scholasticism

scholasticism
/skeuh las"teuh siz'euhm/, n.
1. (sometimes cap.) the system of theological and philosophical teaching predominant in the Middle Ages, based chiefly upon the authority of the church fathers and of Aristotle and his commentators.
2. narrow adherence to traditional teachings, doctrines, or methods.
[1750-60; SCHOLASTIC + -ISM]

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Theological and philosophical movement, beginning in the 11th century, that sought to integrate the secular understanding of the ancient world, as exemplified by Aristotle, with the dogma implicit in the revelations of Christianity.

Its aim was a synthesis of learning in which theology surmounted the hierarchy of knowledge. Principal figures in early Scholasticism were Peter Abelard, St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon. The movement flourished in the 13th century, drawing on the writings and doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas. By the 14th century Scholasticism was in decline, but it had laid the foundations for many revivals and revisitations in later centuries, particularly under Pope Leo XIII (1879), who sought to modernize the insights of the medieval scholastics. Modern philosophers influenced by Scholasticism include Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson (1884–1978).

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Introduction

      the philosophical systems and speculative tendencies of various medieval Christian thinkers, who, working against a background of fixed religious dogma, sought to solve anew general philosophical problems (as of faith and reason, will and intellect, Realism and nominalism, and the provability of the existence of God), initially under the influence of the mystical and intuitional tradition of patristic philosophy, and especially Augustinianism, and later under that of Aristotle.

      From the time of the Renaissance until at least the beginning of the 19th century, the term Scholasticism, not unlike the name Middle Ages, was used as an expression of blame and contempt. The medieval period was widely viewed as an insignificant intermezzo between Greco-Roman antiquity and modern times, and Scholasticism was normally taken to describe a philosophy busied with sterile subtleties, written in bad Latin, and above all subservient to the theology of popery. Even the German Idealist Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), in his Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (1833–36; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1892–96), declared that he would “put on seven-league boots” in order to skip over the thousand years between the 6th and 17th centuries and, having at last arrived at Descartes, said that now he could “cry land like the sailor.” In those same first decades of the 19th century, on the other hand, the Romanticists swung the pendulum sharply to the opposite side, to an indiscriminate overestimation of everything medieval.

      Today, scholars seem better able to confront the medieval epoch, as well as Scholasticism—i.e., its philosophy (and theology)—without prejudgments. One reason for this state of affairs is the voluminous research which has been devoted to this era and which has revealed its true nature, not only as a respectable continuation of the genuinely philosophical tradition but also as a period of exemplary personalities quite able to stand comparison with any of the great philosophers of antiquity or of modern times.

Nature and significance
      Scholasticism is so much a many-sided phenomenon that, in spite of intensive research, scholars still differ considerably in their definition of the term and in the emphases that they place on individual aspects of the phenomenon. Some historians, seeming almost to capitulate to the complexity of the subject, confine themselves to the general point that Scholasticism can only be defined denotatively as that kind of philosophy that during the European Middle Ages was taught in the Christian (Christianity) schools. The question of its connotation, however, remains, viz., What kind of philosophy was it?

      The answer that Scholasticism was “school” philosophy and, in fact, “Christian” school philosophy can be understood only by examining the historical exigencies that created the need for schools. The search thus leads the inquirer back to the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages—a point which, according to Hegel, was marked by the symbolic date AD 529, when a decree of the Christian emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens and sealed “the downfall of the physical establishments of pagan philosophy.” In that same year, however, still another event occurred, which points much less to the past than to the coming age and, especially, to the rise of Scholasticism, viz., the foundation of Monte Cassino, the first Benedictine abbey, above one of the highways of the great folk migrations. This highly symbolic fact not only suggests the initial shift of the scene of the intellectual life from places like the Platonic Academy to the cloisters of Christian monasteries, but it marks even more a change in the dramatis personae. New nations were about to overrun the Roman Empire and its Hellenistic culture with long-range effects: when, centuries later, for example, one of the great Scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, was born, though he was rightly a southern Italian, his mother was of Norman stock, and his Sicilian birthplace was under central European (Hohenstaufen) control.

      It was a decisive and astonishing fact that the so-called barbarian peoples who penetrated from the north into the ancient world often became Christians and set out to master the body of tradition that they found, including the rich harvest of patristic theology as well as the philosophical ideas of the Greeks and the political wisdom of the Romans. This learning could be accomplished only in the conquered empire's language (i.e., in Latin), which therefore had to be learned first. In fact, the incorporation of both a foreign vocabulary and a different mode of thinking and the assimilation of a tremendous amount of predeveloped thought was the chief problem that confronted medieval philosophy at its beginnings. And it is only in the light of this fact that one of the decisive traits of medieval Scholasticism becomes understandable: Scholasticism above all was an unprecedented process of learning, literally a vast “scholastic” enterprise that continued for several centuries. Since the existing material had to be ordered and made accessible to learning and teaching, the very prosaic labour and “schoolwork” of organizing, sorting, and classifying materials inevitably acquired an unprecedented importance. Consequently, the writings of medieval Scholasticism quite naturally lack the magic of personal immediacy, for schoolbooks leave little room for originality. It is therefore misleading, though understandable, that certain polemicists have wrongly characterized Scholasticism as involving no more than the use of special didactic methods or a narrow adherence to traditional teachings.

