BISHOPS, THEOLOGIANS, AND PHILOSOPHERS IN CONFLICT AT THE UNIVERSITIES OF PARIS AND OXFORD: THE CONDEMNATIONS OF 1270 AND 1277 In one of his letters from prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: The movement beginning about the thirteenth century (I am not going to get involved in any arguments about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (un- der which I place the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and manages in science, social and political affairs, art, ethics and religion) has in our time reached a certain completion. Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis. In questions concerning science, art, and even ethics, this has become an understood thing which one scarcely dares to tilt at any more. But for the last hundred years or so it has been increasingly true of religious questions also: it is becoming evident that everything gets along without "God," and just as well as before.' Bonhoeffer's perceptive remark shows how important it is to examine our me- dieval past as well as other pasts if we are to understand our present. His allusion to the medieval movement towards human autonomy directs our attention to a number of conflicts between churchmen and theologians from the eleventh cen- tury on. We shall examine the most dramatic of these—the condemnations in 1270 and 1277 at the University of Paris by Etienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, and an almost simultaneous condemnation in 1277 at Oxford University by the Arch- bishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby. Kilwardby's condemnations were re- newed in 1284 by his successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham.2 'Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, translation of Widerstand und Ergebung—Briefe und Aufzeichnungen aus der Heft (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, s.d.), (London: S.C.M. Press, 1953; London: Collins Fontana Books, 1959), pp. 106-107. 2Studies of these events include E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Mid- dle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), pp. 385-427, 717-50 (needs some revision in view of newly edited texts and recent studies); A. Maurer, Medieval Philosophy (2nd ed.; The Etienne Gilson Series, 4; Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982), pp. 192-219,407-10,439-41; J. Miethke, "Papst, Ortsbischof und Universität in den Par- iser Theologenprozessen des 13. Jahrhunderts," in A. Zimmerman, ed., Miscellanea me- diae valia, vol. X: Die Auseinandersetzungen an der Pariser Universität im XIII. Jahrhundert (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), pp. 52-94; F. Van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de Brabant, Philosophes médiévaux, 21 (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1977) [good bibliography]; R. Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277, Philosophes Médiévaux, 22 (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1977) [good bibliog- Bishops, Theologians, and Philosophers in Conflict 115 Earlier tensions had grown with the rise of the cathedral schools of France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Lanfranc and local councils against Berengar of Tours, Bernard of Clairvaux and William of St. Thierry against Abelard, Ber- nard and Gerhoh of Reichersberg against Gilbert of Poitiers—these struggles were usually the reflection of two different ways of doing theology, one the so-called "monastic" theology linked with the monks' lectio divina and ordered to pious contemplation rather than probing into new questions, the other the more profes- sional (we would say "academic") theology of the new schools, or "scholastic" theology, which applied dialectics and speculative grammar within faith, exam- ined apparently conflicting authoritative texts from Scripture or the Fathers, and raised many new questions for discussion. Less controversial, but beginning the trend noted by Bonhoeffer, was the discovery of natures in created things, espe- cially in the twelfth-century school of Chartres.3 In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the organization of the new University of Paris coincided with the entry into the West of Aristotle's physics, psychology, metaphysics, and ethics, together with commentaries on them by Avicenna, Averroes and others. In 1210 and 1215 ecclesiastical authorities for- bade lecturing on (but not personal reading of) this whole new wave of teachings that fascinated many scholars.4 These prohibitions were renewed in 1231 by Pope raphy]; A. Bernstein, "Magisterium and License: Corporate Autonomy against Papal Au- thority in the Medieval University of Paris," Viator 9 (1978), 291-307; R. Hissette, "Étienne Tempier et ses condamnations," Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 47 (1980), 231-70; C. Ryan, "Man's Free Will in the Works of Siger of Brabant," Mediaeval Studies 45 (1983), 155-99. 