| #### 3. CATHOLIC THOUGHT: THE MENACE OF ARISTOTLE AND AVERROES |

| #### #### When in 1161 Peter Lombard died, and Roland Bandinelli, now Pope Alexander III, began to b wholly absorbed in the defence of the papacy's independence against Frederick Barbarossa, the Catholic intellectual world lost the last of the really great personalities who had led it for now a hundred years. The next generation was not to produce any successor who could be compared to them. Yet it saw the emergence of a new intellectual force none the less, and one so far reaching in its effects that, by comparison with the thought that followed, the work of the century that closed with Peter Lombard is of hardly more than archaeological importance. This new force was the mind of Aristotle. From the middle of the twelfth century the invasion of Christendom by the philosophy of Aristotle, and the slow victory of his ideas in an unending series of fiercely fought battles, is, after the duel with the Hohenstaufen, the chief feature of the Church's history. #### A philosophy strongly Aristotelian in sympathy has been now for so long the officially accredited means by which, in the Catholic Church, revelation is explained and its reasonableness defended, that it requires an effort to conceive that matters were once very different indeed. The history of the century between the death of Alexander III and that of St. Thomas Aquinas (1181-1274) shows that it was only after Homeric fighting, and three generations of hard thinking that the possibilities which Aristotle held for the rational exposition of Catholicism were understood and developed. To the majority of the theologians to whom Aristotle was offered as anything more than the logician -- as the physicist, that is to say, the psychologist, the metaphysician -- this founder of what, "on the face of it is the least religious of all the great philosophies" [ ] could only seem the most dangerous of foes. This was partly due to the shortcomings and incompleteness of Aristotle himself, but it was due still more to the company with whom, and through whom, he made his appearance. Aristotle came to the Catholic West in its first century of freedom from the necessities of a struggle for life, and he came to it as part of that superior Mohammedan culture which, dominant for centuries from India to the Atlantic, had only lately ceased to menace Catholicism's very existence. #### Aristotle had ceased to be studied in the lands that were once the Roman Empire since, in 529, Justinian closed the schools of Athens. The cult, so to call it, found a refuge with the Monophysites of Egypt and Syria, and in Persia too. When the Arabs conquered these lands in the first half of the sixth century, Aristotle, with much other cultural riches, passed to the new empire of Islam. How Greek philosophy developed in that empire, of the inevitable strife between its devotees and the Mohammedan theologians, of the alternations of protection and persecution from the different caliphs that were its lot throughout the next three centuries, must be read elsewhere. As the philosophy was driven from the Eastern caliphate, it began to flourish in Moslem Spain. From Spain, through translations made under the direction of the Archbishop Raymond of Toledo (1126-1150), this Greco-Arab philosophical and scientific culture began, in the last half of the twelfth century, to be known to the Catholic intellectual world which Abelard and his fellows had recently restored to life. #### The translations were, to begin with, inevitably unsatisfactory, made as they were from the Spanish translation of an Arabic translation of a Syrian translation of the Greek original. But, apart altogether from translating Aristotle's text, these clerics of Toledo did something destined to fire every intelligence in France and Italy, and to give the whole Catholic world matter for thought eternally, when they translated the great Arabs and the great Jews whom in the past three centuries the study of Aristotle -- and no less importantly the study of Neoplatonic writings that passed for Aristotle -- had inspired. Finally, the translators were also authors, Catholics philosophising in the spirit of the writings they had translated. With these translations, philosophical ideas, true and false -- and often subtly akin, in their spiritual promise, to the highest aspirations of Catholic life -- entered into the very heart of the Catholic life of the next hundred years, and side by side with the fight to compel recognition of the real Aristotle's real value, another fight was waged to cast out the new, more insidious, pseudo- mystical elements of Neoplatonism. #### That fight was the affair of the next century. The years which this chapter covers merely saw the Aristotelian problem stated. Was Aristotle essentially anti-Christian and his philosophy necessarily destructive of Christianity, or did it offer, rather, the best means of rationally explaining Christianity to itself and to the world? The scholastic world was bitterly divided about this, as, a hundred years earlier, it had been divided on the question of using logic to study Revelation; the positions of the parties that were to fight the question to a finish began to be defined; and finally the arena was prepared that was to be the scene of the fights, the University of Paris, founded at the end of the twelfth century under Innocent III. #### That the nature of the later, thirteenth century, crisis may be understood, something must be said of the chief exponents of this Greco-Saracen thought that the twelfth century saw making its way across Christendom from Spain. There are three