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Metaphysics
577
at the Council
of
Florence
—
of'cosmic' or worldly questions into the
salvific
science
of theology.
Ficino's
intention was to substitute 'Platonic theology' for this 'Christian
philosophy'. Against the Thomists of the period
following
the Council of
Basle,
whose Aristotelianism was aimed at supplying reasons for submission
to papal authority, he sought to provide 'Platonic reasons' supporting
Christianity, for those
—
not only Latin and Byzantine Christians, but also
Turkish Moslems
—
who could not accept a religion on authority alone.
59
He saw the Platonic theology he proposed as a pre-Christian adumbration
of
supernatural revelation.
Just
as God had granted to the Hebrews the
wisdom
which Moses brought down from Sinai, so also he raised up among
the pagans philosophers like Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Zoroaster
and Pythagoras who had anticipated
—
however partially
—
the
truths
of
the
Christian faith. Plato was the Attic Moses who inherited this pristine
theology.
Far from separating philosophy and religion, Plato brought
together in his own person both the philosopher and the priest. Although he
remained on the
level
of the Mosaic law, his teaching foreshadowed
Christian revelation. He was able, moreover, to support his teaching with
Pythagorean and Socratic reasons accessible to all men.
60
The Platonic
theology
was therefore a religious doctrine inherent in man's nature.
Although
it had — like Judaism — been irrevocably superseded by
Christianity, it offered the best introduction to the religion which had been
supernaturally revealed to man in Christ. Its
true
heirs were
John
the
Evangelist,
Dionysius the Areopagite and Augustine. The later platonici
—
Plotinus in a pre-eminent way
—
had penetrated into many of the secrets of
Plato's text, but, in the final analysis, they represented a heretical current in
Platonism which left the main stream after it had become Christian.
Because
they did not recognise the equality of the word with God, they
were unable to understand the myth of the Phaedrus. Behind Plato's
charioteer was Christ himself, leading angels and men to God. Christ is the
world-soul in whom all individual human souls participate. It is his
Incarnation
that
makes man the knot, the link, holding the world together.
Ficino
concluded with a new dynamic understanding
of
the idea
that
man is
the imago Dei: God became man so
that
man might become God.
61
Ficino's
attempt to formulate a Platonic metaphysics which would
59.
Ficino
1964-70,
1, pp. 35-7
(prooem.).
60.
Letter
to
Prenninger
in
Klibansky
1981, pp. 45-7.
61.
Ficino
1576, 1, pp. 20-2 (De Christiana religione
16-18).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
578
Metaphysics
support the Christian doctrine of God ran counter to the Thomistic
apologetics
which the papacy had made its own after the Council
of
Basle.
Ficino's
diffidence saved him from condemnation; the same was not
true
of
the youthful Giovanni Pico della Mirándola. The stages in the struggle
between the two approaches are clearly reflected in the history of Pico's
career. Pico was born in the year
that
Ficino began his Platonic studies. After
studies in philosophy at Ferrara and Padua, he arrived in Florence in 1484,
just as Ficino's translation
of
Plato was coming
off
the press. In the course of
his university studies he had been reared in the Aristotelian tradition of the
schools.
The period at Padua influenced his intellectual development in a
special
way. He gained
there
a thorough acquaintance with the teachings of
the scholastics, the Latin Averroists and Averroes himself. Even after he
came to
live
in Florence, 'to explore the camp of the Platonists', he
continued to invoke the authority of the great scholastic masters, Albertus
Magnus,
Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome and Duns
Scotus.
Where many
of
the Florentines had
turned,
with Ficino, exclusively
to Plato, Pico regarded all the various philosophies as but different
expressions of the one
truth.
In his earlier
attempts
to establish the harmony between all these
philosophies, Pico also sought to show the fundamental agreement of
philosophy with Christian doctrine. This effort was made, however, not in
the spirit of the Thomistic idea of a Christian Aristotelianism, but
rather
through Proclus and the prisci theologi whom Ficino had made available. It
was
Pico
himself
who,
inspired by the departed soul
of
Cosimo
de' Medici,
incited Ficino to
translate
and comment on Plotinus. His discovery, among
cabalistic doctrines,
of
proofs for the Trinity and for the divinity of Christ
could
only confirm to this newcomer to the Florentine Academy the basic
viability
of Ficino's approach to the problem of the relationship between
philosophy and religion. The famous 900 Conclusiones which he planned to
dispute at Rome in i486 provide an idea
of
the synthesis in which he planned
to bring all this material together.
