Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 1: The Middle AgesLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 1: The Middle Ages
Lord, John
History
Although both Plato and Aristotle accepted "universals" as the
foundation of scientific inquiry, the former arrived at them by
consciousness, and the other by reasoning. The spirit of the two
great masters of thought was as essentially different as their
habits and lives. Plato believed that God governed the world;
Aristotle believed that it was governed by chance. The former
maintained that mind is divine and eternal; the latter that it is a
form of the body, and consequently mortal. Plato thought that the
source of happiness was in virtue and resemblance to God; while
Aristotle placed it in riches and outward prosperity. Plato
believed in prayer; but Aristotle thought that God would not hear
or answer it, and therefore that it was useless. Plato believed in
happiness after death; while Aristotle supposed that death ended
all pleasure. Plato lived in the world of abstract ideas;
Aristotle in the realm of sense and observation. The one was
religious; the other secular and worldly. With both the passion
for knowledge was boundless, but they differed in their conceptions
of knowledge; the one basing it on eternal ideas and the deductions
to be drawn from them, and the other on physical science,--the
phenomena of Nature,--those things which are cognizable by the
senses. The spiritual life of Plato was "a longing after love and
of eternal ideas, by the contemplation of which the soul sustains
itself and becomes participant in immortality." The life of
Aristotle was not spiritual, but intellectual. He was an
incarnation of mere intellect, the architect of a great temple of
knowledge, which received the name of Organum, or the philosophy of
first principles.
Thomas Aquinas, we may see from what has been said, was both
Platonic and Aristotelian. He resembled Plato in his deep and
pious meditations on the eternal realities of the spiritual world,
while in the severity of his logic he resembled Aristotle, from
whom he learned precision of language, lucidity of statement, and a
syllogistic mode of argument well calculated to confirm what was
already known, but not to make attainments in new fields of thought
or knowledge. If he was gentle and loving and pious like Plato, he
was also as calm and passionless as Aristotle.
This great man died at the age of forty-eight, in the year 1274, a
few years after Saint Louis, before his sum of theology was
completed. He died prematurely, exhausted by his intense studies;
leaving, however, treatises which filled seventeen printed folio
volumes,--one of the most voluminous writers of the world. His
fame was prodigious, both as a dialectician and a saint, and he was
in due time canonized as one of the great pillars of the Church,
ranking after Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the
Great,--the standard authority for centuries of the Catholic
theology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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