Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), a Dominican brother, was not just a Christian saint and thinker but one of the chief philosophers of the West. He explained Christianity in terms of Aristotle, making Aristotle “the Philosopher” in the West till the time of Galileo over 300 years later.
By making Christianity and Greek science into one system, Aquinas laid the groundwork for the rise of Western science.
What Aquinas did was a rare thing. The Muslims failed to make peace with Aristotle and rational thought. When they reached this turn in the road they concluded that God is beyond reason or even contrary to reason. And even in the West today there is no peace between religion and science.
Aquinas’s system of thought is known as Thomism or scholasticism and his followers were called schoolmen in English. It was the last time all of Western thought fell under one system.
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is based on his thought. Even Shakespeare makes more sense once you know Thomism.
In the 1600s Aristotle’s physics was proved wrong and scholasticism fell, even though it had little to do with his physics. It lives on in certain Catholic circles.
In Aquinas’s lifetime the Church had not yet made its peace with Aristotle and though this was to happen through the system of Aquinas, it was not accepted till after his death.
The West had known about Aristotle’s books on logic all along. They had been translated into Latin by Boethius long ago. But in the late 1000s Aristotle’s science burst upon the West from Arab Spain.
Aquinas was friends with William of Moerbeke, a fellow Dominican who was translating Aristotle not from Arabic but from the original Greek.
Some were against Aristotle because he seemed to disprove Christianity, while others were for him just because he did. The genius of Aquinas was to use Aristotle to explain Christianity!
The pope asked Aquinas to write a commentary on Aristotle. He did, but his master work was not that but his “Summa Theologica.”
The Summa explains the nature of God, man, angels, Creation, Judgement Day, Christian virtues and the sacraments – all in terms of Aristotle’s philosophy, all in simple, clear Latin.
The Summa takes the form of a series of questions. For each question Aquinas looks at reasons for and against the Church’s answer. He uses Aristotle’s thinking to show how the Church is right.
The nature of truth: Aristotle said that we know the truth through facts and reason. Aquinas agreed but added one more thing: faith. Facts and reason help us get to through this world, but God needs to reveal to us other truths to help us get to heaven.
Faith and reason both come from God so both are true. Faith does not oppose reason but stands above it. God does not waste his time revealing what is plain or easy to prove, but what is beyond the power of our reason.
See also:
“…By making Christianity and Greek science into one system, Aquinas laid the groundwork for the rise of Western science.
What Aquinas did was a rare thing. The Muslims failed to make peace with Aristotle and rational thought. When they reached this turn in the road they concluded that God is beyond reason or even contrary to reason…”
Abagond, wait a minute, now. There is no doubting the achievement of Thomas Aquinas. But what (or who) was behind scientific method?
If you mean Aristotle (and other Greeks) was the prime movers behind the development of the scientific method, then this is a leap too far.
Sure, they were the first to adopt observation and measurement as part of learning about the world, but that was not enough. I’d agree that Aristotle was the father of empirical science, but the development of scientific process as I understand is – was developed by the Muslim scholars. And later refined by Enlightenment thinkers in the West.
Take the 10th an d14th centuries – wasn’t it the Muslims that used experiment and observation as the basis of science? I thought historians regard scientific method as having been invented during this period.
For example:
What about Al-Haytham, aka, Alhazen, during this era? Wasn’t he who lay the groundwork for Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and the rest in the Western world? Or:
Where did Copernicus get his references from? Aren’t his discoveries about the earth’s movement practically the same as Muslim scientists, like al-Biruni, before him?
*************************************************************************
Also, I am not sure if you are implying that the falling behind of Islam in science historically is due to this failure to make peace with rational thought.
I think the chief Muslim critic of Aristotle was Al-Ghazali.
Al-Ghazali agreed that the approach of mathematics and exact sciences as essentially correct.
However, Al-Ghazali did so by use of Aristotle’s techniques/procedures of logic to expose the flaws of Aristotelianism and its excessive rationalism.
