The Condemnations That Tried to Stop Scholastic Philosophy

The confidence that reason could serve revelation was not universally shared even inside the medieval schools that built it. By the 1260s and 1270s, some masters in the University of Paris's arts faculty were teaching Aristotelian and Averroist positions, among them that the world has no beginning in time and that a single intellect is shared by all humanity rather than each person having a separate immortal soul, as philosophical conclusions in their own right, defended as what reason shows even where it conflicted with Christian doctrine. Bishop Etienne Tempier of Paris responded in 1277 with a condemnation of 219 propositions drawn from this teaching, a document broad enough to catch positions associated with Thomas Aquinas himself alongside the Latin Averroists it chiefly targeted, and backed by the threat of excommunication for anyone who taught them. The condemnation did not simply suppress inquiry. Historians of science have argued that by forcing philosophers to treat some Aristotelian necessities as merely one possibility among several God could have chosen instead, it opened room for thought about other possible worlds that later fed into the new physics of the scientific revolution. What it settled beyond dispute was that Scholasticism's method could not by itself guarantee where reason would lead, and that the theologians who built the method were also the ones with authority to police its conclusions.