The House of Wisdom

by Jonathan Lyons

  Things began to improve somewhat with the arrival from North Africa in 1146 of the Berber Almohad dynasty, whose founder, Ibn Tumart, quietly began to loosen the reins on theology and even philosophy. Ibn Tumart believed in a strict literal reading of the Koran and had little time for the formularized interpretations of the legal schools, such as the Malikites, that had grown up around the religious texts. For him, man was endowed with reason that would allow him to make sense of religious teaching. Ibn Tumart and other like-minded Muslim thinkers believed that reason and revelation were complementary and in no way stood in opposition to each other. The faculty of reason established the grounds for man’s belief in revelation. Thus, reason could establish the existence of God.53 The Almohad leader and his successors, however, remained cautious in public lest they anger the powerful religious jurists.

  No wonder Averroes was terrified when the sultan first broached a taboo subject like the Eternity of the World: “Confusion and fear took hold of me, and I began making excuses and denying that I had ever concerned myself with philosophic learning.” However, Averroes had been introduced at court by his friend and mentor Ibn Tufayl, a philosopher and the physician to the sultan, and the ruler then launched a discussion of the very topic, exhibiting considerable knowledge of the matter. “Thus he continued to set me at ease until I spoke, and he learned what was my competence in that subject,” reports Averroes. “And when I withdrew he ordered for me a donation in money, a magnificent robe of honor, and a steed.”54

  By the time of his meeting with the sultan, Averroes had already written works on religious law and philosophy, as well as a major medical textbook, which enjoyed great popularity for centuries among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim doctors. Years later, he would be summoned to replace his aging friend Ibn Tufayl as the sultan’s personal physician. But first, Abu Yaqub charged him with a fateful commission, with Ibn Tufayl acting as go-between. Averroes later recalled for one of his students: “Ibn Tufayl summoned me one day and told me, ‘Today I hear the prince of Believers [the sultan, Abu Yaqub] complain of the difficulty of expression of Aristotle and his translators, and mention the obscurity of his aims, saying if someone would tackle those books, summarize them and expound their aims, after understanding them thoroughly, it would be easier for people to grasp them.’ ” Ibn Tufayl at once recommended the sultan assign the task to Averroes, who leaped at the offer of royal patronage for his philosophical work. “This is what led me to summarize the books of the philosopher Aristotle.”55

  Despite a full roster of duties as a jurist, Averroes threw himself into the Aristotle project. With the political and financial backing of the sultan, he turned out three types of works devoted to explicating specific texts for his Muslim readers: the epitomes, summarizing Aristotle’s central points; the so-called middle commentaries, which paraphrased and explained the material; and the “great” commentaries, which examined the text line by line and brought to bear a wide range of Arab and Greek philosophical writings as well as his own interpretations. In all, thirty-eight commentaries are extant in Latin, Arabic, or Hebrew, covering most of Aristotle’s major works.56 Together, they represent a remarkable effort to reveal the “true” Aristotle, shorn of many of the accretions of later Greek commentators and the esoteric tendencies of Avicenna, and to assert an Andalusi philosophical tradition as opposed to that of the Muslim East.57 This was in keeping with Averroes’s own inclinations as well as those of the rationalist Almohad sultans, who were determined to establish the place of reason alongside revelation.

  At the core of this collection is the Great Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, an exhaustive study of the science of being and the key, in Averroes’s eyes, to understanding both God and the natural world. In writing on the Creation, Averroes advances Aristotle’s view that the world is eternal and concludes that the accepted view of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish theologians that it was created in time—and from nothing—is absurd. The Commentator rejects the literal reading of scripture and argues that it places unacceptable limits on God’s power and perfection. What did God do before he created the universe, he prods his readers, sit by idly? And why did God elect to create the world at one particular time and not another? This suggests the unthinkable—that God, who is perfection itself, either made a mistake or had a change of heart.

