Scholasticism
Understand scholasticism — the medieval European intellectual method that attempted to reconcile Christian theology with classical Greek philosophy.
Scholasticism was the dominant intellectual method in medieval European universities from roughly the 12th to the 15th centuries. At its core was an ambitious project: reconciling the truths of Christian revelation with the philosophical methods of Aristotle and other classical thinkers, creating a unified system of knowledge that could explain both the natural world and the divine.
The movement was made possible by the translation of Aristotle's works from Arabic into Latin, primarily in 12th-century Toledo. When European thinkers encountered Aristotle's systematic logic, metaphysics, and natural philosophy — preserved and commented upon by Islamic scholars like Averroes and Avicenna — the impact was electric. Here was a comprehensive philosophical system that seemed to explain the natural world through reason alone. The question became: could it be reconciled with Christian faith?
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) produced the most influential synthesis in his Summa Theologica, arguing that faith and reason were complementary paths to truth. Other scholastics — Peter Abelard, William of Ockham, Duns Scotus — took different positions, but all engaged in the same project. Scholasticism's lasting legacy was the method itself: rigorous logical argument, systematic organization of knowledge, and the conviction that truth could withstand rational scrutiny. The medieval university, with its lectures, disputations, and degrees, was scholasticism's institutional expression.