The University of Paris and Scholasticism

The Notre-Dame cathedral school, seedbed of the university

The University of Paris was not born from a single founding act. It emerged gradually, between the late 12th century and 1231, from the cathedral schools that had multiplied around Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, legally dependent on the chancellor of the cathedral, who held the licentia docendi, the right to grant the licence to teach^[3].

Alongside the episcopal school survived the schools of the abbey of Saint-Victor, founded in 1108 by William of Champeaux and marked by the spirituality of Hugh and Richard, and of Sainte-Geneviève, on the Left Bank, which remained more independent of the cathedral chapter. The Left Bank of the Seine became, around the turn of the 13th century, the quarter of the schools: the future Latin Quarter, where Latin was spoken among masters and students come from all over Europe^[4].

Abelard and Peter Lombard, forerunners of the method

Before the university was legally constituted, two masters prepared the intellectual ground. Peter Abelard (1079-1142), a philosopher and theologian of brilliant intellect and difficult character, taught at Notre-Dame, then at Sainte-Geneviève and elsewhere. He introduced into theology the method that would become central: systematically opposing the contrary authorities of Scripture and the Fathers, and seeking the solution through reason. His Sic et non lists 158 questions where patristic passages seem to contradict one another, and invites the reader to harmonise them. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux opposed him at the Council of Sens in June 1140, fearing that an unpurified reason might dissolve the mysteries; Innocent II condemned him. But Benedict XVI himself acknowledges that Abelard, despite his condemnations, "made a decisive contribution to the development of scholastic theology"^[5].

It is Peter Lombard (c. 1095-1160), canon and then bishop of Paris, who gave the method its decisive teaching tool. Around 1155-1158, he completed the Four Books of Sentences (Sententiae in IV libris distinctae), divided into 4 books and 182 distinctions (48, 44, 40 and 50 for books I to IV). The plan follows the order of God, creatures, the incarnation and redemption, then the sacraments and the last things. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, by its canon 2, condemned Joachim of Fiore's libellus against Peter Lombard and made his Trinitarian doctrine its own^[6].

From the 13th century onward, commenting on the Sentences became the obligatory trial for every candidate for the mastership in theology at the University of Paris. The commentary on the Sentences was, in university practice, the medieval equivalent of a qualifying thesis: a dense work, published and defended, in which the future master took a position on the whole of Catholic doctrine. Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert the Great and Duns Scotus all commented on Peter Lombard before their personal teaching^[7].

The first statutes and Roman recognition (1200-1215)

The date of 1200 is traditionally retained as the first royal act: Philip Augustus granted privileges to the Parisian masters and students and recognised their clerical status. It was a one-off protective act, after a serious incident between German students and Parisian townsfolk, but it did not yet create a constituted institution.

The decisive act was the letter of Cardinal Robert of Courson in 1215. Legate of Pope Innocent III, himself a former student of Paris, Robert of Courson gave the young corporation of Parisian masters and students (universitas magistrorum et scholarium) its first complete statutes: age requirements for teaching the arts (minimum twenty years) and theology (thirty-five after eight years of study), length of studies, authorised books, manner of disputations, dress of the masters^[8].

Robert of Courson explicitly forbade the teaching of Aristotle's Metaphysics and Physics, then badly translated and perceived as dangerous to the faith. This prohibition did not hold for long: the entire intellectual labour of the 13th century would consist precisely in assimilating Aristotle in a Catholic way, which Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas did.

The strike of 1229 and the bull Parens Scientiarum (1231)

The decisive turning point came from a crisis. On Shrove Tuesday 1229, following a quarrel over prices in a tavern in the faubourg Saint-Marcel, students returned armed to ransack the establishment. Rather than letting ecclesiastical justice exercise its jurisdiction over clerics, Blanche of Castile, regent for the young Saint Louis IX, ordered repression by the royal sergeants. Several students were killed — the English chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall speaks of 320 clerics thrown into the Seine, an unverifiable figure that nonetheless conveys the scale of the shock^[9].

Masters and students declared a strike. Teaching stopped. Part of the corporation dispersed to other towns: Reims, Toulouse, Oxford — which emerged strengthened. The paralysis lasted two years. Pope Gregory IX, himself a former student of Paris, intervened as arbiter. After mediation, he sealed the restoration with the bull Parens Scientiarum, promulgated on 13 April 1231^[10].

