SOURCE: "The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas" in The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by Edward Bullough, B. Herder Book Co., 1937, pp. 1-36.

[In the following excerpt, Gilson traces the history of philosophy to the time of Aquinas; discusses the difficulties Aquinas faced in adapting the obscured essence of Aristotelianism to theology; and explains Aquinas's function as Doctor of the Church.]

The Man and His Environment

All great philosophies present themselves at first sight and externally as closed systems uncompromisingly opposed to all concessions. The history of philosophy, however, very soon discovers in pursuing its analysis beneath that rigorously systematic appearance, a hidden spirit of conciliation. Indeed, the very concessions which a philosophy is no longer able to make once it exists, were bound to be made before it came into existence. For every philosophical system represents a more or less successful attempt to organise tendencies which, in their natural state, would have remained irreconcilable. The teaching of St. Thomas is no exception to this rule. Like all the richest philosophies, it is born of a compromise, in the mind of an epoch or of a person, between spiritualtendencies which recognise fairly each other's claims and thus order themselves in an harmonious equilibrium. The "thomistic problem" as such is the original conflict of these tendencies. It is therefore a matter of importance to define these, in order to understand the system which was designed to furnish the solution of this conflict, and to review in a general way the peculiarly complex conditions in the midst of which the system took shape.

A. The Life¹ and Works² of St. Thomas.

St. Thomas of Aquino was born towards the beginning of the year 1225 at the Castle of Roccasecca. The very name alone calls up the wildness and desolation of the spot where even to-day stand the ruins which indicate the site of his family seat. A little further, in the direction of Naples, lies the little village of Aquino,³ of which his father was count; further still rises the Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino, where he was brought as an oblate by his parents in 1230. It has been supposed, not without probability, that certain family ambitions concealed themselves behind this decision. Landolf, Count of Aquino, was the nearest Lord to the Abbey; in the year preceding, 1229, he had supported the Emperor Frederic II against the Pope by assisting him in seizing the monastery to hold it to ransom. In these circumstances the idea of establishing there one of his sons with the view to his later becoming Abbot and to a participation of his family in the revenues of the Abbey, barely even deserve to be called a ruse, so evident must have been the object of the game.⁴ Nor could he have discovered a more profitable way of making peace after the war which was then drawing to its close, and this, no doubt, was a consideration very present to the mind of Count Landolf. As to rearing a future saint in the Benedictine spirituality, or a future philosophical genius in a taste for science to which the austere and bare hill-top had for centuries offered a refuge, or a future theologian in the respect for the rights of the Church which the monks upheld against the Emperor and himself—that surely was an idea that never entered the head of Count Landolf; yet that was precisely what he did.⁵

The child remained for nine years in the care of his first teachers there, near a library which was almost unique at that time, covering under the guidance of excellent masters the classical road of the "trivium" and introduced to the Latin tongue by the writings of St. Gregory, St. Jerome and St. Augustine. The fact, moreover, that he remained from the age of five to fourteen under the influence of a Benedictine environment in which humanism, science and religion formed an indivisible whole, cannot have failed to leave deep traces upon his mind.⁶ In 1239 this happy existence came to an end. Frederic II, still engaged in war against Gregory IX, expelled the monks from Montecassino in order to break the opposition which these uncompromising supporters of the Papacy offered to his designs. The boy had to return to his parents and to put off the Benedictine habit; he remained at home until the autumn of that same year, when he proceeded to the University of Naples which Frederic II had just founded.⁷

Accurate information of what the University milieu was like and of the directions which the new student may have received from his teachers there, would be most valuable; unfortunately none is available or at least so sparse that it would be very unwise for us to draw any definite conclusions from it. It is of little use to be told that a certain Master Martin there taught the "trivium" or that Peter of Ireland gave instruction in the "quadrivium."⁸ What biographers tell us of the successes achieved by the young student, does not go beyond the simplest conjectures. On the other hand, it is certain that the Neapolitan student world was open to the scientific and philosophical works recently translatedfrom the Greek and Arabic, and was eminently suited to awaken the curiosity of a mind like that of the boy.⁹ We should gain little by exchanging this modest certainty for the study of hypotheses which recent years have shown to have yielded perhaps but little profit.

In the course of the year 1244 a decisive change occurred in the life of St. Thomas. Of age by now, since he was in his twentieth year, and free since the death of his father on December 24th, 1243, the young man decided to enter the Order of St. Dominic. The meaning of this decision is clear, if we bear in mind the examples which had inspired it. The Dominicans, established right in the centre of University life, at Naples as well as in Paris, presented the wholly new spectacle of religious whose special vocation it was to cultivate the sciences and to teach them publicly. Men whom previously one had been accustomed to find within massive walls of fortress-like Abbeys, were here mixing freely in the crowd of teachers and students, learning from the former in order to teach the latter in their turn. The Dominican vocation, born in the midst of a medieval University, is, therefore, above all the resolve to serve God by teaching and in absolute poverty. To be a religious and a Doctor, such remains until the last months of his life, the ideal of St. Thomas of Aquino.

In taking the Dominican habit, the young man definitely disappointed a family hope: he renounced the dignity of Abbot of Montecassino. Anticipating opposition on the part of the family, the Master-General of the Order, John the Teuton, decided to take him away at once to Bologna, where he had to attend a General Chapter, and to send him to the University of Paris, which was then the most important centre of University studies, not only of France but of the whole Christian world. It was during this journey that the famous incident occurred when his brothers attacked him and locked him up, in anger at his decision to enter the Dominican Order. After having been kept in confinement for about a year, which he spent in prayer and studies, St. Thomas, having defeated all the schemes and wearied the obstinacy of his persecutors, recovered his freedom towards the autumn of 1245 and was at last able to proceed to Paris.

The young Dominican stayed there for a first period from 1245 till the summer of 1248,¹⁰ and came under the influence of Albert of Cologne, the famous teacher who later was to be called Albert the Great. That the impression made by such a teacher upon such a student must have been deep and lasting admits of no doubt; much more difficult, however, than one thinks, is it to know precisely in what it consisted. In a general way, it is held that the genius of Albert the Great, possessing as he did a prodigious power of assimilation, was then collecting the materials, and was beginning to sketch the outline of a doctrinal synthesis which he was never to complete; and that the young Thomas of Aquino, gifted with a genius, if less extensive in its curiosity, yet more constructive and better ordered, and, as it were, supported and carried along by the efforts of his master, immediately grasped the plan of the latter's work and undertook its realisation.¹¹ This is a view which certainly contains an element of truth but requires a good deal of modification. What the pupil found in such a teacher was no doubt an erudition which was the vastest as well as the deepest that the 13th century had known; and again, a taste for science and the right feeling of what a rational explanation means and, lastly, perhaps the most precious gift of all, the powerful impetus which a mature and fully developed mind can impart to a young and budding genius. But it is by no means certain that the thomistic system was more necessarily preformed in the teaching of Albert the Great than in that of Alexander of Hales, for instance, or that, in consequence, the work of Albert the Great can be considered as a sketch, of which that of St. Thomas is to be taken as the finished picture.¹² To define and measureexactly the influence of the master upon the pupil will no doubt remain for ever an inaccessible ideal of history; we are lacking too much information to lay any claim to be able even to approach it. At any rate, the effect of Albert the Great upon the young Thomas was certainly very deep. On leaving Paris in order to set up in Cologne a "studium generale," i.e. a centre of theological studies for a whole province of the Order, the celebrated master took his disciple with him in order to keep him under his direction for another four years. It may be said that in these six years of intensive work and in daily intercourse with Albert the Great, St. Thomas assimilated the essential parts of all the materials which had been amassed by the encyclopaedic erudition of his master and was to be recast in turn by him in a new philosophical and theological system.

