The Story of Reason (1120–1308)

How can one explain that astonishing flood of philosophy which began with Anselm, Roscelin, and Abelard and reached its peak of perfection with Albertus Magnus and Saint Thomas Aquinas? As usual, many causes combined. The Greek East had never lost its ancient heritage; the works of the ancient philosophers were studied in every century in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria. Men such as Michael Psellus, Nicephorus Blemmydes, George Pachymeres, and the Syrian philosopher Bar Hebraeus had direct acquaintance with the writings of Plato and Aristotle. Gradually Greek teachers and manuscripts entered the Western world. Even in Western Europe itself a remnant of the Hellenistic heritage had survived the barbarian invasions. Most of Aristotle’s Organon on logic and two dialogues of Plato, the Meno and the Timaeus, had survived, and it was Plato’s conception of the underworld that imprinted hell with all its features on Christian minds. Successive waves of translations of books from Arabic and Greek in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries opened the door to the inspiring and challenging thoughts of Greek and Muslim philosophers.

The new philosophical teachings differed so greatly from Christian wisdom that if the Christian world had not been able to invent a counter-philosophy, all its theology would have been destroyed by this flood. But if the West had remained poor, these influences could never have created a Christian philosophy. What made these factors effective was the growth of wealth through the preparation of European lands for agriculture, the expansion of commerce and industry, the services and accumulation of revenues. This economic revival, parallel with the freedom of the communes, the rise of universities, the revival of Latin literature and Roman law, the codification of canon law, the splendor of the Gothic style, the flourishing market of imagination and legend-making, the science of the troubadours’ joy, and the awakening of the sciences, founded the “twelfth-century Renaissance.”

In the shadow of wealth, leisure and study came into existence; the very word “school” originally conveyed the meaning of leisure. Scholasticus meant the director or master of a school; “scholastic philosophy” was the philosophy taught in the secondary schools of the Middle Ages or in the universities that were mostly founded on the basis of such schools. The “scholastic method” was the style of philosophical debate and exposition that prevailed in these schools. In the twelfth century, except for Abelard’s classes, the most active and famous center of teaching near Paris was Chartres. There philosophy was combined with literature, and the learned students wrote about obscure questions with such elegant and beautiful prose that this became an honorable tradition in France.

Plato, the philosopher who had made philosophy a branch worthy of understanding, was especially honored at Chartres. There, in order to reconcile the views of the nominalists, they said that universals are “real” and are the Platonic ideas or creative archetypes that exist in the mind of the Creator. Bernard of Chartres (c. 1117) and his brother Thierry (c. 1140) raised the school of Chartres to the height of its influence. Three students who had experienced this school became, in the half-century after Abelard, the greatest philosophers of Western Europe: William of Conches, Gilbert de la Porrée, and John of Salisbury.

The breadth of scholastic vision is evident in the opinions of William of Conches. William was a scholar familiar with the works of Hippocrates, Lucretius, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, Constantine the African, and even Democritus. He was captivated by the atomic or indivisible particle hypothesis and declared that all the works of nature arise from the combination of atoms; this is true even for the most necessary events of the human body. The soul is the bond between the individual’s essential principle and the celestial spirit or the world’s essential principle. Following Abelard, William turned his attention to a dangerous secret and wrote: “In the God who is the source of creation, power, wisdom, and providence are implicit, and the saints have called these three aspects three persons.” He considered the story of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib more of an allegorical tale and replied with strong language to a certain Cornificius and his followers who, relying on pure faith, rejected science and philosophy:

Since they are ignorant of the forces of nature, and since they want a number of people to keep them company in ignorance, they do not allow others to investigate anything, and they want us to believe like peasants and not seek reasons. ... But we say that for everything there must be a reason; if reason fails, the matter must be referred to the Holy Spirit and faith. ... (They say) “We do not know how this is, but we know that God is able to do it.”

O wretched fools! God is able to create a cow from a tree. But has he ever done so? Therefore bring a reason why it is so, or deny that the thing is as you suppose. ... We who rejoice not in quantity but in the correctness of a few matters, seek only truth.

These statements were too strong to be acceptable to a man like William of Saint-Thierry. That zealous monk, who had set Saint Bernard on Abelard’s trail, without delay complained of this new man of rationalism to Bernard, the vigilant abbot of Clairvaux. William of Conches retracted his heretical statements, accepted that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, realized that since the benefits of philosophy were not proportionate to its dangers, it was better to abandon the field; he therefore became the private tutor of Henry Plantagenet, king of England, and withdrew from history.

Gilbert de la Porrée carried out this dangerous task with greater success. He taught at Chartres and Paris, rose to the bishopric of Poitiers, and wrote the Book of Six Principles, which for several centuries was a reliable and authoritative source for the teaching and study of logic. But in another book, his Commentary on the Opinions of Boethius, he expressed the view that the nature of God’s essence is so far above human comprehension that all statements about this subject should be regarded as pure analogy; and he emphasized the unity of God to such an extent that the Trinity became merely an artistic device. In 1148, although Gilbert was seventy-two years old, he was accused by Saint Bernard and tried at Auxerre; but Gilbert confused his opponents with precise linguistic arguments and returned home without being condemned. The following year he was tried again. This time he agreed to tear up and burn some parts of his books, but once again, without any crime being proved against him, he returned to his episcopal see. When it was suggested that he should discuss his views with Bernard, Gilbert refused, saying that Saint Bernard knew less theology than was necessary to understand his words. John of Salisbury said that Gilbert “reached such a degree of perfection in a culture whose sole purpose was to enlighten minds that no one surpassed him.”

It was as if John had said this about himself, for among all the scholastic philosophers no one equaled him in the breadth and comprehensiveness of his knowledge. He was an extremely kind man with a style that spoke of perfect taste. John was born around 1117 in Salisbury, England. He attended Abelard’s school on Mont Sainte-Geneviève and William of Conches’s lectures at Chartres, and for a time was among Gilbert de la Porrée’s students in Paris. In 1149 he returned to England and became secretary to two archbishops of Canterbury, Theobald and Thomas à Becket. In this capacity he was sent several times by the two archbishops on important political missions, visited Italy six times, and resided for eight years at the papal court. When Becket went into exile and headed for France, John accompanied him and witnessed Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral. In 1176 he became bishop of Chartres and died in 1180. It was a varied and eventful life in the course of which John learned how to block the way of logic with life and to look at metaphysics with the same humility with which one sees a tiny particle of creation. In the later years of his life, when John again visited the schools of his youth, he was amused to see that the dispute between the realists and the nominalists still continued. On this subject he writes:

A man cannot escape this issue wherever he goes. The world has grown old from debating it. The time spent on this subject is far greater than the times the Caesars spent conquering and ruling the world. ... Wherever a discussion begins, the flow of speech always returns and joins this subject. It is the story of Rufus’s madness about Nivya: “He thinks of nothing else, speaks of nothing else, and if Nivya did not exist, Rufus would be mute.”

John himself explained the problem of the reality of universals in a simple way, saying that a universal is a mental concept that, for ease of work, links all the common characteristics of the parts. In reality, the founder of the “conceptualist” school should be considered John of Salisbury, not Abelard.

A wonderful example of the expansion of the intellectual horizon of medieval scholars is John’s work in compiling a history of Greek and Roman philosophy, which, since the time of Alcuin’s letters, no Latin prose of such eloquence and fluency had been seen. In his book Metalogicon, John, with the help of his own memoir, lightened the heaviness of logic, and on his other book, the Policraticus (1159), he placed, with a touch of humor, the subtitle “On the Foolishness of Courtiers and the Works of Philosophers.” In Christian literature this book must be considered the first imaginary treatise on political philosophy. It lists the errors and defects of contemporary governments and describes government and the ideal man. He said that “today everything is openly bought, unless the seller’s modesty prevents it. The impure fire of greed even threatens the holy altars. ... Even the representatives of the papal court do not refrain from soiling their hands with gifts, but sometimes fall into the madness of drunkenness and revelry and pour like a flood from one province to another.” If one can trust the words of John of Salisbury (to which more reference has been made), he told Pope Hadrian IV that the Church shares without restraint in the corruption of the age, and the Pope’s reply was in fact that wherever and in whatever form human beings are, they will be human. John wisely adds: “In every office of the house of God (or the Church), when some are negligent, the work of others increases. Among deacons, archdeacons, bishops, and papal legates I have seen some who strove so hard in the service of truth that from the benefits of their faith and piety it was clear that they had truly been appointed shepherds of God’s sheep.” In John’s opinion, civil government was far more corrupt than the clergy, and it was proper that the Church, to protect the rights of the people, should have moral authority over all kings and governments on earth. The most famous sentences of the Policraticus are about killing tyrants:

If kings gradually step beyond the path of justice and equity, even in such a case the immediate and sudden overthrow of them is not correct, but tyranny must be reproached with patient rebuke until it becomes clear that the tyrannical kings persist in their evil work. ... But if the king’s power is contrary to the divine commands and he wants to make me a partner in his war against God, then I freely raise my voice that God must be preferred to any human being on earth. ... Killing a tyrant is not only lawful but correct and pure justice.

This outburst of feeling and hot temper was unusual in John’s writings, and he later explained in another passage of the same book that the condition for killing a tyrant is that “the killer is not bound by the oath of fidelity to the tyrant.” This condition saved many potential tyrants from death, since every prince or king usually bound his subjects by an oath of loyalty. In the fifteenth century, Jean Petit, citing the Policraticus, defended his act of killing Louis of Orléans, but the Council of Constance condemned Petit on the grounds that even a king cannot condemn an accused without summoning and trial.

We “moderns” cannot always agree with the moderns or the “modern” class to which John belonged. Sometimes he expresses things that seem meaningless to us. But even his nonsense comes with a style so full of delicacy and tolerance that its like was rarely seen before Erasmus. John was also a humanist, meaning that he loved worldly life more than eternal life; he loved beauty and gentleness more than the fixed principles of any religion; he cited the works of ancient writers with more freedom and inclination than the Holy Scripture. He compiled a detailed list of “doubts” or “things about which a wise person may have doubt,” including the nature and origin of the soul, the creation of the world, and the relationship between God’s foreknowledge and human free will. But he was too clever to expose himself to the charge of heresy. John passed through the disputes and disagreements of his age with political grace and safety. In his view, philosophy was a balm for peace, not a kind of war; he said that wisdom acts as a stabilizing factor in all matters and “whoever, with the support of philosophy, has attained benevolent love has reached the true goal of philosophy.”

II – Aristotle in Paris

Around 1150, Peter Lombard, one of Abelard’s students, published a book that was both a compilation of Abelard’s opinions—albeit free of any heretical statements—and a foundation on which official scholastic philosophy was built. Peter, like Anselm, Arnaldo da Brescia, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, was an Italian who went to France to complete his studies in philosophy and theology. He was interested in Abelard and called that philosopher’s Sic et Non a book of happy prayer; but at the same time he wanted to attain the bishopric. In his book, entitled the Four Books of Sentences, he used the Sic et Non method in a refined way, meaning that under every question of theology he quoted a series of answers, for and against, from the Holy Scripture and the opinions of the Church Fathers; but, with sincere intention, he tried to reconcile all the contradictory opinions and reach correct conclusions. Peter was made bishop of Paris, and his book was so respected for four centuries in theology courses that Roger Bacon criticized it because he saw that it had replaced the Holy Scripture. Apparently, more than four thousand theologians, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, wrote commentaries on the Four Books of Sentences.

