…very good example of that tradition. The philosophical work that I find most interesting, really, from the Middle Ages is St. Thomas Aquinas. And the recent theologian I've liked most, who I think explores the Christian tradition and its mystical roots, and…

…theologian, Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval visionary abbess, one of the most powerful religious women voices from the Middle Ages, and St Thomas Aquinas. And their view of angels is, of course, much more nuanced than the kind of new agey sort of an angel…

…influence in Europe in the Middle Ages. It became part of scholastic orthodoxy. It was integrated with Christian theology by St. Thomas Aquinas. And the idea that all plants had souls was the standard doctrine throughout medieval Europe. The idea that all…

…word anima, which means soul. So it was completely taken for granted by everybody following the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. and the Arab philosophers that we lived in a living world. The stars were intelligent beings. Each star had its…

…all shamanic cultures. It's what the Middle Ages in Europe had. Christian animism was the basis of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas' interpretation of Aristotle. It's what the scientific revolution rejected. But it's coming back again. And it's coming back…

…say what God is not. Not what God is. Because God's nature is by definition beyond our own minds. And an image that St. Thomas Aquinas often used is that we couldn't understand the being of God if we saw it directly because we'd be dazzled by it. Just…

…meaning, things that we have that animals don't have. All this was incorporated into Christian theology in the Middle Ages. St. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, famously based his whole system, which became the main orthodoxy of the universities and the…

…the saints, i.e. has a secure place in heaven. And Dante describes encountering various figures. Some of them are saints, like St. Thomas Aquinas. Others are folk that he knew who were Saint Lee. And they come to him at different levels of paradise. He…

…thought before was a philosophy of nature taught in the medieval universities of Europe based on Aristotle as refined by St. Thomas Aquinas. in the 12th century. And it was a very sophisticated philosophy of nature. According to Aristotle and St. Thomas,…

…thought before was a philosophy of nature taught in the medieval universities of Europe based on Aristotle as refined by St. Thomas Aquinas. in the 12th century. And it was a very sophisticated philosophy of nature. According to Aristotle and St. Thomas,…

…the biblical account in Genesis is sort of somewhat ambiguous, but in the theological reflections on the creation by St. Thomas Aquinas and serious theologians in the Christian tradition, Thomas came to the conclusion that creation is creation ex nihilo, that…

…you get a hint of that in whitehead but um For when I'm thinking about that, I go back to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas more than Whitehead because it's clearer to me. But I think that in the context of modern science, people like Michael Levin…

…was a fairly unified philosophy of nature, a holistic view of nature, based on Aristotle and Plato, mainly Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, who Christianized a lot of the Aristotelian thought, based very much on Arabic philosophy. And This gave a view of…

…may be conscious too, I became aware that in the Middle Ages, in standard thought in Christian universities, influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas and all the great theologians and philosophers of the time, it was taken for granted that the universe was alive.…

…They've already got the idea of lots of intelligences beyond the human level. Is it relevant today? Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingen, the visionary medieval abbess in Germany, who was a mystic and a poet. We chose the…

…that way, but that would be their own subjective projection onto them. It is fascinating, though, when you look at St. Thomas Aquinas' angel hierarchy, or Iamblichus, or I'm sure Dionysus. you see these specific attributes that they tie to specific angel…

…souls throughout nature. Philosophy in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages was essentially animist. The philosophy of Aristotle, modified by St. Thomas Aquinas, taught that all animals have souls, all plants have souls, the soul is the form of the body. And…

…we're familiar with from physics works from the past towards the future. Again, in the Middle Ages, in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and in the philosophy of Aristotle, to explain everything, you had to have not just the physical cause and the…

…long time. In the Middle Ages, the philosophy of the Middle Ages was very much influenced by Aristotle as reinterpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the leading philosophers in the 13th century. And that started a kind of orthodoxy which was…

…And I became aware there was a lot more to it than I'd known. And no one had ever told me about St. Thomas Aquinas or St. Bonadventure or St. Teresa of Avila or Dionysus the Areopagite, or Origen, or these great philosophers, and Meister Eckart. And…

…dominated by a kind of Christian animism, which gave rise to the cathedrals. The official doctrine, based on Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, was that nature is alive, animals and plants are living beings with souls. That's why the word animal comes from…

…be alive and conscious by the ancient Greeks. And in the philosophy of the Middle Ages, influenced by Aristotle, refined by St. Thomas Aquinas, the whole Earth was considered to be alive, The suns, planets and stars were considered to be living beings with…

…goddesses, Venus, Mars, Mercury, and so on. So, in medieval Europe, this was the standard worldview. Theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas integrated this Greek view, particularly Aristotle's view, with Christian theology to produce a view, an animistic view of…