Blackwell Readings in Medieval Philosophy - Fordham University ...

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The assimilation and integration of this enormous amount of new material, coming from
a radically different cultural background into the existing philosophical-theological framework
of Western Christianity, was a huge enterprise that necessarily led to some deep-seated tensions
and conflicts within this framework.
The tension between faith and reason especially had to re-emerge in this context on a
new level. For at this point the issue was not merely the conflict between “dialecticians”
and “anti-dialecticians,” as was fundamentally the case, for instance, in the conflict between
Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), but rather the multiple conflicts between
philosophy and theology, between Aristotelianism and Platonism (especially, as it survived
in medieval Augustinianism), and between Christian theological considerations and Muslim
and Jewish interpretations of Aristotle, on top of all the new empirical and scientific
information to be assimilated, concerning which the Church Fathers could not give much
guidance. The task of sorting out and systematically organizing this material required
extraordinary minds that were capable of integrating all of these considerations into huge,
comprehensive systems of thought, the intellectual equivalent of the gothic cathedrals of
the period. In fact, the simile is far from superficial. For just as the cathedrals are built up
from finely chiseled blocks that all serve an overarching structure designed to elevate the
spirit, so are the finely crafted arguments and distinctions of the huge volumes of medieval
philosophical and theological literature designed to fit into an overarching system of
thought, to elevate human understanding.
Main figures, literary genres
So who were the architects of these cathedrals of thought, and what sorts of works embody
the cathedrals themselves? In theology, the historically most important systematic work was
the Libri Quattuor Sententiarum (“Four Books of Sentences”) of Peter Lombard (ca. 1100–60),
in which the author, cautiously proceeding in the footsteps of his master, Abelard, collected
and collated the main theses and arguments of the Church Fathers, in order to provide a
systematic survey of the theological doctrine of the Church. As a teacher at the cathedral
school of Notre Dame, Peter soon established his work as a standard textbook for those who
came there to study theology. But the work gained real importance in the subsequent three
centuries when, with the rise of the universities (especially the universities of Paris and Oxford),
the Sentences became the set reading for theology students and the text to be commented
on by future masters of theology. In fact, it soon became the general practice in the course
of acquiring the licentiate in theology to write one’s commentary on the Sentences. This practice,
then, gave rise to an entire literary genre in scholastic theology, the “commentaries on
the Sentences.”
Despite the fact that commentaries are usually supposed to provide mere elucidations,
helping students to get a firmer grasp on the doctrine of the author, these commentaries
were by no means mere slavish repetitions of some old, trite doctrine. This was well served
by Peter’s original style, which (following Abelard’s Sic et Non), collated several apparently
opposing authorities, sometimes providing his own resolution, but sometimes leaving a
question open for further discussion. The great commentaries of the subsequent centuries
formally accepted this invitation for further discussion in their peculiar literary form: the
question-commentary. A question-commentary is not a mere running commentary offering
clarifications of the text (in the form of lectures, lectiones); rather, it is a systematic, thoroughgoing
discussion of the main problems raised by the text in the form of yes/no questions, to be
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GENERAL INTRODUCTION