Page 252 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

Euclid on mathematics. Above all, the West now had available the complete works of Aristotle. During the second half of the twelfth century, all of Aristotle’s sci- entific works were translated into Latin. This great influx of Aristotle’s works had an overwhelming impact on the West. He came to be viewed as the “master of those who know,” the man who seemed to have under- stood every field of knowledge.
The recovery of Greek scientific and philosophical works was not a simple process, however. Little knowl- edge of Greek had survived in Europe. It was through the Muslim world, especially in Spain, that the West recovered the works of Aristotle and other Greeks. The translation of Greek works into Arabic was one aspect of the brilliant Muslim civilization; in the twelfth cen- tury, these writings were translated from Arabic into Latin, making them available to the West.
The Islamic world had more to contribute intellectu- ally to the West than translations, however. Scientific work in the ninth and tenth centuries had enabled Mus- lim scholars to forge far ahead of the Western world, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Arabic works on physics, mathematics, medicine, and optics became available to the West in Latin translations.
When Aristotle’s works were brought into the West in the second half of the twelfth century, they were accompanied by commentaries written by outstanding Arabic and Jewish philosophers. One example was Ibn- Rushd (ib-un-RUSHT or ib-un-RUSH-ed), also known as Averro€es (uh-VERR-oh-eez) (1126–1198), who lived in C􏰀ordoba and composed a systematic commentary on virtually all of Aristotle’s surviving works.
The Revival of Roman Law
Another aspect of the revival of classical antiquity was the rediscovery of the great work of Justinian, the Body of Civil Law, known to the medieval West before 1100 only at second hand. Initially, teachers of law, such as Irnerius of Bologna, were content merely to explain the meaning of Roman legal terms to their students. Gradu- ally, they became more sophisticated, so that by the mid-twelfth century, “doctors of law” had developed commentaries and systematic treatises on the legal texts. Italian cities, especially Pavia and Bologna, became prominent centers for the study of Roman law. By the thirteenth century, Italian jurists were systematizing the various professional commentaries on Roman law into a single commentary known as the ordinary gloss. Study of Roman law at the universities came to consist of learning the text of the law along with this gloss.
The training of students in Roman law at medieval universities led to further application of its principles as these students became judges, lawyers, scribes, and councillors for the towns and monarchies of western Europe. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the old system of the ordeal was being replaced by a rational decision-making process based on the systematic collec- tion and analysis of evidence, a clear indication of the impact of Roman law on the European legal system.
The Development of Scholasticism
The importance of Christianity in medieval society prob- ably made it certain that theology would play a central role in the European intellectual world. Theology, the formal study of religion, was “queen of the sciences” in the new universities. Beginning in the eleventh century, the effort to apply reason or logical analysis to the church’s basic doctrines had a significant impact on the study of theology. The philosophical and theological sys- tem of the medieval schools is known as scholasticism. A primary preoccupation of scholasticism was the attempt to reconcile faith and reason—to demonstrate that what was accepted on faith was in harmony with what could be learned by reason.
Scholasticism had its beginnings in the theological world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries but reached its high point in the thirteenth. The overriding task of scholasticism in the thirteenth century was to harmo- nize Christian revelation with the work of Aristotle. The great influx of Aristotle’s works into the West in the High Middle Ages threw many theologians into conster- nation. Aristotle was so highly regarded that he was called simply “the Philosopher,” yet he had arrived at his conclusions by rational thought—not revelation—and some of his doctrines, such as the mortality of the indi- vidual soul, contradicted the teachings of the church. The most famous attempt to reconcile Aristotle and the doctrines of Christianity was that of Saint Thomas Aqui- nas (uh-KWY-nuss).
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught theology at Paris, where he finished his famous Summa Theologica (SOO-muh tay-oh-LOG-jee-kuh) (Summa of Theology—a summa was a compendium that attempted to bring to- gether all existing knowledge on a given subject). Aqui- nas’s masterpiece was organized according to the dialectical method of the scholastics. He first posed a question, cited sources that offered opposing opinions on the question, and then resolved them by arriving at his own conclusions. In this fashion, Aquinas raised and discussed some six hundred articles or issues.
214 Chapter 9 The Recovery and Growth of European Society in the High Middle Ages
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