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       SEVEN The New Learning and heresy(1483–1525)

      The late fifteenth century was marked by a deep spiritual malaise throughout Christendom. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the Renaissance had created a mood of scepticism among the laity in respect of the traditional teachings of the church. Piety still flourished. Pilgrimages and the cult of saints were as popular as ever. However, on a more sophisticated level, that of the theologians in the universities, sharp differences existed regarding the philosophical foundations of Christian belief. Three currents of thought existed simultaneously: scholasticism, mysticism and humanism.

       The University of Paris on the eve of the Reformation

      The University of Paris comprised four faculties: Theology, Canon Law, Medicine and Arts. The first three were graduate faculties, whose members had to be doctors. The Faculty of Arts was made up of those who had obtained the degree of Master of Arts, a prerequisite for doctoral study in the other faculties. The beginner in arts was usually about fifteen years old. He attached himself to a master, registered with one of four ‘nations’ and paid a means-tested fee. By 1500 nearly all the teaching took place in one of about forty secular colleges. The mendicants were taught in their own convents, while other religious orders maintained residential colleges (studia) where their members lived while pursuing the arts course. The usual period of study in arts was three and a half years, which was commonly followed by a trial regency of a year and a half, making five in all. Following this quinquennium, the student became a regent master. A Master of Arts who wished to become a doctor of theology had to study for another thirteen or fifteen years. The Bible and the Book of Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1100–64) formed the core of the long curriculum. Lectures took place in several colleges and in the studia of the religious orders. Each bachelor lectured in the college or convent to which he was affiliated.

      In theory, doctors of theology were licensed to ‘read, dispute, deliberate, and teach’ in the faculty; in practice, few did all of these things. Many were content to give simply one annual lecture on the feast of St Euphemia. Their main function was to preside over the disputations and inaugural lectures of students. Another major duty was attendance at regular meetings of the faculty, especially those called to deal with important matters. From 1506 to 1520 the average number of meetings was 27 per annum and they normally took place in the chapel or refectory of the convent of Saint Mathurin. A doctor’s income, made up of fees from students and fringe benefits, barely compensated for his long years of training. The main attraction of the doctorate in theology was prestige: it enabled the holder to deliberate on the highest matters of faith and to help decide matters of religious and political significance. Both church and state were in the habit of consulting the university’s theologians on various issues. They were consulted about 70 times on matters of doctrine or morals between 1500 and 1542 and such deliberations sometimes led the doctors to challenge papal authority.

       Scholasticism

      The Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris was, by virtue of its teaching, the preaching of its masters and the doctrinal judgements of its assembly, the sovereign interpreter of dogma. All its learning was drawn from the Bible, the only source of divine knowledge, and Lombard’s Book of Sentences. However in the fifteenth century all notion of a critical study of Scripture had been lost. A decision of the council of Vienne of 1311 that oriental languages should be taught in the principal European universities had been ignored, so theologians were unable to read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew or the New in the original Greek. They were content instead with the quadruple method of exegesis: historical, allegorical, analogical and tropological. In applying this method they preferred the interpretations of medieval scholars, like Nicholas of Lyra, to those of the early church fathers. Above all they relied on the Book of Sentences, a compendium of answers to metaphysical and ethical problems written in the twelfth century.

      The Faculty of Arts regarded Aristotle’s writings as the fount of all knowledge, but, as the Parisian masters knew no Greek, they had to rely on mediocre Latin versions. They used the gloss by Averroes, the twelfth-century Arab philosopher, to build up their own theories on the world and on man. Outstanding among thirteenth-century doctors at the university was St Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy was largely shaped by Aristotle’s metaphysical writings. In his judgement, knowledge of God was attainable through reason with the assistance of Scripture and the traditional teaching of the church. However, the certainties inherent in his teaching were challenged by Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) and, more recently, by William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347). The latter denied that spiritual concepts could be grasped merely through reason. Divine truth, in his opinion, lay beyond the reach of the human intellect; obscurely expressed in Scripture, it was held in trust by the church and could only be apprehended through its teaching.

      The new doctrine, called Nominalism as distinct from the Realism of Aquinas, seemed to demote knowledge into a mere study of ideas and for this reason it was twice condemned by the University of Paris, but during the second half of the fourteenth century it managed to gain dominance. The Nominalists, instead of building on Ockham’s ideas, were content merely to repeat them. They even narrowed their scope, withdrawing into a study of formal logic that was both abstract and sterile. They created a new philosophy, called Terminism, which became for the sixteenth-century humanists the epitome of intellectual backwardness and confusion. The triumph of Nominalism effectively paralysed the study of theology in the university. Christianity was reduced to a collection of affirmations that had to be accepted without thought or love, and the Christian life to the

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