25),
composed
not later than 1268, Bacon had
not yet heard of William of Moerbeke, but in the later Compendium Studii
Philosophiae he attacks him, under the name of William the Fleming,
with peculiar venom, and thinks him no better than Gerard of Cremona,
Herman, or Michael the Scot (the three chief translators from the
Arabic), or than any of the pretended experts in Greek.
not yet heard of William of Moerbeke, but in the later Compendium Studii
Philosophiae he attacks him, under the name of William the Fleming,
with peculiar venom, and thinks him no better than Gerard of Cremona,
Herman, or Michael the Scot (the three chief translators from the
Arabic), or than any of the pretended experts in Greek.
Cambridge Medieval History - v5 - Contest of Empire and the Papacy
In particular we owe to John of Salisbury a large
part of our acquaintance with the school of Chartres, the most brilliant
example of the old cathedral-school, now about to be superseded by the
studium generale, or University. To say that he personally belonged to
this school would, however, be inaccurate. He spent some years there
and venerated its masters, but he learned also of Abelard, Robert of Melun,
Alberic of Rheims, and many others outside the precincts of Chartres; nor
is there anything in his works to prove his formal adherence to the
characteristic tenets of the school. What makes his testimony so invalu-
able is just his gift of intellectual detachment and his distaste for the fury
of the partisan. In politics, that is to say, in his estimate of the spiritual
and the temporal power, it is otherwise; for his hierarchical opinions are
definite and strong. Nor is he ever restrained by love of compromise from
expressing the frankest of judgments on controversies of the day, much
less from lively denunciation of Philistines and fools. Yet, as he passes
from one seat of learning to another, he combines an honest respect for
the teachers with the privilege of smiling at the school. Thus, for example,
does he return after many years to Mount St Geneviève, to see how his
friends are faring, and finds them still, as he says, at the same old
ques-
tions, with not one little propositiuncula annexed to the familiar stock in
trade. With the same aloofness, he admires Abelard, but laughs at his
theory of universals; he reveres Bernard, the senex Carnotensis, but keeps
clear of the Platonised ideas, and is aware that the master's hope of recon-
ciling Plato and Aristotle is vain.
With justice, then, did John of Salisbury profess himself an Academic;
CH. XXIII.
## p. 806 (#852) ############################################
806
John of Salisbury and philosophy
by which, it is well to add, he did not mean a Platonist. He knew that
the Sceptics had captured the Academy, and attributes the rise of Scep-
ticism to the Aristotelian criticism of Plato. He did not understand the
return of the Platonists to their ancient home, and when he names Plotinus,
Iamblichus, and Porphyry as the most distinguished of the Academics, he
betrays the
gaps in his knowledge of history. About his own position,
however, he is perfectly clear. What he professes is the “ Academic or
Sceptical Philosophy," as Hume called it, not the Platonism of Chalcidius
and Macrobius, or of his own contemporaries and friends. His Academ-
icism does not mean extravagant distrust of reason, but chiefly a spirit of
tolerant criticism, distaste for dogmatic obstinacy, and disinclination to
swear allegiance in verba magistri. Had his bent been for mathematics,
he might almost have anticipated the great saying of Pascal, that a man
should be three things, a good mathematician, a good sceptic, and a
humble follower of Jesus Christ.
Thanks largely to his cool and sceptical temper, we can readily learn
from John of Salisbury what an utter misconception of the Middle Ages
it is to confound the history of philosophy with the history of logic, or
to oppose philosophy to the life of religion. As is shewn by the very title
of his longest work, Policratici, sive de nugis Curialium et vestigiis Philoso-
phorum Libri VIII, the world is roughly divided for him into the foolish
and the wise. On the one side is the life of the courtier, a life devoted to
hunting and gambling, or to laughing at actors and buffoons; on the other
is the call to the higher life of the mind. The alternatives are plain and
mutually repellent; qui curialium ineptias induit, et philosophi vel boni
viri officium pollicetur, Hermaphroditus est'. All who respond to the
serious call are philosophers, and therefore John of Salisbury's friends.
And what is philosophy? Not the product of copia litterarum, but the
choice of an arduous way. In its ancient sense, philosophy, as he says,
pulsat ad ostium; and when the door of wisdom is opened, the soul is
illumined with the “light of things," and the name of philosophy vanishes
away. But that illumination is for the future. Philosophy in this world
is the viaticum of the few who content themselves with following a road
that leads to no worldly advantage. As to where and how the true road
is to be found, John himself is not doubtful. The philosopher, as Plato
had taught, is cultor Dei, and the end of all philosophy is the enlargement
of charity. But in this respect no Christian is inferior to Plato; the rule
of Christ surpasses the wisdom of antiquity; the vita claustralium outdoes
the practice of all the schools.
Philosophia quid est nisi fons, via, duxque salutis,
Lux animae, vitae regula, grata quies?
So he asks in the Entheticus, and adds in the sad doggerel of that discur-
sive poem:
Non valet absque fide sincere philosophari?
1 Policraticus, v, 10.
? Entheticus, 277-278 and 319.
## p. 807 (#853) ############################################
John and the controversy about Universals
807
Armed with this firm conviction, John goes forth to the defence and
criticism of logic. By logic he understands, in the first instance, very much
what we found in Hugh of St Victor. He notes the same quality of sermo
and ratio as translations of logos, and insists, like Hugh, on the close alli-
ance of logic with eloquence and grammar; not indeed because he deems
logic a science of words, but because he has learned from Bernard of
Chartres and William of Conches to believe in humane education as the
first safeguard against arid disputes. In his championship of logic he has,
in fact, to steer a difficult course between the scurrilous mockers, personified
under the pseudonym of Cornificius, and the so-called puri philosophi', who
identify philosophy with logic and disdain every other branch of know-
ledge. No modern critic of the Middle Ages has exposed so remorselessly
the ipeptitude of wrangling about trifles, the emptiness of logic divorced
from natural and moral science. As an introduction to further studies
logic is excellent; in isolation it is exsanguis et sterilis? The teachers
grow old in the exercises of boys; the boys (hesterni pueri, magistri
hodierni) escape to-day from the rod, and to-morrow assume the gown
and mount the cathedra. The world is crowded with half-educated
wiseacres, the schools with Peripatetics whose Peripateticism consists only
in walking about.
After these caustic criticisms it is no surprise to find that John of
Salisbury puts the whole controversy about universals into its proper
and subordinate place. Far from being the sum of philosophy, this
fashionable topic of the schools serves chiefly to provoke the emulous
ingenuity of lecturers, no one of whom is content to agree with his
predecessors or to remain within the bounds proposed by Boethius.
John's own solution and the many varieties of Realism we have no space
to examine. His main anxiety is to prevent the reduction of any part of
philosophy to a conflict of words. For this reason he dislikes any verbalist
theory of universals, and speaks with some contempt of Roscelin and
Abelard. His distinction between the two is that Roscelin had talked of
voces, Abelard of sermones“, a term not adequately explained in the
Metalogicus, but further illustrated by a parallel passage in the Policra-
ticus, where an evident allusion to Roscelin is followed by a mention of
those qui indifferenter nomina pro rebus vel res pro nominibus posuerunt'.
If, then, sermones are not simply voces but nomina, it would seem that
Abelard rather than Roscelin was the true nominalist. Whatever the
exact import of Abelard's view, John declines to take it seriously, but
offers to excuse its author on the ground that an elementary book like the
Categories had perhaps to be taught in an elementary manner®. In no case
is there room for the opinion that Abelard was a conceptualist. That
opinion (which arose partly from the wrong attribution to Abelard of a
treatise De Generibus et Speciebus) is sufficiently refuted by John himself,
i Metalogicus, 11, 6. 2 Ib. 11, 20.
3 16. 1, 25.
4 1b. II, 17.
6 Policraticus, vii, 12. 6 Metalogicus, ii, 1.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 808 (#854) ############################################
808
The new Aristotelian logic
>
when he passes immediately from Roscelin and Abelard to a third non-
realist theory, in which the universal is called a notio or intellectus et
simplex animi conceptio. Here, if anywhere, we must look for Concep-
tualism, and not in the doctine of Abelard.
From John of Salisbury, lastly, we receive our first clear impression of
the “new logic," already known in some measure to his senior contempor-
aries, Otto of Freising, Thierry of Chartres, and Adam du Petit Pont.
The translation of the Organon by James of Venice is assigned to the
year 1128, some thirty years before the Metalogicus was written; but John
himself used another version, probably by Henry Aristippus of Catania,
distinguished also as a translator of Plato. The effect of recovering the
Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistici Elenchi may be considered in two
relations, to the general conception of logic and to the reputation of
Aristotle. Hitherto, as we have often had occasion to remark, logic, in
the character of dialectic, had hovered on the borderland between reason-
ing and discourse, while Aristotle had been simply the great dialectician.
But now it began to be understood that the traditional Aristotelian books
were but elementary prefaces to the dialectical treatises, and that the
whole of dialectic must fall into a minor position, as compared with the
ars demonstrandi or method of science. “The philosopher," says John of
Salisbury, “who uses demonstration has his business with truth, the dia-
lectician with opinion, the sophist with the bare appearance of probability. "ı
The Posterior Analytics, evidently, were found very difficult, and John
speaks of them with the most cautious respect. The art of demonstration,
he says, has fallen into almost complete disuse. It survives only in mathe-
matics, especially in geometry; sed et huius disciplinae non est celebris usus
apud nos, nisi forte in tractu Ibero vel confinio Africae? Mathematics, in
other words, were studied only by the Arabs or their neighbours.
The revolution in logic, we should gather from John of Salisbury,
magnified the reputation of Aristotle without radically altering its
character. As urbs stands for Rome and poeta for Virgil, so the name of
philosophus is reserved by common consent for Aristotle'. On the authority
of Burgundio of Pisa, John adds in another place that Aristotle's pre-
scriptive right to the name was based on his skill in demonstration, the
art most highly esteemed by the Peripatetics*. It would be wrong, how-
ever, to infer from this anticipation of the title so freely employed in the
thirteenth century that Aristotle had already usurped the throne of Plato.
John's personal estimate of “the philosopher” reflects his attitude towards
logic in general. Refusing to treat any utterance of Aristotle's as sacro-
sanctum, he accuses him (with how much knowledge? ) of many errors in
natural and moral philosophys. Even in logic he does not count him in-
fallible, but notes his deficiencies, and believes it possible for modern
teachers to improve on his handling of some parts of the subject. John,
1 Metalogicus, 11, 5
3 Policraticus, vii, 6.
4 Metalogicus, iv, 7.
5 lb. iv, 27.
2 lb, iv, 6.
## p. 809 (#855) ############################################
The School of Chartres. Gilbert de la Porrée
809
indeed, is at all times a champion of the moderni. He sympathises with
Abelard's difficulty in getting a hearing for any doctrine not sanctioned
by antiquity, and insists that respect for old authors should not hamper
the critical exercise of reason. On the other hand, he does maintain that
Aristotle is peerless in logic, and defends the study of the Categories and
the Sophistici Elenchi against unintelligent critics, among whom he men-
tions some followers of Robert of Melun! On the whole, Aristotle
remains where he was, the prince of logicians, without as yet any claim to
wider dominion. Down to the end of the twelfth century or even later,
none but the “pure philosophers” were disposed to exalt the pupil above
the master. The rest of the world would have endorsed the verdict of the
Policraticus, where John describes Plato, with all deference to the Aris-
totelians, as totius philosophiae princeps? .
