william t. costello, sj - The School of Literature, Communication, and ...

THE FRAMEWORK OF SCHOLASTICISM 9
likely to be a sensitive thinker, pouring out his thoughts onto
pages for others to read or not as they chose. He was rather a proselytizer
for his own opinions, eager "to divide truth from error/'
to best his adversary here and now, to secure acceptance of his
ideas by his disciples and contemporaries. He had a passion for
enunciation, was forever expounding, defining, distinguishing,
and disputing. The scholastics were before all else teachers, and
their philosophy was intended to live, not in the library, but in
the hurly-burly of the schools.
The second characteristic of early seventeenth-century scholas-
ticism was the predominance of Aristotle. Even as late as the
1650'$, James Duport was telling his students: "If at any time in
your disputation you use the Authority of Aristotle, be sure you
bring his owne words 8c in his owne language. In your answering
reject not lightly the Authority of Aristotle, if his owne words
will permitt of a favourable, and a sure interpretation." 7 Aris-
totelianism, however, was an acquired characteristic, and the early
scholastics had raised many questions before Aristotle was avail-
able for the answers. Peter Lombard's Four Books of Sentences
loom large in the history of scholasticism, not alone because they
contain a sturdy marshaling of patristic opinion on dogma, but
because in his explanations and comments he raised many problems
of metaphysics and psychology, which began to flesh the dia-
lectical skeleton. With the crystallizing synthesis of Aquinas, Aristotle's
ideas of substance, accident, potency, act, nature, mode,
motion, soul, matter, and form were absorbed into a philosophi-
cal system that, taking over the dialectical findings of the previous
generations on the problem of universals, formulated a theory of
ontology and of knowledge in new Aristotelian terms. This basic
Aristotelianism received renewed emphasis at Cambridge in the
reforms of Henry VIII. In 1535, in what amounts to the first rudimentary
syllabus of study, the King ordered that the students of
the arts be given the elements of dialectics, rhetoric, arithmetic,
geography, and music "ex purissimis earum artium scriptoribus,"
admonishing Cambridge lecturers to use Aristotle primarily, and
after him the new German scholastics, Rudolph Agricola, Philip
8
Melanchthon, ". . . and men of this stamp." By the same token
their students ". . . from the darkness worse
they were to guard
than chimaera, from the frivolous 'quaestiuncula,' and from the
blind and obscure glosses of Scotus, Burleius, Anthony Trombeta,
Thomas Bricot, [George of] Brussels and others of that pack." 9
Aristotle's premier dukedom was confirmed, in effect, by Elizabeth