Thomas Aquinas and the Great Synthesis
How a humble 13th century monk brought Aristotle and Islam into Catholicism.
I discussed in an earlier article how Islamic culture greatly influenced the development of Western philosophy.
In this article, I will discuss a major reason how that happened.
When Christian armies conquered Islamic lands in southern Spain, they discovered Islamic scholarly texts. Like their Islamic counterparts a few centuries earlier, Christian scholars knew what they had in the Islamic libraries there. Over the period from 1130 to 1240, works by Aristotle (who the Christian scholars knew from his logic books) were eagerly translated into Latin and distributed widely, monastery to monastery to seminary. The spread of the “new” Aristotle and the fascination with these books was so strong that there were reports of monks and priests neglecting their duties because they were busy debating Aristotle.
The problem was simple: The new Aristotle contradicted the Neoplatonic ideas that had held sway for hundreds of years. But Aristotle, despite being non-Christian, could not be dismissed; he was an ancient and venerated authority, a centerpiece of the letters. Some forces in Catholicism…
