Alexander of Hales

← Encyclopedia

Alexander of Hales was an English theologian and Franciscan friar, born around 1185 in Hales, traditionally in Shropshire, and active in Paris until his death in 1245. He is remembered as one of the architects of early scholasticism and, in the order’s memory, as the first Franciscan to hold a chair of theology at the University of Paris.

He studied and then taught at Paris, the leading theological school of the age, and had built a substantial reputation as a secular master before, around 1236, he did something rare for a man of his standing: he entered the Franciscan order, then barely a generation old, bringing his university chair with it. The move gave the friars an established teaching post and a place at the center of academic theology; the school that formed around him produced Bonaventure, among others, and shaped the Franciscan intellectual tradition for the rest of the century.

His most consequential contribution was less a doctrine than a method. The standard way of teaching theology had been the running commentary on Scripture; Alexander is credited with making Peter Lombard’s Sentences — a topically arranged compilation of patristic opinions — the basic textbook on which masters lectured and disputed. That shift turned theology into a systematic discipline organized by question, and the Sentences remained the framework of theological education for three centuries. Every major medieval theologian after him, Aquinas included, began by commenting on the same book.

The work that travels under his name complicates the picture. The vast Summa Theologica long attributed to him — the Summa Halensis — is now understood by scholarship to be largely the work of his pupils and collaborators, assembled during and after his lifetime rather than written by one hand. What survives as securely his are his Sentences gloss, disputed questions, and scriptural lectures. The honorific Doctor Irrefragabilis, the “irrefutable teacher,” was fixed on him by later admirers; like most such titles it records reputation more than argument.

Alexander worked at the moment when the newly recovered texts of Aristotle were entering the Latin schools, and his thought sits at the seam between the older Augustinian and broadly Neoplatonic inheritance and the Aristotelian apparatus that would dominate the generation after him. He was not, on the whole, an innovator in the manner of those who followed; his importance lies in consolidation — in setting the form of the question, the textbook, and the disputation that the great syntheses of the later thirteenth century would inherit and fill. The structures outlasted the man who helped raise them.

→ Related: Siger Of Brabant · Fulbert Of Chartres · Middle Ages · Neoplatonism