The history and future of philosophy’s relationship with theology

ABSTRACT

The Middle Ages are often described as a period when there was no stark separation between theology and philosophy. This article will qualify that characterisation, highlighting the inter-dependent relationship medieval thinkers often associated with theology and philosophy, which respectively considered the nature of God and things other than God, which nonetheless find their source and purpose in him. As the article will demonstrate, these disciplines began to develop into unique areas of specialisation following the founding of the first universities in the early thirteenth century. In this context, scholars gained access to the recent translations of the major works of Aristotle and leading Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes, which enabled them to offer more precise renderings of philosophical and theological questions. At the end, the article will outline two of the main approaches to defining the relationship between philosophy and theology that prevailed in the Middle Ages: the Franciscan and the Dominican. The goal in doing so is to offer a resource and inspiration for efforts to overcome the divide that often characterises the relationship between philosophy and theology and to encourage their interaction today.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle Ages
• Franciscan
• Dominican
• scholasticism
• Avicenna
• Aristotle
• University of Paris

The history of the relationship: the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages are often described as a period in which there was no stark separation between philosophy and theology, and the same is often said of the earlier Christian, or patristic, period as well. The integration of the two disciplines in the pre-modern era is often perceived positively, given that it avoids the somewhat artificial divisions and even animosity that mark their relationship today. At the same time, however, the medieval perspective can give the impression that scholars of this period were rather confused or backward when it came to understanding the distinct purview of the two disciplines: that they simply did not know how to draw appropriate boundary lines between the fields, perhaps because they were so strongly motivated by their religious agendas to fit the proverbial philosophical square peg into the theological round hole. As a matter of fact, however, medieval thinkers had a relatively straightforward and consistent conception of the territory proper to the fields we would describe in terms of philosophy and theology.

Although they did not use those terms as such at first, they did generally possess a clear understanding of the subject matters treated by the disciplines as we know them. While theology deals with matters that pertain to God in his own right, philosophy treats things that are ‘not God’: the nature of reality, human nature, knowledge, will, and so on. The reason philosophy and theology are always intertwined in this period is because scholars operated on the assumption, inspired by the longstanding Neo-Platonic tradition, that all things come from and thus derive their purpose from God in some way. What that way is can of course be defined by many different means.

Thus, medieval thinkers developed an exceptionally broad range of answers to the questions they asked about the nature of God and the world of creatures they believed to be fashioned by him. On this same assumption, they sought to develop what we would describe as philosophical explanations of the nature of human knowledge and the purpose of human life, for example. However, they did so in the context of considering how human knowledge and life are enabled by God and designed by him to operate. In sum, they offered what I have elsewhere described in terms of a ‘theological philosophy’, in which philosophical matters are treated with regard for larger questions about their conditions of possibility¹. Far from muddling the relationship between philosophy and theology, this methodology simply presupposed that objects of philosophical inquiry cannot be intelligently analysed without reference to their ultimate ends; and that human inquiries regarding God cannot be pursued in a vacuum, without reference to his relationship to us and our way of being in the world.

For a long time, there was no perceived need to articulate an explicit difference between philosophy and theology, or even to define them as independent disciplines, precisely because the two fields dealt with what were effectively perceived as two sides of one coin: God and the relationship of all things to him. The situation only began to change following the founding of the first universities around the turn of the thirteenth century. Most important among these for the present purposes was the University of Paris. This was the first chartered university in the West and the premier site for the study of philosophy and theology in this period, which had already flourished as a centre for study in the twelfth century. At the young University of Paris, and later, Oxford, scholars made it their mission to bring a greater degree of systematic order to their study of God and the world. This eventually resulted in a division of labour between various disciplines, which I seek to outline below.

Theology and philosophy in the first universities

In the early universities, the number of academic disciplines that were available for students to choose from was much more limited than it is today. At the baccalaureate level, students could study the liberal arts, which boasted a curriculum in logic, dialectic, rhetoric, and of course, philosophy. At the graduate level, courses were available in law, medicine, and theology, albeit not always at the same university. Paris was unique in serving as a home to all three faculties within a short time after its founding. The formal creation of the two humanities faculties specifically, namely, arts and theology, which drew together many masters who had been teaching in Paris previously – quickly gave rise to conversation amongst their members concerning their precise areas of responsibility². On one level, the theologians could claim both philosophy and theology as their domain, since they were often the more senior and well-trained faculty members.