In 1252 St. Thomas returned to Paris, where he passed, though not without incidents, through the regular stages leading to the degree of Master in Theology. He therefore commented on the Bible (1252-1254), then on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard (1254-1256) and obtained the degree of Licentiate in Theology.¹³ He was then a young man with his future before him, even then enjoying the esteem of his equals and of his superiors. The friar's habit concealed a gentleman of noble birth, a fact which had not been forgotte¹⁴; he led a life of perfect regularity; as to his erudition, he knew all that was known at his time. The licentiate, whom Alexander IV described in the foregoing terms, had every claim to aspire to the degree of Master, i.e. to form part of the body of Masters teaching in the University of Paris. The disputes which at that time were raised by the secular Masters against the mendicant Orders, delayed only for a very short time St. Thomas' attainment to the standing of Master in Theology, since he performed his "principium" in the course of that same year, 1256; nor did they trouble his activity as teacher, since he continued his teaching for the three academic years, up to the summer vacations of 1259.

After this date, St. Thomas returned to Italy to teach almost uninterruptedly at the pontifical curia, under the Popes Alexander IV, Urban IV and Clement IV, from 1259 till 1268. In the autumn of this year he was recalled to Paris to teach again Theology. The University had by then become a battlefield, where the struggle between corporations had given way to the bitterest doctrinal disputes. It is during this period that St. Thomas began the struggle, on the one hand, against Siger of Brabant and the Latin Averroists and, on the other, against certain Franciscan theologians who were anxious to maintain intact the teaching of Augustinian theology. Recalled from Paris, St. Thomas went back to Italy and resumed in November, 1272, his theological instruction in Naples. He left this town for the last time to take part in the general Council of Lyons, on the invitation of Pope Gregory X. In the course of this journey he fell ill and died, on March 7, 1274, at the Cistercian monastery of Fossanuova, near Terracina.

His works, the bulk of which is very considerable, especially if we remember the shortness of the author's life (1225-1274), are catalogued in a writing of 1319, and other documents of a similar kind have, on the whole, confirmed this list. There is therefore no room for doubt about the authenticity of the great works which are attributed to St. Thomas by tradition. The question of their chronology, on the contrary, is still much debated.…

B. St. Thomas and Aristotelianism.

A reference to the period of the philosophical "Dark Ages" which followed upon the last efforts of Hellenistic speculation, is almost a platitude. With Plotinus the great lineage of Greek philosophers came to an end. The system which he elaborated undoubtedly presents a clearly marked religious character, but it is after all a real philosophy, a vast syncretistic system in which elements taken from Plato, Aristotle and even the Stoic philosophers were fused. It is a monistic system of the Universe in which we see how all things proceeded from the One and how, in ecstasy, we are able to reach back to the One and find union with It. The Greek philosophical speculation reaches its completion with Porphyrius, the disciple of Plotinus, who gives a still stronger relief to the religious element in the doctrine of his master.

It may be said that all philosophical speculation vanishes at that point for a long time to come. If philosophy is taken to mean a natural interpretation of the universe, a general view of things taken from the point of view of reason, there is no philosophy between the end of the 3rd century after Christ, which saw the death of Porphyrius, and the middle of the 13th century, which witnessed the appearance of the "Summa contra Gentiles." Does this mean that humanity passed through ten centuries of ignorance and darkness? It is possible to maintain this only by the confusing of intellectual activity with philosophical speculation. In reality and on closer examination, this apparently obscure period is found to be employed upon the fruitful work which is about to lay the foundations of medieval philosophy. The characteristic feature, in fact, of the patristic period is the substitution of religious for philosophical thought. Catholic dogma is finally elaborated and organised. Numerous elements have for this work been borrowed from the Greek philosophers; traces of Hellenistic culture have been alleged even in St. Paul. In any case, and even without going back so far, Hellenistic culture is obvious in Origen, St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Augustine. The aim, however, which these thinkers pursue is not philosophical. What they express in philosophical formulæ, are religious conceptions, and it is a theological system which they intend to build up. Against the tireless imagination of heretics, these Fathers affirm and maintain the existence of one God, one in three persons, the creator of the world, distinct from creation as the infinite is from the finite, incarnated in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, who has given Himself for the world in order to save it. They affirm that the end of man is knowledge of the eternal and the love of God for all time; a love and a vision face to face, reserved for the elect, for those who with the necessary help of Divine Grace, will follow the commandments of God and of His Church. To establish these fundamental truths, to express them in the least inadequate form, to defend them against the incessant attacks from all sides—that is the work achieved by the Fathers from Origen to St. Augustine, passing through Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, St. Ambrose and Cyril of Alexandria. When we come to the death of St. Augustine, we find ourselves in the middle of the 5th century. The two hundred years of theological speculation since the time of Plotinus, have produced the "De Trinitate" and the thirteen books of the "Confessions," that is to say, one of the most perfect monuments which Christian theology can boast and one of the masterpieces of the human mind.

Then and only then, and for a relatively short time only, a general stagnation of intellectual activity seems to set in. Three centuries elapse, laboriously occupied in building up a new civilisation on the wreckage of the Roman world, between the 5th century and the first stammerings of the new philosophy. The restoration of the Empire and of Roman Law is the great achievement of that epoch; and even then, in the midst of so great a darkness, men are to be found who outlined a new synthesis as St. John of Damascus, or salved what could be rescued from the wreck. With Boëthius, Isidore of Seville, and the Venerable Bede we reach Alcuin, and with him the Carlovingian renaissance. Thedifficult pass is overcome. Philosophical speculation is about to be reborn, to develop down to modern times without any real break in its continuity.

The road covered from the 9th to the 13th century is considerable. Leaving aside a system outlined by a thinker such as John Scotus Erigena and confining ourselves to such works as prepared the birth of the Thomistic philosophy, we find in that period three important acquisitions assured to philosophy: the progressive determination of the relation of reason and faith; conceptualism; and the so-called scholastic method.

Concerning the relation of reason and faith, a way was found to let them live peaceably side by side without allowing one to stifle the other or preventing the legitimate development of both. This result had not been achieved, of course, without endless difficulties. The dialecticians who wished to force dogma and Scripture into the form of syllogisms, were confronted, by an inevitable reaction, with those teachers of the inward life who considered the time spent on philosophical speculation as so much time lost for salvation. Between Anselm the Peripatetic, and St. Peter Damian²⁰ a middle course gradually opened out. It came to be admitted more and more that reason and faith cannot be in contradiction, since both come from God; that, therefore, reason should render faith credible, by exposing the hidden flaws in the arguments of its enemies. "Fides quaerens intellectum": this is the programme which it is hoped henceforth to realise.

Moreover, the long and subtle controversy on the nature of universals ends in Abelard and John of Salisbury by restoring the Aristotelian doctrine of abstraction. Universals are concepts "cum fundamento in re." As opposed to the philosophers who keep more or less to the Platonic theory of ideas, the tendency is to think that the intellect abstracts from the individual the universal which is contained in it. With the demonstration of the sensory origin of concepts, philosophical thought takes possession of a principle of which the Thomistic system is largely the metaphysical justification and consistent application.

