In Our Time - Greyfriars and Blackfriars

Episode Date: November 10, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, known as the Blackfriars and Greyfriars. "Just as it is better to light up others than to shine alone, it is better to share the fruits of one's contemplation with others than to contemplate in solitude". Thus St Thomas Aquinas described his vocation, not only as a teacher, but also as a Dominican friar and philosopher at the University of Paris. In the 13th century, the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were a great force for change in Catholic Europe. They thrived in the emerging towns and cities of the High Middle Ages, leading crusades and changing the way the Church dealt with heretics. They were the evangelists who transformed the Church's preaching of the Christian message to the people. On top of all this, these two orders were also responsible for reconciling Classical and Christian philosophy; their studies of Aristotle paved the way for the Renaissance. They also managed to change the curriculum at the universities of Paris and Oxford. But the Blackfriars and the Greyfriars did not come from the great monasteries of the time; they started out as itinerant preachers surviving upon the charity of the faithful. So how did these two orders come to dominate the spiritual and academic life of the 13th century, and how did they manage to accumulate such huge wealth while professing allegiance to lives of poverty? With Henrietta Leyser, medieval historian and Fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford; Alexander Murray, medieval historian and Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford; Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Quote, just as it's better to light up others than to shine alone, it is better to share the fruits of one's contemplation with others

than to contemplate in solitude. Thus St. Thomas Aquinas described his vocation, not only as a teacher but also as a Dominican friar and philosopher at the University of Paris. In the 13th century, the religious orders of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were a great force for change in Catholic Europe. They thrived in the emerging towns and cities of the high Middle Ages, leading crusades and changing the way the church dealt with heretics. These two orders were also responsible for reconciling classical and Christian philosophy. Their studies of Aristotle and Islamic scholars paved the way for the Renaissance. They changed the curriculum at the Universes of Paris.

and Oxford. So how did these orders come to dominate the spiritual and academic life of the 13th century? How did they manage to accumulate such huge wealth while professing allegiance to lives of poverty? With me to discuss the Greyfriars and the Black Fries is Henrietta Liza, medieval historian fellow of St. Peter's College, Oxford. Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Ballet College Oxford. And Alexander Murray, medieval historian and Emeritus Fellow of University College, Oxford. And yet Eliza, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, their grey fries and the black fires, were the first mendicant orders in the Catholic Church. How did they emerge?

They emerge from a background of a totally changed Europe, which has become much more city-based rather than agriculturally focused. They don't, of course, come out of the blue. I mean, it seems as if that's the case. But actually, from the late 10th century, I think one can say, the traditional Benedictine way of life had increasingly been. challenged. This was no longer seen as appropriate really

for the needs of this new mercantile class. The traditional Benedictine life being? Being based very much on big rural monasteries and which were no longer appropriate and which didn't really serve the needs of the laity. And so from the

late 10th century on you've got itinerant preachers who want to suggest a different way of life, one which is less focused on vicarious piety and more really encouraging people to become penitence to find their own way of living a Christian life that in the world, you don't have to leave the world in longer to become a good Christian, you can do it yourself with guidance, and it's precisely that guidance that the

mendicants try to provide. It's interesting to probe just a bit more at the roots of that, you know, because you have these great abbeys, the Cistercian, the Benedictine Ami, and they were part of it. The Cistercians were farmers, and they were part of the world in that sense meeting other farmers and, let's call them farmers and so and so forth. And so was there anything else bringing this need forward? Was there a recovery of belief in the Gospels or something? Well, of course, the Cistercians themselves are, in a way, a break away from the Benedictine monasteries of the kind of 9th and 10th century.

The Cistercians are paradoxical order in the same way that the mendicants become because the Cistercians originally try to leave wealth behind them to set up in rural places and they become very rich. sheep farmers, but that isn't really their original intention. And they, too, like the mendicants, are much more concerned with the individual seeking salvation rather than being a great order that is simply praying for the needs of others. I mean, they certainly do that, but they are actually looking for individual salvation. And so they are, in a way, a sort of halfway house, I think, between the Benedictans and the mendicants.

