Medieval Religion and Thought169The Intellectual Crisis of
the Twelfth Century
By the beginning of the twelfth century the Latin
church was the dominant institution and chief unifying
force of western and central Europe. Though feudal
monarchies did not always acknowledge its political
pretensions, they were usually prepared to accept its
spiritual direction and to heed its calls for crusades or
other actions on behalf of the faith. Religiously and in-
tellectually it had no rivals.
As a result neither theology nor speculative philos-
ophy was highly developed. Creative thought rarely
evolves in an atmosphere of unanimity, and the teach-
ings of the church had not been seriously challenged
since the patristic era. The monastic and cathedral
schools, which educated the priesthood, were able to
avoid major controversies until the middle of the
eleventh century. After that, whatever intellectual com-
placency Christians may have felt began to erode, and
by 1200 it was entirely shattered.
Around 1050 a heated controversy developed over
the ideas of Berengar of Tours (d. 1080). Arguing from
logic, he rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation,
which explained how, in the miracle of the mass, the
bread and wine were transformed into the body and
blood of Jesus Christ. Transubstantiation was not yet a
dogma of the church, but his writings created a furor.
The dispute opened up two issues that were to per-
plex the church for centuries. The first was over the use
of reason itself. St. Peter Damian espoused Tertullian’s
argument that faith required no support from logic; rev-
elation was enough. Others, including St. Anselm of
Canterbury (1033–1109), argued that reason could
only illuminate faith and improve understanding.
Though the advocates of formal logic would tri-
umph, at least in the schools, a third group distrusted
them for other reasons. Led by John of Salisbury
(d. 1180) and centered at the cathedral school of
Chartres, these scholars feared that an excessive con-
centration on reason might narrow the scope of learned
inquiry. They developed an interest in the secular liter-
ature of ancient Rome. Their efforts have been called
the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” because mod-
ern historians thought that they foreshadowed the Re-
naissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The second issue was that of universals, which had
first been raised by the sixth-century Christian philoso-
pher Boethius and was implicit in the arguments of
Berengar of Tours. The question, central to virtually all
medieval thought, is: Are ideas or qualities objectively
real? Does such a thing as “redness,” for example, exist
apart from any physical object that is “red”? “Realists”
held that such universals were real and that they consti-
tuted the “substance” of things. The physical manifesta-
tion of a substance was its “accident.” “Nominalists”
believed that universals are merely nomina,or names
that reflect little more than arbitrary linguistic conven-
tion. No distinction could be made between substance
and accident.
Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and transub-
stantiation were usually explained in language that im-
plied the reality of universals. In the miracle of the
mass, the substance of the bread and wine in commu-
nion is changed or transubstantiated into the substance
of the body and blood of Christ; the accidents remain
unchanged. If, like Berengar, one did not believe in the
distinction between substance and accident, this was
difficult to accept. A partial solution to the problem
was proposed by Pierre Abelard (1079–1142), who ar-
gued that a universal was a logical term related to both
things and concepts. The controversy, however, was
only beginning.
While Abelard avoided the extremes of either real-
ism or nominalism, his career as a whole intensified the
growing spirit of contention. He is best known outside
theological circles for his affair with Heloise, the bril-
liant niece of Canon Fulbert of Chartres. Their relation-
ship produced a child and some memorable letters
before her relatives had him castrated. He thereupon
became a monk and she a nun, but his penchant for
making enemies was not yet satisfied. Abelard was de-
termined to provide a rational basis for Christian doc-
trine, and his provocative writings—including Sic et
Non,a list of apparently contradictory passages from
the Fathers—set the agenda for much of what would
one day be called Scholasticism.
To Abelard, Anselm, and the other philosophers of
the cathedral schools, reason meant the logic of Aristo-
tle as embodied in those parts of the Organonthat had
been translated into Latin by Boethius. They had no di-
rect access to Aristotle’s works and their knowledge of
his thought was largely derived from the commentaries
of his translator, but they were convinced that God’s
world must necessarily operate on logical principles.
They also believed that Aristotle and other virtuous
pagans would have accepted Christianity had they not
been born before the time of Christ. It was in many
ways an age of innocence.
That innocence was shattered after the mid-twelfth
century by the discovery that Aristotle was far better