Scholasticism in Medieval Paris

Scholasticism: The Gothic school of philosophy in which scholars applied Aristotle’s system of rational inquiry to interpret religious belief. 

The University of Paris was the center of scholarship and teaching in the Gothic age. The professors developed Scholasticism, a philosophy that sought to prove the Christian faith using Aristotle’s reasoning. Thomas Aquinas was the greatest advocate and believer of Scholasticism, and his work, Summa Theologica, remains the foundation of contemporary Catholic teaching.

Philip II Augustus succeeded to the throne a few years before the formal consecration of the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. He took the feudal barons under his control and expanded the royal domains, including Normandy in the north and most of Languedoc in the south, which laid the foundation for the modern nation of France. He earned the title of The Maker of Paris, for his efforts in giving the city its walls, and paved streets, and for building the Palace of the Louvre, one of the world’s great museums.

One of the main results of the urbanization of Paris was the development of cities as the centers of scholarship and teaching, which shifted monasteries from their previous role in this matter. This shift had significant consequences for the later history of Europe.

During the Medieval era, Rome continued to be the religious center of Western Christendom while the Île-de-France region, and Paris in particular, emerged as the leading intellectual and artistic capital. The University of Paris was renowned for attracting the brightest minds from all over Europe, and virtually every prominent thinker of the Gothic age, at some point in their career, studied or taught there.

Origins of Scholasticism

During the Romanesque period, Paris was already a center of learning, which later strengthened its reputation as a hub of knowledge and scholarship. The professors of the Cathedral School, known as Schoolmen, developed a philosophy called Scholasticism. One of the most renowned Schoolmen of the time was Peter Abelard (1079-1142), who backed “Logical Reasoning”. Abelard and his contemporaries were introduced to the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle through the Arabic scholars of Islamic Spain. Abelard applied Aristotle’s method of rational inquiry to the interpretation of religious beliefs.

Before the 12th century, both clergymen and laypeople believed that truth was only found in divine revelation through the holy scriptures. However, the Schoolmen, using Aristotle’s method, attempted to prove that reason alone could lead to certain truths. They aimed to demonstrate the central beliefs of Christianity through arguments called “disputatio”. In a Scholastic argument, the Schoolmen first presented a possibility, then cited an opposing authoritative view, reconciled the differences, and finally responded to each of the rejected original arguments.

Bernard of Clairvaux, one of Abelard’s greatest critics, believed that Scholasticism was equivalent to questioning Christian dogma. In 1140, Bernard succeeded in having the Church officially condemn Abelard’s teachings. Nevertheless, the Schoolmen’s philosophy continued to develop systematically, and by the 13th century, the Schoolmen of Paris had organized themselves as a professional guild of master scholars, separate from the Church schools overseen by the bishop of Paris. This structure served as the model for many other European universities. One of the most famous advocates of Abelard’s Scholasticism was Thomas Aquinas, an Italian monk who became a saint in 1323.

In 1244, Aquinas moved to Paris and was taught Aristotelian philosophy by the German theologian Albertus Magnus, who greatly influenced him. After that, Aquinas became a respected professor at the University of Paris. His most notable work was the Summa Theologica (Compendium of Theology), which he left unfinished at his death. This work exemplifies the Scholastic approach to knowledge.

Aquinas divided the treatise into books, the books into questions, the questions into articles, and each article into objections with contradictions and responses, and finally, answers to the objections. He presented forty-five ways to rationally prove the existence of God. Aquinas’s work continues to form the basis of contemporary Catholic teachings.

Transition to Late Scholasticism

The shift from High to Late Scholasticism is conventionally dated to the middle of the fourteenth-century histories of philosophy. This change became thoroughly and universally effective when the teachings of William of Ockham gained widespread acceptance, around 1340. Eventually, Ockham’s ideas became so influential that they were condemned by the Church.

Two schools of thought – Thomists and Scotists – stayed prevalent, much like academic painting that survived even after Manet. However, the influence changed into poetry and eventually humanism through Guido Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch, or into anti-rational mysticism through Master Eckhart and his followers. Philosophists who practiced Scholasticism mostly became agnostic, leaving out the Averroists who became an increasingly isolated group as, a result of the modern movement through critical nominalism.

Disputatio: Latin, “logical argument. The philosophical methodology used in Scholasticism. 

University of Paris: Many separate schools existed in Paris already by the late 11th C. Cradle of the University of Paris were three schools: those of the Palais Royal, the Notre Dame cathedral, and the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève (to which is often added the school of the abbey of Saint-Victor, where Pierre Abelard taught in the early 1100s).

The triple-cradle schools were organized around 1150 into a Parisian guild of masters and students (”Universitas magistrorum et scholarium Parisensis”). Royal charter was granted by Philip II Augustus of France in 1200, confirmed by Pope Innocent III in 1215, although it was the Parens scientiarum bull of Pope Gregory IX (1231), two years after a famous student strike of 1229, that gave the university its independence and constitutional structure. Its most famous college, the Sorbonne, was started as a residence in 1257.

Logic and theology were the principal strengths of Paris and although it would spawn worthy rivals (most famously, Oxford), the University of Paris remained the preeminent Theology School in Medieval Europe and ground zero of Medieval Scholasticism.*¹