      First of all, if the major historical task of that epoch was really to learn, to acquire, and to preserve the riches of tradition, a certain degree of “scholasticity” was not only inevitable but essential. It is not at all certain that today's historians would have direct intellectual access to Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine had the Scholastics not done their patient spadework. Besides, the progress from the stage of mere collection of given sentences and their interpretation (expositio, catena, lectio), to the systematic discussion of texts and problems (quaestio, disputatio), and finally to the grand attempts to give a comprehensive view of the whole of attainable truth (Summa) was necessarily at the same time a clear progression toward intellectual autonomy and independence, which in order to culminate, as it did in the 13th century, in the great works of Scholasticism's Golden Age, required in addition the powers of genius, of men like Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.

      On the other hand, the moment had to come when the prevalent preoccupation with existing knowledge would give way to new questions, which demanded consideration and answers that could emerge only from direct experience. By the later Middle Ages, procedures for exploiting and discussing antecedent stocks of insight had been largely institutionalized, and it was an obvious temptation to perpetuate the dominion of those procedures—which could lead only to total sterility. It is widely agreed that this is almost exactly what did happen in the 14th century in what is called the “decline” and disintegration of Scholasticism.

History and issues

Roots of Scholasticism
      From the beginning of medieval Scholasticism the natural aim of all philosophical endeavour to achieve the “whole of attainable truth” was clearly meant to include also the teachings of Christian faith, an inclusion which, in the very concept of Scholasticism, was perhaps its most characteristic and distinguishing element. Although the idea of including faith was expressed already by Augustine and the early Church Fathers, the principle was explicitly formulated by the pivotal, early 6th-century scholar Boethius (Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus). Born in Rome and educated in Athens, Boethius was one of the great mediators and translators, living on the narrow no-man's-land that divided the epochs. His famous book, The Consolation of Philosophy, was written while he, indicted for treachery and imprisoned by King Theodoric the Goth, awaited his own execution. It is true that the book is said to be, aside from the Bible, one of the most translated, most commented upon, and most printed books in world history; and that Boethius made (unfinished) plans to translate and to comment upon, as he said, “every book of Aristotle and all the dialogues of Plato.” But the epithet that he won as “one of the founders of Scholasticism” refers to quite another side of his work. Strictly speaking, it refers to the last sentence of a very short tractate on the Holy Trinity, which reads, “As far as you are able, join faith to reason”—an injunction which in fact was to become, for centuries, the formal foundation of Scholasticism. Instead of “faith,” such concepts as revelation, authority, or tradition could be (and, indeed, have been) cited; and “reason,” though unambiguously meant to designate the natural powers of human cognition, could also be granted (and, in fact, has been granted) very different meanings. In any case, the connection between faith and reason postulated in this principle was from the beginning and by its very nature a highly explosive compound.

      Boethius himself already carried out his program in a rather extraordinary way: though his Opuscula sacra (“Sacred Works”) dealt almost exclusively with theological subjects, there was not a single Bible quotation in them: logic and analysis was all.

      Though called the “first Scholastic,” Boethius was at the same time destined to be for almost a millennium the last layman in the field of European philosophy. His friend Cassiodorus, author of the Institutiones, an unoriginal catalog of definitions and subdivisions, which (in spite of their dryness) became a source book and mine of information for the following centuries, who, like Boethius, occupied a position of high influence at the court of Theodoric and was also deeply concerned with the preservation of the intellectual heritage, decided in his later years to quit his political career and to live with his enormous library in a monastery. This fact again is highly characteristic of the development of medieval Scholasticism: intellectual life needs not only teachers and students and not only a stock of knowledge to be handed down; there is needed a certain guaranteed free area within human society as well, a kind of sheltered enclosure, within which the concern for “nothing but truth” can exist and unfold. The Platonic Academy, as well as (for a limited time) the court of Theodoric, had been enclosures of this kind; but in the politically unsettled epoch to come “no plant would thrive except one that germinated and grew in the cloister.”

