Scholasticism

I

Introduction

Scholasticism, philosophical and theological movement that attempted to use natural human reason, in particular, the philosophy and science of Aristotle, to understand the supernatural content of Christian revelation. The dominant movement in the medieval Christian schools and universities of Europe from about the middle of the 11th century to about the middle of the 15th century, its ultimate ideal was to integrate into an ordered system both the natural wisdom of Greece and Rome and the religious wisdom of Christianity. The term scholasticism is also used in a wider sense to signify the spirit and methods characteristic of this period of thought or any similar spirit and attitude towards learning found in other periods of history. The term scholastic, which originally designated the heads of the medieval monastic or cathedral schools from which the universities developed, finally came to be applied to anyone teaching philosophy or theology in such schools or universities.

II

Principal Characteristics

Scholastic thinkers held a wide variety of beliefs in both philosophy and theology. What gives unity to the whole scholastic movement are the common aims, attitudes, and methods generally accepted by all its members. The chief concern of the scholastics was not to discover new facts but to integrate the knowledge already acquired separately by Greek reasoning and Christian revelation. This concern is one of the most characteristic differences between scholasticism and modern thought since the Renaissance.

The basic aim of the scholastics determined certain common attitudes, the most important of which was their conviction of the fundamental harmony between reason and revelation. The scholastics maintained that because the same God was the source of both types of knowledge, and truth was one of His chief attributes, He could not contradict Himself in these two ways of speaking. Any apparent opposition between revelation and reason could be traced either to an incorrect use of reason or to an inaccurate interpretation of the words of revelation. Because the scholastics believed that revelation was the direct teaching of God, it possessed for them a higher degree of truth and certitude than did natural reason. In apparent conflicts between religious faith and philosophical reasoning, faith was thus always the supreme arbiter; the theologian's decision overruled that of the philosopher. After the early 13th century, scholastic thought placed more emphasis on the independence of philosophy within its own domain. None the less, throughout the scholastic period, philosophy was called the servant of theology, not only because the truth of philosophy was subordinated to that of theology, but also because the theologian used philosophy to understand and explain revelation.

This attitude of scholasticism stands in sharp contrast to the so-called double-truth theory of the Spanish-Arab philosopher and doctor Averroës. His theory assumed that truth was accessible to both philosophy and Islamic theology but that only philosophy could attain it perfectly. Hence, the so-called truths of theology served as imperfect imaginative expressions for the common people of the authentic truth accessible only to philosophy. Averroës maintained that philosophical truth could even contradict, at least verbally, the teachings of Islamic theology.

As a result of their belief in the harmony between faith and reason, the scholastics attempted to determine the precise scope and competence of each of these faculties. Many early scholastics, such as the Italian ecclesiastic and philosopher St Anselm, did not clearly distinguish the two and were overconfident that reason could prove certain doctrines of revelation. Later, at the height of the mature period of scholasticism, the Italian theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas established a balance between reason and revelation. Scholastics after Aquinas, however, beginning with the Scottish theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus, restricted more and more the domain of truths capable of being proved by reason and insisted that many doctrines previously thought to have been proved by philosophy had to be accepted on the basis of faith alone. One reason for this restriction was that scholastics applied the requirements for scientific demonstration, as first specified in Aristotle's Organon, much more rigorously than previous philosophers had done. These requirements were so strict that Aristotle himself was rarely able to apply them fully beyond the realm of mathematics. It was this trend that finally led to the loss of confidence in natural human reason and philosophy that is characteristic of the early Renaissance and of the first Protestant religious reformers, such as Martin Luther.

Another common attitude among scholastics was their great respect for the so-called authorities in both philosophy and theology. These authorities were the great philosophers of Greece and Rome and the early Fathers of the Church. The medieval scholastics educated themselves to think and write only by intensive study of these ancient authors, whose culture and learning had been so much richer than their own. After they had reached their full maturity of thought and had begun to create original works of philosophy, they continued the practice of quoting authorities to lend weight to their own opinions, even though the latter were reached, in many cases, quite independently. Later critics concluded from this practice that the scholastics were mere compilers or repeaters of their authorities. As a matter of fact, the mature scholastics, including Aquinas and Duns Scotus, were extremely flexible and independent in their use of the texts of the ancients; frequently, in order to bring the texts into harmony with their own positions, they gave interpretations that were difficult to reconcile with the ancients' intentions. The appeal to authority was often little more than a stylistic ornament for beginning or ending the exposition of the commentator's own opinions and was intended to show that the commentator's views were in continuity with the past and not mere novelties. Novelty and originality of thought were not deliberately sought by any of the scholastics but rather were underplayed as much as possible.