Mohammedans, two Jews and the chief of their translators to consider: Avicenna, Al Ghazel, Averroes, Avicebron, Maimonides and Dominic Gondisalvi. #### Avicenna, (Ibn Sina), born in Turkestan in 980, is one of the greatest figures in the history of philosophy. He was a man with a truly universal mind, who possessed an extraordinary knowledge of the natural sciences, of law, of theology and -- what gave him great fame through all the Middle Ages of medicine too. He was a passionate student of Aristotle, but the Metaphysics proved an insurmountable barrier, for all that he had read them so often that he knew them by heart, until he fell in with the commentary of Al Farabi. [ ] With the mastery of Aristotle thence gained, Avicenna's formation was complete. Much of his original work in philosophy has perished, but a kind of Summa of Aristotelianism as he conceived it, in eighteen books, survives to show the scale of his achievement and to explain the fact of his enormous prestige. His work, however, like that of all these Islamic philosophers, suffers inevitably from the twin defects that he worked on a text that was a translation at second-hand, and that his Aristotle included two famous treatises which we now know are of Neoplatonic authorship. Avicenna, for all his vast Aristotelian scholarship, is really a Neoplatonist. His aim is mystical, namely to achieve union with the Divine even in this life. He is not primarily a physicist, as assuredly was Aristotle, but his interest is psychological. Here, too, thought interests him -- and he builds from an examination of thought processes -- simply as a means of arriving at his religious end. He shares the Platonist idea of the opposition between spirit and matter, the insistence of that philosophy on the immortality of the soul and its theory of Providence. Through a gradual ascent of knowledge man comes finally to the moment when in all things he sees God, and nothing but God; the knowledge of self disappears, and the mystic is rapt in contemplation. #### As a system of practical mysticism related to philosophy, [ ] and in which, apparently, a place was found for all three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, Avicenna had, of himself, much to interest the Catholics who first studied him. In spirit, through his use of psychological analysis, he was something akin to St. Augustine, something very far removed from the impersonal metaphysics of Aristotle. A further point to be noted, is his attitude towards one of the major problems of Aristotelian interpretation, the theory, namely, by which Aristotle explains the spiritual character of the essential intellectual operation. For Avicenna the true first intellect of all mankind is the Demiurge-Logos, the agent of the Divinity's dealings with man. It is through this Logos, by participation in him, that is to say, that the individual mind understands. #### The Spanish Jew, Avicebron (Salomon Ibn Gabirol, 1020-1058), it is convenient to consider with Avicenna, for they were later studied in combination by the school of Catholic scholastics to whom their ideas appealed. Avicebron, poet as well as philosopher, author of the Fons Vitae, had in view the same practical mystical end, namely to satisfy, even in this life, the religious man's aspiration to union with God. His Fons Vitae is remarkable for its special theory that all things are composed of matter and form -- he is possibly, here, a source of Gilbert of la Porree -- that God is the form of the universe considered as a whole, and that form is united to matter through the intellect. Avicebron supplies a common ground where mystics and natural scientists meet. He makes physics serve the needs of mystical aspiration. [ ] #### Al Ghazel (1059-1111) comes to his place in this story in a very curious way, for he was one of the leaders of the Mohammedan reaction which, after Avicenna's death in 1037, destroyed the philosophical movement in the Eastern caliphate. To ruin beyond all hope of repair the hold of the philosopher on the thinking mind Al Ghazel first set out Avicenna's doctrine systematically. His summary was so clear, and so concise, that, in another country, a generation later, it did more than any other work to make Avicenna understandable and to popularise his thought. Avicenna's teaching on the soul now stood out in particular relief: that the soul is not merely the form of the body, that it is a substance, and that it is immortal precisely because it is a substance. #### To translate into Latin these three related thinkers was part of the great work of Dominic Gondisalvi, Archdeacon of Toledo. Of Gondisalvi himself -- Gundissalinus, as he was to those who used him -- we know almost nothing; nor did he, in his own writings, show himself more than a mediocre compiler. But the materials which made up the compilation were new; and it was in such works as his De Immortalitate Animae and De Divisione Philosophiae that thousands into whose hands the more valuable translations never came, made their first acquaintance with the metaphysics and the ethics of Aristotle. Nor was Gundissalinus content merely to translate the greater writers. In one important particular he re-adjusted Avicenna himself. Sure as that mystic's system was of a hearing, in a generation when theology's chief importance still lay, for many, in its being a road to immediate union with God, and surer still for the undoubted half-Christian ideas it already contained, this correction made by Gundissalinus put the system's success beyond all doubt. Where Avicenna had placed the source of the intellect's illumination in the DemiurgeLogos -- a being really distinct