Introduction

Modern secular philosophy has often objected to theology that Christianity is loaded with paradoxes. The paradoxical situation of our Western theoretical culture is that its philosophy is itself a paradox, for modern philosophy cannot know itself if it ignores its own history. Apart from the fact that there is flourishing research in the history of medieval philosophy, general philosophy still widely ignores the decisive continuity between sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century thought, on the one hand, and theology and philosophy in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, on the other. The effect of this pattern is that the discontinuity between Western thought at the eighteenth-century universities and philosophy at nineteenth-century universities is usually misunderstood. This misinterpretation specifically has the result that the medieval way (via) of Scotism, which was still very important at the universities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, plays only a marginal role in the historical literature on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought.

The outcome is that the great philosophical individuals (Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Wolff) are considered to be the main figures and that the impact of university philosophy and theology is somewhat overlooked. ‘Modern students of theology have often been frequently encouraged to believe that significant theological thinking is a product of the nineteenth century.’ Philosophy students enjoy the same myth. That was the trick of nineteenth-century academic culture, intensified further by the historical revolution of the 1820s. However, the university of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is the updated medieval university – Catholic and reformational.