Lecture 23: Scholasticism: Anselm, Abelard, and Thomas Aquinas

The lecture, section by section

1. A strange gift from a terrible crusade

   One thread ties this lecture to the last: the treasures and learning looted from Constantinople in 1204, much of it visible in Venice today, helped seed the Italian Renaissance, and a second infusion would come when eastern scholars fled west after the city's fall in 1453. Through crooked channels, the recovery of learning that would one day serve the Reformation was already underway.

2. What scholasticism was

   After centuries when the feudal system left scholarship to the monasteries, the high Middle Ages built schools, and scholasticism, the schooling movement, set out to reconcile Christian theology with Greek philosophy. Its engine was the dialectical method: pose a question, marshal the authorities for and against, Scripture on one side of a point, Plato or Aristotle perhaps on the other, and argue toward resolution. Theology was the queen of the sciences, drawing Europe's best minds; but married to Rome's hardening traditionalism, the method also bred legendary minutiae, the possibly apocryphal angels on a pinhead, and a documented eight week debate in 1493, longer than Columbus's voyage the year before, on whether four five minute prayers equal one of twenty minutes.

3. Plato yields to Aristotle

   The early church had breathed Plato: an unseen perfect realm above this shadowed one, congenial to citizens of heaven. Aristotle, long lost to the west, returned by a remarkable route, from Muslim scholars of the east through Muslim Spain into Christian Spain and France, and he emphasized everything Plato did not: the material universe, empirical observation, reason built from what can be seen and touched. Busenitz's framing is worth keeping: Plato leans supernaturalist, Aristotle naturalist; the ancient church was over-influenced by the first, the modern church is over-influenced by the second; and the shift beginning here runs straight to the Enlightenment, where reason and science displace revelation as the seat of authority.

4. Anselm: faith seeking understanding

   Anselm of Canterbury bridges the old devotional education of monastery and cathedral and the new scholastic method, even writing his theology in the form of prayers, a standing rebuke to every purely academic theology since. His motto set the era's first configuration of faith and reason: belief precedes understanding; we believe in order to know. From within that faith he articulated the classic proofs, the cosmological argument from creation to a first cause, the teleological from design to a designer, the moral from conscience to a lawgiver, arguments with genuine biblical footing in Romans 1 and 2, where Paul leaves the unbeliever without excuse.

5. The ontological argument

   Anselm's own famous proof works with eyes closed: define God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived, and argue from the concept itself to the reality, since a God existing only in the mind would be less than the greatest conceivable. Philosophers have felled forests debating whether it works, and Busenitz declines to adjudicate; the important historical point is that even here, Anselm's reason operates inside a prior faith, giving definition to a reality he already held self-evident.

6. Why God became man

   Anselm's greater legacy is his doctrine of the atonement. Against the old ransom theory, Christ's death as a payment to Satan, and alongside the true but partial Christus Victor picture of the cross as triumph, Anselm taught that the death of Christ was a payment to God, satisfying divine justice. And the logic yields the incarnation's necessity in one unforgettable sentence: man has all of the obligation and none of the ability; God has all of the ability and none of the obligation; therefore God became man, to owe the debt as man and pay it as God. On this satisfaction theory the reformers would later build the full doctrine of penal substitution.

7. Abelard: reason before faith

   Peter Abelard of Paris, brilliant orator and gleeful debater, inverted Anselm: understand first, believe after, a post-Enlightenment mind centuries early. His book Sic et Non, Yes and No, posed theological questions, stacked the authorities on both sides, and deliberately refused resolution: doubt provokes thought, thought reaches conclusions, conclusions ground faith. His life supplied the era's most notorious scandal, the affair with his student Heloise that left her in a convent and him mutilated by her family's revenge, a story he told in an autobiography aptly named for calamity.

8. Peter Lombard's Sentences

   The textbook of the whole era came from Peter Lombard, whose Sentences organized theology into the categories on which university students lectured and commented for centuries. Lombard is credited with settling the sacraments at seven, down from lists running as high as thirty, the seven Rome later canonized. Calvin knew the Sentences intimately, citing Lombard perhaps a hundred times in the Institutes, rarely kindly: where Augustine spoke lucidly, Calvin said, Lombard obscured him, and where Augustine erred slightly, Lombard corrupted him thoroughly.

9. Universities and orders

   The institutions arose together: Bologna in 1088, Oxford in 1096, Paris around 1150, Cambridge in 1209, schools now approaching their thousandth year, teaching grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And new orders arose beside them: the Franciscans of Francis of Assisi, missionaries and Platonists at heart, and the Dominicans, an order of preachers distinguished precisely by their embrace of Aristotle, the order that produced the era's towering mind.

10. Thomas Aquinas

    Born to a wealthy Benedictine family, Thomas chose the upstart Dominicans at university, and his family kidnapped and held him two years to dissuade him; he would not bend, and they relented. Trained at Paris under Albert the Great, he produced the Summa Contra Gentiles, an apologetic for unbelievers, quite possibly with Muslims in view, deploying the evidentialist proofs, and the vast, unfinished Summa Theologica, an 'introduction' for students of theology. His synthesis gave the era its third configuration: faith and reason together, Aristotle united with Augustine. Rome canonized him within fifty years of his death and in 1880 made him patron of all Catholic education.

11. What should evangelicals make of Thomas?

    Busenitz gives the divided verdict honestly. In apologetics Aquinas is esteemed even among evangelicals for his clarity on the classic proofs; in soteriology he sounds thoroughly Catholic, embracing and advancing the sacramental system that was hardening around him. As a pre-Reformation figure he stands before the clear battle lines were drawn, and the lecture's counsel is a discriminating middle: sometimes genuinely helpful, at other times to be approached with extreme caution, a judgment call that, as Busenitz's anecdote about two pastors shows, still generates friction in churches today.

1. Anselm wrote his theology as prayer. What would change in your own study of doctrine if every chapter had to be addressable to God?

2. Anselm believed in order to understand; Abelard understood in order to believe. Which direction does our culture assume, and what does Scripture assume?

3. Man has all the obligation and none of the ability; God has all the ability and none of the obligation. Practice explaining the necessity of the incarnation from that one sentence.