Medieval Christian Theology: An Introduction
"Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her. She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her." — The Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-13
The term "theology" has, for our purposes, a capacious ambiguity: it can signify both doctrine and discipline. On the one hand, it refers to the body of concepts about God and his relations to the world and to humans, held as either formal points of doctrine, and thus sanctioned by appropriate authorities, as a more informal set of ideas or doctrinal emphases held generally by the practitioners of a particular religion, or by a significant subset of those practitioners. And so
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one can speak meaningfully of "Reformed Protestant theology," or of "the theology of the Council of Nicaea" or of "the theology the late Middle Ages." On the other hand, the term "theology" can also includes the vital activity of thinking about God (and religious topics more generally), whether that thinking occurs in a disciplined and scholarly way, as we see with, say, Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, or Duns Scotus; or in a more idiosyncratic, perhaps even mystical context, as with Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, and many others. Some writers, especially those of a more scholastic bent, consciously thought of themselves as theologians (or "philosophers"), while some writers performed theological thinking even though they may have been writing poems, romances, chronicles or other literary or historical texts. Thus we might speak of the theology achieved or implied by Dante's literary project, or by Chaucer's, or even Villon's or Malory's.
Among the more self-conscious and intentional theologians, the main energy that enlivened the Catholic Christian theology of the Middle Ages was perhaps best summed up by Anselm of Canterbury, who defined theology as fides quaerens intellectum: “faith seeking understanding.” In the earliest centuries of the Christian era, this entailed an imperative to understand properly the nature of God, the nature and mission of Jesus Christ, the role of the Catholic Church in the world, and the relationship of an orthodox Christian faith both to Judaism and to the various heresies and heterodoxies that had emerged at that time. As the centuries progressed, medieval theologians had the opportunity to fine-tune and sometimes dispute earlier positions, to articulate religiously-informed responses to an ever-changing variety of cultural and political situations, and to think through the tenets of the Christian faith in the face of intellectual challenges from Islamic philosophy and the newly-recovered works of Aristotle. Insofar as the corpus of medieval Christian theology—“the Queen of the Sciences”—represents the ongoing confrontation and cooperation between faith and human reason, it stands as one of the richest most remarkable monuments of the medieval mind.
In the end, it is highly debatable how much religious identity rests in abstract theological concepts rather than in the embodied practices of living together in community with fellow believers, in the devotional acts of prayer and participation in the cycles of a liturgical calendar, and in daily interactions with the material trappings of a religious culture—in the case of medieval Europe with churches and cathedrals, with clerical vestments, with statues of Christ and his saints, with the light of candles, the smell of incense, the chanting of psalms, the ringing of steeple bells. A typical medieval merchant or farmer (or, for that matter, even the occasional parish priest) might know certain prayers or perform certain regular devotions or rituals without grasping their full theological significance, reciting common prayers like the Paternoster (“Our Father”) in Latin from memory without knowing what most of the words meant: the little boy in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, blithely singing the hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater over and over, even after his own murder, is a case in point.
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We shall have the opportunity to explore the lived material aspects of medieval Christian devotion elsewhere. But, whether acknowledged or not by the great majority of believers, these practices are underpinned by the basic doctrinal principles of the Christian faith, principles derived from the Christian Bible, refined and reasoned out by many of the early Church Fathers, codified in the course of the early ecumenical Church councils, especially the Councils of Nicaea (325 CE), Ephesus (430 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE), and further elaborated and explicated by thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. The theological ideas outlined here remained central, even basic, to Christianity from these early Church councils through to the modern age, even if they often evolved and adapted to emerging cultural situations. The pages below review the abiding theological tenets of the medieval Christian world.
Explore these links for specific topics that explicate the basics of medieval Christian doctrine and theological thinking:
Further Reading
- Anselm of Canterbury, "Proslogion," in The Major Works, eds. Brian Davies & G. R. Evans (Oxford UP, 2008)
- David Bentley Hart, "Tradition and Authority: A Vaguely Gnostic Meditation," in Theological Territories (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020)
- Irenaeus of Lyons, On the Apostolic Preaching, trans. John Behr (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2012.
- Clare Monagle, The Scholastic Project (Arc Humanities Press, 2017)
- Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Basil Blackwell, 1952)
- Rik Van Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to Medieval Theology (Cambridge UP, 2012)
- Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale UP, 2005)