Scholasticism

Theology in the schools

‘Scholastic’ means ‘of the schools’. Until about the year 1000, Western theology grew mostly in monasteries, where monks read Scripture and the Fathers slowly and prayerfully. As towns and cathedral schools grew in the eleventh century, and universities formed at Paris and Oxford around 1200, theology became a discipline argued in the lecture hall. Scholasticism is less a set of doctrines than a method: define terms exactly, draw distinctions, and wherever Scripture and the Fathers seem to disagree, pose a question, hear the reasons on both sides and give an answer. The scholastics themselves often reached different conclusions.

Its spirit is caught in Anselm's phrase ‘faith seeking understanding’. Anselm (1033–1109) did not seek to understand in order to believe; he believed, and so sought to understand Anselm, Proslogion. That is of a piece with the apostle's charge to every believer:

But in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give a defense to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope that is in you.

1 Peter 3:15

Peter Abelard's Sic et Non set apparently conflicting authorities side by side to train students to resolve them. Peter Lombard's Sentences (1150s) gathered the Fathers' sayings by topic and became the theology textbook of the universities for centuries Peter Lombard, Sentences. The method reached its height in Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and his Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Each article poses a question, states the strongest objections first, sets a word of Scripture or a Father against them, gives Thomas's answer and then replies to each objection. Reason, he held, is God's creation and no enemy of grace: grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. In the fourteenth century John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, stressing God's free will, opened other paths.

A contested legacy

The Catholic Church honours Thomas as its ‘Common Doctor’, and in 1879 Pope Leo XIII urged that his philosophy be placed at the centre of Catholic education. The Eastern churches, for the most part, did not take this road, doing theology rather within the Fathers' tradition, worship and prayer.

The Reformers' criticism was sharp. Luther believed scholastic theology had been captured by Aristotle and had obscured grace and justification. One late medieval school in which he was trained taught that God gives grace to those who do what lies within them; Luther came to see this as turning grace into a reward for merit. In the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) he set the ‘theologian of glory’, who reasons from what is seen, against the ‘theologian of the cross’, who knows God in the suffering and the cross Luther, Heidelberg Disputation. Humanists such as Erasmus mocked the schoolmen's subtle questions and called for a return to the sources (see Renaissance humanism).

Yet the next generation of Protestant teachers, Lutherans like Johann Gerhard and Reformed like Francis Turretin, took up the scholastic method again to set out and defend the Reformation's teaching. The question, in the end, is less the method than where reason stands. Set above Scripture, it becomes the "philosophy and empty deception" Paul warns against (Colossians 2:8); when we "take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5), it serves faith. Today's systematic theology, which orders doctrine by topic, owes much to the schools. The story is told in the lessons Anselm and the rise of scholastic theology and Thomas Aquinas.