Medieval Europe · c. 1070 – early 17th c.
Scholasticism
Reason, trained by Aristotle’s logic, can prove much of what faith believes and clarify the rest, because truth cannot contradict truth.
How far can reason go in understanding what faith holds?
Cathedral schools and then the new universities of Paris and Oxford needed a method for teaching theology. From the 12th century, Latin translations of Aristotle and of Arabic and Jewish philosophers arrived, and scholars had to fit this powerful pagan system into Christian doctrine.
God is the author of both nature and scripture, so what reason demonstrates and what revelation teaches must agree. The way to resolve apparent conflicts is the disputation: state the objections, give the authorities, then distinguish senses until the contradiction disappears.
- Faith and reason are distinct but cannot truly conflict.
- God’s existence can be shown by argument.
- Hard questions are settled by disputation and careful distinctions.
It created the university disputation and much of Western philosophical vocabulary; Thomism was revived in the 19th century and is still taught.
Thinkers
1033–1109Anselm of CanterburyBenedictine monk and Archbishop of Canterbury1079–1142Peter AbelardParis logician famed for his dialectic and his love for Héloïse1225–1274Thomas AquinasDominican friar who wove Aristotle into Christian theologyc. 1266–1308John Duns ScotusFranciscan theologian, the “Subtle Doctor”Key texts
Where it came from
Grew out ofPatristic & Augustinian philosophyAnselm took Augustine’s method of “faith seeking understanding” and turned it into rigorous argument.Borrowed from
AristotelianismThe recovery of Aristotle’s full corpus in the 12th–13th centuries gave the schools their logic, physics and metaphysics.Borrowed from
Falsafa (Arabic Aristotelianism)Latin translations made in Toledo and elsewhere brought Avicenna’s essence–existence distinction and Averroes’ commentaries into the universities.Borrowed from
Medieval Jewish philosophyAquinas cites “Rabbi Moses” (Maimonides) on negative theology and on why the world’s eternity cannot be disproved.
What it led to
Opposed byLate-medieval nominalismOckham rejected the realist apparatus of common natures and Scotus’s formal distinction as needless entities.Opposed by
Renaissance humanismHumanists attacked the schoolmen’s technical Latin and endless logical disputes as barren, preferring eloquence, history and moral philosophy.Opposed by
RationalismDescartes, schooled by Jesuits at La Flèche, replaced scholastic forms and qualities with a mechanical nature described by mathematics, while recasting scholastic proofs of God.Carried on by
Social contract theoryLocke’s natural law, knowable by reason and binding even on rulers, descends from Aquinas through the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, whom Locke repeatedly cites.Carried on by
PhenomenologyThrough Franz Brentano, the scholastic idea of the mind’s “intentional” directedness became phenomenology’s starting point.Carried on by
Virtue ethics revivalAnscombe and Foot drew on Aquinas’s ethics, and MacIntyre came to see Thomism as the strongest form of the Aristotelian tradition.
Its answers to the big questions
God & the ultimateIs there a ground of everything?Five ways from motion, cause and order lead to a first cause, “and this everyone calls God”.On the record
Scholasticism ran from c. 1070 to the 16th century, ending with Suárez.
Suárez died in 1617, and the Stanford Encyclopedia stresses that his death “does not mark the end of this university tradition”: Iberian “baroque” scholasticism continued, and some historians would end medieval Latin philosophy only around 1700. The atlas now ends the block in the early 17th century, after Suárez, and treats later school philosophy as its afterlife.
Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Medieval Philosophy”