Lastly, and this last progress is also not without importance, the scholastic method of exposition and argument takes shape. After the incomplete attempts, such as the "Sic et Non" of Abelard, the final solution is reached with Alexander of Hales. At least, as far as our present state of knowledge allows us to form an opinion, it is he who first employs the form of argument which became classical from the second half of the 13th century onwards: the enumeration of the arguments contra; the exposition of the proposed solution, and the criticism of the objections previously set out.

Nevertheless, despite these advances and despite all those which might be added, philosophical speculation of the 12th and early 13th centuries displays grave defects. The gravest of these, and the root of all the others, consists in the lack of co-ordination. With the exception of the attempt, so original, although so far so little known, of Guillaume d'Auvergne, that period, when more than one thinker proved his capacity to explore and discuss with skill and insight certain special problems, produced no single general system having any pretension to give a rational explanation of the universe. Without doubt, the fault was, that philosophical thought, deprived of the great works of antiquity, was unable to draw out of itself the substance of a new philosophy; but, as has been very truly observed,²¹ the fault also lay in that the scholastics of that time made use simultaneously of philosophical systems which were not only misunderstood but were moreover mutually contradictory. Wavering, as they were, without reaching a definite position between Aristotle and Plato, and possessing a very imperfect knowledge of both, how could they have succeeded in drawing a truly coherent system from principles which were mutually exclusive?

This is the internal defect, which, hidden in the philosophical speculation of the 12th century, prevented its reaching a complete development. But at this point a revolution is about to set in: a revolution determined by the influx of the works of Greek and Arabic philosophy.

The Middle Ages had all along been in possession of part of Aristotle's works. The 12th century possesses the whole of the "Organon." From that time onwards certain parts of Aristotelian Physics are known in the scholastic circles of Chartres²²; but although it is true to say that the infiltration of Aristotelian natural philosophy has henceforth begun, it remains also true that "the scholastics of the first centuries saw in Aristotle nothing but a logician."²³ The situation in which we find the philosophers of the early 13th century is quite different.²⁴ The Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle, the abbreviated form of these by Avicenna and the commentaries of Averroës are translated from Arabic into Latin, thanks mainly to the translators of the College of Toledo. Therewith the imperfect philosophical attempts of the end of the 12th century are confronted by a complete and systematically elaborated philosophy; and this is all the more serious as the doctrine, especially in the interpretation of Averroës, hannonises badly at more than one point with the traditional teaching of the Church. The most clear-sighted witness to this opposition between the peripatetic philosophy and Christianity is St. Bonaventure.

According to this doctor,²⁵ the fundamental error of Aristotle consists in his rejection of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Since, according to Aristotle, God does not possess in Himself, like so many models, the ideas of all things, it follows that God knows only Himself and is ignorant of the particular. From this first error springs the second, namely, that God, ignorant of all things, possesses no prescience and exercises no providence in regard to things. But, if God exercises no providence, it follows that everything happens either by accident or by necessity of fate. And as events cannot be the result of a simple accident, the Arabs concluded that everything is necessarily determined by the movement of the spheres, viz. by the intelligences which move them. Such a conception obviously annuls the disposition of events of this world with a view to the punishment of sinners and the glory of the elect. Hence we find that Aristotle never mentions either the devil or the future beatitude. The error is therefore threefold, namely, a failure to understand first, exemplarism, then Divine providence and lastly the disposition of this world with a view to the other.

This threefold failure is the root of a threefold blindness. The first concerns the eternal existence of the world. Since God is ignorant of the world, how can He have created it? All the commentators, whether Greek or Arabic, are accordingly agreed on this point. Aristotle has never taught that the world has had a beginning and an origin. This first blindness entails a second: for, if the world is assumed as eternal, the true nature of the soul is obscured. On such an assumption we are driven to the choice of one of the three following errors: if the world is eternal an infinite number of human beings has existed, and therefore an infinite number of souls, unless either the soul is corruptible, or the same soul passes from one body to another, or there exists, for all human beings, but a single intelligence. If we follow the interpretation of Averroës, Aristotle would seem to have decided for this last error. Now, this second blindness leads necessarily to a third: since there exists only one soul forall men, there is consequently no personal immortality, and, therefore, there cannot be after this life either punishment or reward.

Let the reader imagine what the state of mind of the theologians and the Christian philosophers must have been when confronted with such a doctrine. We may leave aside all those who, on principle, maintained an attitude of irreconcilable suspicion to all philosophical speculation. This attitude, which in the 11th century had inspired the resistance to the dialectic movement, had lost none of its strength in the 13th and had never perhaps a better opportunity for display. But the great majority of theologians had not the slightest intention of denying the usefulness of philosophical speculation and among these a twofold tendency appears. The one, the smaller party, was so profoundly impressed by the Averroist Aristotelianism that they saw in this doctrine the final and complete truth. They accepted it, therefore, with all its inherent consequences and there were clerics who actually taught at Paris that there is no providence, that the world is eternal, that there is but a single intelligence for the whole human race and that, in short, there is for man neither freedom nor immortality. Such were Boëthius of Dacia and especially Siger of Brabant. The others, far more numerous, felt a repugnance, which varied much according to each mind, against these damnable innovations, and they entrenched themselves more strongly than ever behind the Platonic-Augustinian philosophy which, at that moment, was the only traditional philosophy of the Church. The most remarkable personality which we find among this party, is without a doubt St. Bona-venture. We saw how energetically this doctor maintained the Platonic exemplarism against Aristotle; he, and the whole Franciscan school with him, also maintained the Augustinian doctrine of illumination against the Aristotelian doctrine of abstraction; he affirmed the hierarchic plurality of forms against the unity of substantial form which seemed to him to compromise the immortality of the soul. Thus the attitude of St. Bonaventure remained in opposition to the doctrine of Aristotle, even though Aristotelian thought had at several points coloured his own thought: unwittingly to himself.

But a third attitude yet remained possible. The doctrine of Aristotle—and this was evident to any Christian thinker—showed serious lacunae in its metaphysical parts. To say the least, this philosophy left the two problems of the creation and of the immortality of the soul in the air. On the other hand, the strictly physical and natural part of the doctrine presented a system incomparably superior to the fragmentary and little coherent solutions proposed by the older schoolmen. This superiority of the Aristotelian physics was so crushing that in the eyes of clear-sighted minds it could not fail to obtain the assent of reason and to secure the ultimate triumph of the doctrine. Was it therefore not an act of grave imprudence to persist in maintaining positions which were foredoomed to fall? The triumph of Aristotle was inevitable, and wisdom urged that steps should be taken to make this triumph a help to Christian thought, rather than a menace. In other words, the task to be undertaken was to Christianise Aristotle: to re-introduce exemplarism and the creation into the system, to maintain providence, to reconcile the unity of substantial form with the immortality of the soul; to show, in short, that even accepting the Aristotelian physics, the great truths of Christianity remained unshaken; better still, to show that these great truths find in the physics of Aristotle their natural support and their strongest foundation. Such was the problem which it became a matter of urgency to solve.

It is impossible to doubt that the problem presented itself from this point of view to several of the theologians of the 13th century, for one need but consult their works to convince oneself that each in his own manner was pursuing its solution. On the other hand, it is very hard to discover what couldhave put the young Thomas of Aquino on the road to the very personal answer which he was to supply.