But
the condemnation of his theses by Pope Innocent VIII in 1487
wrought a profound change in
Pico.
After the charge - made by the papal
commission
—
that
some
of
the theses were heretical because they
effectively
reduced faith to rational knowledge, Pico came progressively to abandon
the prisci theologi and cabala. His ultimate submission to the Thomistic
programme can, no doubt, be ascribed in
part
to the powerful influence of
Girolamo
Savonarola, himself
author
of Thomistic textbooks. It brought,
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Metaphysics
579
in
any
event,
the
third
period
in the
history
of
Florentine Platonism
to a
close.
At
first Pico
had
tried,
in his own
way,
to
continue along
the
path Ficino
had indicated.
In his
celebrated Oratio
de
dignitate hominis
he
outlined
a
metaphysical
view
of
man's place
in
nature
quite similar
to
that
of the
Florentine master.
Man has a
privileged place
in the
universe because
of a
decision
of
the creator himself. When
the
creation
of
the whole universe
had
been completed,
God
decided
to add a
being capable
of
admiring
the
greatness
of the
world
and
loving
its
beauty. Thus
he
undertook
the
creation
of
man. Since
all the
creator's gifts
had by
then been distributed
among
the
other creatures,
God
decided
that
man
should have
a
share
of
all
the gifts
that
had
been
given
to the
others.
For
this reason,
man has no
fixed
essence
or
nature.
He is
neither celestial
nor
earthly, neither mortal
nor
immortal. Possessing within
himself
the possibility
of
being
all
things,
he is
outside
the
hierarchy
of
beings.
He may
descend
to
become
a
plant
or an
animal;
he may
rise
to
become
a
celestial being
or an
angel,
or he may
even
be united with
God
himself.
62
Several years later
in the
Heptaplus,
a
commentary
on the
opening verses
of
Genesis, Pico again stressed
the
idea
that
man is
outside
the
hierarchy
of
beings
and has no
fixed
essence.
His
exposition begins
by
distinguishing
three
different worlds
—
the
elemental,
the celestial
and the
supercelestial which make
up the
universe.
After
discussing this hierarchy, Pico introduces
man as a new
creation whose task
it
is to
unite
the
other
three
worlds which
God has
made.
63
Pico
expressed these ideas with great originality.
But his
understanding
of
them placed
him
clearly
in the
tradition
we
have been tracing
in
this
section.
His
notion
of
man
as the
bond and juncture
of
three
worlds echoes
the theme
of man as
microcosm
that
we
have encountered
in
Nicholas
of
Cusa
and
Ficino.
The
notion
of
man
as an
incomplete
nature
brings
to
mind
the idea
of
a latitudo
formarum
which
was
applied,
as we
shall see,
by
certain
fourteenth-century scholastics even
to the
substantial forms
of
created
things. Even where
he is
most original, Pico does
not
deny
his
indebtedness
to
the
tradition. Whereas
the
Oratio stressed
the
notion
that
it is
through
his
freedom
that
man has to
perfect his nature,
the
Heptaplus recalled
that
man is
an intellectual being,
the
unique
nature
who is
able
to
know
the
whole
of
creation
and in it its
creator.
Above
all,
Pico situated himself firmly
in the
theological
tradition which sought
to
give
reasons
for
Christian doctrines.
62. G. Pico 1942, pp. 102-6
(Oratio).
63.
Ibid.,
pp. 266-70,
300-4
(Heptaplus
iv, prooem.; v.6).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
58o
Metaphysics
As
in
Lull,
Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino, the principal themes of his early
thought come together in the person of Christ. For
Pico,
man is the con-
summation of all inferior natures, and in the same way Christ is the
consummation of all men. Because man as the image of God is the bond
which
holds creation together, it was fitting
that
he should be joined in an
ineffable
union with Christ, who is the image
of
the invisible God, the first-
born of all creation.
64
The
third
period in the history
of
Florentine Platonism was characterised
by
a search for new sources, for sources which could
give
expression, within
a metaphysical framework, to the new dynamic understanding of reality
which
distinguished the Renaissance period and show the fundamental
agreement between
true
philosophy and the totality of Christian doctrine.
