Abstract

One of the characteristics of medieval thought that makes it so fascinating is how medieval thinkers in general, and theologians in particular, would work to incorporate received theological language into their own personal writing, even if that language did not sit well with the larger enterprise, informed as it often was by philosophical traditions unknown to the founding authors of the medieval theological tradition. This phenomenon is explainable, of course, by noting how seriously the medievals took the very wording of both the Bible and authoritative Christian writers, such as Augustine, Damascene, and so on — though the Bible would always have pride of place in terms of its ultimate normative authority. Still, it was often the case that the intellectual underpinnings that established the order of an author’s written work could derive from many different sources, some very important ones of which might be philosophical, or otherwise not directly biblical