In the later Middle Ages, Scholasticism rose to become Catholic Europe's dominant theological movement. While earlier generations were content to rest on the utterances of Church Fathers like Augustine and Jerome, the rediscovery of Greek philosophy (via the Islamic world), combined with a growing tendency toward rigorous theological speculation, forced medieval schools and scholars to develop a new synthesis. By penning and arguing about their vast logical systems that described both nature and divinity, the scholastics sought to weave a righteous body of reasonable—and orthodox—truth. Undoubtedly the best-known scholastic was Thomas Aquinas, a portly Italian Dominican. Though controversial in his day, Aquinas's ideas became virtually canonical in the neo-scholastic revival promoted by the Vatican in the late 19th century as the Church sought to squash the secularizing influence of modern science.
Scholasticism