THE SCHOOLMEN of the Summa,’ the Pope is reported to have said; and he declared Thomas a saint in 1323 Paris, rather belatedly, revoked the condemnation of his works in 1325 Oxford, however, seems to have taken no academic notice of the canonization, and throughout the Middle Ages Aquinas did not enjoy, outside his own order, the special prestige among Catholic theologians that he was to enjoy in the twentieth century True, the Summa was set in a place of honour, beside the Bible, during the deliberations of the Council of Trent; but it was not until the encyclical letter Aeterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII in 1879 that he was made, as it were, the oYcial theologian of the whole Roman Catholic Church All those who study Aquinas are indebted to Pope Leo for the stimulus which his encyclical gave to the production of scholarly editions of the Summa and of other works But the promotion of the saint as the oYcial philosopher of the Church had also a negative eVect It closed oV the philosophical study of St Thomas by non-Catholic philosophers, who were repelled by someone whom they came to think of as simply the spokesman of a particular ecclesiastical system The problem was aggravated when in 1914 Pius X singled out twenty-four theses of Thomist philosophy to be taught in Catholic institutions The secular reaction to the canonization of St Thomas’ philosophy was summed up by Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy ‘There was little of the true philosophical spirit in Aquinas: he could not, like Socrates, follow an argument wherever it might lead, since he knew the truth in advance, all declared in the Catholic faith The Wnding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy but special pleading.’ It is not in fact a serious charge against a philosopher to say that he is looking for good reasons for what he already believes in Descartes, sitting beside his Wre, wearing his dressing gown, sought reasons for judging that that was what he was doing, and took a long time to Wnd them Russell himself spent much energy seeking proofs of what he already believed: Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that and make We judge a philosopher by whether his reasonings are sound or unsound, not by where he Wrst lighted on his premisses or how he Wrst came to believe his conclusions Hostility to Aquinas on the basis of his oYcial position in Catholicism is thus unjustiWed, however understandable, even for secular philosophers But there were more serious ways in which the 76