University

UNIVERSITY. - In the sense that is now exclusive to the word, it is the school of higher order in which, according to prevailing practice, letters and sciences are publicly taught, or at least the disciplines proper to certain faculties, in an advanced manner, and the entire education of youth receives its final completion. In its origins and early development it is bound up with the doctrinal movement that began to mature in the early Middle Ages (v. SCUOLA, VI).

I. THE ORIGINS

In chronological order the first university is without doubt that of Salerno (v. SALERNITANA, SCUOLA), made famous by its school of medicine from as early as the mid-11th century and for about two centuries remaining the most distinguished European center of medical science. The abbey of Montecassino certainly had a part in its formation, but nothing is known of its organization until 1231, when Frederick II, who in 1224 had founded the University of Naples, established that it should be the only faculty of medicine in the Kingdom. It therefore had its own origin and life and had very little in common with the great university movement of the rest of Europe, except insofar as it contributed to the development of medical science when this was introduced into the universities themselves.

At the rise of these, two things converged: on the one hand the craving for knowledge, which already in the 11th century became more active, stirring ever new energies throughout the Christian West; on the other, the development of social life which, freeing itself ever more from the bonds of feudalism, led in the cities to the constitution of the universitates, that is, of guilds, practically recognized by the public authorities, in which those who felt the need and the interest drew together, proposing common regulations for the defense of their own rights and the enlargement of their own sphere of influence. Even ecclesiastics, from as early as the 10th-11th century, in the more populous places took care to constitute their own guilds outside the ecclesiastical institutions of which they were part. It is no wonder, therefore, that masters and disciples, wherever they happened to be more numerous, organized themselves for the protection of their own class interests in mutual agreements among themselves and in their relations with the seigneurial or communal authorities.

II. THE ORDINANCES

Studium generale, the name that more properly and officially designates the medieval university as an institution of teaching, is to be understood in the sense of "a place of study open to all" and which the public could attend without distinction of class or belonging to particular ecclesiastical orders. It was therefore general as to persons, not as to the disciplines taught there, which could be restricted to a single Faculty. The term universitas, on the other hand, designates rather the corporation (corpus, collegium, societas) and always implied the specification of magistrorum, or of scholarium, or of both together. And just as every craft guild, in order to defend its members from the unbridled competition of others, established the rules for entry into the guild itself and for remaining in it, and granted the faculty of practicing that art according to the good rules, so the universitas magistrorum, after a suitable examination, granted the licentia or facultas (hence the name of faculty to designate the whole of a given teaching) ubique docendi, thus making itself guarantor of the competence of the promoted candidate.

The scholar was in this way admitted into the class of teachers with the title of doctor or magister, and as such could teach in the Faculty; in reality only very few remained to teach in the studium; the majority, having obtained the doctoral title, did not occupy the chair of their teachers and did not bring about the founding of new chairs or new universities, but devoted themselves to teaching in non-university schools, or practiced professions in which teaching was not an integral part. The first universities, on which the others were modeled, did not arise from one moment to the next, nor by the specific will of some personage; they arose little by little, determined by particular needs and with the concurrence of favorable circumstances. The heated polemics that preceded and accompanied the struggle over investitures, besides contributing to resolve the struggle itself and to clarify ideas, had the effect of deepening investigation both in the field of law and of theology.

