The vivid battles of Abelard’s day contrast strangely with the unoriginal
and pedantic fruits of his intellectual children and grandchildren. But the
genealogy is palpable nevertheless. Abelard and his fellow combatants had
made Paris the focus of intellectual attention, a central meeting place that
became institutionalized in famous schools. And Abelard himself laid down
the first great example of a textbook, his Sic et Non, early in the century, in
which he set forth contradictory passages from the Church Fathers arranged
around abstract philosophical issues. The method had emerged a generation
earlier in the hands of canon lawyers; shortly after Abelard, the concordance
of conflicting legal texts was made a systematic compilation by the great
Gratian at Bologna (Grabmann, 1909–1911; Kantorowicz, 1938). The legal
and theological faculties were forming simultaneously and in mutual influence.
Abelard’s Sic et Non gave the intellectual community one of its great pieces of
cultural capital, a set of puzzles over which to work. The scholastic method
was to flourish in a kind of architectural splendor; later commentators from
Bonaventure down to Ockham would marshal authorities first on one side of
a question, then on the other, systematically refuting and approving and
weighing in the balance. As intellectual life heated up again in the next century,
these texts became monuments to the thoroughness and subtlety of an intel-
lectual community taking seriously its history and its conflicts, the two struc-
tural ingredients of creativity.Universities and Encyclopedic Science
The intellectual life that took off again in the generations after 1200 was
shaped by several factors. The free-standing schools were amalgamating and
formalizing into universities. With this came a move to extend the branches of
knowledge and to present them in encyclopedic compendia. The Arab philoso-
phies were imported, in two waves represented by Avicenna’s Neoplatonism
and Averroës’s Aristoteleanism, followed by the Greek texts themselves. The
gap in the chains of important names at the end of the 1100s coincides with
the time when texts were pouring in from the Arab world. The temporary
downturn in indigenous creativity is typical of what happens during a genera-
tion of importers. The narrower base of Neoplatonist and late Roman texts
on which the first wave of Christendom had built its philosophy was now
swamped by the wider range of rediscovered Greek philosophy. The nominal-
ism which Christian philosophers had constructed was forgotten in the prestige
of ancient texts; nominalism would not be heard again until Ockham four
generations later. In world perspective, what is striking is how quickly Chris-
tian philosophers recovered from their dependence on imported ideas. Impetus
was given by their new organizational base.
468 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths