A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

It was in the process of approaching faith through reasoned argument that Aquinas found Aristotle so useful, particularly Aristotle’s newly translated works on logic and metaphysics (see pp. 33–4). Building on Aristotle’s idea that everything created must have a cause from which it receives its existence, he could construct a system in which everything that is and can be described is linked back in a chain of causation to God, the first cause of all things. This God is still primarily the ‘Unmoved Mover’, Plato’s perfect, passionless God, so it would be a caricature to see Thomas as rejecting Plato in favour of Aristotle; he was using any intellectual resource at his disposal in order to create his system.