And our fourth, last Christian Stage shall be represented by St. Thomas
Aquinas (A.D. 1225-74), in the one great question where this
Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul apparently so largely derivative and
abstractive, is more complete and balanced, and penetrates to the
specific genius of Christianity more deeply, than Saints Paul and
Augustine with all their greater directness and intensity. We saw how
the deepest originality of our Lord's teaching and temper consisted in
His non-rigoristic earnestness, in His non-Gnostic detachment from
things temporal and spatial. The absorbing expectation of the Second
Coming, indeed the old, largely effete Graeco-Roman world, had first to
go, the great Germanic migrations had to be fully completed, the first
Crusades had to pass, before--some twelve centuries after Nazareth and
Calvary--Christianity attained in Aquinas a systematic and promptly
authoritative expression of this its root-peculiarity and power. No one
has put the point better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive
point here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of what is
Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full elaboration of the
consequences involved in the conception of the Supernatural. The
Supernatural is now recognized not only in the great complicated miracle
of man's redemption from out of the world corrupted by original sin. But
the Supernatural now unfolds itself as an autonomous principle of a
logical, religious and ethical kind. The creature, even the perfect
creature, is only Natural--is possessed of only natural laws and ends;
God alone is Supernatural. Hence the essence of Christian
Supernaturalism consists in the elevation of the creature, above this
creature's co-natural limitations, to God's own Supernature'. The
distinction is no longer, as in the Ancient Church, between two kinds
(respectively perfect and relative) of the one sole Natural Law; the
distinction here is between Natural Law in general and Supernature
generally. 'The Decalogue, in strictness, is not yet the Christian
Ethic. "Biblical" now means revealed, but not necessarily Christian; for
the Bible represents, according to Aquinas, a process of development
which moves through universal history and possesses various stages. The
Decalogue is indeed present in the legislation of Christ, but as a stage
preliminary to the specifically Christian Ethic. The formula, on the
contrary, for the specifically Christian Moral Law i