So at the end of the 12th, early 13th century, this is gathering force, and the time is, as we're ripe for a Absolutely. And you're right. I mean, there's a switch to a kind of New Testament-based Christianity rather than an Old Testament-based Christianity. But all these things are only possible because of the increased prosperity of the time.

You can't possibly start talking about poverty unless actually the world is very rich. I mean, it's just not appropriate, it's not attractive, and it's not what anybody's... I mean, poverty before, say, the 12th century is something that's rather... that people fear rather than... They worry about riches.

This is something which everybody kind of wants. but when you get to a certain point of prosperity, then you begin to think, help is this dragging me down and taking me towards hell rather than being a reflection of heaven. Alexander Murray, let's follow that point. The founder of the Franciscan, St Francis, what do we know of his early life and how he started preaching?

Well, we ought to know a great deal because there's a huge amount of literature about him. And the trouble is, as with almost any very famous and influential person, and the literature has different slants on it because different schools come in and slightly change the story. But I think that the reality that we can see quite clearly is that he was somebody of quite extraordinary, I think, to say religious genius is one expression people might use.

He was a young man born in a CC, father of wealthy merchant, at a time when I think one would say that European capitalism was really beginning to take off. And his father was a successful long-distance merchant. He'd been in France, actually, when Francis was born, which is why he was called Francis. Anybody called Francis can think of that, because that's how it all began, male or female.

He was born, and he grew up like a wealthy young man. He went parties, and he sort of flitted with the girls, and he was going off, in fact, to fight in a war in Sicily, when something inside him, which had been brewing for some time, said, you know, this is not for you. And Christ died for us in the... poverty and simplicity, and that this is, you've got to follow him. And so then he gave up his property.

His father was extremely angry with giving up all his property. It was a great parental problem there and gave up fighting and built a little, or obtained permission to have a little tiny community near, just outside a CC of prayer. Now, this is where the problem arose because, as Henry has just said, there were quite a number of people who sort of had this spiritual urge in the 12th century. Some of them were somewhat suspect because they wanted the church sort of, they just cock to snook at the church.

St. Francis did not want to do that. He saw the church of something which was the great sort of ship in which everybody had to travel, even if it was corrupt. He didn't like it being corrupt. But he wanted to stay within it. The bishop of Assisi fortunately happened to be going to Rome for business. And St. Francis said, will you take it? me with you so that I can get approval for our way of life.

And then one of the historic meetings of history took place in which Francis was presented to Pope Innocent III. There was another very great man in his field. And Innocent the Third at first thought, you know, we can't encourage this sort of, you know, this sort of rebel way of life. And he thought about it a lot and realized that what Francis wanted to do was to live as closely as possible to the gospel. And then there was a dream.

If you don't believe me, you can go to Assisi and it's picked. pictured there by somebody who I think is not jotto, but thought by, there's a fight about that, I think. But you can see, Innocent is looking at the church which has been recognised as St John Lateran, and it was crumbling, and there's a poor man holding it up. And he comes out of this and thinks, send for that chap. And he talks to Francis and says, look, if you all take an oath of obedience to me and your followers will take one to you, the system will hold together, and then I'm with you. I see that as an enormously influential decision by a great ruler and a religious genius, because

it meant the order could start. It is extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, because he preached, this is your phrase, without license in the C, and he went with a few followers from him, and then he's established when so many of these, let's call them outside just to make it easy, he had been rejected, they'd been thought of getting in the way, trivial or even opposition. and he was taken on at a time when, as you choose your phrase, again, capitalism was taking off, but his doctrine against ownership, France's doctrine in his ownership, extended even to the possession of prayer books,

and even education was a possession that could be rejected, because what mattered was you had to follow in the steps of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that was that. So he was very hard line in that sense, wasn't he? Very much so. He was, poverty was his sort of lady poverty. He was married to lady poverty. an imaginary figure. And as you mentioned the prayer book, one of the stories about him in a life is one of the brethren comes up to him later and says, can't I even own a prayer book?

And Francis says, no, because within a few days, he was starting to say, Brother John, give me my prayer book, and this is all possession. So he was very strong against possession. And as you say, the intellectual stuff, he thought these people were just being too clever, and they were rising in the world as lawyers and the rest of it.