      The principle of the conjunction of faith and reason, which Boethius had proclaimed, and the way in which he himself carried it out were both based on a profound and explicit confidence in man's natural intellectual capacity—a confidence that could possibly lead one day to the rationalistic conviction that there cannot be anything that exceeds the power of human reason to comprehend, not even the mysteries of divine revelation. To be sure, the great thinkers of Scholasticism, in spite of their emphatic affirmation of faith and reason, consistently rejected any such rationalistic claim. But it must nonetheless be admitted that Scholasticism on the whole, and by virtue of its basic approach, contained within itself the danger of an overestimation of rationality, which recurrently emerged throughout its history.

      On the other hand, there had been built in, from the beginning, a corrective and warning, which in fact kept the internal peril of Rationalism within bounds, viz., the corrective exercised by the “negative theology” of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius (Pseudo-Dionysius The Areopagite), around whose writings revolved some of the strangest events in the history of Western culture. The true name of this protagonist is, in spite of intensive research, unknown. Probably it will remain forever an enigma why the author of several Greek writings (among them On the Divine Names, “On the Celestial Hierarchy,” and The Mystical Theology) called himself “Dionysius the Presbyter” and, to say the least, suggested that he was actually Denis the Areopagite, a disciple of Paul the Apostle (Acts). In reality, almost all historians agree that Pseudo-Dionysius, as he came to be called, was probably a Syrian Neoplatonist, a contemporary of Boethius. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, his writings exerted an inestimable influence for more than 1,000 years by virtue of the some-what surreptitious quasi-canonical authority of their author, whose books were venerated, as has been said, “almost like the Bible itself.” A 7th-century Greek theologian, Maximus the Confessor (Maximus the Confessor, Saint), wrote the first commentaries on these writings, which were followed over the centuries by a long succession of commentators, among them Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The main fact is that the unparalleled influence of the Areopagite writings preserved in the Latin West an idea, which otherwise could have been repressed and lost (since it cannot easily be coordinated with rationality)—that of a negative theology or philosophy that could act as a counter-poise against Rationalism. It could be called an Eastern idea present and effective in the Occident. But after the Great Schism, which erected a wall between East and West that lasted for centuries, Denis the Areopagite, having become himself (through translations and commentaries) a Westerner “by adoption,” was the only one among all of the important Greco-Byzantine thinkers who penetrated into the schools of Western Christendom. Thus negative theology was brought to medieval Scholasticism, as it were, through the back door.

      The most important book of Denis, which dealt with the names that can be applied to God, exemplified his negative theology. It maintained first of all the decidedly biblical thesis that no appropriate name can be given to God at all unless he himself reveals it. But then Denis showed that even the revealed names, since they must be comprehensible to man's finite understanding, cannot possibly reach or express the nature of God; and that in consequence, every affirmative statement about God requires at once the corrective of the coordinate negation. The theologian cannot even call God “real” or “being,” because he derives these concepts from the things to which God has given reality; and the Creator cannot possibly be of the same nature as that which he has created. Thus, The Mystical Theology concluded by finally relativizing also the negations, because God surpasses anything that man may possibly say of him, whether it be affirmative or negative.

      Scholasticism certainly could have learned all of this also from Augustine (Augustine, Saint), who repeatedly warned that “Whatever you understand cannot be God.” But probably an authority of even greater weight than Augustine was needed to counteract a reason that was tending to overrate its own powers; and this authority was attributed, although falsely, to the works of Denis the Areopagite. This impact could, of course, not be restricted to the idea of God; it necessarily concerned and changed man's whole conception of the world and of existence. The influence of Denis is reflected in the noteworthy fact that Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas, Thomas, Saint), for instance, not only employed more than 1,700 quotations from Denis the Areopagite but also appealed almost regularly to his work whenever he spoke, as he often did (and in astonishingly strong terms), of the inexhaustible mystery of being. Thomas Aquinas, however, who also wrote a remarkable commentary on Denis' book On the Divine Names, is mentioned here only as an example, albeit a most telling example.

      At the very end of the medieval era of Scholasticism, the Areopagite emerged once more in the work of a 15th-century cardinal, Nicholas Of Cusa, also known as a mathematician and advocate of experimental knowledge, in whose library there are preserved several translations of the Areopagite writings—replete, moreover, with marginal notes in the Cardinal's handwriting. But even without this concrete evidence, it would be quite plain that Cusanus' doctrine of “knowing nonknowing” is closely linked to the Areopagite's conviction that all of reality is unfathomable.

      The translation into Latin of the Corpus Areopagiticum, which was made in the 9th century—i.e., some 400 years after the death of its author—by John Scotus Erigena (Erigena, John Scotus), is itself worthy of mention, especially because the translator was one of the most remarkable figures of early medieval philosophy. After generations of brave and efficient collectors, organizers, and schoolmasters had come and gone, Erigena, in his De divisione natura (“On the Division of Nature”), developed the Dionysian Neoplatonism on his own and tried to construct a systematic conception of the universe, a more or less pantheistic world view, which (as Gilson says) for a moment offered the Latin West the opportunity—or the temptation—to choose the way of the East once and for all. The church, though not until centuries later, condemned the book, apparently convinced that any counterpoise to its own position can become dangerous in itself.