  The Great Commentary also identifies among Aristotle’s most important precepts the notion that the route to primary knowledge is through an understanding of causality.58 In another work, Averroes spells out his argument that accepting the philosophers’ approach to cause and effect, without direct recourse to God, provides the only basis for man’s knowledge of his surroundings: “Denial of cause implies denial of knowledge, and denial of knowledge implies nothing in this world can be really known.”59

  This sets him on a collision course with the theologians, who claim that the philosophers’ understanding of Creation, and their attendant views on cause and effect, leaves God powerless. In response, Averroes says that God can apprehend our lowly world of generation and corruption without a change in the state of his perfect knowledge. This gives him access to the particulars. The theologians’ cardinal error lies in confusing man and God and casting the latter as a sort of superman. “He who believes this makes God an eternal man and man a mortal God,” Averroes writes in The Incoherence of the Incoherence, his direct reply to al-Ghazali.60 “It becomes clear that they [the theologians] only made God an eternal man, for they compared the world with the products of art wrought by the will and knowledge and power of man … But this theory is nothing but a metaphor and a poetical expression.”61

  Averroes’s defense of God’s knowledge of the particulars preserves his vision of the Eternity of the World without undermining the Muslim articles of faith concerning Judgment Day and related questions. And it is this running dispute over Creation that forms the bulk of the “exchange” between Averroes and al-Ghazali. Like the struggle over the particulars, the battle over the Eternity of the World boils down to a question of God’s divine attributes, chiefly his knowledge, power, and will. The theologians fight tooth and nail to preserve a maximalist reading of God, while the philosophers led by Averroes seek to create metaphysical space for reason and for a natural world governed by immutable laws—both essential ingredients for true science.

  In the world of late twelfth-century Islam, politics tipped the balance against Averroes and in favor of the theologians. With the Berber sultans of al-Andalus facing a deadly threat from the Christian armies of northern Spain, the palace sought to rally the conservative Muslim clerics and the people at large with public displays of orthodox religious zeal. Averroes was disavowed in 1195 and banished to the predominantly Jewish town of Lucena, outside Cordoba. His philosophical works were burned, and the study of his teachings was banned by a tribunal of his fellow religious judges.

  Averroes’s formal exile lasted just two years before he was recalled to the Almohad court in Marrakesh. He died not long afterward, on December 9, 1198. Fourteen years later, Spanish Islam suffered a mortal defeat at the hands of a powerful Christian coalition in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. Muslim al-Andalus never really recovered. The same cannot be said for Averroes. Within little more than half a century of his death, he was the undisputed star of an intellectual drama playing out along Paris’s Street of Straw, the legendary scholars’ lane that ran through the theological heart of western Christendom.

  Averroes’s Herculean effort to fulfill the sultan’s commission bequeathed Europe a thoroughly rationalist approach to philosophy that changed forever the landscape of Western thought. This put Averroes almost five centuries ahead of Descartes, whose mathematical rationalism has made him the West’s traditional candidate for founder of modern philosophy.62 Centuries before, St. Augustine had made philosophy subordinate to theology. The arrival in the West of Averroes’s writings began to turn this state of affairs on its head. Averroes takes as his starting place the assertion that Aristotelian philo
sophy is a fully demonstrative science capable of attaining absolute truth from ironclad first principles. For him, philosophy is as reliable a source of truth as revelation, and the two can never be in any real opposition to each other. Where necessary, an allegorical interpretation of scripture can reveal an inner meaning in accordance with philosophical proof. Both theology and philosophy lead man to the same truth.63