The very name of the bull is a programme: Parens Scientiarum — "the mother of the sciences". Paris is presented there as a city of letters "shining with a precious brightness"^[11]. The text guarantees:

• the freedom of the corporation to establish its own statutes (method and timetables of lessons and disputations, reception and conduct of students);
• the separation of jurisdictions: a student is not arrested for debt by a royal sergeant and falls under ecclesiastical justice;
• the obligation for the chancellor of Notre-Dame to swear to grant the licence to teach only to candidates deemed worthy by their peers, and to examine without favouritism or regard for origin;
• the university's own disciplinary power, which may exclude those who violate the statutes^[12].

Historians rightly see in it the Magna Carta of the University of Paris: for the first time, a university corporation received from the Holy See itself the guarantee of its intellectual and legal autonomy^[13]. This autonomy does not mean independence from the Church: on the contrary, it means that the Church, and not the civil power, is its ultimate guarantor.

"Paris, mother of the sciences, like another Cariath-Sepher, city of letters, shines with a radiant light, great indeed by her students, greater still by her masters." — Gregory IX, bull Parens Scientiarum, 13 April 1231^[14]

Four faculties

The university was structured into four faculties, in a hierarchy that was not only administrative but doctrinal^[15]:

The faculty of arts was compulsory: one entered young — later statutes would fix the age of determination at fourteen — and the course lasted a minimum of six years, the licence being conferred only around the age of twenty^[16]. The "higher" faculties — law, medicine, theology — came afterwards. Theology required, according to the statutes of Cardinal de Courson (1215), at least eight years of study and thirty-five years of age to teach^[17].

Four nations

To manage the mass of students, the faculty of arts was organised into four nations, attested from the first decades of the 13th century^[18]:

• French Nation: masters and students from the south of France, Italy, Spain and the Near East
• Picard Nation: Artois, Picardy, Flanders, Brabant
• Norman Nation: Normandy and Brittany
• English Nation: British Isles, German Empire, Scandinavia

Each nation elected a proctor. The four proctors in turn elected the rector of the faculty of arts, who would eventually become the rector of the whole university. Organisation by nation reflected a concrete reality: Latin was spoken among scholars, but students lived in linguistic communities, shared the same hospitia, and the nations managed internal solidarity, board, care for the sick and defence before the authorities.

Rector, chancellor, deans

Three authorities shared the life of the university:

• The chancellor of Notre-Dame, an ecclesiastical authority linked to the bishop of Paris, who held the power to confer the licence to teach.
• The chancellor of Sainte-Geneviève on the Left Bank, who exercised a similar, more independent role.
• The rector, elected by the nations, at the head of the university corporation itself.

The bull Parens Scientiarum explicitly limited the chancellor's power: he had to examine within three months and could impose neither excessive oaths nor levies of money^[19]. This tension between episcopal authority and corporate freedom structured the entire medieval life of the institution.

The colleges and the birth of the Sorbonne (1257)

If the university conducted studies and conferred degrees, it did not organise student housing. That was the role of the colleges, charitable foundations where poor students received lodging, board and spiritual guidance. The most famous was born in 1253-1257: Robert de Sorbon (1201-1274), chaplain and confessor of Saint Louis, a theologian of peasant origin who had become canon of Cambrai then of Paris, founded a house for "poor masters and students in theology". Saint Louis confirmed the foundation in 1257, and Pope Alexander IV approved it in 1259^[20].

The college first bore the official name of Domus pauperum magistrorum studentium in theologia, "House of poor masters and students in theology". The title is precise: Robert de Sorbon wanted the beneficiaries to be poor (equality in poverty), already masters of arts having completed their course, and theologians willing to devote themselves fully to study without seeking any other professional remuneration^[21].

The College of Sorbonne was not, originally, a place of public teaching — it was a place of residence, very soon endowed with a rich library. But it shone so brightly through the quality of its doctors that its name would end up designating by metonymy the entire faculty of theology of Paris, then the university itself. Along with the College of Navarre (founded in 1304 by Joan of Navarre), the College of Cardinal Lemoine (1302) and the College of the Cholets, it formed the first generation of the great Parisian colleges^[22].

Alongside the secular colleges, the mendicant orders — Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from 1217, Franciscans at the Cordeliers — set up their own studia, which rapidly obtained, not without conflict, their chairs in the faculty of theology. It was in these mendicant studia that the greatest scholastic masters would be formed.