Early Scholastic period
 If there was any philosophical-theological thinker of importance during the Middle Ages who remained untouched by the spirit of the Areopagite, it was the 11th-century Benedictine Anselm of Canterbury (Anselm of Canterbury, Saint), a highly cultivated Franco-Italian theologian who for years was prior and abbot of the abbey Le Bec in Normandy and then became, somewhat violently, the archbishop of Canterbury. In Anselm's entire work there is not a single quotation from Denis; not even the name is mentioned. Consequently, Anselm's thinking, thus freed from the corrective embodied in the Areopagite's negative theology, displayed a practically unlimited confidence in the power of human reason to illuminate even the mysteries of Christian faith; he thus frequently approached a kind of Rationalism, which did not shrink from the attempt to demonstrate, on compelling rational grounds, that salvation (for example) through God incarnate was philosophically necessary. To be sure, a theologian such as Anselm certainly would never have subscribed to the extreme thesis that nothing exists that is beyond the power of human reason to comprehend: the two famous phrases, coined by him and expressing again, in a grandiose formulation, the principle of Boethius, “faith seeking to be understood” and “I believe in order to understand,” clearly proclaim his faith in the mysteries of revelation as comprising the very basis of all reasoning. Nevertheless, in the case of Anselm, the very peculiar conjunction of faith and reason was accomplished not so much through any clear intellectual coordination as through the religious energy and saintliness of an unusual personality. It was accomplished, so to speak, rather as an act of violence, which could not possibly last. The conjunction was bound to break up, with the emphasis falling either on some kind of Rationalism or on a hazardous irrationalization of faith.

      That this split did actually happen can be read to some extent in the fate of the “Anselmic argument,” which Kant, 700 years later, was to reject as the “ontological proof of God”—connecting it, however, not with the name of Anselm but with that of Descartes (Descartes, René), the earliest modern philosopher. It is, in fact, significant that Descartes, in his proof of the existence of God, imagined that he was saying the same thing as Anselm, and that, on the other hand, Anselm would scarcely have recognized his own argument had he encountered it in the context of Descartes's Discours de la méthode (1637; Discourse on Method, 1950), which claims to be “pure” philosophy based upon an explicit severance from the concept of God held by faith. But given Anselm's merely theoretical starting point, that severance was not only to be expected; it was almost inevitable.

      But, also within the framework of medieval Scholasticism, a dispute was always brewing between the dialecticians, who emphasized or overemphasized reason, and those who stressed the suprarational purity of faith. Berengar Of Tours, an 11th-century logician (logic), metaphysician, and theologian, who was fond of surprising formulations, maintained the preeminence of thinking over any authority holding, in particular, that the real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was logically impossible. His contemporary the Italian hermit-monk and cardinal Peter Damian (Peter Damian, Saint), however—who was apparently the first to use the ill-famed characterization of philosophy as the “handmaid of theology”—replied that, if God's omnipotence acts against the principle of contradiction, then so much the worse for the science of logic. Quite analogous to the foregoing controversy, though pitched on a much higher intellectual level, was the bitter fight that broke out almost one century later between a Cistercian reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux (Bernard de Clairvaux, Saint), and a logician and theologian, Peter Abelard (Abelard, Peter). Bernard, a vigorous and ambivalent personality, was in the first place a man of religious practice and mystical contemplation, who, at the end of his dramatic life, characterized his odyssey as that of anima quaerens Verbum, “a soul in search of the Word.” Although he by no means rejected philosophy on principle, he looked with deep suspicion upon the primarily logical approach to theology espoused by Abelard. “This man,” said Bernard, “presumes to be able to comprehend by human reason the entirety of God.”

 Logic was at that time, as a matter of fact, the main battleground of all Scholastic disputations. “Of all philosophy, logic most appealed to me,” said Abelard, who by “logic” understood primarily a discipline not unlike certain present-day approaches, the “critical analysis of thought on the basis of linguistic expression.” From this viewpoint (of linguistic logic), Abelard also discussed with penetrating sharpness the so-called “problem of universals (universal),” which asks, Is there an “outside” and objective reality standing, for example, not only for the name “Socrates” but also for such common names as “man,” “canineness,” and the like? Or do common concepts (“universals”) possess only the reality of subjective thought or perhaps merely that of the sound of the word? As is well known, it has been asserted that this was the principal, or even the only, subject of concern in medieval Scholasticism—a charge that is misleading, although the problem did greatly occupy philosophers from the time of Boethius. Their main concern from the beginning was the whole of reality and existence.