  There was much more to Averroes than first met the medieval Western eye. Missing almost completely from the early Latin translations was the pious Muslim thinker who wrote compelling works on religious law and produced specific treatises exploring the place of philosophy and its relationship to a great monotheistic faith like Islam. Caught up in its unbridled enthusiasm for the commentaries on Aristotle, the Christian world at the time saw little or no value in those of Averroes’s works that addressed overtly Islamic themes. As a result, they were not translated into Latin until centuries later, although medieval Jewish thinkers, including the masterful Moses Maimonides, proved far more receptive. Among these “unknown” texts was Averroes’s landmark assertion of the rightful place of philosophy within a religious context, On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy.64 Introducing the work, Averroes notes, “The purpose of this treatise is to examine, from the standpoint of the study of the [Divine] Law, whether the study of philosophy and logic is allowed by the Law, or prohibited, or commended—either by way of recommendation or as obligatory.”65

  Averroes concludes that philosophy and revelation are different approaches to the same answers. Reaching into the holy texts, he finds ample support in Islam for the use of man’s reason, and even takes it as the religious duty for those few truly capable of philosophizing. “Now since this religion is true and summons to the study which leads to knowledge of the Truth, we the Muslim community know definitely that demonstrative study [i.e., philosophy] does not lead to [conclusions] conflicting with what scripture has given us; for truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.”66 Averroes then goes on to argue for the superiority of the demonstrative knowledge of qualified philosophers over and above the dialectical knowledge of the theologians or the rhetorical knowledge of the pious masses.

  This Averroes—sincere believer in God and defender of the Muslim faith—was all but invisible to thirteenth-century Western thinkers hungry for new ways to look at the world. Rather, the Averroes of the Latin imagination was almost as much a product of men like Michael Scot and Frederick II as he was of his own pen. Michael translated four of the great commentaries, including those on the seminal Metaphysics and On the Soul; two middle commentaries; and one epitome.67 Frederick saw to it that these and other translations were sent to the Italian universities, whence they soon made their way to Paris. A manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale, dated 1243, contains almost all the works of Averroes known to the medieval West.68 In a cover letter, addressed to “you men of learning” at Bologna, Frederick declares his wish to share this priceless material with the world. “We will not conceal those fruits, gathered with so great effort, nor can we find satisfaction in thinking of them as our own property unless first we share with others so great a good … Therefore deign to accept these books as a gift from your friend, the emperor, and, at his request and through the kindness of your hearts, make known to him what you discover as a result of your research.”69

  At first reactions to Frederick’s gift were rather muted. The works of Averroes seemed to slip naturally into the running Christian debate over the Eternity of the World and the reception of Aristotle in general. Some churchmen even welcomed the Commentator as someone who could shed much-needed light on the convoluted world of Aristotelian thought. But such a steady state of affairs was clearly doomed. Europe’s universities, despite their proud origins as semiautonomous corporations, were at heart religious institutions and had to answer to the highest church officials. It was only a matter of time before the secular masters, chiefly the philosophers at the University of Paris, realized that they could deploy the Latin Averroes as their champion against the theologians. His assertion that proper philosophy was superior to theology and that both offered legitimate paths to the same eternal truths doomed Augustine’s notion that philosophers were mere handmaidens to the men of God. Soon enough, the forces of faith and reason were at one another’s throats, and it would take the patience of a philosopher-saint—in this case, one steeped in the teachings of Averroes and his school—to craft a truce between those who upheld the traditional church teachings and the new generations of early modern scientists, as shaped by the Arabs.

  Chapter Nine

  THE INVENTION OF THE WEST

  WHEN THOMAS AQUINAS, theologian and future saint, arrived in Paris in early 1269, he found the university almost paralyzed by a persistent problem: What to do with the philosophers? Aristotle’s instructive texts on logic, the beloved dialectic of the medieval churchmen, had long since been endorsed by a religious establishment eager to demonstrate the truth of Christian revelation. However, natural philosophy, as explicated and amplified by the leading Arab thinkers, was another matter altogether. The full force of the studia Arabum, in particular with the arrival in the 1230s of Michael Scot’s translations of Averroes, turned what had been a mostly genteel tug-of-war over the world-view of medieval Christendom into a philosophical, theological, and scientific free-for-all.

