Fathers of Scholasticism - Authorities as Intellectual Totems in the Middle Ages

Published by Reblogs - Credits in Posts, October 4th, 2023

14th-century image of a university lecture. / Photo courtesy The Yorck Project, Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, Wikimedia Commons

Distinctive individuals used by scholastic thinkers as models for thinking about their own particular identities.

By Dr. Blaise DufalSessional Lecturer, Honorary Associate, HistoryThe University of Sydney

Individual Thinkers and Institutions of Meaning

As a social institution, medieval scholasticism was a historical moment of moyenne durée in the longue durée of medieval societies, lasting from the beginning of the twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth century. As a place of activity, medieval scholasticism was located in Latin western Europe, in the schools, in the universities and in the monasteries. As knowledge, it was defined in the thirteenth century as a scientia within the Aristotelian philosophical principles applied to Christian culture. As a method, medieval scholasticism originated with Anselm of Canterbury and his attempt systematically to ally the Augustinian sentence ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) with the logical method of ‘by reason alone’ (sola ratione).¹ Anselm also introduced the positive conviction that knowledge could be a way of salvation for humankind. This conviction found its role in the institution of medieval scholasticism, the ‘empire of the book’,² as an institution for the production of meaning over which it had the official monopoly in western medieval societies. Medieval scholasticism was the major apparatus of the process of veridiction – determining the truth – as a social and cultural activity, an institution which organized the production, circulation and consumption of the truth. It was an arm of the Church, an institution of faith, of adhesion to belief, an institution focused on the will-to-truth which was also a self-fulfilling prophecy (in that the knowledge produced by its truthful procedures would be true).³ However, more than any complete institution, medieval scholasticism was itself a long and complex process of institutionalization.⁴

Applying the idea from canon law that formally defined an institution (institutio) as an act of recognition of a religious community by an ecclesiastical superior shows us medieval scholasticism as a grouping of institutions:⁵ the universities founded by papal acts of recognition which gave them their specific missions and privileges.⁶ Here, as in Catholic monastic moral conduct, individualism is reprehensible. The community of monks – the model for university communities – was founded on the renunciation of individual character. Following John Cassian and Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux defined an institution as the rules which organized a community, ‘a rule accepted by everyone’.⁷ Adopting this formula from the ‘last Father of the Western Church’,⁸ we can say that medieval scholasticism was a social structure defined by rules of social relationships (juridical statues, legal exceptions, internal rules); rules of teaching (graduations, teaching programmes, reading lists); and rules of thinking and writing (censure, controversies). Medieval scholasticism was a discipline (disciplina) in the monastic ascetic conception and in its scholarly application. This discipline was the way to guarantee the regulation of the controversies and dogmatic order. These rules assured the proper functioning of scholasticism and guaranteed the legitimacy of knowledge. The scholastic world, then, was an institution governed by an idea of establishing truth, the necessity of providing sense in a Christian world and the requirement to boost the Church’s doctrinal foundations. Thus, while the medieval scholastic world was not a ‘total institution’ in some modern senses,⁹ it was an institution for producing a total interpretation of reality, an institution of totalized meaning with much variety within and many extensions into other cultural systems.¹⁰ Bernard of Clairvaux’s conceptualization of institutions finds echoes in contemporary sociological definitions of institutions as collective beliefs and behaviours.¹¹ For him, institutions were ways to act and think used by individuals. However, if the monastic model played an important role in the construction of the university and medieval scholarly self-representations, the scholastic institution was in practice more open and inclusive, more plastic and dynamic. The scholastic institution stretched the tension of an institutional formulation originally designed to produce conformity; and its extension to include the individuality of scholars created an ambiguous paradox.¹²

In a parallel way the historiography of medieval scholasticism has been torn between a focus on some of the most important figures of western thought, such as Thomas Aquinas, and an insistence on the collective aspect of academic and religious groups, especially between the universities and the mendicants. The dialectical movement of this historical analysis between individuals as writers and institutions as producers of archives properly reflects, in this case, the paradigmatic image of the tension which structured the world of medieval scholasticism. The historiographical narration of medieval scholasticism tends constantly to try to articulate these twinned dimensions.¹³ It also reflects the internal tension within a strong institution which produced and expressed strong personalities. Medieval scholasticism was a world dominated by a habitus of humility and dogmatic normativity, two strong forms of domination in which individuals could find collective justifications for their own activities. The medieval scholastics were obsessed with the notion of individual and of person – it was placed in the centre of their investigation – but in connection with the question of individuals’ community – the central place of their reflection.¹⁴ The specificity of scholastics as individuals, and as social actors, was to produce highly developed theories of their own activity and of their own institution. In a way the institution often remained the unspoken but ubiquitous moule (mould) within which the theories of their activity were articulated.¹⁵ In this context, examining the distinctive individuals used by scholastic thinkers as models for thinking about their own particular identities is both a paradoxical and a fitting activity.