And he wanted complete simplicity, as with the poor, and the gospel was enough. I want to come back to that because it made it very difficult simply to live a life, and the paradox was that they became wealthy and great scholars. But we'll come back to that in a second. Anthony Kenny, around the same time, by the, since we call it a blessed coincidence, we have the Dominicans being established by another young man of what you call good or family, Dominic.

Can you tell us how he established that? Well, Dominic was a Spaniard, and he was, I think, a much more down-to-earth and practical person than St. Francis, who was much more romantic, mystical person than Dominic. And Dominic had a fairly conventional clerical career to begin with, but he was going to Denmark, and I can't remember why he was going to Denmark, but he never got there at Toulouse. he met up with a lot of heretics, Manichaean heretics, that's to say, heretics who believe not just in a single God

who made the world and saw that it was good, but two opposing divine principles, one good and one bad. And these heretical groups, they also had a rather eccentric pattern of the spiritual career. at an early stage and for the Hoy-Polloy, the moral rules were pretty lax. You could do almost anything you liked.

But then at a higher stage, you had to be enormously austere and devout. So austere and devout that they were rather shaming the Cistercians by being much more austere and devout than the Cistercians. So Dominic thought this was a bad show, and he began by founding convents of nuns who were to be even more austere than the most austere heretics. The heretics were talking about are the cathars. Yes, that's right.

They're given lots of different names by different people. And then he began to take on, as a way, the intellectual challenge, as well as the spiritual challenge. He wanted, he, though his followers took vows of poverty, he didn't emphasize poverty in the way that Francis did. What he did emphasize was learning. There was that wonderful. quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas, who was the best known of all Dominic's followers, saying that the

vocation was, first of all, to contemplate, but not to let your contemplation be like a light shining alone, but to spread out the results of your contemplation. And that became the motto of the Dominican order. Like St. Dominic, St. Dominic had to get his order approved by the Pope, the Pope said, well, you've got to take on one of the regular rules, and he chose one that was attributed to St. Augustine, the Augustinian rule. Rule being a way of life? As a way of life. It was a simplified version of monastic life.

They were, as people have been saying, they were mobile, urban people rather than people living on monasteries. But they did sing the office in an abrid. abbreviated form, the hours of divine worship during the day and night. But the emphasis was very much on preaching. That was why they were called friars preachers, that's their official name. They were called black friars, even though rather confusingly they wear white, but they did have a kind of black overcoat when they went out.

The Franciscans, because they wore brown, were called grey friars. So I hope that's all quite clear. I think this is the territory we're in this moment. But the Friars preacher, almost everybody calls them Dominicans because of St. Dominic. And it was their main job, was to fight heresy. And if you go into the wonderful Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, you'll see a huge fresco of the saying what the job of the Dominicans is. And you will see on the fresco a lot of sheep who are.

are the faithful Christians. These sheep are being attacked by wolves, who are the wicked heretics, but the wolves are being beaten off by black and white spotted dogs, who are the Dominicans, the Dominicans, the Dominique Karnes, the dogs of the Lord.

I'm going to, if I could come to you, can you explain the differences between these two? We've got these two stars. How did the Dominicans, for instance, become, they founded the Inquisition, which didn't become the terrible Inquisition, for a while, but they did find the position. The Pope found them very useful

not only to think, to outthink the heresies of the cathars, let's say, and so and so forth, but to lead the force, which went into that terrible crusade against them. So can you just give us, they're established these, these two young men have established these orders, can you briskly give us the differences?

And then we can move on to talk about the ideas. Well, the Americans, from the beginning, realized that to beat the heretics, it isn't, yes, you've got to lead a holy life, but you also do need learning. So from the beginning they're a learned order, whereas the Franciscans, as Sandy has suggested, you know, don't think that you'd own books and books will probably just lead to pride. And so from the beginning, there's a very different feel about them. The Franciscans simply want to follow the

