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Augustine followed a natural mental evolution when he was a Platonist before he was a Manichean, and
a Manichean before he was a Christian. And it was exactly in that last association that the first faint hint,
of the danger of being too Platonist, may be seen.
From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, the Moderns have had an almost monstrous love of the
Ancients. In considering medieval life, they could never regard the Christians as anything but the pupils
of the Pagans; of Plato in ideas, or Aristotle in reason and science. It was not so. On some points, even
from the most monotonously modern standpoint, Catholicism was centuries ahead of Platonism or
Aristotelianism. We can see it still, for instance, in the tiresome tenacity of Astrology. On that matter the
philosophers were all in favour of superstition; and the saints and all such superstitious people were
against superstition. But even the great saints found it difficult to get disentangled from this superstition.
Two points were always put by those suspicious of the Aristotelianism of Aquinas; and they sound to us
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now very quaint and comic, taken together. One was the view that the stars are personal beings,
governing our lives: the other the great general theory that men have one mind between them; a view
obviously opposed to immortality; that is, to individuality. Both linger among the Moderns: so strong is
still the tyranny of the Ancients. Astrology sprawls over the Sunday papers, and the other doctrine has
its hundredth form in what is called Communism: or the Soul of the Hive.
For on one preliminary point, this position must not be misunderstood. When we praise the practical
value of the Aristotelian Revolution, and the originality of Aquinas in leading it, we do not mean that the
Scholastic philosophers before him had not been philosophers, or had not been highly philosophical, or
had not been in touch with ancient philosophy. In so far as there was ever a bad break in philosophical
history, it was not before St. Thomas, or at the beginning of medieval history; it was after St. Thomas
and at the beginning of modern history. The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from
Pythagoras and Plato was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph
of Attila or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was only lost after the introduction of
printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society and all the enlightenment of the
Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped
the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human
hobby; the habit of thinking. This is proved by the fact that the printed books of this later period largely
had to wait for the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth century, to find even the names of
the new philosophers; who were at the best a new kind of philosophers. But the decline of the Empire,
the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages, though too much tempted to neglect what was opposed to
Platonic philosophy, had never neglected philosophy. In that sense St. Thomas, like most other very
original men, has a long and clear pedigree. He himself is constantly referring back to the authorities
from St. Augustine to St. Anselm, and from St. Anselm to St. Albert, and even when he differs, he also
defers.
A very learned Anglican once said to me, not perhaps without a touch of tartness, "I can't understand
why everybody talks as if Thomas Aquinas were the beginning of the Scholastic philosophy. I could
understand their saying he was the end of it." Whether or no the comment was meant to be tart, we may
be sure that the reply of St. Thomas would have been perfectly urbane. And indeed it would be easy to
answer with a certain placidity, that in his Thomist language the end of a thing does not mean its
destruction, but its fulfilment. No Thomist will complain, if Thomism is the end of our philosophy, in
the sense in which God is the end of our existence. For that does not mean that we cease to exist, but that
we become as perennial as the philosophia perennis. Putting this claim on one side, however, it is
important to remember that my distinguished interlocutor was perfectly right, in that there had been
whole dynasties of doctrinal philosophers before Aquinas, leading up to the day of the great revolt of the
Aristotelians. Nor was even that revolt a thing entirely abrupt and unforeseen. An able writer in the
Dublin Review not long ago pointed out that in some respects the whole nature of metaphysics had
advanced a long way since Aristotle, by the time it came to Aquinas. And that it is no disrespect to the
primitive and gigantic genius of the Stagirite to say that in some respects he was really but a rude and
rough founder of philosophy, compared with some of the subsequent subtleties of medievalism; that the
Greek gave a few grand hints which the Scholastics developed into the most delicate fine shades. This
may be an overstatement, but there is a truth in it. Anyhow, it is certain that even in Aristotelian
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philosophy, let alone Platonic philosophy, there was already a tradition of highly intelligent
interpretation. If that delicacy afterwards degenerated into hair-splitting, it was none the less delicate
hair-splitting; and work requiring very scientific tools.
What made the Aristotelian Revolution really revolutionary was the fact that it was really religious. It is
the fact, so fundamental that I thought it well to lay it down in the first few pages of this book; that the
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