The Platonism for which the school of Chartres was conspicuous meant,
apparently, not much more than the traditional Platonism of the Timaeus,
with its sundry exponents. The Phaedo and the Meno, which had been
translated by Henry Aristippus of Catania (ob. 1162), produced no
immediate effect on the interpretation of Plato. The Chartres account of
universals, for example, identified them with the Platonic ideas, and
understood idea in the sense of exemplar aeternum, a sense traditional in
the Latin interpretation of the Timaeus, but certainly not derived from
the Phaedo. And again, when followers of Bernard of Chartres, such as
William of Conches, strayed on to dangerous theological ground, they
were inclined to imitate Abelard in Platonising the Trinity and in
identifying the Holy Spirit with the anima mundi. Perhaps it was the
reminiscence of Abelard, as well as the widespread influence of Chartres,
that caused fresh anxiety to ecclesiastical authority. The most famous
disturbance connected with any scholar of Chartres was the trial of Gilbert
de la Porrée (ob. 1154), the learned and venerable Bishop of Poitiers, him-
self sufficiently distinguished to rank as the founder of a school. The story
of the trial, which took place at Rheims in 1148, is related by Otto of
Freising and by John of Salisbury in his Historia Pontificalis. John was
present throughout the proceedings, as were also Peter the Lombard,
Robert of Melun, and other prominent divines, some to support St Bernard
(once more the chief prosecutor), others to aid in the defence of the bishop.
On this occasion Bernard fell short of victory. His followers refused to
confess the defeat, but Gilbert returned safely to his diocese and was
immune from all further attacks.
Apart from this political incident, the fame of Gilbert rests chiefly
on his exposition of the theology of Boethius, and on his Liber de Sex
Principiis, a logical text-book more highly esteemed than any other com-
posed in the Middle Ages. For the most part Gilbert sticks to the “old
logic,” though there is some evidence of his acquaintance with the “new. ”
He refers in one place to the Analytics, and his commentary on the De
1 Metalogicus, iv, 24.
2 Policraticus, 1, 6.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 810 (#856) ############################################
810
Intellectual progress in the twelfth century
Trinitate of Boethius perhaps implies more knowledge of Aristotle than
could well be derived from the more elementary treatises. His treatment
of time and space has even been thought to involve some reference to the
Physics, but that is improbable. So again, his theory of universals, which
he called formae nativae, does not agree with the ordinary Platonism. A
forma nativa is an exemplum inherent in created things, related to the
exemplar in the Creator's mind as eidos to idea'. The origin of such a view
might well be Aristotelian, but the evidence is not clear.
Passing over with regret many other names associated more or less
closely with the teaching of Chartres, we have space only to raise the
general question, whether in the course of the twelfth century much ad-
vance was made towards a wider conception of philosophical problems. A
certain restlessness and a certain feeling of expansion, greatly assisted by
the enlargement of logic, there undoubtedly is. At the beginning of the
century Adelard of Bath was wandering from country to country and realising
the advantage of visiting different schools. In Spain he learnt enough
Arabic to make a translation of Euclid, and to acquire some notion of
the uses of mathematics for the purposes of scientific measurement. His
general outlook, however, is reminiscent of what John of Salisbury im-
putes to Bernard of Chartres. At the close of the same century, Alan of
Lille (Alanus de Insulis), who survived till 1203, is far from suspecting
the immediate advent of a great intellectual revolution. He deserves to
be remembered, if only for his saying: sed quia auctoritas cereum habet
nasum, id est, in diversum potest flecti, rationibus roborandum est. In his
own age he won the title of doctor universalis by his manifold learning;
in modern times his taste for a rigid, quasi-mathematical method has
suggested a comparison with Spinoza. Yet his appetite for novelty was
not striking. The first of the Latins to cite the Liber de Causis, he is but
little affected by the peculiar qualities of that work. The new logic, far
from arousing his enthusiasm, seems rather to have persuaded him that
Aristotle loved to wrap himself in majestic obscurity. Thus, without dis-
paraging his work, which deserves a much fuller account, we may fairly
infer from his case that in the last hours of the twelfth century it was
possible for a man of the highest reputation to enjoy no premonition of
the great movement of thought which the coming century was immediately
to witness.
If only by weight of materials, the thirteenth century stands apart
from those through which we have rapidly travelled. The briefest cata-
logue of names such as Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas
Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, is enough to banish
the thought of any detailed analysis. The only practicable course will be
to sketch the line of development and the general character of the problems
with which these and other authors, only less famous, were engaged.
Nearly eight centuries had passed since Boethius presented Aristotle to
1 John of Salisbury, Metalogicus, 11, 17.
2 MPL, cox, 333.
## p. 811 (#857) ############################################
The new Aristotle at Paris. The translations
811
the Latins, but during the whole of that period less had happened to dis-
turb the intellectual atmosphere than was now to be accomplished in a
single generation by the Aristotelian invasion of Paris. Customary and
right as it is to place the name of Aristotle in the foreground, it would
be idle to pretend that the mere recovery of his writings was enough to ac-
count for all the subsequent events. Without the organisation of studies
in the new universities, and without the intervention of the Friars in
educational and ecclesiastical politics, the story of the thirteenth century
must have been very different. And again, it is difficult to exaggerate
the importance of another fact, the conjunction of the new Aristotle with
an interpretation of him developed by a series of Muslim philosophers,
whose object had not been to keep on terms with Christian orthodoxy,
but to avoid open collision with the Koran. The fragments of Arabian
mathematics and medicine which had drifted from time to time into the
Latin world had brought no anticipation of the tumult immediately
aroused by the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes. The roughly es-
tablished modus vivendi with Pagan philosophy was of no avail when
there suddenly appeared a new Aristotle, the author of a vast and com-
prehensive system, in which were contained, if the Muslims could be
trusted, many doctrines incompatible with the Christian position. And
most of this was brought about by the enterprise of a Christian, Arch-
bishop Raymond of Toledo, who had instituted, in the second quarter of
the twelfth century, a college of translators under the supervision of
Dominic Gundisalvi, himself the author of a De Divisione Philosophiae
and other philosophical works.
The unparalleled importance of translations in the Middle Ages was
not diminished by the prevalence of a single literary language among the
peoples of the West. Absence of linguistic barriers between the scholars
of different European countries may even have helped to strengthen the
frontiers dividing the larger units of culture denoted as the Arabs, the
Latins, and the Greeks. We cannot, however, pursue that complicated
question, but must be content to glance at the golden age of translators,
which began early in the twelfth century and lasted about a hundred and
fifty years. Visits of Western scholars to Byzantium had produced the
translations of the Organon and of John of Damascus; another centre
was the court of Palermo, where Greek and Arabic learning were united;
but the widest diffusion of Muslim knowledge came from Toledo, and it
is necessary to enquire how far the Latin Aristotelianism was affected by
the mediation of the Arabic language. The story, once lightly bandied
about, that the medieval Aristotle was only a Latin parody of an Arabic
version of a Syrian translation of a Greek original is little more than a
fable. It is true that the Muslims were first introduced to Aristotle by
Syrians, chiefly Nestorian Christians; it is true also that Arabic Aristote-
lianism was coloured to the last by the commentators, such as Alexander
of Aphrodisias, who had influenced the Syrians. But long before there was
CH. XXIII.
## p. 812 (#858) ############################################
812
Translations from Greek and from Arabic
any question of extensive Muslim influence on the Latins, direct trans-
lations of Aristotle from Greek into Arabic had been made in abundance.
The name of "philosophers,” in the Arabic transcription of the word, was
especially applied to those who had studied Greek originals; and among
these “philosophers” were the whole series of writers, beginning with Kindi
in the ninth century, whose names we encounter in the works of the Latin
schoolmen. Strange to say, the most famous of all (at least in Latin esti-
mation), Ibn Rushd or Averroes (ob. 1198), was an exception to the rule.
For it is said that he never thought it worth while to learn Greek. If
that be so, we must suppose that he saw no reason, after three centuries
of Aristotelian scholarship, to doubt the adequacy of the Arabic trans-
lations. It was left for his Latin critics to entertain that doubt.
While the relation of the Latins to the Arabs is, at first sight, analo-
gous to that of the Arabs to the Syrians, further scrutiny of the facts
does not strengthen the analogy. There never was a time when the Latins
depended entirely on translations from the Arabic; there never was a
time when the Muslim inferences from Aristotle were not disputed and
opposed; least of all was there a time when Christians could imitate
Muslims in taking Aristotle as an infallible authority. To adopt that
attitude was, in fact, to be an Averroist; and Averroism, as we shall see,
was a movement destructive of all that Christian philosophers were striving
to establish.
Now that the earlier researches of Jourdain have been supplemented
by Grabmann and other recent scholars, it is possible to speak with some
confidence about the translations of Aristotle used by the Latins. No
simple generalisation can be accurate, for the case of each of Aristotle's
works has to be separately considered. Yet on the whole it is safe to
maintain that translations from the Greek relieved the schoolmen of
undue dependence on the Arabs, and enabled them, thus far at least, to
form an independent judgment on the meaning of Aristotle. To illustrate
the facts from a few of the more important works, we find that the earliest
version of the Metaphysics (containing only Books I-III and a small part
of iv) came to Paris from Byzantium before 1210. Next to arrive (ap-
parently before 1217) was a translation from the Arabic ascribed to
Gerard of Cremona. This, too, was imperfect, for it omitted altogether
Books K, M, and N, and mixed up the first book with the second. With
this, however, the Latins had to content themselves until after 1260, when
a Graeco-Latin version of the first twelve books, probably by William of
Moerbeke, was put into circulation. Upon these twelve books St Thomas
wrote his commentary, the last two being still untranslated when he saw
a Greek manuscript of the whole fourteen in 1270. The history of the
Nicomachean Ethics is rather similar: first a Graeco-Latin version of
three books, disguised as four; then, in 1240, a paraphrase from the
Arabic by Herman the German ; lastly a full translation from the
Greek, often explicitly attributed to Robert Grosseteste (ob. 1253), but
## p. 813 (#859) ############################################
Character of medieval translations. Roger Bacon 813
more probably, in Grabmann's opinion, by William of Moerbeke. Both
the Physics and the De Anima were known first in Graeco-Latin versions,
while the Politics, a book neglected by the Arabs, was derived only from
the Greek. Evidently, then, it would be less than a half-truth to say that
the Latins depended on second-hand translations for access to those works
of Aristotle which most deeply affected their thought. It remains to ask
whether the quality of the translations was such as to debar them from
a sound understanding of the text.
To claim distinction of style for the medieval translations would
indeed be courageous. Their rudeness, however, was perfectly deliberate.
It was not due to inability to write Latin, but to a frank mistrust of
elegance where the sole object was to get an exact reproduction of the
original. This they imagined they would best secure by simply replacing,
so far as possible, every Greek word by its Latin equivalent. For reasons
then potent, but now no longer operative, they demanded the letter
rather than the spirit; not a transformation of idiom into idiom, but
a raw and formless text. The task of the translators may have been
wrongly conceived, but in its way it was faithfully done. The belief, still
extant in some quarters, that the medieval understanding of Aristotle
was hopelessly vitiated by faulty translations is unsupported by the facts.
The prime author of this libel was Roger Bacon, whose bitter denuncia-
tions, often repeated as oracles, were in truth the product of ignorance
and spleen. Bacon's judgments on the translation and study of Aristotle
range over a quarter of a century, from about 1266 to 1292. Starting
from the excellent principle that a translator requires both a knowledge
of the languages and an understanding of the sciences concerned, he re-
peatedly declares that only Boethius possessed the first qualification,
only Robert Grosseteste the second. And here at once we begin to sus-
pect him. For Grosseteste's scientific attainments, as Bacon knew, were
in mathematics and optics, neither of which would have helped him in
the least to understand the greater part of Aristotle.