Ficino
drew on the pristine tradition found in the works of Hermes
Trismegistus, Orpheus, Zoroaster and Pythagoras for this purpose. Pico
cast his net even more widely, seeking to decode the pre-Christian
revelation which he thought had been made by God in the cabala. His
famous Conclusiones of i486 contain statements taken not only from the
scholastics,
from Arabic, Hebrew and Greek commentators on Plato and
Aristotle
and from the prisci theologi, but also from the Jewish cabalists.
Cabala,
the techniques
of
which
Pico learnt from Spanish Jews who had
been forced to seek a new home in Italy even before the catastrophe of
1492,
was
essentially a method of contemplation on Gods's attributes. Man can
know
nothing of God's hidden, inner
nature.
Only through his
attributes
can man know something of the divine
life.
The
attributes
describe God's
inner
life
and are not
—
like the Neoplatonic emanations
—
outside of him.
They
name the stages in which the divine
life
pulsates. Cabala used, as did
Ramon
Lull,
the image of the
tree
to describe the way in which creation
reflects this divine
life.
God's inner
nature
is the hidden root of the tree,
while
the
attributes
are represented by its branches. The
tree
forms the
skeleton of the universe, spreading its branches throughout the whole of
creation to form the primordial man, Adam. Like the AYS lulliana, cabala
used techniques for manipulating the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in
order to discover such hidden meanings behind the text
of
the
Bible.
It was
believed
that
when God gave the law to Moses, he also revealed to the
chosen its secret meaning. This cabalistic tradition was said to have been
passed down orally through the ages.
Pico
recognised not only the similarity of the cabalistic techniques to
64. Ibid., pp. 220, 308 (Heptaplus 1.7; v.7).
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Metaphysics
581
those of Lull's Art, but also similarity of the teachings of cabala to the
philosophical ideas
of
Pythagoras and Plato which Ficino had found to be so
close
to Christianity. In the Oratio Pico tells us
that
when he had procured
the books
of
the science
of
cabala, he found in them a religion which was not
so much Mosaic as it was Christian: the mystery of the Trinity, the
Incarnation
of
the word, the divinity
of
the Messiah, the same things about
original sin, its expiation by Christ and the end
of
the world
that
we read in
Paul and Dionysius the Areopagite, in Jerome and Augustine.
65
Similarly,
in the Heptaplus Pico maintained
that
Moses hid, behind the account of
creation, not only all the secrets
of
philosophy, but also foreshadowings of
the coming of Christ. The mutual correspondences found in creation
betwen the angelic, celestial and elemental worlds lead by way of the
microcosm
—
which is man
—
to Christ, through whom alone creation can
return
to the creator.
66
But
the papal condemnation of the thesis
that
no science proves the
divinity
of Christ better
than
magic and cabala came
slowly
to work a
change in Pico's attitude. The thesis was thought heretical because it seemed
to make the assent of faith dependent on rational arguments. One of the
members of the commission, in his refutation, charged Pico with seeking
certitude
of
evidence
rather
than
the firm adherence
of
faith.
67
In his Oratio
Pico
had, in fact, made extravagant claims for philosophy. Through it, he
asserted, the soul can ascend to God himself. The knowledge of divine
things is not qualitatively different from
that
of the other
parts
of philos-
ophy. From the purification worked by dialectic and moral philosophy man
may ascend by way of the illumination effected by natural philosophy to
the perfection of theological knowledge.
68
In his Conclusiones Pico had
maintained
that
on the principles of cabalistic science it is impossible to
deny the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The combinations of the letters
of
the name 'Jesus' prove
that that
he is God and the Son
of
God.
69
Already
in the Heptaplus, however, Pico became more cautious. In this work he
tell us
that
grace is necessary for knowledge of the doctrines of faith.
Religion
builds on philosophy, but only in the way in which grace builds
on nature. Philosophy can take man no further
than
natural happiness.
The
wise men of this world know nothing of the
true
wisdom which
theology
is.
70
65. Ibid., p. 160 (Oratio). 66. Ibid., pp.
168-98
(Heptaplus,
prooem.; prooem.
aliud).
67. See
Carreras
y
Artau
1939-43,
PP-
560-3.
68. G.
Pico
1942, pp. 120 (Oratio).
69. G.
Pico
1973, pp.
83—4
(Conclusiones cabalisticae secundum opinionem propriam,
concl.
5—8).
70. G.
Pico
1942, pp.
