Contra the Schoolmen: Reformation and continuity

... as the School-authors say - Article XIII

... as all the Schoolmen do - An Homily of Repentance, Part II

When the Anglican formularies, echoing other expressions of the Reformation, critique the 'Schoolmen', is it not another expression of rupture?  The Schoolmen, after all, represented a noble development in theological inquiry and teaching in the medieval Latin West, responding creatively to a new philosophical context. Against this, the Reformation invocation of Scripture against the Schoolmen, and the broadsides against their engagement with philosophy, can appear to be a forerunner of an unimaginative, flat fundamentalism, uninterested in and incapable of the serious philosophical reflection which has characterised the Church's mission since the Apostle arrived in Athens.

Except, that is, for the fact that the Reformation critique of School-authors reflected a tradition already present amidst the theologies of the Latin West.  In How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I, Graham Ward explores Hugh of St Victor's critique of Abelard:

The problem with Abelard's method, and the scholastic approaches it encouraged, was that the distinction between grace and nature all but disappears.  Not only does a Pelagianism ensue but a spectre of ontologism arises in which, it might seem possible to know God directly by unaided human reason. Hugh's theology steers strongly away from either such Pelagianism or ontologism by being consistently orientated towards prayer and meditation, as in the tradition of the monastic lectio divina - the exegesis of and commentary on Scripture (p.55).

In other words, the Reformation's turn to Scripture over and against the Pelagianism and ontologism incipient in the School-authors was no proto-fundamentalist protest, but a retrieval of a rich tradition of theology defined primarily by its orientation towards and engagement with Sacred Scripture.  The Reformation, then, becomes not rupture but ressourcement.  In this context, we can hear Cranmer's urgings as calling the parish to share in that "tradition of the monastic lectio divina":

intending thereby, that the Clergy, and especially such as were Ministers in the congregation, should (by often reading, and meditation in God's word) be stirred up to godliness themselves, and be more able to exhort others by wholesome doctrine, and to confute them that were adversaries to the truth; and further, that the people (by daily hearing of holy Scripture read in the Church) might continually profit more and more in the knowledge of God, and be the more inflamed with the love of his true Religion.

Ward emphasises that despite Hugh's protest and challenge, "it was Abelard's method that would carry the day".  Ward goes on to state:

Being a theologian was fast becoming a profession.  This method has the effect of 'desacralizing ... sacra pagina' (p.63).

The consequences of this are significant for the Brad Gregory Unintended Reformation approach - the Reformation as the parent of secularization. This is to misread secularism's genealogy, as we see in Ward's conclusion regarding scholasticism:

But new purely intellectualist notes were being tried out that provided seminal means for the procreation of secular reason (p.64).

In addition to retrieving the attentiveness to sacra pagina that was the monastic tradition of lectio divina, there is another aspect of the Reformation that suggests it can be understood as recovering this earlier critique of the School-authors.  In his discussion of Hugh's De sacramentis, Ward notes:

In an interesting foreshadowing of Calvin, it is faith ... that is the created dynamic in the effectiveness of the sacraments ... It is faith that facilitates the restoration through grace (p.53).

In the words of Article XXVIII:

And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.

Rather than rupture, the Reformation's critique of the School-authors - enshrined in the Anglican formularies - stands in some continuity with the outline Ward provides of an earlier tradition critical of scholasticism's claims for nature and reason.  Reformation concerns that theology should be shaped and formed by attentiveness to Scripture and partaking of the sacraments "by faith with thanksgiving" similarly echo aspects of Hugh's alternative - rooted in the practice of monastic communities - to scholasticism.

The formularies' Reformation critique of the School-authors, then, is a sign not of rupture but of rich continuity, in which the ordered, liturgical reading of Scripture, and meditiation upon that reading through preaching, again becomes central to the Church's life, rather than the doctrine of the Schoolmen and the practices associated with it.  In the words of Ward:

The reading of Scripture has agency to affect salvation; it is part of an ontological operation in the economy of the divine (p.43).