Intellectual History: Two Theological Movements That Changed the Course of History

Many of Aristotle's works, especially those related to science, were preserved and studied in Greek, Islamic, and Jewish intellectual traditions. Through translation centers, including those in 12th-century Spain, these writings reentered Latin European scholarship and helped produce a major shift in European intellectual life. Because late-medieval thought was dominated by priests and monks in the Roman Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Dominican scholar, played a leading role in reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology. Aquinas and the Scholastics developed a system that continues to influence Roman Catholic theology. Their work also helped reshape European philosophy by encouraging scholars to examine the relationship between faith, reason, the natural world, and the cosmos.

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Another intellectual revolution came several centuries later with the Reformation led by Martin Luther and John Calvin. They are well known for rejecting the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, but their teachings also had an enormous impact on European economic, political, and intellectual life. Wittingly or not, the Reformers emphasized the individual rather than the institutional church or secular ruler, an idea that continues to resonate in the West. For the Reformers, what mattered was not simply what an institution said, but what an individual believed.

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Today's tensions between faith and reason and between individual and collective rights have roots in the periods examined in this course. Studying the origins of these frictions can illuminate what we see happening around us today.

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John Wimberly is a retired pastor. He holds a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin, a Master of Divinity, an MBA, and a PhD in systematic theology. He and his wife have lived part-time in San Miguel de Allende since the mid-1980s, built a house in Tres Cruces in 1995, and retired to their home here full-time in 2013.