The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (67 page)

11. R. Markus, “Aquinas and Aristotle,”
Blackfriars,
March 1961. Compare Pelikan’s view that Aquinas’ treatise
On the Soul
was “determined more by philosophical than by biblical language about the soul” (Pelikan,
The Christian
Tradition,
vol. 1, p. 89). It perhaps needs to be stressed how fascinated by science Aquinas was. He did, after all, write commentaries on Aristotle’s physics, cosmology and meteorology, and he is known to have secured a copy of Heron of Alexandria’s work on the mechanics of steam engines before anyone else at the University of Paris.

12. Quoted in Davies,
The Thought of Thomas Aquinas,
p. 246.

13. See J. Mahoney,
The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman
Catholic Tradition
(Oxford, 1987), chap. 7, “The Impact of
Humanae Vitae.
” For the relationship between Aristotle, Plato and Aquinas in the formulation of the concept of natural law, see J. Finnis,
Natural Law and Natural Rights
(Oxford, 1980), chap. 13, “Nature, Reason, God.” Finnis sees Plato’s late work
The Laws
as one of the foundation texts of the concept. Aquinas asserts that natural law cannot conflict with the teachings of the scriptures, but this gives rise to further conceptual problems (for example, is each one of the Ten Commandments to be regarded an expression of natural law?). In the
Catechism of the Catholic Church
(London, 1994), the sections on “Natural Moral Law,” numbers 1954–60, are supported, rather surprisingly, by a quotation from Cicero but otherwise by none other earlier than Augustine.

14. An excellent survey of Aquinas’ political views can be found in J. S. McClelland,
A History of Western Political Thought
(London and New York, 1996), chap. 7, “Christendom and Its Law.” McClelland not only compares and contrasts Aquinas with Augustine but discusses the implications of natural law for medieval political thought. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre claims that Aristotelianism as developed by Thomas Aquinas represents the high point of western thought on ethical issues.

15. The tendency was to use Aristotle as an authority figure in support of Christian theology rather than as a means of invigorating it. Aristotle’s view (supported by Greek thinkers in general) that the male provides the essential element of life at conception, with the woman providing a stable fluid in which it can grow, fitted well with traditional ideas of the virgin birth, and may actually have influenced the development of these views; see M. Warner,
Alone of All Her Sex
(London, 1985), chap. 3, “Virgin Birth.” If the modern scientific view that Mary’s genetic contribution to Jesus would be equal to God’s is taken at face value, the theological problems are daunting. Aristotle’s ideas were also used to support the doctrine of transubstantiation (the doctrine that the bread and wine are changed totally into the body and blood of Christ at the moment of consecration). By the seventeenth century the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was to write that in the universities philosophy “hath no other place than as the handmaiden to the Roman religion; and since the authority of Aristotle is only current there, that study is not properly philosophy but Aristotelity.” Louis XIV was to make the astonishing assertion that “
notre religion et Aristote sont tellement liez qu’on ne puisse renverser l’un sans
ébranler l’autre
”—“our religion and Aristotle are so closely linked that one cannot overthrow one without undermining the other” (quoted in J. Israel,
Radical
Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750
[Oxford and New York, 2001]; this brilliant book shows just how tightly a sterile Aristotelianism dominated conservative thinking in the seventeenth century).

As already stressed in this book, the essence of Greek intellectual life lay in its stress on the provisional nature of knowledge and the acceptance that all “authorities” were there to be challenged, and one can assume that Aristotle would not have approved of the “fixed” status given to his works by theologians, any more than Ptolemy or Galen would have approved of the way that their work was frozen. It was not until the twentieth century that Aristotle’s extraordinary intellectual achievement was once again fully recognized.

EPILOGUE

1. See Jonathan Barnes, “Galen, Christians, Logic,” in T. P. Wiseman, ed.,
Classics in Progress
(Oxford, 2002), for fuller discussion.

2. On the relationship between reason and emotion in the healthy mind, see Antonio Damasio,
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
(New York, 1994; London, 1995). On free will and optimism, see the works of Raymond Tallis, especially
Enemies of Hope: A Critique of Contemporary Pessimism
(London, 1997).

Modern Works Cited in the Text and Notes

References to ancient texts can be followed up in the Loeb Classical Library, although many of the major works can be found in the Penguin Classics series. The Penguin Classics also include the works of the more prominent Christian thinkers, such as Augustine. Note also the compilations by Henry Bettenson cited below. Otherwise, the original works of the Church Fathers are not always easy to track down, and often the easiest way to find translations is through the Internet. For early Christianity in general I can recommend
www.christianorigins.org
, through which can be reached
www.newadvent.org/fathers/
, which has translations of most of the key works of the Church Fathers.

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———.
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