Philosophy in the 10th and 11th centuries in France

We had to wait until the end of the 11th century to see, in the West, a real resumption of intellectual activity: not that this intermediate period was empty or unimportant. It is found everywhere, and in monasteries and in the cloisters of cathedrals, schools, scattered centers, but where the culture is the same. Auxerre, Reims and Paris have had schools near their cathedrals since the 20th century: in Aurillac, in Saint-Gall, in Chartres, studies continued. We must imagine ourselves in the midst of what material difficulties; after the conquest of the Orient by the Arabs, papyrus and parchment became so rare that libraries necessarily remained very poor; one of the richest, that of Saint-Gall, contained four hundred volumes in 860. The intellectual renewal coincided, at the end of the 11th century, with the creation of religious orders, which actively copied manuscripts; and in the 11th century, the library of Saint Vincent de Laon contained eleven thousand volumes (1).

We know more or less the content of these libraries of the early Middle Ages in philosophical works: Saint-Gall, for example, possessed in the 9th century the logical works of Apuleius, works of Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bede , and Alcuin, without counting the Phenomena of Aratus; it was enriched in the 10th century with the Consolation of Boethius, the Pharsalia of Lucan, the Dream of Scipio (perhaps with the commentary of Macrobius), and in the 11th century, with the logical treatises of Boethius. This enumeration shows us the narrow limits of the intellectual horizon at a time when culture relied only on books, which were so rare.

We therefore have little from this period other than marginal glosses and commentaries (mostly unpublished) to the writings of Boethius or Marcianus Capella. In this education, apart from Christian doctrine, dialectics takes up almost all the space. Eric of Auxerre (died in 876), Rémy of Auxerre who taught in Chartres around 862, Bovo of Saxony, at the beginning of the 10th century, Gerbert of Aurillac who became pope (999-1003) under the name of Silvestre II, Fulbert, his student who opened a school in Chartres in 990, are the main authors of these comments. A document from the 11th century has preserved for us in their order the subjects of the teaching of dialectics in Chartres (2). There were successively studied: Ilsagoge of Porphyry, Categories of Aristotle, Categories of Saint Augustine (with the preface of Alcuin), Definitions of Boethius, Topics of Cicero, Perihermerieias of Aristotle and Apuleius, Topical Differences of Boethius, anonymous compositions on rhetoric, Divisions of Boethius, Gerbert’s treatise De rationali et ratione uti; finally Categorical Syllogisms and the Hypothetical Syllogisms of Boethius.

We see how such an education, prolonged over years, could disrupt discussion. Any art other than dialectics would seem almost forgotten, if we could not cite Gerbert’s Geometry around 983, which, in its measurement methods, seems to betray the influence of Arab mathematicians (3). But dialectic reigns supreme, and it gives the mind this taste for discussion, for endless distinctions and divisions, which will dominate all of medieval philosophy.

References

1. L. Maître, Les Écoles épiscopales et monastiques de l’Occident depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Philippe Auguste, especially p. 278 sq., Paris, 1866.
   2. Quoted by A. Clerval, The Schools of Chartres in the Middle Ages, p. 177, Paris, 1895.
   3. WÜRSCHMIDT, “Geodâsische Messinstrumente und Messmethoden bei Gerbert und bei den Arabem”, Archiv. der Mathematik und Physik, p. 315, 1912.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu