Scholasticism

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Scholasticism is the method of inquiry that dominated learning in medieval western Europe — a way of teaching and arguing, more than a single doctrine, that turned the tools of logic on the inherited authorities of faith. Its name comes from the schola, the school: it was the intellectual style of the cathedral schools and, from the twelfth century, of the new universities at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford. The recurring question it set itself was how a revealed religion, holding truth to be given, could also be reasoned about without contradiction.

The characteristic instrument was the quaestio, the disputed question. A master would state a problem, marshal the authorities and arguments on either side, and then resolve it — the form preserved in the great summae, of which Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae is the best known. Behind the procedure lay a conviction that the authorities, rightly read, did not finally disagree: where scripture, the Church Fathers, and the philosophers seemed to conflict, the task was to find the distinction that let both stand. Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non set out contradictory authoritative texts side by side and left the reconciling to the reader; Peter Lombard’s Sentences became the textbook every later master was expected to comment upon.

The decisive event in its history was the recovery of Aristotle. Much of his work reached the Latin West only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, arriving by way of Arabic commentary — Avicenna and Averroes among the mediators — and it forced a reckoning between a complete pagan account of the natural world and Christian teaching. Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas undertook to absorb Aristotle rather than condemn him; later thinkers drew the line elsewhere. The scholastics were never a single party: Duns Scotus and the Franciscans contested the Dominican synthesis, and William of Ockham’s insistence on cutting away superfluous abstractions opened a different road altogether.

Later readers have not agreed on what to make of it. Renaissance humanists coined the contempt still carried in the word “scholastic” — pedantic, hair-splitting, lost in distinctions; the gibe about angels dancing on a pinpoint is a later invention pinned on the period, not anything the masters wrote. Against that caricature, much of the technical vocabulary of European philosophy — substance and accident, essence and existence, the very practice of stating an objection before answering it — was forged or refined in these disputations. The scholastics inherited a great deal from the Neoplatonist tradition as well as from Aristotle, and the question they pressed hardest — how far reason can reach into what is held to be revealed — outlived the schools that framed it.

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Religion · Middle Ages