While most masters in the liberal arts had never gained a higher degree, all masters in theology had earned a degree in liberal arts as part of their initial training. At the same time, however, the increasingly rigorous subject-specific demands that accompanied the formation of the two faculties led many scholars on both sides to believe that there should be some room for disciplinary specialisation. Around 1200, for example, the arts master John Blund insisted that theologians should leave it to philosophers to treat the nature of the soul and its relationship to the body, and limit themselves to dealing with questions concerning the merits and demerits of the soul³. Interestingly, that sentiment was echoed by the early Dominican theologian Roland of Cremona in his Summa (c. 1234), where he likewise argued that theologians should focus primarily on questions about the soul’s merits and leave philosophical inquiries concerning its nature overall to the artists.

This testimony from Roland serves usefully to confirm that the growing division of labour amongst theologians and philosophers in the scholastic period did not necessarily entail any animosity or even a fundamental shift in understanding the relationship between the two disciplines. After all, Blund himself, like virtually all university masters at the time, was an ordained priest and sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, who had a vested interest in theological pursuits. In demarcating his discipline’s territory, consequently, he did not threaten the activities of theologians, but merely witnessed to a growing sense of professional purview, which nonetheless developed within a wider context of scholarly interaction⁴. The implications of such academic professionalisation for the limits of theology were extrapolated even further by Roland’s Dominican student, the theologian Hugh of St Cher, who warned in a sermon from 1242 against the study of philosophy, which in his view contributes to pride and idle curiosity and thereby inhibits growth in genuine wisdom and understanding, which can only be found in Christ⁵.

By contrast to his Dominican contemporaries, the early Franciscan John of La Rochelle enthusiastically defended his extensive uses of philosophy in a sermon delivered to Franciscans in 1243⁶. Although he acknowledged there that the study of philosophy must be ordered towards achieving the goals of theology, he invited and indeed urged his listeners to see it as essential to developing a robust and well-articulated Christian theology⁷. One reason for John’s enthusiasm by contrast to Roland’s may have been the recent lifting of a ban on natural philosophy that was in effect in Paris from 1210 to 1231, which prevented teaching or publishing on the philosophical works by Aristotle and his commentators that had recently been translated into Latin. Arguably, this ban was not intended to prohibit altogether the reading of philosophical works, which was certainly happening in private, but to curb those who had developed heterodox ideas like pantheism on the basis of them⁸.

Likewise, subsequent reiterations of the ban were designed to ensure that philosophy was employed in the service of theology, and in a way that did not contravene any of the dictates of orthodox belief⁹. According to Bianchi, a re-statement of the ban in 1228 may have served further as a warning to theologians not to tread too far into the territory of the arts masters¹⁰. This hypothesis would make sense of Roland’s hesitation to delve too deeply into the field of human psychology, although the testimony of Hugh and John in the early 1240s shows that there were genuinely different opinions on this matter, even after the bans were eased. As noted, this happened more or less in 1231, when Pope Gregory IX, who had himself issued the previous ban, eventually gave up on his project of purging the works of Aristotle of errors. This was partly a political move, to attract students and masters back to his prize university at Paris, which had been subject to a strike since 1229; and partly because Gregory himself and his theological protégées were already ‘safely’ engaging with philosophy to such an extent that there was no longer any point in policing its usage¹¹.

The theological works in which scholars engaged with philosophical questions, at this point, consisted mainly in Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a text that was completed by 1160, which organized a large number of quotations from authorities like Augustine, other church fathers, and the Bible according to theological themes. Broadly, these themes included God, creation, Incarnation, and sacraments; however, each of these four major headings was further sub-divided into more specific topics of inquiry which were often sub-divided themselves. The organization and indeed systematization of theological inquiry in this way was a tremendous innovation at the time, which set the stage for the development of theology as an academic discipline such as it is today. Nevertheless, scholars working in this area did not yet describe their work in terms of ‘theology’, just as the liberal arts masters did not speak of their work as ‘philosophy’.

