Correcting the fathers

In his study of The Passions of Christ in High-Medieval Thought: An Essay on Christological Development (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) , Kevin Madigan concludes that on the issues of the human passions of Christ the scholastic theologians did not unpack what was implicit in patristic Christological. Rather, “high-medieval christological thought is often concerned to correct it, to bring what had slipped the channels back within the borders of orthodoxy. In no way is the early visible in inchoate or implicit form in the latter; and in this sense, the history of relations between ancient and medieval thought on the passions of Christ is a history of correction and improvement. It is therefore, remorselessly, a history of fissure and discontinuity. We should be thinking, when we think of high medieval thought on the passions of Christ, therefore, not in the categories of growth, development, and modification. We should be thinking in terms of invention, novelty, and innovation.”