SCHOLASTICISM, the name usually employed to denote the most typical products of mediaeval thought, and commonly employed with differing shades of meaning down to modern times when its application has become fixed in accordance with the latest views of modern philosophy. These views are so far-reach ing and complicated that the present article will be confined to an historical sketch of Scholasticism merely, and the reader is re ferred to the bibliography for details of modem publications on the subject.
After the centuries of intellectual darkness which followed upon the closing of the philosophical schools in Athens (529), and the death of Boetius, the last of the ancient philosophers, the first symptoms of renewed intellectual activity appear contempor aneously with the consolidation of the empire of the West in the hands of Charlemagne. He endeavoured to attract to his court the best scholars of Britain and Ireland, and by imperial decree (787) commanded the establishment of schools in con nection with every abbey in his realms. Peter of Pisa and Alcuin of York were his advisers, and under their care the opposition long supposed to exist between godliness and secular learning speedily disappeared. Besides the celebrated school of the Palace, where Alcuin had among his hearers the members of the imperial family and the dignitaries of the empire as well as talented youths of humbler origin, we hear of the episcopal schools of Lyons, Orleans and St. Denis, the cloister schools of St. Martin of Tours, of Fulda, Corbie, Fontenelle and many others, besides the older monasteries of St. Gall and Reichenau. These schools became the centres of mediaeval learning and speculation, and from them the name Scholasticism is derived (cf. Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol., i. 471, 1906). They were designed to communicate in struction in the seven liberal arts which constituted the educa tional curriculum of the middle ages. (See TRIVIUM.) The name doctor scholasticus was applied originally to any teacher in such an ecclesiastical gymnasium, but gradually the study of dialectic or logic overshadowed the more elementary disciplines, and the general acceptation of "doctor" came to be one who occupied himself with the teaching of logic. The philosophy of the later Scholastics is more extended in its scope; but to the end of the mediaeval period philosophy centres in the discussion of the same logical problems which began to agitate the teachers of the 9th and loth centuries.
tioned date served only as marks for the obloquy heaped upon the schools by the men of the new time. Erigena is really of the spiritual kindred of the Neoplatonists and Christian mystics rather than of the typical Scholastic doctors, and, in fact, the activity of Scholasticism is mainly confined within the limits of the 11th and the 14th centuries. It is divisible into two well marked periods—the first extending to the end of the 12th cen tury and embracing as its chief names Roscellinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux and Abelard, while the second extended from the beginning of the 13th century to the Renaissance and the general distraction of men's thoughts from the problems and methods of Scholasticism. In this second period the names of Albertus Mag nus, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus (q.v.) represent (in the 13th century and the first years of the 14th century) the cul mination of Scholastic thought and its consolidation into system.
Prantl says that there is no such thing as philosophy in the middle ages; there are only logic and theology. The remark over looks two facts—firstly that the main objects of theology and philosophy are identical, though the method of treatment is dif ferent, and secondly that logical discussion commonly leads up to metaphysical problems, and that this was pre-eminently the case with the logic of the Schoolmen. But the saying draws attention to the two great influences which shaped mediaeval thought—the tradition of ancient logic and the system of Christian theology. Scholasticism opens with a discussion of certain points in the Aristotelian logic ; it speedily begins to apply its logical distinc tions to the doctrines of the church; and when it attains its full stature in St. Thomas it has, with the exception of certain mys teries, rationalized or Aristotelianized the whole churchly system. Or we might say with equal truth that the philosophy of St. Thomas is Aristotle Christianized. The Schoolmen contemplate the universe of nature and man not with their own eyes but in the glass of Aristotelian formulae. Their chief works are in the shape of commentaries upon the writings of "the philosopher" (Aris totle). Their problems and solutions alike spring from the master's dicta—from the need of reconciling these with one another and with the conclusions of Christian theology.