 In the Latin West during the 12th and 13th centuries the goal of commentary was to explain the author’s intention. However, until the end of the 13th century, commentators worked on the assumption that the author intended to express the truth; thus every effort was made to bring an author’s text into harmony with the truth as the author understands it from what he takes to be authoritative sources. This attitude toward texts is generally thought to emerge from the tradition of biblical exegesis, where the biblical text is assumed to be true, to be in accord with the basic articles of faith, and, hence, as needing to be interpreted from within those parameters. Moreover, as interpreters began to collect different interpretations of biblical texts, they tended to deal with conflicts between authorities by attempting to harmonize different opinions rather than simply keeping some and discarding others. So, in an analogous way, for example, Aquinas supports Aristotle’s astronomy even in the face of conflicting mathematical evidence from Ptolemy. He argues that Ptolemy’s account “saves the appearances” but may not in fact be true since the phenomena could be saved in some other way (Aquinas 1964, I, lec. 3; Lohr 1982, 93–94). Also, Aquinas tries to save Aristotle from unambiguously holding the position that the world is eternal, arguing that Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of motion might be merely hypothetical (Aquinas 1964, Bk. I, lec. 29). In general, medieval Latin commentators through the 13th century rarely abandon the principle that the text makes some kind of sense. Thus, even when the Aristotelian text is extremely cryptic, corrupt, or terse, commentators make every effort to give the text a clear and consistent sense, even if it must be almost completely constructed. A very striking example of the commentator’s art in this regard is Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, especially his commentary on the very difficult passages on the workings of the intellect (De Anima III, 5; Aquinas 1994, III, lec. 7–10). As Kenny and Pinborg note, Ockham justified a less literal reading of Aristotle by asserting that Aristotle often speaks metaphorically; at the other extreme, Latin Averroists offered views that might be seen as contrary to Church teaching by maintaining that they were only interpreting Aristotle, not developing their own view (Kenny and Pinborg 1982, 29–30). A less dramatic but nonetheless important change introduced by medieval commentators, continuing in commentaries after 1300, is making divisions of the text and adding descriptions of the overall structure and forward progression of its arguments. These divisions and outlines of the text serve to give unity and coherence to a text even if it might lack these features on its own.