For all the success of Bernard’s monasteries, the pull of the intellectual
marketplace was even stronger. Although Abelard in his old age was con-
demned to imprisonment in a monastery, the network of teachers continued
to thicken, and the schools became more concentrated and permanent. Saint
Bernard’s mysticism, not so much contemplative as a program of spiritual
exercises and virtues, was developed by other members of his austere order of
Cistercian monks. By the next generation, their anti-intellectualism was already
fading into philosophical interpretations of mysticism. A comprehensive aca-
demic mysticism was taught at the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris, where Hugh
of St. Victor included all the secular arts as a basis of contemplation, leading
up through a hierarchical classification as allegorical signs of God in the world.
As the Parisian schools became institutionalized, a rival node of the net-
work gathered prestige at Chartres. Bernard of Chartres and his pupils de-
fended classical learning and a theological Platonism, staking their claim for
attention on their stock of ancient culture. It is not surprising to find the
Chartres network taking the lead in seeking translations from the Arab world,
sending emissaries to Toledo and to Sicily in search of texts to bolster its
position.
Around 1200 the older chains gradually ran out (see Figures 9.3 and 9.4).
The older mysticism, in both anti-intellectual and systematic forms, had faded;
so had nominalism and even Abelard’s sophisticated technical logic. Although
Abelard had many important pupils, the most famous of them exemplified the
skepticism and eclecticism that emerged after two or three generations of a
crowded intellectual field. John of Salisbury was a network sophisticate, pupil
not only of Abelard but also of Gilbert of Poitiers, acquaintance of Hugh of
St. Victor and even of Saint Bernard. John regarded the controversies of his
time with mild skepticism, and espoused a doctrine that knowledge can be only
probable at best. For him the problem of universals had existed since ancient
times and was no doubt insoluble.
From this time dates the development of the sheer technical aspect of
intellectual life—not in the subtleties of Abelard’s logic, which were forgotten,
but in what became the scholastic method. Abelard’s most successful pupil was
Peter Lombard, not an original thinker but the compiler of Sentences, a book
of opinions on disputed questions. It became the most popular textbook of
medieval times; the predominant mode of composition came to be the practice
of writing a commentary on Lombard’s Sentences. The success of his compi-
lation against others which were appearing at the same time was primarily due
to the place of his chain at Paris, where Lombard was master of the cathedral
school at Notre Dame from 1140 to 1159, and then bishop of Paris. For the
cathedral school was then turning into the nucleus of the University of Paris,
and Peter Lombard’s faithful pupil Peter of Poitiers became its first chancellor.
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^467