A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

importance of God’s absolute power to do whatever he pleases short of bringing
about a logical contradiction.’ 8 This was essentially an Augustinian approach
and did nothing to encourage the study of the laws of the natural world. The
second approach to the problem, the one favoured by conservatives, was to reject
Aristotle by re-emphasising the teaching of Augustine that faith had primacy
over reason and that worldly, empirical knowledge was to be scorned.
The third reaction was perhaps the most challenging: to try and integrate
Aristotle with Christianity. It was a path fraught with difficulties, not only
because it, risked challenging the Church’s responsibility for its own teaching
but because Aristotle offered interpretations of the creation and the immortality
of the soul that conflicted with orthodox belief. The greatest of these
Aristotelians, and certainly one of the greatest theologians of all time, was the
Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who spent much of his teaching
career in Paris. Aquinas absorbed the works of Aristotle through his teacher,
another Dominican, Albert the Great, and integrated them into his Summa
Theologiae, a massive structural survey of Christian doctrine in which reasoned
judgement was placed at the core. Aquinas brought back the possibility of
reason, and rather than decrying the power of the human mind, he exults in it.
While Augustine had argued that human beings had been so corrupted by
original sin that their power of reasoning had been almost extinguished, Aquinas
sees reason as a gift from God. He uses it to the full to explain Christian
doctrine, including the existence of God. Yet there remained an unresolved
tension. What if a particular Christian doctrine could not be defended by reason?
With the clarity of thought that was his hall-mark, Aquinas knew that reason had
its limits. 9 In this, as has already been seen, he was going no further than pagan
philosophy, which fully accepted that there were matters the human mind could
not grasp. The Greek philosophers could live with the idea that there are things
we cannot know. 10 This was unacceptable to the Church, which could hardly
sustain its authority if it had to accept that there were fundamental problems of
existence to which there were no answers. The solution, already implicit in the
works of Augustine, was to elevate some aspects of Church teaching as matters
of ‘faith’.
Abelard had done his best to bring the Trinity within the realm of reason, but
he had suffered for it at the hands of those who wished to preserve ‘the faith’ as
some kind of mystery that was sustained above the heads and minds of those ‘in
the streets and market place’. Aquinas was wise enough not to try to provide a