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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.
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