Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
The intellectual life is neither committed to Christianity nor does it antecedently reject it.* That it is not committed to Christianity is clear enough from history. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Moses Maimonides, Ibn Sina and Einstein were not Christians but no one would deny that they were scholars. That the Christian can be a scholar is just as plain. Abelard, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Erasmus, Newton and Newman were Christians and no one would deny that they were creative intellectuals.
* This paper was originally presented to the annual meeting of the Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs at the University of Chicago, April 27, 1957.
1 Trans. from the Greek of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric on Origen, c. 8, MG 10, 1077 c.
2 Trans. from the Greek of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, op. cit., c. 15, MG 10, 1096 a-b.
3 Summa Theologica, II, II, q. 166.Google Scholar
4 Summa Theologica, II, II, 167, 1, ad 3.Google Scholar
5 Summa Theologica, II, II, 188, 5.Google Scholar
6 Trans, from the French, Acta Apostolicae Sedis (Vatican City), 45 (1953), 284.Google Scholar
7 Trans, from the French, Acta Apostolicae Sedis (Vatican City), 45 (1953), 277.Google Scholar