A method, not just a school

The word scholasticism comes from schola, "school". It designates first, in the technical sense, the manner of reasoning practised in the schools — cathedral schools then universities — of the Middle Ages: the "doctrine of the school". It is therefore not, first, a particular doctrinal content nor a homogeneous philosophical school: it is a method of rational work on sacred and philosophical texts.

The Catholic Encyclopedia gives a tight definition: "The very essence of Scholasticism is its clear delimitation of the respective domains of philosophy and theology." It adds, against a common caricature, that far from being hostile to reason, scholasticism rests on the contrary upon "the conviction that reason is to be used in the elucidation of spiritual truth"^[23].

Three names punctuate its history: nascent scholasticism (9th-12th century, from Alcuin and John Scotus Eriugena to Anselm, Roscelin, Abelard, Peter Lombard); the golden age in the 13th century (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure), extended into the early 14th century by Duns Scotus; late scholasticism (14th-15th century, marked by William of Ockham and Jean Gerson — the devotio moderna, with Thomas à Kempis, stands apart as a spiritual reaction, not as a scholastic school)^[24].

Lectio, quaestio and disputatio

Concretely, the scholastic master's day rested on three articulated exercises.

The lectio was the commented reading of an authoritative text: Holy Scripture for the faculty of theology, the Gloss on Scripture, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, or the works of Aristotle and Boethius for the faculty of arts. The master read the text sentence by sentence, explained it, distinguished its senses and difficulties. The lectio was the backbone of teaching.

The quaestio extended the lectio. When a point raised a problem, the master formulated it as a question: Utrum... — "Whether or not...". He listed the objections (the videtur quod non), gave a contrary authority (the sed contra), then his personal answer (responsio or solutio), and finally resolved the objections one by one. This pattern — made canonical by Thomas Aquinas — appears throughout the Summa Theologiae.

The disputatio, finally, was the most impressive public exercise: the master disputed before the entire university on a question prepared in advance (disputatio ordinaria) or even on a question proposed on the spot by anyone in the audience (disputatio de quolibet). The Quaestiones Quodlibetales of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus testify to the prodigious demands of this exercise: one had to accept public intellectual combat, without preparation, and answer unforeseen objections on any subject of faith or philosophy^[25].

The commentaries on the Sentences and the summae

From these exercises were born the great literary genres of scholasticism:

• Biblical commentaries (continuous reading of a book of Scripture)
• Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (the youthful trial)
• Disputed Questions (Quaestiones disputatae) on precise themes (truth, evil, the soul, the virtues)
• Quodlibets (public answers on any question)
• Summae (Summae), attempts at synthesising all theological knowledge
• Commentaries on Aristotle (Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas would make massive use of them)

The Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, written between 1266 and 1273, is the culmination of this genre. It takes up the method of the quaestio in its own right in several thousand articles. Each article follows the structure: interrogative title, objections, sed contra, corpus, answers to the objections. It is the intellectual cathedral of Latin scholasticism.

Fides quaerens intellectum: faith seeking understanding

Scholasticism is not a rationalism — in the modern sense in which reason separates itself from faith and ends up judging it. It is, in the classic formula of Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), a faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). The theologian starts from the faith received, believes what the Church believes, and then seeks to understand the reasons for believing, the harmony of the mysteries and their implications.

Benedict XVI, in his audience of 4 November 2009, recalled that this Anselmian definition — fides quaerens intellectum^[26] — is received as a traditional definition, including by Saint Bernard; the gap between Bernard and Abelard does not concern the definition but the prudent use of reason: for Bernard, "theology has but one aim: to promote the living and intimate experience of God"; for Abelard, critical reason must be able to examine the statements of faith without threatening the mystery^[27]. The whole of mature scholasticism — Albert, Thomas, Bonaventure — would hold both together: rational rigour and spiritual inwardness.

"Faith and reason are like the two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." — John Paul II, encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998, introduction^[28]

Peter Lombard, the Master of the Sentences

Peter Lombard (c. 1095-1160) came from northern Italy. A student at Bologna, then at Reims, he arrived in Paris around 1136 where he taught at the cathedral school. He eventually became bishop of Paris, shortly before his death. His Magna glossatura on Saint Paul and on the Psalms already testifies to his organisational genius, but it is the Four Books of Sentences (c. 1155-1158) that consecrated his name^[29].

