The philosophy in the 13th century

We know what magnificent praise Auguste Comte (1) makes of the 13th century: an organic age par excellence which achieved spiritual unity, true catholicity. Towards this century turns the dream of all those who consider all social peace impossible without the foundation of a common faith which directs thought and action and subordinates philosophy, art and morality.

Certainly, there is perhaps no other time when the frameworks of spiritual life have been more solid and clearer. The circumstances were then especially favorable; the rebirth of powerful and commercial cities favored, as it always does, the active exchange of ideas; the University of Paris, which we will see play such a role in the intellectual life of the twelfth century, is incomprehensible without the Paris of Philippe Auguste, the capital of a kingdom which becomes the most powerful in Europe and which attracts foreigners from all nations: no trace of national exclusivism in this teaching given, in a language common to all of Western Christianity, by masters from all countries, Englishmen like Alexandre de Haies, Italians like Saint Bonaventure and Saint Thomas Aquinas, Germans like Albert the Great. It is the University of Latin Christendom as a whole, and it is the head of this Christendom, the Vicar of Christ, who, by organizing it and giving it statutes, claims to make it the very center of Christian life. It is the same Pope, Innocent III, who created the Inquisition, confirmed the mendicant, Franciscan and Dominican orders, encouraged the University of Paris: three acts inspired by the same spirit, the desire to strengthen Christian unity; he found a means in the Inquisition to expunge heresies, in the mendicant orders of men who, detached from all temporal interest, from all attachment to their country, placed themselves in the exclusive service of Christian thought, in the University – which brings together under the name of Faculties of Arts, Law, Medicine and Theology of the already flourishing but dispersed schools – a means of systematizing all the intellectual life of the time around the teaching of the doctrina Sacra.

Because only the Pope has the upper hand over the teaching of the University, to which Philip Augustus is only asked to grant temporal privileges. He claims to organize this teaching in such a way as to ward off the danger that the excessive development of dialectic had become for theology; logic must remain an organon, and “modern doctors of the liberal arts” must be prevented from dealing with theological subjects; this is what Innocent III said in 1219 and what Gregory IX IX repeated in 1228: “Theological intelligence […] must exercise its power over each faculty like the spirit over the flesh, and direct it in the straight path so that she does not go astray.” And it is a theology which must be expounded only “according to the proven traditions of the saints”, and not use “camel weapons”; in 1231, he gave the watchword: “Let the masters of theology not ostentatiously practice philosophy.” Under these conditions, in fact, philosophy is reduced to the art of discussing and drawing conclusions, starting from the premises laid down by divine authority. From there, the literary form of the writings of this time, which derives from the method used by Abelard in the Sic et non, then by the sententiaries of the twelfth century; on each subject, we argue using authorities or reasons deduced from authority; and after indicating the pros and cons, we give the solution; we come to ignore or avoid any overall presentation, any synthetic view which, systematically linking the various assertions of the theologian, would give Christian doctrine an overly rational appearance. There is undoubtedly an order inherent in the exposition of the truths of Christian doctrine: God, creation, fall, redemption and salvation; it is the traditional order, the one followed by Peter the Lombard and which underlies the Summas of Saint Thomas Aquinas; but it must be noted that it is an order of revealed truths where each does not depend logically on the previous one; creation, fall, redemption, these are free acts, which we can know by their effects, but not deduce from necessary principles; it therefore remains to study each of the articles of faith and the affirmations it implies separately; reason always serves to go down to consequences, but not to go back to principles and to systematize.

But within these fixed and rigid frameworks, did thought have the catholicity that the popes dreamed of imposing on it? In reality, despite the interventions of the magisterium, the 13th century gives us the spectacle of acute conflicts which prohibit, even for that period, from speaking of a unique scholastic philosophy; they will only calm down when the Middle Ages have ceased to exist. These conflicts have precisely their source in the pretension to reduce all high intellectual education to theology and the disciplines which prepare for it; purely human philosophy demands a place for it, and we do not know which one to give it; will we put it within theology? What difficulty we will then have in maintaining the unity of a doctrine which uses at the same time two methods as divergent as authority and the rational method! We will soon see illustrious examples of this. On the contrary, do we expel it from theology? She then claims her independence. In both cases, the spiritual unity that we wanted to establish is broken; it is broken because we believed, for essentially political and religious reasons, that we should not take into account the autonomy of human reason; it will only have a chance of reestablishing itself when the claim of theology to rule over all studies is definitively abandoned.

The history of philosophy in the 13th century is that of these conflicts: nothing more of this anticipated rebirth, of this freedom of spirit, of this passionate thought that we found in the twelfth century: a search at all costs, even at the cost of logic and coherence, of a unity that we desire as much for social and political reasons as for intellectual reasons.