who has left commentaries on Aristotle which fill six folio volumes; and his pupil, St Thomas Aquinas, who prepared (1260-70), through the instrumentality of the monk Wilhelm of Moerbecke, a new translation of the entire works after Greek originals; and who himself wrote laborious commentaries on the ‘Meta-physics,’ the ‘Ethics,’ and other books. It may be observed that by these great churchmen Aristotle is treated with the most implicit confidence; they seem blind to all that is Greek and pagan in his point of view; they defend him from charges of Averroism; and treat him, in short, as one of themselves. All this, of course, argues a great want of the critical and historical faculty, and much mixing up of things—“syncretism,” as it is called by the learned; but historical criticism was hardly to be looked for in the Middle Ages.
The Stagirite was now almost incorporated with Christianity. The Summa Theologiæ of St Thomas Aquinas was a compound of the logic, physics, and ethics of Aristotle with Christian divinity. But the highest honour of all came to him in the year 1300 A.D., when he was hailed in the ‘Divina Commedia’ of Dante as “the master of those that know,” sitting as head of “the philosophic family,” to whom Socrates and Plato and all the rest must look up.[1] Him Dante