from God -- that illumination, with Gundissalinus, was the direct act of God Himself. That in this theory -- Gundissalinus-Avicenna -- man's intelligence was almost effaced before the activity of God is true; but the prima facie resemblance of Avicenna's thought to the traditional Augustinian theory of knowledge is greatly heightened by the theory. It is, in fact, a revival of Augustinianism strengthened by the support of Avicenna. Gundissalinus, also, is practical in his aim -- he makes much use of St. Bernard's De Adherendo Deo -- and it was its writer's mystical objective, writ large all over his work, that secured the new system its first welcome, without that primary hostile scrutiny which might otherwise have been its lot. #### There was, however, still more in the system thus smuggled into the heart of Catholicism than a doctrine of knowledge sufficiently resembling Augustinianism to be swallowed whole by the Augustinians. In Al Ghazel-Avicenna, Gundissalinus found a system which taught that the soul’s supreme happiness consists in its union with the one, semi-divine, active Intellect; and that, even in this life, the union is possible, momentarily at least, for souls which are specially pure and detached from the body. This suggested to him an analogous Catholic theory whose summit is a mystical doctrine of ecstasy by direct union of the soul with God. Finally, this rough and ready adapter of Saracenic Neoplatonism left to the next generation a formidable problem, nothing less in fact than how really to co-ordinate this corpus of thought -- which he believed was Aristotelian, but which was in fact Neoplatonic -- with the teaching, traditional among Catholic mystics, of God as the soul’s illuminator. #### This Avicennian, or Gundissalinian, Aristotle was fortunate in the time of his appearance, for in the last years of the twelfth century it was the mystical theologians who dominated the scene at Paris, while at Chartres the Platonic tradition was still strong. But the intellect of the twelfth century was by no means entirely given up to the thought of the Divine, and of the surest means of earthly communion with It. Side by side with this, there ran a strong current of scientific materialism, of fatalistic astrology and, in the darker places, of atheism too. While to this side of contemporary life -- a very real side, that must never be lost sight of in the study of what have been called "the Ages of Faith"-Aristotle, as expressed in the spiritual idealism of Avicenna, made little appeal, there came from it a welcome at least as great to the Spanish Moor who seemed to those of this day, and to very many thinkers of the next century too, Aristotle born again. This was Averroes, born at Cordova in 1126, no ancient figure, for this end of the twelfth century, revived by the research of the scholarly, but, with all his superb understanding of the great master, still very much alive in the flesh. [ ] Averroes was perhaps the greatest of all who have worshipped at the shrine of Aristotle. The one aim of his life was to make Aristotle intelligible to his time, and the degree of his achievement is declared by the title the Middle Ages gave him. In a time when to comment Aristotle, or some part of him, was almost the first foundation of any intellectual fame, Averroes was, simply, "The Commentator." "Averrois," said Dante, "che il gran commento feo." #### Like a true disciple of Aristotle, Averroes is first of all a physicist, and it is this fundamental interest in physics which links him immediately with those contemporary speculations, partly astrological, partly atheistical, which derived, and not merely through the Arabs, from a very distant antiquity. For Averroes, then, the First Source of all movement has an astral, cosmic character. The heavens of Averroes are a living reality, and the hierarchy of the heavenly intelligences is the chain linking man with the Primum Movens. Here Averroes shows himself, not merely Aristotelian, but as the perfection of a long Arabian and Neoplatonic tradition, the perfection because the most influenced by Aristotle. His Aristotle is none the less Neoplatonist, as witnesses this introduction of a theory of intermediary intelligences, emanated gradually through the hierarchy of the spheres. [ ] #### No commentator, however, was less influenced than Averroes by the spiritual elements of Neoplatonism. So much of a physicist is he that, for him, things are absolutely one. There is no distinction between their essence and existence, no possibility of movement from non-being to being, no possibility of creation. It is a physicism so absolute that it leaves no place for freedom, freedom for example of the will. All is necessary, determined, in an eternal evolution. Form, soul therefore, for the soul is the form of the body, is part of the material cosmos. Yet the soul can think, and thought is non- material. How explain this production of an effect higher in nature than the soul that produces it? Here Averroes, like Avicenna and like all who have striven to follow Aristotle, is brought up against one of the problems to which Aristotle gives no clear solution. We have seen Avicenna's solution already. Another tradition, dating from Alexander of Aphrodisias (2nd century A.D.), which persisted down to Avempace (1138), Averroes' own contemporary, solved it by developing, from doctrines implicit in the Aristotelian corpus, the theory of an operation between the passive intellect existent in each individual and a single active intelligence of the whole cosmos. For Averroes this was a wholly unacceptable compromise. He indignantly rejected it, and showed himself