      The advance of medieval thought to a highly creative level was foreshadowed, in those very same years before Peter Abelard died, by Hugh of Saint-Victor (an Augustinian monk of German descent), when he wrote De sacramentis Christianae fidei (“On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith”), the first book in the Middle Ages that could rightly be called a summa; in its introduction, in fact, the term itself is used as meaning a comprehensive view of all that exists (brevis quaedam summa omnium). To be sure, its author stands wholly in the tradition of Augustine and the Areopagite; yet he is also the first medieval theologian who proclaims an explicit openness toward the natural world. Knowledge of reality is, in his understanding, the prerequisite for contemplation; each of the seven liberal arts aims “to restore God's image in us.” “Learn everything,” he urged; “later you will see that nothing is superfluous.”

      It was on this basic that the university—which was not the least of the achievements of medieval Scholasticism—was to take shape. And it was the University of Paris (Paris I–XIII, Universities of), in particular, that for some centuries was to be the most representative university of the West. Though there are usually a variety of reasons and causes for such a development, in this case the importance of the university—unlike that of Bologna and also of Oxford—lay mainly in the fact that it was founded in the most radical way upon those branches of knowledge that are “universal” by their very nature: upon theology and philosophy. It is, thus, remarkable, though not altogether surprising, that there seems to have existed not a single summa of the Middle Ages that did not, in some way or other, derive from the University of Paris.

      Strangely enough, the classical theological-philosophical textbook used in the following centuries at the universities of the West was not the first summa, composed by Hugh of Saint-Victor, but was instead a work by Peter Lombard, a theologian who probably attended Abelard's lectures and who became magister at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and, two decades later, bishop of Paris. Lombard's famous Four Books of Sentences, which, though written one or two decades later than Hugh's summa, belonged to an earlier historical species, contained about 1,000 texts from the works of Augustine (Augustine, Saint), which comprise nearly four-fifths of the whole. Much more important than the book itself, however, were the nearly 250 commentaries on it, by which—into the 16th century—every master of theology had to begin his career as a teacher. In view of this wide usage, it is not astonishing that Lombard's book underwent some transformations, at the hands, for instance, of its most ingenious commentator, Thomas Aquinas, but also (and even more so) at the hands of Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus, John) in his Opus Oxoniense, which, in spite of being a work of extremely personal cast, was outwardly framed as a commentary on the “Master of Sentences.”

Maturity of Scholasticism
      Clearly, the world view of Western Christendom, on the whole Augustinian and Platonic in inspiration and founded upon Lombard's “Augustine breviary,” was beginning to be rounded out into a system and to be institutionalized in the universities. At the very moment of its consolidation, however, an upheaval was brewing that would shake this novel conception to its foundations: the main works of Aristotle, hitherto unknown in the West, were being translated into Latin—among them his Metaphysics, the Physics, the Nichomachean Ethics, and the books On the Soul. These writings were not merely an addition of something new to the existing stock; they involved an enormous challenge. Suddenly, a new, rounded, coherent view of the world was pitted against another more-or-less coherent traditional view; and because this challenge bore the name of Aristotle (Aristotelianism), it could not possibly be ignored, for Aristotle's books on logic, translated and equipped with commentaries by Boethius, had for centuries been accepted as one of the foundations of all culture. During the lifetime of Abelard the full challenge of the Aristotelian work had not yet been presented, though it had been developing quietly along several paths, some of which were indeed rather fantastic. For instance, most of the medieval Latin translations of Aristotle stem not from the original Greek but from earlier Arabic translations.

      Within the Western Christendom of the 2nd millennium, a wholly new readiness to open the mind to the concrete reality of the world had arisen, a view of the universe and life that resembled the Aristotelian viewpoint. The tremendous eagerness with which this new philosophy was embraced was balanced, however, by a deep concern lest the continuity of tradition and the totality of truth be shattered by the violence of its assimilation. And this danger was enhanced by the fact that Aristotle's works did not come alone; they came, in fact, accompanied by the work of Arabic commentators and their heterodox interpretations.

      The most influential Arabic commentators were an 11th-century polymath, Avicenna, a Persian by birth, and a 12th-century philosopher, Averroës, born in Spain. Avicenna, personal physician to sovereigns, but also a philosopher and theologian, read—according to his own account—Aristotle's Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it, until he learned the text by heart. F.C. Copleston has called him “the real creator of a Scholastic system in the Islāmic world.” In the view of Averroës, who was not only a philosopher but also a jurist and a doctor, Aristotle's philosophy represented simply the perfection of human knowledge; and to the West, he himself was to become the commentator. A third great commentator was a 12th-century orthodox Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides (Maimonides, Moses), also born in Spain, who wrote his main works in Arabic. Maimonides was at the same time a vigorous adherent of the Aristotelian world view and was, thus, confronted by the same unending task that preoccupied the great teachers of medieval Christendom. At first sight it appears strange that none of these three thinkers had any appreciable influence within his own world (neither Islām nor Judaism knew of any such thing as a “discovery” of Aristotle), whereas on almost every page of the 13th-century Christian summae the names of Avicenna, Averroës, and Maimonides are found.

