This is Lecture 28. The Queen of the Sciences, Scholastic theology. One of the great Scholastic theologians is Anselm. I'll talk about Anselm a little later in this lecture, but we'll begin now with a prayer from the church leader, theologian, Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Anselm. Let's pray. My God, I pray that I may so know you and love you that I may rejoice in you. And if I may not do so fully in this life, let me go steadily on to the day when I come to that fullness. Let me receive that which you promise through your truth that my joy may be full, amen. You all have heard the question, how many angels can dance on the head of a pen? Perhaps you don't know the answer to that, but there's a pen and a sign that says occupancy by more than 3,820,712,681 angels on the head of this pen is unlawful. Well that question's not going to be on the exam, so you don't need to try to memorize that number, but that's my introduction to this lecture on Scholastic theology. It's probably not a very fair introduction, but nonetheless it is an introduction. The question that we want to start with is what is Scholastic theology? And simple answer is that Scholastic theology was the way that theology was done in the Middle Ages. It was the approved method, the standard approach to theology. Theology had not always been done this way. In fact, this is a creation of the Middle Ages, but it would have great impact, not only on its own time, but all the way down throughout the rest of church history. Let's try to understand what it is. First of all, then we'll talk about some famous Scholastic theologians. When we get into the matter of Scholastic theology, we have to get into the whole matter of philosophy, because Scholastic theology was very concerned to relate its work to a philosophical system. Philosophy was viewed as a valuable asset to Christian theology in a couple of ways. One, it could demonstrate the reasonableness of faith, and thus defend the Christian faith against non-Christian critics, using philosophy, theologians hope to be able to show that Christianity really had some rationality to it. It made sense. It was not ridiculous. It could answer these questions, and it could answer them in terms of the philosophical system that was being employed. Another reason that Christians wanted to use philosophy was that it enabled theologians to systematically arrange and order their theology. You're going to write theology. You have to have some sort of order, some kind of outline. The Bible doesn't give us that, and to make a systematic theology, there has to be some way of putting it all together in a coherent and organized form, so philosophy seemed to offer some help in enabling Christian theologians to systematize their writings, and the purpose in all of this was to set forth theology in a systematic orderly way, so that Christians could better understand it. So philosophy was viewed as an ally, as something important to be used, to be studied, and to be used by theologians. The problem, of course, then was which philosophy? Early on the teaching of Plato appealed to theologians, and Plato was often used in some way as a kind of philosophical background or philosophical context for the teaching of Christian theology. The appeal of Plato for Christian theologians is clearly seen in the very first sentence under Plato in the New Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, and I was looking at in the library yesterday. First sentence under Plato says this, Plato was a preeminent Greek philosopher whose chief contribution consists in his conception of the observable world as an imperfect image of a realm of unobservable and unchanging forms, and his conception of the best life as one centered on the love of these divine objects. I won't take time to kind of exegy that sentence, but I think you can see in just my reading it how Christian theology would find some sort of affinity with the philosophy of Plato. Aristotle was not well-known in the early Middle Ages. Plato was the philosopher. Aristotle was in many of his writings unknown in the West. Those writings had not come over into the West, had not been translated into Latin, so the full corpus of Aristotle, who is of course viewed as the second of these great Greek philosophers, was not known. There's no one in part. Boethias, you remember, we've mentioned for a couple of minutes, was a channel through which part of Aristotle was transmitted into Western culture, but the full understanding of Aristotle and his philosophical system was not known until the Middle Ages. It came into the West in a rather strange way. Aristotle's teaching, unknown in the West, was known to the Muslims who had conquered much of the East, and so Aristotle, the study of Aristotle, was taking place in Persia when Aristotle was not being studied in Roman Paris and Oxford, and as the Muslims conquered other areas, they took their knowledge of Aristotle with them all the way to Spain, and Muslim philosophers in Spain became the preeminent channel by which the full understanding of Aristotle was then brought into the Christian West. When people began to read Aristotle, they discovered a different sort of philosophy at work, a kind of rational, empirical, hard-headed concentration on the data, a more scientific approach to philosophy, as over against Plato's more mystical, subjective approach. Reality, according to Aristotle, is explained by observation and by logic, not so much by meditation, as by study of the data. Some people in the West, in fact many people in the West, adopted Aristotle then and the Aristotelian system, particularly Aristotelian logic, has been very important for the expression of Christian theology for presenting, organizing, and defending Christian truth. The problem with Aristotle, though, was