The Scholastic Method of Analysis and Synthesis
Underlying the curriculum and the teaching methods of the law schools of Bologna and of the other Western universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was a new mode of analysis and synthesis, which later came to be called the scholastic method.
This method, which was first fully developed in the early 1100s, both in law and in theology, presupposes the absolute authority of certain books, which are to be comprehended as containing an integrated and complete body of doctrine; but paradoxically, it also presupposes that there may be both gaps and contradictions within the text: and it sets as its main task the summation of the text, the closing of gaps within it, and the resolution of contradictions. The method is called "dialectical" in the twelfth-century sense of that word, meaning that it seeks the reconciliation of opposites. 14Both in law and theology, and later in philosophy, the scholastic mode of analysis and synthesis was promoted by the method of teaching in the university, particularly the method of glossing the text and posing questions for disputation. "The principal books of law and theology were the natural outgrowth of university lectures." 15_In other words, science -scholarship -- came from teaching, and not vice versa.
At the very time that Western jurists were beginning to create what they conceived to be a science of law, Western theologians were beginning to create what they conceived to be a science of theology. Indeed.
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Peter Abelard (1079-1142), who was the first to use the word "theology" in the modern sense, meaning a systematic analysis of the evidence of divine revelation, 16 was also one of the great pioneers of scholastic logic and is sometimes called the father of scholasticism. Abelard sought by means of scholastic methods of analysis and synthesis to apply rational criteria for judging which revealed truths were of universal validity and which were of only relative validity.
This was not, then, the kind of fundamentalism which takes all the words of the text as being equally true under all circumstances; the whole is taken to be true, and within the whole the parts are assigned various shades of truth. Indeed, one of the most important books of Abelard, Sic et Non(Yes and No), merely documents by successive quotations a list of over 150 inconsistencies and discrepancies in the Bible and in the writings of the church fathers and other authorities, assuming them all to be true and leaving it to the reader to try to harmonize them. 1 7 _In law, the scholastic method took the form of analyzing and synthesizing the mass of doctrines, many of them in conflict with others, found in the law of Justinian as well as in secular authorities. As in the case of theology, the written text as a whole, the Corpus Juris Civilis, like the Bible and the writings of the church fathers, was accepted as sacred, the embodiment of reason. But the emphasis on reconciliation of contradictions gave the twelfth-century Western jurist a greater freedom and flexibility in dealing with legal concepts and rules than his Roman predecessors had had. Like them, he was, to be sure, concerned, in Professor Dawson's words, with the "consistent and orderly treatment of individual cases." But he was also concerned, as they were not, with finding "elaborately reasoned justifications" and a "theoretical synthesis." And in seeking justifications and synthesis he often sacrificed the narrower kind of consistency that the Romans had prized.