[Sidenote:  The Universities and the Church]

If the democratic spirit of the Universities’ threatened feudalism, their spirit of intellectual enquiry threatened the Church.  To all outer seeming they were purely ecclesiastical bodies.  The wide extension which mediaeval usage gave to the word “orders” gathered the whole educated world within the pale of the clergy.  Whatever might be their age or proficiency, scholar and teacher alike ranked as clerks, free from lay responsibilities or the control of civil tribunals, and amenable only to the rule of the Bishop and the sentence of his spiritual courts.  This ecclesiastical character of the University appeared in that of its head.  The Chancellor, as we have seen, was at first no officer of the University itself, but of the ecclesiastical body under whose shadow it had sprung into life.  At Oxford he was simply the local officer of the Bishop of Lincoln, within whose immense diocese the University was then situated.  But this identification in outer form with the Church only rendered more conspicuous the difference of spirit between them.  The sudden expansion of the field of education diminished the importance of those purely ecclesiastical and theological studies which had hitherto absorbed the whole intellectual energies of mankind.  The revival of classical literature, the rediscovery as it were of an older and a greater world, the contact with a larger, freer life whether in mind, in society, or in politics introduced a spirit of scepticism, of doubt, of denial into the realms of unquestioning belief.  Abelard claimed for reason a supremacy over faith.  Florentine poets discussed with a smile the immortality of the soul.  Even to Dante, while he censures these, Virgil is as sacred as Jeremiah.  The imperial ruler in whom the new culture took its most notable form, Frederick the Second, the “World’s Wonder” of his time, was regarded by half Europe as no better than an infidel.  A faint revival of physical science, so long crushed as magic by the dominant ecclesiasticism, brought Christians into perilous contact with the Moslem and the Jew.  The books of the Rabbis were no longer an accursed thing to Roger Bacon.  The scholars of Cordova were no mere Paynim swine to Adelard of Bath.  How slowly indeed and against what obstacles science won its way we know from the witness of Roger Bacon.  “Slowly,” he tells us, “has any portion of the philosophy of Aristotle come into use among the Latins.  His Natural Philosophy and his Metaphysics, with the Commentaries of Averroes and others, were translated in my time, and interdicted at Paris up to the year of grace 1237 because of their assertion of the eternity of the world and of time and because of the book of the divinations by dreams (which is the third book, De Somniis et Vigiliis) and because of many passages erroneously translated.  Even his logic was slowly received and lectured on.  For St. Edmund, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first in my time who read the Elements at Oxford.  And I have seen Master Hugo, who first read the book of Posterior Analytics, and I have seen his writing.  So there were but few, considering the multitude of the Latins, who were of any account in the philosophy of Aristotle; nay, very few indeed, and scarcely any up to this year of grace 1292.”