that Aristotle was not a Christian, of course Plato wasn't either, although some people tried to get him very close, not into the kingdom of heaven, because he was saying so many things that seemed right to Christians, so he must have been a Christian, if you got it, that right. But Aristotle is more of a problem because in Aristotle's teaching, there are some very definitely strongly stated non-Christian positions, like the eternity of the world. Aristotle believed in the eternity of the world. He seemed to believe in the mortality of the soul. He doesn't have a high view of any view at all, of providence, and his concentration on empirical, visible reality could be opposed to an acceptance of tradition and authority in God and the Scripture, but Christian theologians, as much as they could, Christianized Aristotle. They took his system, they tried to adjust his teaching somewhat, they overlooked some things, but in terms of how to think, how to do philosophy, which in this period really is the same thing as doing theology, Aristotle became the philosopher. Now, not everybody was happy with that. I have included in the syllabus a long quotation from the librarian in the novel by Humberto Ecco, the name of the Rose, and the whole plot of that book won't give the plot away because it's a very exciting book, but the whole plot has to do with this man's hatred for a certain book written by Aristotle, the second book of Aristotle, because he feels that if that book really gets out, gets in the library, and then gets out into the world, it really was already out, but he was trying to stop the damage if people started reading Aristotle, they would lose sight of some of the wonderful truths of the Christian faith, this man felt that Aristotle, rather than being an ally, was really an enemy of the Christian faith. But nonetheless, there he was, Aristotle had come back in, he was the big name, his system of philosophy was the going system of the day, and most Christian theologians accepted it and used it. While all this is going on, we have the rise of the universities. At first there were no universities, there were monastic schools where the monks taught groups of students, and out of the monastic schools grew the cathedral schools in the large cathedral towns, where people would come and study, and then out of those cathedral schools came the universities. So by the time we come to the high middle ages, which we're talking about now, the university is part of the landscape of Europe, in the monastic schools, and somewhat in the cathedral schools, the way of study could be described as devotional. It's like going to chapel all the time, and hearing the word of God read, hearing devotional writings read, studying these things with a view to one's own heart and the application of all of this to one's life. But in the universities, that began to shade over into scientific theology, philosophical theology, academic theology. The method that was used in the universities was the dialectical method that was in large measure based on Aristotle's way of doing philosophy, and based on Aristotelian logic, it was a certain prescribed method. If you wanted to do theology, you did it this way. You learned how to do it in the university this way, and books were written this way. Everything was set up this way. There was a kind of formal procedure in which a question was posed, and that question became the issue of debate. Theology really became a matter than of debate. Question is proposed, like, is the world eternal, and then answers would be given on both sides of that issue. Of course, Aristotle could be quoted on one side, the Bible could be quoted on the other side, and the authorities, philosophers and theologians would be lined up on the two sides of a question like that, and arguments would be given for and against those positions. And then finally, there would be some sort of conclusion. If you were studying to be a theologian in a university, this would be the way your classes would be conducted, and this would be the way that you would be expected to perform as well. State the question, give the arguments on those sides, and come up with a conclusion. That was a dialectical method. Not everybody thought that was a good idea, but it was the prevalent approach to theological work in the Middle Ages. One Christian writer of the 11th century said that which is from the argument of the dialecticians cannot easily be adapted to the mysteries of divine power. He wasn't sure that you could take what he called the mysteries of the Word of God and fit it into that kind of straight jacket approach of question countering arguments in conclusion, but most theologians thought it could be done that way, and they did it that way. Well, who were those theologians? Start with Enselm. Enselm was an Italian monk who went to the Abbey of Beck in Normandy, and then from Normandy became Archbishop Canterbury. He can be considered the first truly great theologian of the period, and in some ways the greatest name between Augustin and the Reformers. Enselm carried on the older devotional approach to theology, but he combined it with a new scholastic approach. So with Enselm you get a kind of bridge from the older way of doing theology to the newer way. He wrote his theology in the form of a prayer, and that certainly reflects the older approach. He said, I am not trying, O Lord, to penetrate thy loftiness, but then he goes on in Seamston. Try to penetrate God's loftiness. So yes, those two sides do him. The devotional side in which authority and the Word is so prominent, but the scholastic side in which rationality and logic are becoming more and more significant. Enselm is known for two great contributions to theology. The first found in his book called Pros Lagian, in which he says his