The rest of the translators, Bacon continues, were ignorant of science,
of Greek, and even of Latin. The result of their labours was erroneous
and unintelligible; so great, indeed, was the consequent misapprehension
of Aristotle that it would have been better for all his works to be burnt.
In the Opus Tertium (cap.
25), composed not later than 1268, Bacon had
not yet heard of William of Moerbeke, but in the later Compendium Studii
Philosophiae he attacks him, under the name of William the Fleming,
with peculiar venom, and thinks him no better than Gerard of Cremona,
Herman, or Michael the Scot (the three chief translators from the
Arabic), or than any of the pretended experts in Greek. William of
Moerbeke (ob. 1286), Archbishop of Corinth during the last years of his
life, was actually the most important of the translators, if only because
so much of his work was instigated by Thomas Aquinas, when both were
attached to the court of Urban IV. His dated works, which include
CH. XXIII.
## p. 814 (#860) ############################################
814
The weaknesses of Bacon. Muslim influence
translations of Proclus, Simplicius, Galen, and Hippocrates, cover the
period from 1260 to 1280. As it happens, only one of his Aristotelian
translations (the De Partibus Animalium) is dated, and there is also some
uncertainty how far he made use of earlier versions. We know, however,
that he was the first translator in that age of the Politics, and we know
that a scholar of Susemihl's rank thought it worth while to print this
translation with his own edition of the text. Bacon's judgment on
William of Moerbeke has, in fact, no more value than a spiteful review
in a modern periodical of a book which the reviewer has omitted to read.
Not even on sheer questions of fact can Bacon be trusted. He invents,
for example, an intimacy between Gerard of Cremona and Herman the
German, though one of them was about eighty-five years senior to the
other. It is more than doubtful, too, if he is accurate in his account of
Robert Grosseteste, one of the very few among his contemporaries whom
he deigned to admire. Depreciation of other men was a passion with him,
almost a disease. He was out of sympathy with the whole Aristotelian
movement, and out of humour with all the world. As to the contemporary
interpretation of Aristotle, his verdict is yet more ludicrous than his con-
tempt for the translations. With all the disadvantages from which they
inevitably suffered, Albertus Magnus and his still more famous pupil were
two of the greatest Aristotelians the world has yet seen. Bacon himself
was incompetent to judge them, but he resented the intellectual dictator-
ship, as he thought it, of Albert, and attacked him with such animosity
that the great Dominican was moved at last to administer a weighty
rebuke. To Bacon, at least, he is thought to be referring, when he speaks
of those who seek a solace for their own indolence by looking only for
objects to attack; who resemble the humor fellis that spreads through a
body, by provoking all other students to bitterness and forbidding them
in dulcedine societatis quaerere veritatem'. As a critic of others Bacon well
deserves the rebuke; it is fortunate that, as an original thinker, he still
can deserve our respect.
The comparative freedom of the Latins in the matter of translations
by no means released them from conflict with the Muslim interpretation
of Aristotle. From the first, apparently, the trouble caused by the new
material was aggravated by the use of certain commenta, which were in-
cluded in the prohibition of Aristotle at Paris in 1210. Whether the
reference was to Avicenna or to Averroes, it is certain that the entire
history of Aristotelianism at Paris is bound up with the claim of the
Arabs to be the authentic exponents. Some indication, therefore, however
slight and meagre, must be given of the character and position of philo-
sophy in Islām. Why there should ever have been room for intellectual
complications in that system is much less obvious than in the case of the
Christian Church. The unitarian God of Mahomet could have a Prophet
but not a Son. He dwelt apart from His creatures, neither incarnate nor
1 Cf. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, Part 1, p. 246.
## p. 815 (#861) ############################################
Character of Muslim philosophy
815
immanent, a lonely presence in the desert which no man could cross. Such
a creed might have continued to satisfy the Arabs of the peninsula, and,
if Islām had remained in that primitive condition, it would have made
no impression on the world. As soon, however, as it came into contact
with Syrian, Persian, and Byzantine civilisation, it had to choose between
adapting itself to a higher order of ideas and perishing altogether. Edu-
cated minds, when they began to reflect on the message of the Prophet,
were not slow to discover in the Koran and its contents sufficient material
for philosophic doubt. Was the sacred book itself created, or co-eternal
with the Creator? Did not the Word or Wisdom of God resemble the
Nous of the philosophers or the Logos of the Christians? Had God
eternal attributes, or would their existence be incompatible with His
absolute unity? Could the freedom of man be maintained against the
Divine Omniscience?
The first debates on these topics date from early times, even before
John of Damascus, as an official at the court of the Umayyads, provided
a curious link between Christian and Muslim thought. The great age,
however, both of translations and of philosophy began with the Abbasids
and the founding of Baghdad, where the patronage of Nestorian physicians
by Manşūr and Ma'mūn led to the institution of a school of medicine and
philosophy. The sect of the Mu´tazilites (once fanatical defenders of the
unity of God) now became prominent in speculation, and from their ranks
arose Kindī (ob. c. 873), the father of a notable line of philosophers, and
himself almost the only one of them who was an Arab by race. In him
we observe already the main characteristics which persisted down to
Averroes, the last of the line. The predominance of Aristotle had been
established from the first. From the first, too, the interpretation of
Aristotle had borne the stamp of Neo-Platonism. Perhaps the most sur-
prising example of this is the general reception of the Theology of Ari-
stotle as a genuine work. Actually an abridgment of Enneads iv-vi, it
was accepted as Aristotelian by Kindī, Fārābi, and many others, who must,
as it seems to us, have been blind to the enormous gulf between the minds
of Aristotle and Plotinus. Or were they, after all, so blind as we think?
Plotinus himself might have dissented. The interpretation of Aristotle
has always been determined by the interests and the methods of criticism
belonging to some particular age. It is a question of emphasis, of the
relative appreciation of his various works, of the special points selected
for discussion. All ages have recognised the great logician, but what a
vast difference it makes whether you take Aristotle as primarily an
astronomer, a theologian, a political thinker, or a biologist.
The Arabs, beginning with Kindī, fastened especially upon the theory
of the intellect in the De Anima. There, in a few brief and difficult
statements, they found the origin of all the disputes about the intellectus
agens and the intellectus possibilis, with other complications too technical
to mention. Here too was the most patent opportunity for fusing together
CH. XXIII.
## p. 816 (#862) ############################################
816
Fārābi and Avicenna
Platonist and Aristotelian doctrines. For Aristotle had certainly hinted
that mind or spirit in its highest manifestations might be independent of
bodily organs, perpetually active, immortal. Its energy was not a form
of motion, and therefore not inseparably linked with time. How, then,
could such an activity belong, like other psychical functions, to the life
of the individual? From this question it was but a short step to the
identification of the intellectus agens with the nous of Plotinus, understood
as the manifestation of God. The wisdom of man thus becomes a divine
illumination, undefiled and imperishable, indifferent to the accident of
death. Such, in roughest expression, was the line of thought along which
the Arabs advanced towards the denial of personal immortality, and
thus to conflict with the Catholic faith.
In the opinion of many Arabic writers and scholars, the most original
of the Muslim thinkers was Fārābi (ob. 950), who in the course of his life
is heard of in Egypt, at Damascus, and at Baghdad. Especially famous
for his commentaries on the Organon, with which the Arabs associated
(not without reason) the Rhetoric and the Poetics, he wrote also on almost
every part of Aristotle's system, on the Laws of Plato, on mathematics
and music. Though his view of the intellectus agens was similar in principle
to Kindi's, he is said to have regarded Aristotle's doctrine as a proof of
the immortality of the soul. And here we may note that, down to Fārābi's
time, there was no perceptible breach between the philosophers and
orthodox Islām. Plato and Aristotle were welcomed at first as a kind of
second revelation, harmonious with the official revelation of the Koran.
Yet the connexion of philosophy with sectarianism was early; the Shi'ites
were more given to speculation than the Sunnīs, and from the time of
Fārābi onwards there was a gradual tendency towards the conversion of
philosophy into an esoteric wisdom, remote from the orthodox profession
of faith.
The last of the Asiatic philosophers, and, next to Averroes, the most
notorious among the Latins, was Ibn Sinā or Avicenna (ob. 1036), who
passed through law and medicine to metaphysics, where he is said to have
owed his first understanding of Aristotle to Fārābī's books. Among other
things, he interested himself in the theory of universals, and formulated
distinctions between the genus ante res, in rebus, and post res. In the
main, however, he resembled the other Muslims in affecting the Christians
chiefly by his doctrine of the intellect. Before Avicenna's day the position
of the philosophers, in the special sense of followers of the Greek tradition,
had become decidedly ambiguous. Two other kinds of teachers had now
to be reckoned with, first the Sufis or mystics, secondly the orthodox
scholastics (as it is convenient to call them), who did not wholly contemn
philosophy but proposed to subordinate it strictly to the teaching of the
Koran. Upon the Sufis we can make only one observation, that they were
certainly touched by Neo-Platonistic influence. The other school, whose
aim might be loosely compared with Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum,
## p. 817 (#863) ############################################
Algazel, Averroes, Avencebrol
817
was represented first by Ashóarī, a contemporary of Fārābī, afterwards,
in the period between Avicenna and Averroes, by Ghazāli or Algazel
(ob. 1111). While the relation of Algazel's teaching to Islāmic orthodoxy
scarcely concerns us, there is a real significance for the later Western
scholasticism in his determined opposition to the professional philosophers.
As the author of the Destruction of the Philosophers (to which Averroes
afterwards replied with the Destruction of the Destruction), he not only
denounced as heretical certain specific doctrines, such as the eternity of
the world, but flatly refused to allow the independent status of philosophy.
Philosophy, he contended, could not be a mode of revelation; it could
not enunciate first principles at once explanatory of the origin of things
and compatible with orthodox beliefs. Reason could serve religion only
in the way of exposition, just as it might be of use to any special science,
or in the management of ordinary affairs.
Now this was the true battleground of philosophers and theologians
at Paris in the thirteenth century; and the character of the struggle was
predetermined much less by the old Latin antithesis of ratio and auctoritas
than by the defined antagonism between the school of Algazel and the
school of Averroes. Moreover, it was not the fear of Islām that worked
so profoundly upon the reasoning of Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, but
the fear of doctrines which Islām was on the verge of rejecting. For Aver-
roes in the West marked the decline of Muslim philosophy, already long
decadent in the East. He owes his fame, first to Jewish thinkers, who,
like the Christians and the Muslims, had their own problem of reconciling
philosophy with “ the book "; secondly to Latin universities, which both
accepted him as the supreme commentator on Aristotle and cherished, as
the most alluring of heresies, doctrines invented or renewed for the con-
fusion of Algazel's disciples. Averroes, therefore, is rightly studied in con-
nexion with Latin Averroism, to which we shall shortly return. As to the
Jews, by their active minds and roving habits they played an important part
as carriers of learning from place to place, but as philosophers they hardly
constitute a class distinct from the Arabs. The Fons Vitae of Avencebrol
(ob. 1058), a Neo-Platonist work in the Arabic style, translated by John
the Spaniard and Dominic Gundisalvi, was widely quoted by Christian
authors, not least by Duns Scotus, who perhaps took Avencebrol to be a
Christian, and openly adhered to his doctrine of matter. The other Jewish
name of high repute among the Latins was Moses ben Maymun (Maimo-
nides or Rabbi Moses), best known for his authorship of the Guide of the
Perplexed. He was contemporary with Averroes (outliving him by only six
years) and one of his warmest admirers. As may be seen in a treatise of
doubtful origin, the De Erroribus Philosophorum, the Latins came to
class his errors with those of Averroes, Algazel, and the rest of the Arabs? .