Though Peter Abelard had already coined the term ‘theologia’ in the twelfth century, he had not done so in the context of establishing theology as an academic discipline or ‘science’ in the full sense of the term. For some time after Abelard, consequently, theologians followed Peter Lombard in framing their scholarly discussions in terms of Augustine’s distinction between things that are to be enjoyed, namely, God, and things that are to be used, namely, things that are not God. This distinction structured the work of Alexander of Hales, a key member of the early theology faculty at Paris, who became the first to adopt Lombard’s text in the early 1220s, not uncontroversially, as a basis for his lectures. These were written down in what became the first full commentary on Lombard’s Sentences¹². During the next decade, which saw Hales become a Franciscan in 1236, he popularized the practice of commenting on Lombard’s Sentences, until it eventually became a standard requirement for attaining the title of master in theology – the medieval equivalent to a PhD¹³.

Although Alexander spearheaded many innovations in pedagogical method at the young University of Paris, he was not the first theologian to inquire whether theology is a science or specific field of inquiry¹⁴. The credit for this novelty falls to the Dominican Roland of Cremona, who posed the question recently-translated Posterior Analytics, concerning the conditions under which any field of inquiry could be said to qualify as a ‘science’ or source of genuine knowledge. This text was translated as part of a larger movement in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which saw many other philosophical works originally written in Greek and Arabic translated into Latin. The vast and sudden influx of new philosophical and to some extent theological resources played a significant role in the bifurcation and specialisation of the disciplines discussed above; thus, it is to this subject that we now turn.

The translation movement

In many accounts of Western intellectual history, the emergence of scholasticism in the early universities is linked to the recovery of Aristotle’s major philosophical works through the aforementioned translation movement. During precisely this period, however, recent research has shown that access to Aristotle was limited and mitigated by various complex factors, as a result of which scholars had a very confused idea of his thought¹⁵. The hesitation around utilizing Aristotle was partly due to doubts about the quality of the Greco-Latin translations that were produced in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries; and partly to the wide circulation of spurious works which were wrongly attributed to Aristotle. Most important among these was the Liber de causis, the Neo-Platonic sources of which were not recognized until Aquinas read William of Morebeke’s translation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology, which was produced in 1268.

In the 1260s, Aquinas also commissioned William to produce new and superior translations of Aristotle’s entire corpus. These translations made it possible for scholars to make more informed use of the commentaries on Aristotle by Averroes that had been introduced to Latin speakers around 1230 but were to some extent neglected initially¹⁶. Before they were available, however, scholars were not completely in the dark as regards the interpretation of Aristotle. They had access to the massive Book of the Cure of the Islamic scholar Avicenna, which was translated into Latin from Arabic between 1152–66, well before the complete works of Aristotle were fully available.

Although Avicenna’s works bore the same titles as Aristotle’s, and interpreted many of his ideas, they were not mere commentaries on Aristotle like those of Averroes but wholly original texts on key issues in metaphysics, psychology, and theology. In formulating his positions in these areas, Avicenna also drew extensively on the principles of Neo-Platonic philosophy. Following a longstanding tradition of Greek and Arabic commentators, he held the two traditions – Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic – to be fundamentally compatible. The support for this belief came in part from the so-called Theology of Aristotle, a work that actually reprises some key themes from Plotinus’ Enneads but came down to Arab thinkers under the name of Aristotle. The Neo-Platonic aspect of Avicenna’s thinking appealed greatly to Latin thinkers, who had inherited their own version of Neo-Platonism through the likes of Augustine, Boethius, and Pseudo-Dionysius.

The latter were towering figures in the medieval Latin West, but they had not developed theological and philosophical systems of comparable rigour and complexity to Avicenna’s. Thus, Avicenna provided what seemed like the optimal resource for articulating beliefs about the nature of God, his creation, and human beings, at the level of sophistication that was now required in the university, and which was indeed demanded as well as made possible by the new philosophical translations themselves. While there was admittedly considerable animosity at the time towards members of the Islamic and Jewish faiths, Latin scholars did not hesitate to appropriate Avicenna along these lines, because they regarded him primarily as a philosophical rather than a religious authority, whose expertise in the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions was particularly amenable for Latin purposes precisely because of its religious orientation.

The Neo-Platonic dimension of Avicenna’s thought also meant that his views could be relatively easily associated with Christian Neo-Platonic authorities, above all Augustine, in a way that also suggested engagement with the philosophy of Aristotle. This alignment of Augustine and Aristotle with Avicenna was not perceived as problematic by scholastics, whose method of arguing involved finding quotations in authoritative sources that served as proof texts for their own claims and positions. As Mary Carruthers has noted, the ability of an authoritative text to generate new ideas over generations and even centuries was precisely what rendered it authoritative in the minds of medieval thinkers, for whom the authority of authorities, as noted above, was Augustine¹⁷.

