The rise of scholasticism took place in opposition to monasticism. In the ninth century the leading thinkers had not advanced beyond the conception of a natural social state, characterized by chaotic conditions, and organized by political machinery. By the twelfth century only the faintest glimmerings of a doctrine of popular sovereignty had begun to appear. The thought of the day was largely theological.
The church through its systems of monasteries had maintained centers where religious and intellectual traditions had been preserved. These centers were undoubtedly important factors in conserving much that was valuable in an age when ruthless disregard for civilized values prevailed.
Because of the abuses which sprang up in connection with the monasteries, certain positive reactions against the monasteries arose. St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) turned from the monastery to actual life. He inaugurated a method for the regeneration of society. He and his followers lived and spent themselves among the actual poor, subjecting themselves to the economic conditions of the poor. They helped the poor, not by giving alms as an expiation for sin and to secure self-salvation, but by the first-hand giving of their lives. St. Francis ignored the regular ecclesiastical conception of charity and gave it all the reality of a new and genuine social force. By renouncing the possession of property and living as the poor live, he obtained what he could secure in no other way—the poor man’s point of view. In this way, also, he secured an entrance into the poor man’s mind and heart that could not be had so well by any other method. By renouncing wealth and accepting literal poverty he reached the core of the problem of poverty. St. Francis was motivated by a desire to live a life of love. He spent not wealth but his life for the poor.
Scholasticism developed as a reaction against churchly asceticism. According to scholasticism the individual should look to reason rather than to church dogma for religious and spiritual guidance. Scholasticism repudiated church traditions as a guide for individual action; it turned to Aristotelian logic for its technique. Thomas Aquinas (1226–1274), the best known of the scholastic philosophers, pushed forward the Aristotelian premises as follows: Man is a social being: he unites with other individuals in a social organization in order to gain his own purposes. The individual looks to able rulers for wise political guidance; he accords the requisite power to these rulers. Aquinas thus recognized a tacit social compact, or contract, foreshadowing Rousseau.
In religion, scholasticism reduced religious mysticism to rational forms. It based religion on learning rather than on authority; it pursued the methods of reasoning rather than of contemplation.
Scholasticism furthered the advancement of learning; it aided and developed the life of the universities. It encouraged the growth of independent thinking, although its decline set in about the fourteenth century, before it had had a fair opportunity to inaugurate a movement which would lead to an inductive or a positivistic philosophy, or sociology.
Various other thought elements appeared in the closing centuries of the Middle Ages. As early as the ninth century a maritime code, a military code, and a rural code were formulated in the Byzantine Empire in order to meet new social needs. Until the fall of Constantinople the Byzantine influence was a deterrent against the forces from the East. Byzantium preserved and gave a new impetus to Grecian literature, art, architecture, and law.
In Arabia the celebrated historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), made a detailed and surprisingly accurate description of the social life of the Arab tribes. With the evolution of the life of the individual, he compared the development of the successive stages in social life. This distinguished historian urged that history should consider not simply rulers, dynasties, and wars, but also racial factors, climatic forces, the laws of association, and the stages of associative life. He wished to make history scientific, even a social science. He formulated an evolutionary doctrine of social progress. He evolved a spiral theory of social evolution, beginning with the crudest primitive life and ending with the most civilized urban life.
In the latter part of the fourteenth century, England’s great popular poet, William Langland, wrote an allegorical poem entitled, Piers Ploughman. In this work the oppressed laboring and peasant classes cry aloud their longings for improved conditions. They are personified in Piers the Ploughman, who as a dignified laborer, plays for the first time the leading rôle in serious thought. He is the leader of a field of all types of people who are laboring together and longing for a better social order. Along with the agricultural laborers we see weavers and tailors, friars and minstrels, merchants and knights. Labor of every sort is dignified. All living laborers who work with their hands and minds, truly earning, living in love and according to the laws of social order and progress, will become the pure and perfected leaders of truth.
Langland depicted well the living and working conditions of the English laboring classes. Productive toil, he argued, will receive its crown of glory. But he did not indicate practical solutions. Langland was sure, however, that the service of labor to society is sacred. He pronounced patient poverty to be the prince of all virtues. He personified Jesus in the form of a working man. Langland’s fourteenth century social message was that the individual should renounce wealth, join the honest laboring poor, and follow Christ’s example of living a life of labor and love.[IX-1]