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THE SCHOLASTICS OR SCHOOLMEN were the characteristic medieval theologians and philosophers. In Italy, the classic secular and Christian writings had never become entirely extinct and a twelfth century revival of law promoted a number of flourishing centers for legal studies, of which Bologna was the chief. There may have been a medical school at Salerno as early as the tenth century; at any rate, medical centers now developed at Salerno, Naples, and Montpellier to retail the medical lore of the Arabian East. The lode of the Greek philosophers available in Moorish libraries had been tapped as early as the tenth century by Gerbert d'Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II. Presently a philosophical revival, closely linked with Scripture and theology, got under way, although the garbled condition of the Arabian sources was not entirely corrected until direct contacts with Greece make the original texts available during the thirteenth century.

At Paris during the twelfth century Abelard's contentious personality gave publicity to the Cathedral School of Notre Dame. By 1170 this and the Abbey School of Ste. Genevieve had fused into a corporation, a "university" of masters. Popes, emperors, and kings took Paris and other budding study centers under their protection, while townsmen, with some grumbling about student rowdiness, agreed that they were good for business. When haphazard student lodging had riotous results, various benefactors, such as Robert de Sorbonne and Bishop Merton of Rochester, founded colleges-at first supervised student dormitories. Later these institutions came to be regarded as faculties or divisions of the universities. Religious communities also founded houses, such as the Dominican convent of St. Jacques at Paris, to provide for their professors and students attending the universities. Professors set standards which evolved into the familiar degrees of bachelor, master, and doctor, while students tried to keep the professors to the subject matter and on time, for academic freedom was, if anything, excessive in the Middle Ages.

METHOD OF INSTRUCTION

The Scholastic method of instruction developed in these sur roundings. For religious training, the Bible was the basis of all study, and other subjects were preparatory to it or commentaries on it Students were required to take notes, memorize them almost verbatim -for books were at first costly-and exercise their wits with frequent debates. So-called Scholasticism was a new order of theological learning introduced into Christendom during the eleventh century which shifted stress from the religious and patristic type of theology to philosophy and human science. But all the great commentaries and summas professed to take the Bible as their authoritative basic text. This was no mere pose for the better Scholastics, though some, especially during the later medieval times, were prone to rely excessively upon subjective reasoning. After a period of rash innovation, Scholasticism produced a number of renowned groups of scholars: the Mystic School of St. Victor; the Augustinian Traditionalipts with St. Bonaventure as their great luminary; and the Aristotelian Progressives, led by Sts. Albert and Thomas Aquinas. Duns Scotus who tried to harmonize the Augustinian and Thomist traditions, actually inaugurated a new "modern" trend, critical and original. Scotistic subtlety went to seed in the Nominalist School of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Scholasticism definitely began to decline. But one masterpiece, the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, had been bequeathed to Christian theology, one that the conciliar fathers at Trent would designate as most useful and reliable at the close of the Middle Ages.

The Thomistic synthesis was a lasting contribution to learning, for in this profound and orderly "Summary" St. Thomas Aquinas combined order and clarity. He arranged the theological doctrines to expound first of God, His self-contained life in a Trinity of Persons, and then of His marvelous, generous loving concern for creatures whom He had made sharers in His own goodness. Of all creatures, on earth man is the chief, and in a second part of his Summary, St. Thomas treated of man, made to God's image: his nature, virtues, and goal, but also of man's unfortunate straying from that heavenly goal by sin. There followed a third part devoted to Christ, the God-man, the Saving link to bind back in friendly contract the parties of the first two parts, God and man. Here St. Thomas told of how Christ became man, founded His Church, and left in it seven saving souvenirs of His Passion: the sacraments.

Western liturgy applied the merits of these sacraments to men. Medieval liturgy had become a magnificent thing, indeed, in the great cathedrals of the "Age of Faith" when the majority of Europeans publicly participated in services, festivals, and processions. If this liturgy remained somewhat too clerical a province, the people's enthusiastic loyalty to their Eucharistic Lord found expression in the introduction of the Elevation into the Mass as a protest against Berengarius' denial of the Real Presence, in the introduction of the Feast of Corpus Christi with its processions, and in Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament. Devotion to Mary, Mother of God, was displayed in new ways: the Angelus commemorated Emmanuel's coming; the Feast of the Immaculate Conception spread; the Rosary beads became the people's own prayer. Other saints were influential, for it is startling that in contrast with the present, the celebrities of the Middle Ages were less statesmen, artists, and sportsmen, than men of God: courageous popes and bishops like Leo IX, Gregory VII, Gregory X, Thomas of Canterbury, and Stanislaus of Cracow; religious founders like Sts. Francis and Dominic; mystics like Sts. Gertrude, Bridget, Catherine of Siena; the innocent and the penitent. If among the rank and file of Christians there may have been too much veneration of these saints and not enough imitation, it cannot be denied that ideals were high and were not ignored.

