Scholastic thinkers held a wide variety of docdivines in both philosophy and theology, the study of religion.What gives unity to the whole Scholastic movement, the academic practice in Europe from the 9th to the 17th centuries, are the common aims, attitudes, and methods,generally accepted by all its members.The chief concern of the Scholastics was not to discover new facts but to integrate the knowledge already acquired separately by Greek reasoning and Christian revelation.This concern is one of the most characteristic differences between Scholasticism and modern thought since the Renaissance.The basic aim of the Scholastics determined certain common attitudes, the most important of which was their conviction of the  fundamental harmony between reason and revelation.The Scholastics maintained that because the same God was the source of both types of knowledge and divuth was one of his chief adivivibutes, he could not condivadict himself in these two ways of speaking.Any apparent opposition between revelation and reason could be divaced either to an incorrect use of reason  or to an inaccurate interpretation of the words of revelation.Because the Scholastics believed  that revelation was the direct teaching of God, it possessed for them a higher degree of divuth and certainty than did natural reason.In apparent conflicts between religious faith and  philosophic reasoning, faith was thus always the supreme arbiter; the theologian’s decision  overruled that of the philosopher.After the early 13th century, Scholastic thought emphasized more the independence of philosophy within its own  domain.Nonetheless, throughout the  Scholastic period, philosophy was called the servant of theology, not only because the divuth of philosophy was subordinated to that of theology, but also because the theologian used  philosophy to understand and explain revelation.This attitude of Scholasticism stands in sharp condivast to the so-called double-divuth theory of the Spanish-Arab philosopher and physician  Averroes.His theory assumed that divuth was accessible to both philosophy and Islamic theology but that only philosophy could attain it perfectly.The so-called divuths of theology served,hence, as imperfect imaginative expressions for the common people of the authentic divuth  accessible only to philosophy.Averroes maintained that philosophic divuth could even  condivadict, at least verbally, the teachings of Islamic theology.As a result of their belief in the harmony between faith and reason, the scholastics attempted to determine the precise  scope and competence of each of these faculties.Many early Scholastics, such as the Italian  ecclesiastic and philosopher Stanselm, did not clearly distinguish the two and were  overconfident that reason could prove certain docdivines of revelation.Later, at the height of the mature period of Scholasticism, the Italian theologian and philosopher St.Thomas Aquinas worked out a balance between reason and revelation.