III. BOLOGNA

The study of law had never died out in Italy, and practical necessities had kept it alive in the schools of Pavia, Ravenna and Rome; but it was Bologna (v.) that gathered up its tradition with constant work on the Digest of Justinian, presenting its first and best-known representative in Irnerius (v.). The concern of those early expositors was to establish the text correctly, reconcile its contradictions and harmonize it with the law in force (aequitas). Their work took concrete form in the gloss (v.) and continued until the death of Accursius (1263), a necessary preparation for a broader development of legal science. Meanwhile the ecclesiastical laws, which did not yet have an authentic corpus iuris like the Justinianic one, were being collected following an attempt at systematic order, of which the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (v.) was the most widespread example, until at Bologna the monk Gratian completed his Decretum, which was called "Concordantia discordantium canonum," and this expression characterizes the author's intent. On the Decretum too, which soon supplanted every other work of the kind, the sagacity of the glossators and expositors was exercised at Bologna; they were quick to have it followed by the collections of the new pontifical laws and decisions, until the popes themselves promulgated their authentic collections and took care to send them to the doctors of Bologna, so that they might use them in their teaching. This teaching soon met with great success: students flocked from every part of Italy and Europe, and among them many were advanced in age and invested with offices and dignities, so that they soon thought of banding together in associations; therefore the scholares cives, that is, those native to the city or its territory, protected by the city statutes, did not form a corporation; in the early years of the 13th century the Italians formed two societates: that of the Tuscorum, with the scholares de Urbe, Campania et Tuscia, and that of the Lombardorum, with those of Upper Italy; the ultramontanes were divided into at least four societates: Francigenae (with the Normans), Provinciales (Provençals with the Spani et Catalani), Anglici, Germanici. Each societas was headed by a rector scholarium, who was always a forensis and could also be a doctor, but after 1250 by custom he was always a scholaris assisted by a certain number of consiliarii, and all the scholares owed him obedience; even the doctores had to submit to his judgments in the event of a dispute with the scholares. The associations, at first independent of one another, came together even before 1250 into just two great corporations: that of the Ultramontani, which in 1265 comprised 13 nations, later 18, and that of the Citramontani, within which, except for that of the Tusci and Lombards, no other distinction of nations is found in the documents. Each of these had its own rector, and together they constituted the Universitas scholarium; and with the body of professors added to it, the universitas magistrorum et scholarium, as it is called by Clement V in 1310 and thereafter commonly.

The masters did indeed have a certain independence in conducting their courses, and it belonged to them to examine and promote candidates to degrees, including the rectors themselves, but by decree of Honorius III they were from 1219 under the presidency of the archdeacon of Bologna. They formed their own collegia, but outside the school they were, as individuals, subject to the two rectors in all other respects. For it was the scholares who summoned them and paid them stipends by virtue of a particular contract, and who also assigned them the portion of the subject matter they were to treat during the year; and when, for whatever reason, they departed from Bologna, the masters had to follow them to the new seat. All this applied especially to the jurists, because the facultas artium, or facultas medicinae, philosophiae et artium, already active by the end of the 12th century, was constituted as a universitas in the 14th century despite the resistance of the legists. Into this teaching were also inserted the ars dictandi, a kind of school of rhetoric, and the ars notaria, which later became affiliated with the jurists in the 15th century. The Faculty of theology was constituted as such at Bologna only on 30 June 1360 by Innocent VI (v. BOLOGNA, VI); before that there were only the studia of the religious, particularly of the Dominicans.

IV. PARIGI

While the University of Bologna was predominantly an association of scholars, that of Paris (v.) on the contrary was predominantly an association of masters. The discussions provoked by the dogmatic deviations noted from Carolingian times onward, followed by those of Roscelin and Berengar and later by the dialectical audacities of Abelard, offered in northern France an occasion for Catholic masters, such as Ivo of Chartres and Anselm of Aosta, to deepen Catholic speculation (v. SCHOLASTICISM), and a center of studies formed at Paris to which celebrated masters gravitated. These seized as a place for teaching the halls of the chapters and monasteries, making gifts to the deans and abbots; these gifts were later claimed as a right, even when the masters no longer used those halls, so that Alexander III (1180) had to intervene to eliminate any contrary custom, establishing that if suitable and literatae persons wished to «regere studia literarum», they could do so without any molestation and «exactione» (Decret., V, 5, 3), that is, as the rubric commanded, «nothing was to be exacted for [granting] the permission to teach». In a manner analogous to what happened at Bologna,

Sacred Scripture with its relevant gloss was the basis of teaching, to which was added, in interpretation, the tradition of the Fathers and in particular of St. John Damascene, until around 1150 one of the doctors of Paris, Peter Lombard (v.), published the Liber sententiarum with the intent of reducing dogmatic teaching to a system, harmonizing the expositions of the Fathers, a work that was the object of numerous commentaries and formed the textbook in the schools even when the masters published their Summae (v. THEOLOGICAL SUMMAE). Toward the end of the 12th century the masters of theology, canon law, and arts (medicine and philosophy) who, independent of one another, had held school in various parts of Paris, spontaneously formed a single body: consortium or universitas magistrorum. The chancellor of the church of Notre-Dame, with a mandate entrusted to him once and for all by the bishop, conferred on the masters the license to hold lectures. Before 1260 these masters, without prejudice to the universitas, in order to promote the interests of studies within the individual Faculties, constituted as many particular societies, each presided over by a dean. When in turn the scholars began to have disputes with the chancellor, Innocent III, around 1210, granted them the right to create a procurator who would represent them legally in protecting their interests, and thus originated the universitas scholarium which, before 1249, was subdivided into the 4 nations: Gallicorum, Picardorum, Normannorum, Anglicanorum (with these were the Germans and the other northern nations); each nation had a procurator at its head, and all four, for common interests, gathered in the universitas artistarum; because the artists constituted the majority among the students and had their own magistri with them as well. A rector universitatis represented the four nations united together and was the executor of their deliberations, until around 1341 he became the true representative of the Studium.

