The allegedly Christian values of the West: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’
Via 'The Freethinker'
I recently published a short piece about the above-mentioned painting in The Freethinker. It’s an ‘image of the week’ piece linking to a couple of recent Freethinker articles that deal with the also-above-mentioned controversy. With permission, I am republishing part of it here. But please do take a look at the original piece as it appears in The Freethinker—and do subscribe to The Freethinker’s free fortnightly newsletter or make a donation to support its work into the future.
Incidentally, I have quite a few thoughts of my own about the resurgence of the idea that Christianity is the bedrock of western civilisation (an argument that is usually made with especial reference to all the good bits of western civ, of course), and I might write more about the topic soon.
A detail from Filippino Lippi’s late fifteenth-century fresco, held in the Carafa Chapel of the Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, venerating the thirteenth-century monk and theologian St Thomas Aquinas (seated in the centre). The influence of Christianity on the development of the western mind has been a topic of interest in the Freethinker of late: see my interview with the scholar Charles Freeman, which (inter alia) deals with this question, and Nick Cohen’s recent essay arguing that western values (whatever these might be) are not inherently Christian.
Freeman discusses Lippi’s painting at the beginning of his 2003 book The Closing of the Western Mind, and in doing so explains why it is germane to the now very prominent debate over Christianity’s role in the intellectual evolution of the western world:
The monk crushes a scowling old man beneath his feet. The old man is a personification of evil and he clutches a banner with the Latin inscription “Wisdom conquers evil”. The monk himself is none other than the great Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-74). Above him in a roundel are the verses from the book of Proverbs with which he chose to begin one of his finest works, the Summa contra gentiles, “a summary of the case against the heretics”, “For my mouth shall speak truth and wickedness is an abomination to my lips.” Also above him, on panels held by putti, appears a declaration of the importance of the revealed word of God: “The revelation of Thy words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” The most important text, however, must be that which Thomas has selected to hold in his left hand; it is from the apostle Paul, SAPIENTIAM SAPIENTUM PERDAM, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.” As this book will suggest[,] the phrase, supported by other texts of Paul which condemn the “empty logic” of “the philosophers”, was the opening shot in the enduring war between Christianity and science.
Continue reading here.