Natural Knowledge in the Latin Middle Ages 105“whether theology is a science,” they meant: Do the premises, arguments,
and conclusions of the new, systematic, logic- intensive discipline of Chris-
tian theology meet the criteria of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics?^109 Not even
the supreme dignity of its object exempted theology from methodologi-
cal scrutiny in the university. While Aquinas argued that theology was a
science, Henry of Ghent and Ockham denied that it was.^110 For Ockham,
the principles of a science must be better known than its conclusions. But
the principles of theology are the articles of faith, which, as he repeat-
edly noted, are so far from self- evident that they appear “false to all, or to
the majority, or to the wisest.”^111 Their being known only to God or the
blessed disqualifi ed them as premises in a demonstration. Theology was
therefore not a science.
Was Aquinas’s theology therefore a pseudoscience? For Ockham, sci-
ence just is true, so the notion of false (= pseudo) science is, strictly speak-
ing, a contradiction.^112 Kilwardby nevertheless closely approximates the
concept of a pseudoscience. In the science of the stars, he distinguishes
three parts: a mathematical part called astronomy and two astrological
parts, the fi rst of which is natural while the other is “quasi- natural—not
truly natural, but mendacious and superstitious.”^113
Wherever one drew its boundaries, the science of the stars offered
theology ever more serious competition. Figures from Bernard Sylvester
in the twelfth century, through Pietro d’Abano in the fourteenth, to Jo-
hannes Regiomontanus and Francesco Capuano da Manfredonia in the
fi fteenth all placed astronomy / astrology at the apex of the sciences.^114
By the fi fteenth century, astronomy / astrology was much in demand in
courts and cities as well as in universities, some of which even founded
new chairs in the subject (such as Bologna and Kraków).
CONCLUSION
In the early Middle Ages, scholars did their best to reconstruct a picture of
natural knowledge from the Latin remnants of classical natural philoso-
phy, mathematical science, and medicine. They soon developed a thirst
for more. The many twelfth- century translations of new Greek and Arabic
texts drastically increased the available material. By the mid- thirteenth
century, Aristotle’s “books about nature,” supported by his works on logic
and method, had become the dominant means of studying nature in Eu-
rope. Natural philosophy had found a permanent home at the heart of
the new universities, where masters of arts cultivated them and brought
them to bear on their work in the higher faculties. Medicine and such