FEW HUMAN CREATIONS LAST for any significant period of time. Universities, however, have proved to be an exception. The oldest universities in Europe, North and South America, and Asia have lasted longer than the governments of the nations in which they reside and virtually every other institution minus the church.2 Interestingly, among the many purposes suggested for a university education today is that it is essential for defending liberal democracy.3 While understandable, the fact that many older universities preceded the rise of liberal democracies raises the question of what universities were for in the thirteenth century when they began.
The thinkers who provided the intellectual scaffolding on which the earliest universities were built did not compose mission statements. Nevertheless, these scholars still offered rationales for the unique project in which they were engaged. Within these justifications one finds a unique way of thinking that departed from earlier Greek and Roman justifications for what today we call a liberal arts education. This distinctive vision, we contend, is crucial for understanding the larger identity, story, and purposes that nurtured the creation of the university and the development of its soul.
Hugh of St. Victor
We begin our story with Hugh of St. Victor, who died in 1141. Unfortunately, we actually know very little about Hugh’s life, including his birth date. He described himself as an earthly resident alien (“From boyhood . . . I have dwelt on foreign soil”4). He later came to Paris, France, where he studied and began to teach and write. Eventually he became a master and head of the school at St. Victor from 1120 to 1141. Hugh’s position at this school proved important for a number of reasons. As European cities grew during this time, centers of education began moving from monasteries to cathedral schools in the cities. A tension soon developed, however, between the monastics and those teachers now educating in the cities. The strain arose because monastics believed that educators in the new city-based schools placed too much emphasis on the nuggets of intellectual gold acquired through the pagan writings independent of faith in God and downplayed the importance of both orthodox belief and virtuous living for gaining wisdom.5
The School of St. Victor, overseen by Hugh, became one of the schools that addressed this tension. It existed just outside the city walls, less than a mile from the royal residence. In the words of Jim Halverson, the school did not represent “the flight to the desert by a weary ecclesiastic.”6 Its founders played a central role in the political and ecclesiastical life of the city. They opened the school to the wider public in the hopes of attracting some of the top minds coming to the city. The priests who ran the school were not monks but a group known as canons regular. They combined the disciplines of a monk with the active ministerial life of priests in urban churches. They saw their educational work of preparing students for various worldly callings as part of their ministerial work.7 This unusual combination of monastic spiritual disciplines and leading academic work built on previous educational approaches, but it also proved groundbreaking in important ways.
Both the continuities and the distinctives can be found in Hugh’s Didascalicon, which contains his ideas about how to justify and organize education. Although earlier Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, Varro, Cassiodorus, and Isidore had also created classification schemes for knowledge, these types of organizational schemes started to blossom during Hugh’s time.8 In the century preceding the rise of the university, the fields of academic knowledge began to expand rapidly. As a result, systematizers such as Hugh arose within the various types of monastic and cathedral schools and tried to organize both old and new forms of knowledge. These scholars began writing manuscripts known as didascalicons, which sought to introduce students to the various writings they should read to be educated.9 These documents were basically instruction manuals for building the substantive content of what they called the academic house or palace for wisdom.
Although Hugh’s Didascalicon was clearly influenced by early Christian scholars in how he thought about education, particularly Augustine of Hippo, his blueprint for learning departed from previous approaches in one important way.10 Previous Christian classifications had often been written as a critical response to pagan systems of knowledge. For instance, in On Christian Doctrine, Augustine created a classification of knowledge in order to help Christians discern which pagan liberal arts were suitable for Christians and which arts were not (e.g., medicine—yes, magic—no). In contrast, Hugh created a positive vision and classification of learning that, while taking pagan knowledge into account, focused more on the creative endeavor of placing the whole educational enterprise within the expansive Christian narrative.11 In other words, he set forth a comprehensive blueprint of how to build the academic structure that answered questions about who we are, why we should learn, what we should learn, and how we should learn it.
The Foundation: A Grand Reason to Discover Wisdom
As with any building, the foundation remains vitally important. During Hugh’s time, two foundational concepts were used. Some organizers simply classified their system under the word scientia (knowledge), but others used the term philosophia (which in Greek means the love of wisdom).12 The latter term drew on both Greek thought as well as Hebrew Wisdom literature such as Proverbs. Philosophia, or philosophy, would be the term that won the day at the time when universities began. For example, for Hugh philosophy served as the overarching category on which to build the academic house since he considered it “the art of arts and the discipline of disciplines.”13 In contrast to contemporary conceptions of philosophy, this wide-ranging view of philosophy included what today we would consider theological questions. “Philosophy” was an all-encompassing term. For example, Hugh believed that “philosophy is the discipline which investigates demonstratively the causes of all things, human and divine.”14 This comprehensive use of philosophy still persists as part of contemporary universities. The highest level of graduate students in the fields of arts and sciences receive a doctorate of philosophy, or PhD. Most students, and even many professors, do not understand why someone receiving the most advanced degree in chemistry should receive a doctorate in philosophy. This language points to the earlier means of conceiving and constructing knowledge that developed during the time leading up to the establishment of the universities.
Yet we have completely lost two important understandings of philosophy that proved central to Hugh’s blueprint for education. First, according to Hugh (as well as other early Christian thinkers), philosophy involved the pursuit of wisdom and not merely the pursuit of certain technical skills such as the use of logic. Echoing Proverbs he opened his first chapter with the claim, “Of all things to be sought, the first is that Wisdom in which the Form of the Perfect Good stands fixed.”15 A second important point is that wisdom for Hugh was found in the ultimate perfect Good—the persons of the Trinity. Consequently Hugh spoke in relational terms about philosophy (i.e., wisdom), since it involved pursuing and getting to know a Being and not simply abstract truths.
Philosophy, then, is the love and pursuit of Wisdom, and in a certain way, a friendship with it; not, however, of that “wisdom” which is concerned with certain tools and with knowledge and skill in some craft, but of that Wisdom which, wanting in nothing, is a living Mind and the sole primordial Idea or Pattern of things. This love of Wisdom, moreover, is an illumination of the apprehending mind by that pure Wisdom and, in a certain way, a drawing and a calling back to itself of man’s mind, so that the pursuit of Wisdom appears like friendship with that Divinity.16
In other words, just as friendship involves getting to know the thoughts of another person and drawing closer to each other in the process, Hugh believed the study of philosophy required developing an intellectual friendship with God. Only by getti...