3On these developments see G. Paré, A. Brunet, and P. Tremblay, La renaissance du Xlle siècle: Les écoles et l'enseignement (Paris: Vrin; Ottawa, Institut d'Études Médié- vales, 1933); Gilson, History, pp. 128-78, 613-36; Maurer, Med. Phil., pp. 47-92, 390- 95, 430-32; M.-D. Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1957), only par- tially translated (9 of 19 chs.) as Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century, ed. and trans. J. Taylor and L. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, 2nd ed., trans. C. Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974); J. Pelikan, The Christian Tra- dition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. Ill: The Growth of Medieval The- ology (600-1300) (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 177-245; W. Principe, Introduction to Patristic and Medieval Theology, 2nded. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982) [photocopied class notes], pp. 177-245. "See H. Denifle, ed., Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis (hereafter referred to as CUP), 4 vols. (Paris, 1889-1897; rpt. Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1964), no. 1 J: I (1889), 70 (for the year 1210): "nec libri Aristotelis de naturali philosophia nec commenta legantur Parisius publice vel secreto, et hoc sub pena excommunicationis inhibemus" (De- cree of Master Peter of Corbeil, Archbishop of Sens and Bishop of Paris). The 1215 decree came from the papal legate, Cardinal Robert Courson; see ibid., no. 20; I, 78-79: "Non legantur libri Aristotelis de methafisica et de naturali philosophia, nec summe de eisdem. ' ' In these texts legere refers to lecturing in public or private, not to personal reading, which certainly was done, as is clear from quotations of Aristotle and others by authors of the period. It should also be noted that these restrictions applied only at the University of Paris; other universities such as Toulouse invited students to come in order to share the greater freedom in lecturing on these authors. 116 CTS A Proceedings 40 /1985 Gregory IX, but he also appointed a commission of theologians to review the works and purge them of error so that they could be used safely. The commission seems, however, not to have completed this work. In any case, after Gregory's death in 1241, lectures on these works began to be given, and in 1255 a statute of the uni- versity actually legalized and prescribed times for the study of all the known works of Aristotle for the Faculty of Arts.5 These prohibitions seem to have been observed more faithfully in the Faculty of Theology, which indeed may have been the source of the pressure to have them introduced. Although all theologians in the first half of the thirteenth century used some elements of Aristotelian and Avicennian (and to a lesser extent Averroistic) philosophy, they subordinated these elements to their neo-Augustinian theology which had assimilated a good measure of Neoplatonism, more attuned as it was to their kind of Augustinianism than was the new Aristotle.6 From this trend among theologians, led by Bonaventure and after his death in 1274 by John Pecham and Henry of Ghent, came strong opposition to the enthusiastic appropriation of Ar- istotle and his commentators (especially Averroes) by professors in the Faculty of Arts in the sixties and seventies of the thirteenth century. Suspicion also grew con- cerning those theologians, Thomas Aquinas in the lead, who made thorough, sys- tematic use of Aristotle in their theology, although it must be stated emphatically that Aquinas was not simply an Aristotelian or different only because of his use of Aristotle: the new philosophy in Aquinas was always governed by and subor- dinate to faith and to his continuous lecturing on scripture throughout his life as a master of theology; moreover, it was balanced by healthy doses of Augustine and other Fathers as well as by the Neoplatonism of the Pseudo-Dionysius and others, and was surpassed in profundity by his own original philosophy of esse or actus essendi applied within theology. Thomas Aquinas was caught in a kind of whirlpool formed by two opposing currents. Like modern theologians who draw elements out of Freudian or Jungian or other psychology, or who use modern existentialist or phenomenological or process or linguistic philosophies, or who apply categories from Marxist or other sociologies, Thomas came under attack from the more conservative theologians, in this case the neo-Augustinians. Bonaventure may have had Thomas in mind when he accused some theologians of diluting the wine of Sacred Scripture with the water of mundane philosophy.7 The other current was that flowing from some 'For Gregory's text see ibid., no. 87 (I, 143-44), and for the 1255 statute ibid no 246 (I, 277-79). 'For the use of Averroes (which was to be crucial in the 1260s and 1270s) in this earlier period see W. Principe, "Richard Fishacre's Use of Averroes with Respect to Motion and the Human Soul of Christ," Mediaeval Studies 40 (1978), 349-60, especially pp.