Monastic life, by the thirteenth century, which marked the height of papal power and the birth of the mendicant orders, there arose scholasticism, which is “the name given to a theology that developed in the [cathedral] schools [that] became the center of theological activity.[1] In these cathedral schools, scholasticism sought to make “an immense intellectual effort to investigate and bring into a single system the articles of faith and reason.”[2] The ways and means by which faith and reason were investigated were through the use of hermeneutics, which involve “all methods of interpreting philosophical or literary texts, including biblical ones [with the intent of] being more involved in the problem of how to achieve an authentic understanding of a culture and an age other than one’s own.”[3] This was, of course, an essential aspect of monastic life as a theological activity. Consider the role that Origen of Alexandria (184-253), a Church Father from the 3rd century CE., plays in this. Hermeneutics, then, was “Origen’s most enduring influence on the [early] church [which endured into the medieval church, surmising that] every text has a spiritual meaning [and] the interpreter [must] discern this meaning, and divine power must be added to the words to make them effective.”[4] As a result, Origen’s use of hermeneutics had a major impact on scholasticism of the medieval church, which, eventually, “was the determinative cognitive attitude of the whole Middle Ages [and] is the methodological explanation of Christian doctrine.”[5]
[1] Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (V.1) (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1984), 311.
[2] William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press Inc., 1980), 514.
[3] Geddes MacGregor, ed., Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy (New York, NY: Paragon House, 1989), 306.
[4] Sinclair Ferguson and David F. Wright, eds., New Dictionary of Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 482.
[5] Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 135.
All Things Theological 