The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Plato was not entirely neglected. Latin versions of the Phaedo and the Meno saw the light of day for the first time in 1156.6 But the rediscovery of Aristotle’s lost works was far more momentous. It gave him an entirely new lease on intellectual life, as did the idea that man has an obligation to search out the truth about the natural realm as well as the divine one. From astronomy and medicine to biology, mathematics, and physics, the entire scientific framework of Western culture took on a fresh robust shape, thanks to Aristotle’s intrepid translators and their Muslim hosts.

  For the fact remains that without Arab help, western Europe would never have recovered its knowledge of Greek science and mathematics—still the foundations of modern science today—or understood how to interpret it.7 Arabs supplied Europe with a new scientific vocabulary, with words like algebra, zero, cipher, almanac, and alchemy; and a new system of recording numbers that we still call Arabic numerals. Arab tables of astronomic observation and mathematical calculation, as well as manuals on medicine, introduced the Western mind to the great discoveries of the Greeks—as did the works of Arab commentators on Aristotle.

  For almost a century the Christian and Islamic worldviews overlapped, especially their view of nature. The seam along that overlap was Aristotle, whom Arab scholars dubbed the Master of Those Who Know and whom Christian scholars would come to know as the Philosopher, as if there were no others of any lasting value.

  No one contributed more to this new appreciation than Ibn Rushd, whom the Christian West knew under his Latinized name of Averroës. Born in Córdoba in Spain in 1126, Averroës was not only personal physician to the all-powerful caliph, but a devoted disciple of Aristotle. “Let us praise God,” he wrote, “who set this man apart from all others in perfection, and made him approach very near to the highest dignity humanity can attain.” The teaching of Aristotle was the supreme truth, Averroës affirmed, because Aristotle’s mind was the final expression of the human mind.8 If Aristotle said it, then it was true. Certainly no one had to look further than Aristotle’s great catalog of works to understand how the world worked. Nor could anyone who read Aristotle’s works doubt any longer that the world around us offers a direct path to understanding reality.

  For medieval thinkers, this was an eye-opening revelation. Side by side with divine truth, Averroës was saying, lay another truth, that of the natural world. This insight earned Averroës an admiration equaled by no other living non-Christian. It is why Dante praises him in his Divine Comedy and why Raphael gives him a prominent place in his School of Athens. It is also why the rediscovered texts of Aristotle had so sweeping, even revolutionary, an impact on minds still conditioned by a Neoplatonized Christian theology.

  For the first time, scholars saw in Aristotle a great thinker who did not see the world of the senses as an illusion or a vale of sin and suffering or even a complex forest of symbols. Here was a thinker, one undeniably of the highest order, who seemed unaware of the need for a Savior and Redeemer or of a better, more perfect world to come. Aristotle’s universe is whole and complete. He is entirely comfortable with it.9 To the surprise of everyone who read him, and to the delight of many, his empirical scientific approach offered a new series of vistas and a new series of tasks, more than a lifetime’s work, and a truth, as Averroës said, as certain and complete as that of divine revelation.

  If this made certain theologians in Spain and elsewhere more than a little nervous, Averroës hastened to offer reassurance. Not to worry, he said. There is no real conflict between reason and faith (Christian or Muslim, it didn’t matter). He distinguished among three levels of reason and three ways of attaining the truth. The first was that of the uncultured ordinary person, whose mind is largely closed to reason and who can be moved either by emotional appeals like those outlined in Aristotle’s Rhetoric or by arguments from authority. That person’s desire for knowledge is easily satisfied by parables and injunctions from the Bible or the Koran.

  Then there is the educated man, who wants something more than the literal Word of God. He turns to theology and dialectic; he seeks to reconcile his reason with his faith but ultimately is content if faith wins out. However, the third level of truth belongs to the true man of reason. Nothing short of Aristotle’s logic with its system of necessary rational demonstration, and nothing short of Aristotle’s science of substance and potentiality, will satisfy his quest for knowledge.10

  This man of reason Averroës described was a startling proposition in the Europe of Saint Bernard and Suger. Here was someone who doesn’t worry if what he learns about how the world works (for example, the process of biological reproduction) conflicts with religious belief (for example, the Virgin Birth). He respects the truths of revelation and theology, but he also knows what he knows. No outside religious authority will ever shake his inner conviction or overturn any truth that pure reason has reached with the help of Aristotle.

  For example, reason will never accept the idea that God could somehow create the universe on His own, literally making something out of nothing. Clearly, Aristotle’s idea of an Unmoved Mover is much closer to the truth. Likewise, the notion of the soul’s immortality violates every principle of science and nature. The soul is better understood as the potential intellect Aristotle described in De Anima. It comes into existence at birth, the moment we come into contact with the outside sensory world. However, at death it passes along to rejoin the universal intelligence, Averroës asserted, like a drop of water returning to the ocean.11

  At this point, the Catholic Church had had enough. In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle’s greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D’Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

  Aquinas was no Averroist. His life’s work would be an implicit repudiation of Averroës’s idea that reason has a higher claim to truth than faith does.12 Instead, Thomas Aquinas’s reading of Aristotle led him in a different direction. He would conclude that faith and reason are actually two sides of the same coin. His writings would try to persuade his age that men are part of both a divine and a human order, and both have valid standing in their lives.