Because Lombard’s book supported the authority of the word of the Holy Scripture against the claims of individual reason, it blocked the progress of the rationalist movement for half a century. But in that half-century a strange event changed the divine wisdom. Just as the translation of Aristotle’s scientific and metaphysical works into Arabic in the ninth century forced Muslim thinkers to find a way of reconciliation between Islamic principles and Greek philosophy, and just as contact between Aristotelian philosophy and Jewish thought in Spain during this same twelfth century drove Ibn Daud and Maimonides to seek harmony between Judaism and the ideas of Greek philosophers, in the same way, between 1150 and 1250 the appearance of Aristotle’s works in Latin in Europe forced Catholic theologians to prepare a combination of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology; and since Aristotle seemed safe from the power of the word of the Holy Scripture, theologians were compelled to resort to the language and weapon of reason. If that Greek philosopher had risen from the grave, he would certainly have smiled to see how many religions that had shaken the foundations of the world now praised his thoughts! But we must not exaggerate the influence that Greek philosophers had in nurturing the blossoms of the garden of philosophy in this age. The spread of education, the necessity of debate, and intellectual activities in the schools and universities of the twelfth century; the influence of men such as Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Abelard, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury; the expansion of the horizon of ideas and opinions as a result of the Crusades; and the increasing knowledge of Islamic opinions and life in the East and West—all these factors, even if Aristotle had remained unknown to the Western world, would undoubtedly have produced a Thomas Aquinas; in truth, Aquinas’s perseverance stemmed from fear of Averroes rather than love of Aristotle. In the twelfth century, Muslim and Jewish philosophers had just begun to penetrate Christian thought through Spain. The opinions of Kindi, Farabi, Ghazali, Avicenna, Ibn Gabirol, Averroes, and Maimonides entered Latin Europe through the same doors that had admitted Plato and Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy.

This kind of invasion by foreign ideas was a very great mental blow to the immature peoples of the West. It is therefore not surprising that at first attempts were made to trample these new ideas or prevent their emergence; what surprises one is the astonishing harmony through which old and new knowledge were absorbed into the new faith. The initial impact of Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, and Averroes’s commentaries that reached Paris in the first twenty years of the thirteenth century, shook the foundations of the faith of many students, and some scholars such as Amalric of Bène and David of Dinant were so influenced by these ideas that they even attacked some of the basic principles of Christianity such as creation, miracles, and immortality. The Church suspected that the penetration of Muslim and Greek philosophical ideas into southern France had undermined the foundations of correct faith among the educated people and weakened their will to resist the Albigensian heretics. In 1210, a council of clerics in Paris condemned Amalric and David and prohibited the study of Aristotle’s “Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy” or the commentaries written on that philosopher’s philosophy. Since this prohibition was repeated in 1215 by one of the papal legates, it can be inferred that the decree of 1210 had encouraged some people to read these prohibited works. The Fourth Lateran Council permitted the teaching of Aristotle in logic and ethics but prohibited the rest. In 1231, Gregory IX granted amnesty to masters and students who had violated these decrees but renewed the commands “temporarily, until the books of that philosopher are examined and their blasphemous contents removed.” Three Parisian masters appointed to purify Aristotle’s works apparently abandoned the task. The prohibition on reading these works did not last long, because in 1255 the students of the University of Paris were required to read Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and other works. In 1263, Urban IV again renewed the prohibition; but apparently Thomas Aquinas reassured him that Aristotle could be rendered harmless, and for this reason Urban did not persist in his opposition. In 1366, the papal legates of Urban V in Paris decreed that whoever aspired to the degree of mastery in the speculative arts must study all of Aristotle’s works precisely.

In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Latin Christianity found itself bewildered between two paths, and this bewilderment created a great crisis in the history of religion. The desire to acquire the new philosophy was an intellectual excitement that could not be stopped. The Church ceased its effort in this path and instead directed its forces to besiege and absorb the invaders.

The loyal monks of that precise institution began to study the works of this astonishing Greek philosopher whose thoughts had shaken the foundations of three religions. The Franciscans, although they preferred Augustine to Aristotle, warmly welcomed Alexander of Hales, who was responsible for the first effort to harmonize the opinions of the “Philosopher” with “Christianity.” The Dominicans provided every encouragement to Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom were engaged in such a great task; and when these three had finished their work, it seemed that Aristotelian philosophy had been rendered harmless for Christianity.

III – The Free-Thinkers

To understand the scholastic movement in its true meaning and not to imagine it as a barren accumulation of dry abstract questions, we must consider the thirteenth century not as an undisputed arena for famous scholastic scholars but as a battlefield in which, for seventy years, skeptics, materialists, pantheists, and heretics wrestled with the theologians of the Church for the conquest of European minds.

So far we have seen that a small minority of Europeans did not believe in Christianity. In the thirteenth century, as a result of contact with Islam through the Crusades and the translation of books, this minority increased. The discovery that another great religion existed in the world and had produced honorable men such as Saladin and al-Kamil, and philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes, was in itself a truth that caused unease; comparing religions with each other is not something that benefits any religion. Alfonso the Wise and the astronomer reported that disbelief in human immortality was widespread among the Christians of Spain; perhaps Averroes’s ideas had found their way there sporadically and taken root in people’s minds. In southern France, in the thirteenth century, there existed a group of rationalists who said that after creating the world, God had entrusted its administration to natural law. The same group believed that miracles are impossible; no prayer can change the behavior of the elements; and the origin of new species is the result of natural evolution and not special creation. In Paris some free-thinkers, even some priests, denied “transubstantiation”; and in Oxford a teacher bitterly complained that “no idolater approaches the holy rites before the altar as much as they do.” Alan of Lille says that “many Christians of our age falsely claim that since the soul perishes with the body, there will be no resurrection.” This group cited the words of Epicurus and Lucretius, attached great importance to individual independence, and had reached the conclusion that the best thing is to enjoy this worldly life and nothing more.

Apparently the spread of the industrial system in the cities of Flanders promoted disbelief. At the beginning of the thirteenth century we encounter a person like David of Dinant, and near the end of that century Siger of Brabant, who were leaders of a strong skeptical movement. David (c. 1200) taught philosophy in Paris and entertained Innocent III with his meticulous debates. He turned his attention to explaining a kind of materialist pantheism according to which God, mind, and prime matter (that is, matter before receiving form) all became one essence in a new trinity. His book Quaternuli, now lost, was condemned and burned by the Council of Paris in 1210. A similar synod rejected the pantheistic philosophy of Amalric of Bène, another Parisian master who had identified God and creation. Amalric was forced to retract his words, and it is reported that he died as a result of asceticism (1207). Later, by order of that council, his bones were exhumed and burned in one of the squares of Paris as a warning to his numerous followers. Nevertheless, many people still did not abandon Amalric, and they expanded his ideas to include the denial of heaven and hell and the power of the holy rites. Ten of these followers of Amalric were burned alive (1210).

The market of free-thinking, or religious laxity, flourished during the reign of Frederick II in southern Italy, and it was in this period and environment that Saint Thomas grew up. Cardinal Ubaldini, a friend of Frederick, openly confessed to materialism. In northern Italy, industrial workers, the merchant class, judges, and masters, following their desires, to some extent surrendered to skepticism. The masters of the schools of Bologna were terribly lax toward religion; the medical schools there and elsewhere became centers of skepticism; and a proverb spread with the meaning that “wherever three physicians gather, two of them are atheists.” Around 1240, adherence to Averroes’s ideas was almost customary among the educated non-clerical classes of Italy. Thousands accepted Averroes’s principles and, following him, believed that natural law, without any intervention from God, governs the world; the world is co-eternal with God; there is only one immortal spirit or “active intellectual power” in existence, of which the individual soul is an unstable form or shape; and finally, heaven and hell are legends invented to deceive or frighten people and force them to observe the rules of chastity. To please the inquisitors, some followers of Averroes resorted to the idea of the double truth: that is, they said that a proposition may be correct according to philosophical standards or according to natural reason, and yet wrong according to the Holy Scripture and Christian doctrine; and they claimed that in this case, by the command of their faith, they believe in something about which they doubt by the command of reason. Such a theory denied the fundamental principle of the scholastic intellectual movement that reconciliation between reason and faith is possible.

Near the end of the thirteenth century, and throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the University of Padua was a noisy center for the promotion of Averroes’s ideas and the teaching of his general principles. Pietro d’Abano, a professor of medicine who later taught philosophy at Padua, wrote a book in 1303 entitled Conciliator of Controversies, the purpose of which was to reconcile medical and philosophical hypotheses. By teaching that the human brain is the source of nerves and the center of veins, and by calculating the year precisely and determining it to be 365 days, six hours, and four minutes, he achieved a high position in the history of sciences. Since Pietro had a strong belief in the science of astrology, he attributed almost all relationships between cause and effect to the power and movements of the stars and in his philosophy completely removed God’s hand from the administration of the world.

The inquisitors accused him of heresy, but the Marquis of Este and Pope Honorius IV, who were his patients, protected Pietro. In 1315 he was accused again, and this time, because he died a natural death, he escaped trial. The inquisitors ordered that his body be burned, but Pietro’s friends hid the body with such skill that it became necessary to burn a dummy to carry out the court’s decree.

When Thomas Aquinas went from Italy to Paris, he realized that Averroes’s ideas had long conquered the minds of a group of university masters. In 1240, Guillaume de Paris wrote that “many individuals at the university believe these inferences (that is, Averroes’s ideas) without investigation,” and in 1252 Thomas learned that Averroes’s opinions were very popular among the young students of the University of Paris. Perhaps it was because of Thomas’s report that Pope Alexander IV became fearful and commissioned Albertus Magnus to write a treatise on the unity of the intellect in refutation of Averroes’s ideas (1256). When Thomas was lecturing in Paris (1252–1261 and 1269–1272), the Averroist movement was at the height of its progress; the leader of this movement in France was Siger of Brabant, who taught at the University of Paris from 1266 to 1276. For a generation Paris was a battlefield between the ideas of the Averroists and the doctrines of the Catholic religion.

Siger, a secular cleric, was a learned man with great proficiency in the sciences of his age, so that even in some of his works that have survived incompletely, references to the works and opinions of Kindi, Farabi, Ghazali, Avicenna, Ibn Bajja, Ibn Gabirol, Averroes, and Maimonides can be observed. In a series of commentaries on Aristotle’s philosophy and a controversial treatise entitled Against the Two Famous Men of Philosophy, Albertus and Thomas, Siger claimed that Averroes’s work in interpreting Aristotle’s philosophy was correct, whereas Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas had done something contrary to the rule. Following Averroes, he also concluded that the world is eternal, natural law is unchangeable, and only the spirit of species survives after individual death. Siger said that God is the final cause of things, not their efficient cause. Since he, like Vico and Nietzsche, was fascinated by logic, he believed in the ominous theory of eternal return: that is, he said that since all events on earth are ultimately determined by the union or combination of celestial bodies, and the number of such possible combinations is limited, every combination must occur repeatedly in unlimited time and have exactly the same effects as in previous periods; “the same species” returns and “the same opinions, laws, and religions” come back. Of course Siger was cautious in expressing this point and at the end of his words said that “we say this according to the opinion of the philosopher, without saying anything in confirmation or approval of it.” He ended all his heretical opinions with such cautious phrases; he did not follow the theory of the double truth; by following the teachings of Aristotle and rational standards he reached certain conclusions and taught those same conclusions to his students; wherever these results contradicted the principles of Christianity, Siger confirmed his belief in the principles of religion and called only those principles truth, not the philosophical inferences.

