My dissertation provides an intellectual history of attempts within the German Dominican School between 1200 and 1361 to define and demarcate the relationship between “philosophical” and “Christian” theology, or, rather, the divine science of the philosophers and that of the saints. It thus seeks to explore several interrelated problems: what sorts of theologizing the German Dominicans recognized in their work, how this informed their strategic and selective use of particular texts as authorities for the practice of theology, and how they managed and adjudicated the apparent conflicts which arose between these different theologies and texts. This dissertation begins with Albert the Great, the inaugurator of a scholastic project informed by a specific engagement with the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, as well as the metaphysics, noetics, and ethics of the Peripatetic or Aristotelian tradition. Next, it moves on to an analysis of German Dominicans such as Ulrich of Strasburg, Dietrich of Freiberg, Meister Eckhart, Berthold of Moosburg, and Johannes Tauler. In doing so, I track how each Dominican, building upon and departing from the work of his predecessors, presents non-Christian and Christian theology as separate, if complementary, discourses or regimes of enunciation that provide a comprehensive account of the nature of God and the universe.

Moreover, my dissertation also seeks to demonstrate that by the time of Meister Eckhart and Berthold of Moosburg, the German Dominican understanding of the nature of both divine sciences moved away from a predominantly Peripatetic conception of theology as wisdom toward a more explicitly Platonic understanding of theology as “supersapiential,” which led to the breakdown of the rigid demarcation between non-Christian and Christian divine science that earlier German Dominicans like Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg had attempted to maintain in their writing. Important to this transformation was the way that the members of the German Dominican School conceived of the relationship between nature and grace, as well as their response to the technical debate in the medieval schools about whether the psychological faculty of the intellect or the will had priority in the beatitude understood to constitute the goal of both philosophical and Christian life. The responses to these debates led members of the German Dominican School to occupy radical positions that sought to subordinate grace to nature, or to insist on the need to overcome both nature and grace through recourse to a radically kenotic and apophatic theology. I ultimately suggest that several, prominent scholarly efforts to comprehend this transformation within the German Dominican School have been hampered by a tactical disregard of the salvific and affective economies that are central to their medieval Christianity due to a tendency to prioritize the rationalism of their project, out of a concern to adjudicate the distinction between so-called mystical and philosophical discourse.