2 - Civil philosophy

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the Foreword that he wrote to the first German translation of Grotius' De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1707), Christian Thomasius was in no doubt about who the enemy was. In outlining the damage done to law, ethics, and politics by scholasticism, he begins with the four books of Peter Lombard's Sentences, attacking them for offering a philosophical explication of Christian doctrine:

It is likely that in these four books Lombard attempted to unite the doctrines of Augustine and Aristotle; [for] the whole work contains a mish-mash of theology and philosophy. The Holy Scriptures are explained in accordance with the principles of pagan philosophy. In ethics and natural law the old stupidities are advanced. Lombard's book was the staff and rod of the theology faculty, over which the theology professors fought in their glosses, just as the jurists fought over their Corpus juris.

If scholasticism corrupted religion, then it simultaneously gave rise to philosophical sectarianism among those purporting to offer the one true metaphysics of faith:

Because their explanations were not of a single opinion and yet each claimed to be right, various sects arose among these orthodox scholastics, including the Albertists, the Thomists, the Scotists, and the Occamists, among whom the reputation of Thomas Aquinas overwhelmed the rest.