by Judy Joyce

Created on: July 27, 2009

In a televised interview with Anthony Gottlieb, author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, the former editor of the reigning financial magazine, the Economist, explains what he uncovered in his decade of research. Part of those findings included the emergence of the discipline of Theology.

The Discipline of Theology

Mr. Gottlieb uncovered that while the ancient world academies were Greek in origin, as scholarly endeavors raised more and more elements of that which needed study, belief in God was one of them.

"Aristotle's accomplishments in up the research institute known as the Lyceum (335 BC): his treatises included works on ethics, political theory, rhetoric, poetry constitutional history, theology, zoology, meteorology astronomy, physics, chemistry, scientific method, anatomy, foundations of mathematics, language, formal logic, techniques of reasoning, fallacies, sociology, comparative politics, psychology, and literary criticism. For the most part, no one had ever thought of such things before. Yet his most exceptional of all these disciplines were biology and formal logic. Aristotle went unmatched in theory and findings until Darwin according to Dream".

Arabian Translations of Aristotle's Philosophy Mix Beliefs in God

Picking up on the Aristotelian translations that were made from the Arabian and accompanied by Arabian commentaries, New Advent Encyclopedia reveals that these elements of the study of God were tinged with Pantheism, Fatalism, and other Neo-platonic errors. These developments were suppressed by the most stringent disciplinary measures during the first few decades of the thirteenth century.

Thomas Aquinas Divides Philosophy and Theology

In time, the translations from the Greek demonstrated an Aristotle free from the errors attributed to him by the Arabian. Gottlieb explains it was the commanding genius of St. Thomas Aquinas who appeared at the critical moment, calmly surveyed the difficulties of the speculative aspects of Christian Philosophy and showed that there are two distinct sciences, Theology and Philosophy. Yet both sciences are not contradictory. They agree.

Philosophy and Theology are distinct, Aquinas teaches, because, while philosophy relies on reason alone, theology uses the truths derived from revelation.... also, there are some truths - the mysteries of Faith - which lie completely outside the domain of philosophy and belong to theology. (New Advent). Aquinas approach to reason is identified as Scholasticism.

Conclusion

Once Aquinas demonstrated that the study of God can be assisted by philosophy, but that faith and other elements of belief lie outside what man has access to without revelation, Theology became the study of God. The revival of Thomism modernly is called Neo-Scholasticism.

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