  The seven liberal arts had easily given way before the Arab intellectual onslaught, but theology—the queen of sciences, its medieval exponents called it—still retained its dominance over St. Augustine’s “handmaiden,” philosophy, and the attendant natural sciences. As long as this new philosophy failed to present anything like a coherent metaphysics, a proper science of “being as being,” there were few points of conflict with Christian faith. For all the early novelty of the abacus, the astrolabe, and the alembic, theology’s position as the primary way to understand the natural world appeared secure. When the first hints of a unified cosmology did appear, beginning in the mid-twelfth century, they generally reflected the user-friendly ideas of Plato, which the church had little difficulty assimilating as its own.1 All that changed irrevocably with Averroes, whose steadfast advocacy of Aristotelian thought within the context of his own monotheism overwhelmed Christian intellectuals of the day. Suddenly the handmaiden turned on her mistress.

  Christendom had already detected the gathering threat. Beginning with the first “condemnations” at the University of Paris in 1210, the church attempted to safeguard its teachings and wall them off from the insidious effects of intemperate philosophizing. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the authorities in Paris would issue more than a dozen lists of banned ideas, meticulously detailed in an official register of errors. The frequency with which these orders were issued, however, suggests just how ineffective the condemnations must have been at deterring the curiosity of scholars and theologians alike.

  This was a losing battle, as many in the church recognized. Among the first to do so was Thomas Aquinas’s own Dominican order, whose charter of 1228 authorized its students to consult the works of pagans and philosophers, albeit only “briefly.” This was an early recognition that science was here to stay and must be mastered, or at least addressed intelligently.2 Soon enough, Dominican thinkers would seek to harness these new ideas to defend and strengthen the faith. Even the papacy was compelled to find ways in which natural philosophy might be made compatible with Christian doctrine. Pope Gregory IX, notwithstanding his stinging rebuke of Frederick II’s reliance on “reason,” modified the standing ban on the natural philosophy of Aristotle and his Arab commentators to allow the formation of a special commission to purge the works in question of their errors.

  “But since, as we have learned, the books on nature which were prohibited… are said to contain both useful and useless matter,” the pope writes, “lest the useful be vitiated by the useless, we command your discretion … that, examining the same books as is convenient subtly and p
rudently, you entirely exclude what you shall find there erroneous or likely to give scandal or offense to readers, so that, what are suspect being removed, the rest may be studied without delay or offense.”3 In another concession, Gregory annulled the excommunication of any scholars who had been caught violating the old prohibition. The promised papal commission never met, but by 1255 all works of natural philosophy available in Latin had been made part of the university’s official arts curriculum. Since an arts degree was a prerequisite to more advanced study, this meant that entire cohorts of medieval university graduates, including all future theologians, were steeped in the teachings of natural philosophy.

  The startling success of natural philosophy and its expanding hold on the Western imagination throughout the thirteenth century was accelerated by the steady transformation of the medieval university into a powerful social, intellectual, and cultural institution in its own right. The university remained within the general orbit of the church for centuries, but it was first and foremost a product of the growing need for trained clerks, lawyers, doctors, and secular officials and bureaucrats.4 The bounties of the studia Arabum offered a ready-made curriculum to help meet this demand.

  It is easy to see why philosophy, as put forward by the Arabs and the Greeks, held enormous appeal for the late medieval mind as it slowly began to shed its isolationism and confront the natural world. This new science was breathtaking in its scope and offered a coherent explanation of just about everything. While it covered elements of the traditional Christian view that it confronted, it also contained much new material on questions left effectively untouched by religious teachings, such as the workings of the physical world and the inner mind of man. It proceeded logically from basic assumptions and self-evident principles, promising order in a seemingly haphazard world.5 Best of all, it carried the powerful Aristotle “brand,” already well established through the practice of dialectics and through the underlying principles of Arab astrology, popularized by the Latin translations of Albumazar.