Hi, I'm Peter Adelson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net.

In today's episode, I, too, can ask questions, Protestant scholasticism.

As we saw last time, Calvin was no scholastic philosopher. Unlike Luther, he studied law, not theology, and his major work, The Institutes, contains in its many pages, a scant-10 references to Aristotle.

And like Luther, he was tireless in carping at the time-wasting pedantries of the scholastics.

So the prospects for a Calvinist or Reformation version of scholasticism look damn.

Indeed, the scholar Richard A. Miller has observed that some modern-day Protestants would consider this to be an unpleasant theological oxymoron, to be Protestant and scholastic at the same time, was to be a living contradiction.

Yet as Miller and others have shown, there were plenty of Protestants who deployed the intellectual tools of Aristotle's logic, took inspiration from his ethics and natural philosophy, and even drew on Catholic authorities like Thomas Aquines.

And one of them was a close collaborator of Calvin. His name was Theodore Beza, and he was the first rector of the Academy at Geneva.

Beza may be credited with supplying a rational defensive Calvinism of the sort that Calvin himself failed to provide, or, as I suggested in the last episode, deliberately chose not to provide.

Beza outlived Calvin by more than four decades, dying only in 1605. His longevity and position as an educator gave him ample opportunity to put his stamp on the intellectual life of Geneva and the Calvinist movement more generally.

A Catholic critic went so far as to say that Beza was, like a pope to the Calvinists, not meant as a compliment and not likely to be received as one, but still a testimony to his importance.

Beza was open in his use of scholastic methods. He said, for instance, that he would not be importing the newfangled ideas of the Paris thinker Peter Ramos, when they swept across Europe, but would instead stick religiously, if you'll pardon the expression, to Aristotle.

As a Calvinist, he placed limits on the capacity of following human reason, but he still believed that reasoning was of great importance for Protestant thought.

One should study dialectic to learn how to test one's own ideas for consistency and for the sake of refuting one's opponents.

It's sometimes said that for Protestant intellectuals, scholasticism offered a set of useful methods, while its doctrines were to be rejected, and Beza might well have said this himself.

Like other reformers and the humanists, he often used the word scholastics as a term of abuse when criticizing the teachings of the schoolmen.

Yet we can find him using their ideas at the heart of his own Calvinist teaching on the topic of faith and salvation.

He held that human reason had held mastery over the will before the fall from grace through original sin, but now in our fallen state, the will often undermines or overwhelms our reason.

So in the terms we apply to medieval scholastics like Aquinas, Henry of Ghent and Scotus, Beza is a rationalist when it comes to the state of humans before the fall, and a volunteerist when it comes to our situation once corrupted by sin.

As a result, it is not enough to be rationally convinced about topics like God's Providence, the will must also be reformed through the gift of grace, just as Calvin had been saying, albeit in more philosophical language.

This nicely exemplifies the way school distinctions could be reformed for use by Protestants. At the same time, the schools themselves were being reformed.

Throughout the 16th century, we see fairly dramatic changes in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe, both in terms of personnel and curriculum.

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