Siger had many supporters among the university students, and this became evident when in 1271 a large number agreed with his candidacy for the presidency of the university; but he did not attain that position. Nothing better shows the power of the followers of the Averroist movement in Paris than that the bishop of the city, Étienne Tempier, repeatedly spoke in reproach and blame of them. In 1269 he rejected and condemned thirteen items of what some masters of the University of Paris taught in their classes as blasphemy. Among them:

The whole human race has only one intellectual power. ... The world is eternal. ... There never existed a being as the first man. ... The soul perishes with the corruption of the body. ... The human will necessarily wills and chooses. ... God has no knowledge of individual events. ... Divine providence does not govern human actions.

Apparently the Averroists continued to teach their ideas, because in 1277 the bishop published a list of 219 opinions and officially rejected them as blasphemy. According to Bishop Tempier, these were opinions that Siger, or Boethius of Dacia, or Roger Bacon, or other Parisian masters, including Saint Thomas himself, taught. Some of these 219 opinions were the same ones that had been rejected in 1269; here are a few samples of the rest:

Creation is impossible. ... Once a body has decayed (through death), it is no longer able to rise from the earth in the same form. ... The philosopher should not believe in the resurrection, because reason does not judge such a thing correct. ... The words of theologians are based on fables. ... Theology adds nothing to its essence. ... Christianity is an obstacle to knowledge.

... Happiness is achieved in this world, not in the next. ... The wise on earth are only the philosophers. ... There is no state better than that in which a person has leisure to learn philosophy.

In October 1277 the Inquisition condemned Siger. He spent the last years of his life as one of the prisoners at the papal court in Rome, until he was killed in the city of Orvieto by a half-mad criminal.

IV – The Evolution of Scholastic Wisdom

To counter this attack that was coming against Christianity from the front, merely condemning heretical statements was not enough.

The young class had tasted the heady wine of philosophy; was it possible to bring the individuals of that class back with the help of reasoning, just as the theologians had preserved Islam against the Mu‘tazilites? In the same way, the theologians of the two Franciscan and Dominican orders and free bishops such as Guillaume de Paris and Henry of Ghent rose to defend Christianity and the Church.

The defenders of the Christian faith were divided into two important groups: one group of Platonic mystical opinions, most of whom were from the Franciscan order; one group of rationalists and followers of Aristotle’s opinions, most of whom were Dominican monks. The Benedictines, like Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor, believed that the best way to defend religion is a person’s direct awareness of a spiritual truth whose essence is beyond the power of all intellects. Those who believed in “strictness” in religious laws, that is, people like Peter of Blois and Étienne de Tournai, said that discussion about issues related to theology should not be within the competence of philosophy; if philosophy does pay attention to such issues, it should speak and behave as if it were a servant bound to theology. It must be remembered that only a few of the scholastic scholars held such an opinion.

A few Franciscans, such as Alexander of Hales, chose the path of reason and tried to defend Christianity with philosophical terms and Aristotelian sentences. But most Franciscans were suspicious of philosophy; they believed that the adventure of reason, even if it procures power and splendor for the Church for a few days, may later escape supervision and lead people so far astray from the path of faith that Christianity would remain weak and helpless in a world full of disbelief and sin. This group preferred Plato to Aristotle, Bernard to Abelard, and Augustine to Aquinas; they agreed with John in defining man with Plato and considered it independent of the body, albeit replacing it, and were extremely terrified that Thomas had followed Aristotle in this matter and called the soul the “substantial form” of the body. In Plato’s philosophy they encountered the hypothesis of the eternal existence of a non-personal essence, which they saw as completely useless for preventing animal impulses and tendencies. The same group, following Augustine, placed will above reason both in God and in man and claimed that the ultimate purpose of man should be goodness, not the pursuit of truth. In the degrees they assigned to individuals, the mystic attained a deeper understanding of the mystery of existence and the purpose of human life than the philosopher.

This branch of scholastic scholars, that is, the followers of Plato and Augustine, had brought the contradictory subjects of religion under their control in the first fifty years of the thirteenth century. The most eloquent and capable representative of this group was Bonaventure, one of the pure-hearted men who, while possessing a healthy nature, pursued heretics; he was a mystic who wrote philosophical books; a researcher who despised knowledge; a man who was a friend and opponent of Thomas Aquinas all his life; he lived in poverty in the manner of the apostles and taught poverty to everyone; and it was during his presidency that the Franciscan order acquired great wealth. Bonaventure in Italian means “happy fortune,” and we do not know why Giovanni di Fidanza, who was born in 1221 in Tuscany, was given such a title. Giovanni fell ill in childhood and nearly died from it; his mother sought his cure from Saint Francis; and from the moment Giovanni recovered, he considered his life indebted to that saint. When he joined the Franciscan monks, he was sent to Paris to study under Alexander of Hales. In 1248 Bonaventure began teaching theology at the University of Paris, and in 1257, when he was still only thirty-six years old, he was elected general minister of the Franciscan order. In this position he made the utmost effort to remedy the negligence of the followers of that order, but because he was a very kind man, he did not succeed in this task. He himself lived with the utmost simplicity in the corner of a cell and spent his days in asceticism. When the papal legates went to his service to inform him that he had become a cardinal, they found him busy washing the kitchen utensils. A year later (1274) he died from excessive work.

All his books are written in a fluent, firm, and concise style. Bonaventure pretended that his work was merely collecting scattered materials, but whenever he touched a subject he filled it with order, enthusiasm, and a soothing humility. His book, known as the Breviloquium, was an admirable collection in which Christian theology was expressed with brevity; his books Itinerarium Mentis in Deum and Collationes in Hexaemeron are considered gems of mystical holiness. The summary of his opinions in these books was that true knowledge is not obtained through the perception of the material world by the senses, but through the discovery of the spiritual world with the help of the human soul. While Bonaventure loved Saint Thomas, he disapproved of the study of philosophy and without any hesitation attacked some of Aquinas’s inferences. He reminded the Dominicans that Aristotle was one of the infidels and of course it is not fitting to equate the words of that infidel with the sayings of the Church Fathers; and he asked whether Aristotle’s philosophy could explain for a moment the movements of the stars. He said that God is not the conclusion of a philosophical proposition, but an essence that is present and watchful.

It is better to feel his existence than to try to define him. Goodness is superior to truth, and simple virtue has a place above all sciences. It is reported that one day a brother named Egidio, who had become greatly astonished at the extent of Bonaventure’s knowledge and proficiency, said to him: “Alas! What can we simple and ignorant people do to become worthy of the Lord’s grace?” Bonaventure replied: “My brother, you know well that it is enough for a person to love God.” Egidio asked: “Then do you believe that an illiterate woman can please God as much as a professor of theology?” And when Bonaventure gave a positive answer to this question, Egidio ran into the middle of the street, addressed a beggar woman, and cried out: “Rejoice, for if you love God, in the eternal kingdom you may have a position higher than our brother Bonaventure!” Obviously, if we imagine that scholastic philosophy was merely a story of a series of uniform and tedious opinions and methods, we are mistaken. In the scholastic school various kinds of philosophical opinions arose, so that among the group of masters of a single university it was possible at the same time for a man like Thomas to honor reason, a man like Bonaventure to despise reason, a man like Guillaume de Paris to choose the philosophy of free will following Ibn Gabirol, and someone like Siger to teach Averroes’s opinions. Among the group of pure followers of religion, the differences of opinion and contradictions were almost as severe as between the faithful and the infidels. For example, John Peckham, one of the Franciscan bishops, might accuse Aquinas with the same intensity that Thomas accused Siger and Averroes; and Albertus Magnus also momentarily deviated from the path of the pure and wrote: “There are ignorant people who use every means to prevent philosophy from being used; and especially of this kind are the members of the Franciscan order, that is, the same senseless animals whose work is disrespect for things about which they have no information.”

Albert loved science and, as long as heresy did not enter the picture, was devoted to Aristotle. Among the scholastic scholars, he was the first to study all the important works of Aristotle and girded himself to interpret and explain them according to Christian standards. Albert was born around 1201 in Lauingen in Swabia; his father, Count of Bollstädt, belonged to the wealthy class. Albert completed his studies in Padua, joined the Dominican order, and for a time taught in the schools of this order in Hildesheim, Freiburg, Regensburg, Strasbourg, Cologne (1228–1245), and Paris (1245–1248). Despite his interest in school life, he was appointed representative of the Dominican order in Germany and bishop of Regensburg (1260). According to reports, he always traveled barefoot. In 1262 he was allowed to take refuge in the corner of a prayer cell in Cologne. When he was seventy-six years old (1277), he came out of that corner of seclusion to defend the name and principles of his deceased student Thomas Aquinas in Paris. He succeeded in this task, took refuge again in the corner of his monastery, and died at the age of seventy-nine. His sincerity in life, his lack of arrogance, humility, and endless spiritual interests are a manifestation of the highest monasticism of the Middle Ages.

Only from the monotonous and calm flow of the years of his residence in the monastery and the extraordinary perseverance that is characteristic of German scholars can one understand how a man who spent so much of his time teaching and managing affairs was able to write articles on almost every aspect of the sciences and compose important treatises on every branch of philosophy and theology. Albert placed his works almost on the same foundation as Aristotle’s books, and even in the titles of the treatises he imitated the Greek philosopher. He uses Averroes’s commentaries in expressing Aristotle’s opinions; but wherever Aristotle and Averroes differ from Christian theology, Albertus Magnus manfully tries to correct the opinions of the two. He quotes so much from Muslim thinkers that his works have become an important source for Western students and researchers to learn about Islamic philosophy. Throughout all his works, almost every other page refers to Avicenna’s opinions, and sometimes he quotes passages from Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed. He considers Aristotle the greatest authority in the sciences and philosophy, Augustine the highest reference in theology, and finally the Holy Scripture the answer to everything. The extremely numerous discussions he has gathered in these works do not have correct order and never become a style of thought free of contradictions. In the course of a treatise, he defends an opinion in one place and attacks it in another; Albert did not have time to smooth out these contradictions. He was a kinder and more pious man than to be a true researcher and to separate feelings and impressions from rational propositions; he was able, in the course of a commentary on Aristotle, to write a detailed treatise in twelve “books” in praise of the blessed Virgin Mary, and in it to mention that Mary had complete knowledge of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Then what was this man’s success? As we shall see, above all else, he contributed considerably to the examinations and theories of the sciences of his age. In philosophy, he achieved his sole purpose of “making Aristotle known to the Latin peoples”; in teaching philosophy, he promoted Aristotelian philosophy; he gathered a rich collection of the thoughts and debates of many pagan scholars and Arab, Jewish, and Christian sages, from which his famous students later used that storehouse to prepare a more orderly and fluent mixture. Perhaps without Albert the appearance of a man like Thomas would have been impossible.

V – Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, like Albert, came from a noble family and gave up worldly wealth for the sake of otherworldly happiness.

His father, Count Landulf of Aquino, belonged to the German nobility, was a nephew of Frederick Barbarossa, and was one of the most famous courtiers of the emperor without a crown, Frederick II. His mother’s lineage went back to the Norman princes of Sicily.

Although Thomas was born in Italy, on his father’s and mother’s side he had Northern and originally Teutonic blood; he had neither the Italian grace nor the devilishness of that people, but was a German, a sturdy youth with a large head, a broad face, golden hair, and a calm satisfaction for intellectual matters. His friends called him “the big silent bull of Sicily.”

