Scholasticism - Biblical And Patristic Roots, The Early Middle Ages, The Twelfth And Thirteenth Centuries, The Waning Of Scholasticism
method christian intellectual
Scholasticism is best understood not as a set of doctrines, but as a method, or body of intellectual practices. In particular, Scholasticism developed as the method through which Christian thinkers of the patristic and medieval periods gradually transformed the narratives of Scripture into a theological system. Scholastic method, then, has its roots in the earliest Christian times. It reached its fullest development in the schools of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The disintegrating Scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries laid the foundations for modern forms of intellectual discourse.
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In Matthew 5:17 Jesus declares, "Do not think that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets. I am not come to destroy but to fulfill (plērōsai)" (Douay-Rheims version). Christianity thus stands in a complex relationship of continuity and discontinuity with regard to its Jewish sources. The Christian faith views itself as preserving the Jewish heritage in its integrit…
The writings of the church fathers were soon subjected to the same synthesizing approach that they themselves had applied to Scripture. From the fifth century onward, Christian thinkers garnered sententiae—"sentences" or authoritative quotations—from the writings of their predecessors. The resulting sentence collections gave rise to two challenges that were crucial in h…
In the twelfth century, the sentence collection became the central genre of theological writing, overshadowing the Scripture commentary and the treatise. A theologian now had to prove his competence by presenting a comprehensive synthesis of traditional doctrine. A number of factors flowed together to produce this situation, especially the inherent dynamics of the development of the Christian inte…
Already toward the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, the intellectual practices of high Scholasticism—such as the question schema just described—were disintegrating. The problems of Christian thought, together with its textual bases, had reached such a degree of complexity that a method designed to integrate discordant voices into a coherent tradition could no longer succ…
Biblia latina cum Glossa ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps, Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/81. Edited by Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret T. Gibson. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1992. Lombard, Peter. Sententiae in IV libris distinctae. Edited by Ignatius Brady. 2 vols. Grottaferrata, Italy: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae Ad Claras Aquas, 1971/1981. St. Augustine of Hippo. On …
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User Comments
over 4 years ago
Very Good Article!
Daniel HP Borocci
(prof. of Philosophy)
Argentina