here the most radical of all the commentators by postulating the unity of the passive intelligence too. What then of the soul’s immortality? For Averroes the soul is only immortal in the sense that the one active intelligence is immortal. Finally the First Mover is inseparable from the whole of that which he moves. #### Clearly the philosophy of Averroes -- of Aristotle too, if Averroes truly represents the essential Aristotle -- is not compatible with the revealed religion enshrined in the traditional teaching of the Church. What of his immediate effect? and what was it in Aristotle which, despite his formidable appearance of irrefutable, scientifically established materialism, was to urge the keenest and most orthodox minds of the next hundred years to attempt a new reading of his Metaphysics? #### There IS one unmistakable feature of the thought of the old classical culture, and that is the common ground which it offers, both to philosophers and to scientists, in the facts of astronomy-a kind of syncretism where the observed periodicity of stellar movements served as a scientific basis for a theory of universal determinism. This syncretism passed, with much else of the GrecoRoman culture, into the rich amalgam of the Arab empire in the East. For Al-Kindi (d. 860), the first of the great translators of Aristotle, astrology was the mistress of the sciences, and his successor and disciple, Albumasar (d. 886), showed a like reverence for it. Thenceforward the cult of the stars shared the varying fortunes of the old philosophy. Even the greatest of these thinkers, Avicenna, had a place for the stars as real determining influences upon human choice. #### This cult of the stars had, on the other hand, been sympathetic, at least, throughout all its history, to a very radical materialistic atheism, as well as to pantheism. To this astral determinism Aristotle's thought had given a certain support and, although atheism played a part in Greek philosophy long before Aristotle, the new philosophies that came from among the continuators of Plato and Aristotle were more favourable to atheism than the earlier philosophies. #### For more than one reason astrology -- with its implicit denial of moral responsibility -- was popular. People and princes alike, in all the last centuries of the antique world, fell before the temptation to use the astrologer, and to direct their lives by his erudite calculations. With the gradual Christian conquest of that culture the astrologer lost his hold, but from the ninth century, thanks in great part to the Arabs, who were now to be found in every city of Italy and southern France, the old practices slowly revived. Works on astrology began to be translated before those of the philosophers, and they were more readily assimilated, more eagerly sought out. By the twelfth century astrology was, in a sense, omnipresent in Christendom; and the new spirit, if congenial to the school of Chartres, found its first great scientific opponent in Abelard. After Abelard's death it regained at Paris what ground it had lost, and then, as the influence of Averroes began slowly to seep through, new life came from his strongly organised thought to the allied astrological and atheistic speculations. Thanks to the new vigour thus infused, things that had slept for centuries began slowly to reawaken. Once more, the enormous prestige of Aristotle himself aided the movement. #### By the end of the twelfth century there was then, undoubtedly, in the intellectual centres of the Catholic world, a strong current of ideas at once astrological and atheistic, and it was threatening to gain the chief seat of Catholic culture, the schools of Paris, in the very moment when the new organisation was forming that was to make them, with the papacy and the empire, the third great feature of Catholic life. #### "Very early in the twelfth century it began to be rumoured everywhere that long before Christianity was heard of Aristotle had solved all the problems of human society." [ ] By the end of the century it was much more than rumour; and here we touch on the core of the new revolution in travail -- the genius of Aristotle himself. When the Catholic West began to read for the first time his Physics, the De Coelo et Mundo, the De Anima, the De Generatione et Corruptione, and the Metaphysics, it reeled before the sudden discovery of a new world. Here was a systematic study of the universe, in its own right and for its own sake, of things, plants, animals, man, the stars, and the Power that moulds the whole. [ ] A whole encyclopaedia of the natural sciences, a whole corpus of new facts, and a philosophy that explained them-it was a kind of sudden revelation in the natural order. And, over all, there presided the genius of the inventor of Logic. It was the key to the universe in the study of the universe, in the study of Nature for Nature's own sake, and in the light of the natural reason. There has, probably. never been anything, in the intellectual order, to equal this sudden restoration -- to a culture already possessed of one important part of the ancient culture-of all that it most lacked and most needed, namely the vast body of the natural science of that ancient culture and the best of its philosophy. Not in one single generation could the gift be truly estimated, possessed, assimilated. The first effect, inevitably, was a confusion of sudden conclusions and half-truths, the inevitable fruit of half-understood principles. For the ruling authorities in the Church it presented an anxious problem, this vast corpus of knowledge, impossible to ignore, impossible not to use, and yet a knowledge shot through