324—38
(Heptaplus vn,
prooem.).
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582
Metaphysics
The
recognition
of
a type
of
knowledge
accessible only through faith led
Pico
to modify his early conviction
that
all philosophies were but different
expressions
of
the one
truth.
In the
tract
De ente et uno - composed some two
years after the Heptaplus - he no longer speaks
of
proofs for the doctrines of
the Trinity and Incarnation, but stresses instead
that
God dwells in darkness.
In a long chapter which recalls in
part
Thomas Aquinas' questions on the
same subject, he
attempts
to remove the imperfections in the names we
apply to God, imperfections which derive from the created things they
signify.
In order to ascend to the dark cloud in which God dwells, man must
enter
into the lux ignorantiae. With a long citation from Pseudo-
Dionysius,
Pico concludes
that
all affirmations and all negations about God
are equally impossible.
71
Along
with the claim for a philosophical knowledge
of
God's
essence, all
references to the prisci theologi and cabala have disappeared from the De ente
et uno. Pici cites 'the Egyptians', Iamblichus, and Olympiodorus only to re-
ject
them. He maintains
that
the 'Platonists'
of
the Academy, in their oppo-
sition to Aristotle, have falsified the
true
teaching
of
Plato and exaggerated
the differences between the founders
of
the two great schools. In the theses of
i486 Pico had made the fundamental harmony between Plato and Aristotle
the first
of
his Conclusiones paradoxae. In the Apologia which he published a
year
later, he defended the notion
that
the principles
of
the two philosophies
are in basic agreement. Pico intended to demonstrate in detail the Concordia
Platonis Aristotelisque in a work which occupied his last years. But because
this work was and remained unfinished, he undertook
—
at the request of
Angelo
Poliziano, who had given him an account of a dispute between
himself
and Lorenzo de' Medici concerning being and the One
—
to clarify
in a separate monograph the relationship not between the later members of
the schools, but between the two great philosophers themselves.
The
main obstacle to this concordance was the Platonists' claim to possess
a mystery unknown to Aristotle, the One beyond being, identified by them
with
the God of Christianity. This doctrine they opposed to the famous
Aristotelian dictum Ens et
unum
convertuntur.
The cornerstone in Pico's
argument had necessarily to be an examination of the Parmenides, the
Platonists' chief witness for their esoteric doctrine. He
started
by firmly
denying the validity of the dialogue as evidence in a metaphysical
discussion, maintaining
that
it cannot be considered a dogmatic
tract,
but
only
an exercise in dialectic. The idea of an unbridgeable
gulf
between the
teaching
of
Plato and Aristotle has arisen not only from a misunderstanding
71.
Ibid., pp.
406-22
(De ente et uno 5).
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Metaphysics
583
of
Plato,
but
also from
an
insufficient knowledge
of
Aristotle. Even
granting
that
the
first hypothesis
of the
Parmenides proclaims
the 'One
beyond being',
it
would still
not
follow
that
Plato
had
found
a
purer
philosophical formula
for God
than
Aristotle.
For,
according
to
Pico's
interpretation, Aristotle also taught
a
transcendent God, who
is the
Good
itself
and
the
One beyond
the
being known
to
us,
and he did so
even more
clearly
than
Plato
had
done. With
the
help
of the
distinction made
by
Thomas Aquinas between being itself
and
participated being, Pico
maintains
that
God
—
the One
—
is identical with being itself, but above being
in
the
second sense.
72
In
the De
ente
et uno,
Pico
was
mounting
a
frontal assault
on
Ficino's
account
of
Platonic metaphysics.
The
weapons
he
used were Thomistic
distinctions. Not only
the
distinction
of
being
itself
and participated being,
but also
the
scholastic doctrine
of
the transcendentals were taken over
by
him
in
their entirety.
73
The
De
ente et uno represents the abandonment
of
the
long
tradition which
ran
from Anselm
and
Lull
to
Nicholas
of
Cusa
and
Ficino
in
favour
of the
Christian Aristotelianism proposed
by
Thomas
Aquinas.
The
rejection
of the
idea
of a
higher type
of
intellectual
knowledge,
through which
the
dynamic implications
of the
Christian
dogmas
of the
Trinity
and
Incarnation could
be
harnessed
for a new
metaphysics, involved
a
radical change
in the
Renaissance
view
of
man.
