In the late Middle Ages (the 1200s), Aristotle excited a lot of thought in the monks and scholars of the universities. These neo-Aristotelians were called schoolmen, or scholastics. By studying Aristotle and his Arab and Jewish commentators, they learned to think more logically, but their goals were still essentialy theological.

The scholastic par excellence was St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274).

Of German stock, he was the son of the Count of Aquino, a town between Rome and Naples. He went to the University of Naples, where there was great interest in Arab and Jewish philosophers -- and, of course, Aristotle. He became a monk of the Dominican order and went to Paris to study.

His mother was so upset by this turn of events that she sent his brothers to kidnap him and bring him home. (Contrary to what we might assume, families were seldom happy when sons or daughters went off to become monks or nuns. They often grieved for them as if they had died!) He escaped and continued his studies in Paris and elsewhere.

He was known to be a very pious and modest man, with no ambitions for church promotions -- unlike the ambitious Abelard! He wrote a great deal, but is best known for the Summa Theologiae, usually just called the Summa, a work of 21 volumes in which he uses Abelard's Sic et Non method to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity.

Thomas believed that the soul is the form of the body, as Aristotle said, and gives it life and energy. But the soul and the body are totally linked together. This flies in the face of the Platonic and neo-Platonic ideas of the church fathers, and irritated the mystical Franciscan monks most of all.

Thomas added that the soul without the body would have no personality, because individuality comes from matter, not spirit, which represents the universal in us. For this reason, resurrection of the body is crucial to the idea of personal immortality. Averroes’ idea that only an impersonal soul survives death was, in other words, quite wrong.

Thomas saw five faculties of the soul:

1. The vegetative faculty, which is involved in food, drink, sex, and growth.

2. The sensitive faculty, i.e. our senses, plus the common sense that binds sensations together.

3. The locomotor faculty, which permits movement.

4. The appetitive faculty, which consists of our desire and will.

5. The intellectual faculty, i.e. thought, reason.

For St. Thomas, reason or intellect is man’s greatest treasure, that which raises him above the animals. In keeping with conceptualism, he felt it was the intellect that abstracts the idea (form or universal) from its individual appearance, so that, even though day-to-day experience can tell us about the particulars of reality, only reason or intellect can lead us to universal laws of the physical, or the human, world.

Ultimately, we do need direct, intuitive knowledge of God. Reason depends on sensory experience, and sensory experience is of matter, not spirit. So reason, like all things human, is imperfect, and cannot comprehend the perfection that is God. Faith is our ultimate refuge. Nevertheless, he insisted, faith and reason do not conflict, since God would not have made a world that did not ultimately match up with revealed truth.

In spite of his obvious brilliance, St. Thomas (like all philosophers in all ages) was a man of his time. For example, he was as chauvinistic as any of his predecessors regarding women: He considered women inferior by nature (and God’s design), and saw them as a serious threat to the moral progress of men. He also devoted a significant portion of the Summa to angels and demons, which he thought of as every bit as real as anything else. Among other things, he believed that the angels moved the planets, that they had no bodies, that they moved instantaneously, and that each person had his or her very own guardian angel.

His ideas threatened many in the church, most especially the Franciscans. His works emphasized reason too much and faith too little. He put too much stock in pagans like Aristotle and Averroes. And he taught that the soul and the body were unified! After his death (at the age of 49), the Franciscans convinced the Pope to condemn him and his writings. But the Dominicans rallied to his defense, and in 1323 Thomas was canonized.

(In 1879, Pope Leo XIII made Thomism the official philosophy of the Catholic church. It is, with Marxism, positivism, and existentialism, one of the four most influential philosophies of the 20th century).