ABSTRACT
We saw in Chapter Four that the doctrine that nature was an autonomous principle, so readily found in Greek philosophy, caused trouble in twelfth-century Christian society. The problem reached a crisis at the end of the century when the Catholics fully understood the dualism of the Cathars. What was critical was the doctrine that the natural, physical, world had been made not merely by an autonomous principle that stood between God and His creation, but by an Evil Principle that rivalled the Catholic God in power and even eternity. A prime focus of the learned debates between the two sides had to be the physical world, its creator and governor, or in other words, 'nature' in one of the senses discussed above. One of these senses, we can recall, was nature as a generative and normative principle, outside the things she controlled. The other was the nature-of-the-thing, the Aristotelian final form of thing, which explained the processes that produced it. This was wholly internal, the very essence of the thing generated. The Dominicans found that by adopting Aristotle's doctrine they could show that the physical world was good, and had been created by the good God, without any second autonomous principle.