Reconciliation and Fathers in the Twelfth Century

Augustine in The Four Doctors of the Western Church. / Photo via Wikipedia

The Church Fathers were models who offered a way to articulate the individual in the Christian community and unite authoritative groups of intellectuals. In medieval societies based on a globalizing conception of kinship,¹⁶ especially spiritual kinship,¹⁷ the figures of the Church Fathers were at the centre of the practices of communication by different social agencies from the twelfth century on. In spiritual kinship, they guaranteed the institution of charity, the link which unifies the Church. Scholasticism became an institution at a symbolic level by establishing a universal heredity from these (past) thinkers through the (present) textual memorialization of them. Building on patristic thought – for example, through commentaries, that ‘idiom of scholastic thought’¹⁸ – was a way to articulate the individual thinker and the institution as a past and as a present through intertextuality. If medieval divine kinship could be understood as an anti-genealogical kinship¹⁹ – it was the place where everything was amassed and where the difference between filiation and alliance was abolished – all the scholastics’ work on patristic texts was a way of reintroducing genealogy and history into this kinship. Thus, scholasticism raised itself by cutting the patristic knot and unrolling the exegetical string. The rise of medieval scholasticism was a dialectical movement both identifying with, and distinguishing itself from, the models of the Church Fathers.

During the twelfth century the theologians and philosophers of the medieval schools began to have the same attitude towards patristic texts as toward biblical texts. This was the result of a long, prior process of incorporating patristic explanations (expositiones) onto the biblical sacred page (sacra pagina) itself. For Lanfranc (c.1020–89), the Church Fathers were under the ‘stronghold of authority’ (arx auctoritatis).²⁰ They became a specific sort of authority. Later debates around the work of Rupert of Deutz (c.1075–1129/1130) were also focused on the intellectual and religious status of the Church Fathers – especially Augustine in De omnipotentia Dei – and Rupert was one of the first to make a clear distinction between apostolic authority and that of the Church Fathers.²¹ Nevertheless, by the beginning of the twelfth century patristic writings had gained a quasi-scriptural status. In the work of Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) the Church Fathers were associated with the apostles and the evangelical texts.²² Patristic writings gained an increasingly quasi-juridical status equivalent to the founding texts of Christianity itself. From now on this group of exegetes became the point of reference for intellectual production, the source of intellectual legitimacy and the model for scholastics. That influence is seen in criticism of it, such as that by the canonist Stephen of Tournai at the end of the twelfth century, when he complained about contemporary masters who produced ‘little books’ (summulae) ‘as if the works of the holy fathers were insufficient’.²³

The question of patristic authority was at the centre of some of the most important controversies of the twelfth century, especially around Peter Abelard (1079–1142).²⁴ His Sic et non was an enormous collection of patristic contradictions and a methodical attempt to overcome them.²⁵ In his preface Abelard summarized the way to reconcile the different religious and intellectual authorities,²⁶ providing a way to synthesize the evolution of the doctrinal issues inspected by the theologians and canonists from the beginning of the twelfth century.²⁷ Following the school of Laon,²⁸ Abelard built his scholastic method as a dialectical way of reconciling biblical and patristic writings. Medieval scholasticism was based on the effort of integrating the diverse excerpts and different authorities which were, moreover, historically and geographically remote from medieval European societies. With similar goals but different methods, the school of St Victor in Paris developed a conception based on the principle of reason as the handmaid of faith (ratio ancilla fidei).²⁹ For Richard of St Victor (d. 1173) the most important intellectual test was the ability to confront patristic authority itself.³⁰ Patristic authority became the invaluable test of scholastic authority by its proponents’ willingness to conform to the high threshold of its reasoning.³¹ For scholastic thinkers this validated; it did not restrict. Based on attempts to resolve the dissonances and discrepancies of a millennium of Latin Christian writing, early scholasticism evolved out of institutions of concord producing dialectical harmonies following the model of canonists’ work.³² In a way we can say that scholastic thought was this effort of reconciliation itself. The two works which effectively founded medieval scholasticism were Gratian’s legal Decretum (by 1140), whose original title was the Concordia, and the theological Sentences of Peter Lombard (c.1100–60) with an analogous goal. Medieval scholasticism appeared thereafter as an institution for the resolution of conflicts: religious, dogmatic, doctrinal and intellectual.³³

The distinction of a major group of four principal Fathers of the Latin Church (Augustine of Hippo, Ambrose of Milan, Jerome of Stridon and Pope Gregory I) appeared only in the second half of the twelfth century in the Latin world.³⁴ These choices were the result of a long process in which the intellectual value of their writings had been important but not superordinate. The model of the Church Fathers became Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who wrote his own biography. The importance of those Confessions in medieval Latin societies was extraordinary, especially in the twelfth century.³⁵ Rupert of Deutz built a compilation of excerpts from it and Ivo of Chartres (c.1040–1115/16) tried to fill the gaps in the Augustinian biography. The Gregorian reforms had emphasized the place of the lives of the Fathers (Vitae patrum) and these became very important for preaching, a trend which assured the place of Jerome as a Father by virtue of his embodiment of Christian language, time and memory.³⁶ Medieval scholastic thinkers were part of the ecclesiastical movement which built up this group of Church Fathers and in return their codification of them ensured the collective affirmation of the scholastics as an institution themselves. The movement opened the possibility for theologians and philosophers to find models for their own social activity. In the case of Hugh of St Victor, the Fathers provided a model for defining different intellectual attitudes and the place of each scholastic thinker in the history of Christian intellectualism.³⁷ The Church Fathers became the benchmark system of medieval scholasticism.

