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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PARISIAN PEDAGOGIES: THE EDUCATIONAL DEBATE BETWEEN PETER ABELARD, HUGH OF SAINT- VICTOR, PETER LOMBARD, AND JOHN OF SALISBURY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY ROBERT JOHN PORWOLL CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2019 *** Uxori meae carissimae, piro aculeoso, Liberisque meis, quae meam vitam laetificant *** Copyright © by Robert J Porowll All Rights Reserved Table of Contents Acknowledgements v Abstract vii 1. Introduction: The Question of Twelfth-Century Pedagogy 1 Part I 2. Peter Abelard and a Teacher’s Talent in Early Twelfth-Century Schools 22 3. Order and Balance: Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Critique of the Parisian Masters 81 4.

Doctrina and Disciplina: The Contours of Hugh’s Pedagogical Program 126 Part II 5. Peter Lombard: Cultivating Readers of Authorities 201 6. John of Salisbury: A Neo-Abelardian Synthesis 260 Bibliography 326 iv Acknowledgements Since first reading Plato, I have been fascinated by the thorny persona of Socrates and the question of educating for wisdom and for virtue. My philosophical, historical, and religious interests continue to recur to how persons may be cultivated in conversation with other persons.

My own career so far reflects the investment of many such teachers, for whose model and guidance I am grateful. Among my first teachers include Professor Jack Marler, Professor Gregory Beabout, Fr., and Professor James Ginther. Their gift of time and high demands stiffened my sinews early in my studies and provided examples of excellent teaching and research. More recently, I have been indebted to Professor Susan Schreiner, Professor Margaret Mitchell, and Professor Ryan Coyne for their reflective criticism that refined my thought and pressed me to consider wider and stranger possibilities.

Their personable teaching and articulate mastery over their fields set a gold standard that I carry with me. To Professor Rachel Fulton Brown I am grateful for her investment in my development and her pedagogical model. Most of all, I am indebted to the wise and humane guidance of my magistra, Professor Willemien Otten. Her grace, precision, and flexibility amid the dual demands of highest intellectual performance and close family life are models that I would hope to imitate the better.

I have received more help than I can recall. The Divinity School was a crucible for learning, supported my studies, and provided my writing fellowship. The Lumen Christi Institute provided a warm haven for conversation and conviviality and my years in Hyde v Park would have been lesser without it. Conversation and good cheer with friends nourished my mind and soul.

I would be remiss to pass over those who in recent years have fallen asleep and whose memories I cherish, including, Joshua Casteel, Jeffrey Morris, Małgorzata Stiff, and John Morris. My final thanks belong to my ever supportive, trusting, and loving wife, Estera Porwoll, who never flagged despite the ordeals of academic life and who celebrated its joys. My daughters, Lucy, Monica, and Teresa, fill my life with love and wonder. vi Abstract The twelfth century in Europe was a long and pivotal century that saw the emergence of new school cultures and intellectual centers.

The liberal arts move out of the proprietorship of monasteries and cathedral schools; by the end of the century the Parisian universitas or university was forming. The directions that education took in these schools—their practices and their theories—were innovative and experimental. This is a study of the innovative pedagogical projects of four prominent teachers and thinkers who operated within the quickly growing intellectual milieu of Paris. Peter Abelard and Hugh of Saint-Victor were contemporaries whose teaching was prestigious and sought after.

Abelard faced the challenges that beset a teacher without a prestigious master and who sought to open his own school. His solution was to build his reputation by relying upon his talent to answer students’ questions through a performative use of dialectical reason in judging the merit of authoritative sources. Abelard’s talent reliance tapped into a larger discussion of talent (ingenium) among his contemporaries. Hugh viewed the Parisian masters’ reliance upon talent as hazardous and disorderly and in response constructed an expansive pedagogical program that encompassed moral and intellectual sides of the student.

By detailed discipline (disciplina) and curricular teaching (doctrina), Hugh presented an alternative to the Parisian trajectory. Peter Lombard and John of Salisbury were students of Hugh and Abelard respectively. They each imbibed much from their own master and also gained an appreciation of their master’s rival. Their own pedagogical thought represents a second vii generation’s approach, offering diverging syntheses of Abelardian and Hugonic elements within their own original, pedagogical strategies.

Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences aimed to mold the student into a diligent and humble reader who respected and trusted the correct authorities. John viewed the liberal arts from his active diplomatic and administrative career, serving the archbishops of Canterbury, and presented a fusion of Abelardian and Hugonic elements to resolve his persistent worries with excessive talent- reliance among scholars. viii Chapter 1: Introduction: The Question of Twelfth-Century Pedagogy The education of succeeding generations may be said to be the crucial factor in a society’s preservation or transformation. Plato called education “the first among the finest gifts that are given to the best men” and left an intellectual legacy that linked education with the character or culture of society.1 In his classic study of παιδεία or ancient Hellenistic education, Henri-Irénée Marrou claimed, “Education is a collective technique which a society employs to instruct its youth in the values and accomplishments of the civilization within which it exists.”2 Already in antiquity, education was the subject of sharp and evolving debate.

