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2 ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS |
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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. |
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(Jf.Pi.) |
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