Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

This book is not written for scholars of medieval theology. It is written for anybody who is new to the field, and who wants to find out more about the ideas of some of the major theologians of the medieval period. Rather than offering a survey of a myriad of theologians I have decided to focus on a limited number of key thinkers, and expound their ideas in some depth. I opted for a text-focused approach, often quoting from primary texts, thus allowing the authors to speak for themselves as much as possible. I have also incorporated some brief comments on the historical and cultural context of each period, which will assist the reader in contextualizing the authors we discuss.

This book, however, aims to be more than a survey. It is an invitation to think along with medieval authors. As a matter of fact, I wrote this book because I am firmly convinced that theology in the twenty-first century has a lot to learn from medieval authors. In a post-modern climate, in which the modern views on “autonomous reason” are increasingly being questioned it may prove fruitful to re-engage with pre-modern thinkers who, obviously, did not share our modern and post-modern presuppositions. Their different perspective does not antiquate their thought, as some of the “cultured despisers” of medieval thought might imagine. On the contrary, rather than rendering their views obsolete it makes them profoundly challenging and enriching, perhaps more so than any post-modern critique of modernity could possibly be. For the post-modern, as a mirror image of the modern, is still determined by key assumptions of the modern. Indeed, it could be plausibly argued that the post-modern critique is part and parcel of the history of modernity itself.