Thomas was born in 1225 in his father’s castle at Roccasecca, five kilometers from Aquino and halfway between Naples and Rome. The monastery of Monte Cassino was nearby, and there Thomas received his preliminary education. At the age of fourteen he began a five-year course of study at the University of Naples. At this time the famous Michael Scot was there translating Averroes’s general works into Latin; at the same university, Jacob Anatoli was translating Averroes’s works into Hebrew; Peter of Ireland, one of Thomas’s teachers, was a fervent supporter of Aristotle; the University of Naples was a center for the influence of Greeks, Arabs, and Jews that affected Christian thought. Thomas’s brothers became interested in poetry and literature, and one of them, Rinaldo, became a servant and falconer at Frederick’s court and urged Thomas to enter court service as well. Frederick himself and his wise minister, Pietro della Vigna, also invited Thomas for such a purpose. Instead of accepting such an invitation, Thomas joined the Dominican order (1244). Shortly after this introduction, he was sent to Paris for the study of theology. At the beginning of the journey, two of his brothers, at their mother’s instigation, kidnapped Thomas; they took him to the castle of Roccasecca and imprisoned him there for a year. To dissuade him from such an idea, they resorted to every action; according to a probably legendary tradition, in the hope of making Thomas interested in material things again, they sent a young and graceful maiden to his bedroom, but Thomas took a burning brand from the fireplace and drove the girl out of his room with it, and drew the sign of the cross on the door. His unshakeable piety finally led his mother to agree with her son’s intentions; she helped her son in his escape, and Thomas’s sister, Marotta, after much conversation, became a nun of the Benedictine order.

In Paris, Albertus Magnus was one of his teachers (1245). When Albert was transferred to the University of Cologne, Thomas also followed him and continued his studies under him until 1252. Sometimes Thomas seemed like a foolish person, but Albert always defended him and prophesied that he would become a great man. After a while Thomas returned to Paris and began teaching theology as a new master; and at the same time, imitating his teacher, he began writing a series of extensive works to present Aristotelian philosophy in a Christian covering to those interested. In 1259 he left Paris to teach at a school that the papal court sometimes held in Anagni, sometimes in Orvieto, and sometimes in Viterbo. At the papal court he became acquainted with William of Moerbeke and asked him to translate Aristotle directly from Greek into Latin.

Meanwhile, Siger of Brabant had become the leader of an intellectual revolution at the University of Paris by promoting Averroes’s ideas.

To counter this danger, Thomas was sent to Paris. When Thomas arrived in Paris, he waged war inside the enemy camp by writing the treatise On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists (1270). He ended his treatise with unusual sharpness in this way:

Behold how we have refuted these errors. Our answer is not based on heavenly verses, but on the reasonings and expressions of the philosophers themselves. Therefore if someone, out of boasting about his supposed intellect, wants to criticize what we have written, let him not do so in a corner, or begin speaking in the presence of children who do not have the power to examine such difficult issues. Let him, if he dares, answer openly. Such a person will find me as an opponent, and not only this weak servant, but many people who have made the discovery of truth their aim. We will fight with his errors, and we will cure his ignorance.

The second period of teaching in Paris was a difficult issue for Thomas, because he not only had to fight the ideas of the Averroists, but he also had to stand against the attacks of his fellow monks, who were suspicious of reason and considered Thomas’s claim about harmonizing Aristotle with Christian doctrine futile. John Peckham, who had taken the chair of philosophy at the Franciscan school in Paris from Bonaventure, reproached Thomas for having polluted Christian theology with the philosophy of a pagan. Later John Peckham reported that Thomas continued to resist his statements, but “with great humility and gentleness” answered his objections. Perhaps those three contentious years weakened Thomas’s active spirit.

In 1272 Thomas, at the request of Charles of Anjou, returned to Italy to give a new organization to the University of Naples. In the last years of his life, whether because of exhaustion or because of despair with dialectical logic and disputes, he stopped writing.

When a friend encouraged him to complete his great book the Summa Theologica, Thomas replied: “I do not have the power for such a work; such things have been revealed to me that what I have written seems like a straw in comparison.” In 1274 Gregory X summoned him to participate in the Council of Lyons. Thomas, who was traveling on a donkey, undertook such a great journey across the whole of Italy, but on the way between Naples and Rome his strength weakened and he had to be bedridden in the Cistercian monastery of Fossanova in Campania, and it was here that in 1274, although he was only forty-nine years old, he passed away.

When the Church placed him among the saints, those who were present to mention his virtues acknowledged that Thomas “spoke softly, conversation with him was easy, he was a cheerful and open-faced man ... noble-natured, extremely patient, very cautious; the light of love and holiness combined with gentleness shone from his forehead, and he was astonishingly kind to the poor.” He was so absorbed in piety and study that these two actions filled every moment of his waking hours and nothing else occurred to him. He participated in all the day and night prayers, every morning either he himself supervised the performance of a mass or he participated twice in such assemblies, and he spent the rest of his time reading and writing, preaching and teaching, and finally performing religious duties. Before preaching or giving a lecture, or before engaging in study or composition, he always prayed, and his fellow monks imagined that “his knowledge was more due to the prayers he recited than to the effort he made rationally.” In the margins of his manuscripts we often see that he asks God or the Virgin Mary for intercession and help with prayers and sacred words such as Ave Maria. He was so absorbed in worship and intellectual matters that he almost did not notice what was happening around him. In the dining hall most of the food plate was placed in front of him or removed from before him without him noticing this matter; but apparently his appetite was very good. It is reported that he was invited with some clerics to have dinner with Louis IX; during the meal, Thomas became absorbed in thought; suddenly he struck the table hard with his fist and cried out: “This will be a crushing answer to the Manichaeans!” The abbot sitting next to him reproached him: “You are sitting at the table of the king of France!” But Louis, with royal politeness, signaled to a servant to place ink and pen before that victorious monk. With all this, that saint absorbed in religion and science could, with good discernment, write about many practical issues of life. What astonished people was his ability to adapt his sermons to the thoughtful minds of book-reading monks or the simple minds of ordinary people. Thomas had no arrogance or haughtiness, expected nothing important from life, did not seek any honors, and was unwilling to accept promotion in clerical ranks. His writings encompass the whole world, but the world that is contained in these works is not so insignificant. It is in such a world that he confronts every kind of argument against his faith and answers them all with humility and calmness.

In completing the tradition of his age he cites the opinions of Eastern philosophers and everywhere explicitly acknowledges his debt to them. Thomas quotes from the opinions of Avicenna, Ghazali, Averroes, Isaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol, and Maimonides.

Obviously no scholar can attain an understanding of thirteenth-century scholastic philosophy unless he considers the background of this school, which is nourished by the philosophical opinions of Muslims and Jews. Thomas does not show the interest in Ibn Gabirol that Guillaume de Paris does, but he has great respect for Maimonides or, as he calls him, “Rabbi Moses.”

Thomas, following Maimonides, says that religion and reason can be reconciled with each other, and like the Jewish sage he considers some of the secrets and mysteries of religion beyond the reach of reason; and in confirmation of this point he quotes exactly the reasons that Maimonides brought in his Guide for the Perplexed. He agrees with Maimonides on the point that human reason can prove the existence of God, but can never understand the divine attributes; and Thomas also presents reasons for the eternity of the universe that are extremely similar to Maimonides’s reasons. In logic and metaphysics, Thomas makes Aristotle his leader and guide and in almost every page of his book quotes the words of Aristotle; but whenever the Greek philosopher deviates from the path of Christian doctrine, Thomas without hesitation stops following him and differs with him. Thomas, after admitting that the Trinity, incarnation, atonement, redemption, and finally the last judgment cannot be proved with rational arguments, in all other issues accepted the wisdom of reason so completely and without question that this action terrified the followers of Augustine. Thomas should be considered a mystic of illumination in that he placed some of the fixed principles of Christianity above human reason, and said that they should be accepted by faith, and like all Christian mystics he was eager for the end of separation and thinking of union with the Truth; but he was counted among the “people of reason and thought” in that he preferred reason to the “heart” for attaining truth. He saw that Europe had set out with the intention of an age of reason; and he believed that the duty of a Christian philosopher is to confront the new spirit with the help of reason. Thomas, before presenting his reasons, quoted verses from the Holy Scripture and the opinions of the Church Fathers whose word was proof, but with effective sincerity he said: “The argument of the powerful is the weakest of arguments.” In expressing the final cause of philosophy he expressed the opinion: “The purpose of learning philosophy is not merely to know the opinions of others, but to attain the truth of the matter.” Thomas’s writings, from the point of view of his constant adherence to logical standards, should be considered a sequel to Aristotle’s works.

In world history one rarely encounters a man like Thomas Aquinas who alone was able to organize and clarify such a vast field of ideas and thoughts. There is no kind of deception in his style; it is simple, straightforward, concise, and precise; he neither prolongs speech nor has any superfluous padding; but he lacks the enthusiasm, imagination, fiery emotions, and poetic lyricism that we observe in Augustine’s style. Thomas believed that in the field of philosophy there is no place for subtlety and elaborate poetic descriptions; when he wished, he was able, by composing the highest poems, to compete with famous poets. The most flawless works that have flowed from his pen are the hymns and prayers he composed especially for the feast of Corpus Christi, and among them is the majestic hymn Lauda Sion that, in its melodious verses, speaks of the real presence of the Most High among the prayers of the two hours after midnight, or the prayer of praise, a hymn by Thomas has remained that begins with a verse from Saint Ambrose Prodiens supernum Verbum and ends with two refrains Hostia salutaris O (“Hail to you, O choir of cherubim”); and this hymn is regularly read in the concluding ceremonies of the holy rites. Also among the prayers of vespers we encounter one of the highest Christian hymns that is a delightful combination of religious ideas and delicate poetic words:

O tongue, sing of that glorious body, and that blood that no price can equal, blood that the most generous mother’s darling, and the king of all men, offered for the redemption of the world.

It was granted to us and born among us, from a virgin maiden, and made the world his dwelling, scattered the seed of the divine word and like us, with this earthly body in this earthly prison took his place and in a wonderful way ended his life.

On the night of the Last Supper, with the apostles, while they bowed their heads, and all the ancient laws in the food that the Church’s law had prescribed were observed, with his own hand he gives food to the twelve who had gathered, he surrenders himself with his own hand.

The word of God took bodily form, makes the real bread with a word into his body, wine becomes the blood of Jesus, and if the sense is not able to see, let the owner of a confident heart, relying on pure faith, gain strength.

Thus we kneel and honor such a great holy rite; let the ancient rite of worship give way to these new rites; let our faith compensate for the deficiency of our dull sense.

Thanks and joyful song, sorrow, pride, strength, abundant blessings; and at his own court, from which both come, let our praise be accepted in the same way.

Thomas’s life was a little more than half of Albert’s life, yet in the course of this period the number of books he composed was no less than the works of his teacher. He wrote commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Book of Sentences, the Gospels, the book of the prophet Isaiah, the book of Job, the epistles of Paul the Apostle, Plato’s Timaeus, the opinions of Boethius and the opinions attributed to Dionysius; and Aristotle’s books on the Organon, On the Heavens and the Earth, On Generation and Corruption, Meteorologica, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, Politics, and Ethics. With titles such as On Truth, On Power, On Goodness, On the Intellect, On the Virtues, and so on; he also composed scattered discussions that included points that had been raised without logical order or connection in lecture sessions, and treatises with titles such as On the Principles of Nature, On Being and Essence, On the Art of Government, On the Hidden Works of Nature, On the Unity of the Intellect, and the like. He also wrote a book in four volumes entitled Summa contra Gentiles (1258–1260), a collection in twenty-one volumes entitled Summa Theologica (1267–1273), and a book entitled Compendium of Theology (1271–1273). All the works that have been published from Thomas amount to ten thousand large two-column pages.