Although
Pico makes
an
appeal for the unity
of
mankind based
on
oneness,
truth
and
goodness,
his
idea
of
man, which
had in his
earlier works been
grounded
in the
concrete person
of
Christ,
has
become
an
abstract idea.
Pico's
language reflects
that
of
Paul's Letter
to the
Colossians,
but he
avoids
any reference
to the
Resurrection.
74
The
distinction between
natural
and
supernatural, which
was
meant
to
protect
the
clergy's role
in the
interpretation
of
revelation, has
put an
end
to the
idea of
a
cosmic Christ
in
philosophy. Similarly, Pico's espousal
of
Thomas Aquinas' account
of
the
Aristotelian ontology meant
the
outright rejection
of
Ficino's
reinterpreta-
tion
of
Platonic metaphysics.
To
argue as Pico does
in
the
De
ente et uno is
in
effect
to do
away with Ficino's
attempt
to
introduce
a
dynamic moment
into
the
divine unity
by
transferring
a
number
of the
attributes
of the
Plotinian mind
to the One. To
establish
the
agreement
of
Plato
and
Aristotle
on
Thomistic
terms
he was
compelled
to
abandon
the
active
conception
of
reality which
had, up to his
time, been
the
foremost
characteristic
of
Renaissance philosophy.
72. Ibid.,
pp. 388-406 (De
ente
et uno 1-4). 73.
Ibid.,
pp. 426-38 (De
ente
et uno 8-9).
74. Ibid.,
pp. 438-40 (De
ente
et uno 10).
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584
Metaphysics
Pico's
De ente et uno - along with the death of Savonarola and the
fall
of
the Medici
—
marked a turning-point in the history of metaphysics as the
science
of divine things. It also marked the end of the
third
period of
Florentine Platonism. Platonism continued to play an
important
role both
in philosophy and in the
arts
and sciences. But the continuity
of
the tradition
which
understood reality dynamically
—
a tradition respected by Ficino's
interpretation
of Plato — was broken or became at least irrelevant for
metaphysics as the science of God. After
Pico,
the history of metaphysics
shifted from the problem of God to the problem
of
being.
It is no accident
that
the Fifth Lateran Council determined not only the supremacy of the
pope to the councils, but also the metaphysical demonstrability of man's
immortality.
The
tradition of a dynamic understanding of reality which had been
represented by
Lull,
Nicholas of Cusa and Ficino became associated with
Renaissance magic and occultism. The idea of man's creativity was
paralleled by the notion of a magical control over
nature
and by the vision
of
a new technology. These ideas led, in
turn,
to the demand for a new
system
of the sciences and to the works of men like Henricus Cornelius
Agrippa
and Giordano Bruno. At the same time, the Renaissance was
characterised by a great explosion
of
knowledge.
The immense amount of
traditional knowledge which classical scholars made available rendered the
Aristotelian
encyclopaedia of the sciences less and less tenable.
Juan
Luis
Vives
and Petrus Ramus made great efforts to develop ways of presenting
this great body of knowledge in a methodical fashion for the purpose of
instruction. Both of these
strains
came together around the end of the
sixteenth century, but they do not belong to the history of metaphysics.
They
are
treated
in other
parts
of this volume.
METAPHYSICS
AS THE
SCIENCE
OF BEING
The
authors
we have considered up to this point developed the doctrine of
God
independently of and often in avowed opposition to the Aristotelian
metaphysics.
Their ideas can, however, be described as metaphysical to the
extent
that
they involve reality not accessible to the senses. The difference
concerned less the subject-matter
than
the method. Aristotle's approach to
reality comprised two steps: an inductive one, which
attempts
to discover
the universal principles of the world by analysing its appearances, and a
deductive
one, which tries to reconstruct the world from the principles
which
have been discovered. On the basis of repeated sense experiences,
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Metaphysics
585
reason first uncovers the identity which underlies the perceived mutability,
the universal form or essence. Ascending
thus
from the concrete, sensible
thing to the general concept, from the particular to the universal
judgement, reason arrives ultimately at the common, first principles of all
reality and all science, such as the law of contradiction, which Aristotle
discusses in the fourth book
of
the Metaphysics
(iv.3-5).