with Materialism, Pantheism and all that was least compatible with the traditional Faith. [ ] #### It was amid this swirl and turbulence of the new thought that in 1205, the pope, Innocent III, called into existence a new insti-tution whose special purpose was the promotion of higher studies and the safeguarding of the traditional Faith, alike among those who studied and among those who taught. This institution was the University of Paris. It was the forerunner of scores of similar institutions, set up in the next two centuries by the same papal authority and, to some extent, it was the model on which all of them were fashioned; but in one important respect it was from the beginning a thing apart. What made this university at Paris unique was the extraordinary number of its students, the fact that these students (and the masters, too) came from all over Christendom, and the prestige in its schools of theological studies and of the study of the newly- revealed Aristotelian books. Already, for nearly a hundred years continuously, before the decisive act of Innocent III, this group of schools that centred around the school of the Bishop of Paris had been the universally recognised capital of the theological intelligence of the Church. Innocent III himself was a product of these schools. #### To the town of Paris the schools were, by the end of the century, an immense asset -- and a grave responsibility in more than one way. And the prosperity of the schools was no less a matter of concern to the French king. Already it was beginning to be seen that, if the Italian nation had the papal capital itself as its glory, and the Germans the Empire, the French could boast in the schools of Paris a third institution no whit less effective than either of these throughout the whole of Christendom. Whatever made for the better organisation and greater contentment of these thousands of foreign scholars who were now a permanent element of life in the French capital, and a rich source of French prestige and influence, must interest the monarchs who were welding France into a single country. The decisive act was the constitution of the whole body of these students and masters as a self-governing corporation, free at once from the jurisdiction of the local bishop and the local civil authorities; and this was what Innocent III did in 1205. #### But in doing this it was far from the pope's intention to create within the Church such an unheard of novelty as an institution that was perfectly autonomous. The new universitas was the creation of the papacy; the popes would endow it liberally with privileges, they would lavish praises on it, [ ] fight its battles, defend its rights: but they would also control it -- control at least the main lines of its development -- during the first formative hundred years. For as a school to which all Christendom came in search of theological learning the university could be, inevitably, a most powerful source of general error as well as a general benefit. [ ] This was not a national institution -- and it was more than what we would call international: the schools of Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were Christendom itself, hard at work upon the Bible, St. Augustine and Aristotle, upon divine Revelation, traditional theology, the new natural sciences and philosophy. Facing such a phenomenon, unprecedented in its kind as well as in its scale, the chief of Christendom could not be a mere spectator or patron. Here, too, he must rule. #### And this papal control of the schools, in these years that were so critical, both for the faith and for the whole future of Western civilisation, [ ] was a model of practical wisdom and of truly Roman tact: -- the first, early prohibition of lectures on the Physics of Aristotle, and the Metaphysics, while these were yet such novelties that, inevitably, like men filled with new wine, students and masters fell with passionate enthusiasm into one error after another, into errors about the new doctrines as surely as into errors about their relation to the traditional faith; then, the strong insistence on the primacy of Theology among the sciences; and the gradual relaxation of the ban on Aristotle, until, finally, the great pagan is given droit de cite, and the study of his works becomes an obligatory part of the theologian's training. #### As the first years of the new century went by, the translations began to multiply -- and to improve. There was now, side by side with the early work of Gundissalinus, a second series of translations, made on the Greek text itself. And presently the opposition began to harden, and to fix itself: opposition, first of all, to Aristotle, and then, more usefully, to Averroes. Averroes, "who knew all there was to be known, understood all, explained all," seemed at first to point to the happy mean between the Neoplatonism of the Augustinians, the Aristotelianism of the last generation of Abelard's influence, and the Positivism of the physicists and astrologers. It was only slowly, and by degrees, that Paris began to realise that Averroes himself was the enemy. William of Auvergne, for example, master in the schools until 1228, and from thence on Bishop of Paris until his death (1249), strenuously opposes the special doctrines of Averroes, and at the same time attacks no less strenuously those who hold them -- for their slanderous imputation of them to Averroes! #### Not until the next generation, apparently, to the last few years of William of Auvergne's episcopate, was Averroes seen to be what he is. By that time the man had arrived who was equal to the new situation -- St. Albert the Great. ####  |