starting point is, I believe in order to know. He did not create that statement, say in Augustin, and said the same thing, and many other theologians had said the same thing, but you see what he's saying there. He starts with faith, I believe, in order to know. He starts with faith, with belief, and then in the context of faith and belief, he moves heaven and earth to use logic and rationality in order to better understand what he already believes. From Pros Lagian, we get the great cosmological arguments for the existence of God. Those are arguments that move from the creation to the creator. Enselm was not the first person to think of all of this, but he organized it and stated it in a very compelling way. You start with creation with what is here, and then you argue to the creator. There are various ways to do that. For instance, you can start with the idea of design. As we look around us, things seem to have some pattern, some organization, some design. It's not just shelter, it's exquisitely put together, and then you can argue from that idea found in the created world, to the fact that there must be a designer, someone to put it all together could not have happened just accidentally. Well, Thomas Aquinas will say the same thing. People had said this before and after Enselm, but Enselm is famous for his emphasis on these arguments from creation to the creator. But Enselm wanted to go further. He wanted to see if he could prove, you might say, in quotes, the existence of God by just shedding his eyes and not looking out at the creation. From thought alone, could he prove that God exists and he thought he could? That is a famous argument from Enselm, from thought to God. It's called the ontological argument, and sometimes Enselm's argument. Enselm reflected on how Seth Evada, the idea of God had become for him. It was just there in his thought. He wondered if he could move from the self-evidence of that idea to some proof of the existence of God. He wanted to see what the implications of the fact that God was self-evident to him would be. Crucially, in Porta to his argument, his definition of God is that then which nothing greater can be conceived. He thought, starting with that definition, he could prove the existence of God. Now, I'm not going to try to explain that mainly because I can't, and if I tried, I would get into a hopeless morias and spend the rest of the class trying to get out of it. But let me just read a couple of sentences from our textbook because Gonzales does the same thing. I'm going to do, he avoids the whole issue and tries to come up with a sentence or two that shows the significance of what's going on. Gonzales says the exact interpretation, significance and validity of this argument has been discussed by scholars and philosophers through the ages. Book after book has been written on the ontological argument of Ensel. What is important for our purpose, however, is to note the method of Enselm's theology which applies reason to a truth known by faith. That's the key. It applies reason to a truth known by faith in order to understand it better. Enselm by faith knows that God exists and then he applies reason to what he knows in order to try to understand better what he already believes. There is another important contribution of Enselm to theology on quite a different level. It comes out in the famous book that he wrote, Cerdéas Homo, why the God-man and deals with the matter of atonement. Ideas of atonement in church history after this point had varied greatly and after this point they vary greatly too. But Cerdéas Homo is a classic on attempting to understand why God became man and how that is necessary for our salvation. One of the older views was the ransom to the devil view as far as the atonement is concerned.
There was a ransom paid to the devil and that was the sacrifice of Christ on the cross so the devil would let people go who could then be redeemed through Christ, some of the church fathers held that, in a rather crude way. The more sophisticated approach was the Christus Victor approach, Christ simply overcomes by his power the forces of evil, conquer's hell and Satan and wins a great victory. Church fathers held that too and that view can be held in connection with other views of the atonement. I think actually when we are finished studying Enselm we would say he has a very clear insight into what the atonement means but it means even more than this. So Christus Victor and the substitutionary concept of Enselm do not need to be held as opposites but as complimentary views of the atonement. I'll talk about Abelard in a moment. Abelard came up with a moral influence view that the atonement was simply a great example of Christ's love which then passes on to us and influences us to love God and man as well. But it's really Enselm who makes crystal clear the important biblical concept of Christ's death as payment for our sin, payment to the Father for the people, the elect. That was not new others had said it before Enselm but Enselm put it together in a very compelling way. Classic formulation of Christ's death as a work of deliverance from the penalty of sin. You see man must pay because man is the sinner but only God can really pay because he is sinless and infinite. So salvation depends upon the God man. Man has obligation but no ability. God has ability but no obligation. So in Christ who is the God man both obligation and ability come together and Enselm sets forth wonderfully his perfect infinite sacrifice on the cross for his people. He's reading recently in books in culture an article by Jacob Noisner called the Cross and the Holocaust. Noisner is a Jewish scholar and he was criticizing a book by the series of sermons preached by the pastor in the Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow preached during