  Like Peter Abelard, Aquinas was born to a noble family. Unlike Abelard, though, he was no warrior. His father, Landulf, was a count and vassal of German emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen. Frederick was the first Western ruler to take up the trappings of Europe’s imperial past (he even commissioned a statue of himself in a Roman toga). He was also the first to assume an openly secular stance regarding political power. When the pope demanded that he launch a Crusade to retake Jerusalem, Frederick instead signed a treaty with Muslim rulers who then gave Christians free passage to the city.†

  Frederick welcomed Jewish and Saracen scholars to his court and founded a university at Naples. It soon became a major conduit for Aristotle’s works to enter the medieval mainstream because Frederick encouraged his scholars to ignore the earlier papal ban. Nowhere else, as scholar Josef Pieper notes, was it possible to encounter Aristotle so comprehensively as in the city of Naples.13 And it was in Naples that young Thomas Aquinas first learned Aristotle’s logic and first read Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

  When Thomas was five, Count Landulf of Aquino took a hard look at his youngest son. The boy was fat and slow moving, with fair, delicate skin. His father tried to imagine him wielding a sword or lance, or dodging a flying missile on the battlefield, and gave up. However, the famed monastery at Monte Cassino was nearby; it seemed the perfect place to put him. Besides, his father and mother had several other sons to carry on the warrior tradition. Tubby little Tommaso seemed destined to pass his life in cloistered obscurity.

  Exactly why that did not happen, we’ll never know. We do know that Tommaso was fourteen or fifteen when he left Monte Cassino to beg
in studying in Naples and that in 1244 he turned in his Benedictine robes to take up the rough, white habit of one of the new orders of preaching friars, the Dominicans. His father had died some months before. When his mother heard what Tommaso had done, she was furious. Having abandoned her son to the Benedictines for more than ten years, Countess Theodora suddenly took an almost hysterical interest in her son’s future and how it might reflect on her.

  The Benedictines were a long-established religious order; Monte Cassino was their founding house. The Dominicans, on the other hand, had been in existence for only twenty years. Members wandered Europe’s cities under a strict vow of poverty, preaching and teaching. Like their Franciscan brothers, the Dominicans were “mendicants”: literally, a begging order. The idea of her son begging food from strangers was more than Countess Theodora could stand.14

  She convinced the pope to offer her son the abbacy of Monte Cassino itself. He would even be allowed to wear his Dominican habit. Thomas turned the pope down. Theodora then sent a letter to her two other sons in the emperor’s entourage, which had pitched camp at Acquapendente in Tuscany.

  But their brother was no longer in Naples. He had set off on foot with his teacher and three other Dominican friars for Paris, where he was slated to continue his studies in theology. They had stopped in a village in Tuscany and were quietly refreshing themselves at a fountain when they realized they were surrounded by armed men. It was the D’Aquino boys, clad in chain mail and wielding swords, and they were fighting mad. They roughly shoved aside the other friars, seized their brother, hoisted him up over a horse, and galloped off so that he could face their mother’s righteous wrath.

  By turns the countess begged, threatened, and cajoled her son to give up the Dominican order. He refused. There were tears and shouts and bellowed threats (at one point, one of his brothers seems to have smuggled in a prostitute to make him violate his oath of chastity). Thomas was unmoved. Instead, he instructed his sisters in sacred literature and converted his eldest sister to become a nun.15 He calmly read the Bible and Aristotle’s Metaphysics and waited.

  His family kept Thomas Aquinas prisoner for nearly two years. Finally they released him and let him go on to Paris. He had won. Why did he do it? Certainly the incident reveals a calm determination underlying Aquinas’s lethargic girth and soft-spoken modesty. On that point, he never changed. His scholarship reflects it. Let’s hear what everyone else thinks first, he begins each chapter of his Summa Theologica. Then I’ll get back to you with what I think. And he always does, quietly cutting through the static and chatter to get to the heart of the matter.

  There may also be another reason Aquinas was so determined to become a Dominican. The order of friars was heavily involved in combating and converting heretics living outside the bounds of the Catholic Church. Aquinas’s first important work was a manual for debating non-Christians, including Muslims. Still later, the pope would appoint him to head a commission to explore a reunion of the Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches.16

  Far more than Bernard or Abelard, Thomas Aquinas was aware of the larger world around him, and he was fascinated by it. By joining the Dominicans, he would see how the other half lived, people from a variety of lands and speaking a variety of languages: peasants, knights, merchants, parish priests and university students, prostitutes and day laborers.

  At the end of his life, Aquinas wrote, “All I have written seems to me so much straw compared to all I have seen and what has been revealed to me.”17 Aristotle became his compass for figuring out how to understand that larger world.

  Paris was a good place to begin.

