in the fourteenth century, when the relation between the papacy and the French crown seriously soured, and the political supremacy that the Roman Curia had enjoyed in the preceding centuries—often dubbed papal monarchy—steeply declined. During the century of the Avignon papacy that followed (1309–76), a succession of seven French popes, all with French royal backing, chose to establish the papal court at Avignon, a city far to the west of Rome but still a satellite papal territory and outside the domain of the French kingdom at the time. After the seventh Avignon pope returned to Rome and died soon thereafter in 1378, the situation only got worse, as it commenced another half-century of divided papacy (1378–1437), this time with two rival popes (or, technically, a pope and an antipope) between the two cities. All the while, much of the western half of the Latin world was embroiled in incessant warfare, roundly called the “Hundred Years War,” which lasted until the mid-fifteenth century. The result, as we know, was the territorial consolidation of France by the triumphant House of Valois and its allies, and in turn the retreat from the Continent (excepting Calais) of the erstwhile French Norman Plantagenets, who thenceforward would become, willy-nilly, English.Footnote 67
The end of the Paris–Oxbridge monopoly on theological doctorates was part of the fallout of this prolonged political turmoil. The papal court—with its hold on universal Latin Christendom now unsteady, and the political fortune of the city of Paris itself unpredictable—began to charter new degree-granting theological faculties elsewhere. Just around this time, entirely new universities were being established one after another, especially in the German lands, mobilized mainly by the interests of various regional rulers, and facilitated in no small part by the “exodus of scholars” from Paris.Footnote 68 At this point in time, the state's control over the university became acutely constrictive at Paris, especially after 1452 when a “general reform” of the university's statutes was effected at the instigation of the French crown. The same change was occurring elsewhere in France. “Henceforth,” observes Paolo Nardi, “France tended to restrict drastically the immunities and privileges which the academics of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries had enjoyed before the complete consolidation of the French monarchy.”Footnote 69 This, in effect, was the beginning of the end of the medieval university, studium, the third realm of power, distinct and free from both regium/imperium and sacerdotium. The final demise came a century later, when the nominal catholicity of Latin Christendom was permanently lost in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. As for the theology faculty of the University of Paris, from this point onward it famously held on to a hardline position on the side of the absolutist state and its repressive religious policies, until, that is, it met the ire of the Republican revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century, followed by Napoleon who swiftly moved to dismantle the university as a bastion of Ancien Régime.Footnote 70
Conclusion
The profile of the medieval university that emerges from the foregoing sketches looks markedly different from the image of a religion-saturated institution where theology was the overlord. With a few exceptions—three, to be exact—theology hardly had a normalized existence in the universities during the first two centuries of the institution's vigorous growth and flowering. This also means that the robust ascendency of the Latin Church that was taking place in the same period did not occasion a surge in eminence or popularity of theology as an academic enterprise. But it certainly caused the value and the prestige of canon law to skyrocket. Clearly, theologians did not like this. If the masters and scholars of other faculties had little respect for them, Paris theologians at least were not too shy to come back and hurl insults in return, targeting particularly the lawyers, whom they feigned to disdain as government's pawns, “political idiots,” and “asses.”Footnote 71 In their turn, the lawyers, however self-confident in their manifest worth, could not be relied upon to remain preternaturally above academic jousting of this sort. Ample contemporary evidence tells of some powerfully stationed canonists testily chiding the theologians, putting them in their place.Footnote 72
In view of these facts, the stock phrase we habitually revert to in characterizing theology's station in the medieval university, where it is supposed to have been “the queen of the sciences,” is positively strange. Was this airy sobriquet but a near-empty phrase we dutifully intone time and again out of some displaced deference to religion, which we imagine to have epitomized Europe's premodern past? Or have we perhaps taken too much at face value some medieval theologians’ wishful thinking, their doleful self-promotion, assigned as they were in reality to their frayed seats? Or worse yet, have we been taken in by some early modern screed dogmatically proclaiming the absolute supremacy of the theological to all eternity?
It has been often suggested that Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) coined the phrase, regina scientiarum, honoring the dignity of theologia. But the attribution appears to be inaccurate.Footnote 73 Thomas, it is true, reportedly said that “philosophy and other sciences” were ancillae, meaning, literally, handmaids. Moreover, his contemporary and another Paris-educated theologian, Bonaventure (1221–74), similarly opined that “all branches of knowledge serve theology.” But this does not mean that others agreed with the theologians; certainly not in Bologna or Padua, and probably not in Paris either. And nothing that we have seen suggests that the masters and scholars of those “ancillary” sciences thought of themselves as rendering their service from the subservient position that the theologians rhetorically allotted to them. In fact, all this seems to be no more than a figure of speech, or jargon internal to the theology faculty at that. Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), for example, is remembered not only for his penchant for boasting his improbably high-flying academic career, but also for having expressed his ideal of scholarly acquirements in the following picturesque terms: “upon the foundation of arts and letters, to raise high the walls of civil and canon law and above them to complete the sacred roof of theological learning.”Footnote 74
Call it a queen or a rooftop, the high station thus accorded to theology was largely symbolic and, in fact, contrary to the material condition on the ground. Though the rhetoric remained thus aloft, beginning with Alan of Lille (1128–1202?)—who spoke of the “regal prerogative” of the theological faculty, but as an ideal yet unrealized—these regal references by the eminent Paris theologians were always couched in lament, as they decried the other faculties’ neglect and their insolent disregard of the divine hierarchy. All of this leads the modern historian Bernard McGinn to observe summarily, “the role of theology in the history of Christianity, and even in the medieval universities, was never quite as imperial, as powerful, and as settled as we might be inclined to think.”Footnote 75
Wherever the true origin of the phrase may lie, “the queen of the sciences” was not really a medieval problem, when the phrase had little or no currency. But it is a problem for us to turn over and to scrutinize, to ascertain its worth and its function among us. To understand how we got here, and how we have become nearly incapable of thinking beyond the Paris model of the medieval university—this will require historical study of much broader scope. At the threshold of any future investigation to that end, surrendering the idolatry of this imaginary queen may be entirely salutary.