The stages in the development of Aristotelianism at Paris are marked
by some detinite dates. Precisely when the new books were first read in
1 Cf. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, Part 11, pp. 21-24.
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXIII.
52
## p. 818 (#864) ############################################
818
Aristotelianism and the University of Paris
public we do not know, but in 1210 a provincial council formally inter-
dicted public or private study of the libri de naturali philosophia, with
commentaries thereon; and in 1215 the papal legate, Robert de Courçon,
renewed the prohibition in the words, non legantur libri Aristotelis de
metaphysica et de naturali philosophia, nec summae de eisdem. It is doubtful
here whether the mention of metaphysics implies a difference between the
first and the second decree. The term metaphysica would be unfamiliar
before the diffusion of Aristotle's book, and the older usage of physica or
naturalis philosophia would cover many questions afterwards called meta-
physical. In 1231, after the dispersion of the university, Gregory IX
repeated the prohibition, but at the same time entrusted William of
Auxerre and two colleagues with the task of expurgating Aristotle for
use in the schools. Nothing came of this impossible project, and the
prohibition remained formally valid, to be renewed once more by Urban IV
in 1263. Meanwhile practice moved more rapidly than law. Outside Paris,
to judge from the example of Toulouse in 1229, free study of Aristotle
had always been possible. At Paris itself some regulations of 1252
mention only the De Anima in addition to the Logic, but in March 1255
the Faculty of Arts laid down a course of study which boldly included
the Physics, the Metaphysics, and practically all the translated works.
This defiance of papal authority provoked no reply until 1263. Even
then we may safely presume that the action of Urban IV was only pro-
visional; for now he was reviving on a grander scale the attempt of
Gregory IX to produce a critical version of Aristotle, invoking to his aid
the greatest of Christian commentators, St Thomas Aquinas, who just at
this time was encouraging William of Moerbeke to produce his new
translations.
The history of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century is, in one of
its aspects, the history of a political struggle in the University of Paris,
too intricate for analysis in this chapter. As a convenient simplification of
the facts, we may concentrate our attention upon the Order of Preachers,
a society which in its earlier phases was by no means inclined to champion
the cause of any Pagan philosopher. In libris gentilium et philosophorum
non studeant fratres. So says an ordinance of 1228, with the object of
confining the studies of the brethren to theology. The author of the
revolution which brought the Dominicans into the front rank of Aristo-
telians was the illustrious Albert of Cologne (ob. 1280), who taught at
Paris from 1245 to 1248, and was occupied for some forty years altogether
in the production of his monumental works. Except during his lifetime,
the fame of this great man has always been a little overshadowed by that
of his pupil Aquinas (ob. 1274), whose greater command of expository
method makes him easier of access. Rash indeed would it be to say that
Albert was the more remarkable of the two, but in the direction of
experimental science he went farther, and to him, as the pioneer, fell
the enterprise of making all parts of Aristotle intelligible to the Latins.
## p. 819 (#865) ############################################
Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Averroism
819
Impatient of the “brute animals” who attacked the use of philosophy and
blasphemed everything of which they were ignorant, he saw that the study
of Aristotle could not be prohibited, and already, perhaps, while teaching
at Paris, discerned the seeds of Averroism which he was afterwards (in
1256) invited by Alexander IV to refute.
Averroism it was again, not merely as a local phenomenon, but as the
climax of the whole Arabian interpretation of Aristotle, that moved
Aquinas to continue his master's work in his own deep and searching
exposition of the principal books. The task before him was one of un-
paralleled complexity, such as only a man of boundless courage, unfailing
candour, and exceptional powers of mind could have faced. Now for the
first time in the history of the Middle Ages, or indeed in the history of
the world, was it imperative to delimit the provinces of philosophy and
theology, and at the same time to vindicate the unity of truth. On the
one hand, St Thomas was perfectly convinced that no truth discoverable
by reason could be inconsistent with the Christian revelation; on the
other hand, he was equally assured that the truths of revelation were
accessible only to a mode of experience not commonly described as reason,
and inseparable from the history and authority of the Church. What he
had primarily to combat was not atheism, nor even any avowed heresy
in dogma, but the impudent sophism, borrowed by certain Christians
from the Muslims, that there can or must be two kinds of truth; so that,
when the voice of reason or philosophy conflicts with the voice of authority
and faith, we may legitimately hearken to both. Or if few quite professed
that absurdity, the alternative was to insinuate that reason would often
oblige us to believe one thing, were not its opposite enjoined on us by
faith.
Aquinas took a wide view of his problem. He did not restrict himself
to the Latin Averroists, against whom he wrote the De Unitate Intellectus
in 1270, but went back to the higher sources of the mischief. By one
of the most amazing accidents in history it had fallen to Aristotle, some
fifteen centuries after his death, to stand as the representative of human
reason. By another accident it was given to the Arabs to work out a
systematic interpretation, and then to hand it over to the Latins. Now
Aquinas, no less than Albert, was deeply interested in Aristotle, and not
in the least afraid of his opinions. He might even, in the peculiar circum-
stances of the time, have agreed with the Averroists that the general liberty
of speculation was summed up in the free study of Aristotle. It is ludi-
crous, however, to suppose that he took Aristotle to be infallible. Except
in the last decadence of scholasticism, the only people who ever did that
were the Averroists and the Muslims. For the most part St Thomas was
not occupied in proving the rightness or wrongness of Aristotle, but in
criticising the Arabian interpretation of him, relatively to such questions
as the eternity of the world, the individuality of the immortal intellect,
and the alleged subjection of the human will to planetary influences. Like
CH. XXIII.
52-2
## p. 820 (#866) ############################################
820
The merits and the limitations of Aquinas
a good Aristotelian, he perceived that in arguing contra Gentiles he must
conduct the discussion on a basis accepted by his opponents. There could
be no question of "authority”; for, as he says, mahumetistae et pugani non
conveniunt nobiscum in auctoritate alicuius Scripturae. . . unde necesse est ad
naturalem rationem recurrere, cui omnes assentire coguntur. Now by
“natural reason” the Muslims understood primarily, if not solely, the
philosophy of Aristotle; and from that philosophy they had extracted
inferences damaging to the Christian position; not indeed to the doctrines
of the Trinity and the Incarnation—for on these points Aristotle could
have nothing to say—but to the belief in moral responsibility and the
immortality of the soul. To St Thomas, therefore, the alternatives were
to reject the Muslim interpretation, or to prove that Aristotle himself
was wrong. He does not choose either course to the total exclusion of
the other, but to a large extent he argues that Averroes and Avicenna
had misrepresented the master of their allegiance.
Whether Aquinas proves his case to the satisfaction of modern critics
may be disputable, but he certainly marshals an array of arguments that
none of his contemporaries was likely to defeat. Along with his elucida-
tion of Aristotle he examines the still wider problem of the whole relation
of reason to faith; upholding in his own sense a duplex veritatis modus,
which yet avoids the duplicity of believing contradictory propositions on
different grounds, and is, in effect, a plea for the unity of truth. If, once
more, we may doubt whether the conditions of the age permitted him to
arrive at a final appreciation of all the difficulties, none can reasonably
doubt the candour of his intention, the subtlety of his intuitions, or the
astonishing range and lucidity of his mind. Similar merits and similar
inevitable deficiencies are revealed in his general understanding of Aris-
totle. He was no biologist, no physicist, no astronomer. He could not
discriminate between paths of science where Aristotle had gone hopelessly
astray,and other paths where he had advanced almost to the verge of modern
achievement. Like the commentators of all ages, not excluding our own,
he was strongest within the bounds of his own experience, and weakest
where his sympathy failed. To the last he was hampered by ignorance of
history. Often as he contested Neo-Platonist interpretations, he was far
from disengaging Aristotle from later accretions. He knew, for example
(with the help of William of Moerbeke), that the Liber de Causis, widely
received as Aristotelian, was in fact an excerpt from Proclus; and yet he
could make the almost staggering assertion that “Dionysius,” in contrast
to Augustine and others, fere ubique sequitur Aristotelem? . This, it is true,
he
says in an early work, and perhaps in later life he might have hesitated
to repeat it. But neither by Aquinas, nor by anyone else in that century,
was Aristotle fully divested of the Neo-Platonist garments in which the
I Summa contra Gentiles, 1, 2.
? Cf. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, Part 1, p. 43, note 2.
## p. 821 (#867) ############################################
Averroism and Siger of Brabant
821
course of history had clothed him. Yet after all these criticisms, to
which others might be added, it remains incontestable that every modern
student of Aristotle has much to learn from the exposition of Aquinas.
Averroism proper, as distinct from the general influence of the Arabs,
is not heard of before the second half of the century. Moreover, when
Albert wrote his De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroem in 1256, he
appears to be attacking a tendency rather than actual teachers at Paris.
Siger of Brabant is first mentioned in 1266, and the first official condem-
nation of Averroism occurs in 1270. Before that date, either in the
autumn of 1268 or in the spring of 1269, Aquinas returned from Italy
to Paris, where he remained until 1272. The resumption of a professorial
chair by a Dominican (for Aquinas had taught at Paris for some years
before 1260) was so unusual that we must attribute it to the manifold
difficulties in which the Order was involved. Among these were the
constant hostility of the seculars to the regulars, differences with the
Franciscans and the "Augustinian” theologians, and finally the emergence
of Averroism, a movement complicated by the attempt to involve the
general credit of Peripateticism with the errors of Siger of Brabant. St
Thomas, accordingly, had both to publish his De Unitate Intellectus as an
answer to Siger's De Anima Intellectiva, and to protect the freedom of
Aristotelian study against critics who still, perhaps, might appeal to
Urban's decree of 1263. Evidence to the same effect is furnished by a
work discovered and printed by Mandonnet, the De Quindecim Proble-
matibus of Albertus Magnus, composed in answer to a letter of enquiry
by Giles of Lessines. Of these fifteen problems the first thirteen are
identical with the propositions condemned at Paris (10 December 1270),
while the last two suggest an attempt to involve Aquinas in the down-
fall of the Averroists.
From a survey of the thirteen condemned propositions we gather that
four main questions were prominent, the unity of the intelligence in all
men, the eternity of the world, the freedom of the will, the knowledge
and providence of God. A more drastic reduction might leave only the
first of the four as of primary importance in 1270; for it seems that this
had spread beyond philosophical circles, in its practical bearing on moral
responsibility and personal salvation. While it is impossible here to
discuss so intricate a problem, or to compare the Averroist and Dominican
readings of the De Anima, it is necessary to remark that Averroes had
advanced beyond the position of Avicenna and his predecessors. The
others had removed from human conditions only the intellectus agens,
which might even be identified with God; but Averroes converted also
the intellectus possibilis into a "separate substance," and declared it to be
unus in omnibus hominibus? Opposed as he was to both these interpre-
tations of Aristotle, St Thomas was aware that even Catholic doctors had
identified the intellectus agens with God, in which case it would rightly
1 Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 11, 59 and 73.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 822 (#868) ############################################
822
Opposition to Thomism
be excluded from human personality. Averroes, however, was clearly
beyond the pale; for, since nothing in God can be merely potential, to
affirm the unity of the intellectus possibilis is to deny the individuality
of man.