  When Aquinas arrived in that city in 1245, it was the busy commercial center of France as well as France’s political capital. It also boasted the leading university in Europe. What Abelard had started little more than a century ago had exploded into a major center of teaching and learning. Paris had become a city of students.18 In 1200, the French king granted the schools established there a royal charter with special privileges, which were later confirmed by the pope. For anyone in Europe interested in getting a bachelor’s degree in the seven liberal arts, or a master’s degree in medicine, canon law, or theology (the College of the Sorbonne was officially set up in 1257), Paris was the place to go.

  Commercial cosmopolitan cities had always been receptive to Aristotle: Alexandria in the ancient world; Toledo in the early Middle Ages; later Georgian London and Edinburgh. In the 1200s, Aristotle’s city was Paris. Despite the official papal ban, his works were everywhere. Aristotle’s logic was accepted as the basis of nearly every university textbook. His other formerly lost works had an equal appeal. They explained every subject clearly and simply and logically, from meteors to the nature of time, in terms that were easy to memorize and in a sequence that was easy for teenage medieval minds to absorb.

  The problem was getting unfettered access to them. All the papal ban had done was increase students’ fascination with Aristotle.‡ The same was true of the works of Averroës. The Arab’s biggest champion, Siger of Brabant, arrived at the university shortly after Aquinas’s second stay in Paris as a teacher ended in 1259. Still, when he first arrived Aquinas could meet confirmed Averroists in every classroom and in every seminar.

  They passionately believed that human beings had the right to learn everything they could about the natural world, including human nature, without worrying about whether it contradicted Scripture or church doctrine. The “truths” of divine revelation might satisfy the curiosity of some, they alleged. The genuine intellectual, however, won’t be satisfied until he gets to the bottom of those truths revealed by his own reason.

  Aquinas was impressed by their arguments and acknowledged the validity of their passion. But he was put off by their air of certainty, not to mention their arrogance. Leave revealed religion to the mob, the hoi polloi, the Averroist says. Knowledge and wisdom really belong only to the privileged few who can see through the façade of simple faith but are discreet enough to say nothing about it. In this sense, Averroism will be the taproot of Enlightenment Deism and is summed up perfectly by Voltaire more than five centuries later: “I don’t believe in God, but I hope my valet does so he won’t steal my spoons.”

  Aquinas was unconvinced. The message of revealed religion contained in the Bible and church doctrine was meant for everyone, not just the rednecks among us. Likewise, every human being deserved to know the whole truth, not just a chosen elite. To fall for the notion of a “double truth” and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.19

  There had to be a better way to reconcile the battle between reason and faith that Abelard and Bernard had started under the respective banners of Aristotle and Augustine. Thomas began to tease out clues from the lectures of his teacher Albertus Magnus, or Albert the Great.§ From his chair as regent master, Albertus patiently led Aquinas page by page through Aristotle’s major texts, including the Metaphysics, and wrote prodigious commentaries on them—thirty-eight volumes’ worth in the modern edition. However, he was also deeply respectful of Saint Augustine and all those Church Fathers who had stressed the primacy of faith. His own theology was heavily influenced by Dionysius the Areopagite.20 If the great Albert never felt it necessary to address any conflict between reason and faith, Aquinas concluded, perhaps there never really was one.

  The problem was, Albert never made that lack of conflict explicit. For all his staggering erudition, he was never tempted to join up the two great existing systems of wisdom in the Western world: the school of Aristotle and Greek science and that of Plato and his Christian disciples, including Saint Augustine. That was the task Aquinas decided to undertake once he received his license to teach at the University of Paris in 1256.

  The work Aquinas did in the next sixteen years changed the face of Western Christianity and philosophy. He wrote commentaries on virtually everything Aristotle wrote; he wrote on the Book of Job, the Gospe
l of John, and Paul’s epistles; he wrote a seminal treatise on the nature of evil and another on building aqueducts and on military siege operations.21 Above all, he also wrote the two works that would earn him the title of Universal Doctor of the Catholic Church: the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica.

  These last two alone total a stupefying two million words. They are a monumental fusion of learning and faith, and a reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, without parallel even in the works of Saint Augustine. In fact, together they make Aquinas the one Christian thinker whose system can stand beside those of Aristotle and Plato—in part because it is a brilliant synthesis of the best of both thinkers.

  What was more stunning is that both works were written by a man who was still largely underestimated by his contemporaries. With his wide girth, slow-moving manner, and soft-spoken, self-effacing style, Thomas Aquinas had never looked like an intellectual superstar. His fellow students at Paris had called him “that dumb ox from Sicily.” Albert Magnus had overheard them during a class and warned, “That dumb ox is going to surpass all of you, and one day his bellowings are going to be heard around the world.”22

  Except that Thomas Aquinas never bellows. This becomes a problem for modern readers. Anyone who picks up a copy of the Summa Theologica, or even an editor’s selection of choice bits, expecting to be dazzled and enthralled will quickly put it down again (as I did as a college student with the original Latin edition).

  Aquinas’s prose style seems passionless and without personality—certainly when he is compared with Saint Augustine. In this, they reflect something Aquinas picked up from Aristotle’s lost writings: the value of an objectivity based on logic, which doesn’t worry about one’s own feelings or preconceptions or the readers’ but stays completely focused on a single question: “Is what I have just said true or not?”