The scholastics considered Aristotle the chief authority in philosophy, calling him simply The Philosopher. The early Christian prelate and theologian St Augustine was their principal authority in theology, subordinate only to the Bible and the official councils of the Church. The scholastics adhered most closely and uncritically to authority in accepting Aristotle's opinions in the empirical sciences, such as physics, astronomy, and biology. Their uncritical acceptance of Aristotle's scientific views produced a serious weakness in scholasticism and was one of the principal reasons for its scornful rejection by scientists during the Renaissance and later.

III

Common Methods

One of the principal methods of scholasticism was the use of the logic and philosophical vocabulary of Aristotle in teaching, demonstration, and discussion. Another important method was the practice of teaching a text by means of a commentary by some accepted authority. In philosophy, this authority was usually Aristotle. In theology, the principal texts were the Bible and the Sententiarum Libri Quatuor (Four Books of Sentences) by the 12th-century Italian theologian and prelate Peter Lombard, a collection of the opinions of the early Fathers of the Church on problems of theology. The early scholastics began by adhering closely to the text on which they were commenting. Gradually, as the practice of critical reading developed their own powers of thinking, they began to introduce many supplementary commentaries on points, known as disputed questions, which either were not covered or were not adequately solved by the text itself. From the 13th century onwards these supplementary commentaries, embodying the personal thought of the teachers, became the largest and most important part of the commentaries, with the result that literal explanation of the text was reduced to a mere fraction of each commentary.

Closely allied with the commentaries on disputed questions was the technique of discussion by means of public disputation. Every professor in a medieval university was required to appear several times a year before the assembled faculty and students in a disputation, defending crucial points of his own teaching against all those who challenged them. The forms of Aristotelian logic were employed in both defence and attack. In the 13th century the public disputation became a flexible educational tool for stimulating, testing, and communicating the progress of thought in philosophy and theology. After the middle of the 14th century, however, the vitality of public disputation declined, and it became a rigid formalism. Disputants became concerned less with real content and more with fine points of logic and minute subtleties of thought. This degraded form of disputation did much to give scholasticism a bad reputation during the Renaissance and later; consequently, many modern thinkers have considered it mere pedantic logical formalism.

IV

Principal Scholastic Philosophers

The outstanding scholastics of the 11th and 12th centuries included Anselm, the French philosopher, theologian, and teacher of logic Peter Abelard, and the philosopher and clergyman Roscelin, who founded the school of philosophy known as nominalism. Among Jewish thinkers of the same period, the rabbi, philosopher, and doctor Maimonides attempted to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with divine revelation, as understood in Judaism, in a spirit similar to that of the Christian scholastics. The scholastics of the so-called golden age of the 13th century included Aquinas and the German philosopher St Albertus Magnus, both of the Dominican order; the English monk and philosopher Roger Bacon, the Italian prelate and theologian St Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus, all of the Franciscan order; and the 13th-century Belgian secular priest Henry of Ghent. Nominalism became the dominant school of philosophy in the 14th century, when scholasticism began to decline. The most important nominalist was the English philosopher William of Ockham, a great logician who attacked all the philosophical systems of the preceding scholastics and maintained that natural reason and philosophy had a much more restricted field of operation than his predecessors had held to be the case.

A brilliant but brief revival of scholasticism, especially in the field of theology, took place in Spain in the 16th century, chiefly among the Dominicans, as exemplified by the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, and the Jesuits, as exemplified by the Spanish theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez. A more widespread revival was launched by Pope Leo XIII in 1879 with the purpose of reconsidering, in the light of modern needs, the great scholastic systems of the 13th century, especially that of Aquinas, and of incorporating in a modern reformulation of those systems all the genuine contributions of modern thought. This revival, which has often been called neo-scholasticism, is one of the established currents of contemporary thought. The principal exponents of neo-scholasticism include the French philosopher and diplomat Jacques Maritain and the French philosopher and historian of philosophy Étienne Henri Gilson.