Thomas Aquinas: Philosophy in an Hour. Paul Strathern
thus survived the Europe of the Dark Ages. They had been absorbed into the canon of Christian teaching, which had remained preserved in remote religious communities, before emerging to become the dominant intellectual force in medieval Europe. Although the ideas put forward by Plato and Aristotle couldn’t possibly have been Christian (they had both died more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ), this was not considered relevant. Yet, as we shall see, this left such things as Aristotle’s proof of the existence of God in a somewhat anomalous position (that is, precisely which God’s existence had he proved?).
The young Aquinas, avidly devouring Aristotle’s Metaphysics in his prison tower, also chose to overlook any possible differences between Aristotle’s God and the Christian God he believed in so fervently. What impressed him was Aristotle’s peerless intellect, his questioning of the ultimate nature of things, and his ability to prove God’s existence. Such philosophical argument was meat and drink to his awakening intellect.
But all good things must come to an end. Aquinas was not to remain undisturbed in his tower indefinitely. Eventually his sister hatched a plan for his escape. In this she was assisted by some of his brothers, who had now become more sympathetic. (One hopes that Rinaldo the poet was among them, but there is no evidence.) Late at night Thomas’s sister and his brothers crept into the tower and lowered Thomas in a basket over the walls. By next morning he was back on the road to Paris – making sure he kept a low profile amongst the travelling pilgrims, knights, wives from Bath, simpletons, and piemen on their way to the fair.
After tramping up through Lombardy, over the Alps, and across Burgundy, covering almost a thousand miles on foot, Thomas arrived in Paris. Here he discovered that Albertus Magnus had gone to teach at Cologne in Germany. Three hundred miles later, Thomas arrived at Cologne.
Albertus Magnus was a Swabian, whose teaching was instrumental in the revival of student interest in Aristotle. (He was belatedly canonised, for no apparent reason, in 1931. Now known as St. Albert the Great, he is the patron saint of natural scientists who feel the need of protection from heretical beliefs – a category into which almost every major scientific advance has fallen at some stage.) Albertus Magnus was quickly impressed by the gauche twenty-three-year-old from southern Italy. Thomas Aquinas had grown into a rather awkward giant. He could express even the most complex ideas with utmost clarity, yet he was all but incapable of expressing his feelings (except with the aid of a flaming faggot). His large oxlike eyes would stare out imploringly as his rowdy fellow students ragged him unmercifully – though from a safe distance. He soon became known as ‘the dumb ox’, though Albertus Magnus is said to have reproved Aquinas’s tormentors: ‘Mark my words, one day the lowing of that ox will be heard all over Christendom’. This story, typical of the flimsy hagiographic anecdote that attaches itself to someone about whom there’s not much else to say, nonetheless seems to confirm a rather bovine manner and appearance.
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