* * *
For now, let it suffice to note that, insofar as the foregoing sketches of the early history of the university could attest, the relation between theological learning and the university was, for the most part, tangential. It might be fair to say that they coexisted adjacent to one another, intellectually as well as institutionally, with varying degrees of integration and with different styles of cooperation, depending on the circumstance of each locality. In any event, there is no evidence to suggest that the theology faculty ever functioned as a regular legislator of an overarching framework or as a dispenser of spiritual “worldviews” that organized or dictated the order of knowledge in the medieval university.
A very significant change to this temporizing relation between theology and the university did take place toward the end of the Middle Ages, it is true, when there was a sudden proliferation of theology faculties all over the Latin West, owing to the historical circumstances briefly described in the previous section. And from this point onward, the theology faculty became a regular feature, more or less, both in the newly established universities and in the already existing ones. The rate of growth and empowerment of theology accelerated even more during the Protestant Reformation, when numerous new universities came to be founded by correspondingly numerous territorial rulers of the now confessionally fractured Latin Christendom, particularly in the North. Naturally, each of these rulers would ensure the university's and its inmates’ conformity to his own confessional persuasion, and the theology faculty became the principal organ for the regulatory purpose.Footnote 76 Meanwhile, in the regions where churches remained obedient to Rome, some new religious orders—above all the Jesuits—worked assiduously to institute a theology faculty in as many universities within their domain of power, expressly to be a bulwark against the scholarly challenges from the Protestant sectaries.Footnote 77 As a result, in both North and South, there came a dramatic increase in church and state control over university affairs.
It was these early modern, post-Reformation conditions of the university that gave prominent intellectuals of the eighteenth century—Leibniz and Kant among them—much to complain about. For instance, in recollecting his desultory teenage years at Magdalen College, Oxford, Edward Gibbon—himself less a reform advocate than a happy transplant in Calvinist Geneva as a religiously noncommittal foreigner—had this to say:
The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science, and they are still tainted with the vices of their origin. Their primitive discipline was adapted to the education of priests and monks, and the government still remains in the hands of the clergy, an order of men whose manners are remote from the present world, and whose eyes are dazzled by the light of philosophy. The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of the public instruction, and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy, and oppressive.Footnote 78
This vituperative judgment by the mature Gibbon was just one example of the imperious profile of the theology faculty reflected in the minds of the university critics of the Enlightenment era. This profile was projected backward in time, all the way to the Middle Ages, and this phantom theology has since grown to a monstrous proportion, an image formidable enough to cast a long shadow even to this day. Thus it came about that the medieval theology faculty finally achieved a posthumous fame, though not as a crowning pinnacle of universal knowledge, but as a senescent despot long overdue for an overthrow.
* * *
History of religion(s) as something distinct, separate, and other than theology—or, as a bona fide science of religion in contradistinction to the fideistic ratiocinations predicated on revealed truths, as some would have it—this has been a self-assigned defining mark of the academic study of religion for over a century. At the same time, it has long been thought that this new science has been struggling to emerge, in order to become itself, in the long shadow of theology, both institutionally and theoretically, and perhaps temperamentally as well. But this shadow of the past is just that: a backward projection, an overblown shade of something that was not quite what has been imagined. Besides, the genealogy of the modern study of religion, all told, is actually quite heterogeneous, and the lineage is therefore much more complex, and its legacy highly debatable.Footnote 79
Meanwhile, probably owing to the very nature of the field and its chronic condition of hyper-self-consciousness since the last century, historians of religion by and large are uncomfortably aware of the inexorable ambiguity, volatility, and indeterminacy of what is meant by “theology,” “religion,” and, for that matter, “history”; so much so that there often lurks a measure of reticence when it comes to delineating explicitly the difference between theology and religious studies, and, even more, owning the difference. To be sure, discomfiture or hesitancy in itself may not lead to any useful insight. And it is premature, moreover, to expect that the case of “religious studies” could be a synecdochic miniature model that would point to some broader general truths about the secularization of learning, or about the birth of human sciences out of, and away from, providential cosmologies. That said, this much may still be true: few other modern sciences have worried as much, and for as long, about their own genealogy and place in the academy as history of religion(s) has. And this chronic condition of unease, and the multiple birthmarks that this science bears, might hold a promise that it may have something to say, something to interject and to instruct, as we aim to confront the conundrum of history's religion.
Open access