The simplest hypothesis, and consequently the most tempting, concerning the genesis of thomistic thought would be to look for the origin of it in the direction of theology. Since the point was to secure the accord of Aristotelian teaching with Faith, why should we not assume that a theologian like St. Thomas would have simply formulated the question in this way: What changes are necessary in Aristotelianism in order to harmonise it with the Christian dogma? At first sight this seems a very plausible hypothesis; but it encounters two very serious historical objections.

In the first place, it is very difficult to account by preoccupations of an exclusively theological nature for the genesis of a system which was bound to appear to the pure theologians as a dangerous innovation. If the young Thomas, essentially a theologian as he was and always remained, had not been actuated by more complex preoccupations, how would he ever have conceived the idea of reconstructing the entire system of theology on the foundations provided by a new philosophy? For the fact is that the thomistic reform was to proceed along the lines of the greatest theological resistance. Did it not mean consciously to run counter to the bitterest theological opposition to force upon the partisans of the traditional Augustinianism the notion that philosophy could be a science distinct from theology, without thereby endangering its legitimacy; to accustom the minds of his contemporaries to think along the lines of Aristotle instead of along those of Plato, when the great theological authority of St. Augustine seemed indissolubly linked with the platonic tradition; to abandon the conception of innate ideas and therewith every proof a priori of the existence of God, to define the human soul as a form, and as the unique form of the body, at the risk of being suspected of compromising thereby the immortality of the soul; to recast, finally, the whole system of the traditional theological truths without losing anything of the substance of any of them while at the same time the formulation of all of them had to be modified? Indeed, having early become suspect in the eyes of the Augustinian partisans, attacked by the Franciscan John Peckham in 1270, declared suspect by the General Chapter of the Order in 1282, he is involved in the condemnation of the 219 Averroism and peripatetic articles which is passed by Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, in 1277. Assailed by two mutually hostile parties, the Masters of the Faculty of Arts who had been won over to Averroism, and the Masters of the theological Faculty, who were the champions of traditionalism, we find him constantly engaged in maintaining against the partisans of Augustinianism what he considered true in the system of Aristotle, and in maintaining against the absolute Aristotelians the Christian truths unknown to Aristotelianism. This is the narrow ridge on which St. Thomas moves with incomparable sureness. The brilliant execution of his task masks for us to-day too easily the extreme difficulty he had to face, in maintaining his position, and the psychological improbability of a pure theologian ever attempting to take it up.

But such an interpretation would raise a second, still more serious difficulty. To present St. Thomas as a simple adaptor of Aristotle to theology, would imply, to start with, that he found Aristotle ready to hand—which would be a misconception of the characteristic form in which the whole problem presented itself to St. Thomas' contemporaries. Albert the Great has formulated it with delicious humour at a time when it was already more than half solved: all the Aristotelians are agreed that Aristotle has spoken the truth, but they all disagree about what Aristotle has said, and each interprets him in his own manner.²⁶ This is a complication the causes of which history enables us to lay bare;but it is important to bear it in mind in order to estimate at its proper value the work accomplished by St. Thomas.

It is a well-known fact that Aristotle presented himself to the medieval thinkers in the disguise of Arabic interpretations. At first sight there seemed to be no reason for removing this disguise.²⁷ The famous prohibition of Robert de Courcon in 1215 to comment on the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle "nec summae de eisdem"²⁸ is evidently aimed at works in which the thought of the philosopher was often confused with that of Averroës. But what has emerged only from recent researches on the 13th century is the capital role played by Avicenna and the extreme difficulty which the western thinkers experienced, of liberating themselves from his influence.²⁹ Imbued as he was with neoplatonic and even Christian notions quite as much as with Aristotelianism, this Arab philosopher presented under the name and authority of Aristotle an original system, expounded in a series of connected writings, not merely of commentaries, which produced a profound impression upon his Christian readers. Strange errors, it is true, could not fail, at first sight, to shock them and to repel them from a system which was so manifestly contrary to Faith; but the whole Plotinianism which inspired Avicenna adapted itself so easily to that form of it which had formerly inspired St. Augustine and was so familiar to them, that the possibility of reconciling the Aristotle of Avicenna with the Christian Faith forced itself upon their acceptance as an evident proposition. It may be said that down to the time of St. Thomas, not excepting even Albert the Great himself, the western philosophers lived on the idea that Avicenna, but for a few gross but easily removable errors, was on the right road. A substantial soul, mistress of the body of which it was only secondarily the form, illuminated by the influence of God, the first cause of our contingent Universe, was not all this the essence of what a Christian philosophical thought might require? With many different shadings and in very different degrees, Guillaume d'Auvergne, Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, Roger Bacon and Albert the Great certainly held this view with conviction.

Only later and through the influence which he had increasingly acquired in the Faculty of Arts in Paris, Averroës succeeded in inducing the theologians to devote serious attention to an Aristotle different from that of Avicenna. The impossibility of accepting the doctrine as it stood, was even more evident here than in the other case, and it has been explained above how this disagreement with Faith struck everyone. All the same Averroës offered both a text of Aristotle together with his commentaries and not merely, like Avicenna, treatises inspired by Aristotle. Averroës' commentaries might be systematic and tendencious, but he presented at the same time the text and left readers free to compare text and commentary. Now, it was impossible to compare them without observing that Averroism and Avicennism corresponded to two possible types of Aristotelianism, but nevertheless remained wholly distinct from it; other interpretations were conceivable, as legitimate as, and possibly more so than, those which the Arabic philosophers had championed. It is precisely this, the original thought of Aristotle that the young Thomas of Aquino seems to have set himself to reach, behind and beyond the mass of commentary which obscured it. We find him, all through his life, bent upon translation direct from the Greek text of Aristotle itself as the subject-matter of his thought³⁰; as regards the commentaries to it which he composed, there again his chief care is to recover the order of ideas, the technical sense of terms and the authentic meaning of the teaching that mainly inspired it. The chief object of St. Thomas appears to have been to understand rather than reconstruct, and the freedom of thought which benefited his own doctrine, was the result of his effort to eliminate all intermediaries between Aristotle and himself.

It is indeed remarkable to note that St. Thomas seems to have laid so great a stress upon the actual letter of Aristotle only in order to disentangle once and for all the spirit of him and freely to appropriate it for himself. Unfortunately the history of his own intellectual development is unknown to us and we have no means of formulating with certainty the problem upon the solution of which he must early have come. From the time of the "Commentary on the Sentences," we find him, except for an occasional detail and the sometimes rather Augustinian tone of his expression, in full possession of the fundamental principles of his philosophical teaching, so that the initial phases of his thought will probably for ever elude us. But many facts allow us to suppose that, in all probability, it was the dialectic arguments directed by Aristotle against Plato which early arrested the attention of the young friar. Nowhere better than in the First Book of the Metaphysics could the original spirit of Aristotelianism reveal itself to him with its assertion of a sensible world, endowed with reality, stability and intelligibility, as against Platonism which leaves to things only the appearance of being and confines intelligibility to a world from which we are excluded. It would not be impossible to show that, in more than one respect, the thomistic philosophy is the continuation and amplification in the 13th century of the struggle which Aristotle originally began against Plato. Plato is the objective of St. Thomas' attacks behind Avicenna, Ibn Gabirol and even St. Augustine³¹; it is in opposition to him that he denies innate ideas, rejects the proofs a priori of the existence of God, denies the need of a special illumination of the intellect by divine ideas, refuses to consider the soul as a substance subsisting per se and independently of the body to which it is bound, maintains the efficacy of secondary causes in a universe whose very texture is made up of the relations of a real causality between beings. The universe of Plato remains for St. Thomas one in which we shall one day be called to live; but he refuses to see in it that in which we live now. By a reform converse to that carried out by his master, he places into heaven the Ideas which Aristotle had brought down upon earth, but he leaves sensible things in possession of their forms as real participations of the Ideas.

