The Question of the Validity of Logic in Late Medieval Thought

Abstract

In the history of logic, there are two periods in which several scholars have simultaneously been among the leading theologians and logicians of their time. The first period was inaugurated by Peter Abelard in twelfth-century Paris; William of Ockham from fourteenth-century Oxford is the best-known representative of the second period. By the twelfth century, logic played an important role in education, and this explains some general features of twelfth-century theology. The official statements of the Church offered a lot of puzzles to logically trained minds; understandably so, since at the centre of the doctrinal picture was the Trinity of three distinct persons each identical to one and the same divine essence, one of these persons, moreover, being a person with two different natures, one divine and one human. Twelfth-century theologians were eager to develop conceptual distinctions by which one could avoid inconsistencies in doctrinal statements. Some exceptions notwithstanding, medieval authors did not think that this would make the mysteries of faith more easily understood. They did believe, however, that even though we necessarily have difficulty seeing the sense of statements concerning the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Sacrament of the altar, we could nevertheless understand that these statements are not conceptually inconsistent, i.e. not non-sensical and, hence, possibly clear and comprehensible to higher intellects, though only very restrictedly so to human minds.