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.