Alexander of Hales Paved the Way for Greater Scholars
ON THIS DAY, 21 August 1245, Alexander of Hales died. He was 59, and had been a brilliant scholar. Contemporaries referred to him as the “unanswerable doctor” and “king of theology.”
Born in Hales, Shropshire, England, Alexander studied and taught in Paris. We know little about his life and much of what we do know comes from his critic Roger Bacon, who thought Alexander received too much credit for merely combining and passing on the ideas of others.
Alexander was the first scholastic philosopher to summarize Christian theology—in his Summa universae theologiae—using newly discovered writings of Aristotle as his key authority. He combined these with Arabic, neo-Platonic, and Augustinian ideas. His theology was influenced by the Franciscan Bonaventura and in turn he powerfully influenced the Franciscans after he became one of them.
Although Alexander looked back to ancient authority, he was an innovator within the scholastic system. A decisive, even fatal, moment in the development of scholastic theology arrived when he substituted Peter Lombard’s Sentences in place of the Bible as his basic text. Nonetheless, Thomas Aquinas admired his work and closely followed the outline of the Summa universae theologiae when he prepared his more famous Summa theologica.
Alexander was active in the church of his day. He attended the Council of Lyons in 1245, dying shortly afterward. Aquinas eclipsed him, and today his writings are mainly studied by scholars.
—Dan Graves
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For more on scholarship in the Middle Ages, take a look at Christian History #73, Thomas Aquinas
and Christian History #139, Hallowed Halls
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