This is an essentially philosophical change of perspective which cannot be said to have been unprepared and yet can be said to have been accomplished only by St. Thomas. Many works anterior to him might have suggested this new orientation of his mind towards it. Not only Abelard and Gilbert de la Porrée in the 12th century,³² but also the masters immediately preceding him against whom he reacted, could not but suggest to him a new solution of the problems that had engaged their attention. Guillaume d'Auvergne, Alexander of Hales and Albert the Great are indeed visibly interested to maintain against the Arabs the substantiality and efficacy of secondary causes, of which the individual human beings are only a special case.³³ But what they failed to see and what St. Thomas saw immediately, was that it was impossible to make an effective defence against the Arabs by relying on St. Augustine, because Augustinianism and Arabic thought both rested in their common foundation upon the same philosophy, that of Plato. St. Augustine might, it is true, furnish weapons against the enemies of Divine efficacy; but he himself was poorly protected against the enemies of the efficacy of secondary causes. What, in short, was needed, was the construction of a doctrine of the Real beyond all authorities and local scholastic traditions. The young Thomas of Aquino presents himself therefore, first and foremost, as a philosopher who, taking the part of Aristotle against Plato, was inevitably bound to depart from St. Augustine. Perhaps the greatest difficulty for us is to understand how this philosopher was by the very fact a Christian philosopher, without however ceasing to be himself, or more exactly precisely because he had to be Christian in order to be fully himself.

C. The Christian Doctor.

The personality of St. Thomas exceeds the limits of this study in three of his most important aspects. The saint that he was, belongs properly to hagiography; the theologian would require a special treatment, conducted on its own appropriate method, the result of which would by rights occupy the first place in a comprehensive study of St. Thomas; the mystic and his inner life elude very largely our grasp; the only aspect that concerns us here, is the intelligence and activity which he placed at the service of philosophy. Fortunately it happens that one of the aspects of his life involves almost equally all the activities of this many-sided personality and seems to represent the most central point of view which we can take up in respect to it. The most evident and most constant element of his personality, the form under which there is the greatest likelihood that he thought of himself, is that of the "Doctor."³⁴ The saint was essentially a Doctor of the. Church; the man was a Doctor of theology and philosophy; the mystic, lastly, never separated entirely his meditations from his teaching which drew its inspiration from them. We shall, therefore, run but little risk of losing our way in looking in that direction for one of the principal sources of the doctrine which is the object of our study.³⁵

Man can choose only between two kinds of life: the active and the contemplative life.³⁶ What imparts to the activities of the Doctor their outstanding dignity, is that they involved both kinds of life, lived in the order of their precise subordination. The proper function of a "Doctor" is to teach; but teaching ("doctrina") consists in communicating to others the truths which have been the subject of one's previous meditation,³⁷ which involves both contemplative reflexion in order to discover the truth, and the functions of the professor in order to convey to others the results of these discoveries. But the most remarkable feature in this complex activity is that the higher function precisely takes precedence over the lower, contemplation over action. Thus the function of a Doctor, as just defined, is naturally orientated towards a twofold object, interior and exterior, according as it is directed to the truth which the Doctor meditates and contemplates within himself, or to the pupils whom he instructs. Hence of the two sides of his life the former is the better, which it is his task to direct.

Now we see that the function of the Doctor is not simply an artificial adjunct to his contemplative life; it derives, on the contrary, from it as from its source and is, as it were, its outward unfolding. His teaching, as well as his preaching which is its kindred action, belong indeed to the work of the active life, but they flow in some manner from the very abundance of his contemplation.³⁸ Hence his teaching cannot even be regarded as in any sense a real interruption of his contemplative life. A man who withdraws himself from the meditation of intelligible realities which feed his contemplative thought, to turn to works even though good, yet purely external, makes a complete break in his contemplation. It is an excellent thing to distribute alms or to entertain strangers, but to do so, nevertheless, makes all meditation, properly so-called, impossible. To teach, on the contrary, is to utter outwardly the inner contemplation, and if it is true that a soul truly free from temporal interests, preserves in each of its outward acts something of the freedom acquired, there is certainly no other activity where this freedom can more perfectly be preserved than in the act of teaching.³⁹ To combine in this manner the active with the contemplative life means not a subtraction but an addition. It is, moreover, evident that in no other manner can the balance more perfectly be kept between these two kinds of life, to maintain which must needs be the object of our actual human state.⁴⁰ To teach the truth which meditation has shown to us, is a relaxation of contemplation without any loss of it, but on the contrary with an increase of its best part.

Several important consequences follow from this which enable us to determine the precise part which St. Thomas assumed in taking upon himself the high function of a Christian Doctor. This is a function, indeed, peculiarly appropriate to the religious state⁴¹ and specially to an Order which was at the same time a teaching and a contemplative Order, like that of St. Dominic. St. Thomas has never tired of defending against all the attacks of seculars the legitimacy of the ideal to which he had devoted his life, that of a mendicant and teaching friar. If anyone contested the right to absolute poverty, he called to witness the example of the ancient philosophers who renounced all riches to devote themselves all the more freely to the contemplation of truth. How much more urgent was not such a renunciation for him, who wished to follow not only wisdom, but Christ, according to the saying of St. Jerome, addressed to the monk Rusticus: "Christum nudum nudus sequere"?⁴² If anyone attacks the legitimacy of accepting an honour such as that of Mastership or a title such as Master, St. Thomas replies with much common-sense that a Mastership is not an honour but a charge,⁴³ and that, the title of Master not being taken but given, it would be difficult to prevent others from giving it to you.⁴⁴ If lastly it was urged that the true religious is bound to do manual work which in its requirements goes badly with the requirements of meditation and teaching, St. Thomas has plenty of distinctions to suggest in order to free himself from so evidently subordinate an occupation and to replace it by the "oral work" of teaching and preaching.⁴⁵ Nothing could, in his eyes, be more legitimate than a religious Order both contemplative and teaching.

Nor could anything be more legitimate, nor even more desirable for a member of such an Order than to aim at the activities of a Doctor and to spend his life in carrying them into effect. Doubtless, the part of a Master is not without its dangers. There are those who teach all their life for mere vainglory, instead of for the good of others, and who, therefore, lead a life unworthy of the true religious.⁴⁶ But he who is conscious of giving his teaching as an act of kindness and true spiritual charity, need have no scruples in desiring to lead such a life. An objection which was constantly raised by the seculars against the religious, aspiring to the position of Master, was: How can you reconcile the humility of the friar with the claim to authority?⁴⁷ St. Thomas disposed of it in perfect accordance with the position occupied by the Masters of the University of Paris and by distinguishing carefully between the situation of a candidate to a professorial chair and that of a candidate to a bishopric. He who aspires to an episcopal place, desires a dignity which is not yet in his possession: but a person on whom a professorial chair is conferred, does not, in fact, receive a new dignity, but merely an opportunity of communicating his knowledge to others; to grant a licentiate to someone does not in any sense mean to grant him knowledge, but the right to teach what he knows. A second difference between the two instances is that the knowledge required for the occupation of a professorial chair is a perfection of the individual person possessing the knowledge, whereas the episcopal power adds to the dignity of its possessor in respect to others. A third difference is that a man is fitted to receive the episcopal dignity foremost by Divine Grace, while it is knowledge which fits a person for the office of teacher. Hence the radical difference between the two cases cannot fail to be clear to anyone: it is praiseworthy to desire one's own perfection, therefore, also knowledge and teaching for which one is fitted by it, whereas it is bad to desire power over others without knowing whether one is in possession of the Grace needed for its exercise. On the other hand, the desire to teach, that is to communicate to others the knowledge one has, is merely the desire to perform an act of charity: nothing could therefore be more praiseworthy than the wish to be authorised to do so, always provided that one is really capable of it. Again, as regards this latter point, the position is clear and defined. No one can know of certain knowledge whether or no he possesses the Grace which iswholly in the gift of God; but anyone can know for certain whether or no he possesses the knowledge required for the legitimate exercise of teaching.⁴⁸ It is, therefore, with the full assurance of possessing the necessary knowledge and from love of the minds he desires to enlighten that St. Thomas devoted the whole of his life to the activity of teacher. The contemplation of truth by thought uttered for the sake of charity and communicated: such is the life of the Doctor, the least unfaithful, however deficient, human imitation of the very life of God.

