ABSTRACT
The twelfth century has long been recognised as a critical period in the Western reception of classical Greek knowledge, and in the development of scholastic thought more generally. For many scholars, these developments go hand in hand, with the recovery of ancient texts (such as Aristotle’s New Logic, for which see below) and a basic familiarisation with Greek helping to fuel the growth and formation of scholastic curricula.1 Even when Latin authors knew little Greek, they still made overt allusions to the authority of the language, as is evident in the titles of Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon (c.1120), John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon (1159) and Policraticus (1159), or (more poetically) Bernard Silvestris’s Cosmographia (c.1147). Other scholars have focused on a complementary mode of intellectual development: the outward and accelerating pace of missionary activities directed toward those who lie beyond the bounds of accepted religious belief (Jews, Muslims, heretics, and, to a more limited extent, pagans). This context is most evident in the copious body of polemical writings, much of it in the literary form of a dialogue or disputation, which was produced during the twelfth century.2 Central to both scholasticism and inter-religious polemic is the importance of debate – the basic but unassailable idea that arguing both sides of an issue could and would yield the desired resolution. In the hands of the century’s most impassioned authors, this sharpened into the notion that through the manifest defeat of false positions (philosophical, theological or other) a more universal truth could be seen and grasped. The tone of a work and the degree of argumentation that was given could of course vary dramatically, but the desire for the reconciliation of divergent opinions through a method of oppositions was very widely cultivated, and it is elegantly expressed in two of the twelfthcentury’s most cherished phrases: concordantia discordantia and diversi sed non adversi.3 In some sense, this dialectical path from disharmony to harmony was the essence of the scholastic method, and as a form of presentation and analysis, it impacted the writings of almost every major theologian of the period, from those associated with major centres of learning to those associated either with or in opposition to the movement for clerical reform. This ‘culture of disputation’, as I have elsewhere characterised it, can be observed both as an internal intellectual development within Latin Christendom and as a means of engagement with the wider non-Christian world.4