Averroism was defeated, and Siger of Brabant, condemned again by
the Inquisition of France in October 1277, passed his last years in Italy,
as the prisoner of the Roman curia. There he perished, as the story goes,
by the hand of a half-insane assassin, and thereafter was honourably
translated to Dante's Paradiso. The subsequent fortunes of Averroism
we cannot pursue. More important for the moment was the renewed
attack on Aristotelianism in general, which gained a passing triumph in
1277.
part of our acquaintance with the school of Chartres, the most brilliant
example of the old cathedral-school, now about to be superseded by the
studium generale, or University. To say that he personally belonged to
this school would, however, be inaccurate. He spent some years there
and venerated its masters, but he learned also of Abelard, Robert of Melun,
Alberic of Rheims, and many others outside the precincts of Chartres; nor
is there anything in his works to prove his formal adherence to the
characteristic tenets of the school. What makes his testimony so invalu-
able is just his gift of intellectual detachment and his distaste for the fury
of the partisan. In politics, that is to say, in his estimate of the spiritual
and the temporal power, it is otherwise; for his hierarchical opinions are
definite and strong. Nor is he ever restrained by love of compromise from
expressing the frankest of judgments on controversies of the day, much
less from lively denunciation of Philistines and fools. Yet, as he passes
from one seat of learning to another, he combines an honest respect for
the teachers with the privilege of smiling at the school. Thus, for example,
does he return after many years to Mount St Geneviève, to see how his
friends are faring, and finds them still, as he says, at the same old
ques-
tions, with not one little propositiuncula annexed to the familiar stock in
trade. With the same aloofness, he admires Abelard, but laughs at his
theory of universals; he reveres Bernard, the senex Carnotensis, but keeps
clear of the Platonised ideas, and is aware that the master's hope of recon-
ciling Plato and Aristotle is vain.
With justice, then, did John of Salisbury profess himself an Academic;
CH. XXIII.
## p. 806 (#852) ############################################
806
John of Salisbury and philosophy
by which, it is well to add, he did not mean a Platonist. He knew that
the Sceptics had captured the Academy, and attributes the rise of Scep-
ticism to the Aristotelian criticism of Plato. He did not understand the
return of the Platonists to their ancient home, and when he names Plotinus,
Iamblichus, and Porphyry as the most distinguished of the Academics, he
betrays the
gaps in his knowledge of history. About his own position,
however, he is perfectly clear. What he professes is the “ Academic or
Sceptical Philosophy," as Hume called it, not the Platonism of Chalcidius
and Macrobius, or of his own contemporaries and friends. His Academ-
icism does not mean extravagant distrust of reason, but chiefly a spirit of
tolerant criticism, distaste for dogmatic obstinacy, and disinclination to
swear allegiance in verba magistri. Had his bent been for mathematics,
he might almost have anticipated the great saying of Pascal, that a man
should be three things, a good mathematician, a good sceptic, and a
humble follower of Jesus Christ.
Thanks largely to his cool and sceptical temper, we can readily learn
from John of Salisbury what an utter misconception of the Middle Ages
it is to confound the history of philosophy with the history of logic, or
to oppose philosophy to the life of religion. As is shewn by the very title
of his longest work, Policratici, sive de nugis Curialium et vestigiis Philoso-
phorum Libri VIII, the world is roughly divided for him into the foolish
and the wise. On the one side is the life of the courtier, a life devoted to
hunting and gambling, or to laughing at actors and buffoons; on the other
is the call to the higher life of the mind. The alternatives are plain and
mutually repellent; qui curialium ineptias induit, et philosophi vel boni
viri officium pollicetur, Hermaphroditus est'. All who respond to the
serious call are philosophers, and therefore John of Salisbury's friends.
And what is philosophy? Not the product of copia litterarum, but the
choice of an arduous way. In its ancient sense, philosophy, as he says,
pulsat ad ostium; and when the door of wisdom is opened, the soul is
illumined with the “light of things," and the name of philosophy vanishes
away. But that illumination is for the future. Philosophy in this world
is the viaticum of the few who content themselves with following a road
that leads to no worldly advantage. As to where and how the true road
is to be found, John himself is not doubtful. The philosopher, as Plato
had taught, is cultor Dei, and the end of all philosophy is the enlargement
of charity. But in this respect no Christian is inferior to Plato; the rule
of Christ surpasses the wisdom of antiquity; the vita claustralium outdoes
the practice of all the schools.
Philosophia quid est nisi fons, via, duxque salutis,
Lux animae, vitae regula, grata quies?
So he asks in the Entheticus, and adds in the sad doggerel of that discur-
sive poem:
Non valet absque fide sincere philosophari?
1 Policraticus, v, 10.
? Entheticus, 277-278 and 319.
## p. 807 (#853) ############################################
John and the controversy about Universals
807
Armed with this firm conviction, John goes forth to the defence and
criticism of logic. By logic he understands, in the first instance, very much
what we found in Hugh of St Victor. He notes the same quality of sermo
and ratio as translations of logos, and insists, like Hugh, on the close alli-
ance of logic with eloquence and grammar; not indeed because he deems
logic a science of words, but because he has learned from Bernard of
Chartres and William of Conches to believe in humane education as the
first safeguard against arid disputes. In his championship of logic he has,
in fact, to steer a difficult course between the scurrilous mockers, personified
under the pseudonym of Cornificius, and the so-called puri philosophi', who
identify philosophy with logic and disdain every other branch of know-
ledge. No modern critic of the Middle Ages has exposed so remorselessly
the ipeptitude of wrangling about trifles, the emptiness of logic divorced
from natural and moral science. As an introduction to further studies
logic is excellent; in isolation it is exsanguis et sterilis? The teachers
grow old in the exercises of boys; the boys (hesterni pueri, magistri
hodierni) escape to-day from the rod, and to-morrow assume the gown
and mount the cathedra. The world is crowded with half-educated
wiseacres, the schools with Peripatetics whose Peripateticism consists only
in walking about.
After these caustic criticisms it is no surprise to find that John of
Salisbury puts the whole controversy about universals into its proper
and subordinate place. Far from being the sum of philosophy, this
fashionable topic of the schools serves chiefly to provoke the emulous
ingenuity of lecturers, no one of whom is content to agree with his
predecessors or to remain within the bounds proposed by Boethius.
John's own solution and the many varieties of Realism we have no space
to examine. His main anxiety is to prevent the reduction of any part of
philosophy to a conflict of words. For this reason he dislikes any verbalist
theory of universals, and speaks with some contempt of Roscelin and
Abelard. His distinction between the two is that Roscelin had talked of
voces, Abelard of sermones“, a term not adequately explained in the
Metalogicus, but further illustrated by a parallel passage in the Policra-
ticus, where an evident allusion to Roscelin is followed by a mention of
those qui indifferenter nomina pro rebus vel res pro nominibus posuerunt'.
If, then, sermones are not simply voces but nomina, it would seem that
Abelard rather than Roscelin was the true nominalist. Whatever the
exact import of Abelard's view, John declines to take it seriously, but
offers to excuse its author on the ground that an elementary book like the
Categories had perhaps to be taught in an elementary manner®. In no case
is there room for the opinion that Abelard was a conceptualist. That
opinion (which arose partly from the wrong attribution to Abelard of a
treatise De Generibus et Speciebus) is sufficiently refuted by John himself,
i Metalogicus, 11, 6. 2 Ib. 11, 20.
3 16. 1, 25.
4 1b. II, 17.
6 Policraticus, vii, 12. 6 Metalogicus, ii, 1.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 808 (#854) ############################################
808
The new Aristotelian logic
>
when he passes immediately from Roscelin and Abelard to a third non-
realist theory, in which the universal is called a notio or intellectus et
simplex animi conceptio. Here, if anywhere, we must look for Concep-
tualism, and not in the doctine of Abelard.
From John of Salisbury, lastly, we receive our first clear impression of
the “new logic," already known in some measure to his senior contempor-
aries, Otto of Freising, Thierry of Chartres, and Adam du Petit Pont.
The translation of the Organon by James of Venice is assigned to the
year 1128, some thirty years before the Metalogicus was written; but John
himself used another version, probably by Henry Aristippus of Catania,
distinguished also as a translator of Plato. The effect of recovering the
Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistici Elenchi may be considered in two
relations, to the general conception of logic and to the reputation of
Aristotle. Hitherto, as we have often had occasion to remark, logic, in
the character of dialectic, had hovered on the borderland between reason-
ing and discourse, while Aristotle had been simply the great dialectician.
But now it began to be understood that the traditional Aristotelian books
were but elementary prefaces to the dialectical treatises, and that the
whole of dialectic must fall into a minor position, as compared with the
ars demonstrandi or method of science. “The philosopher," says John of
Salisbury, “who uses demonstration has his business with truth, the dia-
lectician with opinion, the sophist with the bare appearance of probability. "ı
The Posterior Analytics, evidently, were found very difficult, and John
speaks of them with the most cautious respect. The art of demonstration,
he says, has fallen into almost complete disuse. It survives only in mathe-
matics, especially in geometry; sed et huius disciplinae non est celebris usus
apud nos, nisi forte in tractu Ibero vel confinio Africae? Mathematics, in
other words, were studied only by the Arabs or their neighbours.
The revolution in logic, we should gather from John of Salisbury,
magnified the reputation of Aristotle without radically altering its
character. As urbs stands for Rome and poeta for Virgil, so the name of
philosophus is reserved by common consent for Aristotle'. On the authority
of Burgundio of Pisa, John adds in another place that Aristotle's pre-
scriptive right to the name was based on his skill in demonstration, the
art most highly esteemed by the Peripatetics*. It would be wrong, how-
ever, to infer from this anticipation of the title so freely employed in the
thirteenth century that Aristotle had already usurped the throne of Plato.
John's personal estimate of “the philosopher” reflects his attitude towards
logic in general. Refusing to treat any utterance of Aristotle's as sacro-
sanctum, he accuses him (with how much knowledge? ) of many errors in
natural and moral philosophys. Even in logic he does not count him in-
fallible, but notes his deficiencies, and believes it possible for modern
teachers to improve on his handling of some parts of the subject. John,
1 Metalogicus, 11, 5
3 Policraticus, vii, 6.
4 Metalogicus, iv, 7.
5 lb. iv, 27.
2 lb, iv, 6.
## p. 809 (#855) ############################################
The School of Chartres. Gilbert de la Porrée
809
indeed, is at all times a champion of the moderni. He sympathises with
Abelard's difficulty in getting a hearing for any doctrine not sanctioned
by antiquity, and insists that respect for old authors should not hamper
the critical exercise of reason. On the other hand, he does maintain that
Aristotle is peerless in logic, and defends the study of the Categories and
the Sophistici Elenchi against unintelligent critics, among whom he men-
tions some followers of Robert of Melun! On the whole, Aristotle
remains where he was, the prince of logicians, without as yet any claim to
wider dominion. Down to the end of the twelfth century or even later,
none but the “pure philosophers” were disposed to exalt the pupil above
the master. The rest of the world would have endorsed the verdict of the
Policraticus, where John describes Plato, with all deference to the Aris-
totelians, as totius philosophiae princeps? .
