ruct a supposedly unanswerable argument, usually in respect of faith and in respect of a view of man's position in the universe. As Herlihy puts it, "Taking propositions initially from Christian dogma, then also from natural philosophy as expounded by Aristotle, the scholastics were committed to examining what if any logical ties connected them" (Herlihy, 1968, p. 161, emphasis added). Pieper (1960) positions the intellectual tradition of scholasticism between the work of Boethius in the sixth century and William of Ockham in the fourteenth.
Pieper cites Boethius's reputation as "first scholastic," by reason of the way in which he explored questions and problems of faith that were beginning to emerge in the sixth century. What was (then) unique about his approach was that he sought to explain the difficult doctrine of the Trinity not by transcendent appeal but by an appeal to reason:
He was wholly consistent; not a single Bible quotation is to be found in these tractates, even though they deal with virtually exclusively theological subjects. Logic and analysis is all. This was in fact an amazingly new element--which was to be imitated and continued in medieval scholasticism. . . . Not that the rationalistic, "non-Biblical" approach is an earmark of scholasticism--although this, too, has often been said, and with some justification. But rather that the conjunction of faith with knowledge expressly proclaimed by Boethius for the first time, does constitute an earmark of scholasticism. Therefore its specific character is determined (or at least partly determined) by the weight that is ascribed to reason in proportion to faith. We can see, incidentally, that this aspect of scholasticism is much akin to the one already mentioned: "schooling" fits in very well with rationality.
The extent to which rationality did indeed characterize the whole of scholasticism is plain to see throughout. What defined the great age of scholasticism? Th...