gospel and that's it, to live a simple, pure life and to be an example to others by the simplicity of their lives. Whereas the Dominicans from day one want to argue, want to go out there, want to get to the university and sort of fine-tune their arguments so that the heretics can actually be beaten in disputation. There are two or three things, many more really, but just to talk about two things. One was that these mobile, one of you mentioned the word mobile, mobile forces were getting involved in the new civic life. Another, the ideas that they came from forced them into rethinking Christianity, the radical idea of poverty reintroduced by Francis, but held to quite ruthless, it meant they had to examine the Gospels. And the Dabingen's idea of fighting the heresies meant they had to re-examine. So the intellectual, as well as the going around being a different sort of mobile force in the new towns,

are all coming together. Can you just finally contextualize that for us? Better than I've done. Well, I think you've done it very well, actually, that this ideal did make people look again at the Gospels and think about there. I see the history of the churches like a Loch Ness monster, actually, in which every time there's a twist going up it's a great reform movement whether it's the cluniac monasteries or the cistercians and then as you know it becomes the establishment bit by bit the original fervor and revolution goes away and to some extent both these orders are one of those twists up and then they go the way of all flesh and other orders start taking over the lead in the 14th and 15th centuries

they don't become as rich i think as you make out that's not that's not their problem however having the way I see this is slightly different, I think, from my two colleagues, because I was much influenced once by reading the sermons of a reforming bishop in the 13th century and saw the mendicants through his eyes. And as I see, none of us would have heard of Francis or Dominic if it hadn't been for the orders, and none of us would have heard of the orders if it hadn't been for the reforming bishops, of whom Innocent III was the principal, the Pope of Rome. The biggest thing that he did in his life was not the Albigensian crusoe or anything like that.

that was an side, it's rather like the Iraq war for Mr Blair. You know, it's sort of something that came up after the programme was invented. It was the fourth letter in council, which is getting all the bishops of Europe together to say, what does the church need to do in order to make a reality of the Christian life for everybody? And if you read through that, you see that it all hangs on the parish priest, you know, that they must be well educated, they must behave themselves, they must keep the rules, etc.

The awful problem was that there weren't enough of these priests. parish priests. At least there weren't enough good ones. I mean, there were some good ones, but just not enough. These two little groups of holy people, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, were literally a god sent for these bishops. And in a short time after their deaths in the 12, 20s and 30s, you gradually see a development by which the bishops are using these little groups. They go onto the housing estates or the shantytowns on the edge of towns where there's no parish provision and where the poor people are and the land is cheap. And today you can sometimes find, like Santa Maria Vela, you mentioned, that's the railway

station. You find them on railway stations and bus stations. Santa Croix is the bus station in Florence, Blackfrizz in London's and other cases because it's around the city wall, the old city wall. And they establish themselves there as group practices, rather like our doctors today. They have three or four, sometimes more, the Dominicans are bigger. They know how to preach, they look after each other. My bishop Visconti of Pisa said, poverty, chastity in obedience. He said poverty and chastity, they see to each other. They don't break this. obedience, they're sometimes a bit disobedient, but otherwise they keep the rules.

They preach for nothing. They're learned. And you can go along and listen to their sermon, so that in some ways they're an improved model of the parish clergy. Now, in order to make them that, adjustments were needed in their original order, particularly in the case of the Franciscans. And I think that the second generation Franciscans are the ones who, modify, they still have a picture of Francis on the wall, quite right, and of course famous type of portrait of St Francis. He's still the ideal saying, resist the temptation to Averis, whatever you do, live very simply. But meanwhile, you can study, learn, and you've got to serve the people as if you were a parish

priest. Would you, excuse me, excuse me, Antiquette, would you go, would you, you, you said your colleagues here might demur? Would you like to demur or would you like to conquer? Senator. Sandy has described extremely well half of the things that they were doing. I mean, besides being in shanty towns near the 13th century railway stations, they were also in the rather more developed 13th century universities.

I mean, these years in the years before and after 1215 are really remarkable years in history. Of course, we all know in England we were having Magna Carta. You'll get the foundation charters of the great universities of Paris and Ogden. Oxford, you get the approval of these orders, and you get the gradual recovery of the works of Aristotle, which I think you mentioned earlier. In the universities, the Dominicans are like fish in water at universities. They were founded to be learned scholars, and here is a marvelous environment for them. I can't say they were as welcomed by the ordinary clergy who were in the university as you were saying they were in the shanty dance. Indeed, partly because they were willing to teach for nothing and because they were rather cleverer on the whole. They were pretty unpopular with the people who already held the chairs in the universities.

