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SCHOLASTICISM
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,
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. |
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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. |
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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 schools. The question of its connotation, however, remains,
viz., What kind of philosophy was it? (see also Christianity) |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. 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. |
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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. |
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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." |
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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. |
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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, 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, 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. |
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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. |
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Scholasticism certainly could have
learned all of this also from Augustine, 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, 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. |
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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. |
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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, 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. |
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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, 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. |
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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, 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.
(see also ontological argument) |
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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,
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, 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, and a logician and theologian, Peter
Abelard. 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." |
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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," 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. |
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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." |
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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, 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. |
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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,
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 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." |
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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, 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. |
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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. |
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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 Islamic 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, 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 Islam
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. |
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The first theologian of the Middle Ages
who boldly accepted the challenge of the new Aristotelianism was a
13th-century Dominican, Albertus Magnus, 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." |
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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. |
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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. |
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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, 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,
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. |
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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. |
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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,
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,
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. |
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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,
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. |
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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 of the first
half and Francisco Suárez 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. |
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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. |