The Achievement of Scholasticism

Scholasticism was the culmination of the method of logical inquiry and exposition pioneered by masters like Peter Abelard and Peter the Chanter (see pages 349–53). In the thirteenth century, the method was used to summarize and reconcile all knowledge. Many of the thirteenth-century scholastics (those who practiced scholasticism) were members of the Dominican or Franciscan Orders and taught in the universities. On the whole, they were confident that knowledge obtained through the senses and reason was compatible with the knowledge derived from faith and revelation.

One of the scholastics’ goals was to demonstrate this harmony. The scholastic summa, or summary of knowledge, was a systematic exposition of the answer to every possible question about human morality, the physical world, society, belief, action, and theology. Another goal of the scholastics was to preach the conclusions of these treatises.

The method of the summa borrowed much of the vocabulary and many of the rules of logic outlined by Aristotle in ancient Greece. Even though Aristotle lived before the time of Christ, scholastics considered his coherent and rational body of thought the most perfect that human reason alone could devise. They thought that because they had the benefit of Christ’s revelations, they could take Aristotle’s philosophy one necessary step further and reconcile human reason with Christian faith. Confident in their method and conclusions, scholastics embraced the world and its issues.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was perhaps the most famous scholastic. When he was about eighteen years old, Thomas thwarted his family’s wishes that he become a bishop and joined the Dominicans. He soon became a university master. Like many other scholastics, Thomas considered Aristotle to be “the Philosopher,” the authoritative voice of human reason, which he sought to reconcile with divine revelation in a universal and harmonious scheme. In 1273, he published his monumental Summa Theologiae (sometimes called Summa Theologica), intended to cover all important topics, human and divine. He divided these topics into questions, exploring each one thoroughly and concluding with a decisive position and a refutation of opposing views.

Many of Thomas’s questions spoke to the keenest concerns of his day. He asked, for example, whether it was lawful to sell something for more than its worth. Arranging his argument systematically, Thomas first quoted authorities that seemed to declare every sort of selling practice, even deceptive ones, to be lawful; this was the sic (“yes”) position. Then he quoted an authority that opposed selling something for more than its worth; this was the non. Following that, he gave his own argument, prefaced by the words “I answer that.” Thomas arrived at clear conclusions that harmonized both the yes and the no responses. In the case of selling something for more than it was worth, he concluded that charging more than a seller had originally paid could be legitimate at times, as, for example, “when a man has great need of a certain thing, while another man will suffer if he is without it.”

Scholastics like Thomas were great optimists. They believed that everything had a place in God’s scheme of things, that the world was orderly, and that human beings could make rational sense of it. Their logical arguments filled the classrooms, spilled into the friars’ convents, found their way into the shops of artisans, and even crept between the sheets of lovers. Scholastic philosophy helped give ordinary people a sense of purpose and a guide to behavior. (See “Document 12.1: Thomas Aquinas Writes about Sex.”)

Yet even among scholastics, unity was elusive. In his own day, Thomas was accused of placing too much emphasis on reason and relying too fully on Aristotle. Later scholastics argued that reason could not find truth through its own faculties and energies. In the summae of the Franciscan John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308), for example, the world and God were less compatible. For John, human reason could know truth only through the “special illumination of the uncreated light,” that is, by divine illumination. Unlike Thomas, John believed that this illumination came not as a matter of course, but only when God chose to intervene. John—and others—experienced God as sometimes willful rather than reasonable. Human reason could not soar to God; God’s will alone determined whether or not a person could know him. In this way, John separated the divine and secular realms, and the medieval synthesis cracked.