The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford, 1277-1409, by Andrew E. Larsen

Abstract

Even in the twenty-first century the tension between intellectual speculation and opinions considered dangerous or socially disruptive is not far beneath the surface of public life. Universities, bodies whose members were licensed to explore ideas, have had to struggle hard to maintain their privilege: not least within their own community, the learned being quite as intolerant of one another as any outsider. Before 1277, in the first century of organised universities, theologians still aspired to establish an objective, rationally ordered Christian doctrine; disagreements needed to be resolved, if necessary by authority, if they were not to disrupt the unity of Christendom. Accordingly in that year both Stephen Tempier, the bishop of Paris, and Robert Kilwardby, archbishop of Canterbury, independently (as Andrew Larsen persuasively argues) condemned a range of ideas, at the heart of which was the notion of the soul as the unitary form of the human body. They were too late to be effective: theologians, increasingly concerned with the limits of possible human knowledge of God, were carving out areas of legitimate uncertainty about the divine nature and power, across which they could freely debate. For about a century, it was legitimate to argue virtually any position in the Paris and Oxford schools for the purpose of disputation; faculties of theology exercised a light discipline over their members—some of whom, notably William of Ockham, claimed that doctors of theology were the sole judges even of the orthodoxy of popes. But in the long run religious ideas could not be corralled within the schools. In England, first the opponents of the friars, then the friars themselves, and finally John Wyclif and his followers raised questions about the nature of the church in public debate; and, from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, church authorities (this time acting with the backing of secular princes and public opinion) gradually established control, in the name of social order, over the public expression of disruptive opinions.