V. PRIVILEGES

In the first period of their existence the universities were regarded without dispute as ecclesiastical institutions, and the popes exercised their jurisdiction over them by promulgating or modifying the statutes, supervising orthodoxy, and holding it as their own and exclusive right to establish new Faculties there, particularly of theology, as they did at Bologna (1360) and Padua (1364), or of canon law.

Before long the civil authorities took a direct interest in the scholastic movement that was spreading. Frederick Barbarossa at the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158 promulgated the so-called authentic Habita, by which he intended to favor the Italian schools, and Bologna profited from it in particular; the scholars were taken under the sovereign's protection, so that they could travel without molestation, remain undisturbed at their studies, and be judged by the tribunal of the bishop or of the students themselves. This forum, at first limited to civil matters, was extended also to criminal ones. Philip Augustus in 1200 exempted the schools of Paris from secular jurisdiction, and the chancellor had jurisdiction over the masters and the students; thus began those privileges of exemption that the sovereigns granted or ratified quite freely, making the university an autonomous institution, living a life of its own, with the power to give itself its own statutes, to defend its own privileges and its own members, masters and scholars, against outside interference and in particular against the local powers, and to proscribe dangerous doctrines, preventing them from being taught or defended. In addition to this, there formed around the university a whole complex of interested parties, composed of copyists, papermakers, booksellers, and those employed in various services who in different ways profited from the growth of the university. Honorius III on 16 Nov. 1219 granted that masters and students of theology could draw the revenues of the ecclesiastical benefices with which they were provided for five years while they were at their studies, while still retaining the rights of residence (Decret., V, 5, 5); a concession that was extended to all universities.

It was natural, moreover, that offices and ecclesiastical benefices should preferably be distributed among university men: during the 14th century the university of Paris proposed to the popes the names of those it deemed worthy of particular consideration in this regard. The doctorate and the licentiate in theology and in law were a title of preference in the conferring of bishoprics or canonries. Fortune, favor, and advantages of various kinds were an incentive to try to increase the number of universities by adding to their privileges and endowments; they were generously endowed with ecclesiastical revenues and lay income. Eugene IV, for example, assigned to the Studium Urbis the proceeds of the wine tax. The principle prevailed that a Studium generale was to be established juridically with the intervention of the public power, on the part of the Pontiff, the Sovereign, or the Emperor. In many universities both also cooperated, at distinct moments; especially when, as in Italy, it was the free communes or the small lordships that took the initiative in founding them: for it mattered that the communication of the privileges enjoyed by the older universities should not be lacking.

An important element in the theological universities (or Faculties) was composed of the religious Orders, particularly the mendicants. The Dominicans indeed settled in Paris in 1217 and in Oxford in 1224. The Franciscans were in Paris in 1230 and in Oxford in 1224. Before long the Carmelites and Augustinians had their convents near those studia. The members of these Orders lived a common life, and this offered them various advantages: a permanent residence even for years, hours of study and books, religious practices, mutual solidarity; all this fostered diligence in study and held scholars and masters in higher esteem. The religious could hold a chair, but they had no part in the ordinances and offices of the university, tied as they were to the laws of their institute; and since they had distinguished and esteemed masters, they provoked jealousy not only among the student body but also among the doctors; therefore in the great controversy that tended, toward the middle of the 13th century, to limit the privileges granted by the popes to the mendicant Orders with regard to the care of souls, the attempt to remove them from the teaching office in the university also played its part; but they had the defense of the pontiffs in the protection of their rights.

The secular clergy, on the other hand, lived in isolation with private persons, or in association between disciples and masters, and were therefore exposed to dissipation. Sometimes they took to living together under the direction of a bachelor or a master, who directed the course of this freely constituted community. Special care was taken to provide for poor students by means of foundations or scholarships. These too were established in particular at the colleges that arose to facilitate the students' residence under greater discipline and application to study. There was one in Paris as early as the time of Urban III with its own chapel, and the popes in 1210 and 1248 confirmed its rights. Famous became the one founded in 1257 by Robert Sorbon, chaplain of St. Louis IX, which later gave its name to the whole theological Faculty, the Sorbonne; later the one called of Navarre shared its luster. In 1350 there were 19 such colleges in Paris with 375 free places.

