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Authors: Susan Wise Bauer
Tags: History, Renaissance
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philosophical explorations of being that the Aristotelian texts on logic did not touch; the Elements of Euclid; the Secrets of the great Greek physician Galen.
“Seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject,” one of his students later wrote, “he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. . . . [T]o the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.” By the time of his death, some thirty years later, Gerard had translated at least seventy-one major works on dialectic, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. A wall between the past and the present had been broken down, and more and more thinkers would step over the rubble into a new way of thinking. 6
6.1 Early thirteenth-century Arabic mansucript, showing Aristotle teaching Turkish astronomers.
Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY
----
* A more detailed account is found in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World , pp. 664–666.
* León-Castile had been held by Urraca since 1109; although it was part of the united realm of Alfonso VI, the couple was deeply estranged. When Urraca died in 1126, Alfonso VII (her son with her first husband, Raymond of Burgundy) took her place, still under the overarching authority of his stepfather, Alfonso the Battler.
* In the years afterward, Ourique loomed larger and larger in Portuguese eyes: the number of Almoravid troops killed increased, the Portuguese valor expanded, and the victory swelled, until by the sixteenth century Afonso Henriques had defeated five Muslim kings after seeing, Constantine-like, a vision of Christ promising victory over the pagans. None of these details, however, are contemporary.
Chapter Seven
Questions of Authority
Between 1135 and 1160,
Peter Abelard shows the power of Aristotelian logic,
and systematic theology is born
S OMETIME AROUND 1135, the theologian Peter Abelard put the final touches on his latest project: the Theologia Scholarium , a treatise on the nature of God.
He had been polishing and revising the Theologia for fourteen years, ever since the first version of the book had been condemned as dangerous error. Back then, Abelard had been forced by a church council in Soissons to throw his book into a bonfire with his own hands. Now he hoped to defend his orthodoxy.
Instead, he would find himself facing yet another church council; and this time, the punishment would be more extreme.
For over forty years, Abelard had lived and breathed language. He had spent his teens studying the works of Aristotle in Paris and sharpening his skill with words: “I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all other teachings of philosophy,” Abelard wrote, of his own early years, “and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.” In 1102, still only in his early twenties, he set up his own school in the French town of Melun. He taught and wrote, debated and argued; and his fame as a master of logic grew. By 1114, he had become master of the cathedral school at Notre Dame, the most prestigious in Western Francia. 1
Only one thing had ever distracted Peter Abelard from words: Heloise, the beautiful niece of the Parisian priest Fulbert. In a calculated act of seduction, Abelard rented a room from Heloise’s uncle and offered to tutor Heloise in order to work off his rent. “And so, with our lessons as a pretext,” he tells us, “we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired. . . . My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages . . . [and] our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried.” 2
The inevitable happened; Heloise became pregnant, and Abelard took her to stay with his sister in Brittany until the baby was born.
Fulbert, who up until then had been remarkably blind to the affair, flew into a
“Seeing the abundance of books in Arabic on every subject,” one of his students later wrote, “he learned the Arabic language in order to be able to translate. . . . [T]o the end of his life, he continued to transmit to the Latin world (as if to his own beloved heir) whatever books he thought finest, in many subjects, as accurately and as plainly as he could.” By the time of his death, some thirty years later, Gerard had translated at least seventy-one major works on dialectic, astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and medicine. A wall between the past and the present had been broken down, and more and more thinkers would step over the rubble into a new way of thinking. 6
6.1 Early thirteenth-century Arabic mansucript, showing Aristotle teaching Turkish astronomers.
Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon / Art Resource, NY
----
* A more detailed account is found in Bauer, The History of the Medieval World , pp. 664–666.
* León-Castile had been held by Urraca since 1109; although it was part of the united realm of Alfonso VI, the couple was deeply estranged. When Urraca died in 1126, Alfonso VII (her son with her first husband, Raymond of Burgundy) took her place, still under the overarching authority of his stepfather, Alfonso the Battler.
* In the years afterward, Ourique loomed larger and larger in Portuguese eyes: the number of Almoravid troops killed increased, the Portuguese valor expanded, and the victory swelled, until by the sixteenth century Afonso Henriques had defeated five Muslim kings after seeing, Constantine-like, a vision of Christ promising victory over the pagans. None of these details, however, are contemporary.
Chapter Seven
Questions of Authority
Between 1135 and 1160,
Peter Abelard shows the power of Aristotelian logic,
and systematic theology is born
S OMETIME AROUND 1135, the theologian Peter Abelard put the final touches on his latest project: the Theologia Scholarium , a treatise on the nature of God.
He had been polishing and revising the Theologia for fourteen years, ever since the first version of the book had been condemned as dangerous error. Back then, Abelard had been forced by a church council in Soissons to throw his book into a bonfire with his own hands. Now he hoped to defend his orthodoxy.
Instead, he would find himself facing yet another church council; and this time, the punishment would be more extreme.
For over forty years, Abelard had lived and breathed language. He had spent his teens studying the works of Aristotle in Paris and sharpening his skill with words: “I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all other teachings of philosophy,” Abelard wrote, of his own early years, “and armed with these I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war.” In 1102, still only in his early twenties, he set up his own school in the French town of Melun. He taught and wrote, debated and argued; and his fame as a master of logic grew. By 1114, he had become master of the cathedral school at Notre Dame, the most prestigious in Western Francia. 1
Only one thing had ever distracted Peter Abelard from words: Heloise, the beautiful niece of the Parisian priest Fulbert. In a calculated act of seduction, Abelard rented a room from Heloise’s uncle and offered to tutor Heloise in order to work off his rent. “And so, with our lessons as a pretext,” he tells us, “we abandoned ourselves entirely to love. Her studies allowed us to withdraw in private, as love desired. . . . My hands strayed oftener to her bosom than to the pages . . . [and] our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried.” 2
The inevitable happened; Heloise became pregnant, and Abelard took her to stay with his sister in Brittany until the baby was born.
Fulbert, who up until then had been remarkably blind to the affair, flew into a
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