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PREFACE xv as the major translator of the Aristotelian works from the Greek to the Latin. It is important that St. Thomas avoids the transla- tions of the Arabians and Jews and returns to the original sources for information. His work seems to have been pre- dominately occupied with the problem of reorganizing the liberal arts and in addition the faculty of theology in respect to doctrine. This issued from his Aristotelian background. The two Summae supply a basis of internal or doctrinal organiza- tion which is something other than the organization of the physical plant of a university and the building up of a com- plex corps of administrative executives. During this period of his stay at Paris St. Thomas took a leading part in the serious doctrinal controversies being waged there. At all points he combated the Averroism of Siger of Brabant, although he re- tains such principles of Averroes in his own system as seemed to him consistent with Aristotle and the Christian faith. Despite the protests of the rector and masters of the faculty of theology at Paris, he was again called to Italy in 1272 to organize a studium generate, a center of theological studies for a province of his order. On his way to Lyons, whither Gregory X had called him to assist at the work of a General Council, he died in 1274, being then forty-eight years of age. In 1323, nearly a century after his birth and a half century after his death, Thomas Aquinas was canonized a saint by Pope John XXII. Whatever may be the proper statement of the grounds of sainthood, his vast intellectual achievements are certainly events out of the natural order and appropriate to a miracle. His brothers in religion called him 'the angelic doctor'. It will doubtless be greatly to the advantage of the reader to have a chronological order of the works of St. Thomas, which follows, as taken from page twenty of Le Thomisme, par fitienne Gilson, troisime Edition, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1927. n * * ro [later to 1268.