Are there One or Two Theologies?

Abstract

Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart have been - as far as we know - the only two theologians in the thirteenth century and early fourteenth centuries, who explicitly studied the famous Boethian treatise On the Trinity. Of particular interest was the beginning of chapter 2, where Boethius explains his understanding of theology and its method. While Thomas Aquinas refuses the Boethian conception of a unified theology, which contemplates even the divine mysteries as objects of natural reason, the very same conception attracted Meister Eckhart. In following Boethius, Eckhart became an opponent of Thomas Aquinas’s model of the twofold theology, which Thomas for the first time established as his core methodological principal in his Summa contra gentiles shortly after having commented on the De Trinitate. Although Meister Eckhart always refers to Thomas Aquinas in the most gentle and honourable way, his Opus Tripartitum must be seen as a counter model to the famous Summa theologiae based on the original Boethian conception of a unified theology. But the question, whether there are one or two theologies, is more than a mere academic question among theologians. Rather, it points to the very foundations of thought of two of the greatest minds and most renown theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.