The Platonism for which the school of Chartres was conspicuous meant,
apparently, not much more than the traditional Platonism of the Timaeus,
with its sundry exponents. The Phaedo and the Meno, which had been
translated by Henry Aristippus of Catania (ob. 1162), produced no
immediate effect on the interpretation of Plato. The Chartres account of
universals, for example, identified them with the Platonic ideas, and
understood idea in the sense of exemplar aeternum, a sense traditional in
the Latin interpretation of the Timaeus, but certainly not derived from
the Phaedo. And again, when followers of Bernard of Chartres, such as
William of Conches, strayed on to dangerous theological ground, they
were inclined to imitate Abelard in Platonising the Trinity and in
identifying the Holy Spirit with the anima mundi. Perhaps it was the
reminiscence of Abelard, as well as the widespread influence of Chartres,
that caused fresh anxiety to ecclesiastical authority. The most famous
disturbance connected with any scholar of Chartres was the trial of Gilbert
de la Porrée (ob. 1154), the learned and venerable Bishop of Poitiers, him-
self sufficiently distinguished to rank as the founder of a school. The story
of the trial, which took place at Rheims in 1148, is related by Otto of
Freising and by John of Salisbury in his Historia Pontificalis. John was
present throughout the proceedings, as were also Peter the Lombard,
Robert of Melun, and other prominent divines, some to support St Bernard
(once more the chief prosecutor), others to aid in the defence of the bishop.
On this occasion Bernard fell short of victory. His followers refused to
confess the defeat, but Gilbert returned safely to his diocese and was
immune from all further attacks.
Apart from this political incident, the fame of Gilbert rests chiefly
on his exposition of the theology of Boethius, and on his Liber de Sex
Principiis, a logical text-book more highly esteemed than any other com-
posed in the Middle Ages. For the most part Gilbert sticks to the “old
logic,” though there is some evidence of his acquaintance with the “new. ”
He refers in one place to the Analytics, and his commentary on the De
1 Metalogicus, iv, 24.
2 Policraticus, 1, 6.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 810 (#856) ############################################
810
Intellectual progress in the twelfth century
Trinitate of Boethius perhaps implies more knowledge of Aristotle than
could well be derived from the more elementary treatises. His treatment
of time and space has even been thought to involve some reference to the
Physics, but that is improbable. So again, his theory of universals, which
he called formae nativae, does not agree with the ordinary Platonism. A
forma nativa is an exemplum inherent in created things, related to the
exemplar in the Creator's mind as eidos to idea'. The origin of such a view
might well be Aristotelian, but the evidence is not clear.
Passing over with regret many other names associated more or less
closely with the teaching of Chartres, we have space only to raise the
general question, whether in the course of the twelfth century much ad-
vance was made towards a wider conception of philosophical problems. A
certain restlessness and a certain feeling of expansion, greatly assisted by
the enlargement of logic, there undoubtedly is. At the beginning of the
century Adelard of Bath was wandering from country to country and realising
the advantage of visiting different schools. In Spain he learnt enough
Arabic to make a translation of Euclid, and to acquire some notion of
the uses of mathematics for the purposes of scientific measurement. His
general outlook, however, is reminiscent of what John of Salisbury im-
putes to Bernard of Chartres. At the close of the same century, Alan of
Lille (Alanus de Insulis), who survived till 1203, is far from suspecting
the immediate advent of a great intellectual revolution. He deserves to
be remembered, if only for his saying: sed quia auctoritas cereum habet
nasum, id est, in diversum potest flecti, rationibus roborandum est. In his
own age he won the title of doctor universalis by his manifold learning;
in modern times his taste for a rigid, quasi-mathematical method has
suggested a comparison with Spinoza. Yet his appetite for novelty was
not striking. The first of the Latins to cite the Liber de Causis, he is but
little affected by the peculiar qualities of that work. The new logic, far
from arousing his enthusiasm, seems rather to have persuaded him that
Aristotle loved to wrap himself in majestic obscurity. Thus, without dis-
paraging his work, which deserves a much fuller account, we may fairly
infer from his case that in the last hours of the twelfth century it was
possible for a man of the highest reputation to enjoy no premonition of
the great movement of thought which the coming century was immediately
to witness.
If only by weight of materials, the thirteenth century stands apart
from those through which we have rapidly travelled. The briefest cata-
logue of names such as Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas
Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, is enough to banish
the thought of any detailed analysis. The only practicable course will be
to sketch the line of development and the general character of the problems
with which these and other authors, only less famous, were engaged.
Nearly eight centuries had passed since Boethius presented Aristotle to
1 John of Salisbury, Metalogicus, 11, 17.
2 MPL, cox, 333.
## p. 811 (#857) ############################################
The new Aristotle at Paris. The translations
811
the Latins, but during the whole of that period less had happened to dis-
turb the intellectual atmosphere than was now to be accomplished in a
single generation by the Aristotelian invasion of Paris. Customary and
right as it is to place the name of Aristotle in the foreground, it would
be idle to pretend that the mere recovery of his writings was enough to ac-
count for all the subsequent events. Without the organisation of studies
in the new universities, and without the intervention of the Friars in
educational and ecclesiastical politics, the story of the thirteenth century
must have been very different. And again, it is difficult to exaggerate
the importance of another fact, the conjunction of the new Aristotle with
an interpretation of him developed by a series of Muslim philosophers,
whose object had not been to keep on terms with Christian orthodoxy,
but to avoid open collision with the Koran. The fragments of Arabian
mathematics and medicine which had drifted from time to time into the
Latin world had brought no anticipation of the tumult immediately
aroused by the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes. The roughly es-
tablished modus vivendi with Pagan philosophy was of no avail when
there suddenly appeared a new Aristotle, the author of a vast and com-
prehensive system, in which were contained, if the Muslims could be
trusted, many doctrines incompatible with the Christian position. And
most of this was brought about by the enterprise of a Christian, Arch-
bishop Raymond of Toledo, who had instituted, in the second quarter of
the twelfth century, a college of translators under the supervision of
Dominic Gundisalvi, himself the author of a De Divisione Philosophiae
and other philosophical works.
The unparalleled importance of translations in the Middle Ages was
not diminished by the prevalence of a single literary language among the
peoples of the West. Absence of linguistic barriers between the scholars
of different European countries may even have helped to strengthen the
frontiers dividing the larger units of culture denoted as the Arabs, the
Latins, and the Greeks. We cannot, however, pursue that complicated
question, but must be content to glance at the golden age of translators,
which began early in the twelfth century and lasted about a hundred and
fifty years. Visits of Western scholars to Byzantium had produced the
translations of the Organon and of John of Damascus; another centre
was the court of Palermo, where Greek and Arabic learning were united;
but the widest diffusion of Muslim knowledge came from Toledo, and it
is necessary to enquire how far the Latin Aristotelianism was affected by
the mediation of the Arabic language. The story, once lightly bandied
about, that the medieval Aristotle was only a Latin parody of an Arabic
version of a Syrian translation of a Greek original is little more than a
fable. It is true that the Muslims were first introduced to Aristotle by
Syrians, chiefly Nestorian Christians; it is true also that Arabic Aristote-
lianism was coloured to the last by the commentators, such as Alexander
of Aphrodisias, who had influenced the Syrians. But long before there was
CH. XXIII.
## p. 812 (#858) ############################################
812
Translations from Greek and from Arabic
any question of extensive Muslim influence on the Latins, direct trans-
lations of Aristotle from Greek into Arabic had been made in abundance.
The name of "philosophers,” in the Arabic transcription of the word, was
especially applied to those who had studied Greek originals; and among
these “philosophers” were the whole series of writers, beginning with Kindi
in the ninth century, whose names we encounter in the works of the Latin
schoolmen. Strange to say, the most famous of all (at least in Latin esti-
mation), Ibn Rushd or Averroes (ob. 1198), was an exception to the rule.
For it is said that he never thought it worth while to learn Greek. If
that be so, we must suppose that he saw no reason, after three centuries
of Aristotelian scholarship, to doubt the adequacy of the Arabic trans-
lations. It was left for his Latin critics to entertain that doubt.
While the relation of the Latins to the Arabs is, at first sight, analo-
gous to that of the Arabs to the Syrians, further scrutiny of the facts
does not strengthen the analogy. There never was a time when the Latins
depended entirely on translations from the Arabic; there never was a
time when the Muslim inferences from Aristotle were not disputed and
opposed; least of all was there a time when Christians could imitate
Muslims in taking Aristotle as an infallible authority. To adopt that
attitude was, in fact, to be an Averroist; and Averroism, as we shall see,
was a movement destructive of all that Christian philosophers were striving
to establish.
Now that the earlier researches of Jourdain have been supplemented
by Grabmann and other recent scholars, it is possible to speak with some
confidence about the translations of Aristotle used by the Latins. No
simple generalisation can be accurate, for the case of each of Aristotle's
works has to be separately considered. Yet on the whole it is safe to
maintain that translations from the Greek relieved the schoolmen of
undue dependence on the Arabs, and enabled them, thus far at least, to
form an independent judgment on the meaning of Aristotle. To illustrate
the facts from a few of the more important works, we find that the earliest
version of the Metaphysics (containing only Books I-III and a small part
of iv) came to Paris from Byzantium before 1210. Next to arrive (ap-
parently before 1217) was a translation from the Arabic ascribed to
Gerard of Cremona. This, too, was imperfect, for it omitted altogether
Books K, M, and N, and mixed up the first book with the second. With
this, however, the Latins had to content themselves until after 1260, when
a Graeco-Latin version of the first twelve books, probably by William of
Moerbeke, was put into circulation. Upon these twelve books St Thomas
wrote his commentary, the last two being still untranslated when he saw
a Greek manuscript of the whole fourteen in 1270. The history of the
Nicomachean Ethics is rather similar: first a Graeco-Latin version of
three books, disguised as four; then, in 1240, a paraphrase from the
Arabic by Herman the German ; lastly a full translation from the
Greek, often explicitly attributed to Robert Grosseteste (ob. 1253), but
## p. 813 (#859) ############################################
Character of medieval translations. Roger Bacon 813
more probably, in Grabmann's opinion, by William of Moerbeke. Both
the Physics and the De Anima were known first in Graeco-Latin versions,
while the Politics, a book neglected by the Arabs, was derived only from
the Greek. Evidently, then, it would be less than a half-truth to say that
the Latins depended on second-hand translations for access to those works
of Aristotle which most deeply affected their thought. It remains to ask
whether the quality of the translations was such as to debar them from
a sound understanding of the text.
To claim distinction of style for the medieval translations would
indeed be courageous. Their rudeness, however, was perfectly deliberate.
It was not due to inability to write Latin, but to a frank mistrust of
elegance where the sole object was to get an exact reproduction of the
original. This they imagined they would best secure by simply replacing,
so far as possible, every Greek word by its Latin equivalent. For reasons
then potent, but now no longer operative, they demanded the letter
rather than the spirit; not a transformation of idiom into idiom, but
a raw and formless text. The task of the translators may have been
wrongly conceived, but in its way it was faithfully done. The belief, still
extant in some quarters, that the medieval understanding of Aristotle
was hopelessly vitiated by faulty translations is unsupported by the facts.
The prime author of this libel was Roger Bacon, whose bitter denuncia-
tions, often repeated as oracles, were in truth the product of ignorance
and spleen. Bacon's judgments on the translation and study of Aristotle
range over a quarter of a century, from about 1266 to 1292. Starting
from the excellent principle that a translator requires both a knowledge
of the languages and an understanding of the sciences concerned, he re-
peatedly declares that only Boethius possessed the first qualification,
only Robert Grosseteste the second. And here at once we begin to sus-
pect him. For Grosseteste's scientific attainments, as Bacon knew, were
in mathematics and optics, neither of which would have helped him in
the least to understand the greater part of Aristotle.
The rest of the translators, Bacon continues, were ignorant of science,
of Greek, and even of Latin. The result of their labours was erroneous
and unintelligible; so great, indeed, was the consequent misapprehension
of Aristotle that it would have been better for all his works to be burnt.