This in itself is not the cause of Islam’s stagnation alone.
****************************************************************************
What about Mongol invasion of the Middle East in the 13th century, destroying a large part of the heart of that civilization?
What about the impact of French and British colonialists in Asia, the Middle East and Africa? Did the Westerners consider these people to be savages? How did that affect the intellectual reputation of Muslims, and compound this idea that the Mulsim world is compatible with rational thought process?
Again, I don’t wish to downgrade Thomas Aquinas’ achievement.
The impact of ideas about an ordered cosmos was NOT helpful to Islam’s long-term growth.
But… when you say he laid the groundwork for the rise of Western science, weren’t there other factors inside European societies which were also at play to give Latin Christendom its advantages?
.
@ Bulanik:
The point I am making is that Aquinas did something that was not done in the Muslim world, meaning it was no easy achievement, that it is not something to be taken for granted.
The Arabs, clearly, made their peace with Aristotle and made advances in science without an Aquinas figure.
But in the West the Catholic Church opposed Aristotle’s science till Aquinas smoothed the way. That did not have to be. Without him the West probably would have stagnated.
the Catholic Church opposed Aristotle’s science till Aquinas smoothed the way. That did not have to be. Without him the West probably would have stagnated.
Abagond, I think there is a lot more to it than that.
The Church may have opposed Aristotles’ science, but that never stopped its holy men from practicing science. The belief that without Aquinas the West would’ve become stagnated is based on misconceptions about the medieval period (of European Christendom).
Even though literacy had collapsed, it was a time of institutional innovation and technological dynamism. The Church was engine for scientific and technological advances long before Aquina’s “smoothed the way”.
For example:
from the 11th to the 13th centuries more stone was quarried in France than had been mined in the whole history of Ancient Egypt.
Another example:
200 years before Aquinas’ birth, Pope Sylvester II was “the first to set Europe on the path to science”. He developed Boethius’ treatises on arithmetic, wrote his own on astronomy and made the first clock in recorded history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Sylvester_II
Other holy men, such as Lanfranc and St. Anselm, both 11th century bishops of Canterbury, led in the application of reason to faith.
Many other monks applied themselves to the practical sciences.
Wherever they went, the monks introduced crops, irrigation, industries, or production methods with which the people had not been previously familiar. One of them (Eilmer of Malmesbury) even invented a flying machine!
In fact, it was during the Middle Ages that machinery was introduced into Europe on a scale no civilisation had previously known.
This was to be one of the main factors that led to the dominance of the Western hemisphere over the rest of the world. The machines were used for mills: to grind corn, crush olives, clothmaking, tanning leather, making paper, etc. Mills were not new, but the widespread use of water-power employed to operate them was. And this was so because slavery disappeared by around the mid-9th century.
The growth of water mills construction grew hugely: The Domesday Book records it in England.
The key invention of the time was the camshaft – because it was a way to mechanize the grinding process (a devise attributed to by Al-Jazari, an Iraqi Kurd). Medieval engineer-monks of the 11th century also began to harness wind power. Initially borrowed from Persia, but perfected in Europe.
Another factor was The Medieval Warm Period (from 950 AD) which was behind the agricultural revolution of this period.
This climatic condition (which lasted 300 years) changed farming practices, brought in the introduction of the heavy-wheeled plough, and greater use of horses. Ultimately this led to improved diets and a much increased population. The increase was biggest in England and France, with the Kingdom of France having perhaps a third of the population of all of Europe.
There were also advances in metallurgy, water-powered bellows permitted much higher temperatures in furnaces.
How did this scientific knowledge spread? By regular meetings of abbots – a Europe-wide sharing of technological advances.
The break-up of the monasteries broke up this network of technology transfer. What the monks had was this: the potential to move to blast furnaces that produced nothing but cast iron. They were poised to do it on a large scale, but that virtual monopoly was broken by Henry VIII.
The Arabs, clearly, made their peace with Aristotle and made advances in science without an Aquinas figure.
