Interpretations of Medieval Philosophy in the 20th Century

The Middle Ages has long been considered an epoch when rationality and philosophy was nonexistent (the so-called ‘dark ages’), which perpetuates the negative judgment that the humanists had of Scholasticism, and especially Francis Petrarch (1304-1374). They stigmatized their predecessors, or better yet their contemporaries, accusing them of giving priority to authority rather than to reason, to use a barbaric language crammed with technical terminology instead of the elegance and clarity of classical Latin, and to prefer the sophisms of logic to moral and civil duty. Consequently, little attention has been paid to the thought of this period in the first histories of philosophy, written starting with the 18th c. It was only as a consequence of the anti-modernist political project initiated by the Catholic Church and enunciated in the encyclica Aeterni patris (1879) that the philosophy of the Middle Ages became an object of study in a systematic and serious way. At the beginning, in reality, it was the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas that was viewed as the whole of ‘medieval philosophy,’ and was proposed with anti-modernist intentions as the only system of thought compatible with Catholicism. But the creation of this new field of research, though initially dedicated to the rediscovery of Thomism, produced numerous and diverse interpretations of medieval philosophy throughout the course of the 20th c., all of which are due to an always increasing availability of texts and to the consideration of what significance medieval philosophy has for the modern philosophic culture.