St Thomas Aquinas on the “Scientific” Nature of Theology

Reflecting on the practice of theology to say what theology is and the kind of knowledge it might lead to is one of the most difficult things about doing theology. St Thomas Aquinas famously did this in the first question of the Summa Theologiae. It is a brief statement that is the culmination of a line of development from the time theology was taken up by the cathedral schools in the twelfth century. It is brilliantly conceived and, in some respects, wrong. The development of theology into something like its modem Sense as a rational procedure and an academic discipline owes a huge debt to Peter Abailard (1079-1 142). Of course, Christian theology had been practised for a thousand years before Abailard and, in a quite different sense, can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek poets. But it was Abailard who introduced the use of dialectic (or what we would now call logic) so that truth in sacra doctrina was to be established by rational procedures and not simply by appealing to traditional authorities. It also took theology teaching beyond being little more than a literary analysis of scripture (as it had been with Anselm of Laon, for example) to being once more a speculation about the nature of God, but a speculation no longer limited to the opinions of the Church Fathers, opinions which Abailard had shown in Sic et Non were sometimes contradictory. Abailard's dialectical theology first appeared in his Tractatus de unitate et trinitate divina and led to his condemnation at Soissons in 1121, mainly because of the machinations of Bernard of Clairvaux. Abailard defended himself in his Theologia Christiana (1 123-4) and Introductio ad theologiarn (1 125) and it i s from this point that "theology" became widely used for the discipline with which we are familiar, though St Thomas still called it sacra doctrina a century and a half later. At that time, however, St Bernard called Abailard derisively an "old master turned new theologian".' Abailard's move was to take theology beyond the reading of scripture (lectio divina) towards the disputations which became a standard part of the teaching of theology in