Historical Relations 115 



was the leading architect, was built upon the recovered writings of 

 Aristotle. The work of Aquinas is mergly the greatest and most 

 lucid effort of a process that had been going on for centuries. His 

 " Summa Theological'' regarded as a sustained intellectual effort, 

 must be considered one of the most remarkable and fatiguing per- 

 formances that the human race has yet achieved. As an investiga- 

 tion of evidence for the views that it sets forth, the modern working 

 scientist will pass it by. 



But although the Church accepted or professed to accept the 

 Aristotelian philosophy, there were certain points in that philosophy 

 which could not be effectively incorporated into a Christian system. 

 Many elements of the Aristotelian philosophy were, of course, 

 incompatible with the biblical account. Such, for instance, was 

 the spherical earth. Details of this type were glossed over without 

 grave difficulty. The incompatibility was ignored, or the biblical 

 account was held to be allegorical or to have some mystical or moral 

 meaning, or, again, it was pointed out that the Bible was not written 

 for the purpose of teaching science and that such matters were 

 without profound significance. Discussion of these questions 

 was endless and gave rise to a vast literature, which is, however, 

 neither interesting nor important for our theme. On the whole 

 Christianity plus Aristotelianism explained more than either 

 system by itself, and there was therefore no reason why men should 

 abandon either, still less both. Nevertheless, in the Aristotelian 

 philosophy there certainly were very disturbing elements which 

 might have led to profounder conflict. Such, for instance, was the 

 basic Aristotelian view of the indestructibility and uncreatability 

 of matter, with the corollary that the Universe itself is uncreated 

 and timeless. 



If the actual words of Aristotle had been confronted with the 

 biblical phrases the result would have been a very serious clash. 

 But in fact this contrast could hardly be directly made. The access 

 of the medieval scholastics to the Aristotelian writings was very 

 imperfect. To begin with, the writings themselves are obscure 

 and the language in which they are written is very difficult. Further, 

 although attempts were made by Aquinas and others to have transla- 

 tions made direct from the Greek, these translations were most 

 imperfect and were, moreover, very rare. It is not certain that 

 eyen Aquinas was able to employ them to any large extent. The 

 overwhelming majority of medieval Aristotelian translations and 