The Institution of a Specific Past in the Thirteenth Century

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The Church Fathers and the symbols of the primitive Church became the official Christian past for many thirteenth-century groups more generally, as well as for the founders of the scholastic movement. The Fathers articulated the past for the present of scholasticism, the latter defined by its temporal distance from it.³⁸ Medieval scholasticism affirmed itself by creating a past through a group of thinkers and textual compilations which provided a mirror for its own historical identity. The medieval scholastics upheld the Fathers as a common culture and identified commonalities of collective models of behaviour. The Fathers worked as a referential past which scholasticism interpreted and vivified to assert its own powers of interpretation. As a novel institution, scholasticism needed a past; and to have permanent links to and foundations in that past. The intellectual and spiritual mobilization of the Church Fathers afforded a link to the primitive Church which avoided the possibility of rupture, as unmasked in earlier Christian anthropology. Thus, scholasticism’s interaction with the Fathers could be defined as a process of making them sociably ‘memorable’ – a ‘knowledge for the present’.³⁹

At the beginning of the thirteenth century the translation into vernacular languages, especially French, of the Lives of the Fathers spread patristic images to all medieval Latin societies.⁴⁰ This vernacularizing movement was reinforced by a strong interest in Greek patristics throughout the thirteenth century, supported by the Dominican and Franciscan orders.⁴¹ The building of a strong, specific conception of the Latin Church tradition was also a weapon in the struggle against the Greek Church, an attempt to marginalize this Church which defined itself as the first Church of the Fathers. The Latin Church and its scholastic theologians therefore tried to affirm a similar anteriority for their institution of knowledge. In the thirteenth century the explosion of iconographic representations of the Church Fathers went alongside a declining representation of earlier ‘ancestors’: Abraham, for example.⁴² Augustine of Hippo and Abraham had the same function of double kinship, maternal and paternal, which characterized the paternity of the Christian divinity. The stronger affinity between the Fathers and the scholars is, however, self-evident. The iconic status of the four Church Fathers also diversified. The locating of the Church Fathers in the paradisal court and in the Church militant evolved considerably. This movement was reinforced by the diffusion from the late thirteenth century of the Dominican Jacobus da Voragine’s (c.1230–98) collection of saints’ lives, the Golden Legend (Legenda aurea), which reinforced the Fathers’ liturgical recognition and distinction.⁴³ In 1298 a decretal of pope Boniface VIII instituted the feast of the four Church Fathers. This ecclesiastical decision had important liturgical consequences. The feast of each became a double celebration, meaning that the antiphon (sung response) was doubled between each psalm during celebrations of the office. The four Fathers were now officially distinguished in the Christian community’s liturgical celebration of itself. They became the mirror of the four evangelists. This papal decision registered the ongoing evolution of cultural, religious and intellectual practices which became, from that time onwards, a canonical command throughout Christendom. This feast symbolized the link between past and present: it was a social and ritual construction which also promoted an institutional pattern for the future of scholastic individuals.

Scholastic thinkers increasingly differentiated between grades of past and present exegetical authority. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Alexander of Hales (d. 1245) developed, in his Gloss on the Sentences (Glossa super Sententias (1227)), a distinction between the authority of the Church Fathers and the authority of the French Victorine school, particularly of Anselm of Laon, who inherited some attributions of patristic authority as a specified father of contemporary scholasticism.⁴⁴ Philip the Chancellor’s Summa de bono (1225–8) distinguished three forms of intellectual authority: the Fathers, the pagan philosophers and contemporary Latin thinkers.⁴⁵ This conception stressed the differences between the world of scholasticism and the world of the classical Christian Fathers. The scholasticism of the thirteenth century was conscious of being very different in time and place to that of the early Church. In the middle of the thirteenth century scholastic thinkers, therefore, produced both an important, self-conscious movement with regard to the historicity of knowledge, and historical self-reflection on the ecclesiastical institutionalizing process. Thomas Aquinas, who gave an important place to doxography in his work, considered the first five ecumenical councils as historical sources and textual context for the patristic canon.⁴⁶ Scholasticism was moving to become dominant over, and independent of, patristic thought by enclosing its textual corpus and base within a discrete historical period. Aquinas developed a very high degree of attention to the diversity of texts he could use and the diversity of the knowledge to which he had access. He often quoted the patristic authority before the biblical text in his demonstrations. His enterprise to reconcile Aristotle and Plato with the Fathers, especially Augustine, became the model for a medieval intellectualism in which biblical exegesis would orbit away from the centre of intellectual gravity.

Throughout the thirteenth century we see an explosion of patristic compilations which continued the trend initiated in the twelfth century. Those compilations, such as the Liber florum, or Liber florigenus, were very important for scholarly learning and scholastic works, becoming the major point of access to patristic writings.⁴⁷ These compilations certainly reinforced the authority of patristic thought. In compilations and encyclopaedias the Church Fathers began to be treated as original sources (originalia, documenta).⁴⁸ Early encyclopaedias, such as Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius (1240s–50s), were also important secondary sources for scholastic knowledge of the Fathers. In the encyclopaedias, begun and developed in the thirteenth century, they became sources of knowledge, but without specific differentiation in their level of authority as distinct from other sources. During the thirteenth century, then, patristic texts were often used outside the frame of theology as a discipline, with its focus on preaching and liturgical debate.⁴⁹ The trend of specialization in scholastic production also impacted on the representations of the Church Fathers. It is striking, however, that by the end of the thirteenth century – at precisely the point they are singled out liturgically – we also see a disintegration of their actual theological distinctiveness. The omnipresence of the Church Fathers in scholastic texts, especially Augustine of Hippo, also marked a sort of dissolution. They began to be nowhere by being everywhere. The diluting of the individuality of patristic writings was one of the logical consequences of the scholastic ‘washing machine’. The scholastic institution became too powerful and spun the Church Fathers to the side for its own development. The dialectic between the dissolution of the individuality of the Fathers’ writings and the consolidation of their descendants’ authority became a far more general phenomenon in many later medieval intellectual contexts.