Similar measures were taken at Bologna, at Padua, and later also at Rome. These colleges had particular importance at the two great English universities, where at the end of the 15th century no one paid board and all students had to take lodging in one of them. The scholastic career, which was prolonged for several years, concluded with the degree of doctor (a title preferred at first by the theologians), which was obtained after an examination conducted with great solemnity (examinatio publica sive conventus; v. LAUREA); and since this ceremony obliged one to great expenses, there was the private examinatio which granted the title of licentiatus or prolyta (v. LICENZA). A lower degree was that of the bachelor (v.), who participated (at least in the theological Faculties) in teaching under the direction of the masters.

In the 13th century there also appear the magistri and the doctores medicinae or physici, and those of grammaticae, logicae, philosophiae et aliarum artium.

VI. THE DEBATES

Characteristic in the development of knowledge within the university is the frequent use of theological and philosophical disputations which were held in the school under the direction of the master. They followed precise rules; to syllogize in due form, in adversarial exchange between one who maintained the proposed proposition and one who objected, to whom the master himself gave the conclusion (cf. Dante, Parad., XXIV, vv. 66-68). On more solemn occasions it was the master who proposed one or more theses, declaring himself ready to defend them against anyone. And any doctor could come forward to object, while a jury of doctors, specially constituted, directed the discussion and assigned the victory. There were also quodlibetical questions (v. QUODLIBETI) for the resolution of particularly interesting topics. Discussions formed a large part of examinations. The passion for disputation conducted in its syllogistic forms gave rise, beyond meticulousness in development, to subtlety in argumentation, to a mania for abstruse, unexpected and even extravagant theses. This too was a means of gaining credit; but it cannot be denied that it, at a time when books were few and costly, contributed to deepening knowledge and educating minds to readiness and clarity in argumentation.

VII. DIFFUSION

The university movement was not slow to expand. Following the example of Paris, the University of Toulouse (v.) arose in 1229 with the aim of stamping out the Albigensian heresy, and that of Orléans for the study of civil law, which was forbidden in Paris. From Paris too came the students who gave rise in England to the University of Oxford (v.) at the beginning of the 13th century, soon followed by that of Cambridge (v.), and these remained the only ones in that country. Through a secession from Bologna arose the University of Padua ([v.] 1222), which the bishop and others constantly favored. From Padua there soon derived that of Vercelli (v.). In the same 13th century in Spain, with the favor of the king, the universities of Salamanca and Seville arose; toward the end of that century that of Coimbra arose in Portugal. In Italy, Naples had a university by decree of Frederick II in 1224. Rome, by the will of Boniface VIII, had the Studium Urbis in 1303; but even earlier the Studium Curiae had arisen, a kind of university for the study of theology and canon law for the benefit of those who were in the Curia, who for this reason had to follow the Curia when it moved. In the following age, universities arose in Italy and France a little everywhere. During the 14th century, they also arose in countries remote from the original movement: in Prague in 1347 through the patronage of King Charles IV of Luxembourg; in Vienna in 1365 with the favor of the Habsburgs; in Kraków in Poland in 1364; in Pécs in Hungary in 1367; in Germany at Erfurt in 1379, at Heidelberg in 1385, at Cologne in 1388.

From Prague, Leipzig broke away in 1409 because of nationalist conflicts. Louvain (v.) arose in 1423 through the initiative of its prince; but during the 15th century, universities also arose in the Scandinavian countries, not without complaint from the ancient universities, which saw ever new competitors arising. These, however, rather than deepening the field of knowledge, served to spread it. Indeed, on the morrow of the discovery of America, there arose there, on the model of the University of Salamanca, those of Mexico (1553) and Lima (1555).

VIII. THE RENAISSANCE

The university system reached its full development in the heart of the Renaissance, when it had matured as a whole and its vitality for inquiry was by then almost exhausted; it was then that a movement of reaction arose which went as far as contempt in the name of the new currents of knowledge; at the same time a sense of diffidence reacted against it on the part of university men loyal to their traditions. It was in the Faculties of arts that new philosophical concepts and methods could especially find entry, such as that of studying Aristotle in the original texts, of leaving a broader field to mathematics (geometry), to astronomy, to medicine, and of gradually preparing the age of the great discoveries. The philological-literary field, which was regarded merely as a prerequisite, a necessary initiation into knowledge, remained extraneous to the university; the great humanists for the most part did not teach there. Critical research into new texts, historical and critical investigations, commentary on and imitation of the classics, political problems would be the task of private investigators or entrusted to those schools that were by then multiplying through the initiative of municipalities or patrons and would seem in some way a radical recommendation of the ancient schools of grammar and rhetoric.

