INFLUENCE OF THE ARABIC PHILOSOPHERS ON LATIN SCHOLASTICISM
We have now followed the way in which Hellenistic philosophy was passed from the Greeks to the Syrians, from the Syrians to the Arabic-speaking Muslims, and was by the Muslims carried from Asia to the far West. We have now to consider the way in which it was handed on from these Arabic-speaking people to the Latins. The first contact of the Latins with the philosophy of the Muslims was in Spain, as might be expected. At that time, that is to say during the Middle Ages, we can rightly describe the Western parts of Europe as “Latin,” since Latin was used not only in the services of the church but as a means of teaching and as a means of intercourse between the educated; it does not imply that the vernacular speech in all the western lands was of Latin origin, and of course makes no suggestion of a “Latin race”; it refers only to a cultural group, and we are employing the term “Latin” only to denote those who shared a civilization which may fairly be described as of Latin origin. In Spain this Latin culture was in contact with the Arabic culture of the Muslims. The transmission of Arabic material to Latin is[Pg 276] especially associated with Raymund, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 1130 to 1150 A.D. Toledo had become part of the kingdom of Castile in 1085, during the disordered period just before the Murabit invasion. It had been captured by Alfonso VI., and he had made it the capital city of his kingdom, and the Archbishop of Toledo became the Primate of Spain. When the town was taken it was agreed that the citizens should have freedom to follow their own religion, but the year after its capture the Christians forcibly seized the great church, which had been converted into a congregational mosque about 370 years before, and restored it to Christian use. For the most part, however, the Muslims lived side by side with the Christians in Toledo, and their presence in the same city as the king, the royal court, and the Primate made a considerable impression on their neighbours, who began to take some interest in the intellectual life of Islam during the following years. The Archbishop Raymund desired to make the Arabic philosophy available for Christian use. At the moment, it will be remembered, the Muwahhids were established in Spain, and their bigotry caused a number of the Jews and Christians to take refuge in the surrounding countries.
Raymund founded a college of translators at Toledo, which he put in the charge of the archdeacon Dominic Gondisalvi, and entrusted it with the duty of preparing Latin translations of the most important Arabic works on philosophy and science, and thus[Pg 277] many translations of the Arabic versions of Aristotle and of the commentaries as well as of the abridgments of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina were produced. The method employed in this college and the method commonly followed in the Middle Ages was to use the services of an interpreter, who simply placed the Latin word over the Arabic words of the original, and finally the Latinity was revised by the presiding clerk, the finished translation usually bearing the name of the revisor. It was an extremely mechanical method; and the interpreter was treated as of minor importance. It seems that the preparation of a translation was done to order in very much the same way as the copying of a text, and was not regarded as more intellectual than the work of transcription. The revisor did no more than see that the sentences were grammatical in form: the structure and syntax was still Arabic, and was often extremely difficult for the Latin reader to understand, the more so as the more troublesome words were simply transliterated from the Arabic. The interpreters employed in this college certainly included some Jews; it is known that one of them bore the name of John of Seville. We have very little information as to the circulation of the translations made at Toledo, but it is certain that about thirty years afterwards the whole text of Aristotle’s logical Organon was in use in Paris, and this was not possible so long as the Latin translations were limited to those which had been transmitted by Boethius, John Scotus, and the fragments[Pg 278] of Plato derived through St. Augustine. But this material already in the possession of the West was the foundation of scholasticism, and was developed as far as it would go. Boethius transmitted a Latin version of Porphyry’s Isagoge and of the Categories and Hermeneutics of Aristotle, whilst John Scotus translated the Pseudo-Dionysius. The further development of Latin scholasticism came in three stages: first, the introduction of the rest of the text of Aristotle, as well as the scientific works of the whole logical canon, by translation from the Arabic; then came translations from the Greek following the capture of Constantinople in 1204; and thirdly, the introduction of the Arabic commentators.
The first Latin scholastic writer who shows a knowledge of the complete logical Organon was John of Salisbury (d. 1182 A.D.), who was a lecturer at Paris, but it does not appear that the metaphysical and psychological works of Aristotle were in circulation as yet.