Collective Identities through Patristics in the Fourteenth Century

Manipulus florum / Public Domain

As a past for a world, as the memory of an institution, the Fathers needed to be studied with the building of specific tools of knowledge as well. Scholastic work on the patristic corpus in the second part of the thirteenth century evolved to become more intensive, with new forms of critical textual approach. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, medieval theologians were involved in very deep, extensive work around the writings of the Church Fathers, fashioning new sorts of tools for it. In 1306 the theologian Thomas of Ireland wrote the Manipulus florum, which contained thousands of references to patristic sources.⁵⁰ His works, and those produced by the Dominican Robert Holcot (c.1290–1349), the Franciscan Walter of Bruges (c.1225–1307) and many others, tried to order the ocean of patristic writings and were characterized by an erudite approach, especially in the construction of tables (tabulae), which proved very useful for the scholars.⁵¹ It was an attempt at classification and indexing and a mark of the evolution of the scholastic analysis in complete autonomy from the older structures of knowledge.⁵² Simply put, the scholastic writers re-composed patristic texts according to their own interest and their own methods. Popes, notably John XXII, supported and sometimes provided impetus to this movement, as well as discouraging misunderstanding and misuse of patristic sources.⁵³ In the middle of the fourteenth century Bartolomeo of Urbino composed the Milleloquium veritatis Augustini, dedicated to Pope Clement VI, and perhaps the Milleloquium Sancti Ambrosii.⁵⁴ These big compendia, and the Vidarium Gregorianum⁵⁵ and the Hieronymianus of Jacques Fouquier, were organized alphabetically. The scholastics of the first part of the fourteenth century built textual monuments for the Church Fathers. Those monuments celebrated their authority but also relegated them to the status of intellectual tools and references.

These different, somewhat countervailing, currents can be interestingly explored in attitudes towards one Church Father, dogmatically the most important but also the most global figure to mix the figures of pastor and theologian: St Augustine. The uses made of Augustine were multiple. During the first four decades of the fourteenth century a few scholastics from the mendicant orders composed commentaries on Augustine’s monumental City of God (413–26), written as a riposte to learned pagan criticism of Christianity after the Goths’ sack of Rome in 410. These commentaries showed a variety of different views and representations of Augustine.⁵⁶ For these commentators The City of God provided an opportunity to define their conceptions of Augustine and develop their own conception of what the scholastic thinker should be, drawing on his model and the common patristic references and distinctions. For the Dominican Nicolas Trevet (c.1258–1335), Augustine’s City of God became an ‘old’ text whose cultural references needed explanation, something which Trevet provided in his commentary on pagan religion and classical literature by focusing on the first ten books of the City of God. For the Dominican Thomas Waleys (c.1287–1349) and the Franciscan John Ridevall (d. after 1340), the Augustinian text needed to be used for preaching as well as explanation.⁵⁷ For these scholastic writers the patristic text did not need theological explanation; and they accordingly developed a conception of scholastic thought which encompassed erudite knowledge about all the texts from the past. The Franciscan theologian François of Meyronnes (c.1280–1328), by contrast, tried to organize the theological aspects of The City of God and composed a text which put in order the religious and doctrinal developments of Augustine’s thought. He proposed a ‘scholastization’ of Augustine’s text to make it comprehensible for students and young monks. The Carmelite John Baconthorpe (c.1290–1348) used scholastic logic and Aristotelian tools to establish the superiority of the theology of Augustine. He defended the conception of scholasticism’s focus on theology and tried to avoid what he saw as excesses in philosophical trends. These commentaries expressed the intellectual and cultural concerns of contemporary commentators and illustrate how, by the fourteenth century, the Church Fathers and their texts had become polysemous figures. All wanted to defend Augustine’s text but not in the same way or with the same goals; and in so doing they proposed various conceptions of Augustine – and of patristic figures more widely. Thus, for example, employing the four Aristotelian causes (material, formal, efficient, final), Trevet divided the four exegetical meanings of scripture across each of the four Church Fathers (the division became current in the fourteenth century). Jerome represented the historical level of meaning; Gregory the allegorical; Ambrose the tropological/moral; and Augustine the anagogical/mystical level of meaning. The Church Fathers each embodied one technique of exegesis and represented different traditions of interpretation. This typological schematization nicely exemplifies the scholastic subordination of these superordinate patristic figures within their descendants’ intellectual frameworks.

