Princeps Concordiæ Science, Christianity and Truth

Abstract

THERE might not at first sight appear to be very J. much in common between Mr. Avery Dulles' able and scholarly monograph on the fifteenth century Italian philosopher, Pico della Mirandola (1463— 1494), and Canon A. E. Baker's work of modern popular Christian apologetic ; yet it is surprising to find how little the development of the natural sciences has affected the fundamental problems of religion and philosophy. This is all the more remarkable because Mr. Dulles, by his careful examination of the writings of Pico, makes it clear that this philosopher of the Renaissance was not, as some students of his work have maintained, a humanist of the modern type, nor yet an idealist of the Neo-Platonic tradition, still' less a Hegel born out of due time. Fundamentally, he was a scholastic, belonging to the medieval rather than the modern tradition, the cleavage between these two being less sharp, in point of fact, than has often been supposed. At the Universities of Padua and Paris, but especially at the former, which in the fifteenth century had become the metropolis of scholasticism, Pico came into fruitful contact with the thought of the medieval philosophers. All his thinking is done in terms of scholasticism, which was by no means the barren fig-tree it has been pictured. Princeps Concordiae Pico della Mirandola and the Scholastic Tradition. By Avery Dulles. (Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Prize Essay for 1940.) Pp. xiii + 182. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press ; London : Oxford University Press, 1941.) 11s. 6d. net. Science, Christianity and Truth By the Rev. Canon A. E. Baker. Pp. 158. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, Ltd., 1943.) 6s. net.