Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on the text
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The way of the Schoolmen
- 2 Law and Gospel: the reforms of Luther and Melanchthon
- 3 The soul
- 4 The Providence of God
- 5 The construction of orthodoxy
- Conclusion: a transformation of natural philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
- IDEAS IN CONTEXT
1 - The way of the Schoolmen
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on the text
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The way of the Schoolmen
- 2 Law and Gospel: the reforms of Luther and Melanchthon
- 3 The soul
- 4 The Providence of God
- 5 The construction of orthodoxy
- Conclusion: a transformation of natural philosophy
- Bibliography
- Index
- IDEAS IN CONTEXT
Summary
Just as for the people of God there was an exile in Babylon while Jerusalem was their homeland, so ignorance is the exile of the inner man though sapientia is his homeland … The route from this exile to the homeland is scientia, for scientia deals with earthly matters, while sapientia is concerned with divine matters. One should pass along this route not by steps of the body, but by desires of the heart. Indeed this route leads to the homeland through the ten directing arts and through the books cleaving to the way and serving it like so many towns and villages along a route.
On the exile of the soul and on its homeland, or, On the arts Honorius of Autun (c. 1156)The University of Wittenberg was founded in 1502. By then, men in the universities had been learning, teaching, disputing upon and writing about natural philosophy for at least three hundred years. Natural philosophy was firmly embedded in the arts curriculum and had become an integral part of medieval learning. Its standard texts were Aristotle's libri naturales, such as the Physica, the De caelo, the De generatione et corruptione, the De anima, the Meteora and the Parva naturalia. These were tackled following a set of logical procedures and recognized authorities. Together with logic and metaphysics, natural philosophy formed the core of learning undertaken in medieval universities. The University of Wittenberg began by inheriting the kind of learning characteristic of late fifteenth-century German universities. It is this learning, including natural philosophy, that Luther violently objected to, in person at Wittenberg and more generally in print. I shall therefore begin with a summary of how the medieval Schoolmen dealt with natural philosophy.
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- Information
- The Transformation of Natural PhilosophyThe Case of Philip Melanchthon, pp. 7 - 26Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995