Western Philosophy and the Becoming of Possibility: 4 Divinity as Order: Scholastic Mediation of Possibility

With the medieval scholastics, possibility was neither the transcendent ideality of Plato nor the immanent actualisation of Aristotle, but a horizon subordinated to divine order. The synthesis of classical philosophy with Christian theology reorganised construal around a single, unifying principle: God as the ground of being and the guarantor of possibility.

The scholastic project was not merely theological but ontological. By mediating Platonic universals and Aristotelian categories through the framework of Christian doctrine, medieval thinkers established a hierarchy in which all potential was referred back to divine will. Universals were construed as ideas in the mind of God; substances and their actualisations were ordered according to providence. The architecture of possibility was therefore bound to the theological structure of creation, revelation, and salvation.

This mediation was not simply a restriction but a profound re-cut of construal. The scholastic method systematised reason within the authority of faith, binding dialectical argument to scriptural truth. To think possibility was to think within an order that was both rational and hierarchical: angels above humans, humans above animals, God above all. The scala naturae (great chain of being) expressed this construal vividly, situating every creature and substance within a divinely ordained order of ascent.

Yet scholasticism was also a laboratory of precision. The attempt to reconcile Aristotle’s taxonomy with Christian doctrine generated new distinctions: essence and existence, substance and accident, act and potency as oriented by divine causality. These refinements did not free construal but rather disciplined it, shaping thought into the form of theological reasoning. Possibility itself became a category to be managed: what God could will, what God permitted, what God foreclosed.

The result was a constrained but stable architecture of thought. By anchoring possibility in divine order, the scholastics preserved metaphysical coherence at the cost of construal’s autonomy. Theological hierarchy absorbed the openness of becoming into the fixity of providence. The world could still be investigated, but only as the unfolding of a divine plan.

In this way, medieval philosophy positioned divinity not as mythic narrative, nor as abstract form, nor as immanent taxonomy, but as the supreme order through which all construal of possibility was to be mediated. This order provided security and coherence, but it also closed off other horizons — until the Renaissance and early modern thought began to reopen them.