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Til tross for opplysningsfilosofene som prøvde å fremstille middelalderen som en tid med overtro og intellektuelt mørke, ser vi at det var nettopp middelalderens kristne som institusjonaliserte rasjonell tenkning og forskning i universitetene.

(Fortsettelse fra del 5)

Charles Homer Haskins sier i “The rise of universities”:

”Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. The Greeks and the Romans, strange as it may seem, had no universities in the sense in which the word has been used for the past seven centuries. They had higher education, but the terms are not synonymous. Much of their instruction in law, rhetoric, and philosophy it would be hard to surpass, but it was not organized into the form of permanent institutions of learning…Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries do there emerge in the world those features of organized education with which we are most familiar, all that machinery of instruction represented by faculties and colleges and courses of study, examinations and commencements and academic degrees. In all these matters we are the heirs and successors, not of Athens and Alexandria, but of Paris and Bologna…the university of the twentieth century is the lineal descendant of mediaeval Paris and Bologna”
Universitetene hadde sitt opphav i katedralskolene som var skoler sponset av katedralene rund om i Europa. Grant sier : ”The university as we know it today has evolved from its first beginnings in the Middle Ages, when…it was already in existence in three different places by 1200. In short, the university was a medieval invention. Nothing like it had ever been developed in any preceding or contemporary civilization. The university did not appear on the scene full blown, but had an evolutionary history that begins with the cathedral schools a class of schools sponsored by cathedrals that flourished in Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”(Science and religion, s.170)

Universitetenes betydning kan ikke overdrives. Uten universitetet i middelalderen ville vi ikke hatt den vitenskapelige revolusjon. Grant sier:

”A …pre-condition for the Scientific Revolution was the formation of the medieval university. The universities …were different from anything the world had ever seen. Nothing in Islam, China, or India, or in the ancient civilizations of South America, was comparable to the medieval university. It is in this remarkable institution, and its unusual activities that the foundations of modern science must be sought.”

Videre peker Grant på at eksistensen av et skille mellom stat og kirke var av stor betydning for fremveksten av universitetene: “The university … was made possible because of the evolution of medieval Latin society permitted the separate existence of church and state, each of which was willing to recognize the separate existence of corporate entities such as the university. (Sciense and religion,s.172)

Nettopp dette gjorde at universitetene hadde et relativt stor frihet. ”The Middle Ages transmitted … a remarkable legacy of relatively free rational inquiry…Almost from the outset , masters of art struggled to win a much academic freedom as they possible could…they achieved a surprisingly large degree of freedom during the Middle Ages”(Grant, “The foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages”,s.199).

Oversettelsen av Aristoteles fra gresk og arabisk på 11-1200 tallet og universitetene brakte en monumental forandring i det intellektuelle liv i Europa. Og det skjedde ikke uten brytninger. Det som dog er viktig å huske på når det gjelder kontroverser mellom tro og vitenskap i middelalderen er at det hele foregikk innenfor rammen av en kristen kultur. Det var ikke en kamp mellom kristne på den ene siden, og sekulære forskere på den ande som det noen ganger gis inntrykk av.

Edward Grant slår en kraftig spiker i kista på ideen om dette som en kamp mellom teologene og sekulære forskere:

“What is rather amazing in the Middle Ages is the fact that theologian, or more appropriately theologian-natural philosophers, as well as natural philosophers among the arts masters at the universities, employed a questioning approach toward a wide range of problems involving nature, the supernatural, and hypothetical and imaginary conditions. They were as interested in the way things might have been if God hade made the world differently, or if he had created other worlds, as they were about phenomena in the real world. This inquiring spirit was a major development in the Western world during the Middle Ages. It was, as I have described it elsewhere, a spirit of “probing and poking around” … What is perhaps most astonishing about this new spirit is that it was dominated by theologians who employed the analytic skills they acquired at the universities to cope with questions and problems in natural philosophy as well as in theology.” (Science and religion s.224)

Når det gjelder kontroversene som oppsto, fikk de i selv den effekt at det bidro til den intellektuelle utvikling. Som jeg tidligere har vist til var mye av det grekerne kom frem til feil, og nettopp derfor var kontroversene viktige, fordi de tvang datidens intellektuelle til å nærme seg Aristoteles med nye øyne.
I 1277 ble universitetet i Paris forbud å undervise sider av Aristoteles som ble oppfattet som å være i strid med den katolske forståelsen av Gud og verden.

Om ”fordømmelsene fra 1277” sier Thomas E. Woods:

”Even the Condemnations of 1277, however had a positive effect on the development of science. Pierre Duhem, one of the great twentieth-century historians of science, went so far as to argue that these condemnations represented the beginning of modern science. What Duhem and more recent scholars like A. C. Crombie and Edward Grant have suggested is that the condemnations forced thinkers to break out of the intellectual confinement that Aristotelian presuppositions had fastened upon them, and to think about the physical world in new ways. By condemning aspects of Aristotelian physical theory, they began to break Western scholars of the habit of relying so heavily on Aristotle, and gave them an opportunity to begin thinking in ways that departet from ancient assumptions”(How the Catholich Church buildt western civilization, s. 91)

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