The Summa contra Gentiles was written by Thomas at the request of Raymond of Peñafort, master of the Dominican order, to help in inviting the Muslims and Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity. For this reason, Thomas in this book bases almost all his arguments on rational standards, although he says with regret that “this matter appears less in the works of God.” In this particular collection Thomas sets aside the scholastic method of debate, expresses his material in an almost novel style, and in presenting the subjects sometimes his tone is sharper than is fitting for the position of someone whom posterity called the “heavenly sage.” Thomas in this collection claims that the Christian faith must be a divine religion, because despite forbidding people from bodily pleasures and worldly blessings, that is, doctrines that were not pleasing to people’s ears, it succeeded in conquering the Roman Empire and Europe, while Islam, by encouraging people to enjoy pleasures and by the sword, conquered countries. In the fourth part of this book, he openly admits that the important principles of the Christian faith cannot be proved by reasoning, and accepting the Torah and the Gospels requires faith in revelation and hidden disclosure.

In Thomas Aquinas’s most important work, the Summa Theologica, the addressee is the followers of the Christian faith; here Thomas’s purpose is to explain and defend all the principles of Catholic doctrine in wisdom and theology from the Holy Scripture, the opinions of the Church Fathers, and with the help of rational reasons. The preface of the book says: “Our effort will be to examine all issues related to the principles of religion, as far as the subject under discussion allows, with brevity and clarity.” The author’s brevity, which has brought this work to twenty-one volumes, may amuse us, but at any rate this is what can be seen clearly; this summary is a very great collection, but the author does not prolong it; its volume is simply the result of the vastness of the scope of its subject, because this book, which apparently was composed under the title of theology, includes several extensive books on metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and law; 38 treatises, 631 questions or subjects, 10,000 cases for objection or answer. The order and arrangement of the arguments about each of the questions raised is admirable, but the skeleton and composition of this book have been praised more than necessary. It cannot be compared with Spinoza’s Ethics, which has precise order, or from the point of view of its sequence compared with Herbert Spencer’s synthetic philosophy. The treatise on psychology (Part I, questions 75–94) presents a glimpse of the six days of creation in the midst of a discussion about the state of primordial man in a state of natural innocence. The shape of this book is more noteworthy than its composition and division. Basically Thomas has used and perfected the same method that Abelard first adopted, and then it was freed from its initial defect by Peter Lombard: that is, in every subject he first presents the proposition, brings reasons for its rejection, raises objections to the proof of the proposition, then presents arguments from the Gospel, the Church Fathers, and logical proofs for its proof, and gives answers to the objections raised. This method sometimes causes waste of time; that is, the author himself deliberately fabricates imaginary objections in order to refute them; but in many cases the debate is very necessary and real. Thomas’s skill and dexterity is evident in that, with the power of speech and astonishing sincerity, he himself raises opinions contrary to his own theories and develops them carefully; from this point of view, the Summa Theologica, in addition to being a memorial of the principles of religion, is also a summary of the opinions of heretics, and can be used as an arsenal to equip the army of skeptics. It is possible that Thomas’s answers will not always convince us, but we can never complain that the devil had an incompetent lawyer.

VI – The Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas

1 – Logic

What is science? Is it a divine light that shines from God upon man and without divine decree such a thing is not possible? It is observed that at the beginning of this discussion Thomas disagrees with Augustine, the mystics, the illuminists, and the intuitives. That is, he says that science is a natural product, taken from the external bodily senses and the internal sense that he has called self-awareness or intuition. This science is extremely limited, since until our age no scholar has attained an understanding of the essence of a mosquito; but knowledge, despite its limitations, is trustworthy and there is no need for us to be anxious and distressed about the possibility that the external world is among illusions. Thomas accepts the definition that the scholastic scholars had made of truth, that is, “the equality of thought with the thing.” Since the mind acquires all its natural knowledge through the senses, its direct information about things outside the mind is limited to bodies or, in other words, the “sensory” world or sensibles. The human mind cannot directly attain knowledge of the world beyond the sensibles or metaphysics, that is, it cannot directly understand the intellects placed in bodies or God in creation, but it is possible that by analogy, through sensory experience, it may obtain indirect information about other intellects and also about the existence of God. But about the third realm or the supernatural world in which God lives, no information enters the human mind except through inspiration and hidden revelation. It is possible that with our natural perception we may become aware of the existence and unity of God, because the existence and unity of the divine shines through all the wonders and order of the world; but we are not able, by mere reason, to become aware of the essence of God or the Trinity. Even the knowledge of the angels is limited, otherwise they would also be God.

These very limitations of science indicate the existence of a supernatural world. God reveals the mystery of the world to us in the “Holy Scripture.” Just as it is foolish for a peasant who is unable to understand a philosopher’s hypotheses to consider them nonsense, in the same way it is pure stupidity that because apparently divine revelation in some points contradicts natural human science, man should deny its existence. It can be assured that if our science were complete, then there would certainly be no contradiction between revelation and philosophy. It is wrong to say that a proposition may be incorrect philosophically and correct according to faith; all truth emanates from the existence of God and is one. Nevertheless, it is desirable to distinguish between what we understand by reason and what we accept by the power of faith; the realm of philosophy and the subject of ideology differ from each other. Researchers are allowed to discuss the objections they have to religion in their own circle, but “for simple-minded people it is not appropriate to hear the words of those who do not believe in religion,” because simple-minded people lack the necessary information to answer such objections. Scholars, philosophers, and simple-minded peasants must all bow their heads in submission to the decisions of the Church; “in all matters we must be under the command of the Church,” because the Church has been appointed by God as the treasury of divine wisdom. The person of the Pope “is the final authority in all religious matters, so that his decisions must be accepted by all believers with firm faith.” The other option is nothing but intellectual, moral, and social chaos.

2 – Metaphysics

In the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas the main subject is God, not man. He writes: “The highest information we can have about God in this life is to know that he is superior to all things we can imagine about him.” He rejects Anselm’s argument about existence, but since he considers the existence of God identical with the essence of God, he is not so far from Anselm’s opinions. Thomas says that God is existence itself: “I am who I am.”

In Thomas’s opinion, the existence of God can be proved by natural reasons: 1) all movements are caused by previous movements and so on, until we reach a first mover that is itself motionless, or we reach an “infinite regress” that is inconceivable; 2) in the same way chains of causes require a first cause; 3) the possible, which is probable but not necessary, is conditional on the necessary, which must be; the possible depends on the real; with this chain of arguments, we reach a necessary being that is pure truth; 4) beings have different degrees in terms of goodness, correctness, and originality; there must certainly be a source of perfect goodness, truth, and originality as a model in contrast to these imperfect virtues; 5) there are thousands of evidences and indications of order in the world; even non-living things move in an orderly way; how can such a thing be possible unless there is an intelligent force that created all this? From the issue of the existence of God onward, in natural theology Thomas is almost among the agnostics; he says: “We cannot know what God is, but we can only understand what he is not.” God is not a movable, participable, changeable, and mortal essence. Why should insignificant intellects expect to understand more about the infinite? Thomas (as if he were a forerunner of Bergson’s opinions in this matter) says that for us it is difficult to imagine a non-bodily spirit, because reason depends on the senses and all our external experiences are related to material things; as a result, “non-material things for which there is no form are revealed to us by comparison with sensible bodies for which forms exist.” Understanding the essence of God (as Maimonides taught) is possible only through analogy to the soul or reasoning from ourselves and our experience and ascribing it to him; therefore, if we observe goodness, love, truth, vigilance, power, freedom, or any other virtue in individuals, we say that all this must be gathered in the Creator as well, but to a degree that is proportionate to the relationship between the infinite and ourselves. We use masculine pronouns for God only for ease of work; for God and the angels gender has no meaning. God is one, because in his definition we said that God is existence itself, and the uniform administration of the world indicates a single law and intellect. That it has been said that in this divine unity there are three persons is a mystery whose solution is not within the power of reason and must be accepted only with the help of faith.

Furthermore, we do not know whether the world was created in time (or in other words is contingent) and therefore its creator brought it from non-existence to existence, or according to the opinions of Aristotle and Averroes the world is eternal. The reasons that theologians have presented for the creation of the world in time are weak and must be rejected “lest it appear that the Catholic faith is based on futile arguments.” Thomas concludes that we must believe by the power of faith in the creation of the world in time, but he also adds that this point does not have much meaning, because before creation time did not exist; without change, without matter being in motion, time does not exist. He manfully tries to explain how God could enter the stage of creation from the pre-creation stage without himself being subject to change. Thomas says that the act of creation is eternal (or in other words, ancient) but makes the determination of time conditional on the will of creation so that it may be used to show its effects. Such an argument should be considered like a fat man’s escape from the eye of a needle.

The angels constitute the highest degree of creation. These beings are intellects that are abstract, incorruptible, and eternal. These act as divine ministers in worldly government, they move and lead the celestial bodies; every person has a guardian angel, and the archangels pay attention to the crowd of people. Since the angels are non-material, they can move themselves from one corner of space to another without having traversed the distance between those two points in space. Thomas has ninety-three pages of material about the hierarchy, movements, love, knowledge, will, speech, and habits of the angels, which is the highest example of exaggeration in the great and comprehensive collection of the Summa Theologica and is considered its most undeniable part.

Just as the angels exist, so there is talk of demons, which are small beings that are slaves to the devil. These demons are not merely the product of the imagination and fancy of ordinary people; they are real beings from whose existence innumerable harms arise. These beings can arouse a feeling of disgust toward a woman in a man’s heart and cause impotence. They make various kinds of magic possible, so that a demon can lie under a man’s body, take his semen, quickly pass it through space, have intercourse with a woman, and place the absent man’s seed in the woman’s womb. The demons can enable sorcerers to predict such events that are conditional and dependent on human will. They can, by placing effects on the human imagination, or by appearing to people and speaking to them, reflect a matter or matters in minds, or they may cooperate with witch women and help in harming children through the evil eye.

Thomas, like almost all his contemporaries and most people of our age, attached great value to the science of astrology, so that he says:

The movements of bodies in this lower world ... must be related to the movements of the celestial bodies, and those bodies should be considered the cause of these movements. ... The reason that astrologers often predict the truth by observing the stars is explained in two ways: first, because the majority of people follow sensual desires, therefore most of their actions are performed according to the inclination of the celestial bodies; only a few, or in other words only the rational, are those who moderate these inclinations with the help of reason. ... Secondly, it is because of the intervention of the demons that these predictions are realized. Nevertheless, Thomas believes that “human actions are not subject to the action of the celestial bodies, except by chance and indirectly.” In other words, he has granted a wide realm of free will to man.

3 – Theology

The main subject of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy is God, not man. He writes: “The highest information we can have about God in this life is to know that he is superior to all things we can imagine about him.” He rejects Anselm’s argument about existence, but since he considers the existence of God identical with the essence of God, he is not so far from Anselm’s opinions. Thomas says that God is existence itself: “I am who I am.”

Thomas, like almost all his contemporaries and most people of our age, attached great value to the science of astrology, so that he says: “The movements of bodies in this lower world ... must be related to the movements of the celestial bodies, and those bodies should be considered the cause of these movements. ... The reason that astrologers often predict the truth by observing the stars is explained in two ways...” Nevertheless, Thomas believes that “human actions are not subject to the action of the celestial bodies, except by chance and indirectly.” In other words, he has granted a wide realm of free will to man.