By this time Paris had become the centre of scholastic philosophy, which was now beginning to predominate theology. This takes its form, as yet untouched by Arabic methods, in the work of Peter Lombard (d. 1160 A.D.), whose “Sentences,” an encyclopædia of the controversies of the time but a mere compilation, remained a popular book down to the 17th century. The methods and form used in the “Sentences” shows the influence of Abelard, and still more of the Decretals of Gratian. It is interest[Pg 279]ing to note that Peter Lombard possessed and used a newly finished translation of St. John Damascene.
Early in the 13th century we find various controversies at Paris on subjects very like those debated by the Arabic philosophers, but in reality derived from quite independent sources. Nothing would seem more suggestive of Arabic influence than discussion of the essential unity of souls, which seems as though it were an echo of Ibn Rushd; but this doctrine had been developed independently from neo-Platonic material in the Celtic church, and, in its main features not at all unlike the teaching of Ibn Rushd, was fairly common in Ireland (cf. Rènan: Averroes, 132-133). So we find Ratramnus of Corbey in the 9th century writing against one Macarius in refutation of similar views. Here Arabic influence is out of the question; at the time, indeed, Ibn Rushd was not yet born. So of Simon of Tournay, who was a teacher of theology at Paris about 1200 A.D., we read that “whilst he follows Aristotle too closely, he is by some recent writers accused of heresy” (Henry of Gand: Lib. de script. eccles. c. 24 in Fabrisius Bibliotheca, 2, p. 121), but this simply means that he carried to an extreme the application of the dialectical method to theology.
More interest attaches to the decrees passed at a synod held at Paris in 1209 and endorsed by the decisions of the Papal Legate in 1215. These measures were provoked by the pantheistic teaching of David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena, who revived the semi[Pg 280]pantheistic doctrines of John Scotus’ Periphysis, and the prohibitions dealing with them cite passages from Scotus verbatim. The Periphysis itself was condemned by Honorius III. in 1225. But the decrees of 1209 also forbade the use of Aristotle’s Natural Philosophy and the “commenta,” whilst the Legate’s orders of 1215 allowed the logical works of the old and new translations where perhaps the “new translations” refers to the “new” translations made from the Arabic as contrasted with the “old” versions of Boethius, though it is just possible that some version direct from the Greek was in circulation and known as the “new translations,” and also forbade the reading of the Metaphysics, Natural Philosophy, etc., all material which had become accessible through the Arabic.
In 1215 Frederick II. became Emperor, and in 1231 he began to reorganize the kingdom of Sicily. Both in Sicily and in the course of his crusading expeditions in the East Frederick had been brought into close contact with the Muslims and was greatly attracted to them. He adopted oriental costume and many Arabic customs and manners, but, most important of all, he was a great admirer of the Arabic philosophers, whose works he was able to read in the original, as he was familiar with German, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Contemporary historians represent him as a free-thinker, who regarded all religions as equally worthless, and attributed to him the statement that the world had suffered from[Pg 281] three great imposters, Moses, Christ, and Muhammad. This opinion of Frederick is expressed in passionate words by Gregory IX. in the encyclical letter “ad omnes principes et prelatos terrae” (in Mansi. xxiii. 79), where he compares the Emperor to the blaspheming beast of Apocalypse xiii., but Frederick in reply likened the Pope to the beast described in Apoc. vi., “the great dragon which reduced the whole world,” and professed a perfectly orthodox attitude towards Moses, Christ, and Muhammad. It is quite probable, as Rènan (Averroes, p. 293) supposes, that the views ascribed to Frederick really are based on a professed sympathy towards the Arabic philosophers, who regarded all religions as equally tolerable for the uninstructed multitude, and commonly illustrated their remarks by citing the “three laws” which were best known to them. In 1224 Frederick founded a university at Naples, and made it an academy for the purpose of introducing Arabic science to the western world, and there various translations were made from Arabic into Latin and into Hebrew. By his encouragement Michael Scot visited Toledo about 1217 and translated Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle’s de coelo et de mundo, as well as the first part of the de anima. It seems probable also that he was the translator of commentaries on the Meteora, Parva Naturalia, de substantia orbis, Physics, and de generatione et de corruptione. Ibn Sina’s commentaries were in general circulation before this, so that they were very probably the “commentaries” referred[Pg 282] to in the Paris decree of 1209, but we do not know who was responsible for their rendering into Latin, save that they almost certainly proceeded from the college at Toledo. The introduction of Ibn Rushd, not of great repute amongst the Muslims, bears evidence to the weight of Jewish influence in Sicily and in the new academy at Naples. We know that Michael Scot was assisted by a Jew named Andrew.
