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Averroism

The most characteristic doctrine of the Averroists, a doctrine which involved the denial of the most vital principle of Scholasticism, was that what is true in philosophy may be false in theology, and vice versa. Among the opponents of Averroism are to be reckoned the great schoolmen, who, like Albert and St. Thomas, composed treatises for the express purpose of refuting the doctrines of the Averroists, and controversialists, like Raymond Lully, who undertook an extensive campaign against the errors of the Arabians.

Averroes, known among his own people as Abul Walid Mohammed Ibn-Ahmed Ibn-Mohammed Ibn-roshd, the kadi, was born at Cordova in 1126, and died at Marocco in 1198. His early life was occupied in mastering the curriculum of theology, jurisprudence, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy, under the approved teachers of the time. The years of his prime were a disastrous era for Mahometan Spain, where almost every city had its own petty king, whilst the Christian princes swept the land in constant inroads. But with the advent of the Almohades, the enthusiasm which the desert tribes had awakened, whilst it revived religious life and intensified the observance of the holy law within the realm, served at the same time to reunite the forces of Andalusia, and inflicted decisive defeats on the chiefs of the Christian North. Averroes, who was versed in the Malekite system of law, was made kadi of Seville (1169), and in similar appointments the next twentyfive years of his life were passed at different periods in Seville, Cordova, and Marocco, probably foilowing the court of Jusuf Almansur.

The ignorant fanaticism of the multitude viewed speculative studies with deep dislike and distrust, and deemed any ono a Zendik (infidel) who did not rest content with the natural science of the Koran. These smouldering hatreds burst into open flame about the year 1195. Whether, as one story ran, he had failed in conversation and in his writings to pay the customary deference to the emir, or a court intrigue had changed the policy of the moment, at any rate Averroes was accused of heretical opinions and pursuits, stripped of his honours, and banished to a place near Cordova, where his actions were closely watched. At the same time efforts were made to stamp out all liberal culture in Andalusia, so far as it went beyond the little medicine, arithmetic, and astronomy required for practical life. But the storm soon passed, when the transient passion of the people had been satisfied, and Averroes for a brief period survived his restoration to honour. He died in the year before his patron Almansur, with whom (in 1199) the political power of the Moslems came to an end, as did the culture of liberal science with Averroes.

His historic fame came from the Christian Schoolmen, whom he almost initiated into the system of Aristotle, and who, but vaguely discerning the expositors who preceded, admired in his commentaries the accumulated results of two centuries of labours. Averrpes does not allow the fancied needs of theological reasoning to interfere with his study of Aristotle, whom he simply interprets as a truth-seeker. The points by which he told on Europe were all implicit in Aristotle, but Averroes set in relief what the original had left obscure, and emphasised things which the Christian theologian passed by or misconceived. Thus Averroes had a double effect. He was the great interpreter of Aristotle to the later Schoolmen, worthy of a place, according to Dante, beside the glorious sages of the heathen world. On the other hand, he came to represent those aspects of Peripateticism most alien to the spirit of Christendom; and the deeply-religious Moslem gave his name to the anti-sacerdotal party, to the materialists, sceptics, and atheists, who defied or undermined the dominant beliefs of the church.

The real grandeur of Averroes is seen in his resolute prosecution of the stand-point of science in matters of this world, and in his recognition that religion is not a branch of knowledge to be reduced to propositions end systems of dogma, but a personal and inward power, an individual truth which stands distinct from, but not contradictory to, the universahties of scientific law. In his science he followed the Greeks, and to the Schoolmen he and his compatriots rightly seemed philosophers of the ancient world. Ho maintained alike the claim of demonstrative science with its generalities for the few who could live in that ethereal world, and the claim of religion for all,—the common life of each soul as an individual and personal consciousness. But theology, or the mixture of the two, he regarded as a source of evil to both.

When, in the first decades of the thirteenth century, the Greek text of Aristotle was introduced into the schools and the Christian philosophers began to compose commentaries on the Latin translations made from it, the followers of the Arabian commentators commenced to give a more decidedly Anti-Christian direction to their interpretation of Aristotle. In this way there sprang up two hostile schools of Aristotelianism, — the orthodox Aristotelianism of the schoolmen and the heterodox Aristotelianism of the Averroists. The unity of the active intellect, the immortality of the individual soul, the freedom of the will, and the question of fatalism were some of the points on which the schoolmen and the Averroists differed ih their interpretation of the philosopher.

Towards the end of the thirteenth century Averroism appeared in the University of Paris, and was made the subject of several ecclesiastical inquiries and condemnations. Its chief representatives were Siger of Brabant1 (died 1282 or 1288), Boetius the Dacian, and Bernier of Nivelles. Raymond Lully, Doctor Illuminatus, is in some respects one of the most remarkable figures in the history of mediaeval philosophy. His whole life was dominated by the idea of converting the Moorish world to Christianity. This he hoped to accomplish by the preaching of the gospel, by the refutation of the errors of the Arabians, and by the scientific demonstration of the revealed truths of the Christian religion. He was an apostle, a controversialist, and a theosophist. He was also an inventor, having contrived, among other things, a logical machine by means of which he hoped to prove all truth. Raymond was born at Majorca in 1234 or 1235. After spending some years at the court of Aragon, he entered the order of St. Francis and devoted the remainder of his life to the conversion of the Moors. He was stoned by the Mussulmans at Tunis in 1315.

Averroism had, in the eye of the great Dominican school, come to be regarded as the arch-enemy of the truth. When Frederick II. consulted a Moslem free-thinker on the mysteries of the faith, when the phrase or legend of the " Three Impostors" presented in its most offensive form the scientific survey of the three laws of Moses, Christ, and Mahomet, and when the characteristic doctrines of Averroes were misunderstood, it soon followed that his name became the badge of the scoffer and the sceptic. What had begun with the subtle disputes of the universities of Paris, went on to the materialist teachers in the medical schools and the sceptical men of the world in the cities of Northern Italy. The patricians of Venice and the lecturers of Padua made Averroism synonymous with doubt and criticism in theology, and with sarcasm against the hierarchy.