      The first theologian of the Middle Ages who boldly accepted the challenge of the new Aristotelianism was a 13th-century Dominican, Albertus Magnus (Albertus Magnus, Saint), an encyclopedic scholar. Although he knew no Greek, he conceived a plan of making accessible to the Latin West the complete works of Aristotle, by way of commentaries and paraphrases; and, unlike Boethius, he did carry out this resolve. He also penetrated and commented upon the works of the Areopagite; he was likewise acquainted with those of the Arabs, especially Avicenna; and he knew Augustine. Nevertheless, he was in no wise primarily a man of bookish scholarship; his strongest point, in fact, was the direct observation of nature and experimentation. After having taught for some years at the University of Paris, he travelled, as a Dominican superior, through almost all of Europe. Not only was he continually asking questions of fishermen, hunters, beekeepers, and birdcatchers but he himself also bent his sight to the things of the visible world. But amidst the most palpable descriptions of bees, spiders, and apples, recorded in two voluminous books on plants and animals, Albertus formulated completely new, and even revolutionary, methodological principles: for instance, “There can be no philosophy about concrete things,” or, “in such matters only experience can provide certainty.”

      With Albertus, the problem of the conjunction of faith and reason had suddenly become much more difficult, because reason itself had acquired a somewhat new meaning. “Reason” implied, in his view, not only the capacity for formally correct thinking, for finding adequate creatural analogies to the truths of revelation, but it implied, above all, the capacity to grasp the reality that man encounters. Henceforth, the Boethian principle of “joining faith with reason” would entail the never-ending task of bringing belief into a meaningful coordination with the incessantly multiplying stock of natural knowledge of man and the universe. Since Albertus' nature, however, was given more to conquest than to the establishment of order, the business of integrating all of these new and naturally divergent elements into a somewhat consistent intellectual structure waited for another man, for his pupil Thomas Aquinas.

 To epitomize the intellectual task that Aquinas set for himself, the image of Odysseus' bow, which was so difficult to bend that an almost superhuman strength was needed, is fitting. As a young student at the University of Naples, he had met in the purest possible form both extremes, which, though they seemed inevitably to be pulling away from one another, it was nevertheless his life's task to join: one of these extremes was the dynamic, voluntary poverty movement whose key word was “the Bible”; and the second phenomenon was the Aristotelian writings and outlook, which at that time could have been encountered nowhere else in so intensive a form. And “Aristotle” meant to Thomas not so much an individual author as a specific world view, viz., the affirmation of natural reality as a whole, including man's body and his natural cognitive powers. To be sure, the resulting Summa theologiae (which Thomas himself chose to leave incomplete) was a magnificent intellectual structure; but it was never intended to be a closed system of definitive knowledge. Thomas could no longer possess the magnificent naiveté of Boethius, who had considered it possible to discuss the Trinitarian God without resorting to the Bible, nor could he share Anselm's conviction that Christian faith so completely concurred with natural reason that it could be proved on compelling rational grounds.

      In the meanwhile, the poles of the controversy—the biblical impulses, on the one hand, and the philosophical and secular ones, on the other—had begun to move vigorously apart, and partisans moving in both directions found some encouragement in Thomas himself. But in his later years he realized that the essential compatibility as well as the relative autonomy of these polar positions and the necessity for their conjunction had to be clarified anew by going back to a deeper root of both; that is, to a more consistent understanding of the concepts of creation and createdness. At Paris, he had to defend his own idea of “a theologically based worldliness and a theology open to the world” not only against the secularistic “philosophism” of Siger of Brabant (Siger De Brabant), a stormy member of the faculty of arts, and against an aggressive group of heterodox Aristotelians around him, but also (and even more) against the traditional (Augustinian) objection that by advocating the rights of all natural things Thomas would encroach upon the rights of God, and that, besides, the theologian needs to know only that part of creation that is pertinent to his theological subject. The latter idea was supported also by the Italian mystical theologian Bonaventura (Bonaventure, Saint), who, in his earlier days as a colleague of Thomas at the university, had likewise been enamoured of Aristotle, but later, alarmed by the secularism that was growing in the midst of Christendom, became more mistrustful of the capacities of natural reason. Thomas answered this objection in somewhat the following way: The benefit that the theologian may derive from an investigation of natural reality cannot be determined in advance, but, in general, faith presupposes and therefore needs natural knowledge of the world; at times, an error concerning the creation leads men astray also from the truth of faith. This may sound like an optimistic Rationalism; but the corrective of negative theology and philosophy was always present in the mind of Thomas, as well. Not only, as he argued in his treatise on God, does man not know what God is, but he does not know the essences of things either.

