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: a scholasticus was a master who taught in one, and scholasticism 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. It is best understood not as a body of conclusions but as a discipline of procedure — a shared grammar in which a Dominican and a Franciscan who agreed on almost nothing could still argue, because they argued the same way.

The method: lectio, disputatio, quaestio

Behind the surviving texts lies a classroom. Two exercises governed the medieval faculty of theology, and the literature is the residue of both. The first was lectio, the reading — a master taking an authoritative text line by line, glossing its difficulties, drawing out its sense. The second was disputatio, the formal debate, in which a thesis was attacked and defended in the open, a respondent fielding objections and a presiding master delivering, at the end, his determinatio, the ruling that settled what the day’s argument had unsettled. Out of the disputation grew the most characteristic instrument of the whole tradition: the quaestio, the disputed question, frozen from a live exchange into a written architecture.

Its shape is the signature of the age. A question is posed in the form utrum — whether such-and-such is the case. There follow the objections, each opening videtur quod, “it seems that,” and each marshalling the strongest authorities and arguments for the position the master will end by rejecting; he states his opponents’ case at its most formidable before he answers it. Then comes the sed contra, “on the contrary,” a brief countervailing authority that tilts the scale. The body of the article, the respondeo dicendum quod — “I answer that” — gives the master’s own determination, working through definitions and the drawing of distinctions until the matter resolves. Finally each objection is answered in its turn, not waved aside but met on the ground it chose. The form is adversarial by design and irenic in aim: it builds the strongest case against a conclusion into the very monument that establishes it. This is the architecture preserved in the great summae, of which Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae is the best known — thousands of articles, each a miniature disputation, stacked into a single ordered structure. A second, freer genre, the quaestio quodlibetalis, let a master answer questions on anything at all (de quolibet) put to him from the floor in the seasons of Advent and Lent: the disputation as public performance, the reasoner exposed to whatever the room could throw.

The building blocks: contradiction made productive

Behind the whole procedure lay a conviction that organizes everything else: the authorities, rightly read, do not finally disagree. Where scripture, the Church Fathers, and the philosophers seemed to conflict, the fault lay not in the sources but in the reader, and the task was to find the distinction that let both stand. The text that turned this conviction into a method was Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non — “Yes and No.” Composed in the first half of the twelfth century, it gathers some hundred and fifty-eight theological questions and, for each, sets contradictory authoritative texts side by side: the Fathers affirming and the Fathers denying, sic against non, with no resolution supplied in the body. The reconciling is left to the student. The work’s prologue, however, supplies the tools — examine whether a word is used in the same sense on both sides, attend to the context of a citation, ask whether an author speaks in his own voice or merely reports another’s, and distinguish a considered teaching from a passing concession. Sic et Non is, in effect, an exercise book: it trains the reader to apply dialectic to the sacred page, and it made productive the very contradictions that an earlier piety had been content to leave undisturbed.

The other indispensable book was Peter Lombard’s Sentences — the Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, compiled around the middle of the twelfth century. The Lombard arranged the whole of Christian doctrine into four books — God and the Trinity; creation and the fall; the Incarnation and the virtues; the sacraments and the last things — quoting and ordering the authorities on each point and threading them with his own judgments. Where Abelard left contradiction open, the Lombard closed it into a curriculum. From the 1220s onward, lecturing on the Sentences and producing a commentary on it became the standard requirement for the degree of master in theology: every later schoolman, Aquinas and Duns Scotus and William of Ockham among them, cut his teeth on the same four books. No work of Christian literature except the Bible was commented upon more often. The Sentences gave the tradition a common syllabus; the quaestio gave it a common engine; together they made it possible for generations to argue across centuries as if seated in one room.

