单选题
Scholastic thinkers held a wide variety of doctrines
in both philosophy and theology, the study of religion. What gives unity to the
whole Scholastic movement, the academic practice in Europe from the 9th to the
17th centuries, are the common aims, attitudes, and methods generally accepted
by all its members. The chief concern of the Scholastics was not to discover new
facts but to integrate the knowledge already acquired separately by Greek
reasoning and Christian revelation. This concern is one of the most
characteristic differences between Scholasticism and modern thought since the
Renaissance. The basic aim of the Scholastics determined
certain common attitudes, the most important of which was their conviction of
the fundamental harmony between reason and revelation. The Scholastics
maintained that because the same God was the source of both types of knowledge
and truth was one of his chief attributes, he could not contradict himself in
these two ways of speaking. Any apparent opposition between revelation and
reason could be traced either to an incorrect use of reason or to an inaccurate
interpretation of the words of revelation. Because the Scholastics believed that
revelation was the direct teaching of God, it possessed for them a higher degree
of truth and certainty than did natural reason. In apparent conflicts between
religious faith and philosophic reasoning, faith was thus always the supreme
arbiter; the theologians' decision overruled that of the philosopher. After the
early 13th century, Scholastic thought emphasized more the independence of
philosophy within its own domain. Nonetheless, throughout the Scholastic period,
philosophy was called the servant of theology, not only because the truth of
philosophy was subordinated to that of theology, but also because the theologian
used philosophy to understand and explain revelation. This
attitude of Scholasticism stands in sharp contrast to the so-called double-truth
theory of the Spanish-Arab philosopher and physician Averroes. His theory
assumed that truth was accessible to both philosophy and Islamic theology but
that only philosophy could attain it perfectly. The so-called truths of theology
served, hence, as imperfect imaginative expressions for the common people of the
authentic truth accessible only to philosophy. Averroes maintained that
philosophic truth could even contradict, at least verbally, the teachings of
Islamic theology. As a result of their belief in the harmony
between faith and reason, the Scholastics attempted to determine the precise
scope and competence of each of these faculties. Many early Scholastics, such as
the Italian ecclesiastic and philosopher St. Anselm, did not clearly distinguish
the two and were overconfident that reason could prove certain doctrines of
revelation. Later, at the height of the mature period of Scholasticism, the
Italian theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas worked out a balance
between reason and revelation.
单选题
With the Scholastics, the search for new knowledge ______.