Listen, watch and history

The history behind the questions

Many disagreements make sense only once you know how they arose. Start with the approachable ones.

• Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy
  Josef Pieper, 1960 · about 180 pages · Short portraits of the schoolmen, and why the medieval marriage of faith and reason held and then came apart.
  Journal

  Helps with: Faith and reason: who has the last word?; What is theology for?; Do natures and essences really exist?

• The Orthodox Church
  Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, 1963 · about 350 pages · The standard introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy, half history, half belief and worship, by an English convert who became a bishop.
  Journal

  Helps with: The procession of the Holy Spirit; The office of Peter; What is salvation for?; God's essence and His energies; What are the Eastern Catholic Churches?; Icons and images

• A History of Philosophy
  Frederick Copleston, SJ, 1946 · 9 volumes · The standard survey from the Greeks to the twentieth century, by a Jesuit who explains each thinker fairly before weighing him. Read the medieval volumes for the background to most questions here.
  Journal

  Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; Where does knowledge begin?; Why is the good good?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Is morality objective and knowable?; Is truth objective?; What makes you this one and no other?

• The Evolution of Medieval Thought
  David Knowles, 1962 · about 350 pages · A Benedictine historian's clear single-volume account of medieval philosophy, from Augustine to Ockham.
  Journal

  Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; Why is the good good?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Where does knowledge begin?

• A Secular Age
  Charles Taylor, 2007 · about 900 pages · How the West went from a world where belief was the default to one where it is one option among many.
  Journal

  Helps with: How is God related to the world?; Church and state; May the state restrain false religion?; Reform or tradition?

• History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages
  Étienne Gilson, 1955 · about 800 pages · Gilson's detailed history of how Christian thinkers from the Fathers to the fourteenth century used and changed philosophy.
  Journal

  Helps with: Do natures and essences really exist?; Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; Why is the good good?; Faith and reason: who has the last word?; What makes you this one and no other?; How does creation speak of God?

• The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine
  Jaroslav Pelikan, 1971 · 5 volumes · What the Church believed, taught and confessed, century by century, East and West, by a scholar who ended his life in Orthodoxy.
  Journal

  Helps with: Does doctrine develop?; The procession of the Holy Spirit; How are we made right with God?; How does grace move the will?; Icons and images; God's essence and His energies

• The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy
  Étienne Gilson
  Journal

  Helps with: Faith and reason: who has the last word?; Can reason know that God exists?; Are the world's learning and arts a danger or a gift?

• The Unintended Reformation
  Brad S. Gregory, 2012 · about 600 pages · How late-medieval metaphysics and the Reformation's quarrels, without anyone meaning it, produced a secular, pluralist West.
  Journal

  Helps with: Is 'being' said of God and of creatures in the same sense?; How are we made right with God?; Who interprets revelation?; Is truth objective?; Church and state