The Latin West

Abstract

The post-Augustinian Latin tradition explored in this chapter was written off within Sophiology as something of a dead-end. This chapter aims to show that this judgement was premature and that the wisdom teachings of the Latin West are of enormous richness and significance with eloquent representatives in figures such as Pope Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, John Scotus Eriugena, Hildegard of Bingen, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Latin West also offers and intriguing counterpoint to developments in Greek patristic theology over roughly the same time period. The consistent manner in which divine simplicity was construed from Augustine to Aquinas meant that there is no place for wisdom as divine except in relation to the categories of divine substance (with which it is identical) or person (principally, for exegetical reasons, the person of the Son). Thus the space or gap that opens for Sophiology in the Greek East remains largely closed in the Latin West. It is also the case that the West remained consistently focussed on and rooted in biblical wisdom literature and sapiential theology in a way the East often did not. Thomas Aquinas is presented as a particularly rich source of wisdom reflection and as a shining representative of a tradition that Sophiology was too quick to dismiss.