Scholasticism

Scholasticism shares Christianity's external structure but internally it has a different view of creation. It regards a self as having natural goodness supplemented by a donum superadditum ("given over and above"), a supernatural spiritual goodness, and sees Christianity as spiritual truth supplementing natural truth. Man's spiritual goodness has been destroyed by Defection, but his natural goodness has only been diminished.

It sees spiritual truth as revealed by God and accepted only by restored folk, and natural truth as attained autonomously and accepted, to various degrees, also by wicked folk.

It was first fully articulated by Thomas Aquinas, dominated West-European thinking from about AD 1300 until the time of "the Reformation" (c.1500 CE), and is still the cogniframe of many Christianoids.

It is so called because it was first articulated by scholars in the universities of Western Europe. The word can denote their style of debating, but I use it to denote the cogniframe expressed.

Scholastics have espoused various versions of "nature".

Aquinas espoused Aristotelian Hellenism, and this is still the official Roman Catholic view.

Some other Ritualist Christianoids have espoused other varieties of Apollonian Hellenism such as Platonism.

Renaissance Humanists espoused Personhood, a new attitude that arose within Scholasticism and later became a component of modern Humanism.

Most Protestants have espoused Humanism, initially Causality-orientated (naturliche ["naturalistic"]) but later often Personality-orientated (geistliche ["spiritual"]).

Scholastic Worldviews

Aristotelians

The rediscovery of Aristotle's writings transformed cosmology.

1200. Albert began a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christianity.

1250. Thomas Aquinas, his student, completed that synthesis.

Renaissance Humanists

1300. Dante Aligieri

1480. Leonardo da Vinci

1500. Erasmus of Rotterdam

1500. Thomas More

Back to The Major Cogniframes.