Another translator of this period was a German Hermann who was in Toledo about 1256, after Frederick’s death. He translated the abridgment of the Rhetoric made by al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd’s abridgment of the Poetics, and other less known works of Aristotle. Hermann’s translations were described by Roger Bacon as barbarous and hardly intelligible; he transliterated the names so as to show even the tanwin in Ibn Rosdin, abi Nasrin, etc.
By the middle of the 13th century nearly all the philosophical works of Ibn Rushd were translated into Latin, except the commentary on the Organon, which came a little later, and the Destruction of the Destruction, which was not rendered into Latin until the Jew Kalonymos did so in 1328. Some of his medical works also were translated in the 13th century, namely, the Colliget, as it was called, and the treatise de formatione; others were translated from the Hebrew into Latin early in the following century.
The first evidence of the general circulation of ideas taken from Averroes (Ibn Rushd) is associated with William of Auvergne, who was Bishop of Paris,[Pg 283] and these show a considerable amount of inaccuracy in detail. In 1240 William published censures against certain opinions, which he states to be derived from the Arabic philosophers; amongst these he expresses his disapproval of the doctrine of the First Intelligence, an emanation from God, as being the agent of creation, a doctrine common to all the philosophers, but which he attributes specifically to al-Ghazali; he objects also to the teaching that the world is eternal, which he attributes correctly to Aristotle and Ibn Sina, but mentions Averroes as an orthodox defender of the truth; he further condemns the doctrine of the unity of intellects, which most incorrectly he attributes to Aristotle, and also refers to al-Farabi as maintaining this heresy; throughout he cites Averroes as a sounder teacher who tends to correct these ideas, but his description of the doctrine of the unity of intellects reproduces the features which are distinctive of Averroes. The arguments he uses against this latter doctrine are, on the whole, very much the same as those employed a little later by Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas, viz., that the doctrine undermines the reality of the individual personality, and is inconsistent with the observed facts of diversity of intelligence in different persons. He cites Abubacer (Ibn Bajja) as a commentator on Aristotle’s Physics, but in fact this was a book on which Ibn Bajja did not write a commentary, and the substance of the citation agrees with the teaching of Averroes. At that time evidently the position was[Pg 284] that Aristotle and the Arabic commentators generally were regarded with suspicion save in the treatment of logic, the one exception being Averroes, who was considered to be perfectly orthodox. So strange a perversion of the facts could only be due to Jewish influence, for the Jews at that time were devoted adherents of Averroes.
When the friars began to take their place in the work of the universities we note two striking changes: (i.) the friars cut loose entirely from the timid policy of conservatism and begin to make free use of all the works of Aristotle and of the Arabic commentators, and also make efforts to procure newer and more correct translations of the Aristotelian text from the original Greek; under this leadership the universities gradually became more modern and enterprising in their scientific work, though not without evidence of strong opposition in certain quarters. (ii.) As a natural corollary a more correct appreciation was made of the tendencies of the several commentators.
The leader in these newer studies was the Franciscan Alexander Hales (d. 1245), who was the first to make free use of Aristotle outside the logical Organon. His Summa, which was left unfinished and continued by the Franciscan William of Melitona, was based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and serves as a commentary to it. Peter Lombard, however, had not quoted Aristotle at all, whilst Alexander uses the metaphysical and scientific works as well as the logic.[Pg 285] From this time forth the Franciscans begin to use the Arabic commentators.
The more accurate study of Aristotle in............