The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

Confucius alone has had as great an influence. Everybody knows how, at Alexandria and in Imperial Rome, the work of Aristotle became the foundation of advancing science; how in the thirteenth century his philosophical writings, brought by the invading Moors to reawakened Europe, played a fertilizing role in the development of scholastic philosophy; how the great Summae of that virile age were only adaptations of the Metaphysics and the Organon; how Dante placed Aristotle first among all thinkers—“master of those who know” how Constantinople brought the last lost treasures of his thought to the eager students of the Renaissance; and how this quiet sovereignty of one man over a millennium of intellectual history came to an end only with the audacious irreverence of Occam and Ramus, the experimental science of Roger Bacon, and the innovating philosophy of Francis Bacon.We shall not find again, in this tour of the world upon which we are engaged, another name that so long inspired and enthralled the minds of men.

4. SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS So Greece flits by, and we come to Rome. Who were the great thinkers there? Lucretius first and finest of all.Yet, because his philosophy was not his own, but with modest candor was ascribed to Epicurus, and because his influence upon his own people and upon posterity was esoteric and sporadic, touching only the topmost minds, we shall have to let him stand outside our circle, consoled with his high place in the literature of the world. And as to Seneca and Epictetus and Aurelius, they too were echoes of the Greeks, adapters of Zeno’s apathy to a dying Rome. The old civilization was disappearing as they wrote; the strength had gone from the sinews of its people; freemen were everywhere replaced with slaves, and the proud free cities of the past were humbled with vassalage and tribute. The master-class divided itself into wastrel Epicureans, or Spartan Stoics too militantly stern to indulge in the delights of philosophy. Suddenly the ancient edifice collapsed, and European civilization lay in ruins.

It began again when the Church healed the strife of factions with the mystic authority of the Word, and brought men back from the battlefields to a settled life. The emperors passed, the popes remained; the legions marched no longer, but the monks and missionaries of the rising faith created quietly a new order in which thought could grow once more. How long and dreary was that second adolescence of the conscious European mind! Even today we are so precariously established in enlightenment that we can yet feel, as if in memory, the fearful groping of those many years.

And then trade grew, towns graduated into cities, schools into universities; again it was possible for some portion of mankind to be freed from toil for the leisure and luxury of thought. Abelard stirred half a continent with his eloquence. Bonaventure and Anselm laid down in majestic theology the rationale of medieval faith. When the work of preparation was complete another Aristotle came, Saint Thomas of Aquino, a man who took the universe for his specialty, and flung a frail bridge of reason across the chasms between knowledge and belief. What Dante did to the hopes and fears of the Catholic Renaissance, Aquinas did for its thought: unifying knowledge, interpreting it, and focusing it all upon the great problems of life and death. The world does not follow him now, preferring a doubting Thomas to a dogmatic one, but there was a time when every intellect honored the Angelic Doctor, and every philosophy took his gigantic Summae as its premises. Even today, in a hundred universities, in a thousand colleges, his thought is reverenced as still sounder than science, and his philosophy is the official system of the most powerful church in Christendom. We may not love him as we have loved the rebels and the martyrs of philosophy, but because of his modest supremacy in a great century, and his vast influence upon millions and millions of mankind, we must make a place for him in our litany of thought.

No doubt some hearts will break at this selection, including the author’s own. There are so many other names that one might here invoke more lovingly than Thomas’s, names far more congenial to the modern world; names like Spinoza or Nietzsche, for which one may have passionate affection rather than mere intellectual respect. But if we prove unfaithful to the standards we have ourselves laid down, we may as well abandon our quest at once; our list would then be an album of favorites rather than a gallery of great minds….