quadrivium three more required sciences, based on Aristotle’s texts in natural
philosophy, metaphysics, and moral philosophy (CHLMP, 1982: 521–523).
Logic and natural philosophy, above all Aristotle’s Physics, became the core
of the arts studies, the major subject of lectures and disputations among the
younger students and masters, and also a magnet of attention for the theolo-
gians.
This wide concern with natural science continued after Duns’s death in- The nominalists of course were involved, but so were anti-nominalists
such as Burley and Bradwardine, and Scotists such as Francis of Meyronnes
(DSB, 1981: 5:115–116). What had shifted was that such topics were much
closer to monopolizing the focus of philosophy, as its theological border was
being willfully depopulated. Intellectuals now were concentrating on the most
autonomous areas of the arts curriculum.
It has been stressed (Grant, in CHLMP, 1982; Blumenberg, 1985) that the
condemnation of 1277 had paved the way for nominalism, and for the inde-
pendence of natural science from theology, by mandating that no restrictions
be placed on the omnipotence of God. In effect, this meant the end of rational
theology, and of theologized philosophy, leaving the two segments to go their
own ways. Nevertheless, the events of 1277 were no arbitrary turning point.
The conservatives who engineered the condemnations faded away; and indeed
the positions they condemned, including both Averroism and Aquinas’s meas-
ured Aristoteleanism, remained as examples of unified rational theology-cum-
metaphysics. It is, rather, that the balance point of the conflicts shifted, so that
now Aquinas became the “right wing,” the bedrock of the conservative posi-
tion. Although there was a widespread Thomist faction in the 1300s, it was
confined to minor figures (see key to Figures 9.4 and 9.5) with none of the
innovative prestige of the Scotists and especially the nominalist critics. The
extremes of the intellectual spectrum—Thomist orthodoxy at one end, Aver-
roist heresy and anti-papalism at the other—became its static anchors; dyna-
mism shifted to the realigning camps of the organizationally uncommitted. It
was these contentions which carried some implications of the 1277 condem-
nations to highly unorthodox results. The arbitrariness of theology vis-à-vis
the world was now used to break apart the unified hierarchical cosmology that
had been shared by both old Neoplatonists and Aristoteleans. The attack on
Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, itself permeated by astronomy, became the
turf on which intellectual contests were now fought.
The Paris Network and the Oxford Calculators
Church authorities in Paris by 1340 were condemning unnamed groups of
students and young masters who were gathering privately to read banned texts490 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths