Nature and significance
Scholasticism is so much a many-sided phenomenon that, in spite of intensive research, scholars still differ considerably in their definition of the term and in the emphases that they place on individual aspects of the phenomenon. Some historians, seeming almost to capitulate to the complexity of the subject, confine themselves to the general point that Scholasticism can only be defined denotatively as that kind of philosophy that during the European Middle Ages was taught in the Christian schools. The question of its connotation, however, remains, namely, What kind of philosophy was it?
The answer that Scholasticism was “school” philosophy and, in fact, “Christian” school philosophy can be understood only by examining the historical exigencies that created the need for schools. The search thus leads the inquirer back to the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages—a point which, according to Hegel, was marked by the symbolic date 529 ce, when a decree of the Christian emperor Justinian closed the Platonic Academy in Athens and sealed “the downfall of the physical establishments of pagan philosophy.” In the same year, however, still another event occurred, which points much less to the past than to the coming age and, especially, to the rise of Scholasticism, namely, the foundation of Monte Cassino, the first Benedictine abbey, above one of the highways of the great folk migrations. This highly symbolic fact not only suggests the initial shift of the scene of the intellectual life from places like the Academy to the cloisters of Christian monasteries, but it marks even more a change in the dramatis personae. New nations were about to overrun the Roman Empire and its Hellenistic culture with long-range effects: when, centuries later, for example, one of the great Scholastics, St. Thomas Aquinas, was born, though he was rightly a southern Italian, his mother was of Norman stock, and his Sicilian birthplace was under central European (Hohenstaufen) control.
It was a decisive and astonishing fact that the so-called barbarian peoples who penetrated from the north into the ancient world often became Christians and set out to master the body of tradition that they found, including the rich harvest of patristic theology as well as the philosophical ideas of the Greeks and the political wisdom of the Romans. This learning could be accomplished only in the conquered empire’s language (i.e., in Latin), which therefore had to be learned first. In fact, the incorporation of both a foreign vocabulary and a different mode of thinking and the assimilation of a tremendous amount of predeveloped thought was the chief problem that confronted medieval philosophy at its beginnings. And it is only in the light of this fact that one of the decisive traits of medieval Scholasticism becomes understandable: Scholasticism above all was an unprecedented process of learning, literally a vast “scholastic” enterprise that continued for several centuries. Since the existing material had to be ordered and made accessible to learning and teaching, the very prosaic labour and “schoolwork” of organizing, sorting, and classifying materials inevitably acquired an unprecedented importance. Consequently, the writings of medieval Scholasticism quite naturally lack the magic of personal immediacy, for schoolbooks leave little room for originality. It is therefore misleading, though understandable, that certain polemicists have wrongly characterized Scholasticism as involving no more than the use of special didactic methods or a narrow adherence to traditional teachings.
First of all, if the major historical task of that epoch was really to learn, to acquire, and to preserve the riches of tradition, a certain degree of “scholasticity” was not only inevitable but essential. It is not at all certain that today’s historians would have direct intellectual access to Plato, Aristotle, and St. Augustine had the Scholastics not done their patient spadework. Besides, the progress from the stage of mere collection of given sentences and their interpretation (expositio, catena, lectio), to the systematic discussion of texts and problems (quaestio, disputatio), and finally to the grand attempts to give a comprehensive view of the whole of attainable truth (summa) was necessarily at the same time a clear progression toward intellectual autonomy and independence, which in order to culminate, as it did in the 13th century, in the great works of Scholasticism’s Golden Age, required in addition the powers of genius, of philosophers like St. Albertus Magnus and Aquinas.
On the other hand, the moment had to come when the prevalent preoccupation with existing knowledge would give way to new questions, which demanded consideration and answers that could emerge only from direct experience. By the later Middle Ages, procedures for exploiting and discussing antecedent stocks of insight had been largely institutionalized, and it was an obvious temptation to perpetuate the dominion of those procedures—which could lead only to total sterility. It is widely agreed that this is almost exactly what did happen in the 14th century in what is called the “decline” and disintegration of Scholasticism.