In a second step the
philosopher
then
descends from these principles by way of syllogistic
demonstration to the individual phenomena with which he began. Aristotle
found the model for this deductive step in contemporary geometry: a
systematic presentation
of
laboriously won knowledge as conclusions from
principles which are
true,
evident and indemonstrable. But he brought this
method into the context
of
his own thought by requiring
that
the syllogistic
conclusions be linked by the
fixed
essences discovered in the inductive first
step. Aristotle
thus
does not distinguish, as we do, between science and
philosophy. For him the particular speculative sciences, like physics and
mathematics, are philosophical, but they are distinguished from metaphys-
ics
because they deal with a portion of reality and its proximate principles,
whereas metaphysics enquires into all reality and its ultimate principles. But
Aristotle
does not decide whether this science is to be 'wisdom' in the sense
of
dealing with all reality, 'first philosophy' in the sense
of
investigating the
first principles of all science or 'divine science' as the science of a supra-
sensible, first reality.
The
Renaissance
authors
we have been considering found little they
could
use in Aristotle's approach. Their goal was a higher type of
knowledge,
an intellectual vision which transcended not only sense-
perception but also reason itself. Nicholas of Cusa went furthest in this
regard. In his
view
the upward
path
to the One is not the ascent from one
type
of
being to
another.
Rather each individual being is the manifestation
of
the unfolding dynamism
of
the infinite and each manifestation images in
itself
the whole of reality. Instead of
a
hierarchical chain
of
being Nicholas
stressed the interrelatedness of things as the proper object of knowledge.
These dynamic relationships are the symbols
of
God,
not the static essences
of
things. The intellect encounters the infinite beyond reason in the
coincidence of opposites. Man's intellectual vision is a docta ignorantia, an
'ignorance' because it is cut
off
from a knowledge of the essences of things,
but 'learned' because it
attains
certain knowledge by way of conjecture.
When he writes
that
we know
truth
in the otherness of conjecture
75
75.
Nicholas
of
Cusa
1932™, 111, p. 58 (De coniecturis 1.11).
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586
Metaphysics
Nicholas
alludes to Ramon Lull's approach to the question of the
knowledge
of supra-sensible reality. Wanting to demonstrate with
necessary reasons the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation to
non-believers,
Lull
rejected the Aristotelian syllogism which proceeds by
way
of essences in favour of a higher form of proof resembling Plato's
dialectical
method of accepting a statement provisionally in order to
discover
whether or not it implies a contradiction. His approach regards
beliefs
and opinions as conjectures or hypotheses and
attempts
to supply a
sufficient
reason for assent through a negative type of understanding. The
question which is implicit in every
belief
or opinion is first expressed in the
form of two contradictory hypotheses. Then in accordance with the
principle
that
a proposition is necessary when its contradictory implies a
contradiction, the argument concludes to the
truth
of one of the
hypotheses by drawing out the consequences
of
the other and showing
that
they are impossible. Lull's method wants to ascend from
belief
to a higher
type of understanding in which the intellect experiences itself as the
interpretation
of
truth,
recognising
that
it cannot assent to the opposite
conclusion.
His method is clearly related to the fides quaerens intellectum of
Anselm
of Canterbury and the notion of necessary reasons for the faith
which
were sought by Anselm, Richard of St
Victor
and others in the
twelfth
century. For the history of metaphysics the distinction between
Lull's
approach and
that
of Aristotle is
important
because it provides the
reason for the scholastic conception
of
the science
of
supra-sensible reality as
the science of being
rather
than
as a doctrine of God.
Around the
turn
of the
thirteenth
century
—
in a step which marks the
beginning
of
scholasticism in the strict sense
of
the
term
- the masters in the
newly
established Latin universities consciously rejected Anselm's pro-
gramme. Traditionally the task
of
the theologians had been the presentation
of
the teaching of the
Bible
and the Church Fathers. But as a result of the
twelfth-century translations from Greek and Arabic, a vast amount
of
new
scientific
material complicated their task immensely. Their answer to this
challenge was the idea
of
a scientific presentation
of
theological
doctrine, an
idea which in
turn
forced them to try to locate their teaching within the
Aristotelian classification
of
the sciences as it was known through the works
of
Boethius and various Arabic treatises. Some of the theologians
maintained in accordance with theology's
salvific
purpose
that
their science
was
to be related to Aristotle's practical sciences; others emphasised the
speculative aspect
of
the doctrine
of
God
and
thus
were confronted with the
problem of the relationship between Christian theology and Aristotle's
metaphysics.
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