At the university, disputation still continued in viam Scoti or in viam Thomae, and, for example, in Rome the chair of the Controversiae, so brilliantly held by Bellarmine, was allowed to lapse, perhaps in the thought that it was no longer needed.

Nevertheless the new problems raised by the new studies did not fail to influence teaching methods and the orientation of investigations in the juridical and philosophical fields, which were rendered more autonomous from the old schemes. In the theological field, the necessity of checking the advance of doctrines that completely overturned traditional teaching reduced them, if not to thoroughly modernizing their methods, at least to bringing them closer to the new requirements. The Jesuit colleges which, in imitation of the Collegio Romano, founded in 1553, arose in the Catholic countries and had particular importance in Germany as university institutions, played a large part in this.

The Protestant universities, averse by their very nature to traditional scholasticism, created a new one, founded on a confessional authoritarianism, unreasonable and arbitrary, with which the civil power itself allies, dominating it. They offer lively resistance to free scientific research, until the moment when they will know how to react to the Enlightenment.

The first to become Protestant was that of Wittenberg, which had been founded in 1507; nor did one then arise at Marburg in 1527 with the goods of monasteries and Catholic benefices, followed by several others in that same century. Geneva, through the work of Calvin and of Theodore Beza, above any official recognition, was the major intellectual center of the Reformed of all Europe. These centers of study, completely withdrawn from the authority of the Church, came to fall under that of the civil authority of each place. Moreover, absolutism, which in the government of States began to dominate more and more from the 16th century onward also in the Catholic countries, assumed that progressive interference in the universities, whereby the corporate system came to lose real importance and freedom was limited in the organization of chairs, in the appointments of teachers and in the discipline of students. Even the interference of the Church came gradually to be lost, so that the university came to be considered outright an organ of the State.

IX. RECENT TIMES

This evolution was taking place at the end of the 18th century, when the reform movement was invading every field and the anti-Scholastic and anti-medieval spirit favored new orientations in studies, and the emperor Joseph II was already boldly setting about changing the internal structures and even creating a kind of hierarchy in the universities.

The French Revolution, enemy of every privilege, abolished the universities on 15 Sept. 1793; instead "special schools" were established under the direct control of the State for the training of professionals, especially physicians and lawyers. Napoleon in 1806 created the Université de France, "a body charged exclusively with public instruction and education throughout the Empire"; lay in its nature, it embraced all public teaching from the elementary schoolmaster to the professor of the Sorbonne, with a "Grand Maître" at its head. Dependent on the University of Paris for higher education in the various localities were the "academies," each divided into five orders of faculties: theology, law, medicine, sciences and letters. Thereby the universities lost all autonomy and the State monopolized teaching; in 1850 the Ministry of Public Instruction replaced the Grand Maître, and in 1896 the academies regained the ancient name of universities.

Similar principles concerning the predominance of the State in the field of higher education and the full secularity of teaching were adopted in the other States of Europe and of America. The faculties of theology and of canon law were either abolished or more or less withdrawn from the authority of the Church (v. ITALIA, VII, Insegnamento, libertà di); while full freedom to teach any doctrine was recognized. Apart from the ecclesiastical universities, directed above all to the doctrinal formation of the clergy, over which the Church claimed its exclusive competence, thought was given to founding universities where teaching would be given according to the principles and doctrines of the Church for all branches of knowledge. This could not be obtained unless the freedom of teaching (v.) had first been claimed, with full authority to confer academic degrees valid for civil effects as those of the state authority. A full and truly free Catholic university was that of Louvain, reconstituted by the bishops of Belgium with the approval of Gregory XVI in 1833-35. With this system the universities were practically reduced to being institutions of a national character. For ecclesiastical universities, the new structures are proposed in the apostolic constitution of Pius XI, Deus Scientiarum Dominus (v.).

Through the initiative of Fr. A. Gemelli and Msgr. J. Schrijnen, the Federation of Catholic Universities arose in 1924, with the approval of Pius XI, and about twenty athenaeums joined it. Only Catholic universities properly so called could be members. Having lapsed, through various circumstances, the Federation was reconstituted by Pius XII on 27 July 1949 (AAS, 42 [1950], pp. 385-87). — See plates LXXXII-LXXXIII.

Iginio Cecchetti - Pio Paschini

UNIVERSITÀ CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE