Paris Masters of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries and Ideas of Intellectual Freedom

Abstract

To introduce the theme of this essay, there are few statements more fitting than the caustic judgment of Albertus Magnus on those whom he considered the enemies of freedom in his day. Reproaching the petty obscurantism of the opponents of Aristotle's philosophy, he described these men, whose sole aim in reading books was to find something to condemn, as stagnant themselves in intellectual inertia, and seeking always to paralyze others into their own state. It was men like these, he said, who killed Socrates, and whose plots forced Aristotle to leave Athens with the words, “I shall not give the Athenians a second chance of sinning against philosophy.” In the world of learning, according to Albertus, such bitter, bilious men are like the liver in the body; “they try to inject their own bitterness into everyone else, and to prevent others from pursuing truth in the sweetness of society.”