This is not so. By “The Arabs” I think you mean the Arab-speaking world, as a great many of the ideas and leading Muslim thinkers of the time were not Arabs.
I mentioned the Persian writer Al-Ghazali earlier. He is a giant in Islamic intellectual history, and was one of Aquinas’ major influences.
But although others before Al-Ghazali had embraced Aristotle, Al-Ghazali himself had mastered Aristotle’s philosophy, he later rejected Aristotle for being non-Islamic, and discarded Greek teachings on the basis of their “unbelief”.
Aquinas did the opposite.
The rebuttals to Al-Ghazali’s rejection of Aristotle were ignored by the Islamic world. This reason – Islam’s orthodoxy and conservatism from the 11th and 12th centuries – is ONE of many reasons why Islamic civilization and Golden Age declined during this period.
Many scholars believe that Islamic philosophy never completely recovered from al-Ghazali’s massive and brutal assault on Aristotle’s approach.
I have also not mentioned the other societal factors at play in Europe during Aquina’s era which had remarkable influence and enabled Europe to become the force it became. Things like law and institutions.
I’ll return to that answer later when I have time.
@abagond
There is no doubt that a belief in an ordered cosmos was an important contribution in the advance of Western science.
I believe this was crucial at that time because creating a structured order fitted in with Classical, Germanic, Celtic and (ultimately) Christian and Jewish notions of proper authority.
Having said that, a number of factors assisted and supported this belief.
We cannot simply leave out the context all around it.
Because men of religion had been practicing science and also promoting techological and institutional development to meet then needs of an expanding European population this meant that foundations of:
-institutions – laws -political forms, and new principles – were all being laid.
It was these factors that set the Latin-speaking Christians apart in medieval Europe and put them at an advantage at the time.
Take political forms, as only one example:
Europe had a variety of them! Republics, hereditary monarchies, self-governing cities and so on. This political variety meant that Latin Christendom had far more institutional possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on.
Look at Castile and Leon, an autonomous region of Spain, and its notion of a representative principle, for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castile_and_Le%C3%B3n
In contrast, can unpopular ideas from a religious thinker be given any oxygen at all in an autocracy? if Aquinas had put out his ideas in a place where the ruler had absolute religious sanction – would Aquinas have been tolerated?
2nd example. Laws, or legal systems.
Would Aquinas’ ideas have had a chance if what he promoted broke the actual laws of Christianity, and was at odds with the legal system that it was based on?
What if there was a thing such as Christian Law, which was God’s law and final word? But there isn’t, because all law was seen as human, even canon law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_law
Latin Christendom of Aquina’s time had a wide range of legal system and laws, all of which were alterable. This meant that Latin Christendom had far more possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on — plus, the capacity to engage in legal experiments with more ease. This is societal context at play…
The Muslim world of this time, in contrast, only had Shar’ia, which IS God’s law. Although Islam has a variety of schools of jurisprudence, it has only one basic set of laws which though subject to interpretation – are not open to alteration or experimentation.
Furthermore, would Aquinas’ have the credit for smoothing the way for science in the West if it wasn’t for the likes of:
*the Reformation (when printing of banned books was controlled by Catholics but encouraged by Protestants priests),
*backlash against the many Wars of Religion in Europe, plus
*the wealth of knowledge brought back by the voyages of discovery and by exploration of the cosmos undermining Aristotelian physics — ?
Without these, and many other factors, would there have been such a thing as Scientific Revolution(s) and the Age of Enlightenment?
Would the West have achieved its later scientific, technological advances and global advantage?
There are many other reasons that enabled Thomas Aquinas to acquire his reputation and stature as the gate-opener for Western science to come through, but these few examples are the ones I can think of at the moment.
Examples of the words Aristotle used to describe the female of the species were:
- Subordinate.
- Deformed Male.
- Unfinished Man.