The institutional setting

The setting changed beneath the method. The early centers were the cathedral schools — Laon, Chartres, and above all the school clustered around the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, where Abelard had taught and quarreled. Across the twelfth century these gave way to a new kind of corporation. The medieval Latin universitas meant simply a guild, a sworn association of those in a common craft; the Paris institution called itself a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a guild of masters and scholars, banding together to set their own standards, license their own teachers, and defend their members against town and bishop alike. Bologna, reckoned the oldest of the European universities and dated by convention to 1088, grew up around the study of law; Oxford emerged in the later twelfth century; Paris won its first royal and papal privileges in the opening years of the thirteenth and received formal statutes in 1215. By the middle of that century the term studium generale had come into common use for such a place — a school whose degree was recognized everywhere, drawing students from beyond its own region. The studium stood alongside the sacerdotium and the regnum, priesthood and kingdom, as a third estate of medieval Christendom, and scholasticism was the discipline it practiced. The form of the quaestio is inseparable from the lecture hall that bred it: a method designed to be performed aloud, before witnesses, and then written down.

The recovery of Aristotle

The decisive event in the tradition’s history was the recovery of Aristotle. For centuries the Latin West had known him only through a narrow channel. Boethius, in the sixth century, had translated Porphyry’s Isagoge together with Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation, and this cluster — the logica vetus, the old logic — was for some six hundred years nearly the whole of the Philosopher available in Latin. From it the schools inherited their first great problem, the quarrel over universals: are genera and species, like humanity or animal, real things existing in their own right, or only names we give to groupings of particulars? The question, posed and left open by Porphyry, ran through the twelfth century — realists against nominalists, with Abelard cutting a careful path between — and it never stopped being a fault line in the metaphysics of the schools.

Then, across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the rest of Aristotle arrived — the Physics, the Metaphysics, the De Anima, the ethical and political works — and it came freighted with the great commentators of the Islamic world who had already digested it. Much of it crossed into Latin through the translation movement centered on Toledo, where Gerard of Cremona, Michael Scot, and others rendered Arabic versions into Latin between roughly 1165 and 1230, carrying with them the metaphysics of Avicenna (Ibn Sina) — whose distinction of essence from existence gave the Latins a vocabulary they would never relinquish — and the commentaries of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), whose readings of the soul and the eternity of the world arrived as both indispensable and alarming. Later in the thirteenth century the Flemish Dominican William of Moerbeke, working at the urging of Aquinas, translated and revised much of the corpus directly from the Greek, finishing with the Poetics around 1278 and giving the West, for the first time, an accurate Aristotle read close rather than at second hand. The arrival forced a reckoning: here was a complete pagan account of the natural world — an eternal cosmos with no beginning, a first mover indifferent to particulars, an intellect that seemed to leave no room for a personal soul — set against the teaching of a revealed faith. The conservative reflex in Paris was to quarantine the new learning: the Aristotelian books on nature were repeatedly prohibited in the arts faculty across the first half of the thirteenth century, and prohibited because they were being read.

The internal divisions

The scholastics were never a single party. Albert the Great undertook, against the bans, to absorb the whole of Aristotle into Christian learning rather than condemn him; his pupil Aquinas carried the project to its height, holding that reason rightly used and revelation rightly received cannot finally collide, since both descend from one source — that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. The synthesis was Aristotle held within a frame of participation and return that owed as much to the Neoplatonic line, by way of Pseudo-Dionysius and the Liber de Causis, as to the Lyceum. It did not go unanswered. The Franciscan school, drawing on the older Augustinian temper that Bonaventure had defended, contested the Dominican settlement; Duns Scotus, the Subtle Doctor, reworked its foundations from the ground up — arguing that being is said univocally of God and creatures rather than by analogy, and that each thing carries an individuating “thisness,” a haecceitas, that makes it precisely itself. A generation later William of Ockham cut the other way, paring away the abstractions he judged superfluous — the principle later remembered as his razor — and denying that universals exist outside the mind at all. Three broad currents, Thomist and Scotist and the via moderna of the nominalists, divided the schools for centuries, and they divided them by means of the very method they shared: each built its case in objections and replies, in distinctions drawn and conceded, on the floor of the same disputation.