Easter season in 1995 by the pastor of that Episcopal church in Scotland who was also a Jew converted to Christianity and Noisner says this for a Jew who practices Judaism the book called Jesus and the Holocaust reflections on suffering and hope by Joel Marcus the Episcopalian priest in Glasgow this book constitutes according to Noisner unrelieved blast from me committing a profound offense against the sanctity of the unique suffering of Holy Israel. One man had his Jesus against six million if that is Marcus's ratio it's beyond this Jews comprehension but you see what Enselm says in Cordeus Homo is that that is not a ridiculous idea if the one man is God that's exactly what Cordeus Homo says. Well Enselm is writing great books and teaching theology and Normandy and in Canterbury to read what was going on in Paris about this time makes one's head spin at the center of it was the brilliant enigmatic figure of Peter Abelard the invincible arguer the magnetic teacher Abelard was a star like a great prize fighter he expressed his contempt for anyone who met him in the ring of open discussion he would win these debates hands down and this was the most exciting show in town people would turn out to hear Abelard debate theology. The older medieval philosophers like Enselm had said I must believe in order that I may understand Abelard took the opposite course I must understand he said in order that I may believe he said by doubting not by reciting or affirming or quoting but by doubting we come to questioning and by questioning we perceive the truth see how Abelard now has made a massive shift in the way theology is being done strange words to have been written in the year 1122 of course they got him into trouble well Abelard was good at getting into trouble is life that he wrote his autobiography is called history of calamities summarizes his whole life that way you will have heard about his love affair with Eloise his student and the niece of the canon of the cathedral in Paris which resulted in Eloise's pregnancy and Abelard's castration by Eloise's enraged uncle that's just the beginning of the calamities that happened to him his book on theology has a strange name it's called sick at known that means yes and no and what Abelard does in this book is to follow the dialectical method of setting up questions and giving list of contradictory answers to those questions but he doesn't try much to resolve at all he really is better at setting up the questions and letting people wrestle with those questions probably a very modern idea but certainly not an idea that was prevalent in the high middle ages because the emphasis now is more on the fact that perhaps we can't know and the Bible contradicts itself it seems to and the church fathers contradict each other so what are you going to do well here is Abelardian pig resolving a yes and no question it's not exactly the way Abelard did it but nonetheless you can see that approaching theology this way he has moved it away from the realm of authority and moved it much more into the realm of rationality we've got to do the best we can to try to decide these matters Abelard's purpose may have been to force deeper reflection and so greater understanding but it had the effect of pricing theology away from authority and exposing it to the scrutiny of reason and all of this kept getting him into trouble with other theologians and with the church personally deep down he would continually express his submission to the Bible and to the tradition and to the church in fact he wrote to Eloise after she had become a nun I will never be a philosopher if this is to speak against St. Paul I would not be an Aristotle if this were to separate me from Christ but despite statements like that he keeps on doing it and finally died a rather friendless man and a rather sad man and a cluniac monastery in 1142 we talk about a number of other important scholastic theologians just to get their names before us another very important figure's Peter Lombard his book of theology is called Four Books of the Sentences which he divides theology into God creation and Old Testament salvation through Christ and sacraments and last things and Lombard simply organizes theology this way collects a lot of references from a lot of sources and tries to come up with some kind of understanding of theology through this approach Alistair Magrath says that Four Books of Sentences is perhaps one of the most boring books that's ever been written and I must admit I have not read much of it but I'm not about it to see what's going on but it may have been a very boring book but at the same time it was a pretty important book because Lombard became the standard theological text for the Middle Ages you wanted to be a theologian you had to master Lombard and you had to produce something similar to Lombard. There were numerous commentaries on the sentences all of this set forth as you would expect standard medieval Catholic theology I'm going to talk more about that later when we come to the sacramental system exactly what was that theology and how did people view the churches answered to the question what must I do to be saved you can find all of that in a highly organized system in Peter Lombard. Caledon in the institutes refers to Lombard at least a hundred times but he doesn't quote Lombard the way he quotes Augustin he quotes Augustin hundreds of times almost always favorably Calvin says about Lombard when Augustin says anything clearly Lombard obscures it and if there was anything slightly contaminated in Augustin Lombard corrupts it another medieval theologian was the Franciscan minister general Bonaventure after the death of St. Francis the Franciscan order fell into turmoil because there were different ideas as to how the order could and should continue it was really Bonaventure