ciscan order, responsible for its politics and its internal discipline even more
than its intellectual life. The silencing of Bacon must have taken place with his
support, if not his initiative. This was doubtless a sideshow to more serious
conflicts. Already the Franciscans were being rent by a struggle between purist
“spirituals,” who defended Francis’s original aim of a life of poverty and
charity, against those wielding power in the church and the universities. But
the struggle was necessarily fought out in the realm of politics, where the
advocates of poverty were repeatedly condemned as their faith carried them
into currents of doctrinal heresy. To survive, the spirituals had to enter the
terrain of academic subtleties. On the intellectual front, things would not stand
still long enough for Bonaventure’s system to take hold. His main pupils, John
Peckham and Matthew of Aquasparta, found themselves fighting rear-guard
actions against the Averroists and against Aquinas. Before the dust of that
struggle could settle, the battle lines had moved. The great Franciscans from
the 1270s into the next century went far beyond Bonaventure: Peter John Olivi,
Duns Scotus, Peter Aureoli, and William of Ockham.
Revolt of the Arts Faculty
The emergence of the Averroists at Paris was a direct consequence of importing
the great commentaries on Aristotle from the Arab world. The transmission
of cultural capital was more than an accidental intrusion; factions of Christian
intellectuals had been seeking out new texts to fill the knowledge space opened
by the growth of education. Can we say that they were seeking just this sort
of text? The translators and the schools which sent them sought the prestige
of ancient wisdom, that is to say, knowledge beyond the horizon of the existing
Christian culture. Natural science was an appropriately neutral ground on
which to expand in this way. And if the situation of intercultural contact in
Spain had motivated Averroës to produce a new Aristotle and a new “religion
of reason,” there was also a structural slot in the Christian intellectual world
two generations later which was prepared to exploit this product.
The newly formalized universities had four higher faculties—civil law,
canon law, theology, and medicine—though not every university had all of
these, and most universities were eminent in only one. Preparatory to these
was the arts faculty, in which were taught the preliminary “undergraduate”
studies—dialectic, mathematics, and metaphysics. These were the slots into
which natural science expanded most readily. The universities where philoso-
phy was most developed were those in which theology dominated the higher
faculties, giving an especially abstract emphasis to its preparatory courses.^8
As the university became increasingly regulated, the theology masters jeal-
ously guarded their turf against the arts masters, repeatedly legislating against
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^475