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), under Innocent III, approved his Trinitarian doctrine against the objections of Joachim of Fiore. This official approval made the Sentences the authorised textbook: all future masters in theology of Paris (and beyond, of all Latin Christendom) would have to comment on it to attain their degree. For three centuries, from the 13th to the early 16th, the Master of the Sentences was the fundamental pedagogical authority in systematic theology^[30].

Saint Albert the Great, integrator of Aristotle

Albert the Great (c. 1200-1280), a Swabian Dominican, is one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages. Theologian, philosopher, naturalist, he undertook the immense task of assimilating all of Aristotle into Christian thought, in a movement whereby the Metaphysics and the Physics, long suspect, became the pillars of a new Catholic natural philosophy.

Albert obtained his mastership in theology at Paris around 1245 and taught there as regent until 1248 at the Dominican chair of the Saint-Jacques convent. In 1248, he founded the great Dominican studium generale at Cologne and directed it until 1254. It was in these two cities — Paris and Cologne — that he had as his disciple the young Thomas Aquinas, who followed him to Cologne and continued his studies under his direction^[31].

Albert was not only the master of Thomas; he was also the author of an immense encyclopaedic work, covering logic, physics, metaphysics, psychology, the natural sciences (mineralogy, botany, zoology) and theology. His late canonisation (1931) and his proclamation as patron of scientists by Pius XII in 1941 say something essential: Parisian scholasticism, in the 13th century, embraced science.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), an Italian Dominican and pupil of Albert, became master in theology at Paris in spring 1256: on the order of Alexander IV, the chancellor conferred on him the licence to teach although he was only thirty-one and the statutes required thirty-five^[32]. He first taught at the Dominican chair of Saint-Jacques until 1259. During this first Parisian period, he wrote the Disputed Questions De veritate, the first Quodlibets and the commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate^[33].

He left Paris in 1259 for ten years of teaching and writing in Italy (Naples, Orvieto, Rome, Viterbo). It was in Italy, around 1265-1266, that he began composing the Summa Theologiae. He returned to Paris a second time, from 1268 to Easter 1272, in a university then traversed by the spread of Aristotelianism and quarrels between secular and regular masters. There he wrote the Second Part (Secunda Pars) of the Summa and most of his commentaries on Aristotle^[34].

His doctrine is the culmination of Parisian scholasticism. Taking up Aristotle, it does not settle for a veneer: it subordinates the Philosopher to Revelation and thus achieves an organic synthesis of faith and reason. Fides et Ratio would say of him that he "had the merit of giving pride of place to the harmony which exists between reason and faith"^[35]. Leo XIII would make the Summa the obligatory reference of Catholic seminaries through the encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879.

"Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason." — John Paul II, encyclical Fides et Ratio, §43, on the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas^[36]

The Ignispedia article devoted specifically to his masterwork — the Summa Theologiae — details the structure and content of this doctrinal cathedral.

Saint Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor

Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (c. 1217-1274), an Italian Franciscan, studied the arts at Paris before taking the habit of the Friars Minor and returning to teach there. He became regent master of the Franciscan school around 1253, at the same time as Thomas Aquinas obtained his Dominican mastership. These two masters, mendicants, foreigners, young, were first rejected by the secular masters of Paris — the central episode of the quarrel between seculars and mendicants — before being imposed by pontifical authority.

In 1257, Bonaventure was elected minister general of the Friars Minor and left his university chair. He nevertheless continued to write and preach: his Legenda maior of Saint Francis, his Itinerarium mentis in Deum (1259), his Collationes in Hexaemeron (1273) extended a work whose distinctive mark was to unite scholasticism and mysticism^[37].

Bonaventure did not oppose Thomas, but he stressed other dimensions: the centrality of Christ and the Cross, the divine illumination of the intellect in the Augustinian line, contemplation as the goal of all theology. He would be proclaimed Doctor of the Church by Sixtus V in 1588. The nickname of Seraphic Doctor — in contrast with the Angelic Doctor Thomas — expresses this mystical inflection of an equally rigorous theology.

Blessed John Duns Scotus, the Subtle Doctor

John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), a Scottish Franciscan, completed his studies at Oxford before coming to Paris to comment on the Sentences from 1302. Briefly exiled in 1303 for refusing to sign a protest against Boniface VIII in the conflict then opposing the pope to King Philip the Fair, he returned to Paris in 1304 after the death of Boniface VIII. His mastership in theology in 1305 crowned an intellectual career of exceptional intensity. The years 1304-1307 were the apex of his output: Ordinatio (revision of his lectures on the Sentences), Quaestiones Quodlibetales disputed before the entire university, Reportata Parisiensia^[38].