In the Opus Tertium (cap.
25), composed not later than 1268, Bacon had
not yet heard of William of Moerbeke, but in the later Compendium Studii
Philosophiae he attacks him, under the name of William the Fleming,
with peculiar venom, and thinks him no better than Gerard of Cremona,
Herman, or Michael the Scot (the three chief translators from the
Arabic), or than any of the pretended experts in Greek. William of
Moerbeke (ob. 1286), Archbishop of Corinth during the last years of his
life, was actually the most important of the translators, if only because
so much of his work was instigated by Thomas Aquinas, when both were
attached to the court of Urban IV. His dated works, which include
CH. XXIII.
## p. 814 (#860) ############################################
814
The weaknesses of Bacon. Muslim influence
translations of Proclus, Simplicius, Galen, and Hippocrates, cover the
period from 1260 to 1280. As it happens, only one of his Aristotelian
translations (the De Partibus Animalium) is dated, and there is also some
uncertainty how far he made use of earlier versions. We know, however,
that he was the first translator in that age of the Politics, and we know
that a scholar of Susemihl's rank thought it worth while to print this
translation with his own edition of the text. Bacon's judgment on
William of Moerbeke has, in fact, no more value than a spiteful review
in a modern periodical of a book which the reviewer has omitted to read.
Not even on sheer questions of fact can Bacon be trusted. He invents,
for example, an intimacy between Gerard of Cremona and Herman the
German, though one of them was about eighty-five years senior to the
other. It is more than doubtful, too, if he is accurate in his account of
Robert Grosseteste, one of the very few among his contemporaries whom
he deigned to admire. Depreciation of other men was a passion with him,
almost a disease. He was out of sympathy with the whole Aristotelian
movement, and out of humour with all the world. As to the contemporary
interpretation of Aristotle, his verdict is yet more ludicrous than his con-
tempt for the translations. With all the disadvantages from which they
inevitably suffered, Albertus Magnus and his still more famous pupil were
two of the greatest Aristotelians the world has yet seen. Bacon himself
was incompetent to judge them, but he resented the intellectual dictator-
ship, as he thought it, of Albert, and attacked him with such animosity
that the great Dominican was moved at last to administer a weighty
rebuke. To Bacon, at least, he is thought to be referring, when he speaks
of those who seek a solace for their own indolence by looking only for
objects to attack; who resemble the humor fellis that spreads through a
body, by provoking all other students to bitterness and forbidding them
in dulcedine societatis quaerere veritatem'. As a critic of others Bacon well
deserves the rebuke; it is fortunate that, as an original thinker, he still
can deserve our respect.
The comparative freedom of the Latins in the matter of translations
by no means released them from conflict with the Muslim interpretation
of Aristotle. From the first, apparently, the trouble caused by the new
material was aggravated by the use of certain commenta, which were in-
cluded in the prohibition of Aristotle at Paris in 1210. Whether the
reference was to Avicenna or to Averroes, it is certain that the entire
history of Aristotelianism at Paris is bound up with the claim of the
Arabs to be the authentic exponents. Some indication, therefore, however
slight and meagre, must be given of the character and position of philo-
sophy in Islām. Why there should ever have been room for intellectual
complications in that system is much less obvious than in the case of the
Christian Church. The unitarian God of Mahomet could have a Prophet
but not a Son. He dwelt apart from His creatures, neither incarnate nor
1 Cf. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, Part 1, p. 246.
## p. 815 (#861) ############################################
Character of Muslim philosophy
815
immanent, a lonely presence in the desert which no man could cross. Such
a creed might have continued to satisfy the Arabs of the peninsula, and,
if Islām had remained in that primitive condition, it would have made
no impression on the world. As soon, however, as it came into contact
with Syrian, Persian, and Byzantine civilisation, it had to choose between
adapting itself to a higher order of ideas and perishing altogether. Edu-
cated minds, when they began to reflect on the message of the Prophet,
were not slow to discover in the Koran and its contents sufficient material
for philosophic doubt. Was the sacred book itself created, or co-eternal
with the Creator? Did not the Word or Wisdom of God resemble the
Nous of the philosophers or the Logos of the Christians? Had God
eternal attributes, or would their existence be incompatible with His
absolute unity? Could the freedom of man be maintained against the
Divine Omniscience?
The first debates on these topics date from early times, even before
John of Damascus, as an official at the court of the Umayyads, provided
a curious link between Christian and Muslim thought. The great age,
however, both of translations and of philosophy began with the Abbasids
and the founding of Baghdad, where the patronage of Nestorian physicians
by Manşūr and Ma'mūn led to the institution of a school of medicine and
philosophy. The sect of the Mu´tazilites (once fanatical defenders of the
unity of God) now became prominent in speculation, and from their ranks
arose Kindī (ob. c. 873), the father of a notable line of philosophers, and
himself almost the only one of them who was an Arab by race. In him
we observe already the main characteristics which persisted down to
Averroes, the last of the line. The predominance of Aristotle had been
established from the first. From the first, too, the interpretation of
Aristotle had borne the stamp of Neo-Platonism. Perhaps the most sur-
prising example of this is the general reception of the Theology of Ari-
stotle as a genuine work. Actually an abridgment of Enneads iv-vi, it
was accepted as Aristotelian by Kindī, Fārābi, and many others, who must,
as it seems to us, have been blind to the enormous gulf between the minds
of Aristotle and Plotinus. Or were they, after all, so blind as we think?
Plotinus himself might have dissented. The interpretation of Aristotle
has always been determined by the interests and the methods of criticism
belonging to some particular age. It is a question of emphasis, of the
relative appreciation of his various works, of the special points selected
for discussion. All ages have recognised the great logician, but what a
vast difference it makes whether you take Aristotle as primarily an
astronomer, a theologian, a political thinker, or a biologist.
The Arabs, beginning with Kindī, fastened especially upon the theory
of the intellect in the De Anima. There, in a few brief and difficult
statements, they found the origin of all the disputes about the intellectus
agens and the intellectus possibilis, with other complications too technical
to mention. Here too was the most patent opportunity for fusing together
CH. XXIII.
## p. 816 (#862) ############################################
816
Fārābi and Avicenna
Platonist and Aristotelian doctrines. For Aristotle had certainly hinted
that mind or spirit in its highest manifestations might be independent of
bodily organs, perpetually active, immortal. Its energy was not a form
of motion, and therefore not inseparably linked with time. How, then,
could such an activity belong, like other psychical functions, to the life
of the individual? From this question it was but a short step to the
identification of the intellectus agens with the nous of Plotinus, understood
as the manifestation of God. The wisdom of man thus becomes a divine
illumination, undefiled and imperishable, indifferent to the accident of
death. Such, in roughest expression, was the line of thought along which
the Arabs advanced towards the denial of personal immortality, and
thus to conflict with the Catholic faith.
In the opinion of many Arabic writers and scholars, the most original
of the Muslim thinkers was Fārābi (ob. 950), who in the course of his life
is heard of in Egypt, at Damascus, and at Baghdad. Especially famous
for his commentaries on the Organon, with which the Arabs associated
(not without reason) the Rhetoric and the Poetics, he wrote also on almost
every part of Aristotle's system, on the Laws of Plato, on mathematics
and music. Though his view of the intellectus agens was similar in principle
to Kindi's, he is said to have regarded Aristotle's doctrine as a proof of
the immortality of the soul. And here we may note that, down to Fārābi's
time, there was no perceptible breach between the philosophers and
orthodox Islām. Plato and Aristotle were welcomed at first as a kind of
second revelation, harmonious with the official revelation of the Koran.
Yet the connexion of philosophy with sectarianism was early; the Shi'ites
were more given to speculation than the Sunnīs, and from the time of
Fārābi onwards there was a gradual tendency towards the conversion of
philosophy into an esoteric wisdom, remote from the orthodox profession
of faith.
The last of the Asiatic philosophers, and, next to Averroes, the most
notorious among the Latins, was Ibn Sinā or Avicenna (ob. 1036), who
passed through law and medicine to metaphysics, where he is said to have
owed his first understanding of Aristotle to Fārābī's books. Among other
things, he interested himself in the theory of universals, and formulated
distinctions between the genus ante res, in rebus, and post res. In the
main, however, he resembled the other Muslims in affecting the Christians
chiefly by his doctrine of the intellect. Before Avicenna's day the position
of the philosophers, in the special sense of followers of the Greek tradition,
had become decidedly ambiguous. Two other kinds of teachers had now
to be reckoned with, first the Sufis or mystics, secondly the orthodox
scholastics (as it is convenient to call them), who did not wholly contemn
philosophy but proposed to subordinate it strictly to the teaching of the
Koran. Upon the Sufis we can make only one observation, that they were
certainly touched by Neo-Platonistic influence. The other school, whose
aim might be loosely compared with Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum,
## p. 817 (#863) ############################################
Algazel, Averroes, Avencebrol
817
was represented first by Ashóarī, a contemporary of Fārābī, afterwards,
in the period between Avicenna and Averroes, by Ghazāli or Algazel
(ob. 1111). While the relation of Algazel's teaching to Islāmic orthodoxy
scarcely concerns us, there is a real significance for the later Western
scholasticism in his determined opposition to the professional philosophers.
As the author of the Destruction of the Philosophers (to which Averroes
afterwards replied with the Destruction of the Destruction), he not only
denounced as heretical certain specific doctrines, such as the eternity of
the world, but flatly refused to allow the independent status of philosophy.
Philosophy, he contended, could not be a mode of revelation; it could
not enunciate first principles at once explanatory of the origin of things
and compatible with orthodox beliefs. Reason could serve religion only
in the way of exposition, just as it might be of use to any special science,
or in the management of ordinary affairs.
Now this was the true battleground of philosophers and theologians
at Paris in the thirteenth century; and the character of the struggle was
predetermined much less by the old Latin antithesis of ratio and auctoritas
than by the defined antagonism between the school of Algazel and the
school of Averroes. Moreover, it was not the fear of Islām that worked
so profoundly upon the reasoning of Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, but
the fear of doctrines which Islām was on the verge of rejecting. For Aver-
roes in the West marked the decline of Muslim philosophy, already long
decadent in the East. He owes his fame, first to Jewish thinkers, who,
like the Christians and the Muslims, had their own problem of reconciling
philosophy with “ the book "; secondly to Latin universities, which both
accepted him as the supreme commentator on Aristotle and cherished, as
the most alluring of heresies, doctrines invented or renewed for the con-
fusion of Algazel's disciples. Averroes, therefore, is rightly studied in con-
nexion with Latin Averroism, to which we shall shortly return. As to the
Jews, by their active minds and roving habits they played an important part
as carriers of learning from place to place, but as philosophers they hardly
constitute a class distinct from the Arabs. The Fons Vitae of Avencebrol
(ob. 1058), a Neo-Platonist work in the Arabic style, translated by John
the Spaniard and Dominic Gundisalvi, was widely quoted by Christian
authors, not least by Duns Scotus, who perhaps took Avencebrol to be a
Christian, and openly adhered to his doctrine of matter. The other Jewish
name of high repute among the Latins was Moses ben Maymun (Maimo-
nides or Rabbi Moses), best known for his authorship of the Guide of the
Perplexed. He was contemporary with Averroes (outliving him by only six
years) and one of his warmest admirers. As may be seen in a treatise of
doubtful origin, the De Erroribus Philosophorum, the Latins came to
class his errors with those of Averroes, Algazel, and the rest of the Arabs? .
The stages in the development of Aristotelianism at Paris are marked
by some detinite dates. Precisely when the new books were first read in
1 Cf. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, Part 11, pp. 21-24.
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XXIII.
