Albertus Magnus 1193-1280.
Aquinas 1225-1274.
When Aristotle first came to Paris (about 1200 a.d.), in Oriental dress, and accompanied by Moslem authors, the Council of Paris denounced him as an infidel; yet in less than fifty years all his works were placed on the list of books prescribed in the university course. This was brought about by the Dominicans. In six of his twenty-one ponderous volumes the German friar Albertus Magnus paraphrased the whole of Aristotle’s works, and stripping his philosophy of the pantheistic and materialistic garb in which the Spanish Arab Averroës had clothed it, presented the Greek philosopher as an ally of Christianity. The Italian saint, Thomas Aquinas, pupil of Albertus, in his much more readable commentaries and treatises, popularized this idea so successfully that Aristotle—the Philosopher, as he was called—speedily became as great an authority on every other subject as he had always been on logic.
It was a mutual victory. Aquinas captured the Greek for the Christian faith; Aristotle won the western world to accept his theories. No longer was the doctrine of a spherical Earth called “an old heathen theory”: it was almost an integral part of the Catholic faith. Aristotle’s demonstration that there must be a First Mover, himself unmoved, became an argument for the existence of the Christian Deity; the intelligences which preside over the celestial movements were interpreted as the nine hierarchies of angels whose existence was taught by the Church. To the eight spheres of the Greeks and the Primum Mobile of the Arabs, the thirteenth-century Christians added the all-embracing heaven of heavens, the Empyrean, to be the abode of the Creator and blessed spirits. Within the central immoveable earth they placed Purgatory and the fires of Hell. They accepted the limits of the habitable earth as laid down by Ptolemy, but kept Jerusalem as the centre by asserting that it was situated 90° from the Pillars of Hercules, and 90° from the mouths of the Ganges. Eden, the earthly paradise of Adam and Eve, was represented on contemporary maps as in the extreme East, separated by sea from the eastern boundary of the inhabited earth.
Thus theology and science supported one another. All learning was sacred, and all that man’s mind is capable of understanding he might aspire to know, for the search if rightly pursued would lead at last to the perfect bliss of beholding with unveiled eyes the Source of all Truth.