Richard Lee's book has a deceptively specific focus. It studies the question of the scientific nature of theology from Robert Grosseteste in the early thirteenth century, through Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, to Marsilius of Inghen and Pierre d'Ailly in the late fourteenth century. Under the impact of Aristotle's notion of demonstrative knowledge and what constituted "scientific" proof, attempts were made to establish the demonstrable character of revealed truth and the compatibility of Christian revelation with Aristotelian science -- an enterprise usually described as the synthesis of faith and reason, or more simply as Christian metaphysics. The traditional account covers the early attempts in the first half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the Thomistic synthesis, and then its gradual dissolution under the skeptical impact of Nominalist thought in the fourteenth century. It is a story that finds a place in every course on medieval thought or philosophy. For Neo- Thomists who wish to reestablish a Christian philosophy in the modern world, the late-medieval ending of this story was an unfortunate loss of courage and insight. For others, the entire enterprise was flawed from the outset, and the scientific rigor of the fourteenth-century thinkers who abandoned it, or restricted it, is to be applauded.
Considering the attention this topic has received across the last century, from Etienne Gilson's Reason and Revelation and Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism to recent treatments by Steven Marrone and Stephen Dumont, one wonders what more can be said on the subject. Lee's work shows that there is, indeed, more.
For one thing, the story is usually told from the standpoint of the almost- successful synthesis under Aquinas, which received renewed life under the revivals of Thomism in the early modern period as well as the nineteenth century. Viewed that way, it is Thomas who was ultimately successful (at least in some circles) and Ockham who was a destructive radical. Lee takes Ockham as his focus (privileges the medieval outcome, if you will) and interprets the thirteenth century in light of the fourteenth. That reading makes Aquinas the radical when viewed in light of earlier and later approaches, somewhat along the lines that E. A. Moody suggested in his seminal article on empiricism and metaphysics in The Philosophical Review (1958). Moreover, Lee reshapes the problem in terms of the importance of existing singulars in relation to the question of the ground of being, or rational ground. Lee's approach is both ontological and epistemological: what do we know, and how do we come to know it. Lee's agenda is essentially philosophical, and the story of the battle over the scientific nature of theology is the occasion for exploring how various thinkers, Ockham in particular, dealt with a fundamental philosophical issue.
I admit to being disturbed at the beginning of the work by encountering such phrases as "philosophy set for itself the challenge ..." (1). Philosophers may do this; a discipline does not. Similarly, the Heideggerian language of the introduction did not make me optimistic about what might be done with the medieval sources. Once into the work, however, I found the analysis perceptive and its language in keeping with the medieval thinkers under discussion. The reason for the introduction becomes clear as one moves through the work. Lee sets the problem of the scientific nature of theology in the context of a battle of two very different perspectives. One is the perspective of Greek philosophy, which answers the questions of the nature of things and their knowability in terms of an eternal and necessary world of inhering forms or natures that determine why things are the way they are, and why they behave as they do. This view leaves discussions of divine origin to myth and religion, and insists on a rational explanation for a world that is not only the best, but the only possible world. The other perspective concentrates attention on existing individuals themselves and argues that they ultimately have no ground beyond the plan of God created and implemented through his inscrutable will.
After examining Aristotelian terminology and preconceptions, and under the guise of the question of the scientific nature of theology, Lee traces the battle over the why and how of the existing singular from Grosseteste to Pierre d'Ailly, giving particular attention to Aquinas and Ockham. Ockham comes out the winner because, in the view of Lee, the search for a rational ground of existing singulars is ultimately wrong-headed. "For the rational ground is a demand the we place on singulars -- it does not belong to their own mode of being...Once existing singulars are referred to the divine will rather than the divine intellect, the failure of reason to grasp their ground becomes evident" (117).
The "philosophical" grounds for this conclusion are made clear in Lee's "unconcluding postlude." The search for the rational ground, which dominated philosophy from its Greek origins through the nineteenth century, has in his view been abandoned by many philosophers in the twentieth century, such as Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, and others, who accept the view that existing things will always exceed our rational concepts, they "will always have a remainder that cannot be thought through rational conceptualization." Lee is careful not to equate Ockham's view in all respects with this modern view, but the similarities are suggestive and make that particular chapter in medieval philosophy important for modern discussions. Ultimately in Lee's approach, reading medieval philosophy may well be an important means of gaining perspective and new approaches within the modern discussion.
This work will be controversial, both for those who study medieval philosophy and probably for those in modern philosophy as well. I consider that beneficial for historians and for philosophers. The work is a welcome addition to sketching out the philosophical implications of a view of the world that takes creation and the divine will seriously, or on other grounds rejects the explanatory capacity of human reason to fully account for existing singulars. For medievalists, this work is a welcome addition to the literature on a covenantal, less rationalistic view of the nature of the created universe that was documented in other ways in Heiko Oberman's The Harvest of Medieval Theology and Francis Oakley's Omnipotence, Covenant and Order. An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz.