INTRODUCTION

2. ERASMUS, SCHOLASTICS, HUMANISTS
AND REFORMERS
page 4

Unhappily, the Thomist synthesis was too daring to win widespread acceptance in the schools until the sixteenth century, by the end of which Aquinas's Summa Theologica had universally replaced the Sentences of Peter the Lombard as the basis for commentary in the theology schools. A series of condemnations at Paris in 1277 seemed possibly to have pointed to heterodox implications in Thomist psychology, and Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) reacted strongly against Aquinas by restoring in psychology primacy to the will over the intellect. He thereby emphasized both the freedom of the human will at the expense of the rationality of the act of choice and, what was worse, the arbitrary nature of a divine law no longer linked, as in the Thomist psychological system, to the moral aspirations of rational human nature. The link between divine law, natural law and the judgement of conscience was severed, and human perfection was no longer necessarily linked to moral aspiration or fulfillment.

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