These different appropriations of St Augustine testify to a diffraction of the scholastic world, a world which by the beginning of the fourteenth century appeared as an institution co-ordinated by the constellation of authorities. Thus scholasticism, a written world inked by speculative distinctions and a social world built by classification struggles, was dividing into multiple communities and identities. From the fourteenth century specific schools and groups of thinkers appeared which distinguished themselves with reference to specific contemporary authorities (Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus). This competition over identification was further stressed by the question of Aristotle’s place, still seen as a pagan Father, but perhaps also a scholastic Father in the manner of Augustine.⁵⁸ The Church Fathers became demultiplicate bodies: they were limbs of the Church and the scholastic institution and they were specific figureheads for certain groups. Their texts, as specific bodies for specific questions, functioned as ambiguous masks for these different groups. The various appropriations and mobilizations of patristic figures in the fourteenth century were a de facto way of inscribing new forms of dispositive authority and of re-composing the system of scholastic self-representation. In this connection, the patristic author, as a source of authority, became an individual because of his existence as a historical figure. He moved from saintly to human.⁵⁹ Through St Augustine, groups which affirmed their own identity found a way to attach that specificity to a normative intellectual pedigree, something which contemporary institutionalization required. For the mendicant orders, Augustine’s writings in particular became a forge on which to make – individually and collectively – proofs for their own institutions and a way to be a part of the glorious history of the Church. The Augustinian orders themselves also had an enormous impact on the cultural production of this patristic figuration, likewise the Carmelite order.⁶⁰ The important diffusion of De origine et progressu ordinis fratrum eremitarum Sancti Augustini et vero ac proprio titulo eiusdem (1334) by Henry of Friemar throughout the fourteenth century showed the polysemy and ambiguity of medieval conceptions of the Fathers.⁶¹ Its success nursed new evolutions in patristic attitudes at the end of the fourteenth century. The mendicant orders, to reinforce themselves, built patristic figures who mixed ascetic behaviours and intellectual aptitudes. Doing so brought them back as religious and devotional figures in the second part of the fourteenth century, qualifying their earlier dominance as primarily scholastic intellectual figures.

The Church Fathers as ‘Totems’ of Medieval Scholasticism

The Church Fathers, an 11th-century Kievan Rus’ miniature from Svyatoslav’s Miscellany. / Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As a world of coexistence between naturalist and analogist anthropology, Latin medieval societies participated in some totemic representations. Anthropologically, western medieval societies were characterized by a mix between a naturalist ontology and an analogic ontology, following Descola’s typology.⁶² Briefly, Descola has suggested that it is useful to think about societies in terms of the four ways of relating themselves to the world which, he argues, they adopt, adapt and mix to different degrees: animistic (perceiving continuities between humans and other living systems/creatures); totemistic (perceiving particular shared attributes between humans and other particular species); analogistic (perceiving multiple parallels and correspondences across created substances); and naturalistic (perceiving the world and its entities as belonging to a single generalizable order of material logic but where internal worlds are separate, in contrast to animism). The scholastic world dealt with the principle of Christian transcendence and earthly material embodiment with a discursive structure dominated by analogical principles. The ambiguity of the ontological background of medieval societies was fixed by the gravity of the Church Fathers as institutional embodiments of an individual figure, abstracting the individual into a general understanding of their personae (following the classical theatrical term for a dramatic character). The Church Fathers accordingly became mythological figures, the products of culture⁶³ and collective representation,⁶⁴ at a moment when scholastics became aware of the temporal difference between antiquity and their modernity.⁶⁵ The Church Fathers represented the past of the scholastic world, but this past needed to be managed if the present was to remain self-sufficient and not be overwhelmed by it. The Fathers needed to be connected, but not too connected, to their contemporary successors. On the one hand, these mythologized figures were formulated to function in a genealogy of scholasticism which connected medieval societies to the early and classical Christian world. On the other hand, too great a distancing from them would have risked a break between the Church’s legitimating late antique roots and the ecclesiastical institution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries which claimed those roots as its warrant. The Church Fathers were given a double structure, historic and a-historic: they belonged to the inscribed word but also to the living language.⁶⁶ They were a way for scholastics to build a continuity between two worlds which had become different. Scholastic interpretations of the Church Fathers could be seen as different versions of a mythological story.⁶⁷ They appeared in the scholastic texts as names, where they were put forward as emblems.⁶⁸ These emblems were social characteristics for groups and for individuals, embodying and operating as tutelary authorities.⁶⁹ These ‘totems’ gave the name of the social groups; fixed the identity; named and appointed their purpose; and guaranteed the harmony of their society.⁷⁰ Monastic orders, as brotherhoods and similar to clans,⁷¹ also built their identities on the paternal reference to a spiritual father, again operating as institutionalizing totems.⁷² As a specific cult, the Church Fathers supported a more general cult of the late antique patristic past which instituted and reinforced the identifies of medieval intellectual groupings and of the Church itself.⁷³

The Church Fathers, as paradigmatic, instrumental figures, provided a way to think both of the collective past and the present world; and a way to conceive the genealogies between individuals and scholastic culture. As figures of mediation between individuals and institutions, the Church Fathers worked as totemic forms for the medieval scholastic world,⁷⁴ in a process of institutionalization which aimed to organize and control the links between individuals and social models.⁷⁵ In a dialectical process of self-recognition, medieval intellectuals defined themselves relative to these ‘ideal types’. Scholastic thinkers built their own Fathers as a way to describe themselves and to recognize their relative intellectual ancestors. The Patristic Fathers worked as social models, exemplary figures, cultural prototypes, ideal types, for their scholastics sons. Those very polysemous ‘ideal types’ played a decisive part in the construction of scholasticism as an institution. Between individuals and institution, the Church Fathers were social figures, cultural intermediaries and subtle intellectual mediators who allowed the building of representations of individual intellectuals linked to a collective identity. In order to objectify and stabilize itself, scholasticism as an institution needed the Church Fathers to circumscribe the social habitus which embodied its own social standards, to put a limit on the hubris of theologians and philosophers.⁷⁶ The referential system of scholasticism needed permanently to reconcile its internal tensions and external social injunctions. The resolution of this conflict between individuals and scholasticism lay in the institutional reconfiguration of patristic authors as common cultural references which each Christian thinker could appropriate. As they were figures of intellectual and religious authority in the medieval world, talking and writing about the Fathers was an important contribution to the strengthening of scholasticism as a set of institutions. Commentaries on their works and the different uses of their authority were ways for scholastics to distinguish themselves and connect internal groupings, expressed by specific conceptions of what they were reading, writing and arguing. The uses of these figures showed, in fact, how an institution was not a common way to realize common purposes but a common way to realize different ends.⁷⁷ The Church Fathers represented the possibility of plural expressions in a unified context which included the possibility of individual self-affirmation. Together, these different intellectual attitudes produced a large pantheon; and the patristic tradition was employed as a founding agency for scholasticism as an institution which gathered together all the symbolic structures for each group and intellectual individuality.⁷⁸ They represented kinship as a shared fatherhood, a conception of the generational transmission of sacred knowledge; and they embodied love and charity (caritas) as the spiritual link which unified the Church and sought to protect it from the dangers of misinterpretation.

