The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [21]
After six years the student was ready to establish his academic rank, or rsquo;degree’ of proficiency. In some cases a year’s advance notice would be given of the set text. The examination consisted first of a session before the doctors of the university, when the student was interrogated on the text and all relevant commentaries. The student was not asked for his own opinions, but merely to repeat what he had been taught. There then followed a more cursory public session and degrees were conferred on the successful candidates. The first degrees were called licentia docenti (licences to teach) and conferred the title of Teacher (or Magister, from which comes the modern word ‘Master’) of Arts.
The first reference to a body of teachers and students in Bologna, forming a kind of proto-university, was made in an imperial decree issued by Frederick Barbarossa in 1158 at a government meeting in Roncaglia, Italy. This document refers to the corporate existence of ‘Bolognese doctors’. By 1219 the system of degrees was certainly well established.
If Irnerius and Gratian had made Bologna home of the law, the teaching of Pierre Abelard made Paris that of theology and dialectic. The first certain reference to the university of Paris is in a papal communication of 1200. Paris was, however, a very different type of academic organisation from that in Bologna. Civil law was banned because it encouraged free-thinking. A guild of masters was in charge, which was organised into the faculties of canon law, medicine, theology and the arts—the old quadrivium (geometry, music, astronomy and maths).
The key subject was theology. The text for the main course was the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a development of Abelard’s Sic et Non. This course was heavily oversubscribed because qualification in theology paved the way for preferment in the Church. Indeed, from the beginning of the thirteenth century, entry to the Roman Curia was available only to those with this degree.
The theological course was preceded by an arts course, which lasted six years, followed by two years on the Sentences, two more years teaching and studying the Bible, and two final years of teaching and disputation. Only after this could a student qualify as a Doctor of Theology.
The arts faculty soon became controversial because it was here that the full effect of the new knowledge from Spain was felt most strongly. Students were trained to examine nature textually in the trivium, and through the use of mathematics and reason in the quadrivium. Also taught was logic, which, thanks to Aristotle, was fast becoming the most revolutionary of subjects.
While the new learning stimulated the creation of universities, it posed fundamental problems for the Church. The difficulty for Rome lay in the fact that Aristotle advocated the use of logical, empirical observation to investigate nature. This technique ran directly contrary to Augustinian teaching. If a student were to analyse the workings of the universe he might come close enough to the mechanism of Creation to ask awkward questions about God’s role. But the new intellectual instrument was too seductive to be easily suppressed. In 1210, when the teaching of Aristotle was banned in Paris, either the ban was ignored or students moved to a new school in Toulouse where, under the protection of the local Count, Aristotle was taught.
From 1130 until the end of the twelfth century Greek and Arab science and logic flooded into Europe. The texts made available the full-blooded exploitation of Greek naturalism and rationalism. Nature was no longer a closed book to be understood only by initiates: it was as much a functioning part of the universe as man himself, and was open to man to explore. Nature could be divided up into different areas of study, each with its own rules of operation, to be comprehended