问答题 Scholastic thinkers held a wide variety of doctrines in both philosophy and theology, the study of religion. (1) 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 modem 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. (2) 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. (3) 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 Averros. 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. Averro