Endnotes

In general, M. Grabmann, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode (2 vols, Freiburg, 1909–10). Translations are by the author unless otherwise specified.
2 A. Boureau, L’empire du livre. Pour une histoire du savoir scolastique (1200–1350) (La Raison scolastique, ii, Paris, 2007).
3 G. Leclerc, ‘Histoire de la vérité et généalogie de l’autorité’, Cahiers Internationaux de sociologie, cxi (2001), 205–31, esp. p. 221 on self-fulfilling prophecies.
4 See V. Tournay, Sociologie des institutions (Paris, 2011).
Y. Thomas, Los artificios de las istituciones. Estudios de derecho romano (Buenos Aires, 1999); E. Coccia, ‘"Qu’est-ce que la vérité?" (Jean 18,38). Le christianisme ancien et l’institution de la vérité’, in Aux origines des cultures juridiques européennes. Yan Thomas entre droit et sciences socialesi, ed. P. Napoli (Rome, 2013), pp. 207–30; R. Chéno, ‘La pertinence ecclésiologique de la théorie de l’institution de Maurice Hauriou’, Revue sciences religieuses, lxxxii (2008), 225–43.
For Paris, see I. P. Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c.1100–1330 (Cambridge, 2012), ch. 3.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de Praecepto et Dispensatione (PL, clxxxii),col. 861 (cap. I, ‘An monasticae Regulae instituta praecepta sint, an consilia duntaxat’). See also letters 7 and 221 in the same volume. Commentary in J. Dubois, ‘Ce qu’étaient pour saint Bernard la Regula et l’Institutio dans les monastères de son temps’, Bull. Société Nat. des Antiquaires de France (1980 for 1977), 162–5; E. Coccia, ‘Regula et vita. Il diritto monastico e la regola francescana’, Medioevo e Rinascimento, xx (2006), 97–147.
J. Mabillon, ‘Préface’, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Liber de Praecepto, cols. 25–6; O. Rousseau, ‘S. Bernard. Le "dernier des Pères"’, Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis, ix (1953), 300–8.
E. Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York, 1961); Erving Goffman et les institutions totales, ed. C. Amourous and A. Blanc (Paris, 2001); M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975).
See A. de Libera, Penser au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1991).
‘One can … call institutions all the beliefs and all the patterns of conduct established by a collectivity. Sociology can thus be defined as the science of institutions, of their genesis and of their functioning’, cited in E. Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris, 1871), pp. xxii–xxiii.
Y. Thomas, ‘Les artifices de la vérité en droit commun médiéval’, L’Homme, clxxv–clxxvi (2005), 113–30.
See the comments on the work of Southern and Glorieux in the introduction to this volume.
A. Boureau, De vagues individus. La condition humaine dans la pensée scolastique (Paris, 2008).1
E. Marmursztejn, L’autorité des maîtres. Scolastique, normes et société au XIIIe siècle (Paris, 2007).
A. Guerreau-Jalabert, ‘Sur les structures de parenté dans l’Europe médiévale’, Annales, xxxvi (1981), 1028–49.
D. Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au Moyen Âge. Autour de l’anthropologie affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx (Caen, 2005).
As Alexander Murray said at Oxford during the original conference for this volume.
See P. Legendre, Leçons IV, suite. Le dossier occidental de la parenté. Textes juridiques indésirables sur la généalogie (Paris, 1988).
Lanfranc of Bec, Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini (PL, cl), col. 408; see also cols. 428–9, 435.
Rupert of Deutz, Expositio in Apocalypsim (PL, clxix), cols. 10–17.
Hugh of St Victor, De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris (PL, clxxv), col. 15 (c. 6).
‘quasi non suffecerint sanctorum opuscula patrum’, Epistola Stephani Tornacensis episcopi, ad Romanum quemdam Pontificem (Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Chatelain (4 vols, Paris, 1889–99), i. 47–8 (no. 48)).
B. Pranger, ‘Sic et non: patristic authority between refusal and acceptance: Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux’, in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West from the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. I. Backus (2 vols, Leiden, 2001), i. 165–93, at p. 169.
D. E. Luscombe, The School of Peter Abelard: the Influence of Abelard’s Thought in the Early Scholastic Period (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 214–22.
Peter Abailard [sic], Sic et non: a Critical Edition, ed. B. B. Boyer and R. McKeon (Chicago, Ill., 1976), p. 96.
J. Jolivet, ‘Le traitement des autorités contraires selon le Sic et non d’Abélard’, in J. Jolivet, Aspects de la pensée médiévale: Abélard. Doctrines du langage (Paris, 1987), pp. 79–92.
E. Bertola, ‘I precedenti storici del metodo del Sic et non di Abelardo’, Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, liii (1961), 266–76; N. M. Häring, ‘The interaction between canon law and sacramental theology in the twelfth century’, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, ed. S. G. Kuttner (Monumenta Iuris Canonici, series C, Subsidia, xv, Vatican City, 1976), pp. 483–93; G. Makdisi, ‘The scholastic method in medieval education: an inquiry into its origins in law and theology’, Speculum, xlix (1974), 640–61.