In addition to the genuine works of Augustine, this period witnessed the wide circulation of spurious texts that were attributed to him mistakenly. One of these, the immensely popular De anima et spiritu, which was likely written by a twelfth-century Cistercian, includes a compilation of sources that lent themselves especially well to an Avicennian interpretation¹⁸. This text was the basis on which many early scholastics constructed the Avicennized Augustinianism. The most prominent scholars to do this were early Franciscans like John of La Rochelle, who tended to be the most enthusiastic philosophers of this period, while others like Philip the Chancellor and Albert the Great already raised doubts about the authenticity of the De spiritu and other pseudo-Augustinian writings¹⁹. The work of John and his collaborator, the aforementioned Alexander of Hales, eventually became the basis for the so called Summa Halensis, named for Hales, which was written between 1236–45 and endeavoured comprehensively to lay down a distinctly Franciscan perspective on theology and philosophy for the first time.

As recent research has shown, this text was one of the first, and certainly the foremost, of the period to make pervasive use of Avicenna’s philosophy in the development of its ideas about the nature of God and creatures. The perspectives articulated there were inherited by later Franciscans such as Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus, who received their initial theological training on the basis of this work, which was completed twenty years before Thomas Aquinas even set his hand to the task of writing his Summa Theologiae. By his time, the philosophical environment had shifted in that the era of ‘reading Aristotle with Avicenna’²⁰ as Amos Bertolacci has called it had given way to one in which the reading of Aristotle on his own terms was prioritized, not least by Aquinas.

The Franciscans who had originally related their views equally to Augustine and Aristotle now tended to try to associate them mainly with Augustine instead, as the example of Bonaventure indicates, although Scotus soon forged his own idiosyncratic reading of Aristotle which drew inspiration from his predecessors’ earlier Avicennian leanings. Thus, the two schools of thought which are most commonly associated with the high Middle Ages – Augustinian and Aristotelian – or better Franciscan and Dominican – emerged. These schools often found themselves in opposition to one another, which came to a head in 1277, when Franciscan sympathizers invoked their ‘Augustinianism’ as a basis for accusing Aquinas of abandoning the longstanding theological tradition and implicating him in condemnations that were issued in Paris this year.

In this regard, they neglected to to acknowledge that their so-called Augustinian tradition had only been developed in the previous generation, mostly on the basis of sources foreign to Augustine, such as Avicenna, and often by drawing on positions first advocated by Roland of Cremona and Hugh of St Cher among others. Although their solutions to doctrinal problems were not identical to those of the Dominicans in this period, and they did disagree on major issues, these early scholastic figures largely concurred when it came to a body of doctrines and questions that were supposed to be Augustinian²¹. The situation only changed, at least for the Dominicans, when Thomas Aquinas initiated a turn to Aristotle which had a considerable impact on the subsequent development of his school.

This school, like that of the Franciscans, became home to both theology and arts masters who were committed to working hand in hand on theological and philosophical questions, although some specialised more in certain areas than in others. The biggest difference between them post-Aquinas generation concerned precisely how the two schools envisaged the relationship between philosophy and theology, which was itself taken for granted. A view that has been contentiously put forward in recent years posits that some of the Franciscans who berated Aquinas, above all, John Duns Scotus, were responsible for finally establishing philosophy as an autonomous discipline, independent of theology, such as we know it today²². Among other things, Scotus is claimed to have done this by rejecting the doctrine of divine illumination as it had been formulated by Bonaventure, and before him, Hales and Rochelle. Although attributed to Augustine, this doctrine like many others was originally the product of the incorporation of Arabic-language sources²³.

According to the early Franciscan interpretation of it, the image of God consists in an innate knowledge of Being, a notion originally derived from Avicenna, without which there can be no accurate knowledge of beings in relation to their exemplars, which exist in the mind of God. This innate knowledge is the divine light by which all knowledge of reality is possible. Although Scotus did not reject the notion of an innate knowledge of Being as the condition for all knowledge, he did query the idea that this knowledge constitutes the image of God. In his view, the knowledge of Being is instead a natural possession of the soul, which is therefore capable of achieving accurate knowledge of its own accord²⁴. At first glance, Scotus’ conclusion might seem to entail a rebellion of philosophy against theology, a denial of philosophy’s role as theology’s handmaiden, However, the very opposite turns out to be true when the context of his argument is taken into account.

