St. Thomas Aquinas' philosophy was influenced and derived from Aristotle, Averroes, and Maimonides--a pagan, a Muslim, and a Jew. Was this considered controversial in the Church at the time?

by Theoson
voltimand

Firstly, it is important to note that Aquinas' philosophy is derived from so many different sources that we wouldn't want to reduce his list of influences to one so small. On a larger list of Aquinas' influences, we would see many other philosophers too, including some Christians, most prominently Augustine. And Aquinas is critical of many of the people on your list: perhaps the most famous medieval philosophical disagreements concerned the eternity of the world and whether there is only one intellect shared by all human beings. These disagreements split Aquinas and the people on your list: after all, Averroes' most famous discussion concerns his view that there is only one intellect, which was a "condemned" proposition in 13th-century French medieval philosophy.

(I wrote an answer here on r/askhistorians earlier this year on the "condemned" propositions in the 13th century. I am terrible at using Reddit's search function, apparently, and cannot find it...)

The so-called "Condemnations" are probably the closest thing to a 'controversy' there was surrounding Aquinas' appropriation of non-Christian philosophy. These "Condemnations," as you'd see from my earlier answer that I can't find, were a list of banned propositions -- but these came towards the very end of Aquinas' life, and frankly, only a few of these overlapped with things that Aquinas himself taught. The fact that the Condemnations happened at the end of his career meant they didn't disrupt his output, but his reputation was briefly damaged by this. (Consider that it was only fifty years after his death that he became a saint.)

We should also point out that Aquinas was likely given a certain post at the University of Paris around in the late 1260s specifically to counter the growing "Averroism" that perhaps prompted the Condemnations in the first place. That is because Aquinas' arguments against the Averroists were particularly well-known. Mind you, Aquinas was around the same period accused by people outside his order (that is to say, by the Franciscans who were outside Aquinas' Dominican Order) of encouraging the Averroists. Aquinas pretty successful rebutted these accusations, and generally he was successful throughout his career when it came to allaying fears of an Aristotelian "take-over" of Christian philosophy by just writing more texts that corrected the misapprehensions. Nothing substantial came of any accusations.

Many of Aquinas' contemporaries did not see him as taking from non-Christian philosophers anything "dangerous" -- after all, he disagrees in the appropriate places (concerning the eternity of the world, for instance), and he borrows from so many other philosophers, too. We do not know exactly who was intended to be the target of the Condemnations, but the fact that there was so little (but indeed some) overlap between Aquinas' views and the condemned propositions makes it unlikely that Aquinas was the target. And generally, many historians of philosophy today think that there wasn't anyone who held some of the deeply weird views outlined in the Condemnations. For instance, one condemned belief is that religion and philosophy yield true yet mutually exclusive views -- in other words, that a contradiction can be true! (This isn't something we actually see in the medieval period of philosophy.)

One disappointing consequence of the Condemnations, though, is that the delicate balance of assimilating non-Christian philosophy into Christian philosophy, which characterized Aquinas' project, does not really survive his death. The damage done to his reputations was brief, as I said, but it was just long enough that outside the Dominican Order, philosophers usually end up pushing back on Aristotle in particular. Ockham is a great example of this: he tries to show that Aristotelian-type philosophy and Christianity disagree profoundly on everything from the immortality of the soul to whether God is the efficient cause of the world (but Ockham still says Christianity gets it right!).

Edit: for a link to my answer about the Condemnations, see the link helpfully provided below!

t_lou

I think it's important to understand that the influence of pagan works on Christian philosophy was deeply rooted in two things: the idea that departing to much from preacedere (what came before) was not desirable, and that influence by pagan more went to form had a lot to do with the education system at the time rather than any deliberate reaching into pagan thought.

The main form of expression wasn't originality, which was perceived as vanity, but instead meshing your own ideas into existing thought. For instance, Aimoin of Fleury-sur-Loire preemptively defended himself against critics for his history by stating that he wasn't ashamed of writing a history, he had the example of good authors before him, and "I believe I am allowed to do what they did." New ideas were often perceived as potentially dangerous. Bishop Adalbold of Utrecht defended the position of "novelty" by arguing that what is now old was once new, so therefore new things must precede old things. He wouldn't have had to defend that idea if there wasn't opposition to it.

Additionally, the education system at the time was learning Latin by copying Latin. People believed that by writing, a person learned better than by just reading. And more importantly, a person had to write in Latin style, which was the polished style of Rome. Roman authors imitated Greeks, so you can see where that's going. You also had to be able to write Latin poetry. People learned to write Latin poetry by copying the ancient Latin poets. Artistic speech was necessary because something that was good should be venerated by beautiful speech, so God had to be venerated by the most beautiful speech possible.

So monks and theologians would attempt to copy the style and form of the best pagan works without elevating their content. You have people like the biographer of Archbishop Bruno of Cologne writing that he modeled his works after comic poets "only in compiling the words." On the other end, someone who was too enthusiastic about the content of classic works could be put to death. See, Vilgard of Ravenna. Because a scholar was essentially raised on imitating prior pagan works, it wasn't unusual for an author to look to them for inspiration about form, as long as the content would be considered proper.