History and issues

Roots of Scholasticism

From the beginning of medieval Scholasticism the natural aim of all philosophical endeavour to achieve the “whole of attainable truth” was clearly meant to include also the teachings of Christian faith, an inclusion which, in the very concept of Scholasticism, was perhaps its most characteristic and distinguishing element. Although the idea of including faith was expressed already by Augustine and the early Church Fathers, the principle was explicitly formulated by the pivotal early 6th-century scholar Boethius. Born in Rome and educated in Athens, Boethius was one of the great mediators and translators, living on the narrow no-man’s-land that divided the epochs. His famous book, De consolatione philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), was written while he, indicted for treachery and imprisoned by Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, awaited his own execution. It is true that the book is said to be, aside from the Bible, one of the most translated, most commented upon, and most printed books in world history; and that Boethius made (unfinished) plans to translate and to comment upon, as he said, “every book of Aristotle and all the dialogues of Plato.” But the epithet that he won as “one of the founders of Scholasticism” refers to quite another side of his work. Strictly speaking, it refers to the last sentence of a very short tractate on the Trinity, which reads, “As far as you are able, join faith to reason”—an injunction which in fact was to become, for centuries, the formal foundation of Scholasticism. Instead of “faith,” such concepts as revelation, authority, or tradition could be (and, indeed, have been) cited, and “reason,” though unambiguously meant to designate the natural powers of human cognition, could also be granted (and, in fact, has been granted) very different meanings. In any case, the connection between faith and reason postulated in this principle was from the beginning and by its very nature a highly explosive compound.

Boethius himself already carried out his program in a rather extraordinary way: though his Opuscula sacra (Sacred Works) dealt almost exclusively with theological subjects, there was not a single Bible quotation in them: logic and analysis was all.

Though called the “first Scholastic,” Boethius was at the same time destined to be for almost a millennium the last layman in the field of European philosophy. His friend Cassiodorus, author of the Institutiones—an unoriginal catalog of definitions and subdivisions, which (in spite of their dryness) became a source book and mine of information for the following centuries—who, like Boethius, occupied a position of high influence at the court of Theodoric and was also deeply concerned with the preservation of the intellectual heritage, decided in his later years to quit his political career and to live with his enormous library in a monastery. This fact again is highly characteristic of the development of medieval Scholasticism: intellectual life needs not only teachers and students and not only a stock of knowledge to be handed down; there is also needed a certain guaranteed free area within human society as well, a kind of sheltered enclosure, within which the concern for “nothing but truth” can exist and unfold. The Platonic Academy, as well as (for a limited time) the court of Theodoric, had been enclosures of this kind, but, in the politically unsettled epoch to come, “no plant would thrive except one that germinated and grew in the cloister.”

The principle of the conjunction of faith and reason, which Boethius had proclaimed, and the way in which he himself carried it out were both based on a profound and explicit confidence in human intellectual capacity—a confidence that could possibly lead one day to the rationalistic conviction that there cannot be anything that exceeds the power of human reason to comprehend, not even the mysteries of divine revelation. To be sure, the great thinkers of Scholasticism, in spite of their emphatic affirmation of faith and reason, consistently rejected any such rationalistic claim. But it must nonetheless be admitted that Scholasticism on the whole, and by virtue of its basic approach, contained within itself the danger of an overestimation of rationality, which recurrently emerged throughout its history.