The reason Scotus denied that the innate knowledge of Being is the image of God – that is, the role of the divine light in human knowing – is that he wished to avoid the implication that God could somehow comprise a direct object of human knowledge²⁵. Furthermore, he was concerned that positing God’s collaboration in human knowledge through the help of innate concepts might suggest that God had created human beings unfit for the very task that is proper to them by nature, namely, to gain knowledge. In that sense, Scotus removed the divine influence as a factor in human knowing, not out of a desire to create artificial boundaries between faith and reason, or theology and philosophy, but out of a faithful and even pious intent to honour God in all his glory.

For all the famed rigors of his philosophy, Scotus was after all a member of the Franciscan order and shared in the religious assumptions and life that entailed. In light of these, it would be surprising if his intent was to erase God as a factor in philosophical inquiry. The more likely explanation for his approach is that he, like others at the time, had acquired a strong sense of what was appropriate for a religious person doing philosophy or theology to say or not to say about their subject matter. Although later thinkers may have advocated a view with surface similarities to that of Scotus, in a context where the symbiotic relationship between philosophy and theology was no longer assumed, in order to argue for philosophy’s independence from faith, it would be anachronistic to assign motives like theirs to Scotus. The context in which a view like his is advocated – religious or secular – makes all the difference in terms of its implications and its meaning.

The future of philosophy and theology

The task of specifying exactly when philosophy declared its independence from theology, if not in Scotus, is notoriously difficult and possibly not even profitable to pursue. For there is rarely one thinker or event that can be singled out as the cause of any development in intellectual history. This includes the situation we currently face in university departments of philosophy and theology, which generally operate as quite distinct entities. That however is not to deny that we can assess the exigencies of our current situation and try to mitigate them in the modes of thinking we formulate and adopt in the present and the future. In this regard, many contemporary scholars have sought to turn back to Thomas Aquinas, to recover his way of thinking about philosophy and theology, which is often said to compensate for the split between the disciplines that was supposedly affected by the Franciscans.

Although I have engaged in a similar project, I would like in the final part of this article to outline not only a Thomist-inspired understanding of the defining the relationship between philosophy and theology, but also one I have discovered through the reading of early Franciscan texts such as the Summa Halensis, which provides an optimal window into the theological and spiritual rationale behind the distinct approach to the relationship that the Franciscans ultimately adopted. The brief examination and comparison of these two models – Dominican and Franciscan – will help to illustrate that each one provides a viable and valuable way of conceiving the relationship between the two disciplines and their inter-dependency. Those approaches do vary in certain respects, not in a way that necessarily renders one superior to the other, but rather in a manner that entails different theological emphases and complementary strengths.

The Franciscan paradigm

The Franciscan paradigm is distinct in the way that it establishes love for God as the key to all true knowledge – philosophical or otherwise. This presupposes that God himself is the source of all beings that we may know, within whose mind their perfect exemplars necessarily exist. According to early Franciscans, we have seen, God is also the source of the innate knowledge of Being – an image of himself – on all human minds. This knowledge makes it possible for us to comprehend any given being in terms of the way it is known by God himself. In other words, it ensures the correspondence between our ideas and the exemplars for things that subsist in the mind of God.

As noted above, such knowledge of things ‘in themselves’ depends upon the love for God that makes us aware of him as the source of our ability to know in the first place. Those who lack this love, to the extent they do so, are inevitably ignorant of the innate knowledge of Being, and indeed of God, that exists in the mind and can therefore never be sure to attain accurate knowledge of things. That is why early Franciscans like Bonaventure expressed scepticism regarding the possibility of achieving sound philosophical knowledge outside the theological context. By contrast, those who love God, to the extent they do so, tap into the resource that consists in the innate knowledge of Being and thereby improve their chances of attaining full and accurate knowledge of beings.

This knowledge of natural beings gives a limited but nonetheless direct window into the nature of the divine being who is the source of all things. In this regard, Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum famously cited Francis of Assisi as an example of how love for God opens the doors of knowledge: the intensity of his love for God gave him special insight into the nature of God’s creatures and the way God’s love is expressed through each and every one of them. According to Bonaventure, this ability to find God’s love in creation became so mature and pervasive in Francis, that he eventually came to see only love and was thereby transported beyond the realm of knowledge to unity with the God of Love himself. As was typical for the Franciscan vision, consequently, love not only served as the precursor to all true knowledge but also as the ultimate culmination of it.