Eastern religious life meanwhile went on enhanced by the imperial magnificence of Constantinople where the Hagia Sophia Basilica survives as a relic of a brilliant liturgical system. But too thoroughly was the Eastern Church identified with the Byzantine Empire so that disdain easily built up for those rough and boorish western brethren, barbarized by the German invasions. It was a patriarch of Constantinople, Photius, a learned and gifted man, who was none the less goaded into public denunciation of papal and Latin practices. True, the rift was not lasting, but the widening chasm of language, culture, and politics culminated in yet another jurisdictional conflict in the eleventh century. This time Michael Cerularius of Constantinople broke with the Roman See despite the pleas of another Oriental, Patriarch Peter of Antioch: "We must not expect from these barbarians the same perfect manners as we find among our civilized people. . . I beg you to give way. Consider what would happen if that First and Apostolic See be divided from our churches . . ." Unfortunately this break was not healed but instead still endures. It was even accentuated when Greeks massacred Italian merchants at Constantinople and plundered their churches, while the westerners later retaliated by seizing the city and sacking it. Alas, "See how these Christians love one another," the pagans' exclamation in the days of the primitive Church, could no longer. be said.

THE MENDICANT ORDERS

The Mendicant Orders proved to be the form of religious life distinctive of the "High Middle Ages," as monasticism had been of the earlier Feudal Age. For the greater mobility of these new religious enabled them to minister to a more sophisticated class of townsmen who were being brought to the fore by changing economic conditions. With the revival of a money economy and of a strong profit motive, this new capitalistic class was prone to be more critical of clerical and monastic possessions and revenues; it was here that the corporate poverty of the Mendicant Orders served as an effective rebuttal. It was the mission of these Orders to demonstrate-after the Waldenses and Cathari had fallen into heresy on the same tack- that apostolic poverty and disciplined orthodoxy were not incompatible. They also provided the learned and fervent instruction which the advancing educational standards of the towns and universities demanded.

Four such Orders became famous. The Carmelites, founded in Palestine in 1155 by the crusader, St. Bethold, were transformed into a mobile mendicant community by St. Simon Stock, an Englishman, during the thirteenth century. The Augustinians, originally local groups of hermits following a rule based on that of St. Augustine, were given greater centralization by Popes Innocent III and Alexander IV during the thirteenth century. The Franciscans, founded by Giovanni Bernadone (1182-1226), nicknamed "Frenchy": Francisco of Assisi, always reflected the friendly, informal, popular spontaneity of this unconventional but obedient lay reformer. The Dominicans, organized by the canon and priest Domingo Guzman (1170-1221), displayed his greater ability for organization and promotion of scholarship. Dominic's disciples came to furnish some of the greatest theological faculties for the new universities. The Dominicans were estimated at 7,000 in 1256, but they never became as numerous as the Franciscans who were said to have numbered 5,000 as early as 1219.

Dissenters, unfortunately, were not met only with arguments. For there were periodic medieval heretical movements, launched by men not content with traditional teaching or clerical rule. What was new here was the anti-social character of the Manichaean Albigenses: forbidding marriage, denouncing oaths and military service; rejecting the sacraments of the Church. Popular reaction began with mob executions during the eleventh century. At first bishops sought to restrain this popular Iynch law. Later they tried to prevent irresponsible prosecution and execution of social radicals by means of special religious courts.

These courts of the Inquisition aimed at providing fair and expert trial of suspects on theological points. In extreme cases it is true, a defiant and obstinate rabble rouser-whose crime was deemed an attack on the State as well as on the Church-would be handed to the secular government for the death penalty. Yet during his career the model inquisitor Bernard de Gui pronounced by 42 such sentences out of 930; penitential reconciliation was the rule. The Inquisition did achieve its original aim so long as it was directed against violent anti-social groups. During the later Middle Ages it declined, either losing popular support as intellectual dissent and protest created confusion, or more often, as happened in France and Spain, coming under governmental control and developing into a sort of special police whose norms were political than religious.