PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

From 1384 to the end of the fourteenth century, two German masters educated at Paris lectured on the Bible at the new University of Vienna: Henry of Langenstein and Henry of Oyta. United in their background and plans for building a new academic tradition (indeed, even in friendship), their commentaries on the Old Testament included a common project: based on a quotation from Augustineʼs City of God V,9, they aimed at defining the proper nature of God against a broad range of heretics. When dealing with the relationship between faith and reason, however, the two Henries decided on different epistemologies. While the more conciliatory Oyta opted for doubtless certitude in faith, Langenstein, a powerful rhetorician and poet in the margins of his commentary, pursued a burning rejection of logical reasoning in doctrinal matters by inventing the most blasphemous syllogisms of the entire Middle Ages. In some sermons recently ascribed to him, this rejection emerges as interwoven with the pervasive acquaintance of Langenstein, the only Hebraist at the new university, with a polemical Askhenazi work. Indeed, sermons, commentaries on the Sentences and on the Bible appear as interconnected pieces of one and the same enterprise. All the same, the principal aim of this talk remains to show how the Anselmian substructure of Oytaʼs and Langensteinʼs undertaking explains the Viennese preference for religious dialogue instead of interreligious disputation.