Scholasticism

Scholasticism. A method of scholarly inquiry which proceeds by way of questioning ancient and authoritative texts, first by drawing up lists of contradictory statements in these texts and then applying to them the rules of logic to reveal their underlying agreement, thus attaining what the scholastics saw as the inner truth to which in the end all these texts bore witness. The method was originally a teaching device developed in the schools and universities of W. Europe from the late-11th cent.; it flourished until the 16th cent.

The texts used by medieval scholars to develop the art of logical argument were largely works of Boethius. Charlemagne and Alcuin provided a framework of monastic and cathedral schools in which learning could be cultivated and material collected; by 1050 important collections of logical material were at hand. In the late-11th to 12th cents., the scholastic method was developed in the schools. Anselm of Laon and his brother, for their lectures on Scripture, collected authoritative statements from the Fathers and attached them to the matching texts of the Bible, beginning the Glossa Ordinaria. When two Fathers differed in their interpretation, their contradictory statements were compared in the classroom and became the subject of a quaestio. The technique was perfected by Peter Abelard in his Sic et Non. By simply collecting authorities without attaching them to the appropriate biblical passages, Abelard showed the way for later generations to separate systematic questioning from lecturing on Scripture. In the prologue he also enumerated two key doctrines of Scholasticism: (1) that questioning is the key to the perception of truth, (2) that differences which arise in questioning can usually be resolved by determining the meaning of terms used by different authors in varying ways. By the end of the 12th cent. Alan of Lille had devised a complete set of rules for the proper use of language and logic in theology.

In the 13th cent. the universities developed the teaching methods of the schools. Paris was the first to separate speculative questioning from lectures on the Bible. Peter Lombard's Sentences were chosen as the textbook for the new lecture course. Besides ordinary lectures, special days in the university calendar were set aside for disputations, in which either the master broached a controversial subject or someone in the audience could ask him anything. It was in these quaestiones disputatae and quodlibetales that the scholastic method could be exploited most fully, because the master was free to explore all sides to a question. The final stage in the development of the scholastic method in the 13th cent. was reached with the Summae, freely composed works in which the sequence of questions was dictated not by the text used in the classroom but by the internal progress of the argument.

The main controversy of the 13th cent. revolved on the contents of Aristotle's natural philosophy and his Arab and Jewish commentators. Despite the efforts of St Thomas Aquinas and others to prove that there was no fundamental contradiction between secular learning and theology, doubts about a possible reconciliation between faith and reason grew as knowledge of Aristotle's natural philosophy increased. In the 14th cent. the scope of the scholastic technique became more narrowly defined. Problems of the present superseded preoccupation with ancient books and the connection between the text and question became a mere formality. Duns Scotus was the first theologian to limit the universal validity of logic by stating that the structure of the world represented only one possible manifestation of God's power, which was bound by nothing but His will and the law of contradiction. William of Ockham went further; he severed the link between logic and reality, maintaining that logic is not about reality as represented by words, but just about words, and he thought logic of little use in theology. Scholasticism was attacked by the humanists, and in the 16th cent. most European universities replaced the medieval arts course with the study of Greek and Latin literature.