Withal, we have to beware of a possible equivocation which might blur the precise sense of St. Thomas' words. Whenever he speaks of the Doctor or the Master, we think first of the philosopher, whereas his first thought is of the theologian. The "Master" par excellence cannot but teach the wisdom par excellence, i.e. the science of Divine things, which is essentially theology. This is also the only Mastership to which a religious can legitimately aspire. When, therefore, St. Thomas sings the praises of a life divided between teaching and the contemplation which inspires it, he thinks primarily of this; it is for its sake that he demands the manifold Graces needful to the Doctor"⁴⁹: a full knowledge of the Divine things on which he is to instruct others conferred on him by Faith; power of persuasion and demonstration in order to convince others of the truth, assisted by the gift of Wisdom; aptitude to develop his ideas and to express them in a form suited to the instruction of others, aided by the gift of Knowledge⁵⁰: wisdom and knowledge directed above all else to the understanding of Divine things and placed at the service of their teaching. If we wish, therefore, to look for the Doctor of philosophical truth in the complex personality of St. Thomas, it is only in the theologian that we can hope to find him.

In thus going back to the definition which he himself has given of his own function, we find on last analysis nothing but a philosopher inseparable from a theologian. This is an abstract formula, inadequate through its very indefiniteness, since the most diverse doctrines have been able to appeal to it with perfect justice; yet it is a formula which needs to be considered first in all its bareness, with all the demands it implies, in order to avoid certain serious errors concerning the meaning of thomistic thought.

A religious, St. Thomas considers, can legitimately aspire to the title and functions of a Master, but since he teaches nothing but Divine things, secular science can be of interest to him only in reference to these. This is the demand, in fact, made by the very essence of the contemplative life whose direct prolongation into the sphere of the active life constitutes teaching. Contemplation is the highest form of human life on condition that it is centred upon the object, the knowledge of which is the end of that life; knowledge and contemplation which in the future life will be perfect and will give us full beatitude, cannot but be imperfect in this life and can carry with them only the beginnings of beatitude. Yet it is best for us to enjoy it, and the use of philosophy is both legitimate and necessary as a condition of this supreme contemplation. Now, we shall have to observe that in the actual conditions of man, all knowledge rests fundamentally on the order of sensible things: hence the Doctor of theology must start inevitably from a scientific and philosophical knowledge of the universe, in order to rise to his proper object, which is the contemplation of God; but it is only in proportion as this knowledge can give him access to the higher wisdom that it is permissible for him to labour at acquiring it.⁵¹ We may, therefore, say that a philosophy is a strict requirement for the Christian Doctor, but that, however useful, this philosophy cannot itself be its own end.

What then is this philosophy? St. Thomas has never practised or conceived it, except in its proper place within the hierarchic structure of Christian Wisdom, and therefore, no doubt, it never occurred to him to detach it from it and to give it a special name. Yet it might have a name, because it existed and had a name long before St. Thomas transformed it and marked it so deeply with his impress: it is the "Christian Philosophy."⁵² We mean by this a philosophy which intends to be a rational interpretation of data, but considers as the essential element of these data the religious Faith, the object of which is defined by the Christian revelation. Within such a doctrine the rôle assigned to reason and the place assigned to philosophy may vary endlessly: St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, Pascal will incline to treat secular knowledge with suspicion and to expect from this handmaid a service kept under strict surveillance; Clement of Alexandria, John Damascene, Albert the Great, St. Thomas of Aquino, Roger Bacon will, on the contrary, give it wider scope; but all are agreed on the essential point, namely, that there is a Christian philosophy, that is to say, a philosophy directed towards an object which eludes its grasp, but from which, knowing that it exists, it cannot turn away. Destined to fall short of its object, it will find a foothold, in some manner, upon the prolongation of the ideal roads which lead to it. Without consenting to deform in any way the natural aspect of things and still less the true knowledge which we have of them, it claims to possess in the little that it can grasp of an object actually inaccessible, a principle of selection and of order for that knowledge which reason supplies.

Such at least, it seems to us, must be the point of view to be adopted, unless we are prepared to turn two grave historical problems into as many insoluble riddles: how did St. Thomas conceive the work which it was his mission to accomplish? What is the thomistic philosophy?

Upon the first point, it is impossible to pursue research honestly to its last consequences without coming to the conclusion that the philosophical problems which St. Thomas undertook to examine, were and always remained for him strictly philosophical problems; and yet we should have to run counter to his most express statements and his clearly stated intentions, if we denied that his whole philosophy is consciously ordered towards the sphere of revelation and of Faith. As regards the second point, it is clear that St. Thomas recognised in the strictest possible manner the real distinction between philosophy and theology. Nothing is easier than to sketch the ideal plan of a pure philosophy such as St. Thomas himself has conceived, approximately such as Aristotle had already carried out⁵³; and yet St. Thomas never troubled to realise it himself or to carry out the plan he had drawn so well. It has therefore all the appearance as if St. Thomas had had the idea of constituting a system of purely rational truths which, precisely because rational, fit of themselves into the doctrinal structure of Revelation. Thence flows for the historian the important consequence that, to present under the name of thomistic philosophy a system which St. Thomas has neither known nor intended, because it would have proved to be built upon the plan of a pure philosophy, would mean not only to present a mere phantom in place of an historical reality, but also to misconceive the original inspiration of Thomism in its most intimate and deepest elements. It would mean to forget what St. Thomas was and consciously wanted to be: a Christian Doctor.

In what manner a philosophy can be Christian without ceasing pro tanto to be a philosophy, must be the next object of our study.

Notes

¹ Concerning the biography of St. Thomas we follow the chronology of P. Mandonnet, Chronologie sommaire de la vie et des écrits de saint Thomas, Rev. des sciences phil. et théol., 1920, p. 142-152. Cf. Bibliographie thomiste, Introduction, p. ix-xi. For a series of important articles by P. Mandonnet on the life of St. Thomas cf. Rev. thomiste and Rev. des Jeunes, May, June, 1919; 25 Jan., 10 March, 1920.

