The Medieval Contribution

Abstract

Medieval culture (including science, philosophy and theology) laboriously emerged from the ashes of the Greek and Roman world left by wars and the invasions of barbarian tribes. Medieval thinkers started almost from nothing, and had enormous reverence for ancient writers. This is why the medieval culture was “of the overwhelmingly bookish and clerkly character”. In our own society most knowledge depends, in the last resort, on observation. But the Middle Ages depended predominantly on books. Medieval philosophy was a link between Greek rationality and the modern way of thinking. Around 1250 a great shift occurred in medieval philosophy. Before that date it remained under the influence of Platonic, or rather Neoplatonic, thinking. After that date the construction of the great synthesis of Christian theology with Aristotelian science and philosophy was well under way. The process was accompanied by the rise of first universities. St. Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Dominican, is said to have “Christianized Aristotle.” He succeeded in doing so in such a superb way that it finally led to what could be called an “Aristotelianization of Christianity.” The Scholastic method of never using imprecise or ambiguous terms compelled medieval authors to start with careful definitions. The evolution of concepts is a key element in the progress of every science. Concepts live in definitions and in the adventures of solving problems, and in these fields medieval thinkers performed a useful service. Modern physics will be born as soon as Scholastic definitions (aimed at grasping the essence of things) change into definitions containing a recipe of how to measure a corresponding property (the so-called operational definitions). It seems that this latter step could not be accomplished without the former preparatory steps. No science can exist without a certain degree of abstraction, and medieval Scholasticism was certainly a very good exercise for philosophers and theologians in performing various kinds of abstraction. It is true that that the method of abstraction was always associated with doing philosophy, but in this respect medieval philosophy was very special. Abstraction became an art, subject to rigorous rules of Scholastic procedures and logical schemes.