Scholasticism and the Dialectic

Farrell’s third volume argues that the dialectic lodged in the Augustinian doctrine of God worked itself out first as scholasticism — theology reconstituted as a dialectical system, with the Filioque and absolute divine simplicity as its axioms — culminating in Aquinas and formalized at the Council of Florence. This file expounds that claim as Farrell’s argument and flags, plainly, the historiographical objections to reading a whole intellectual movement as the logical unfolding of one theological premise.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (modern theological literature; historiography) — Farrell’s thesis, not Church dogma

The Claim

Volume III of GHD — History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe — is where the book makes its most sweeping and least verifiable claims, and the reader must be told so at the outset: what follows is Farrell’s thesis about how ideas moved through Western history, not a teaching of the Church and not an established finding of historians (see The Genre of Theological History; METHODOLOGY.md, §4.1).

The first great “cultural consequence” is scholasticism. Farrell argues that once absolute divine simplicity and the relations-of-opposition account of the persons were installed as the axioms of Western theology (see Absolute Divine Simplicity), theology itself had to become dialectical system-building — the deployment of dialectic (the logic of distinction-by-opposition) to derive and organize the whole of Christian doctrine from a simple essence. Scholasticism, on this reading, is not merely a method that happened to arise in the medieval schools; it is the necessary form that theology takes once the doctrine of God is dialectical. The dialectic in the source demands a dialectical science, and scholasticism is that science (Farrell, GHD, Vol. III).

Farrell traces this from the early scholastics through its high point in Thomas Aquinas, whose synthesis of Aristotle and Augustinian theology he reads as the fullest expression of the dialectical God: God as actus purus, absolutely simple, with the persons as subsistent relations, and the Filioque woven into the system. The Council of Florence (1439), which defined the Filioque and stated that in God “all things are one where there is no opposition of relation,” is for Farrell the dogmatic crystallization of the whole dialectical trajectory — the Second Europe declaring its metaphysics as creed (Farrell, GHD, Vol. III; on Florence’s formula, see the standard accounts in Siecienski, The Filioque [2010]).

What Is Sound in the Claim

Part of this has real purchase, and the collection should grant it. That Latin scholasticism did develop a highly systematic theology organized around absolute divine simplicity and relations-of-opposition is simply true; the formula of Florence is real and says what Farrell says it says. That Orthodox theology took a different path — apophatic, energetic, less systematizing, grounded in the essence-energies distinction and the experience of deification rather than in dialectical derivation — is likewise a genuine and often-noted contrast (see St. Gregory Palamas; Orthodoxy: Theosis). David Bradshaw’s Aristotle East and West makes a careful, scholarly version of a related contrast — how the divergent receptions of Aristotle’s energeia shaped two different metaphysics of God — and Bradshaw’s book is the sober counterpart to Farrell’s sweeping one (Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West [2004]; see The Scholarly Debate).

Where the Claim Overreaches — and Its Own Counter-Evidence

The historiographical objections are serious and must be stated (per METHODOLOGY §4.2):

  • Mono-causality. To say that scholasticism is the necessary output of a Trinitarian premise treats a vast, varied, centuries-long intellectual movement as the logical unfolding of a single idea. Historians of medieval thought would point to a dozen other drivers — the recovery of Aristotle through Arabic and then direct translation, the rise of the universities, the demands of canon law, the internal dynamics of the schools — none of which reduce to the doctrine of divine simplicity. Cultures and intellectual movements are overdetermined; mono-causal accounts of them are exactly what the discipline distrusts (see The Genre of Theological History).
  • The disputed root. The whole chain depends on the claim that Augustine’s theology is rigidly, viciously dialectical — the very claim the Ayres/Barnes reassessment and the Orthodox Readings of Augustine scholars contest (see Farrell’s Reading of Augustine). If the root is not as dialectical as Farrell needs, the derivation of scholasticism from it loses its necessity.
  • Aquinas and the essence-energies question. Marcus Plested’s Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (2012) documents that Byzantine theologians — including in the very Palamite century — read, translated, and in part appropriated Aquinas, and that the relationship between Thomist and Palamite theology is far more entangled than a flat opposition allows. Some Byzantines found Aquinas usable; the “two civilizations” wall is more porous than Farrell’s frame permits (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas [2012]; see The Scholarly Debate). This is counter-evidence internal to Farrell’s own subject matter: if Palamite-era Byzantines could read Aquinas with profit, the scholastic “dialectic” was not the sealed alien system the thesis requires.

Holding the Claim

The reader should therefore hold Farrell’s account of scholasticism as a suggestive, partly illuminating thesis — it captures something real about the systematizing, essence-first character of Latin scholastic theology and its contrast with the Orthodox path — while declining the strong claim that scholasticism was caused, with logical necessity, by the Augustinian Trinity. The genuine dogmatic difference (absolute simplicity and the Filioque versus the monarchy and the energies) is one thing, confessed by the Church; the total intellectual history built upon it is another, and it is Farrell’s, contested by the historians and complicated by his own tradition’s actual engagement with Aquinas (see What the Reader Can Take With Confidence).

See Also

References

  • Farrell, Joseph P. God, History, and Dialectic, Vol. III: History: The Theological Pathology of the Second Europe. 1997; 4-vol. ed. 2016.
  • Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  • Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Siecienski, A. Edward. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010 (on the Council of Florence).