AVERROËS (Ibn Rushd, Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad; Latin: Averroes). - While in the East, after Avicenna, Arab philosophy rapidly declined, in Spain, through contact with Jews and Christians, the Arabs, from the 10th century onward, initiated a flourishing philosophical school that had in A. its most distinguished representative.
He was b. in 1126 (520 AH) at Cordova, and d. at Marrakesh in Morocco on 10 Dec. 1198 (595 AH). Like his father and grandfather, he was a qadi in his native city, and physician to the caliph. He enjoyed the favor of the great until, accused of heterodoxy, he was relegated to Lucena (Cordova). He cultivated law, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, theology. Some seventy titles of his works are known to us, only partly extant and almost all not in the original Arabic but in Hebrew and Latin translations. A.'s writings can be grouped into two great categories: original writings and commentaries on Aristotle. Among the original writings are to be noted: the celebrated medical treatise Colliget, some treatises on astronomy, on jurisprudence and on the relations between faith and reason; questions on the metaphysics of Avicenna, a summary of the Organon, questions of physics, a reply to al-Ghazālī entitled: Destructio destructionis, very well known, together with the little treatise De animae beatitudine, to Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages; an interesting Epistula de connexione intellectus abstracti cum homine and the De substantia orbis.
But A. owes his renown above all to his commentaries on almost all the works of Aristotle. A certain number of these commentaries have been lost. For the Stagirite A. professed boundless admiration, going so far as to call him « regula in natura et exemplar quod natura invenit ad demostrandam ultimam perfectionem humanam » (In libr. De Anima, cap. 2, ed. Venice 1550, f. 169, l. 59). In the Middle Ages in the West he was called the Commentator par excellence. A.'s commentaries are divided into three groups: the great, the middle, the abbreviations and paraphrases. In the first, A. reproduces the text in full, accompanying it with ample illustration; in the second the text is reported partially, but the commentary is more concise and rich in original developments; in the third the text is abandoned and A. summarizes, sometimes with the greatest freedom, the material treated by Aristotle. For the Posterior Analytics, for the Physics, the Metaphysics and the treatises On the Soul and On the Heavens there exist, in Latin translations, the three types of commentary; the Organon is perhaps the work commented most faithfully in the second and third types.
A. did not know Greek and was far from the spirit of Hellenism, and although he had to work on translations, anything but perfect, made by Syriacs, he nevertheless always succeeded in astonishing the world of the learned by his great fidelity to Aristotle, or at least by the acumen with which he penetrated the philosopher's system. On his interpretation all the Latin Aristotelians of the 13th century largely depend.
The philosophical positions that most characterize A.'s thought can be summarized as follows. God is pure act and is rationally demonstrable. Among the arguments he adduces to prove His existence are those of Avicenna, of the passage from the contingent to the necessary, and from the imperfect to the perfect, but more fittingly formulated. To this formulation St. Thomas Aquinas drew close in his third and fourth arguments for the existence of God. God has created prime matter and the intelligences that inform it ab aeterno (Aristotelian thesis) and directly (against Avicenna). One therefore denies creation ex nihilo and the creation of the world in time, which St. Thomas held to be indisputable only by faith. Creation is not made once and for all: prime matter, coeternal with God, is not the empty receptacle where all forms are found projected (Neoplatonism), but is, as the medieval Latins expressed it, the latitatio formarum, that is, a pure indeterminacy, a universal potentiality of forms. God, pure act, continually draws the forms from this matter, from the potential state to the actual one. The generation of this is necessary (determinism) and eternal both a parte ante and a parte post.