The argument had a sharp institutional edge. In 1270 the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, condemned thirteen propositions associated with the radical Aristotelians of the arts faculty; in 1277 he condemned a far wider list of two hundred and nineteen articles, aimed chiefly at the Averroism of figures such as Siger of Brabant — the eternity of the world, the unity of the intellect across all humanity, the so-called double truth — but sweeping in, by collateral damage, some theses close to Aquinas’s own, three years after his death. The condemnations are the mark of how high the stakes ran: the question of how far a pagan philosophy could be admitted into the study of a revealed faith was not an academic exercise but a matter the Church was prepared to police.

The legacy and the word

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, written in a barbarous Latin that offended their recovered classical ear. Lorenzo Valla’s assault on the corrupted Latin of the schools and Erasmus’s mockery of the theologians’ artificial style fixed the caricature, and it has clung; the gibe about angels dancing on a pinpoint is a later invention pinned on the period, not anything the masters wrote. Against that caricature stands the plain fact of what the disputations forged. Much of the technical vocabulary of European philosophy — substance and accident, essence and existence, act and potency, the very practice of stating an objection in its full strength before answering it — was minted or refined in these schools. The scholastic inheritance did not end with the Middle Ages: it was carried into the curriculum of Counter-Reformation Europe, revived in the nineteenth century when Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) made Thomism normative for Catholic philosophy and launched the neo-scholastic movement, and it survives as a living tradition wherever the quaestio is still taught as the shape of a careful argument.

Sources, texts, and scholarship

The primary monuments are largely available in the public domain and, in part, hosted in the Library here. Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, the fullest surviving embodiment of the quaestio form, is read in English in the translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province; the metaphysics of being on which it rests draws the essence–existence distinction from Avicenna, and its frame of procession and return from the Dionysian line. The two twelfth-century texts that set the method running are easy to locate: Peter Abelard’s Sic et Non, whose prologue lays out the rules for reconciling discordant authorities, is treated in full in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s article on Abelard, and Peter Lombard’s Sentences — described, with its four-book structure and its later career as the universal theology textbook, in the Encyclopædia Britannica — became the most commented work of the Latin Middle Ages after the Bible.

For the method and institutions, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s survey of medieval philosophy sets out the lectio/disputatio/quaestio sequence and the rise of the universities, and its companion entry on the Condemnation of 1277 reconstructs Tempier’s two hundred and nineteen articles and the politics of the Aristotelian crisis at Paris. Among modern studies, Josef Pieper’s Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy (1960) remains the most readable orientation; Anthony Kenny’s Medieval Philosophy (the second volume of his New History of Western Philosophy, 2005) gives the analytic anatomy of the arguments; and John Marenbon’s Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (2007) is the standard scholarly conspectus. The broader recovery of Aristotle is traced through the Toledo translators and William of Moerbeke, and the humanist turn that made “scholastic” an insult is documented in the career of Erasmus, whose polemics against the schools’ Latin did much to fix the word’s modern sense.

The contemporaneous quarrel in Jewish learning — the Maimonidean controversies over whether Greek philosophy belonged in the study of Torah — ran on the same fault line of reason and revelation, fought in a different idiom; and the contemplative current of Rhineland mysticism, which sought God in unknowing rather than in disputation, grew up beside the schools as their deliberate counterweight. The earlier carriers of the method — the old logic transmitted by Boethius, the ninth-century synthesis of Johannes Scotus Eriugena, the Victorine reconciliation of learning and prayer in Hugh of Saint Victor — stand behind the high scholastic achievement; the experimental temper of Roger Bacon and the later learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa stand at its edges, pressing against its confidence in argument from within and beyond it.

What the schools left is the machine itself. The quaestio is a device for holding a contradiction open — stating the case against a conclusion in its full force, refusing to suppress the strongest objection — and then closing it by distinction rather than by decree. To answer a question, in this discipline, is first to have armed its enemies; a thesis is worth nothing until it has survived the best that can be said against it. That the masters trusted reason to carry the weight of their faith is the wager the method makes on every page, article by article, objection answered before the answer is allowed to stand.

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