AFAIK, the argument that Aristotle used to support this idea was that during procreation, “woman is passive and receptive, while man is active and productive”. Aristotle’s reasoning was that the child inherits only the male characteristics, and the woman is only needed to be the soil, while the male is the sower. This idea, above all others — that the reproductive functions were a determining cause in the status of one’s life, and the accompanying belief that men are superior and women to be inferior — was all due to the roles occurring in conception and reproduction….which, of course, also led him to believe that men were more intelligent and capable of learning more than women.
Unfortunately Aristotle held precedence over Plato or Socrates, neither of whom looked down on women in the same way — as far as I can tell.
No wonder that in such an intellectual tradition God became male —”King,” “Father,” “Lord,” “Master, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him,” etc.
Something Aquinas and men of his time, saw as perfectly consistent.
That theological language was fixed in the era of the early patriarchy — and remained so. Images, solidified in language, have a way of surviving in the imagination so that a person can function on 2 different and often contradictory levels. Which means:
one may speak of the abstract conceptualization of God as spirit and still imagine “him” as male.
Being a Greek, Aristotle’s traditions were grounded in dualism, “Hellenistic dualism.” That meant for them that the for the human person salvation is seen as an escape or “getting away” from the world and the body. Sin was in the body. And, since in Hebrew culture woman was already identified (because of child-bearing and menstruation) with unclean bodily functions, it was but a natural extension to identify her with this new dimension of sin.
In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas says:
“Woman was made to be a help to man. But she was not fitted to be a help to man except in generation, because another man would prove a more effective help in anything else.”
http://religiousstudies.uncc.edu/people/jtabor/dualism.html
The remarkable thing about Aquinas’ thinking was that he saw compatibility in ideas were others saw obstacles and contradiction.
I believed he reconciled science with religion because he did not see them in opposition. For example, scientific knowledge has made many thinkers believe that Genesis’ account of the creation is incompatible with evolutionary biology. But, when I think about Aquinas — he did not believe that the Book of Genesis presented any difficulties for the natural sciences. He felt otherwise, because the Bible is not a textbook in the sciences. What is essential to Christian faith, according to Aquinas, is the “fact of creation,” not the manner or way the world was formed.
He meant that there was truth in scripture, yes, but Bible did not have to be read literally. The literal sense of the text includes metaphors, similes, and other figures of speech useful to accommodate the truth of the Bible to the understanding of the human reader.
So when 6 days at the start of the beginning of Genesis does not actually mean 6 days in quantifiable time as measured by human – because as a creative act of the Divine – it is timeless and instantaneous. Similarly with something like “God stretches out his hand” – it does not mean that God has that body part , but instead the extension of Godly power.
This freedom and harmony within interpretation leaves faith untouched.
@Bulanik and Abagond
Did Aquinas ever say (worryingly) that he might possibly be opening a Pandora’s Box of secularism? We think of Spinoza as the beginnings of secularism in the West. Aquinas as the beginning of Western secularism is a twist.
@ Legion
FROM WHAT I KNOW he did not. If he thought in terms of secularism at all he would have seen himself as saving the West from it by making the secular thought of Aristotle and the sacred beliefs of the Church into one. If Catholicism is true and Aristotelianism is true then at some level they must be different parts or aspects of the same thing. As far as I know it was only when Thomist thought BROKE DOWN in the 1600s that secularism started to be taken seriously.
@Bulanik
Oh wait! Bulanik, you’ve already answered my question, in your most recent comment.
The remarkable thing about Aquinas’ thinking was that he saw compatibility in ideas were others saw obstacles and contradiction. [Aquinas' view: truth in different guises, Bible as one of them.]
Sorry, I should have read more carefully.
Thanks for your comment Abagond. What you said combined with what Bulanik said gives me the clear picture about where Aquinas’ head was (seemingly) at. Looking at what he was doing from today’s era, I think, “man he was taking an enormous risk.” But for him, I guess he was using the best intellectual rigour available (in his opinion) at the time, to prove God and justify/reinforce Catholicism.