4 – Psychology

Thomas examines the philosophical issues of psychology with great care; and his writings on these subjects are among the best outpourings of his pen among all the diverse subjects he has gathered. He begins his discussion with the premise that living beings are not machines, but have life; that is, a machine is composed of parts that have been placed on top of each other from the outside, whereas a living being itself makes its constituent parts and is moved by its own internal force. This internal shaping force is the soul. Thomas expresses this opinion in Aristotelian terms, the soul is the “substantial form” of the body, that is, it is the vital source and force that gives life and form to a living being. “The soul is the main source of our nutrition, sensation, movement, and perception.” Souls have three degrees: “vegetative,” that is, one that has the power of growth; “sensitive,” which has the power of sensation; “rational,” that is, one that has the power of reason. Every living being possesses the first, only animals and humans have the second, and finally the third type is exclusive to human beings. But higher living beings, in their physical and individual evolution, pass through stages where lower beings have taken their place; “the higher a form is in the degrees of existence ... it must pass through a greater number of intermediate forms to reach the form of perfection.” In fact, this statement of Thomas is a copy of the nineteenth-century hypothesis of recapitulation that says man passes through all the stages that species have traversed in their evolutionary course.

While Plato, Augustine, and the Franciscans considered the soul as a prisoner in the prison of the body and identified it only with the person, Thomas bravely accepted Aristotle’s theory and defined man even personality as a combination of body and soul, matter and form. The soul or the internal force that is the creator of form and giver of life exists inseparably in every part of the body and is connected with the body in a thousand ways. From the vegetative soul aspect it needs nutrition; from the sensitive soul aspect it depends on impressions; and from the rational soul aspect it needs forms that create or compose their impressions. Even rational power and spiritual perceptions require a body that is to some reasonable extent free of defects; naturally when the skin is thick, it indicates a spirit free of sensitivity. Dreams, intense emotions, mental states, human nature and temperament are all related to the functions of the organs. Sometimes Thomas speaks as if body and soul are one unified and single truth that gives power from within and is given form from outside to this indivisible whole. Nevertheless, in his view it was clear that the rational soul, that is, the thing that abstracted, generalized, reasoned, and mapped the universe, is a truth that is non-bodily. Thomas said that although our tendency is to think about all things by material standards, no matter how hard we try we cannot find anything material in awareness or intuition; the rational soul is a truth that differs entirely from any material or spatial thing. This rational soul must certainly be counted among spiritual things and considered something that God, that spiritual force that is behind all material phenomena, has injected into us. Only a non-material force had the power to embody a general concept, or to jump back and forth in time, or to understand large and small with equal ease. The mind can be aware of its own existence, but it is impossible to imagine a material essence that is aware of its own existence to this degree.

Therefore it is reasonable to believe that this spiritual force remains in us after the perishing of the body. But a soul that has been separated from the body in this way is not a personality for itself; it cannot sense or will or think; it is a weak and wretched spirit that without its own flesh and skin is unable to perform any action. Only when through the resurrection of the body it is connected with its earthly frame that formed its inner life, then together with that body it forms an immortal individual and personality. In Thomas’s opinion, because Averroes and his followers did not believe in the resurrection of the body, they were forced to accept the hypothesis of the “active intellect” and say that the spirit of the universe, or of species, is immortal.

Thomas uses all the arrows he has in his dialectical quiver to refute this hypothesis. In his view, this dispute with Averroes over eternal life was the most important issue of the century and had such importance that the results obtained from the wars of kings, that is, changing the borders and titles of kingdoms, seemed like a small foolish work in comparison. Thomas says that the soul must be counted among spiritual things and considered something that God, that spiritual force behind all material phenomena, has injected into us. Only a non-material force had the power to embody a general concept, or to jump back and forth in time, or to understand large and small with equal ease. The mind can be aware of its own existence, but it is impossible to imagine a material essence that is aware of its own existence to this degree.

5 – Ethics

The correct purpose of man in this world is the acquisition of truth, and in the hereafter the seeing of this truth in God. Now we have come and agreed with Aristotle that man seeks nothing but happiness; it must be seen what the best means to achieve such a goal is. Although man may enjoy bodily pleasures, honors, wealth, power, and even works related to rational virtues, it must be known that he will not see happiness in any of these. Let us also accept this proposition that “a temperament free of defect ... is necessary for pure happiness.” But none of these can equal the happiness that is accompanied by the calm of the soul or the penetration and permanence of the power of perception over the soul itself. Probably with attention to Virgil’s famous saying “Happy is he who has been able to know the causes of things” that Thomas considered the greatest success and satisfaction of the soul or the attainment of the natural peak of rationality specific to the soul in that “the entire system of creation and its causes are imprinted on the tablet of the human soul.” The calm of mind that is superior to perception itself arises from the power of perception.

But even this greatest worldly joy does not completely satisfy or content the human soul. Man vaguely knows that “absolute and real happiness is not granted in this world.” In man there is a desire that is not satisfied with anything except the attainment of happiness and a knowledge that is safe from changes and protected from the ups and downs of this perishable world. Other human tendencies may be satisfied with other things in the meantime, but the human mind will not be completely calm and settled except when it attains that treasury and peak of truth that is the divine essence. Only in the existence of God is there absolute goodness; God is the source of all virtues, the cause of all causes, and the truth of all truths. The ultimate purpose of man is to see the blessed beauty of God, that is, to understand a state that grants real happiness.

As a result, all ethics is the art and science of preparing man to attain this final and eternal happiness. Good ethics and virtue can be defined as the method that brings man to the real destination, that is, seeing the face of God.

Man is naturally inclined to goodness, that is, the desired action; but what he considers good is not always morally good. It was because of Eve’s mistaken idea about goodness that Adam disobeyed God’s command and now in every generation must carry the stain of that original sin with him. If in this matter someone asks how a God who foresees everything should create a man and woman who are so curious, and bring forth a race whose share is such inherited guilt, Thomas answers that, from the metaphysical point of view, it is impossible for a creature to be perfect, and human freedom in committing sin is a price that must be paid for his free will. Without that freedom of will, man would be an insignificant being that would not be above good and evil but below it, and his credibility and dignity would not be more than a machine.

Since Thomas wholeheartedly believed in the theory of original sinfulness, was immersed in Aristotelian philosophy, accustomed to seclusion, and terrified of the female sex, it was almost destined that he would disapprove of woman and speak about woman with masculine chastity. Following Aristotle’s climatic self-love, he imagined that nature, like the father of a medieval tribe, always desires that his child be a boy and believes that woman is an imperfect accidental being; the female sex is in fact a male that has deviated; woman is probably the result of a defect in the male’s productive power, or an external factor like the moist south wind. Thomas, relying on Aristotle’s opinions and his contemporaries’ opinions about biology, imagined that woman only brings the passive matter to offspring, while the male’s action is bringing the active form; woman is the result of the victory of matter over form. As a result, woman is a weaker being in terms of body, intellect, and will. Woman’s sexual desire far surpasses that of man, while man is the manifestation of a more stable element. Both man and woman are created in the likeness of God, but this matter is especially more true in the case of man. Man is the beginning and end of woman, just as God is the source and end of the universe. Woman needs man in everything, but man needs woman only for reproduction. Man performs all affairs better than woman, even attention from the home. Woman is not qualified to hold any important position in the Church or the kingdom. Woman is a part of man, really one of his ribs. Woman must consider man her natural lord, must accept his guidance, and submit to his discipline and reprimands, and through this woman will attain her main purpose and her happiness.

And as for evil, Thomas strives to prove that evil does not exist abstractly. He says “evil is not a positive existence”; every truth is in itself good; evil is merely the lack or absence of a property or force that a being naturally should have. Therefore, for man not having wings is not evil, but the lack of two hands is evil; likewise if a bird is deprived of two hands, this is evil for it. Everything, as it has been created by God, is good, but even God was not able to make creatures share in his infinite perfection.

God permits some corruptions so that good purposes may be achieved, or to prevent the occurrence of greater corruptions.

Exactly “in the same way that human governments ... rightly tolerate some corruptions (such as prostitution) so that greater corruptions may be prevented by this means.”

Sin is a voluntary act that disrupts the rational order (which is also the order of the world). The rational order is the adjustment and regulation of means to achieve purposes. In the case of man this order is the adjustment of behavior to attain eternal happiness. God gives us freedom to err, but at the same time inspires in us from his divine essence the sense of distinguishing right from wrong so that we may distinguish between the two. This innate conscience is an absolute commander and must be obeyed at any cost. If the Church gives a command contrary to someone’s conscience, that person is obliged to disobey the Church’s commands. If his conscience commands him that belief in Christ is an evil thing, he must abandon that belief.

Naturally conscience not only inclines us to the natural virtues of justice, prudence, moderation, and steadfastness, but also urges us to follow the religious virtues of faith, hope, and benevolence. These three latter virtues constitute the distinguished and proud ethics of Christianity. Since human reason is limited, faith is a moral duty. Man must not only believe by relying on faith in the principles above Christian reasoning, but he must also count everything he understands by the power of reason in this category. Since error in matters related to faith may condemn many to eternal torment, therefore one should not show tolerance toward infidels, unless the purpose is to avoid a greater evil; for this reason “whenever the number of infidels has been very conspicuous, the Church has often shown the way of tolerance toward the rites, even heresies, and pagan communities.” Infidels should never be allowed to have superiority or rule over believers. Since the Jewish rites before the appearance of Christ were a sign of Christian rites and this matter is “a clear witness to the existence of Christianity,” an exception can be made with the people of that nation and the way of tolerance can be followed. The unbaptized Jews should never be forced to accept Christianity, but heretics, that is, those who have broken faith from the principles of the Church’s doctrines, can be rightly forced to do such a thing. No one should be considered a heretic unless, when the clerical authorities point out his error to him, he persists in his misguidance. To individuals who abandon their heresy, permission for repentance can be given, and even their past dignity and credibility can be restored to them, but if such individuals again turn to heresy, “they can be given permission for repentance, but they should not be saved from the punishment of death.”

6 – Politics

Thomas wrote about political philosophy in three places: first in a commentary he wrote on Aristotle’s Politics, second in the Summa Theologica, and third in the short treatise On the Art of Government. What is obtained at first glance from the headings of this book is that Thomas has merely repeated Aristotle’s opinions in politics, but when examined carefully, the reader is surprised at how much original and precise material it contains.

The social organization is a means that man creates as a substitute for the organs of the body for seizure and defense. Society and the state are for the individual, not the individual for the two. The right of government emanates from God, but has been delegated to the people. On the one hand, since men are numerous, scattered and changeable, and moreover, because of ignorance, they cannot directly or wisely use this right of sovereignty, therefore they delegate their powers to a king or a leader. This delegation of power by the nation is always irrevocable, and “the king has the right of legislation only to the extent that it represents the will of the nation.”

It is possible to delegate the right of government of the nation to a large group or several people or one person, provided that the laws are good and are well executed; democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy are all desirable. In general, constitutional monarchy is the best of governments, because it gives unity, continuity, and stability. And as the Greek poet Homer said, “A large crowd is better administered by one person than by several.” But the emir or king must be elected by people from every class or free group. If the ruler becomes a tyrannical man, the people must, by adopting a systematic method, remove him from his position. He must always be a servant of the law, not its master.

Law is of three kinds: “natural,” like the “natural laws” of the world; “divine,” as it has been revealed through revelation in the “Holy Scripture”; and “human” or positive, as it is clearly seen in the approved systems of kingdoms. Human law became necessary because of the influences of individuals and the evolution of government. For this reason the Church Fathers had believed that private property is contrary to natural and divine law, and is the result of human sinfulness as a result of Adam’s fall. Thomas does not admit that property is unnatural. He sets aside the arguments of the communists of his age and answers like Aristotle that if everyone owns everything, no one pays attention to anything. But private property is a public trust. “Man must own external things not as personal property, but as public property, so that he can transfer them to others when needed. If a human, because of preserving his position in life, desires wealth greater than his needs and strives toward it, he has fallen into a sinful greed.”

