I wonder if Scholasticism arose in the West as an effort to bolster the armamentarium for responses to heresies.
I don't know about controversies in the East and how they were dealt with. I DO get the impression that for a while there scholasticism in the West led to a kind of Free Republic argumentativeness -- "You're a heretic," "I know you are but what am I?""I'm rubber, you're glue ..."
“I wonder if Scholasticism arose in the West as an effort to bolster the armamentarium for responses to heresies.”
You may well be right. We know that Aquinas’ Aristotelianism was in reality simply the context within which he chose to contest with the Mohammedan theologians, providing a common language and ground rules within which to have their discussions. It has been argued that from Duns Scotus on, however, Aristotelian logic (and thus increasing legalism, not that it wasn’t already there) became definitional of Scholasticism rather than just a conversational matrix of sorts. Personally, I think it got out of hand very quickly.
In the East there was certainly a great deal of “You’re a heretic” stuff, but it was pretty much over by the time of Aquinas. The Patristic/conciliar method prevalent in The Church, East and West, for the first 1000 years seems to have been able to handle heresy, ultimately, quite well, and without resort to the methods of Scholaticism or legalism...or for that matter the Inquisition or the Reformation.
Off to do battle for a client!