He was the first great master publicly to defend, in a celebrated disputation at Paris in 1307, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary against the objections of the greatest doctors. His thesis — Mary was preserved from original sin by the anticipated grace of the merits of Christ the Redeemer — resolved the classic Thomist objection (if Mary is immaculate, she seems to have no need of Christ) and prepared the dogma proclaimed by Pius IX in 1854^[39].

Beatified by John Paul II in 1993, Duns Scotus received the nickname of Subtle Doctor for the fineness of his metaphysical distinctions: haecceitas — that which makes each being precisely this one and not another — and the formal distinction — two aspects truly distinct within one and the same being. His school would remain, until the 17th century, one of the great alternatives to Thomism in the Latin scholastic tradition.

The quarrel between seculars and mendicants (1252-1257)

From their arrival at the university, the mendicant orders — Dominicans from 1217, Franciscans shortly after — obtained chairs in theology. This upset the traditional balance: the secular masters, who had held the monopoly, saw their position challenged. The crisis erupted in the years 1252-1257, driven by William of Saint-Amour, a secular master, who denounced the place of the mendicants at the university in his De periculis novissimorum temporum (1255).

The conflict was settled by Rome. On 5 October 1256, at Anagni, Alexander IV condemned the De periculis: the work had to be burned and its author was banished from France^[40]. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure replied with treatises defending the legitimacy of religious in university teaching. The crisis ended with the definitive integration of the mendicants into the faculty of theology: it was precisely at that moment, in 1257, that Bonaventure became minister general and Thomas Aquinas began his first Parisian regency. The face of 13th-century theology was then largely shaped by these two new orders, and by the university that welcomed them despite resistance.

The condemnations of 1270 and 1277

The Aristotelianisation of philosophy posed, in the faculty of arts, a formidable problem: certain secular masters, reading Aristotle through the commentary of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), taught propositions hard to reconcile with the Christian faith. Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia are the most prominent figures of this Parisian Latin Averroism^[41].

On 10 December 1270, Bishop Étienne Tempier promulgated a first condemnation of 13 philosophical and theological propositions of Aristotelian or Averroist inspiration, grouped around four theses:

• the eternity of the world,
• the denial of God's universal providence,
• the unity of the intellect for all men (Averroist monopsychism),
• determinism^[42].

On 7 March 1277, following the request for inquiry addressed by Pope John XXI on 18 January 1277^[43], the same Tempier pronounced a second condemnation, much broader: 219 articles of philosophy and theology judged erroneous and taught in the faculty of arts^[44]. The condemnation explicitly cited the incriminated masters' denunciation of a "double truth" — the idea that a thing could be true in philosophy without being so in theology. Tempier wrote: "They say that these things are true according to philosophy, but not according to the Catholic faith, as if there were two contrary truths."^[45].

The event held major symbolic significance in the eyes of historians of medieval thought, by the scope of the propositions targeted and the status of the persons concerned^[46]. A few articles indirectly touched Thomist theses (Thomas Aquinas had died three years earlier), notably on the unicity of the substantial form, but the heart of the condemnation targeted Latin Averroism. The 1277 condemnation would later be lifted for the articles concerning Thomas: Étienne de Bouret, bishop of Paris, declared on 14 February 1325 that it did not apply to his doctrine^[47].

Far from having paralysed Christian thought, these condemnations had a stimulating effect on the new physics: by positing God's omnipotence as a principle limiting Aristotelian necessities, they freed the medieval mind to envisage hypotheses that Aristotelian metaphysics held to be impossible (plurality of worlds, the vacuum, uniform motion). Several historians of science (Pierre Duhem in the early 20th century, then Edward Grant, Stanley Jaki) saw in 1277 one of the distant starting points of modern science^[48].

Late decline and Occamism

After the apogee of the 13th century, scholasticism underwent in the 14th century a shift sometimes called its critical phase. William of Ockham (c. 1287-1347) defended a rigorous nominalism and challenged the metaphysical scope of universals; the Parisian masters of the 14th century developed a logic of formidable sophistication — suppositio, that is, the way a word designates a thing in a sentence, and consequentia, that is, the art of saying which conclusion truly follows from which premises — but the project of theological and metaphysical synthesis of the 13th century gradually lost its force^[49].