What some people have in abundance arises from natural law for the purpose of helping the needy. “And if there is no other remedy, it is a lawful act for a person to satisfy his needs by means of another’s property, that is, to take it openly or secretly.”

Thomas was not a man who would separate economics from ethics and consider it a sinister science. He believed that society should have the right to regulate and administer agriculture, industry, and commerce, to bring usury under supervision, and even to set a “just price” for services and goods. He looked with suspicion at the dexterity of merchants who bought cheap and sold expensive. He condemned any kind of hoarding and any action that was performed with the intention of attracting profit with attention to the rise and fall of prices. He was opposed to giving loans for taking profit, but he did not consider it necessary for a person to borrow money from those whose work is lending “for a good cause.”

About the issue of slavery, Thomas said nothing higher than the opinions and ideas of his age. The Sophists, the Stoics, and the Roman legislators had taught that all men are “by nature” free; the Church Fathers had agreed with slavery and explained that, like property, it is the result of human sinfulness as a result of Adam’s fall. Aristotle, the lover of the strong, had considered slavery the result of natural inequality of individuals and justified it. Thomas tried to reconcile these opinions. He said that before committing sin there was no kind of slavery, but after the fall it was found useful that simple-minded individuals be made obedient and subject to wise men. Those who have a strong body but a weak intellect have been created by nature for slavery. But the slave belongs to his master only in terms of body, not in terms of spirit; the slave is not obliged to satisfy his master’s sensual needs, and all the moral duties of Christianity must be observed in dealing with slaves.

7 – Religion

Since economic and political issues ultimately have a moral aspect, in Thomas’s view it is right that religion should have a place above political and industrial issues, and that government, in ethics, should be subject to the supervision and guidance of the Church. The higher the goal of the ruling power, the nobler that institution will be; the kings of the earth, who are the guides of individuals toward worldly happiness, must obey the Pope, who leads individuals toward eternal happiness. Government must be the highest authority in worldly matters, but if kings deviate from moral systems or commit injustices against the people that can be avoided, even in such matters the Pope must have the right to intervene. Therefore, the Pope can punish a criminal king or free the people from their oath of allegiance to him. In addition, government is obliged to protect religion, support the Church, and implement the commands of that institution.

The highest duty of the Church is to lead people toward the destination of salvation. Man is not only a subject of this worldly realm, but is one of the members of a spiritual kingdom that is far greater than any government. The most prominent truths of history testify that man, by disobeying the divine command, committed an unlimited sin, and therefore deserved an unlimited punishment; and the second person of the Trinity, or the Son of God, by manifesting in human form and enduring disgrace and the suffering of death, created a treasury of saving grace by the blessing of which man can, despite original sinfulness, be saved. God, according to his will, grants this grace to whoever he wants; we do not have the power to understand the reasons for his choice; but “no one has been so mad as to say that merit is the cause of divine predestination.” The principles of Paul and Augustine find their way into the philosophy of a kind and gentle man like Thomas: “It is fitting that God should determine the destiny of human beings, since all creatures are subject to the Lord. ... Since by the power of the Most High eternal life has been destined for human beings, in the same way his unchallenged power allows that some should not attain that destination; this point has been called deprivation of eternal salvation. ... Just as predestination implies the will to grant grace and honor, in the same way deprivation of eternal salvation implies the will to permit the individual to commit sin, and to decree eternal torment in return for that sin. ... ‘Before the foundation of the world was laid, he chose us for himself.’”

Thomas makes great effort to establish reconciliation between divine predestination and individual freedom, and explains why an individual whose destiny is sealed with the divine seal must be diligent in seeking virtue; how prayer can bring a God who is unchangeable to mercy; or in every society that has already, by the command of predestination, selected a group of individuals for salvation and another group for eternal torment, what the duty of the Church should be. His answer is that God has only foreseen which path each individual will willingly choose. Apparently all infidels are among the hell-dwellers, except perhaps a few whom God has especially and personally revealed to them out of grace.

The most important happiness of the saved will be seeing the beauty of God, meaning not that the saved will understand his essence—for only the infinite is able to understand the infinite—but, with the inspiration of divine grace, this group will be able to observe the divine essence. The entire universe, since it has emanated from the existence of God, returns to the existence of God; the human soul, which is a gift from his warm sea, will never rest until it returns to its source. In this way, the divine cycle of creation and return to the first source is completed, and Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy, which began with God, ends with God.

8 – The Acceptance of Thomas’s Philosophy

The reaction of most of Thomas’s contemporaries was that his philosophy is a formidable collection of pagan arguments that will inflict deadly blows on the body of the Christian faith. The Franciscans, who were following God through Augustinian mysticism, were extremely disgusted by Thomas’s “rationalism,” by the high rank he had given to reason and considered it higher than human will, by the fact that he had placed perception above love, by the fact that he had made understanding superior to love. Many were astonished at how one could raise hands in prayer to such a negative and cold and distant God from humans, or as Thomas had said in his book, to that “pure active power.” How could Jesus Christ be a part of such an abstract phenomenon, and if Saint Francis were alive, what would he say to such a God or about such a God? If body and soul of man were to be united, then what would be the duty of the incorruptibility and immortality of the human soul? Despite Thomas’s denials, his opponents claimed that he had united matter and form and in this way he himself had fallen into the trap of the Averroists’ hypothesis about the immortality of the world. Since he had considered matter, and not form, the principle of distinction and multiplicity of individuals, it seemed that, according to this hypothesis, no means remained for distinguishing the soul and the result was acceptance of the Averroists’ hypothesis about the unity and survival of the general soul. Worse than all, the victory of Aristotle over Augustine in Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy seemed to the Franciscans a victory of paganism over Christianity. Were there not masters and students at the University of Paris in this same history who preferred Aristotle to the “Gospels”? Just as Sunni Islam, at the end of the twelfth century, had expelled and exiled Averroes the supporter of Aristotle, and the pure Jews, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, were burning the books of Maimonides the supporter of Aristotle, in the same way, in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, pure Christians also rose to defend their correct opinions against Thomas who had spoken in the manner of Aristotle. In 1277, at the indication of Pope John XXI, the bishop of Paris in a decree condemned 219 items of Thomas’s opinions as heretical statements. Among the matters that were explicitly raised in this decree “against brother Thomas” were three pieces as follows: 1) the angels are without body, and each of them forms a separate type; 2) matter is the source of multiplicity; 3) God without matter is not able to multiply the individuals of one type. The bishop of Paris said that whoever believes in such opinions, relying on these same opinions, is excommunicated from the papal court. A few days after the issuance of this decree, one of the notables of the Dominicans, Robert Kilwardby, encouraged the masters of the University of Oxford to condemn various opinions of Thomas, including the unity of the soul and body of man.

At this time three years had passed since Thomas’s death, and he was no longer able to defend his opinions, but his old teacher, Albert, with great haste rushed from Cologne to Paris and encouraged the Dominicans of France to rise in support of their fellow brother. A monk from the Franciscan order, named Guillaume de la Mare, entered this dispute with a treatise entitled On the Correction of the Errors of Brother Thomas and, according to his own opinion, corrected 118 points of Thomas’s opinions; also John Peckham, the archbishop of Canterbury who was another leader of the Franciscan order, officially condemned Thomas’s philosophy and urged his religious brothers to return to the opinions of Bonaventure and Saint Francis. Dante also, by accepting the principles of Thomas’s doctrines and modifying them for the foundation of his Divine Comedy, stepped into the field of battle and in ascending the stairs of the highest heaven made Thomas his guide. After fifty years of extensive struggles, the Dominicans convinced Pope John XXII that Thomas was one of the pure of religion, and by placing him among the saints (1323) the victory of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy became certain. From then on the mystics in Thomas’s great book attained the discovery of the deepest and clearest explanations about the life of the thoughtful mystic. In the Council of Trent (1545–1563) the Summa Theologica was placed side by side with the Holy Scripture and the decrees issued by the popes on the altar. Ignatius Loyola made the Jesuits obliged to teach Thomas’s philosophy. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII, and in 1921 Benedict XV, while not considering Thomas’s works completely free of defects, declared them the official philosophy of the Catholic Church; and today that philosophy is taught in all the religious schools of the Roman Catholic Church. Although Thomas’s principles have several opponents among Catholic theologians, in our age they have found new defenders and now, as one of the most enduring and influential collections of philosophical ideas, compete with Platonic philosophy and Aristotelian opinions.

It is easy for a person to cast a glance at the past 700 years and point out some of Thomas’s opinions that have come out of the test of time as incorrect. Thomas’s great reliance on Aristotle, while it was a defect, was also an advantage for him; that is, his pure reliance indicated his lack of originality, and the courage that Thomas showed opened a new path for the jousting of medieval thought. Since Thomas obtained precise and direct translations of Aristotle’s works, his information on the philosophical (and not scientific) books and treatises of that philosopher was more comprehensive and precise than any medieval thinker except Averroes. He was willing to benefit from the table of Muslim and Jewish knowledge, and respected their philosophers with confidence. In his philosophical principles, like all philosophies that do not correspond with our opinions, we encounter many nonsense words; it is strange that a man so modest and humble should speak in such detail about the knowledge of the angels or the nature of man before the fall, or explain what would have become of the human race if Eve’s clever curiosity had not existed. Perhaps we wrongly consider him a philosopher; Thomas himself sincerely called his works theology; and he did not claim that wherever reason guides him, he follows it; he admitted that he begins the discussions with his desired results; and although most philosophers resort to such an action, most reject this method as a betrayal of philosophy. The scope of his research was so vast that no one except Spencer has dared to undertake a similar action until now. Thomas gave clarity and lucidity to every subject, and in solving every issue he used a mild creativity that avoided exaggeration and sought moderation and balance. He said: “A wise man creates order.” Thomas did not succeed in reconciling Aristotle’s opinions with Christianity, but in this struggle he attained a historical victory for reason. He led reason like a bound prisoner into the fortress of faith, but with his victory he also ended the age of faith.

VII – The Successors

The historian always tends to facilitate matters and straighten events and, from among the crowd of people and chains of events that he is never able to understand or comprehend their complexity, hastily selects a few individuals and some facts as far as he can and presents them. When speaking of the scholastic age, one should not imagine this movement as an abstract purified from the thousands of special oddities of that age, but one should know that this title has been applied out of laziness to hundreds of philosophical and religious hypotheses that were taught in the schools of the Middle Ages from Anselm in the eleventh century to William of Ockham in the fourteenth century. The historian is condemned by necessity to the shortness of time and the narrowness of human patience, and is forced, with two or three lines, to insult men who were immortal for a short time and are now hidden from view among the peaks of history.

One of the strangest men of the thirteenth century, that is, the same century that had multiple aspects, is Ramon Llull, who was born in Palma in the bosom of a wealthy family from Catalonia. When Ramon grew up, he turned to the court of James II in Barcelona, spent a stormy youth there, and gradually turned his love affairs into asceticism. He was thirty years old when he suddenly abandoned the world and material things and everything that belonged to the devil and directed his strange power, which had various aspects, to mysticism, occult sciences, helping people, imitating the apostles, and seeking martyrdom; he learned the Arabic language, established a school for Arabic studies in Majorca, and asked the Council of Vienne (1311) to establish schools of Oriental languages and literature to train people for inviting Muslims and Jews to Christianity. That council established five such schools in Rome, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca, each of which had positions or chairs for masters of Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic languages. Probably Llull himself was studying the Hebrew language, since he became one of the sincere enthusiasts and serious students of the Jewish Kabbalah.