who led in settling the internal dissentions of the order he was a great Franciscan theologian faithful to the Augustinian dash and Selmic tradition with some sympathy for the new Aristotelian philosophy Bonaventure's greatest influence as a writer was a spiritual writer one who deals with matters of faith and love to God as so many of the monastic writers did but Bonaventure will constantly treat the matter of the relation between philosophy and theology in setting forth his spiritual writings one of his most interesting books is retracing the arts to theology like Augustin like Anselmy begins with faith his premise stated in his own words in this book is the manifold wisdom of God which is clearly revealed in sacred scripture lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature a rather striking and important sentence and you can find the same kind of sentiment in the church fathers and in St. Augustin but when Bonaventure deals with this in retracing the arts to theology he attempts to prove all of this with some pretty hefty intellectual arguments and next Thomas Aquinas and Aquinas is such a big name I'm going to skip him all together and dedicate the next lecture to Thomas Aquinas so I'm not ignoring Aquinas but putting him off because in so many ways he is the culmination of this whole process that I've been talking about I'd like to come in the closing minutes to reflect with you for a few minutes on this whole matter of scholasticism was it a good thing or was it a bad thing people have argued about this for a long long time and you can get different views depending on how you look at scholasticism theology during the scholastic period certainly with center stage it was the queen of the sciences
medieval universities did not have separate buildings for separate departments but if these universities had done that the department of theology would be right in the center of the campus they didn't have campuses either but that building would have been a massive building and the administration building would have been a little shack around back and the other departments small buildings surrounding this great center building dedicated to the study of theology the brightest and vast minds of the period went into theological study so that with scholasticism we have a sophisticated theological system which at the end Gil-Saul has described as a cathedral of the mind about the same time all of this is going on their people building those wonderful cathedrals at Shartra and other places in Europe and scholasticism is like a cathedral of the mind massive impressive powerful and in many ways theology greatly benefited through all of this the attention of the vast minds of the age on every conceivable question related to the Bible and to theology and the production of precise thorough detail answers of course one of the problems is that much of this was in the service of a church which really had moved away from the authority of scripture as its center and as its reason for existence if we can say some good things about scholasticism there were also some problems and that is that under the scientific university led dialectical scholastic method theology could move away from the church could move away from the monastery could move away from the common people and become a kind of domain of the intellectuals and could become as it did academic and abstract how many angels can dance on the head of a pen not really a burning question that the average person wanted an answer to now it could well be that that question was never debated in the universities all those some people think that maybe it was draw it has to do with the whole idea of the immateriality of angels in the spiritual world I suppose if you conceive of it that way then the answer that I put on the overhead earlier was not accurate because it'd be no limit to the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pen but if that question was never really raised or debated there were other questions that people spend a lot of time talking about in fact the university in Belgium in the year 1493 there was a debate over this question do four five minute prayers on consecutive days stand a better chance of being answered than one 20 minute prayer and some very great scholars spent actually eight weeks debating that issue that was longer than it took Christopher Columbus to sail to America the preceding year well all of this and perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit but all of this tended to tie theology too much to philosophy and to rationality and in some ways to make it a game and remove it from its service to the church and to the gospel it was one late medieval thinker who compared the scholastics to physicians who having learned their trade then sit down and talk about it while people are dying of the plague plague was a big problem during this time too well again trying to balance this sunlight there are some good things about it but could easily lead into excesses and into problems this was a great period of theology unfortunately it was not a great period of preaching and I think that was the problem the theology stayed in the universities in the textbooks in the academic circles people were beginning to become interested in preaching there were some great preachers some of the Dominicans and others and great preachers were well respected and well known but there weren't many of them and average person in his or her parish never heard a sermon at least not a very good one so there was no way for great theology and there were some questions about the theology too because it was producing some wrong answers as well as many right answers but there was no way for that to get to the people and so the grass withers in the flower fades but the word of our God will stand forever