Augustine and Scholasticism

Augustine of Hippo lived from 354 to 430 CE. He was born in Roman North Africa and became a bishop and a major thinker. His ideas shaped Christian ethics for over a thousand years.

What is Confessions?

Confessions is Augustine’s best-known book, written around 396 to 400. It has thirteen books. The first nine tell his own life story. Scholars call it “philosophy in autobiography”.

Why is it called Confessions?

The word has two senses. It means admitting sin. It also means praising God for forgiveness. Augustine does both while telling of his own struggles.

What is the memory hook?

Confessions: a life story used to teach about God and the will.

Augustine asked why good people still do wrong. His answer was the human will. He said the will is damaged by original sin, so it cannot heal itself.

What is original sin?

Augustine taught that Adam’s first sin passed a tendency to sin to all his descendants. Before the fall, Adam had real free will. After it, people lost that freedom.

What is grace?

Grace is God’s help, given freely. Augustine said only grace can free the will for true virtue. Grace does not force anyone. It restores the freedom to choose well.

How did he answer Pelagius?

Pelagius said humans can avoid sin by their own effort. A church council condemned that view in 418. Augustine held that people depend wholly on grace.

What is evil, then?

Augustine said evil is not a thing in itself. It is a lack of good. This answered the Manichean idea of evil as a rival power.

What is the memory hook?

Will is wounded. Grace is the cure.

Augustine wrote City of God after Rome was sacked in 410. Many pagans blamed Christians for the disaster. He began the book in 412 and finished it in 426.

What is the City of God?

Augustine said a community is defined by what it loves. The City of God is made of those who love God above all. The earthly city is made of those who love themselves above all.

Are the cities places?

No. The two cities are defined by love, not by place. Everyone either loves God above all, or does not.

Why did it matter?

The book argued that Rome’s fall was not caused by Christianity. It also offered a view of history and politics that influenced later thinkers.

What is the memory hook?

Two cities, two loves.

Scholasticism was the style of thinking taught in medieval universities. It tried to join Christian faith with reasoned argument. The word names both a method and a system.

Where did it grow?

It grew in the new universities. Paris became a university by about 1200, and Oxford developed at the same time. Teachers there trained students in careful, step-by-step argument.

What did Aristotle do?

Translations of the full works of Aristotle reached Europe during the thirteenth century. After some church opposition, they became central. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) held that Aristotle could not truly conflict with Christian teaching.

What was the method?

Teachers wrote commentaries on set texts. They raised questions and weighed arguments for and against. Peter Lombard’s Sentences was the standard theology text.

How did it end?

The style lasted for centuries. New science and Descartes entered teaching late in the seventeenth century. It faded late in the seventeenth century.

What is the memory hook?

Scholasticism: faith plus Aristotle plus debate.

William of Ockham was an English Franciscan friar. He was born around 1287 and died in 1347. He studied at Oxford but never finished his theology degree.

What is nominalism?

Ockham denied that universals exist outside the mind. A universal is a general idea, like “humanity”. He said only single things exist. General ideas are concepts we form after seeing real similarities.

What did he say about faith and reason?

Ockham held that belief in God rests on faith, not on proof. He rejected the standard proofs of God’s existence. He wanted theology kept apart from philosophy.

Why did he clash with the Pope?

He judged Pope John XXII’s ruling on Franciscan poverty to be heretical. He was summoned to Avignon around 1323–24. In 1328 he fled to Louis of Bavaria and was excommunicated.

What is the memory hook?

Ockham: single things, faith apart, trouble with Rome.

Occam’s razor says a simpler explanation is usually better. Do not add causes you do not need. The name comes from Ockham, but the story is not so simple.

Did Ockham coin the name?

No. He never called it a razor. The name first appeared in 1852, in the work of Sir William Hamilton. Similar ideas existed earlier in Aristotle and Aquinas.

What did he actually say?

The common line “do not multiply entities beyond necessity” is not found in his texts. He preferred the form “it is useless to do with more what can be done with less”.

How should we use it?

It limits needless assumptions. A simpler theory is more likely true, but not certainly. It guides thinking. It does not decide facts.

What is the memory hook?

Razor: trim what you do not need.