rays upon the head of S. Thomas.  Single rays descend in like manner upon the evangelists and Moses and S. Paul.  They, like Plato and Aristotle, hold open books; and rays from these eight volumes converge upon the head of the angelical doctor, who becomes the focus, as it were, of all the beams sent forth from Christ and from the classic teachers, whether directly effused or transmitted through the writers of the Bible.  S. Thomas lastly holds a book open in his hand, and carries others on his lap; while lines of light are shed from these upon two bands of the faithful, chiefly Dominican monks, arranged on each side of his footstool.  Averroes lies prostrate beneath his feet with his book face downwards, lightning-smitten by a shaft from the leaves of the volume in the saint’s hand, whereon is written:  veritatem meditabitur guttur meum et labia mea detestabuntur impium.[138]

This picture, afterwards repeated by Benozzo Gozzoli with some change in the persons,[139] has been minutely described, because it is important to bear in mind the measure of inspiration conceded by the mediaeval Church to the fathers of Greek philosophy, and her utter detestation of the peripatetic traditions transmitted through the Arabic by Averroes.  Averroes, though Dante placed him with the great souls of pagan civilisation in the first circle of Inferno,[140] was regarded as the protagonist of infidelity.  The myth of incredulity that gathered round his memory and made him hated in the Middle Ages, has been traced with exquisite delicacy by Renan,[141] who shows that his name became a rallying point for freethinkers.  Scholars like Petrarch were eager to confute his sect, and artists used him as a symbol of materialistic disbelief.  Thus we meet with Averroes among the lost souls in the Pisan Campo Santo, distinguished as usual by his turban and long beard.  On the other hand, the frank acceptance of pagan philosophy, insofar as it could be accommodated to the doctrine of the Church, finds full expression in the art of this early period.  On the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena were painted the figures of Curius Dentatus and Cato,[142] while the pavement of the Duomo showed Hermes Trismegistus instructing both a pagan and a Christian, and Socrates ascending the steep hill of virtue.  Perugino, some years later, decorated the Sala del Cambio at Perugia with the heroes, philosophers, and worthies of the ancient world.  We are thus led by a gradual progress up to the final achievement of Raphael in the Vatican.  Separating the antique from the Christian tradition, but placing them upon an equality in his art, Raphael made the “School of Athens” an epitome of Greek and Roman wisdom, while in the “Dispute of the Sacrament” he symbolised the Church in heaven and Church on earth.