#scholasticism

In this Scholastic system logicalness becomes the first test of truth, and the living source of faith is placed in a secondary place. And that’s why later people hated it so much because they felt it to be a completely dead framework in which there’s no life left, idly discussing questions which no one is concerned about, and when you do discuss true questions, you flatten them out and deaden them. And a Western man, under this influence, begins to lose his living relation to the Truth. And thus Christianity is reduced to a system, to the human level. And this is one of the chief roots of the later errors in the West, which can actually be summed up as the attempt to make by human efforts something better than Christianity.

Dostoyevsky has a little story about this in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Brothers Karamazov, in which he very acutely describes what the Popes did, that is, the whole Western Church making something better than Orthodoxy, by their own powers.

You can see this, for example, in the celebrated “Proof of the Existence of God” in Anselm, who invented the new proof of the existence of God, which, as you can see, is extremely clever and doesn’t prove a thing.

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This is really the very same thing that Descartes tried to do when he tried to prove his own existence by saying, “I think, therefore I am”; and is also something which later on Metoxis Makrakis was to do when he said that he was the first man in the history of Orthodoxy to prove the existence of the Trinity, as though before this time all the Fathers had been wasting their time, and he was the first one to have enough intelligence and understanding of philosophy to prove what the Holy Fathers couldn’t prove. Makrakis has exactly that same mentality of, “By my own efforts, I will give you simple people who believed in sort of whatever you were told, I will give you the real explanation of things.” And this is exactly what people like Anselm are trying to do. This is again the spirit of trying to improve on Christianity, trying to accept not as Holy Fathers accepted in simple faith, but proving by means of — actually he’s under the influence of all these new currents coming in, and especially of course Aristotle who was very influential in those times, because he seemed to have sort of the universal philosophy — except Christianity; his view of nature was considered to be absolutely the truth.

Thomas Aquinas – Scientist of the Day

Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican friar and philosopher, was born Jan. 28, 1225.

Bible leaf with gloss from the 13th century. Beals 17, University of Washington.

Renaissance classicism also differed from medieval classicism in fundamental intellectual habits. From late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, classical (and also Christian) texts were conceived as ‘authorities’ - that is, as bundles of factual statements about specific individual things or issues. Each specific statement might be determined to be true or false, but in either case it was regarded as what one authority had said on its subject. In effect, each known work of an authoritative writer was dissolved into a bundle of individual statements; and each statement tended to be quoted and understood without the slightest attention to the context in which it had originally stood, still less with any attention to the historical circumstances or the original intention of the author. As the cathedral schools of northern France were eclipsed by the professionally oriented universities, this disaggregation of classical literary texts into bundles of unrelated statements became even more marked. The individual statements were known in Latin as sentientiae (opinions), and university schools collected anthologies of such sentientiae, completely divorced from their original context and hence often also divorced from their original meaning. Such collections included the famous Sic et Non (Yes and No) of Peter Abelard and the book that became the standard manual for study of theology, The Book of Sentences (or Book of Opinions) of the twelfth-century theologian Peter Lombard. Such books were organized according to debatable issues (quaestiones), with the excerpts favoring and opposing a specific conclusion arranged under a statement of the question. Logical analysis would then be used to determine which contending opinion was correct and to explain or refute the contrary set of opinions. A philosophical or theological work covering a broad range of issues with a summa, such as the famous Summa theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas. This was the scholastic method of intellectual discourse. Its great virtue was that it for probed each issue in an orderly and rational way, collecting the various possible opinions and making a determination of the opinion deemed correct. The great intellectual vice of this method was that it simplified and distorted the opinions of its authorities by reducing each author’s opinion to a single statement, totally divorced from the original context. This was precisely the weakness to which humanist critics began objecting in the fourteenth century. From Petrarch onward, humanists insisted on reading each opinion in its literary context, abandoning the anthologies and subsequent interpretations and going back to the original source in search of the author’s real meaning. Put it another way, classical (and early Christian) authors re-emerged as real human beings, living at a particular moment in history and addressing their remarks to specific issues that might have no connection at all with the issues for which medieval anthologists used the author’s words. To a student working from a scholastic anthology, ancient authors were essentially bundles of disaggregated opinions, not real, individual human beings whose writings reflected their own situation and addressed specific current issues rather than general and universal ones. Petrarch and his successors found this whole method -the very foundation of medieval learning- intellectually flawed and even dishonest. Behind their complaints about textual and stylistic inadequacies of scholastic texts is this much deeper objection. Thus the humanists thought the traditional medieval approach to classical texts to be invalid in principle. Scholastic thinkers applied these excerpted opinions to their own questions, not those of the original authors. In practice this meant that they wrote interpretations or commentaries that shaped the ancient material so that it served their own purpose. Hence humanists rejected all the commentaries that had accumulated about the words of an ancient author like Cicero or Aristotle, and demanded a return to the full original text. The only valid interpretation of a passage in an ancient book was one that took into account te whole work and also, more broadly yet, the historical milieu in whhich the author wrote. To read merely in order to pluck out information on narrowly defined issues was to miss the point - indeed, it was to distort the point.