Faith That Thinks: Scholasticism

After the centuries of survival that followed the fall of Rome, the West recovered, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, peace, cities and prosperity. A great awakening of the mind accompanied it. In the schools and the new universities, Christian thinkers set reason to work upon the faith. This effort, called scholasticism, produced the richest theology of the Middle Ages and, in Thomas Aquinas, one of the summits of Christian thought.

The Schools and the Universities

Learning, long kept in the monasteries, first flowered again in the schools attached to the cathedrals. In the twelfth century, masters and students flocked there in such numbers that these schools grew into a new institution: the university. Paris became the great center of theology, Bologna that of law, Oxford shone in England. There one studied the arts, law, medicine, and at the summit theology, held to be the queen of the sciences because it treats of God. The institution, born of the Church, has endured through the centuries: it is the one the whole world still knows today.

Faith Seeking Understanding

The project of scholasticism is held in a formula of Anselm, monk and bishop: faith seeking understanding. The believer does not doubt what he holds; but, having received it, he desires to penetrate it by the intellect, for to believe and to understand are not opposed. The method was rigorous: to pose a question, line up the objections for and against, then decide by reason and by the authority of Scripture and the Fathers. Peter Abelard had given the tool in his Sic et non, where he set the contrary opinions of the Fathers face to face to force the mind to reconcile them; Peter Lombard drew from it his Sentences, the ordered collection of the whole of doctrine that served as a textbook for centuries of students. To this tool was soon added a decisive contribution: the West rediscovered, through the Arab and Byzantine scholars, the work of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the most powerful logic it knew. The masters then stood before a grave question: whether this pagan thought could serve the Christian faith or whether it threatened it.

This conviction came from further back than Anselm. Augustine had already made “believe in order to understand” the very way of the believer: faith opens the intellect, and the intellect strengthens faith. The Latin masters read it even in Isaiah, whose old version bore “unless you believe, you will not understand,” where the Hebrew text says “you will not stand firm” (Isaiah 7:9). Anselm gathered up this ancient program and gave it its clearest formula.

The answer was not immediate, and the crisis was real. Aristotle gave cause for alarm: his physics seemed to deny creation in time, his treatise on the soul appeared to refuse personal immortality. The Church of Paris first forbade the teaching of his books of natural philosophy, from 1210 to 1231. Then masters of the faculty of arts, called Averroists after the Arab commentator Averroes, pushed Aristotle to theses irreconcilable with the faith, suggesting that a thing might be true in philosophy and false in theology. Even the accord that Thomas Aquinas managed to establish was at first contested: in 1277, the bishop of Paris Étienne Tempier condemned two hundred nineteen propositions, some of which touched his doctrine closely, and it was fully received only later.

The Mendicant Orders

At the same moment there arose two new orders that would people the universities. Francis of Assisi, having left all to wed poverty, founded the Friars Minor, who preached the Gospel by their whole life. Dominic founded the Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, devoted to announcing the faith and refuting error by study. They were called mendicants because they lived on alms, without estates or riches. Mingled with the people of the growing towns, their best minds also taught in the universities, uniting evangelical poverty and learning.

Scholasticism did not speak with a single voice. Against the Dominican current, which broadly welcomed Aristotle, the Franciscans kept their wariness and remained faithful to the more inward heritage of Augustine. Their greatest master, Bonaventure, a friend of Thomas Aquinas and himself a doctor of the Church, held that philosophy without faith goes astray, and set the love of God above learning alone. These two schools, the Dominican and the Franciscan, together nourished the universities.

Thomas Aquinas

The summit was reached by a Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, formed by Albert the Great, the master who had first made Aristotle serve theology. He took up the challenge of Aristotle and showed that faith and reason, coming both from God, cannot contradict each other: reason rightly guided serves faith, and faith raises reason without breaking it. He showed that reason alone, starting from the created world, can rise to acknowledge that God exists, by five ways that ascend from effects to their first cause; and he named God the subsistent being, the one whose very essence is to exist. Revelation then adds what reason would not reach of itself: the inner life of God and his plan of salvation. In his great Summa of Theology, he ordered the whole of Christian learning with new clarity, setting out each question, weighing the for and the against, concluding with measure. One principle runs through his work: grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it. The Church would later make of his thought a common reference, so well had he been able to state the faith with order and depth.

This recognition came by degrees. Canonized in 1323, Thomas was proclaimed a doctor of the Church, and the Council of Trent held his Summa in such esteem that it was laid, so it is said, on the altar beside Scripture. In 1879, pope Leo XIII, in the encyclical Æterni Patris, made his thought the common ground of catholic philosophy and theology; he was called the Common Doctor, so fully had the Church recognized itself in him.

Faith and Reason

The most lasting fruit of scholasticism was this certainty: the God of faith is also the God of reason, and one does not serve the one by scorning the other. Far from fearing the intellect, faith called it to her aid and carried it to its highest. It is this confidence that built the universities and shaped the thought of the West, even in its later disputed relation between faith and science. The Christian Middle Ages showed that the Gospel could think.