Thomas Aquinas Opens Europe to Greek Ideas

Two centuries after the lost writings of Aristotle and the rest of the Greeks returned to Europe, Thomas Aquinas opened the European mind to them with the idea that God is revealed through our everyday experience of nature (natural theology) rather than through scriptures and religious experiences (revealed theology). By rehabilitating Aristotle, who Aquinas called “The Philosopher”, Aquinas opened the door to past ideas that sparked an explosion of new thinking.

Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, a Catholic priest, and a saint of the Catholic Church. His impact on the way people viewed the world and approached questions probably had an even more profound and far-reaching impact on astronomy than his efforts to expose post-Roman Europe to Aristotle – maybe even rivaling the transformation wrought by Newton 400 years later. 

The impact of Aquinas’ work exposes some unexpected aspects of life in Europe after about 1000 A.D.: 

First, Europe after the fall of Rome largely abandon slavery as a major mode of labor and, combined with several population shocks (like the black death for example) became increasingly interested in practical technology development out of necessity to meet economic and cultural (cathedrals) demands. Technical skills and machinery were fundamental to Europe’s scientific revolution.

Second, Aquinas was exposed to Aristotle's writings at a university in Naples, before he or anyone else reconciled Aristotle's ideas with the teachings of the Catholic Church. So even before 1300, it was clearly possible to study ideas that were out of favor with the church.

Thrid, Europe was liberated from “revealed truth” to a much greater extent than we give it credit for (in no small part because of Thomas Aquinas) and the famous impediments of the later middle ages had more to do with challenging political and scientific authority than challenging God’s revealed truth. This is an important distinction for us today, because while only small parts of the world population still adhere to the idea of revealed truth, we all live in a world of political influence and “settled science”.