And St. Thomas Aquinas began his career as a lecturer as a strike breaker because the university was on. strike against these jumped-up mendicants coming in. But very quickly, they did become the leading philosophers and theologians and were accepted as such. As I say, this was very easy for the Dominicans. For the Franciscans, it did take, as Sandy was saying, a degree of adjustment. And the great St. Bonaventure was the person who presided over this, of preserving the of St. Francis without his impracticality.

So I'll come to him in a moment, just to establish a bit more about the universities. Can you take us through the way that they planted themselves in universities? Was this a deliberate, was this again a deliberate act to get a grip on the thinking of the time and to steer it, even control it? Well, very much for the Dominicans. I mean, this is the whole point of Dominic's mission, I think, has been made clear, really. and that's why the idea is to have a university at Toulouse, which is a sort of centre of heretical activity,

because Dominic very clearly sees the only way to beat the heretics is to argue with them. The Franciscans, it's much more complicated and paradoxical with the Franciscans, and I don't think, I mean, they sort of follow along and join the Dominicans in this, but it isn't really quite what they want to do. They are much more on the ground in the shanty towns,

where, as Sandy says, they're very much needed, though they are also resented, of course, by the parish priests and the secular clergy, just as in the way at the universities, there's a lot of trouble with the secular masters. So among the local boys who think they're doing their job well enough, are pretty fed up with the Franciscans coming in and the Dominicans and attracting all the crowds and sort of being the popular preachers and really sort of setting up, sort of, you know, fan groups.

I mean, people have to, Anthony Padreux, he's got to stop preaching so that people can get back to the heart. harvest and this sort of cult of popular preachers doesn't go down well with everybody. But what's happening, Alexander, Mary, from what you said in the previous contribution, it seems to me that the bishops saw these, well, you use the word God said, didn't you, and used them and brought them in and employed them with brilliantly for the reforming and the future of the church. Would you? Yes, I would accept that.

The official line, and you see the successive popes, I mean, the innocent third died, but then others came along. And they saw that this was a very valuable, here were two very valuable groups. And I think one might mention at this point, the pictures always get complicated, that around the middle of the century, the 13th century.

The 13th century. The popes actually encouraged other similar groups, and so you get the Austin Friars, the Augustinian friars, and the Carmelites, and the Servites, in Florence, that lovely church by Brunelisky is a Servite church, other little groups

and the popes do the same with them. They say, look, you may want to pray like Billy and sit in the mountains, but I'm going to approve you if you're prepared to take a rule which allows me to put you in a town somewhere, and you can pray there and you know, do the things, and at Worcester College at Oxford, that's where the

Carmelites were once, and right in the middle of towns, he can plant these other groups, so that the popes and the bishops, positively use these people and you can actually find documents in which they're reckoning up rather like when planning permission is given for a supermarket today. They look at the

population of a town, how many supermarkets does it require and that some of the French historian, Schack LeGoff particularly, have done little surveys to see that you can actually measure the population of the town in 1260, 70, 80 by the number of mendicant convents that there are in it because they allow

I forgot what it is, but so many for so many population. And that's all the bishops join in with this? I mean I think the only thing I would want to add to that is that to some extent this isn't just it's a good idea that the popes are having it. The popes are actually having to struggle also to contain the amount of popular fervour that there is. And so by sort of backing certain orders, they're actually also trying to if you like clamp down on others and they're trying to channel the popular devotion that is into certain recognised groups and actually they get worried all the time that there are too many of them.

