A home for free learning

Two powers

Greek science had no lasting institutions behind it. Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum were private schools, and the Museum at Alexandria, where scholars did draw royal stipends, lasted only as long as the favor of its kings. Nobody expected results from them. That freedom was the point, but it also made Greek learning fragile. When its cities fell, it had nowhere safe to live. This course’s first argument is that Christian Europe built that safe place. It started with an unusual attitude toward power.

Christianity spread slowly. More than three hundred years passed between Jesus’s ministry and 380, when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. That’s longer than most Chinese dynasties lasted. For most of that time it was a religion of the poor and the weak, surrounded by enemies. So, in this reading, it learned to keep out of the state’s way, and it drew on a saying of Jesus to do so:

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

Gospel of Mark 12:17 (King James Version)

Worldly government belonged to rulers; spiritual authority belonged to the church. Christians generally obeyed the governments they lived under. In this reading, the church kept this division even after it became powerful. In the Middle Ages the church held Europe together, but popes didn’t try to run kingdoms in place of kings.

The division was sharpened in what the American legal historian Harold Berman called the Papal Revolution, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Popes asserted the church’s independence from emperors and kings, and scholars at Bologna revived ancient Roman law. The church built its own system of law, called canon law, to govern its own affairs and mark the limits of royal power. Two powers, church and crown, now lived side by side within a framework of law. Their relationship was orderly but tense, and that tension left room for something new.

The third force

After about the year 1000, Europe grew. New farming methods, like the heavy plow and rotating crops through three fields, fed more people, and trade revived. Merchants and craftsmen became a third force, squeezed between the power of kings and the power of the church, and they found their home in the city.

A European city was more than a place. It was a self-governing body. A king, a bishop, or a lord granted it a charter, and its citizens then ran their own affairs, with their own councils, courts, and taxes. A serf who lived in such a town for a year and a day could claim freedom, a rule German historians later summed up as “city air makes you free.” Chinese cities, by contrast, were what this course bluntly calls “pseudo-cities”: walls around a market, governed by officials sent from the capital. They never governed themselves.

Inside the city, people organized into guilds: bakers, shoemakers, coppersmiths, cloth merchants. Each guild was a small self-governing association of free individuals that set its own rules and defended its members’ rights. In this reading, the free individual is the key to understanding Western civilization. Cities, guilds, and later capitalism all grew from it. And one kind of guild matters more than all the others for the history of science.

A guild called a university

Each fall, freshmen arrive at China’s best universities asking how to get high grades. That is a high school question. A university is about self-directed, free learning. The confusion runs deep. China’s primary and secondary schools grew out of its own traditions, but its universities were imported from the West, around 1900, so to many Chinese students college just feels like more school.

Where did universities come from? Not from any government plan. In the 1100s, as translations of Greek and Arabic learning spread, people across Europe wanted to study. A good teacher would set up in some town and students would flock to him; teachers in turn went where the students were. There were no campuses and no buildings, only people.

To protect themselves, they did what every other trade did: they formed guilds. Teachers asked the church to grant them the legal status of clergy, which put their disputes under church courts instead of local ones. They bargained with townspeople over rents and threatened to leave if they didn’t get their way. Students formed guilds too. At Bologna, the student guild hired the professors and fined them for starting late or skipping hard parts of the syllabus. They were protecting themselves from what Chinese students today call 水课, “watered-down courses.”

Bologna, traditionally dated to 1088, is counted as the first university. It was run by its students: the rector was a student, and professors had to swear to obey the student statutes. Paris, which took shape around 1200, was a guild of teachers. When a town treated its scholars badly, they could simply leave. In 1209 some Oxford scholars left for Cambridge. In 1222 a group from Bologna founded the university at Padua. In 1229 the University of Paris went on strike and dispersed for two years.

First a person, then a professional

Why did medieval society want universities at all? The answer is practical. Christian Europe needed three kinds of professionals: doctors to care for the body, priests for the soul, and lawyers for society. So every full university had three higher faculties: medicine, theology, and law.

But nobody went straight into them. First you studied in the faculty of arts, and there you learned the seven liberal arts from Course 1: the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These were the Greek and Roman subjects of free people. Only after earning a degree in arts could you go on to theology, law, or medicine. In short: first become a person, then become a professional.

Compare China today, where students go straight into law, business, or management as undergraduates. Some of the brightest applicants to China’s top universities choose business schools at eighteen. This course finds that backward. By medieval standards, you should first learn the subjects that make a free person, and only then learn a trade.

A fortress of free learning

The faculty of arts, in this reading, became a fortress of free learning. It taught Greek philosophy, above all Aristotle, and it could teach it on its own terms. There were conflicts. Theology professors worried that arts masters were following Aristotle wherever he led, even where he contradicted Christian doctrine. In 1277 the bishop of Paris condemned 219 propositions, some of them taught in the arts faculty. But the conflict itself shows how much room the arts masters had.

We tend to imagine the medieval church controlling every thought in Europe for a thousand years. The picture here is different. The church divided power with kings, and it sheltered universities where Greek learning could be studied and argued over for centuries. These, the argument goes, were Christianity’s institutional gifts to the modern world.