Aspects of Jewish Culture in the Middle Ages

DISPUTATIO

DISPUTATIO Sunday, 5 May 1974 PARTICIPANTS Chairman, Edward A. Synan, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies ]eremy duQ. Adams, Southern Methodist University Norman Cantor, New York University Alice M. Colby-Hall, Cornell University Stanley Ferber, State University of New York at Binghamton PAUL E. SZARMACH, CONFERENCE COORDINATOR: This morning's session is a disputatio, which is technically a medieval philosophical debate. We are moderns , and we will make some adjustments in that rather traditional method of dispute and discourse. We do not have a round table; 1must therefore use alphabetical order as a means of precedence with one exception, our disputatio moderator and leader Father Synan. 1would like to turn the proceedings to Father Synan who will explain our method of procedure this morning and who will conduct the proceedings from this point. Father Synan. 172 I Disputatio FATHER SYNAN: As Professor Szarmach indicated, we are doing our best to set up this morning a twentieth-century analogue to the Questio Disputata de Quolibet of the thirteenth century. Because we are doing it in terms of analogy rather than of univocity, we are making several changes in the way those old boys did their business. The first change is that this morning 1 should like very, very brief!y to express the appreciation of those of us who are guests at SUNY for these days for their combination of courtesy and competence in a very special way: Paul Szarmach, Franr;ois Bucher, and Professor Bernard F. Huppe, who is with us this morning after what seems to have been a transitory indisposition. With this professorial phalanx out of the way, 1should also like to thank Mr. Lansdown, the man who is taking care of transportation t11is morning. He is very tall, very conspicious ; tall people always impress me for some obscure , possibly Freudian reason, but 1have observed his activity with admiration now for two days. Now the medieval disputation, which we are trying to imitate or to mine for whatever value it may have, derives no doubt from very complex sources from which 1 think we cannot exclude the possibility that rabbinic disputations played their role. In any case Aristotle certainly was there; Aristotle was the one who told me how to pose the question. The question must always be answerable in terms of either yes or no. If you can't formulate your question that way, you are not allowed to ask it. So this is what Aristotle had in mind. We are going to ignore that prescription this morning. Furthermore the disputation was the work of the master; and the master, you will be perhaps a little terrified to know, had as his first and most noble function, not to carry on 173 I Disputatio disputations at all but to preach. Praedicare was where the master began, but marked as1 am by my very clothing this morning as a persecuted minority figure, 1am g9ing to dispense with that role of the master. The next thing he was supposed to do was, he was supposed to go in for something called legere-he was supposed to "read." Now this rather odd verb, because it really meant that he was supposed to talk, is maintained in the British University system. You have the reader in crystalography for the university and you do even on this continent give "lectures," and these are visible traces of the role of legel'e; but the liveliest thing he did was disputare , and the disputation of the medieval university took place in two ways. First of all you had disputatio ordinaria, and this was an organized teaching device that went on all year long, semester by semester, but in addition to that you had a more difficult one, because it was so difficult it was actually voluntary, and this was the disputatio de quolibet-a disputation in which you were allowed to put your name on the board and announce "1 shall dispute on anything." And then the considerable ingenuity of staff and students was exercised against you, and they would ask you various silly questions to which you were obliged to give formal answers. This morning 1think we are more or less in the role of the disputatio de quolibet. This morning it isn't part of an ordered, organic, systematic intellectual formation. We are simply here and we are going to say pretty well anything we like. However we will have to...