Free Republic

The Inclination to the Truth Msgr. Charles Pope • March 14, 2016 • In a recent post (Is There a Way Back to Undeniable Reality and Universally Binding Norms?) I discussed how we today tend to “live in our heads” a lot more so than did the people living in biblical times and even those who lived up to and including the High Middle Ages and the Scholastic Period. Prior to that time, the “real world” was taken to be largely self-evident. But in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a school of thought later called “nominalism” began...

Twice a year (Labor Day and Memorial Day) I enjoy a picnic provided by one of my former seminary professors, along with many of his former students, mostly from classes that came years after me. During that last one, I toasted my old teacher in gratitude for the fact that he had always maintained, in my defense, that one can still believe in the Bound Powers theory, in spite of the language used in Vatican II. He smirked, and asked the younger priests there if they had ever heard of the Bound Powers theory; and no one raised his hand....

Scholasticism (Gk. scholastikos, “schooled” or “educated”) Scholasticism was a school of thought which sought to reconcile the established Christian belief within a body of reason or rational thought, especially that of Greek philosophy. The “scholastic period” primarily refers to the period during the late middle ages (eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries) in the West when Christianity was experiencing a renaissance of learning and education and was being challenged by the rational thought of Islam. Early Christian scholastics include Anselm, Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas. The term can also refer to any system of...