So in 1274 they say, hang on, some of you, we're just not going to support anymore. And I think, again, the whole success of the Franciscan Dundamicans depends on there being people who are the forming little groups among themselves have got to kind of do-it-yourself religion going. And so it isn't a top-down movement that the Mendic. But it's partly triggered, isn't it, by the Lateran Council that you were mentioning earlier, because of the obligation, which, it placed on all Christians to confess their sins once a year to a priest. And that placed an enormous new demand on clergy. But it's to their priest. Again, I think you have to see that as a way of the latter of the Pope,

trying to make sure that you've got kind of tabs on people. That decree says to your own priest. And one of the problems is that the Franciscans and Dominicans come along and they're not the local priests. They are other people. Exactly because the local priests can't answer the demand. Yes. But again, it's, you know, there are all these laypans.

penitential movements that I think the Pope is trying to keep tabs on because of the tendency of many of them to become heretical. And many of these groups, as far as one can tell, actually they're not even sure themselves whether they're heretical or orthodox. Sometimes they think they're one thing, one day and one thing the next. And so I think the Pope's got a real problem. And the Francis and the Dominican are the answer to that because he can try and say, well, actually, this is the order you've got to join. Just can we sort of tidy everything up? can we try and streamline this devotion?

But as the century goes on, the Franciscans become part of the problem. Oh, indeed. That is to say, there are a number of seismic franciscans who themselves are regarded by the popes as heretical, and then they condemn the Pope for being heretical because he's unsound on apostolic poverty and so on. Can I ask a question to both of you? So far as I know, the Dominicans never split up into different rival groups, never had a serious reform movement, whereas the Franciscans were always splitting into new groups.

Why was there this difference? Was it just because Dominic was a better manager to begin with, and Francis was too highfalutin? Well, I think Francis is ideal, because it was a higher sort of nobler, simpler ideal, ran into the problems that people with such ideals do run into. That is to say that in ordinary life, they sometimes just are impossible to achieve.

and consequently, I agree with you, it was the Franciscan order that had the problems. Though the Dominicans did run into a different sort of problem, as you must know, partly because they used to go and preach to these ladies' convents. And they're very mystical. The real monks of the Middle Ages were the nuns because they couldn't get out and they just prayed all day.

And so the Dominicans would preach. And Meister Eckhart, as you know, in the beginning of the 14th century, with his mystical ideas about union with God, does one become, when one's deep in prayer, does one almost become God? There were certain statements which he made, which some of his enemies said, you know, that doesn't sound too good. You sound as if you're sort of being pantheistic or thinking your God yourself.

So I think the Dominicans had their own special problems, not least when Aquinas came, as you know really were on the scene, that there were people for and against Aquinas. But that's another subject. So the Dominicans ran into intellectual problems, but the Franciscans were the ones that really were explosive in their ideology. Can I just turn now to the On the Universities

The Franciscans are the arm that does a great deal for Rome Including mopping up lay penitentials Although they represent the lay penitentials I mean the strategy which has been brought in by Alexander Murray is brilliant We've got these people wandering around causing a lot of trouble We'll have one lot, our lot wandering around And we have heresies that we have to fight not only with arms But we thought and we've got this other lot, the Dominicans

What happens is they merge at the universities. The Franciscans go to learning, and so do the Dominicans, and this powers the universe at that time, particularly, emerging in Paris and Oxford. So that's where we are there. Can you tell us Anthony Kenny about Bonaventure's role in dissembing and what he was and what he did that was important? Well, he was both a mystic and an administrator, and his mystical works are still read today as works of spirituality. In terms of the sort of philosophical background,

I think it would be fair to say that Bonaventure and Thomas, who were almost exact contemporaries, that was born and died in royalist the same year, that Bono Venture and Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure represents the more traditional side of theology, the Augustinian side, going back to St. Augustine. And he's a Franciscan. He's the Francisco.

Whereas Aquinas is much more the innovator or renovator, that is he is very keen to incorporate the learning and wisdom of Aristotle into the patrimony of the church. Bonaventure knew Aristotle quite well too, but he is, on the whole, wanting as little change as possible in traditional Augustinian theology, whereas Thomas Aquinas wants to, once he's made Aristotle, as it were, safe for Christianity by denying some of Aristotle's pagan ideas, for instance, that the world had existed forever.