Late Scholastic period
      Thomas did not succeed in bridging the faith–reason gulf. When he left Paris (1272) and after his death (1274), the gulf became much more radical; and on March 7, 1277, the Archbishop of Paris, in fact, formally condemned a list of sentences, some of them close to what Thomas himself had allegedly or really taught. This ecclesiastical act, questionable though it may have been in its methods and personal motivations, was not only understandable; it was unavoidable, since it was directed against what, after all, amounted in principle to an antitheological, rationalistic secularism. Quite another matter, however, were the factual effects of the edict, which were rather disastrous. Above all, two of the effects were pernicious: instead of free disputes among individuals, organized blocks (or “schools”) now began to form; and the cooperative dialogue between theology and philosophy turned into mutual indifference or distrust. Nonetheless, the basic principle itself (“join faith with reason”) had not yet been explicitly repudiated. This was to happen in the next generation.

      The negative element, as formulated in the theology of the Areopagite, proved to be insufficient as a corrective to counter the overemphasis of reason, for reason seemed to imply the idea of necessity; Anselm's asserted “compelling grounds” for revealed truths, for example, were akin to such a necessitarianism. A second corrective was therefore demanded and this took the name of “freedom”—which indeed was the battle cry of an important Franciscan, Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus, John), known as the “subtle doctor,” who lived at the turn of the 14th century. Scotus used “freedom” primarily with reference to God; consequently, since redemption, grace, and salvation as well as all of creation were the work of God's groundless, absolute freedom, there could be no “necessary reasons,” if indeed any reasons at all, for anything. It was therefore futile to attempt to coordinate faith with speculative reason. Clearly, Scotus' theological starting point made the conjunction of what man believes with what he knows every bit as difficult as it had been in Siger of Brabant's secularistic “philosophism.” From both positions there was only one step to the doctrine of a “double truth”—a step that in fact was taken in the 14th century by the Nominalist William of Ockham (Ockham, William of), also a Franciscan, to whom singular facts alone are “real,” and their coherence is not; this mere factuality, he held, can neither be calculated nor deduced, but only experienced; reason therefore means nothing but the power to encounter concrete reality. And upon such soil only a consistently “positive” theology could thrive. Any collaboration with speculative reason must be rejected as untheological. Faith is one thing and knowledge an altogether different matter; and a conjunction of the two is neither meaningfully possible nor even desirable. Inexorably, and justified by reasons on both sides, a divorce was taking place between faith and reason—to the connection of which the energies of almost a thousand years had been devoted. What was occurring was the demise of medieval Scholasticism.

Enduring features
      But not all of Scholasticism is specifically medieval and therefore definitively belonging to the dead past; there are perennial elements that are meant for every age, the present one included, three of which may be here distinguished. First, not only has Scholasticism held true to the normal historical rule that ideas, once thought and expressed, remain present and significant in the following time; but the medieval intellectual accomplishments have surpassed the rule and exerted, though more or less anonymously, a quite exceptional influence even on philosophers who consciously revolted against Scholasticism. New historical investigations clearly show that the classical modern philosophers Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibniz owe much to medieval ideas. Of Descartes, for instance, it has been said, contrary to the usual view, that he could quite well have been “included with the later Scholastics”; and even Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce, Charles Sanders), the originator of 20th-century American Pragmatism, refers not too rarely to Scholastic maxims. Secondly, there have been explicit attempts to go back to Scholastic thinkers and inspire a renascence of their basic ideas. Two chief movements of this kind were the Scholasticism of the Renaissance (called Barockscholastik) and the Neoscholasticism of the 19th and 20th centuries, both of which were primarily interested in the work of Thomas Aquinas.

