including Ockham and Buridan. The nominalists were periodically forced out,
leaving Paris in 1407 and returning in 1437 after Paris was recaptured by the
English; in 1474 Louis XI banned nominalism, though rescinding the edict in
- Oxford, by contrast, became strongly nominalist. The orders, once
centers of creativity, now were frozen in their official doctrines. The Domini-
cans, who had made Thomism compulsory in 1309, were increasingly barred
from England by the strength of the Franciscans. Life for the Dominicans on
the Continent became uneasy as well: they left Paris in 1387, then returned in
1403 as the result of changing fortunes in the Hundred Years’ War. The
stronghold of Thomism became primarily the universities of Spain, where the
Counterreformation eventually added its weight to make Thomism virtually
the criterion of faith against heretics; by the same token, it became anathema
to Protestants.
The universities now were intellectual fortresses. Change came no longer
by internally generated creativity, but when a school was taken by storm when
external politics changed. The very labels “nominalist,” “realist,” “Scotist”
had now hardened from the inchoate movements of the earlier period into
names hurled in battle.
The Humanists, who treated all the “schoolmen” as an object of satire,
added no relief but only one more faction. Humanism was a symptom of the
crisis of decentralization and fragmentation of the attention space. The Hu-
manists did not begin the critique of scholasticism; it had already started from
within. Nor was Humanism and the inflow of texts from the east a historical
deus ex machina which just happened to restart intellectual life in a new
direction after the fall of Byzantium. There had been plenty of contacts with
Byzantium since the period of the Crusades; but there was no intellectual life
there, and European Christian thinkers had no need to rely on imported texts
while they were creating philosophies of their own. There was a structural
reason why intellectuals began looking for new imports once the universities
had lost their focus, and why those who did the most energetic searching were
those who had acquired a rival base as courtier-intellectuals. And once the field
starts relying on imports rather than indigenous creativity, philosophy enters
the usual trough. The shift from the dense creative networks of the High
Middle Ages to the sparse and broken ones of the Renaissance period is typical
of generations of importers; the motive to import came from the crisis of
success in the expansion of universities.
Academicization as a Two-Edged Sword
We face a disturbing paradox. Schools provide the material base and the
insulation from lay conceptions which allow intellectuals to pursue their own
ideas. But schools are also places of routine and pedantry. Formalism develops
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^519