As any admirer of Tolkien should know, a number of early European epics, especially from the North, speak of fire-breathing, winged dragons. So these purported beings made their way into the written literature of Christendom, there eventually to be found and fruitfully employed by the great twentieth-century writer who offered us a tale with the unforgettable character of Smaug.
 
The Catholic intellectual tradition that found its home in the new universities of the High Middle Ages considered dragons from a different angle, one more scientific than literary. In particular, these legendary beasts attracted the intention of the mid-thirteenth-century Dominican, St. Albert the Great, who took it as a fundamental principle that knowledge ought to be grounded upon observation. When direct observation was not possible, then knowledge must base itself upon analogy, comparing what could not be seen with what could.
 
And so, what of fire-breathing, winged dragons? Dragons, to be sure, were not to be seen in thirteenth-century Europe. But that did not prove that large, scaled reptilian creatures could not exist. Nor, reasoned St. Albert, was it beyond the realm of possibility that large, scaled reptilian creatures might have wings (and we know now that, in the age of dinosaurs, some quite possibly did). But fire-breathing? Albert knew of no animal, reptilian or otherwise, that breathed fire, and all observation of the respiratory systems of animals seemed conclusive that no animal could breathe fire. Therefore our saint felt confident in asserting that there were not, and never had been, fire-breathing, winged dragons.
 
What we can see in the rumination of St. Albert upon dragons is an example of the way in which, with a mature confidence in God’s gift of intellect, medieval Catholic Europe systematically laid the foundations for modern science. As the lucid cultural historian, Christopher Dawson, has observed, “The great intellectual synthesis of the thirteenth century [is] in reality the assertion of the rights of human reason and the foundation of European science.” To that synthesis few contributed more than St. Albert, one of the finer products of an age aware of what every age would do well to realize, that common sense and the Faith are really two names for one and the same thing.