Compendium of the Study of Theology

rest of the Philosophy of Aristotle, in a thousand volumes, in which he treated all the Sciences, have not yet been translated or communicated to the Latins ; and therefore almost nothing worthy is known of the Philosophy of Aristotle, and up to the present there have been but three who have been able to judge truly about those few (books) which have been translated." ¹

BOOK OR PART II.—The "prologue" tells us that the writer will now proceed to establish the truths themselves and to "evacuate" errors in detail. He admits that the proper subject of theology should be the study of the sacred text, but "for the last fifty years the theologians have been principally occupied about questions (questiones), as is evident to all through the treatises and summe and horse-loads which have been composed by many". He will therefore yield to the prevailing taste, although, according to Palladius on Agriculture, "incomparably greater is the profundity and magnificence of wisdom, and therefore greater is the difficulty, shown in expounding the text than in questions". A great part of theology as now understood is really philosophy (in terminis philosophie), and even the purely theological subjects, "about the blessed Trinity and the fall of our first parents and the glorious Incarnation, and about sins and virtues and gifts and sacraments and desires, and about punishment, are chiefly ventilated by authorities and reasons and solutions drawn from philosophical considerations, and therefore, as it were, the whole occupation of Theologians is now philosophical alike in substance and in mode". Roger will therefore deal with the speculative philosophical questions commonly treated of by Theologians, endeavouring to treat of all the topics which properly fall under one head once for all, instead of recurring again and again to the same topics as each particular question

¹ I will not venture to guess who these were. It is not probable that he would include the great Dominicans, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, though it may be questioned whether any others have an equal right to be included. The Anti-Thomist (though Dominican) Archbishop Robert Kilwardby is likely to have been one: William de le Mare may have been another. Cf. Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, II, p. 529 sq. Was Roger Bacon himself the third?