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-Article:"Christ in History" by Gerald J. Russello
"But in spite of the contrast in spirit and institutions between Paris and Bolgna, they both contributed equally to the transformation of western education and to the formation of the professional intellectual classes which were henceforth to dominate Western culture. In the past the spiritual unity of Christendom had been realized in a common faith and a common moral or ascetic discipline which was the tradition of Western monasticism. it was only with the rise of the universities that Western culture acquired that new intellectual and scientific discipline on which its later achievements were dependent
It is true that this aspect of medieval culture was for centuries ignored or derided. The Humanist despised the Schoolmen for their bad Latin, and the scientists and philosophers attacked them for their degenerate and "vermiculate" Aristotelianism. It is only in recent times that men like A.N.Whitehead have recognized that modern science itself could hardly have come into existence had not the Western mind been prepared by centuries of intellectual discipline to accept the rationality of the universe and the power of human intelligence to investigate the order of nature.
Clearly the fact that the educated classes of Europe for centuries underwent a rigorous and elaborate training in the art of logical thinking must have left a mark on European culture, as was recognized a century ago by Sir William Hamilton and J.S.Mill. But I believe that we can go further than this, and see in the medieval scholastic discipline one of the main factors which have differentiated European civilization from the great religion-cultures of the East, to which the earlier medieval culture and that of the Byzantine Empire were so closely akin. No doubt the Roman tradition which survived in Western culture may have been responsible for the social activity and the constructive political sense that were distinctive of the Western Church since the days of St. Gregory or even St. Leo the Great, but this Roman tradition with its sense of the value of discipline and law and authority was essentially a conservative force. It was not thence that Europe derived the critical intelligence and the restless spirit of scientific inquiry which have made the Western civilization the heir and successor of the Greeks. It is usual to date the coming of this new element from the Renaissance and the revival of Greek studies in the fifteenth century, but the real turning point must be placed three centuries earlier in the age of the universities and the communes. Already in Paris in the days of Abelard and John of Salisbury the passion for dialectic and the spirit of philosophic speculation had begun to transform the intellectual atmosphere of Christiandom. And from that time forward the higher studies were dominated by the technique of logical discussion - the quaestio and the public disputation which so largely determined the form of medieval philosophy even in its greatest representatives. "Nothing" says Robert of Sorbonne, "is known perfectly which has not been masticated by the teeth of disputation", and the tendency to submit every question, from the most obvious to the most abstruse, to this process of mastication not only encouraged readiness of wit and exactness of thought but above all developed that spirit of criticism and methodic doubt to which Western culture and modern science have owed so much." (189-191)
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