were supported by secular intellectual bases in the aristocratic courts, outside
the institutions of the church; but this separation was never as extreme as in
Islam. It is above all with the Humanists of the Renaissance that this institu-
tional split approached that found in Islam. This constitutes a striking differ-
ence in chronology: the Muslims experience the separation of secularist imports
versus orthodox theological philosophy early in the life of their networks,
whereas Christendom experiences it late.
The other major difference in factional alignments is that the Christian
version of (2) hadith—scriptural loyalists—has a different kind of structural
base than in Islam. The hadith specialists are teachers and practitioners of law;
the legal world is the most scripturally traditionalist part of the Muslim
educated classes. In Christendom, by contrast, law and scriptural traditional-
ism are split very early. The strength of the law schools is found in different
places from the institutional strongholds of theology (northern Italy versus
northern France and England); the lawyers are even more connected to secular,
pre-Christian traditions (in this case Roman rather than Greek). So there arises
a faction not prominent in Islam, which might be called rational law. Hereafter
the scholastic tools and methods of the law schools become some of the
ingredients that penetrate the practice of Christian rational theology and
philosophy. Lacking a tie with law, scriptural traditionalists in Christendom
have a much weaker base than in Islam, and are much less able to control the
terms of the struggle with other intellectual factions.
If Islam and Christendom diverge intellectually, it is not so much because
of different ingredients as by divergent outcomes of their conflicts. Moving the
relative point of balance within the same kind of structure brings about quite
different long-term products. We look first at the external conditions of intel-
lectual life that channeled the European network on its path.
The Organizational Bases of Christian Thought
The crucial institutions of medieval Christendom are three: the monasteries,
the papacy, and the universities.
Northern Europe began as a thinly populated frontier, in which civilized
settlement was introduced largely by rural monasteries.^1 The church developed
in alliance with the local aristocracy; monks were recruited among their sons
and relatives, endowed with buildings, landed property, and serfs to work it.
Monasteries were devoted to ritual in honor of their founders, masses for their
sins and their memory, providing emotional mobilization and cultural legiti-
mation as the military rulers set themselves apart from the ruled. Around
1050–1100 there began a second wave of monastic expansion and reform. The
original Benedictine monasteries began to decline in numbers of monks and in
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^455