ABSTRACT

To this point we have seen how, as a consequence of the power struggles and politics of twelfth-and thirteenth-century Europe, interest in and discussion of nature was promoted as part of a major campaign to keep the intellectual and physical peace and retain the status quo. In their studia, shadowing the secular studia, the Dominicans created a Christianized version of Aristotelian teaching in order to fight a very particular foe. The message was that God is good, His creation is good, the goodness and the causality of the Creation are evidence of the goodness of God. At its inception this new concern with nature was thus God-centred, and the point of it was to convey a certain message about God. Nature was to be studied, discussed, disputed about and even observed and investigated, not primarily for itself nor for the sake of disinterested knowledge but for what it said about God its creator.