Abstract
The impact of Greco-Arabian philosophy on the West dominates the intellectual climate of the thirteenth century.1 For some time it had been rumored throughout Europe that, long before the advent of Christianity, Aristotle had expounded a complete system of sciences in the pure light of natural reason. Here was no faith seeking understanding, as in St. Augustine and St. Anselm, but an autonomous scientific account of the universe that rivalled anything written by the saints. Its logical completeness made it look like the last word in human wisdom. And it offered what the West completely lacked: a vast body of natural sciences. In the newly unified Christendom, this idea of explaining reality without reference to revelation sounded as novel and alarming as the idea of ruling society without reference to divine law. Freedom of investigation as well as liberty of princes were on the same plane: they were liberties allowed within the Church, liberty to exercise reason and liberty to take administrative measures, so long as they did not conflict with Christian principles. From the earliest days of the Church, theology had made abundant use of Platonism; the medieval discovery of the physical treatises of Aristotle raised a different kind of problem. Here was the first contact of the Christian mind with what passed for science. Could peripatetic philosophy be harmonized with the faith?
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