All the intelligences, unequal in perfection, are united extrinsically to spheres. The Heaven is composed of several spheres; the first sphere is informed and moved by the Prime Mover and communicates its movement to the second; this to the third, and so on, until reaching the moon, which is moved by the human intellect. The human intellect, insofar as it is the mover of the moon and the illuminating force that renders its own sensible species intelligible to each individual soul, according to the dispositions of each, is identified with the active intellect of which Aristotle speaks; and, insofar as it is a mirror that reproduces and receives the cognitions acquired in each individual person, it is called material or acquired (ὑλικός). This is to be identified with the "passive" intellect of Aristotelian terminology or with the "possible" intellect of other terminologies. The passive intellect is therefore not a certain "preparation" residing in the individual soul, as Alexander of Aphrodisias said in interpreting Aristotle, but is itself substantially separate from each soul, just like the active intellect, and is one for all souls. The union (coniunctio or copulatio) that is established between these and the intellect is a consequence of the illuminating action that the intellect exercises on the sensible images that are proper to each individual, that is, the union occurs per continuationem intentionis intellectae cum nobis (De Anima, ed. Venice, p. 164, V. A.), and is purely accidental. Deeper unions, but also not substantial, occur when the individual comes to participate in abstract essences (mystical knowledge and prophetic illumination). The human intellect, in the final analysis, is absolutely impersonal, and impersonal, therefore, is its survival. This doctrine of the single intellect thus certainly results in the negation of the immortality of individual souls, and it was around this negation that the heterodox Aristotelianism of the 13th and 14th centuries gathered, which goes under the name of Latin Averroism. But it should be noted that A. never explicitly deduced the perishability of individual souls from the theory of the single intellect, just as it should also be observed that on this very matter his thought, by his own admission, always remained in grave torment.
On the subject of the relation between religion and philosophy, the position of A. - contrary to what many believed in the Middle Ages - cannot be accused of impiety. Philosophy and revealed religion express for him the same and identical truth, albeit through a different language and methods. The Koran, according to A., sets forth the same philosophical truth by making use of allegories, excellent for convincing the unlettered; but it falls to philosophy, if it wishes to convince the lettered of the same truths, to derive, from the reading of the Koran, the scientific interpretation of religious dogmas by stripping them of the deceptive garments of allegory. To this position of A., perhaps not always clearly expressed by him, is traced that doctrine of double truth which is reproached to some of his Latin admirers of the 13th-16th centuries.
BIBL. The complete editions of the Latin texts of A. range from that of Padua of 1472-74 (in 3 vols.) to that of Venice of 1560 (in 11 vols.). The best is that of Venice, at the Giunta press, of 1552: Aristotelis... omnia quae extant opera... Averrois... in ea opera omnes qui ad nos pervenere commentarii. The recent editions of the Arabic texts are contained in the Bibl. arabica Scholasticorum. Sér. arabe. Edited by M. Bouygues, there have appeared, up to now (1930-38), vols. III (Tahāfūt at-tahāfūt, or "Incoherence of the Incoherence"), IV (Tafsīr kitāb al-maqālāt, or "Paraphrase of the book of the Categories"), V. II (Tafsīr mā ba'd at-tabī'at, or "Great commentary" on the Metaphysics).
A critical edition of the Latin translations of A., together with that of the Arabic-Latin versions of Aristotle, has recently been entrusted to the Mediaeval Acad. of America. On this subject cf. H. A. Wolson, Plan of Corpus commentariorum Averrois in Aristotelem, in Speculum, 1931, pp. 412-27; Bull. de la Classe des lettres de l'Académie royale de Belgique, 18 (1932), 5th series, pp. 345-64; 23 (1937), pp. 294-97; 24 (1938), p. 265.
There exists no satisfactory comprehensive study on A., but only some monographs on particular subjects. Thus the old book of E. Renan, Averroes et l'averroïsme (2nd ed., Paris 1861: the 1st ed. is from 1852; those after the 2nd reproduce it without changes) concerns more the history of Latin Averroism than the personal doctrines of A.; L. Gauthier, La théorie d'Ibn Rochd sur les rapports de la religion et de la philosophie, Paris 1909; A. Manson, La théorie aristotélicienne du temps chez les peripatéticiens médiévaux, Averrois, Albert le Grand, Thomas d'Aquin, in Rev. Néosc., 36 (1934), pp. 275-307; C. Nalino, s. v. in Enc. Ital., V, pp. 624-27, where there is ample information on editions, translations and studies; also rich in bibliographical information is the article of M. M. Gorce, Averroïsme, in DHG, V, col. 1032 ff., which is likewise however dedicated especially to tracing the history of Latin Averroism; M. De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, I, Louvain 1936, p. 305 ff. For more recent indications, scan the indexes of the Bull. de théologie ancienne et médiévale from 1937 onward.
Gerardo Bruni