Rather than a placid monolith, the sources of Greek and Roman education that professed the liberal arts often constituted persistent tensions between debated visions of liberal education. For example, philosophers countered dominant rhetorical education; Jews and Christians rivaled the Greek and Roman classics with new texts; Christians among themselves varied widely on the proper fusion of classical arts with the wisdom derived from and leading back to the Logos. Medieval Europe inherited this contested legacy of liberal arts. It was a tradition that not only propounded the vital need for correct and good education but also left many interpretative options for how to constitute that liberal education.

The medieval 1 Plato, Laws 644b, “ὡς πρῶτον τῶν καλλίστων τοῖς ἀρίστοις ἀνδράσιν παραγιγνόμενον,” ed. Ioannes Burnet, Platonis Opera V. 2 Henri-Irénée Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), xiii.

1 European tradition of the liberal arts did not and could not simply reproduce the schools and education (institutio) of the imperium romanum. Instead, medieval teachers and scholars reinvented the liberal arts in accordance with their own material conditions, cultural forms, and intellectual and ethical aims and aspirations. Monks, bishops, and cathedral-school teachers practiced the arts, bending them from imperial service and administration toward a new set of aims and practices, chief among them the reading and writing on sacred scripture.3 Drawing upon this tradition, medieval masters found themselves supplied with stores of diverse articulated educational ideals, pedagogical methodologies, practical techniques and texts for school exercises. Rather than hindering creativity, these materials allowed medieval pedagogues to synthesize the elements into their own creative innovations.

These innovations would transform the educational landscape through the course of the twelfth century in ways that would shape the course of European cultural history.4 These pedagogical innovations and the debates they sparked deserved careful attention. The present work is a study of the pedagogical debates amid the changing educational landscape of early twelfth-century Paris between four keynote thinkers and teachers: Peter Abelard, Hugh of Saint-Victor, Peter Lombard, and John of Salisbury. 3 A classic treatment of monastic culture of liberal arts is Jean Leclercq’s. See Jean Leclercq, OSB, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans.

Stephen Jaeger’s study of the culture of liberal arts within the cathedral schools is an unmatched treatment. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950–1200 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 21–195. 4 For example, see John Van Engen, “The Twelfth Century: Reading, Reason, and Revolt in a World of Custom,” European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Noble, John Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 17–44.

2 *** Any discussion of the twelfth-century is fraught with interpretative questions. Scholars have found it a hinge or transitional century for diverse reasons. Rapid changes, crises, and developments occurred in several spheres: new political orders or energy became visible in Germany, France, England, and Iberia; an agricultural revolution fed a reurbanization that in turn spurred commerce and trade; reform ideals stirred programs in monastic, papal, and popular religious aspects; new energy appeared in the schools with a corresponding emergence of vernacular literature.5 On account of these movements, scholars have often described this era as a renaissance. Though scholars had already been using the term ahead of him, Charles Homer Haskins is responsible for popularizing the notion of the twelfth century as a renaissance (in The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, 1927).6 Haskins opposed the notion of renaissance articulated by Jacob Burkhardt (Die Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, 1867), for whom renaissance was revival of classicism, budding secularity, and the mother of modernity.

Haskins’ renaissance was inseparable from religious thought and tended toward innovation upon the classics rather than their close adherence.7 5 For a brief but insightful survey of these and other features, see John Cotts, Europe’s Long Twelfth Century: Order, Anxiety, and Adaptation, 1095–1229 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6 For a historiographical narrative of the notion of renaissance, see Alex Novikoff, “The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century before Haskins,” Haskins Society Journal 16 (2005): 104–116; “Introduction,” The Twelfth- Century Renaissance: A Reader, ed. Alex Novikoff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), xv–xxii. For Haskins, see The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927); The Rise of the Universities (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1923).

7 For Haskins’ divergence from Burkhardt, see Robert Benson and Giles Constable, “Introduction,” Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert Benson, Giles Constable (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xx–xxix. Another recent collection that takes a nuanced view toward the 3 Some have embraced the optimism of Haskins’ account in narrower fields. For the rising school culture, Richard Southern offered a strong account and defense of medieval humanism with a distinct character to that of early modern humanism.

The humanism of the schools (or “scholastic humanism”) had four features: dignity of human nature, introspective inquiry, friendship between humanity and God, and the intelligibility of the natural order.8 Southern’s scholastic humanism bore within it the seeds of its own later dissolution, yet it initiated an intellectual revolution that unfolded a widespread political, social, and doctrinal order for medieval Europe.9 Few scholars are willing to discard the notion of this renaissance, but very many have wished to expose the hidden complications and ragged edges apparently occluded by the optimistic outlook.10 A more pessimistic view of twelfth-century humanism appears in the work of C. Contrary to Southern’s assessment of “scholastic humanism” as a development, Jaeger viewed the twelfth century as a decay and decline from the oral culture of letters and virtue-formation in the tenth- and changes and shifts that occurred in the twelfth century is European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, ed. Noble, John Van Engen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 8 Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Volume I: Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 22–35; “Medieval Humanism,” Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 29–60.

9 Southern, Scholastic Humanism, I. More recently Peter Dinzelbacher has offered a stark argument for an optimistic assessment of broad- sweeping twelfth-century trends. Rather than focusing on an aspect (e., intellectual or political), Dinzelbacher compared structural or climatic qualities with earlier medieval culture.