Classifying the one hundred and fifty volumes of Llull’s compositions is impossible. In his youth, several collections of ghazals flowed from his fertile pen that laid the foundation of Catalan literature. He first composed his book Contemplation on God in Arabic, and then translated it into Catalan; this book is not merely a collection of mystical imaginations, but an encyclopedia of theology that amounts to one million words (1272). Two years later, Llull, as if he were a completely different man, composed a treatise entitled On the Art of Chivalry and almost simultaneously a guide on educational issues. Meanwhile, Llull began composing a number of philosophical dialogues and published three books of this type in the course of which he expressed the opinions and ideas of Muslims, Jews, Greek Christians, Roman Catholic Christians, and Tatars with astonishing kindness, fairness, and tolerance. Around 1283, he composed a long and poetic religious story entitled Blanquerna, which patient literary critics have considered “one of the masterpieces of medieval Christianity.” In 1295, during a short stay in Rome, he published another encyclopedia entitled Arbor Scientiae, consisting of four thousand questions about sixteen of the sciences of the time, along with reliable answers. During a short stay in Paris (1309–1311), by publishing some shorter treatises in theology, he tried to fight the stubborn followers of Averroes’s ideas there. He published all these treatises with a care that was not his usual habit, under the fantastic pseudonym Fantasticus or “strange man.” Throughout his long life Llull composed so many books about the sciences and philosophy that even mentioning the names of some of them would cause prolongation of speech and weariness of the reader.

Among all these interests, he was fascinated by a thought that has captivated the minds of the most prominent scholars of our age, meaning that he claimed that all the instructions and degrees of logic can be turned into mathematical equations or symbols.

Llull said that Ars Magna or the “Great Art” or “Great Technique” of logic is that the main concepts of human thought should be written on movable squares and then these four-cornered houses should be placed in different positions so that not only all the opinions of philosophy take the form of equations and diagrams, but also, with the help of mathematical formulas, the truths of Christianity can be proved. Ramon in his kindness resembled some mad people and hoped that with the help of his logical reasons he could encourage Muslims to accept Christianity. The Church was very pleased with his confidence, but did not show a favorable view to his proposal about converting all the principles of religion into logical reasons and placing the issue of the Trinity and incarnation in his logical machine.

In 1292, to compensate for the loss of Palestine, he decided to invite Muslim Africa to accept Christianity without resorting to war; for this reason he headed from Spain to Tunis and secretly formed a small Christian settlement there. In 1307, during one of these trips to promote Christianity, he was captured in Tunis; he was brought before the grand mufti of Bejaïa. He ordered that a public debate assembly be held between Ramon and some Muslim jurists. According to the writer of Ramon’s biography, he was victorious in this debate and was thrown into prison. Some Christian merchants arranged for his release and finally returned him to Europe. But in 1314 Ramon Llull, who apparently longed for martyrdom, returned again to Bougie, there openly called people to Christianity, and the Muslim rabble stoned him until he died (1315).

Turning attention from Ramon Llull’s opinions to the philosophy of John Duns Scotus is exactly like a person who, after hearing popular music like Carmen, suddenly enters Bach’s well-sounding clavier. Both “Duns” and “Scotus” are place names and John chose these two names because he was born in Duns in the region of Berwickshire in Scotland (?1266). At the age of eleven he was sent to a monastery belonging to the Franciscan monks in Dumfries; four years later he officially joined that order. John completed his studies in Oxford and Paris and then taught in the university domains of Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He was still young, that is, only forty-two years old, when he died (1308) and left behind a large amount of writing, most of which was on metaphysics; his works are so full of complexity and meticulousness that their like is rarely seen in the history of philosophy before the appearance of another Scot.

In fact, what Duns Scotus did was extraordinarily similar to the work of Kant five centuries later: that is, Scotus claimed that in defending the principles of religion one must bring the practical and moral necessity of them as proof, not their logical necessity. The Franciscans, who wanted to save Augustine’s philosophy from the clutches of Thomas, that dragon of the Dominican order, made this “sharp-sighted sage” their guide, and from then on, living and dead, followed him, and under his banner several generations were engaged in philosophical struggle.

This Scottish sage is one of the greatest intellects in the history of the Middle Ages. After studying mathematics and other branches of the sciences, and benefiting from the table of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon in Oxford, he found a precise concept of proof for himself and applied the same test he had thought of to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy and realized that the result was almost the same that Thomas had taken, that is, a temporary reconciliation between theology and philosophy. Although Duns Scotus clearly knew the inductive method (unlike Francis Bacon), he claimed that inductive proof (that is, inferring from effect to cause) is an uncertain matter; the only real proof is possible through deduction and syllogism: that is, this method shows that some effects must arise from the essential nature of the cause; for example, to prove the existence of God, first it is necessary that we learn metaphysics: that is, “study being as being” and become aware of the essential properties of the world with the help of pure logic. In the realm of essences there must exist an essence that is the source and origin of others, that is, the first essence; this first being is God. Duns agrees with Thomas Aquinas that God is “pure active power,” but he interprets this phrase as pure active. In his view God is primarily will, not intellect. God is the cause of causes and eternal, but what we can understand about the existence of God with the help of reasoning and thought is only this and nothing more. As for the fact that he is the God of love, three existences are implicit in one essence, he created the universe in time or that he oversees everything with his divine power—all these propositions, and almost all the principles of Christian doctrine, must be counted among “believables,” that is, these ideas should be believed only because the Church says so and it is narrated in the Holy Scripture, but none of them can be proved with reason and proof. In fact, every moment that we begin to reason about God we find ourselves trapped in irrefutable contradictions (that is, what Kant in his philosophy called “the antinomies of pure reason”). If God is absolute power, then he must be the cause of all defects, including every kind of evil, and secondary causes, including human will, all become illusory. Because of these house-destroying inferences, and because of the necessity of religious belief for our moral life (what Kant called “practical reason”), it is more reasonable for a person to abandon the efforts that Thomas made to prove theology with the help of philosophy and accept the principles of the Christian religion only on the basis of the words of the Holy Scripture and the commands of the Church. We are not able to understand God, but we can love him, and this love is superior to knowing him.

In psychology, Duns Scotus should be considered a “realist” on the basis of his own meticulous arguments, because he says that universals have objective reality, from the point of view that the common characteristics that the mind extracts from similar things in order to create a general concept with them must certainly have external existence in things, otherwise how is it possible that we perceive and extract those characteristics. He agrees with Thomas on the point that all natural knowledge originates from impressions, but in the rest of the issues related to psychology there is a difference of opinion between the two. In Duns Scotus’s view the principle or origin of multiplicity is form, not matter, and his purpose from form is only form in the precise meaning of everything as it is, or in other words, the special qualities and distinguishing and specific signs of a particular thing or individual. The powers of the human soul are not separate from each other or from the soul itself. The main power of the soul is will, not perception; it is the human will that directs perception to any kind of impressions or purposes that it desires; only the will has complete freedom, not the command of reason. Thomas’s discussion that our intense desire for survival and complete happiness is proof of the immortality of the soul is baseless speech, because this proposition can be applied to any of the beasts of the field. We are not able to prove individual survival; this matter must be accepted only by the power of faith.

Just as the Franciscans had claimed that in Thomas’s works they had seen the victory of Aristotle over the “Gospels,” in the same way the Dominicans perhaps saw in Duns Scotus the victory of the philosophy of Muslim scholars over Christian philosophy, so that his opinions in metaphysics are nothing but the theories of Avicenna, and his opinions in the philosophy of the world’s existence are the same ideas of the Jewish sage Ibn Gabirol. But the fundamental and sad truth in Duns Scotus’s philosophy is the same abandonment of any effort to prove the principles of Christianity with rational reasons. His followers followed the master’s work and went even further; they pulled the commands and rules of religion one after another out of the realm of reason’s rule and increased the precise rules and subtle points of his logic so much that in England the word “Dunsman” became a term for a foolish person whose work is meticulousness; gradually this word was applied to dull sophists, and today the word Duns is used with the meaning of stupid, ignorant, and uncomprehending. Those who had gradually fallen in love with philosophy were in no way willing to obey the jurists who had rejected philosophy; philosophy and theology, after quarreling, parted ways; and since faith expelled reason from its court, reason also expelled faith. In this way, for the age of faith this magnificent story came to an end.

The scholastic movement had the rule of a Greek tragedy whose avenging goddess was lying in wait in its own essence.

The effort that the scholastic philosophers made to prove faith with reason implicitly admitted the ruling power of reason; the confession of Duns Scotus and others that reason is not able to prove faith shook the scholastic institution from its foundation and weakened people’s faith so much that in the fourteenth century, within the framework of the clergy, from top to bottom everywhere the voice of opposition and the banner of rebellion was raised. Aristotelian philosophy was a gift from the Greek world to the Latin Christian world; it had the rule of the same Trojan horse that had hidden a thousand opposing elements in its heart. These seeds of the Renaissance and the age of enlightenment were not only “the revenge of paganism” on Christianity, but unknowingly also had the rule of the claim of Islamic faith; the Muslims who had been attacked in Palestine and had been almost driven out of the whole of Spain transferred their science and philosophy to Western Europe, and history showed that this knowledge is a shattering force; in fact, in addition to Aristotle, it was Avicenna and Averroes who corrupted Christianity with the material of rationalism.

But no view can darken the shining splendor of the scholastic movement. This was an action as bold and reckless as is characteristic of youth, and just like youth it was not free from the defects of undue self-confidence and love of debate; this was the fresh young voice of Europe that had again attained the discovery of the exciting game of reason. Despite the inquisitors of thought and councils whose entire effort was spent on pursuing and tormenting heretics, the scholastic intellectual movement, during the two centuries that it was at the height of its flourishing, enjoyed such freedom of research, thought, and teaching that it was in no way inferior to the freedom of today’s European universities. The scholastic movement, with the support of the legislators of the thirteenth century, by making and refining the tools and terms of logic, and by means of arguments so meticulous that their like had never been seen in the philosophy of the pagan age, sharpened the minds of the peoples of Western Europe. Certainly this proficiency in argumentation was carried to excess, and after it came the dialectical verbosity and “scholastic” meticulousness that not only Roger and Francis Bacon but the people of the Middle Ages themselves rose in opposition to it. Nevertheless, the advantages of the inherited tradition were far more than its defects. Condorcet said: “Logic, ethics, and metaphysics, thanks to the existence of the scholastic movement, acquired a precision and meticulousness of analysis that the people of ancient ages did not have”; Sir William Hamilton said: “That precision and analytical meticulousness that is seen in colloquial language must be attributed to the efforts of the scholastic scholars.” The special property of the French mind, that is, that race’s love of logic, clarity, and delicacy, is mostly the product of the peak of youth of logic in the medieval schools of France.

The scholastic movement, which in the seventeenth century became an obstacle to the development of European thought, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was considered a revolutionary or at least a reformist progress in human thought. The “new” thought begins with Abelard’s rationalist school, reaches its first peak with the clarity of style and bold action of Thomas Aquinas, suffers a passing defeat in Duns Scotus’s opinions, rises again with William of Ockham, conquers the papal institution with Leo X, seizes Christianity with Erasmus, laughs with Rabelais, smiles with Montaigne, becomes unbridled with Voltaire, triumphs ridiculously with Hume, and seats Anatole France in mourning for its victory. The medieval attack on the fortress of reason was what founded that brilliant and reckless dynasty.