Medieval European Universities and Scientific Thought

Science in Western Europe: The Universities

Once the tenth and eleventh centuries were reached, beginning with economic and population growth in Europe, culture was a matter for clerics and church people, taking place mainly within the walls of monasteries. But from the twelfth century, cities expanded, and culture rose above the old monastic walls, moving to develop at the cathedral school. Here, the liberal arts from Antiquity were taught, grouped into the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music) and the trivium (arts of eloquence: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic/logic).

The Emergence of the University

Amid this intellectual ferment came the university. The University was a partnership that lacked formal institutional structure initially. In Paris, the Universitas magistrorum et scolarium (chronologically the first European university alongside the University of Bologna) brought together teachers and students. In the early thirteenth century, new religious orders emerged in the West: the mendicant orders, represented by the Franciscans and Dominicans, gradually assumed the teaching roles within the universities.

Scholasticism and Reason

In this framework, scholasticism developed. This religious or philosophical movement, dominant in the Middle Ages, aimed to coordinate faith and reason using Aristotle's parameters. Since then, science gained access to theology through language and methods.

Classifying Medieval Science

Initially, theology was integrated into the classification of disciplines. It was divided into:

• "Natural Theology": Its theme was God, approached from reason.
• "Revealed Theology": Developed from the realm of faith and named by Thomas Aquinas as sacred doctrine.

Thomas Aquinas distinguished two kinds of science:

1. Science derived from principles known by the natural light of the intellect (e.g., arithmetic, geometry).
2. Science derived from principles known in the light of a higher science (e.g., optics comes from principles known by geometry).

Theology (sacred doctrine) belongs to this latter group; it is a science that proceeds from principles known by a higher science—namely, the science and blessedness that God possesses.

Toward Original Scientific Thinking

Medieval Western Europe, having assimilated and adapted Greco-Arab models, began to embrace original scientific thinking based on pure observation and experience. The inductive method was the only method capable of fostering modern science based on "real science." Thus, the perception of individual things through the senses (intuitive knowledge) leads us to build propositions about individual things—the foundation of "real science." This must be distinguished from theories constructed to explain observed facts based on "sound science," where names stand for concepts, not for reality.