On the other hand, there had been built in, from the beginning, a corrective and warning, which in fact kept the internal peril of rationalism within bounds, namely, the corrective exercised by the “negative theology” of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, around whose writings revolved some of the strangest events in the history of Western culture. The true name of this protagonist is, in spite of intensive research, unknown. Probably it will remain forever an enigma why the author of several Greek writings—among them Peri theion onomaton (On the Divine Names), Peri tes ouranias hierarchias (On the Celestial Hierarchy), and Peri mustikes theologias ( On Mystical Theology)—called himself “Dionysius the Presbyter” and, to say the least, suggested that he was actually Denis the Areopagite, a disciple of St. Paul the Apostle (Acts of the Apostles). In reality, almost all historians agree that Pseudo-Dionysius, as he came to be called, was probably a Syrian Neoplatonist, a contemporary of Boethius. Whatever the truth of the matter may be, his writings exerted an inestimable influence for more than 1,000 years by virtue of the somewhat surreptitious quasi-canonical authority of their author, whose books were venerated, as has been said, “almost like the Bible itself.” A 7th-century Greek theologian, St. Maximus the Confessor, wrote the first commentaries on these writings, which were followed over the centuries by a long succession of commentators, among them Albertus Magnus and Aquinas. The main fact is that the unparalleled influence of the Areopagite writings preserved in the Latin West an idea, which otherwise could have been repressed and lost (since it cannot easily be coordinated with rationality)—that of a negative theology or philosophy that could act as a counter-poise against rationalism. It could be called an Eastern idea present and effective in the Occident. But after the Great Schism (1054), which erected a wall between East and West that lasted for centuries, Denis the Areopagite, having become himself (through translations and commentaries) a Westerner “by adoption,” was the only one among all of the important Greco-Byzantine thinkers who penetrated into the schools of Western Christendom. Thus, negative theology was brought to medieval Scholasticism, as it were, through the back door.

The most important book of Denis, which dealt with the names that can be applied to God, exemplified his negative theology. It maintained first of all the decidedly biblical thesis that no appropriate name can be given to God at all unless he himself reveals it. But then Denis showed that even the revealed names, since they must be comprehensible to humans’ finite understanding, cannot possibly reach or express the nature of God and that, in consequence, every affirmative statement about God requires at once the corrective of the coordinate negation. Theologians cannot even call God “real” or “being,” because they derive these concepts from the things to which God has given reality, and the Creator cannot possibly be of the same nature as that which he has created. Thus, On Mystical Theology concluded by finally relativizing also the negations, because God surpasses anything that humans may possibly say of him, whether it be affirmative or negative.

Scholasticism certainly could have learned all of this also from Augustine, who repeatedly warned that “whatever you understand cannot be God.” But probably an authority of even greater weight than Augustine was needed to counteract a reason that was tending to overrate its own powers, and this authority was attributed, although falsely, to the works of Denis the Areopagite. This impact could, of course, not be restricted to the idea of God; it necessarily concerned and changed humanity’s whole conception of the world and of existence. The influence of Denis is reflected in the noteworthy fact that Aquinas, for instance, not only employed more than 1,700 quotations from Denis the Areopagite but also appealed almost regularly to his work whenever he spoke, as he often did (and in astonishingly strong terms), of the inexhaustible mystery of being. Aquinas, however, who also wrote a remarkable commentary on Denis’s book On the Divine Names, is mentioned here only as an example, albeit a most telling example.

At the very end of the medieval era of Scholasticism, the Areopagite emerged once more in the work of a 15th-century cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, also known as a mathematician and advocate of experimental knowledge, in whose library there are preserved several translations of the Areopagite writings—replete, moreover, with marginal notes in Nicholas’s handwriting. But even without this concrete evidence, it would be quite plain that his doctrine of “knowing nonknowing” is closely linked to the Areopagite’s conviction that all of reality is unfathomable.

The translation into Latin of the Corpus Areopagiticum, which was made in the 9th century—i.e., some 400 years after the death of its author—by John Scotus Erigena, is itself worthy of mention, especially because the translator was one of the most remarkable figures of early medieval philosophy. After generations of brave and efficient collectors, organizers, and schoolmasters had come and gone, Erigena, in his De divisione natura (On the Division of Nature), developed the Dionysian Neoplatonism on his own and tried to construct a systematic conception of the universe, a more or less pantheistic worldview, which (as Étienne Gilson says) for a moment offered the Latin West the opportunity—or the temptation—to choose the way of the East once and for all. The church, though not until centuries later, condemned the book, apparently convinced that any counterpoise to its own position could become dangerous in itself.