The way in which this vision was set up – with distinct realms allocated to love and knowledge, the supernatural and the natural, faith and reason, is what has led some to suppose there is too much room in the Franciscan intellectual tradition for severing the relationship between the two poles, as was perceived to have been done conclusively in the thought of Duns Scotus. As explained above, however, the reasons for describing the relationship between philosophy and theology in this way had nothing to do with a desire to bifurcate the two domains and cordon off the natural from the supernatural, thereby making it increasingly irrelevant. Instead, the goal was to stress the extent to which love for God is often needed to obtain an accurate perception of reality.

There are presumably many reasons for this; but one in particular is that human beings are prone to conceiving things that are ‘not God’ as if they have the absolute significance for human life that only God can have, at least for a certain purpose or in a certain respect. As Augustine put it in De Trinitate 8.3, they confuse ‘this good and that good with the Good.’ Thus, one might come to think of a certain relationship or career track as the be-all and end all of one’s existence and organize life around obtaining it. The problem with this approach, as Bonaventure and his earlier Franciscan contemporaries stressed, is that it inverts the proper order of things, in which God alone should be regarded as the supreme object of our desires. This in turn causes us to place our happiness at the mercy of fleeting and finite circumstances that are out of our control and thus sets us up for disappointment and frustration in life.

By contrast, love for God reminds us to put him first – not in a way that denigrates the value of other things that he has made but rather that enables us to see the limited and distinct way in which his nature and love is reflected and communicated to us in all our experiences. In this regard, the Franciscan account takes particularly seriously what contemporary scholars have described as the ‘noetic effects of sin’, the fact that sin or the loss of the knowledge of God as the supreme being has an incapacitating effect on the way we think about reality. That is not to deny that Franciscans acknowledged the ability of those without belief in God to achieve some understanding, philosophical or otherwise; but it is to highlight some significant limitations in terms of their capacity for attaining true knowledge which love for God secures.

The Dominican/Thomist paradigm

By many accounts, Aquinas had a much more liberal attitude when it came to affirming the ability of philosophers to achieve knowledge of reality. Where the Franciscans insisted on an innate knowledge of Being or God as essential to making sense of experience, Aquinas followed Aristotle in affirming experience itself as completely adequate for enabling human beings to form ideas about the nature of things. As noted above, the Franciscans saw knowledge as an all-or-nothing affair, in which the love of God provides access to the understanding of things as they ‘really are’, from the moment that ideas are attained. In Aquinas’ view, however, human ideas can and must be revised through continuous experience, which may challenge our preconceived ideas and generate growth in knowledge.

For Aquinas, consequently, knowledge is a gradual matter of achieving understanding that increasingly encompasses all the specific manifestations of any given type of thing. While such knowledge is in principle possible for all human beings to attain, Aquinas acknowledges that it can take a long time and much effort for those without belief in God to arrive at genuine understanding of philosophical truth or any aspect of reality. As we have seen, this is because human beings have a natural tendency to project their own narrow ideas of what is good onto the category of the supreme or transcendent good.

According to Aquinas, belief in God or at least some kind of transcendent being has the power conclusively to counteract this trend, because such a being, as the source of all beings, is not circumscribed by the limiting conditions that characterize those beings²⁶. For this reason, belief in him can prevent us from reducing the highest good to any good that is more limited. The problem Aquinas raises in this regard is that the knowledge of God is not innate, as Franciscans supposed. While it was present on the human mind at the initial creation, it was completely erased through sin, so that the only trace that is left of it is the natural desire for happiness that all people share. On this basis, Aquinas contends that the knowledge of God or the transcendent can only be restored through revelation, which reminds us that there is a God in the first place.

The reason this God must be specifically Triune, for Aquinas, is that the Triunity of God establishes his capacity for communication – at least inside himself – with the Father disclosing himself to the Son, and the Son in return to the Father through the Holy Spirit. The Incarnation of the Son of God is further crucial in Aquinas’ view to confirming God’s power to communicate with and to us on our own terms. That is not to say that belief in God, Triune and Incarnate, establishes the unknowable God as an object of thought in his own right. What it provides instead is the resource needed to put things other than God in proper perspective: to check our tendency to over or under-estimate their worth in ways that inhibit our ability to flourish. Although this revelation of God through his Son is received through initial faith, Aquinas is quick to stress that the full effect of the knowledge of God, which was erased through sin, like knowledge of anything else, can only be gradually restored.