In the 15th century, the devotio moderna (with Thomas à Kempis and his Imitation of Christ) and the return to scriptural sources accentuated the reaction against an overly technical scholasticism. In the 16th century, humanism and the Reformation provoked among Catholics a second scholasticism (Salamanca, with Vitoria, Cano, Suárez) that would extend and renew the great heritage. In Paris, the university corporation continued until its suppression by the Convention in 1793^[50].

A lasting mental architecture

The 13th-century Parisian scholasticism bequeathed to Catholic culture a mental architecture by which it still lives: the careful distinction between philosophy and theology without separating them, the rigour of the quaestio, respect for the authority of the Fathers and councils, the boldness of using pagan sciences to understand Revelation. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), still today, owes its question-and-answer structure and precise language to centuries of scholastic pedagogy.

Leo XIII and the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879)

In the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII discerned that modern challenges (rationalism, positivism, liberalism, socialism) required a solid philosophical renewal. Through the encyclical Aeterni Patris of 4 August 1879, he proposed Saint Thomas Aquinas as the common master of Catholic schools: his doctrine, he wrote, was not merely one school among others, but a foundation of doctrinal unity for Christian philosophy. The encyclical inaugurated the great movement of neo-Thomism (Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Gilson, Pieper) that would be one of the intellectual driving forces of the 20th-century Church.

John Paul II and the encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998)

One hundred and twenty years later, Pope John Paul II extended Leo XIII's gesture in his encyclical Fides et Ratio of 14 September 1998. The pope defended the autonomy of philosophical reason and the need for theology of a true philosophy; he recalled that modernity had impoverished itself by separating faith and reason; he again proposed the Thomist synthesis as a model of a just articulation — without denying the legitimacy of other paths (Augustinian, Bonaventurian, Scotist)^[51].

"Faith therefore has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has profound trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason." — John Paul II, encyclical Fides et Ratio, §43^[52]

A contemporary posterity

The scholastic method, transposed, still irrigates contemporary Catholic theology. Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) stressed, in his catechesis on Bernard and Abelard, that the tension between monastic theology and scholastic theology is not a conflict to be overcome, but a fruitful polarity: the former lives in praying experience, the latter in conceptual rigour, and the Church needs both if it is to yield neither to sentimentalism nor to rationalism^[53].

The medieval University of Paris no longer exists as a corporation: the Convention suppressed it in 1793 and the contemporary Sorbonne is no longer a faculty of theology. But the institutional model it invented — hierarchised faculties, academic degrees (bachelor, licentiate, master, doctor), autonomous corporation, public disputations, commentaries on authoritative texts — spread throughout the world and remains the matrix of higher education to this day^[54].

The University of Paris is the decisive intellectual institution of the Christian Middle Ages. From Notre-Dame Cathedral was born an autonomous corporation of masters and students, guaranteed by Pope Gregory IX in 1231 in the bull Parens Scientiarum, and organised into four faculties, four nations and many colleges, including the Sorbonne founded by Robert de Sorbon in 1257.

Scholasticism is neither a modern rationalism nor a mere philosophical school. It is a method: lectio, quaestio, disputatio; an intellectual architecture in which faith seeks understanding without devouring it; a communal practice in which truth is sought through public disputation. The greatest masters — Peter Lombard, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus — produced works that remain authoritative to this day.

The very crises of the university — the quarrel of the mendicants, the condemnations of 1270 and 1277 — did not weaken but purified its tradition. Far from having stifled thought, they prepared a new articulation between reason and faith that proved fruitful up to the birth of modern science. And when, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Church wished to resume the great conversation between philosophy and faith, it was still to 13th-century Paris that it turned: Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII and Fides et Ratio of John Paul II are its major witnesses.

• Read the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas: the doctrinal summit of Parisian scholasticism.
• Read the founding of the Dominicans: the order of preachers that gave Paris Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.
• Read the founding of the Franciscans: the minor order that gave Paris Bonaventure and Duns Scotus.
• Read Benedictine monasticism: the earlier monastic tradition whose monastic theology precedes and accompanies scholasticism.
• Read the Desert Fathers: the Eastern spiritual heritage that scholasticism indirectly receives via Cassian and tradition.