      Renaissance Scholasticism received its first impulses from the Reformation. One of its leading figures, a Dominican, Cardinal Thomas de Vio (16th century), commonly known as Cajetan, had some famous disputations with Martin Luther. Cajetan's great commentary on Thomas Aquinas, published again in a late edition of the Summa theologiae (1888–1906), exerted for at least three centuries an enormous influence on the formation of Catholic theology. He was much more than a commentator, however; his original treatise on the “Analogy of names,” for example, can even pass as a prelude to modern linguistic philosophy. The so-called Silver Age of Scholastic thought, which occurred in the 16th century, is represented by two Spaniards: Francisco de Vitoria (Vitoria, Francisco de) of the first half and Francisco Suárez (Suárez, Francisco) of the last half of the century were both deeply engaged in what has been called the “Counter-Reformation.” Though likewise commentators on the works of Thomas Aquinas, the Renaissance Scholastics were much less concerned with looking back to the past than with the problems of their own epoch, such as those of international law, colonialism, resistance to an unjust government, and world community. Though Suárez was for more than a hundred years among the most esteemed authors, even in Protestant universities, Renaissance Scholasticism was eradicated by Enlightenment philosophy and German Idealism. This, in turn, gave rise in due time to the Neoscholasticism of the 19th century, one of the most effective promoters of which was a German Jesuit, Joseph Kleutgen, who published a voluminous scholarly apology of patristic and Scholastic theology and philosophy and was also responsible for the outline of the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris of Leo XIII (1879), which explicitly proclaimed the “instauration of Christian philosophy according to St. Thomas.” The result, fed of course from many different sources, was that all over the world new centres of Scholastic research and higher learning (universities) arose—some more traditionalistic, some from the start engaged in the dialogue with modern philosophy and science, and some primarily devoted to historical studies and the preparation of critical editions of the great medieval Scholastics—and that a multitude of periodicals and systematic textbooks were produced. It is too early for a competent judgment on this enterprise to be made. Its immeasurable educational benefit for several generations of students, however, is as undeniable as the unique contributions of some Neoscholastic thinkers to current intellectual life. A weak point, on the other hand, seems to be a somewhat “unhistorical” approach to reality and existence. In any case, it is scarcely a matter of mere chance that, after World War II, the impact of Existentialism and Marxism caused a noticeable decline in Neoscholasticism and that the positions of “Scholastic” authors active in the 1970s were already beyond Neoscholasticism.

      The third and most important aspect of the enduring significance of the Scholastic movement implies the acceptance of the following fundamental tenets: that there exist truths that man knows, and also revealed truths of faith; that these two kinds of truth are not simply reducible to one another; that faith and theology do not, by means of symbols and sensuous images, merely say the same as what reason and science say more clearly by conceptual argumentation (Averroës, Hegel); that, on the other hand, reason is not a “prostitute” (Luther), but is man's natural capacity to grasp the real world; that since reality and truth, though essentially inexhaustible, are basically one, faith and reason cannot ultimately contradict one another. Those who hold these convictions appear quite unable to refrain from trying to coordinate what they know with what they believe. Any epoch that addresses itself to this interminable task can ill afford to ignore the demanding and multiform paradigm of Scholasticism; but to the problems posed it will have to find its own answer.

Josef Pieper

Additional Reading
For a detailed bibliography covering Scholasticism, see W. Totok, Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, Mittelalter und frühe Neuzeit (1970). Among the most reliable, best grounded presentations of the whole period are: E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955); F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Mediaeval Philosophy, vol. 3, Late Mediaeval and Renaissance Philosophy (1950, 1953; paperback edition, 1962, 1963); M. de Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, 6th ed., 3 vol. (1934–47; Eng. trans. of vol. 1, 1951); and E. Brehier, La Philosophie du moyen âge, 2nd ed. (1949). Still indispensable, though obsolete in some details is: F. Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, B. Geyer, Die patristische und scholastische Philosophie, 11th ed. (1928). Lucidly arranged and divided is the 13th volume of Fliche-Martin, Histoire de l'Église: Le Mouvement doctrinal de XIe au XIVe siècle (1951), which includes contributions by A. Forest, F. van Steenberghen, and M. de Gandillac. M. Grabmann's masterpiece, Die Geschichte der scholastischen Methode, 2 vol. (1909–11, reprinted 1956), covers only the time until the first years of the 13th century. For a first introduction for the general reader, see J. Pieper, Scholastik (1960; Eng. trans., Scholasticism, 1960). Special problems concerning the continuing influence of medieval Scholasticism are treated in the following monographs: A. Koyre, Descartes und die Scholastik (1923); A. Tellkamp, Das Verhältnis John Locke's zur Scholastik (1927); and J.O. Fleckenstein, Scholastik, Barock, exakte Wissenschaften (1949). The following are sources on Neoscholasticism: J.P. Golinas, La Restauration du Thomisme sous Leon XIII et les philosophies nouvelles (1959); Giovanni Rossi, Le origini del Neotomismo nell'ambiente di studio del Collegio Alberoni (1957); A. Viel, “Le Mouvement thomiste au XIXe siècle,” Revue Thomiste (1909–10); E. Bettoni, La Situation actuelle de la philosophie parmi les catholiques dans les divers pays (1948), a survey of centres of study, institutes, and publications; and J.S. Zybura (ed.), Present-Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism: An International Symposium (1926).

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