Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/599

Rh of the East sent them to an Emperor of the West as the most worthy of gifts. In the ninth century they were widely made known in western Europe, and became a fruitful source of thought, especially on the whole celestial hierarchy; thus the old ideas of astronomy were vastly developed; and the heavenly hosts were classed and named in accordance with indications scattered through the sacred Scriptures.

The next of these three great theologians was Peter Lombard, professor at the University of Paris. About the middle of the twelfth century he gave forth his collection of "Sentences," or Statements by the Fathers, and this remained until the end of the middle ages the universal manual of theology. In it was especially developed the theological view of man's relation to the universe. The author tells the world: "Just as man is made for the sake of God—that is, that he may serve Him,—so the universe is made for the sake of man,—that is, that it may serve him; therefore is man placed at the middle point of the universe, that he may both serve and be served."

The vast significance of this view, and its power in resisting any real astronomical science, we shall see, especially in the time of Galileo.

The great triad of thinkers culminated in St. Thomas Aquinas, the sainted theologian, the glory of the mediæval Church, the "Angelic Doctor," the most marvelous intellect between Aristotle and Newton; he to whom it was believed that an image of the Crucified had spoken words praising his writings. Large of mind, strong, acute, yet just—even more than just—to his opponents, he gave forth, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, his Cyclopædia of Theology, the "Summa." In this he carried the sacred theory of the universe to its full development. With great power and clearness he brought the whole vast system, material and spiritual, into its relations to God and man.

Such was the vast system developed by these three leaders of mediæval thought; and now came the man who wrought it yet more deeply into European belief, the poet divinely inspired who made the system part of the world's life. Under the touch of Dante the empyrean and the concentric heavens, paradise, purgatory, and hell, were seen of all men; the God Triune seated on his throne upon the circle of the heavens as real as the Pope seated