his202 - lect 2 - wk 9

Learning in the Twelfth Century

Two prominent figures of education in 12th century

Peter Abelard (1079-1142)

John of Salisbury (1120-1180)

Now we start to see some idiosyncratic behaviour, some individuals who are a bit weird and some who are simply exciting to read.

This new class was not a class of land owners like knights or dukes. This social class was born from monastic values and education. What we see emerge in the 12th century within this new independent social class of students, universities and monasteries are masters, masters of their chosen fields, instead of entering the priesthood, politics or becoming monks, they became teachers. Masters of their chosen academic field and able to sell their mastery of their field, much like the sophists of antiquity.

So we want to look at how these two characters compared in their teachings and how they represented their monastic fields.

Abelard was from a noble family from the city of Nantes, Bretagne in the south of France. He was sent to Paris for his education. During this education he began to excel at dialectic - arriving at the truth by the exchange of logical arguments - dialectic it can also mean argumentation for argumentations sake. But the core meaning is the former. Dialectic therefore is an expansion on logic, the term dialectic often replaces logic within the seven liberal arts. The attraction to logic for someone like Abelard is the power of reason. Reason was long seen as a corner of liberal arts. Men like Augustine and Platinus discussed their world views according to a series of logical axioms, they built an argument based upon logical statements. In the 6th century we have people like Boethius who works with logic - he was the philosopher working for Theodoric in the Italian court who ended up in prison for treason. His work cultivates a spiritual and cultural world being through the power of reason. We see here a tradition of the use of logic and the power of reason.

John Scotus - 9th century - worked in the Frankish court of Charlemagne, late 9th century. Scotus a neo-platonist went back to Plato's work and championed again the power of the mind and the application of logic. These he said were the key to gaining knowledge of the world. Human supremacy over nature is because of the power of logic.

Understanding and dividing the line between faith and reason was a particularly important issue in the 12th century. It was the impetus behind Abelard's career.

There are plenty of students in Paris and it's an intellectual center. In 1113 he was invited by the Bishop of Paris to become a professor of theology and to personally tutor his neice, Heloise.

Abelard was deemed heretical because he believed that one could simply come to know the world and humanity through logical argumentation and nothing else. Part of the problem is that you could arrive at truths which are contradictory or questioning the Church fathers.

Historia calamitatum (the story of my misfortunes) c. 1120