52
## p. 818 (#864) ############################################
818
Aristotelianism and the University of Paris
public we do not know, but in 1210 a provincial council formally inter-
dicted public or private study of the libri de naturali philosophia, with
commentaries thereon; and in 1215 the papal legate, Robert de Courçon,
renewed the prohibition in the words, non legantur libri Aristotelis de
metaphysica et de naturali philosophia, nec summae de eisdem. It is doubtful
here whether the mention of metaphysics implies a difference between the
first and the second decree. The term metaphysica would be unfamiliar
before the diffusion of Aristotle's book, and the older usage of physica or
naturalis philosophia would cover many questions afterwards called meta-
physical. In 1231, after the dispersion of the university, Gregory IX
repeated the prohibition, but at the same time entrusted William of
Auxerre and two colleagues with the task of expurgating Aristotle for
use in the schools. Nothing came of this impossible project, and the
prohibition remained formally valid, to be renewed once more by Urban IV
in 1263. Meanwhile practice moved more rapidly than law. Outside Paris,
to judge from the example of Toulouse in 1229, free study of Aristotle
had always been possible. At Paris itself some regulations of 1252
mention only the De Anima in addition to the Logic, but in March 1255
the Faculty of Arts laid down a course of study which boldly included
the Physics, the Metaphysics, and practically all the translated works.
This defiance of papal authority provoked no reply until 1263. Even
then we may safely presume that the action of Urban IV was only pro-
visional; for now he was reviving on a grander scale the attempt of
Gregory IX to produce a critical version of Aristotle, invoking to his aid
the greatest of Christian commentators, St Thomas Aquinas, who just at
this time was encouraging William of Moerbeke to produce his new
translations.
The history of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century is, in one of
its aspects, the history of a political struggle in the University of Paris,
too intricate for analysis in this chapter. As a convenient simplification of
the facts, we may concentrate our attention upon the Order of Preachers,
a society which in its earlier phases was by no means inclined to champion
the cause of any Pagan philosopher. In libris gentilium et philosophorum
non studeant fratres. So says an ordinance of 1228, with the object of
confining the studies of the brethren to theology. The author of the
revolution which brought the Dominicans into the front rank of Aristo-
telians was the illustrious Albert of Cologne (ob. 1280), who taught at
Paris from 1245 to 1248, and was occupied for some forty years altogether
in the production of his monumental works. Except during his lifetime,
the fame of this great man has always been a little overshadowed by that
of his pupil Aquinas (ob. 1274), whose greater command of expository
method makes him easier of access. Rash indeed would it be to say that
Albert was the more remarkable of the two, but in the direction of
experimental science he went farther, and to him, as the pioneer, fell
the enterprise of making all parts of Aristotle intelligible to the Latins.
## p. 819 (#865) ############################################
Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Averroism
819
Impatient of the “brute animals” who attacked the use of philosophy and
blasphemed everything of which they were ignorant, he saw that the study
of Aristotle could not be prohibited, and already, perhaps, while teaching
at Paris, discerned the seeds of Averroism which he was afterwards (in
1256) invited by Alexander IV to refute.
Averroism it was again, not merely as a local phenomenon, but as the
climax of the whole Arabian interpretation of Aristotle, that moved
Aquinas to continue his master's work in his own deep and searching
exposition of the principal books. The task before him was one of un-
paralleled complexity, such as only a man of boundless courage, unfailing
candour, and exceptional powers of mind could have faced. Now for the
first time in the history of the Middle Ages, or indeed in the history of
the world, was it imperative to delimit the provinces of philosophy and
theology, and at the same time to vindicate the unity of truth. On the
one hand, St Thomas was perfectly convinced that no truth discoverable
by reason could be inconsistent with the Christian revelation; on the
other hand, he was equally assured that the truths of revelation were
accessible only to a mode of experience not commonly described as reason,
and inseparable from the history and authority of the Church. What he
had primarily to combat was not atheism, nor even any avowed heresy
in dogma, but the impudent sophism, borrowed by certain Christians
from the Muslims, that there can or must be two kinds of truth; so that,
when the voice of reason or philosophy conflicts with the voice of authority
and faith, we may legitimately hearken to both. Or if few quite professed
that absurdity, the alternative was to insinuate that reason would often
oblige us to believe one thing, were not its opposite enjoined on us by
faith.
Aquinas took a wide view of his problem. He did not restrict himself
to the Latin Averroists, against whom he wrote the De Unitate Intellectus
in 1270, but went back to the higher sources of the mischief. By one
of the most amazing accidents in history it had fallen to Aristotle, some
fifteen centuries after his death, to stand as the representative of human
reason. By another accident it was given to the Arabs to work out a
systematic interpretation, and then to hand it over to the Latins. Now
Aquinas, no less than Albert, was deeply interested in Aristotle, and not
in the least afraid of his opinions. He might even, in the peculiar circum-
stances of the time, have agreed with the Averroists that the general liberty
of speculation was summed up in the free study of Aristotle. It is ludi-
crous, however, to suppose that he took Aristotle to be infallible. Except
in the last decadence of scholasticism, the only people who ever did that
were the Averroists and the Muslims. For the most part St Thomas was
not occupied in proving the rightness or wrongness of Aristotle, but in
criticising the Arabian interpretation of him, relatively to such questions
as the eternity of the world, the individuality of the immortal intellect,
and the alleged subjection of the human will to planetary influences. Like
CH. XXIII.
52-2
## p. 820 (#866) ############################################
820
The merits and the limitations of Aquinas
a good Aristotelian, he perceived that in arguing contra Gentiles he must
conduct the discussion on a basis accepted by his opponents. There could
be no question of "authority”; for, as he says, mahumetistae et pugani non
conveniunt nobiscum in auctoritate alicuius Scripturae. . . unde necesse est ad
naturalem rationem recurrere, cui omnes assentire coguntur. Now by
“natural reason” the Muslims understood primarily, if not solely, the
philosophy of Aristotle; and from that philosophy they had extracted
inferences damaging to the Christian position; not indeed to the doctrines
of the Trinity and the Incarnation—for on these points Aristotle could
have nothing to say—but to the belief in moral responsibility and the
immortality of the soul. To St Thomas, therefore, the alternatives were
to reject the Muslim interpretation, or to prove that Aristotle himself
was wrong. He does not choose either course to the total exclusion of
the other, but to a large extent he argues that Averroes and Avicenna
had misrepresented the master of their allegiance.
Whether Aquinas proves his case to the satisfaction of modern critics
may be disputable, but he certainly marshals an array of arguments that
none of his contemporaries was likely to defeat. Along with his elucida-
tion of Aristotle he examines the still wider problem of the whole relation
of reason to faith; upholding in his own sense a duplex veritatis modus,
which yet avoids the duplicity of believing contradictory propositions on
different grounds, and is, in effect, a plea for the unity of truth. If, once
more, we may doubt whether the conditions of the age permitted him to
arrive at a final appreciation of all the difficulties, none can reasonably
doubt the candour of his intention, the subtlety of his intuitions, or the
astonishing range and lucidity of his mind. Similar merits and similar
inevitable deficiencies are revealed in his general understanding of Aris-
totle. He was no biologist, no physicist, no astronomer. He could not
discriminate between paths of science where Aristotle had gone hopelessly
astray,and other paths where he had advanced almost to the verge of modern
achievement. Like the commentators of all ages, not excluding our own,
he was strongest within the bounds of his own experience, and weakest
where his sympathy failed. To the last he was hampered by ignorance of
history. Often as he contested Neo-Platonist interpretations, he was far
from disengaging Aristotle from later accretions. He knew, for example
(with the help of William of Moerbeke), that the Liber de Causis, widely
received as Aristotelian, was in fact an excerpt from Proclus; and yet he
could make the almost staggering assertion that “Dionysius,” in contrast
to Augustine and others, fere ubique sequitur Aristotelem? . This, it is true,
he
says in an early work, and perhaps in later life he might have hesitated
to repeat it. But neither by Aquinas, nor by anyone else in that century,
was Aristotle fully divested of the Neo-Platonist garments in which the
I Summa contra Gentiles, 1, 2.
? Cf. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant, Part 1, p. 43, note 2.
## p. 821 (#867) ############################################
Averroism and Siger of Brabant
821
course of history had clothed him. Yet after all these criticisms, to
which others might be added, it remains incontestable that every modern
student of Aristotle has much to learn from the exposition of Aquinas.
Averroism proper, as distinct from the general influence of the Arabs,
is not heard of before the second half of the century. Moreover, when
Albert wrote his De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroem in 1256, he
appears to be attacking a tendency rather than actual teachers at Paris.
Siger of Brabant is first mentioned in 1266, and the first official condem-
nation of Averroism occurs in 1270. Before that date, either in the
autumn of 1268 or in the spring of 1269, Aquinas returned from Italy
to Paris, where he remained until 1272. The resumption of a professorial
chair by a Dominican (for Aquinas had taught at Paris for some years
before 1260) was so unusual that we must attribute it to the manifold
difficulties in which the Order was involved. Among these were the
constant hostility of the seculars to the regulars, differences with the
Franciscans and the "Augustinian” theologians, and finally the emergence
of Averroism, a movement complicated by the attempt to involve the
general credit of Peripateticism with the errors of Siger of Brabant. St
Thomas, accordingly, had both to publish his De Unitate Intellectus as an
answer to Siger's De Anima Intellectiva, and to protect the freedom of
Aristotelian study against critics who still, perhaps, might appeal to
Urban's decree of 1263. Evidence to the same effect is furnished by a
work discovered and printed by Mandonnet, the De Quindecim Proble-
matibus of Albertus Magnus, composed in answer to a letter of enquiry
by Giles of Lessines. Of these fifteen problems the first thirteen are
identical with the propositions condemned at Paris (10 December 1270),
while the last two suggest an attempt to involve Aquinas in the down-
fall of the Averroists.
From a survey of the thirteen condemned propositions we gather that
four main questions were prominent, the unity of the intelligence in all
men, the eternity of the world, the freedom of the will, the knowledge
and providence of God. A more drastic reduction might leave only the
first of the four as of primary importance in 1270; for it seems that this
had spread beyond philosophical circles, in its practical bearing on moral
responsibility and personal salvation. While it is impossible here to
discuss so intricate a problem, or to compare the Averroist and Dominican
readings of the De Anima, it is necessary to remark that Averroes had
advanced beyond the position of Avicenna and his predecessors. The
others had removed from human conditions only the intellectus agens,
which might even be identified with God; but Averroes converted also
the intellectus possibilis into a "separate substance," and declared it to be
unus in omnibus hominibus? Opposed as he was to both these interpre-
tations of Aristotle, St Thomas was aware that even Catholic doctors had
identified the intellectus agens with God, in which case it would rightly
1 Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 11, 59 and 73.
CH. XXIII.
## p. 822 (#868) ############################################
822
Opposition to Thomism
be excluded from human personality. Averroes, however, was clearly
beyond the pale; for, since nothing in God can be merely potential, to
affirm the unity of the intellectus possibilis is to deny the individuality
of man.
Averroism was defeated, and Siger of Brabant, condemned again by
the Inquisition of France in October 1277, passed his last years in Italy,
as the prisoner of the Roman curia. There he perished, as the story goes,
by the hand of a half-insane assassin, and thereafter was honourably
translated to Dante's Paradiso. The subsequent fortunes of Averroism
we cannot pursue. More important for the moment was the renewed
attack on Aristotelianism in general, which gained a passing triumph in
1277.
