Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/493

 The Culture of the Middle Ages 457 might lead to scandal or harm the reader, so that the rest might become a safe subject for study. This was a difficult task, and the pope's plan was not carried out. It would seem that the monks and some of the theolo- gians remained suspicious of Aristotle during pretty much the whole of the thirteenth century. The distinguished Dominican monk, Albertus Mag- Editing of nus, undertook, however, to put Aristotle in a form ^ksb 6 ' 5 suitable for general study. He did this by writing a Albertus series of works in which he followed Aristotle's classifi- Thomas ^ cation of the sciences, and in which he incorporated his Muinas. own notions and discoveries and the suggestions of the Arabic commentators. While this was useful as a form of popularization, Aristotle roused such interest in the minds of many of the scholars of the time that they began to ask to see his work in its original form. It was perhaps due to this demand that Thomas Aqui- nas undertook, with a collaborator, a new translation, or revision of the Latin version, of many of Aristotle's works, and then added a commentary on the text. Aquinas appears to have done his work with extraor- dinary thoroughness and to have, in general, faithfully reproduced the thought, although his translation, like Aristotle's own works, has little elegance of style. Aquinas did not, however, share the unreasonable view of admiration for Aristotle which was expressed by the on q the as followers of Averroes. He declares that "the object progress of thought. of the study of philosophy is not to learn what men have thought, but what is the real truth of the matter." He says, moreover, in his commentary on The Meta- physics : "Anything that a single man can contribute by his labors to the knowledge of truth is necessarily