² As regards the works of St. Thomas (authenticity and chronology), cf. especially P. Mandonnet, Des écrits authentiques de saint Thomas d'Aquin, Fribourg, 1909, 2nd ed., 1910. Some of his conclusions have been contested by M. Grabmann, Die echten Schriften des hl. Thomas von Aquin, Beiträge Cl. Baeumker, XXII, 1-2, Münster, 1920; A. Birkenmayer, Kleinere Thomasfragen, Phil. Jahrb. Bd. 34, H. 1. p. 31-49. The whole question has been taken up afresh, from the methodological point of view, by Fr. Pelster, Zur Forschung nach den echten Schriften des hl. Thomas von Aquin, Phil. Jahrb., Bd. 36; H. I, p. 36-49. The problem of the Quodlibets is the subject of an important comprehensive study by P. J.-A. Destrez, Les disputes quodlibetiques de saint Thomas d'après la tradition manuscrite, Mélanges thomistes (Bibl. thomiste, III), Le Saulchoir, Kain, 1923. Cf. also Bibl. thomiste, nos. 556, 557. As to works dealing with the Summa theol., see nos. 526ff.

³ Roccasecca lies at kilom. 121 on the railway from Rome to Naples; Aquino, the home of Juvenal before it became that of St. Thomas, lies at kilom. 126; a little further, on the top of a bare ridge, one sees the Abbey of Montecassino, 138 km. from Rome and 111 km. from Naples.

⁴ Legend has chosen an hermit, fra Buono, as the mouthpiece of popular opinion, in making him prophesy, at the birth of the child, that his parents would entertain this scheme: "ad magnos ipsius monasterii reditus pervenire." See L.-H. Petitot, Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Lavocation. L 'œuvre. La vie spirituelle. Ed. by the Rev. des Jeunes, 1923, p. 14-16.

⁵ The presentation of a child of 5 years by his parents as an oblate monk ("Pater dicti fr. Thomae monachavit eum puerum," says Bartolomeo of Capua) in a Benedictine Abbey may seem curious. St. Thomas always considered that his father had an absolute right to do so: "quia pueri quousque ad annos discretionis pervenerint, sunt secundum jus naturale in potestate parentum." Quodlib., III, art. 11, concl. He even considered that it was an excellent thing for the child's soul: "considerandum est pueros etiam infra annos pubertatis in religionem recipi non esse secundum se malum, immo est expediens et fructuosum, quia illud quod a pueritia assuescimus, semper perfectius et firmius tenemus," Quodlib., IV, art. 23, concl. For the same reason, he thinks (ibid. ad Sed quod ulterius), that it is not only right but praiseworthy that the child should bind itself by a vow: "Cum ergo bonum sit quod pueri ad religionem veniant, multo melius est quod eorum voluntas sit ad hoc firmata, quod fit voto vel juramento." It is, of course, not a question here of solemn vows, but of a simple vow to enter religion. Cf. Summa theol., IIaIIae, qu. 189, art. 2, ad lum; and ibid, art 1 on the whole question.

⁶ Cf. L.-H. Petitot, op. cit., pp. 17-19.

⁷ Cf. Denifle, Die Universitaten des Mittelaters bis 1400, Berlin, 1885, p. 453. The establishment of a studium generale at Naples by Frederic II goes back to 1224. Concerning the teachers of St. Thomas at the University, cf. Cl. Baeumker, Petrus de Hibernia, der Jugendlehrer des Thomas von Aquino und seine Disputation vor König Manfred (Sitzgsber. d. Bayer. Akad. d. Wissensch. philos. phil. u.hist. Kl., 1920, Abh. 8). An Italian translation has appeared in Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, 1921, fasc. 2 and 5.

⁸ This, in fact, is all we know. Baeumker has found in a "determinatio" of Peter of Ireland the proof that he interpreted Aristotle on the lines of Averroes rather than of Avicenna; whence he draws the conclusion (op.cit., pp. 35-40), that St. Thomas received the first suggestion to abandon the Avicennism professed by Albert the Great from his first teacher. But this "determinatio," if it is really that of St. Thomas' teacher, dates from a time about 15 years after he had him as pupil, i.e. from a time when St. Thomas had already written his Commentary on the Sentences, his De ente et essentia and was working at his Contra gentes (op. cit., p. 10, 34-35). Between 1244 and 1260 the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle had become sufficiently general to make the assumption more probable that Peter of Ireland was simply following the general movement at the same time as his former pupil. The fact that St. Thomas has written an extract from the Sophistici elenchi (p. 35, note 1) immediately after the interruption of his Neapolitan studies, merely proves that he had even then been taught the logic of Aristotle (which had been called in question), and nothing more. The tendency to think that the most recently discovered unedited writing must solve necessarily all sorts of important questions, is, only natural; the fact that the "disputatio" published by Baeumker is later than 1244 detracts from it as a source of information about the teaching which St. Thomas received at Naples.

⁹ Later, towards 1263, King Manfred, King of Sicily, presented to the University of Paris a number of philosophical writings recently translated by his order (cf. Denifle-Chatelain, Chartularium, t. I, pp. 435-6). On the influence of the Hohenstaufen on the dissemination of the works of Aristotle, see Amable Jourdain, Recherches critiques sur l' âge et l'origins des traductions latines d'Aristote, ed. 2, Paris, 1843, pp. 50-51, 152-165.

¹⁰ Fr. Pelster, S.J., in his Kritische Studien zum Leben u. zu den Schriften Alberts des Grossen, Freiburg i. Breisg., Herder, 1920, pp. 62-84, admits on the contrary that St. Thomas went direct from Italy to Cologne, where he heard Albert the Great before the latter's departure for Paris. He himself is said to have come to Paris only in 1252. On this view, which accords with the evidence of ancient biographers, but raises, nevertheless, a number of difficulties, see Paulus de Loë, O.P., De vita et scriptis B. Alberti Magni, Analecta Bolland., 1900, T. 19, p. 259, No. 2; Petitot, op. cit., p. 36, note.

¹¹ P. Mandonnet has repeatedly defined this point of view, Siger de Brabant. Etude critique, Louvain, 1911, pp. 36-42, Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Le disciple d'Albert le Grand, Rev. des Jeunes, 25 Jan., 1920, p. 153-155. We have ourselves also dealt with it in La philosophie au moyen-âge, Paris, 1922, t. II, pp. 4-5.

¹² Cf. sect. B, p. 20.

¹³Chartularium Universitatis parisiensis, ed. Denifle-Chatelain, t. I, p.307. The letter of Alexander IV, praising Aymery, the Chancellor, for having conferred the licentiate on fr. Thomas is dated 3 March, 1256. An earlier letter, actually lost, urged the Chancellor to do so.

¹⁴ "Delectabile nobis est auditu percipere … quod dilecto filio fratri Thome de Aquino Ordinis Praedicatorum, viro utique nobilitate generis et morum honestate conspicuo ac thesaurum litteralisscientie per Dei gratiam assecuto, dedisti licentiam in theologica facultate docendi, priusquam illuc nostre littere pervenirent, quas tibi super hoc specialiter mittebamus" (ibid)…

¹⁶ Mgr. Grabmann has since put the writing of the Commentary on the Metaphysics back to 1266; Augustin Mansion, Pour l'histoire du commentaire de St. Thomas sur la métaphysique d'Aristote, Rev. néoscolast. de phil., Aug., 1925, pp. 274-295, places it in the year, 1271-1272.

¹⁷ The treatise, rejected by P. Mandonnet, but retained by Mgr. Grabmann, seems to us not only authentic, but a fundamental text for the thomistic epistemology.

