A History of Political Theories by William Dunning

Author:William Dunning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ozymandias Press

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS AND HIS SCHOOL

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1. General Character of the System

THE culmination of papal influence in European politics was synchronous with a widespread revival of speculative philosophy. During the twelfth century a very marked activity in all forms of intellectual life was manifest. The philosophical expression of this activity was the extensive literature in which was embodied the doctrines of scholasticism. In its most general aspect, scholasticism was a system of thought in which philosophy, in the purely rational sense, was so subordinated to established theological doctrines “that where philosophy and theology trod on common ground, the latter was received as the absolute norm and criterion of truth.” Because the mediæval mind was essentially dependent upon authority for the bases of its speculative activity, the rational element in scholasticism was furnished by the philosophy of the ancients and the theological element by the church fathers. The earlier scholastics, from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, were obliged, in the absence of fuller sources, to follow in their systems the scanty outlines of Stoic and Platonic doctrine that had been transmitted through the Dark Ages in more or less accurate compends. Of Aristotle, but few works were known, and these, as Symonds says, through “Latin translations made by Jews from Arabic commentaries on Greek texts.” The Aristotelian logic, however, imperfectly as it was understood, constituted the chief source of the rigid syllogistic method that is so common in scholastic reasoning.

In the latter half of the twelfth century the complete works of Aristotle began to enter Western Europe by way of Spain, where Latin translations of them had long been used in the Moorish universities. A little later Greek texts were brought from the East by the Crusaders, so that by the middle of the thirteenth century the greatest work which the human reason had yet produced was before the philosophers of the time. The result was the shaping of scholasticism into its later and most perfect form. Through the systematizing industry of compilers and commentators the doctrines of the church fathers and the dogmas of the church itself had by this time been digested into compact and intelligible form. Aristotle’s works embodied a complete system of rational philosophy. From the two bodies of doctrine it was now the task of the schoolmen to forge out a single system of ultimate science which should blend, in final harmony, the products of reason and of revelation.

This purpose is the key to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is the greatest of the later scholastics, and perhaps of all scholastics. Through him politics enters once more into the circle of the sciences, and assumes a position like that assigned to it by Aristotle, always subject, however, to that principle which permeates all mediæval thought— that the dogma of the saint takes precedence over the reasoned conclusion of the philosopher. Because Augustine had been the most prolific and the most respected of the fathers of the church, and had touched most of all on

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