potential to generate more wealth.
The scholastics’ teachings were preached to townsmen by the friars as a matter
of course. They came as well to permeate the thought of the reclusive contemplatives
in the cities of Italy, the Netherlands, and the Rhineland, who absorbed the
vocabulary of the schools from their confessors. The Dominican Meister Eckhart
(d.1327/1328), who studied at Paris before beginning a career of teaching and
preaching in Germany, and who enriched the German language with new words for
the abstract ideas of the schools, was himself a contemplative: a mystic who saw
union with God as the goal of human life.
These thirteenth-century scholastics united the secular realm with the sacred in
apparent harmony. But at the end of the century, fissures began to appear. In the
writings of the Franciscan John Duns Scotus (1265/1266–1308), for example, the
world and God were less compatible. As with Bonaventure, so too with Duns Scotus:
human reason could know truth only by divine illumination. But Duns Scotus argued
that this illumination came not as a matter of course but only when God chose to
intervene. He saw God as willful rather than reasonable; the divine will alone
determined whether human reason could soar to knowledge. Further unraveling the
knot tying reason and faith together was William of Ockham (d.1347/1350), another
Franciscan who nevertheless disputed Duns Scotus vigorously. For Ockham, reason
was unable to prove the truths of faith; it was apt only for things human and worldly,
where, in turn, faith was of no use. Ockham himself turned his attention to the nature
of government, arguing the importance of the state for human society. But several of
his contemporaries looked at the physical world: Nicole Oresme (c.1320–1382), for
example, following Ockham’s view that the simplest explanation was the best,
proposed that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the heavens.
Harmony and Dissonance in Writing, Music, and Art
On the whole, writers, musicians, architects, and artists, like scholastics, presented
complicated ideas and feelings in harmony. Writers explored the relations between
this world and the next; musicians found ways to bridge sacred and secular genres of
music; artists used fleshy, natural forms to evoke the divine.
VERNACULAR LITERATURE
In the hands of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), vernacular poetry expressed the order
of the scholastic universe, the ecstatic union of the mystic’s quest, and the erotic and