Aquinas says, no, no, that's quite wrong. The world, as we know from Genesis, was created by God. It had a beginning. But Aquinas wanted to take over Aristotle's psychology, the idea of a human being as essentially a rational animal, not a kind of soul imprisoned temporarily in a body, but that the human beings were basically animals. They were different from the other animals because they were rational. They had reason and intellect, and that intellect would. survive death, but only as a kind of interim thing to the resurrection of the body, which was

the ultimate glorious goal that everyone was to go to. Of course, the Franciscans also believed in the creation of the world, the resurrection of the body and so on. But they tended rather more towards a platonic idea, I think, of the soul as partially imprisoned in the body. and after St. Thomas's death, there was something of a reaction against his Aristotelian teaching about human psychology, and some of his propositions were condemned in Paris and in Oxford. St. Thomas, for instance, believed that the intellectual soul controlled everything that happened in the

the body, all the animal functions and the vegetative functions, digestion, sleep and everything, these were all controlled by the intellectual soul, which was the single form that made the body a human being. This was rejected by the Franciscans and indeed by, in the end, by some of the Dominicans. When St. Thomas was canonized as a saint a few years after his death, the condemnation in Paris was revoked. So far as I know, the Oxford condemnation has never been revoked. So, you know, if any of us teach that there is only a single form in the human body, the Vice-Chancellor might have an action against us,

though I imagine he has other things on his mind at the moment. Alexander Murray, can I, let's stick with Aquinas because he's so, we must come back and do a proper programme on Equinus or several. This is an aristocratic young man who, with a family with, hopes for him to take up one of the great abbess, and he's become a wealthy prince of the church, but still a prince of Italy and so on. He determined to go and join his mendic and poverty order.

And he's entranced by Aristotle. So he's the double thing is it. Now, just to stick with Aquinas and he's thinking, Aristotle, as it were, came on the scene through translations, which had been made by Persian and Islamic scholars and then translated into Latin. These translations seem to fire the imagination, of imagination of the cleverest young men,

they thought this is new. Aristotle is marvellous. We must do something about him. But he was three or four hundred years before Christ, 300 years before Christ. He was therefore officially a pagan. There are things in him that didn't work. And I'm terribly simple.

I really do apologise. But Quind has set himself the task of trying to make it work in to the Catholic faith while still having a real serious reverence. I think that's a proper word for Aristotle himself. Can you, can you? Can you tell us how to go by?

That's roughly right, the picture you've given. Before Aquinas came on the scene, he was sort of before he was born, in fact, in the 12th century, they'd got a little bit of Aristotle in Latin. The logical works had come in from ancient times through the early Middle Ages. But then Spain, particularly and Sicily, were places where the Islamic world and the Christian world were in contact. And translation began to take place in the 12th century. It turned out that these books were very interesting. And when they were read in Latin, because all the scholars had to be able to read Latin then,

there was a demand for them just because they were interesting. And Aristotle read about all sorts of things, about meteors and about fish and plants and human beings and animals, the mind, metaphysics. He wrote a fantastic range of things he wrote about. And the conservatives, in the meaning of the people who wanted to keep things the same, were a bit suspicious of all this, that the logic was all right. They could cope with the logic. They dealt with that. But in the early 13th century, some of the people reading Aristotle were coming out with some rather funny views, including that the world had existed forever.

And there was another one which is that when I die, my soul will just go back into store it into the general world's soul. And so that when I'm called up for judgment, I won't be there, this sort of thing. Lots of little doctrines. You have to be as clever, if I may say, with Anthony, to understand all these doctrines. They're very technical some of them. But you can see that some of the doctrines are sort of strength. Now, when Aquinas turned up in Paris, and he was very interested in theology and philosophy, he read these books and said, now let's look and see what's in here.

Aristotle, as you just pointed out, lived long before Christianity. The medieval Christians had to deal with their ancestors all the time. I mean, the Latin, Ciceroan people, they had to have a place for the pagans, so-called pagans. and Plato was known of, Neo-Platonisks were known quite well, and Aristotle was known of. But here was a challenge. Now, what Aquinas did, and I'll try and keep this as simple as I can, that will necessarily falsify the whole process. These translations, by the way, they weren't all made from Arabic, some of them were made from Greek directly. There was a huge sort of interplay between them, often by Jews, and they came through several languages,

sometimes sort of into Hebrew and then out into Latin again. There was a huge translation business, and pioneers used to do it. it. What had happened was that Aristotle had been, when he was first translated into Arabic, the sort of second phase of Islam, early Islam was very sort of puritanical and, you know, learning, but in the Baghdad phase, the Abbasid period, some of the old cultures came up in Persia and in Spain, and Islamic scholars started studying Aristotle. Thought he was wonderful. They also read Plato. And some of the versions that were coming into Europe actually had got commentaries on them, which, and what Aquinas pointed out is that some of these dangerous doctrines