E. Michaud, Guillaume de Champeaux et les écoles de Paris au XIIe siècle (Paris, 1867).
Richard of St Victor, ‘Prologue’, in In visionem Ezechiel (PL, lcvi), cols. 527–34.
A. Boureau, ‘L’usage des textes patristiques dans les controverses scolastiques’, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, xci (2007), 39–49, at p. 43.
S. G. Kuttner, Harmony from Dissonance: an Interpretation of Medieval Canon Law, ed. R. M. Kollar (Latrobe, Pa., 1960); S. G. Kuttner, ‘On auctoritas in the writing of medieval canonists: the vocabulary of Gratian’, in S. G. Kuttner, La Notion d’Autorité au Moyen Age. Islam, Byzance, Occident (Paris, 1982), pp. 69–81; C. Munier, Les sources patristiques du droit de l’Église du VIIIe au XIIIe siècle (Mulhouse, 1957).
Marmursztejn, L’autorité des maîtres, p. 17.
On Ambrose’s multiple afterlives, see P. Boucheron, La trace et l’aura. Vies posthumes d’Ambroise de Milan (IVe–XVIe siècle) (Paris, 2019).
P. Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire: antécédents et postérité (Paris, 1963).
J. Lössl, ‘Hieronymus – ein Kirchenvater?’, in Väter der Kirche. Ekklesiales Denken von den Anfängen bis in die Neuzeit. Festgabe für Hermann Josef Sieben SJ zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. J. Arnold et al. (Paderborn-Munich, 2004), pp. 431–64.
D. Poirel, ‘"Alter Augustinus – Der zweite Augustinus". Hugo von Sankt Viktor und die Väter der Kirche’, in Arnold et al., Väter der Kirche, pp. 643–68.
See Lévi-Strauss’s dictum that ‘a myth is always related to a past event’ (C. Lévi-Strauss, ‘La structure des mythes’, in C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (2 vols, Paris, 1956–73), i. 227–55, at p. 231.
M. Détienne, L’invention de la mythologie (Paris, 1981), p. 79.
Wauchier de Denain, L’histoire des moines d’Égypte suivie de la Vie de Saint Paul le Simple, ed. M. Szkilnik (Geneva, 1993); E. Schwan, ‘La vie des anciens pères’, Romania, xiii (1884), 233–63.
N. Lewis, ‘Robert Grosseteste and the Church Fathers’, in Backus, Reception of the Church Fathers, i. 197–229; G. Bardy, ‘Sur les sources patristiques grecques de saint Thomas dans la Iere partie de la Somme théologique’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, xii (1923), 493–502.
J. Baschet, Le Sein du Père. Abraham et la paternité dans l’Occident médiéval (Le temps des images, Paris, 2000), pp. 308–9.
B. Fleith, ‘The Patristic sources of the Legenda aurea. A research report’, in Backus, Reception of the Church Fathers, i. 231–87; A. Boureau, ‘Vitae Fratrum, Vitae Patrum. L’ordre dominicain et le modèle des Pères du désert au XIIIe siècle’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, xcix (1987), 79–100.
A. Horwoski, La Visio Dei come forma della conoscenza umana in Alessandro di Hales (Rome, 2005), p. 16; H. P. Weber, Sünde und Gnade bei Alexander von Hales. Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung der theologischen Anthropologie im Mittelalter (Innsbruck, 2003).
Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, ed. N. Wicki (Bern, 1985).
L. J. Elders, ‘Thomas Aquinas and the Fathers of the Church’, in Backus, Reception of the Church Fathers, i. 337–66, at p. 344.
E. Dekkers, ‘Quelques notes sur des florilèges augustiniens anciens et médiévaux’, Augustiniana, xl (1990), 27–44, at pp. 36–7; T. Falmagne, ‘Le liber Florigerus: recherches sur l’attribution d’un florilège augustinien’, Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques, xlv (1999), 139–81, at p. 160.
R. H. Rouse, ‘La diffusion en Occident au XIIIe siècle des outils de travail facilitant l’accès aux textes autoritatifs’, Revue des études islamiques, xliv (1976), 115–47, at pp. 142–3.
Boureau, ‘Usage des textes patristiques’.
R. H. Rouse and M. A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus Florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto, 1979), pp. 311–407; R. H. Rouse, ‘The list of authorities appended to the Manipulus florum’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, xxxii (1965), 243–50.
Walter of Bruges, Tabula originalium, in Répertoire des maîtres en théologie de Paris, ed. P. Glorieux (2 vols, Paris, 1933–4), ii. 84–6.
J. de Ghellinck, ‘Une édition ou une collection médiévale des Opera omnia de saint Augustin’, Liber Floridus. Mittellateinische Studien Paul Lehman gewidmet, ed. B. Bischoff and S. Brechter (St Ottilien, 1950), pp. 63–82.
F. Ehrle, Historia bibliothecae romanorum pontificum tum bonifatianae tum avenionis (Rome, 1890), i. 151–4, 180–1.
Paris, BNF, MS. lat. 2120, offered to Pope Clément VI; Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS. Urb. Lat. 81 and MS. Vat. Lat. 518.
J. Fouquier, Vidarium Gregorianum (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS. 687).
B. Dufal, ‘Repenser l’autorité du Père Saint Augustin et le De civitate Dei au XIVe siecle’ (unpublished University of Paris PhD thesis, 2014).
B. Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960).
C. König-Pralong, Avènement de l’aristotélisme en terre chrétienne. L’essence et la matière entre Thomas d’Aquin et Guillaume d’Ockham (Études de philosophie médiévale, Paris, 2005).
