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before the sultan, who received him courteously but remained a Mohammedan. On his return, he found that the Franciscans had built themselves a house; he was deeply pained, but the Pope induced or compelled him to give way. After his death, Gregory canonized him but softened his rule in the article of poverty.
In the matter of saintliness, Francis has had equals; what makes him unique among saints is his spontaneous happiness, his universal love, and his gifts as a poet. His goodness appears always devoid of effort, as though it had no dross to overcome. He loved all living things, not only as a Christian or a benevolent man, but as a poet. His hymn to the sun, written shortly before his death, might almost have been written by Akhnaton the sun-worshipper, but not quite-Christianity informs it, though not very obviously. He felt a duty to lepers, for their sake, not for his; unlike most Christian saints, he was more interested in the happiness of others than in his own salvation. He never showed any feeling of superiority, even to the humblest or most wicked. Thomas of Celano said of him that he was more than a saint among saints; among sinners he was one of themselves.
If Satan existed, the future of the order founded by Saint Francis would afford him the most exquisite gratification. The saint’s immediate successor as head of the order, Brother Elias, wallowed in luxury, and allowed a complete abandonment of poverty. The chief work of the Franciscans in the years immediately following the death of their founder was as recruiting sergeants in the bitter and bloody wars of Guelfs and Ghibellines. The Inquisition, founded seven years after his death, was, in several countries, chiefly conducted by Franciscans. A small minority, called the Spirituals, remained true to his teaching; many of these were burnt by the Inquisition for heresy. These men held that Christ and the Apostles owned no property, not even the clothes they wore; this opinion was condemned as heretical in 1323 by John XXII. The net result of Saint Francis’s life was to create yet one more wealthy and corrupt order, to strengthen the hierarchy, and to facilitate the persecution of all who excelled in moral earnestness or freedom of thought. In view of his own aims and character, it is impossible to imagine any more bitterly ironical outcome.
Saint Dominic ( 1170-1221) is much less interesting than Saint Francis. He was a Castilian, and had, like Loyola, a fanatical devotion to orthodoxy. His main purpose was to combat heresy, and he adopted
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poverty as a means to this end. He was present throughout the Albigensian war, though he is said to have deplored some of its more extreme atrocities. The Dominican Order was founded in 1215 by Innocent III, and won quick success. The only human trait known to me in Saint Dominic is his confession to Jordan of Saxony that he liked talking to young women better than to old ones. In 1242, the order solemnly decreed that this passage should be deleted from Jordan’s life of the founder.
The Dominicans were even more active than the Franciscans in the work of the Inquisition. They performed, however, a valuable service to mankind by their devotion to learning. This was no part of Saint Dominic’s intention; he had decreed that his friars were “not to learn secular sciences or liberal arts except by dispensation.” This rule was abrogated in 1259, after which date everything was done to make a studious life easy for Dominicans. Manual labour was no part of their duties, and the hours of devotion were shortened to give them more time for study. They devoted themselves to reconciling Aristotle and Christ; Alberrus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, both Dominicans, accomplished this task as well as it is capable of being accomplished. The authority of Thomas Aquinas was so overwhelming that subsequent Dominicans did not achieve much in philosophy; though Francis, even more than Dominic, had disliked learning, the greatest names in the immediately following period are Franciscan: Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam were all Franciscans. What the friars accomplished for philosophy will be the subject of the following chapters.
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CHAPTER XIII Saint Thomas Aquinas
THOMAS AQUINAS (b. 1225 or 1226, d. 1274) is regarded as the greatest of scholastic philosophers. In all Catholic educational institutions that teach philosophy his system has to be taught as the only right one; this has been the rule since a rescript of 1879 by Leo XIII. Saint Thomas, therefore, is not only of historical interest, but is a living influence, like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel –more, in fact, than the latter two. In most respects, he follows Aristotle so closely that the Stagyrite has, among Catholics, almost the authority of one of the Fathers; to criticize him in matters of pure philosophy has come to be thought almost impious. * This was not always the case. In the time of Aquinas, the battle for Aristotle, as against Plato, still had to be fought. The influence of Aquinas secured the victory until the Renaissance; then Plato, who became better known than in the Middle Ages, again acquired supremacy in the opinion of most philosophers. In the seventeenth century, it was possible to be orthodox and a Cartesian; Malebranche, though a priest, was never censured. But in our day such freedoms are a thing of the past; Catholic ecclesiastics must accept Saint Thomas if they concern themselves with philosophy.
Saint Thomas was the son of the Count of Aquino, whose castle, in the kingdom of Naples, was close to Monte Cassino, where the education of the “angelic doctor” began. He was for six years at Frederick II’s university of Naples; then he became a Dominican, and went to Cologne, to study under Albertus Magnus, who was the leading Aristotelian among the philosophers of the time. After a period in Cologne and Paris, he returned to Italy in 1259, where he spent the rest of his life except for the three years 1269-72. During these three years he was in Paris, where the Dominicans, on account of their Aristotelian-
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* When I did so in a broadcast, very many protests from Catholics resulted.
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ism, were in trouble with the university authorities, and were suspected of heretical sympathy with the Averroists, who had a powerful party in the university. The Averroists held, on the basis of their interpretation of Aristotle, that the soul, in so far as it is individual, is not immortal; immortality belongs only to the intellect, which is impersonal, and identical in different intellectual beings. When it was forcibly brought to their notice that this doctrine is contrary to the Catholic faith, they took refuge in the subterfuge of “double truth”: one sort, based on reason, in philosophy, and another, based on revelation, in theology. All this brought Aristotle into bad odour, and Saint Thomas, in Paris, was concerned to undo the harm done by too close adherence to Arabian doctrines. In this he was singularly successful.
Aquinas, unlike his predecessors, had a really competent knowledge of Aristotle. His friend William of Moerbeke provided him with translations from the Greek, and he himself wrote commentaries. Until his time, men’s notions of Aristotle had been obscured by Neoplatonic accretions. He, however, followed the genuine Aristotle, and disliked Platonism, even as it appears in Saint Augustine. He succeeded in persuading the Church that Aristotle’s system was to be preferred to Plato’s as the basis of Christian philosophy, and that Mohammedans and Christian Averroists had misinterpreted Aristotle. For my part, I should say that the De Anima leads much more naturally to the view of Averroes than to that of Aquinas; however, the Church, since Saint Thomas, has thought otherwise. I should say, further, that Aristotle’s views on most questions of logic and philosophy were not final, and have since been proved to be largely erroneous; this opinion, also, is not allowed to be professed by any Catholic philosopher or teacher of philosophy.
Saint Thomas’s most important work, the Summa contra Gentiles, was written during the years 1259-64. It is concerned to establish the truth of the Christian religion by arguments addressed to a reader supposed to be not already a Christian; one gathers that the imaginary reader is usually thought of as a man versed in the philosophy of the Arabs. He wrote another book, Summa Theologiae, of almost equal importance, but of somewhat less interest to us because less designed to use arguments not assuming in advance the truth of Christianity.
What follows is an abstract of the Summa contra Gentiles.
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Let us first consider what is meant by “wisdom.” A man may be wise in some particular pursuit, such as making houses; this implies that he knows the means
