re: #311 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

A work that expands on Thomas Aquinas from retired Anglican Bishop Shelby Spong

Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism

Aquinas was handed a monumental task: to reconcile “heathen” science and philosophy with Catholic dogma. Before the ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts found their way back to Europe (through Muslim preservation efforts and translation), the Church had taught that the people who had existed in ancient times were brutes and barbarians, surviving Roman architecture and appia notwithstanding. That Plato, Aristotle and others were clearly men of letters put the Church in an uncomfortable position. How could Aristotle, for example, have developed his philosophy without knowing of Jesus and his Father? How could the Church absorb and/or adapt ancient Greek and Roman thought into Church dogma for the “modern” person? Ignoring it was not going to work, because scholars at the universities were already poring over the manuscripts and developing their own ideas, some of which would be non-dogmatic.

Now, to our minds, Aquinas was perhaps too strict in accepting everything Aristotle proposed as fact, but Thomas did manage to capture the Greeks’ willingness to study the real world separate from supernatural influences to see what might be learned about the natural world. People belittle the Middle Ages as a time of closed and benighted beliefs, but Aquinas’ melding of Catholic belief and Greek thought was pretty revolutionary, and it eventually led to scientific investigation and observation, and to the
“big” Renaissance. (The 13-14th centuries were the “little” Renaissance.”)

I’ve read some of Aquinas’ work. It’s pretty dense reading, but even a small sample would show someone Aquinas was a very intelligent fellow, though necessarily constrained by his beliefs and situation not to veer too far from church dogma.