A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (2nd rev. edn, Philadelphia, Pa., 2012).
D. Blume and D. Hanssen, ‘Agostino pater e praeceptor du un nuovo religioso (considerazioni sulla propaganda illustrata degli eremiti agostiniani)’, in Arte et spiritualità degli Ordini Mendicanti. Gli Agostiniani et il cappello di S. Nicola a Tolentino (Tolentino, 1992), pp. 77–92; S. Dale, ‘I veri figli di Agostino e gli affreschi della chiesa di Sant’Agostino a Gubbio’, in Arte et spiritualità degli Ordini Mendicanti, pp. 151–64.
R. Arbesman, ‘Henry de Friemar’s treatise on the origin and development of the order of the hermits friars and its true and real title’, Augustiniana, vi (1956), 37–145; P. Courcelle, ‘Les romans de propagande développés par les ermites de saint Augustin’, in P. Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire. Antécédents et Postérité (Paris, 1963), pp. 324–7.
P. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris, 2005); F. Coste, ‘Philippe Descola en Brocéliande’, in Faire l’anthropologie historique du Moyen Âge, ed. E. Brilli, P.-O. Dittmar and B. Dufal (= Atelier du Centre de Rechercher Historique, vii (2010)) <https://journals.openedition.org/acrh/1911> [accessed 15 Feb. 2019]; P.-O. Dittmar, L’invention de la bestialité. Une anthropologie du rapport homme-animal dans les années 1300 (Paris, 2010). An accessible English summary by Descola of his typology is ‘Modes of being and forms of predication’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, iv (2014), 271–80 <https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.1.012> [accessed 15 Feb. 2019].
Pensée mythique et représentations sociales, ed. D. Jodelet and E. Paredes (Paris, 2010).
According to R. Barthes, ‘[m]yth, closely related to what Durkheimian sociology calls a collective representation, can be heard to speak in the formulations of newspapers, advertising, mass-market goods, is that which is determined socially, a reflection. This reflection however, conforming to the celebrated image of Marx, is inverted – myth consists in overturning culture into nature, or at least, the cultural, ideological, historical into the natural’ (R. Barthes, Mythologies (Paris, 1957), pp. 181–2).
According to Lévi-Strauss , ‘[a] myth is always related to a past event’ (Lévi-Strauss, ‘La structure des mythes’, p. 231).
F. Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris, 1995).
Lévi-Strauss, ‘La structure des mythes’, p. 240.
A. Boureau, L’aigle. Chronique politique d’un emblème (Paris, 1985).
According to E. Durkheim, ‘[t]he use of emblems, necessary for a society to become conscious of itself, is no less indispensable in assuring the continuity of that conscience’ (E. Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie (2nd rev. edn, Paris, 1925), p. 331).
Barthes writes: ‘Myth correctly has a double function: it designates and it notifies, it creates understanding and imposes it’ (Barthes, Mythologies, p. 202).
Durkheim writes: ‘The clan is moreover, a society which can, less than any other, dispense with emblems and symbols, since there is hardly another so lacking in coherence. The clan cannot define itself through its chief, since even if all central authority is not absent, it is at least uncertain and unstable. It cannot, furthermore, define itself through the territory which it occupies, since the population, being nomadic, is not tightly tied to a specific locality … The unity of the group then is only apprehensible thanks to the collective name which all its members bear and the emblem, also equally collective, which reproduces the thing designated by this name’ (Durkheim, Formes élémentaires, pp. 333–4).
D. Donadieu-Rigaut, Penser en images les ordres religieux (XIIe–XVe siècles) (Paris, 2005), p. 2.
According to Durkheim, ‘[t]he different cults specific to each clan merge and complement one another by forming an interdependent whole [untout solidaire]’ (Durkheim, Formes élémentaires, pp. 423–4).
Descola asserts that ‘[t]he Lévi-Straussian principle of conceiving of discontinuities in the natural world [as a means of explaining discontinuities in humans’ social world] is inoperable here and one has to turn therefore towards mythical ontogenesis [i.e., the way humans stage their narrative of mythical development] in order to understand the reasons for totemic rearrangements’ (Descola, Pardelà nature et culture, p. 228).
M. Weber, Économie et société (2 vols, Paris, 1995), i: Les catégories de la sociologie, p. 94.
P. Bourdieu, ‘Les rites comme actes d’institution’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, xliii (1982), 58–63.
J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), ch. 2.
M. Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986); M. Calvez, ‘L’analyse culturelle de Mary Douglas: une contribution à la sociologie des institutions’, SociologieS (2006) <http://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/522> [accessed 15 Feb. 2019].

Chapter 1 (53-69) from Individuals and Institutions in Medieval Scholasticism, edited by Antonia Fitzpatrick and John Sabapathy (University of London, 09.25.2020), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

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