¹⁸ Cf. Fr. Pelster, Phil. Jahrb., 1923, vol. 36, p. 42. This treatise, rejected by P. Mandonnet and Mgr. Grabmann, appears to us, as to Fr. Pelster, undoubtedly authentic.

¹⁹ Cf. Destrez, op. cit., p. 74.

²⁰ Cf. J.-A. Endres: Petrus Damiani und die weltliche Wissenschaft, Beitr, z. Gesch. d. Phil. d. Mitt., VIII, 3, Münster, 1910; Forschungen zur Gesch. d frühmitt. Philosophie, ibid., XVII, 2-3, 1914.

²¹ Cf. M. de Wulf, Histoire de la phil. médiéevale; 4th ed., pp. 141-147.

²² Cf. Duhem, Du temps oú la scolastique latine a connu la physique d'Aristote, Rev. de phil., 1909, pp. 162-178.

²³ De Wulf, op. cit., p. 156.

²⁴ On this point, see esp. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et I'averroisme latin, "Les Philosophes belges," t. VI, pp. 1-63, Louvain, 1911; M. Grabmann, Forschungen uber d lat. Aristoteles Übersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhdts, Beitr., XVII, 5-6, Münster, 1916.

²⁵In Hexaemeron, collatio VI, Opera omnia, ed. Quaracchi, t. V, pp. 360-361. Mandonnet, op. cit., p. 157, note, refers also on this point to Henry of Ghent: Quodlibeta, IX, qu. 14 and 16. Cf. E. Gilson, La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (Études de phil. méd., IV), Paris, Vrin, 1925, p. 99.

²⁶ Albertus Magnus, De anima, lib. III, tr. 2, cap. 3; in Opera omnia, ed. Jammy, t. III, p. 135.

²⁷ Amable Jourdain, op. cit., pp. 193 and 199.

²⁸ Denifle-Chatelain, Chartularium, t. I, pp. 78-79.

²⁹ Cl. Baeumker, Petrus de Hibernia, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

³⁰ The whole series of translations of Aristotle by the Dominican William of Moerbeke marks a fundamental date in the history of medieval Aristotelianiasm. Now St. Thomas himself seems to have been the prime mover in the matter; cf. Amable Jourdain, op. cit., pp. 67-75.

³¹ See on the point the decisive text in De spiritualibus creaturis, art. X, ad 8m.

³² Dehove, Qui praecipui fuerint labente XII° sec. ante introductam Arabum philosophiam temperati realismi antecessores, Lille, 1908.

³³ Apart from Christian thought, a special place must be reserved, among the sources of St. Thomas, to the influence of Moses Maimonides. On a good many points the position of the "Rabbi Moses" prepares that adopted by Thomism and their respective interpretation of Aristotle is often analogous. Maimonides is opposed to the Arabic "motecallemin" (theologians) just as St. Thomas opposes the Augustinian traditionalists; their mental attitude, positive and full of common-sense, is singularly akin and the study of their relationship would be worthy of an exhaustive treatment. Cf. J. Guttmann, Das Verhältnis des Thomas von Aquino zum Judentum, Göttingen, 1891; L.-G. Levy, Maimonide (Les Grands Philosophes), Paris, 1911, pp. 265-267.

³⁴ St. Thomas himself has declared, in adopting a saying of St. Hilary, that his main business in life is to speak of God. "Ut enim verbis Hilarii (De Trin., I, 37) utar, ego hoc vel praecipuum vitae meae officium debere me Deo conscius sum, ut eum omnis sermo meus et sensus loquatur," Contra Gent., I, 2.

³⁵ Cf. on this A. Touron, La vie de St. Thomas d'Aquin … avec un exposé de sa doctrine et ses ouvrages, Paris, 1737; esp. bk. IV, chap. ii and iii: Portrait of the perfect Doctor according to St. Thomas. On the mystical side of his personality, cf. Saint Thomas d'Aquin. Sa saintete, sa doctrine spirituelle, "Les Grands Mystiques," ed. of the Vie spirituelle, Saint-Maximin. Joret, O.P., La contemplation mystique d'après saint Thomas d'Aquin, Desclée, Lille-Bruges, 1924. This is a very penetrating study equally useful concerning his personality as concerning his mysticism. Also consult Bibliographie thomiste, pp. 70-72.

³⁶ See on this point, Chapter II.

³⁷ "Ergo quod aliquis veritatem meditatam in alterius notitiam per doctrinam deducat …," Sum. theo., IIaIIae, qu. 181, art. 3, 3a obj. Cf. ibid. on what follows.

³⁸ "Sic ergo dicendum est, quod opus vitae activae est duplex: unum quidem, quod ex plenitudine contemplationis derivatur, sicut doctrina et praedicatio …; et hoc praefertur simplici contemplationi: sicut enim majus est illuminare quam lucere solum, ita majus est contemplata allis tradere, quam solum contemplari." Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 188, 6, concl.

³⁹Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 182, 1, concl. and ad 3m. See esp. the conclusion of the article: "Et sic patet quod cum aliquis a contemplativa vita ad activam vocatur, non hoc fit per modum substractionis, sed per modum additionis."

⁴⁰ On the diversity of natural aptitudes for the active and contemplative life, see Sum. theol., IIaIIae, qu. 182, art. 4, ad 3m.

⁴¹Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 188, 6, ad Resp. It is there shown that the contemplative and teaching Ordersare of a dignity superior to the merely contemplative Orders, and take their place, in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, immediately after the bishops, because "fines primorum conjunguntur principiis secundorum."

⁴²Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 186, 3, ad 3m.

⁴³Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, cap. II: "Item hoc falsum est, quod magisterium sit honor; est enim officium, cui debetur honor."

⁴⁴Ibid., cap. II, ad Ita, cum nomina and Restat ergo dicendum.

⁴⁵Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 187, art. 3, ad 3m. Quaest. quodlib., VII, art. 17 and 18. Contr. impug. Dei cult, et rel., cap. II, ad Item, sicut probandum est, where teaching is counted as spiritual almsgiving and a work of mercy. Cf. cap. V.

⁴⁶ The following curious question was put to St. Thomas: Can a teacher who has always taught out of sheer vainglory recover a claim to his halo by doing penance? Answer: Penance gives a claim to the reward which one deserves; but he who teaches out of vainglory has not deserved a halo; hence no penance would confer on him the claim to recover it. Quodlib., XII, art. 24.

⁴⁷Quodlib., III, qu. IV, art. 9: "Utrum liceat alicui petere licentiam pro se docendi in theologia."

⁴⁸ "Nam scientia, per quam aliquis est idoneus ad docendum, potest aliquis scire per certitudinem se habere; charitatem autem, per quam aliquis est idoneus ad officium pastorale, non potest aliquis per certitudinem scire se habere." Quod-lib., III, art. 9, ad Resp. Cf. ad 3m: "Sed pericula magisterii cathedrae pastoralis devitat scientia cum charitate, quam homo nescit se per certitudinem habere; pericula autem magisterii cathedrae magistralis vitat homo per scientiam, quam potest homo scire se habere."

⁴⁹Sum. theol., IaIIae, III, 4, ad Resp. Cf. In evang. Matth., c. V.

⁵⁰ On this see Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 177, 1, ad Resp.

⁵¹Sum. theol., IIaIIae, 180, 4, ad Resp.

⁵² This is the expression used by P. Touron, who had so precise an appreciation of thomistic thought. See op. cit., p. 450.

⁵³ See on this point the observation of P. Mandonnet in Bulletin thomiste, Nov., 1924, pp. 135-6.