On his account, this restoration happens when the knowledge of God as the supreme good, which exists in principle in the mind of the believer, is applied by the will in the assessment of ordinary circumstances, until it becomes habitual to do so. As this confirms, Aquinas sees the will and intellect as necessarily working together at all stages of the process to restore the intellect’s knowledge of God. In the Franciscan paradigm, by contrast, we have seen that love takes clear priority over knowledge. Here, the goal is not to gradually recover knowledge of God but to obtain a purer love for God which in turn gives improved access to the knowledge of God, whether in himself or in creatures, that is always in principle available. As noted above, the Franciscan view resulted from the belief that sin makes us completely ignorant of the innate knowledge of God that we always nevertheless possess.

The Dominican view however was a by-product of the belief that this knowledge had been forfeited altogether at the fall. Both schools of thought upheld the fundamental belief that our thinking about the world is broken in some way due to the loss of the knowledge of God. Moreover, both schools advocated the need to recover that knowledge in order to attain any knowledge whatsoever. The key difference between them came down to the question of whether love for God is the key to knowledge, or knowledge of God is the key to reorienting our desires or love. There is truth to both ways of thinking – to such an extent that one might say that they are best entertained together rather than in the mode of opposition that has too often characterized their relationship.

The advantage of both methods, moreover, is that they avoid the competitive relationship between philosophy and theology that is often at play in contemporary debates. Although the Franciscans and Dominicans define the relationship in different ways, scholars from both orders started from the assumption that philosophical questions about human nature and nature more generally are best pursued in the context of considering their divine source and end. By the same token, they addressed theological questions about the nature of God in view of wider questions about how he makes himself known to us in the world. While each discipline enjoyed its own purview on their understanding, neither was regarded as entirely independent of the other. In tracing the history of the development of the two distinct disciplines during the high Middle Ages, in the period’s two predominant schools of thought, consequently, I have sought to gesture towards a possible future for their collaboration as sisters-in-arms.

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Funding

This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [grant agreement No 714427].

Notes on contributors

Lydia Schumacher

Lydia Schumacher is Reader in Historical and Philosophical Theology in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of five monographs: Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Rationality as Virtue, Theological Philosophy (Routledge, 2015), Early Franciscan Theology (Cambridge, 2019), and Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought (Cambridge, 2022).

Notes

1. Schumacher, Theological Philosophy. Some of the material for this article came from Schumacher, ‘Thinking Philosophically in the Middle Ages.’

2. Callus, ‘The Function of the Philosopher,’ 156.

3. Blund, Treatise on the Soul, 13–15.

4. Hasse, Avicenna’s De anima, 38; Callus, ‘The Powers of the Soul,’ 157.

5. Bataillon, ‘Problèmes philosophiques dans les oeuvres théologiques,’ 450.

6. Williams, ‘Repenser l’intention et l’effet des décrets de 1231,’ 161.

7. See note 5 above, 452.

8. Bianchi, ‘Les interdictions relatives à l’enseignement d’Aristote au XIIIe siècle,’ 117, 119.

9. Williams, ‘Repenser l’intention et l’effet des décrets de 1231,’ 145.

10. Bianchi, ‘Les interdictions relatives à l’enseignement d’Aristote au XIIIe siècle,’ 123.

11. Williams, ‘Repenser l’intention et l’effet des décrets de 1231,’ 142, 148. Smalley, ‘Gregory IX and the Two Faces of the Soul,’ 19.

12. Rosemann, The Story of a Great Medieval Book.

13. Spatz, ‘Approaches and Attitudes to a New Theology Textbook.’

14. Hess, ‘Roland of Cremona’s Place in the History of Thought,’ 453. See also Roland of Cremona, Summae, ‘Quid sit subiectem theologiae,’ 22–4.

15. Bertollaci, ‘A Community of Translators.’

16. de Boer, The Science of the Soul, 217.

17. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 262.

18. McGinn, ‘Introduction.’

19. Théry, G. ‘L’authenticité du De spiritu et anima,’ 376.

20. See note 15 above.

21. Even Ezra, Ecstasy in the Classroom.

22. Horan, Postmodernity and Univocity.

23. Gilson, ‘Les sources Greco-arabes de l’augustinisme avicennisant.’

24. Schumacher, Divine Illumination, chapter 6.

25. Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities, 242–4.

26. Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God.