Universities,
like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. So long as knowledge
was limited to the seven liberal arts of the Early Middle Ages, there could be
no universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements of
grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic, astronomy,
geometry, and music, which did duty for an academic curriculum. But between 1100
and 1200 there came a great influx of new knowledge into western Europe, partly
through Italy and Sicily, but chiefly through the Arab scholars of Spain — the works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and
the Greek physicians, the new arithmetic, and those texts of the Roman law
which had lain hidden through the Dark Ages.
Philosophy
and Religion were supposed to stay in their own domains, however by the end of
the twelfth century, the New Logic
was pretty well assimilated. Then came Aristotle’s Metaphysics and natural philosophy, with their Arabic commentators –
and
theological questions
increased exponentially. Things heated up through the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries with intermittent fights between Christian theologians and “pagan
philosophers,” represented by the works of Aristotle.
It
began with Abelard (1079-1142) when he tried to
apply his logical method of inquiry to theology. Abelard as a teacher and ‘classroom
entertainer,’ bold, original, lucid, sharply polemical, always fresh and
stimulating, and withal “able to move to laughter the minds of serious men.” Then,
about 1140, Gratian, a monk of San Felice, composed the Decretum which became the standard text in canon law, thus marked
off from theology as a distinct subject of higher study; and the pre-eminence
of Bologna as a law school was fully assured.
Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides
or "The Rambam" (1135 –1204 CE), lived at
a time when both Christianity and Islam were developing active theologies.
Jewish scholars were often asked to attest to their faith by their counterparts
in other religions. The Rambam's Shloshah-Asar
Ikkarim,
the Thirteen Articles of Faith,
compiled from Judaism’s 613 commandments found in the Torah.
1.
Belief in the existence of the Creator,
be He blessed, who is perfect in every manner of existence and is the Primary
Cause of all that exists.
2.
The belief in God’s absolute and
unparalleled unity.
3.
The belief in God’s noncorporeality, nor
that He will be affected by any physical occurrences, such as movement, or rest,
or dwelling.
4.
The belief in God’s eternity.
5.
The imperative to worship Him exclusively
and no foreign false gods.
6.
The belief that God communicates with man
through prophecy.
7.
The belief that the prophecy of Moses our
teacher has priority.
8.
The belief in the divine origin of the
Torah.
9.
The belief in the immutability of the
Torah.
10.
The belief in divine omniscience and
providence.
11.
The belief in divine reward and
retribution.
12.
The belief in the arrival of the Messiah
and the messianic era.
13.
The belief in the resurrection of the
dead.
It
is the custom of many congregations to recite the Thirteen Articles, in a slightly more poetic
form, beginning with the words Ani Maamin
— “I believe” — every day after the morning prayers in the synagogue. In his
commentary on the Mishnah (Sanhedrin, chap. 10), Maimonides refers
to these thirteen principles of faith as “the
fundamental truths of our religion and its very foundations.”
According
to Maimonides, a Jew is obligated to believe in every single word and every
letter of the Torah, whether it be the Written
or Oral Law, and he who does not
believe in even the smallest aspect of the Written
Torah is halakhically branded a kofer
(heretic). Maimonides explains that the Thirteen
Principles form the very foundation on which all of Jewish belief and
practices rests. A rejection of any of them is not only a rejection of a single
tenet of Judaism, but a rejection of the entire structure of Jewish thought.
Maimonides
reshaped Judaism and allowed it to join Christianity and Islam as another religion
with monotheistic mutually exclusive beliefs. All three have their official
beliefs, sacred books and claims about why their book is “the ultimate source
of divine authority.” And, they have been engaged in conflicts and wars against
each for almost a thousand years since Maimonides. This is a good example of why all belief systems must be large enough
to include all of the facts and flexible enough to be examined!
I
hope you found this informative and thank you for reading it.
Shalom,
Jim
Myers
SOURCES
● The Rise of
Universities by
Charles Homer Haskins; © by 1923 Brown University, © 1957 by Cornell
University; Ithica and London; pp. 1,
4, 40, 52, 53
● The Wolf Shall Lie
With the Lamb: The Messiah in Hasidic Thought by Rabbi Shmuel
Boteach © 1993; Jason Aronson Inc., Northvale, NJ; pp. xi-xii
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