@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12917},
      author = {Baudinette, Samuel},
      title = {Assembling Divine Science: Philosophical and Christian  Theology in the German Dominican School (1200-1361)},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;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  &lt;i&gt;salvific&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;affective&lt;/i&gt; economies that are  central to their medieval Christianity due to a tendency to  prioritize the &lt;i&gt;rationalism&lt;/i&gt; of their project, out of  a concern to adjudicate the distinction between so-called  mystical and philosophical discourse.&lt;/p&gt;},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12917},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12917},
}