are actually in the commentaries. On the question of the eternity of the world, he said, well, look, Aristotle didn't know he wasn't there, nor we, but on faith we think that it was created by God. It's part of the whole package of God, is that he created the world. But he said some of these doctrines are actually not in Aristotle at all, and he sorted that out, and then he took issue, he put Aristotle in his place, he's perfectly reasonable to read Aristotle, who's a mere philosopher trying to use his mind to study the world, which is what you should do and I should do, and what Jesus said we should do. He said, there's one place in the gospel where he says, look at the sky, you can tell when there's, whether it's going

to be bad tomorrow. Well, look at the world. You know, you should be able to tell, and Aquinas rather took up this line that if you look at the world carefully, you'll get there in the end, you'll need faith in the end, but it'll take you a long way, but like the 18th century people. And Aquinas both sorted out what was the real Aristotle, what was commentary, and he pointed out the things that were contaminating to Aristotelian doctrine. And these turn out not to be so much Aristotle, but actually a version, as Anthony just said, a version of Plato, Neo-Platonism, which is of late Platonism, which is, in my view, and not all that too-distant cousin of manichism.

It's manichism with Spex, really. There was a remarkable turnaround, wasn't it? That was a true of course. It didn't seem all that simple either. Without specks. Within 50 years, you've got, you move from a time when most of Aristotle's works are forbidden to be read in the university, to a time when they're obligatory to be read in the university. I mean, there are, I think two other figures we should mention, as we were before, in connection with Aquinas.

In there's Aquinas' own teacher, Dominican, Albert the Great, was taught him in Cologne, Albert. was a German. And Albert was one of the first to appreciate the importance of Aristotle, in a sense, put Aquinas onto Aristotle. He was a far less discriminating reader of Aristotle than Aquinas was. I mean, Albert wrote a vast amount of stuff ranging from rather serious logical commentary to the wildest magical speculations and so on. If you're looking for a forerunner of Renaissance science,

It wouldn't be Aquinas, it wouldn't be Bonaventure, it would be Albert among the Dominicans and among the Franciscans, Roger Bacon. But the Oxford person that I had in mind was not so much bacon as Robert Grosstead, who was the first chancellor of Oxford University. He was not himself a Franciscan, but he lectured in the Franciscan community. he himself was one of those who translated Aristotle directly from the Greek. I'm really, I'm sorry about this, but we really do need to do a program and or several on Aquinas, and I'm very pleased we've stayed with Aquinas. A lot of questions are in front of me, ladies and gentlemen, which you're not going to be asked this morning, but there you go.

I will finish lines about saying, can you just briefly tell us what you think the intellectual legacy was for the next hundred or two hundred rows of the Dominicas and Franciscans and how it might have influenced what we broadly know. the Renaissance? Well, I mean, with the Dominicans, it's clearly Aquinas. With the Franciscans, I don't personally think it's an intellectual legacy so much as a way of setting the pattern for the devotional piety of the later Middle Ages for this new emphasis on the humanity of Christ, empathy with the way Christ lived. I mean, one of the sort of most significant moments, I suppose, of the Franciscan legacy is when Francis actually puts real hay. He has a sort of

of crib at Greco, he brings in real hay, a real ox and an ass, and this is the nativity. And it's that kind of way of involving everybody in Christ's life that is really the Franciscan legacy. And the Dominican? Dominicans, I think it's Aquinas and all that that means, which we've seen is monumental. I would like to shove in two volumes more of writers beside Aquinas, but another time. Another time. The popular legacy of the Dominicans was the Rosary, wasn't it? That was a piece of property.

That's so that one mustn't over-emphasise, and the South of Eregina, which is, again, sort of popular parties, if you like. They've got a lot of work to do on Radio 4 this morning. Thank you very much, Henry Deliza, Anthony Kennedy and Alexander Murray. Next week we'll be talking about pragmatism. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk, forward slash radio 4.