Averroism

AVERROISM. - From the second half of the 13th century through the whole of the 16th, those who, in the controversies over Aristotle's thought, gave preference to Averroes' commentary were called Averroists (averroistae, Averrois sectatores). In the last century, E. Renan, under the name of A., conflated together those philosophical doctrines, Averroistic or not, which took their origin from the various and often opposing currents of Arabic Peripateticism. Later scholars are strongly affected by this confusion of Renan's, and particularly Mandonnet in his great monograph devoted to Siger of Brabant and to the Latin A. of the 13th century. By the expression "Latin A.," Mandonnet means that body of doctrines which St. Thomas had combated in the Summa Contra gentiles and which formed the principal object of the condemnation pronounced on 7 March 1277 by the bishop of Paris. The confusion is further increased by the fact that A. was presented as a heretical movement.

At the beginning of the 13th century, when Aristotelianism spread through the Latin West, the ecclesiastical authorities and the masters of theology showed themselves seriously concerned about it, because of the conflict on many points between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian thought. But the prohibitions of 1210, 1215 and 1231 were not enough to halt the spread of Aristotelianism; those of 1245 and 1263 then failed to drive it from the schools where it had by now installed itself. This happened because Peripatetic philosophy satisfied a need. The Latin West possessed a theology, but not a physics, that is, an organic doctrine of nature, indispensable for the understanding of the works of Hippocrates, of Galen and of the other physicians. Aristotelian physics supplied this deficiency; welcomed first in the faculty of arts, it could not be ignored by that of theology, which one entered after having passed through that of arts. Only thus is it possible to understand how it came about that, after 1230, all the Scholastics without exception were Aristotelians, inasmuch as all accepted by and large the physical scheme of Aristotelianism, striving to reconcile it by means of skilful devices with the biblical one.

However, in the development of the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics, we must distinguish three moments or different tendencies.

The first and oldest is what we may call the Avicennian-Augustinian one. Avicenna's doctrine, strongly tinged, like Augustine's thought, with Neoplatonic reflections, had matured in a climate saturated with religious ideas, which the Muslim philosopher had striven to reconcile with Aristotle's physics and metaphysics. Not only had he endeavoured to save the individuality of the human consciousness and its immortality, the central pillar of both Christian and Mohammedan dogmatics, but in his conception of the world he had made room for miracle, prophecy and revelation. In particular, it seemed that his doctrine of the agent intellect could easily be reconciled with the Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination and of the rationes aeternae. And even the Stoic-Plotinian theory of the rationes seminales, reaffirmed by the bishop of Hippo, seemed capable of being inserted without difficulty into Avicenna's system, according to which the forms that, on the Aristotelian concept, are drawn from the potentiality of matter, are irradiated therein by the light of the agent intellect. To this Neoplatonizing, Avicennian and Augustinian tendency belong Domingo Gundisalvi, William of Auvergne, the first Franciscan doctors and, substantially, Albert the Great.

Against this Avicennian and Augustinian tendency there reacted precisely the movement that was called Averroistic. Averroes' commentary on Aristotle's writings, translated into Latin by Michael Scot, with the help of that Jew Andrew of whom Roger Bacon speaks (Comp. studii philos., ed. J. S. Brewer, p. 472), and perhaps of someone else, became known some seventy or eighty years after Avicenna's philosophical writings. Some trace of it begins to be found only in works composed around 1230. Albert the Great, in the Summa de creaturis, written about twelve years later, cites Averroes a great number of times, but often misunderstands his thought, which he shows he knows very confusedly. John of La Rochelle, d. 1245, is still entirely ignorant of the typical Averroistic doctrine on the intellect. Only after the middle of the century can it be said that the Averroistic commentary was by then circulating in the hands of scholars. The first exposition of the Averroistic doctrine, made with fullness and sure knowledge of its foundations, is that of St. Thomas in the commentary on the second of the Sentences (dist. 17, q. 2, a. 1), written probably at the beginning of 1255. St. Albert the Great informs us that in 1256, at the papal court of Alexander IV, at Anagni, he held a disputation "contra errores Averrois," and that from this disputation, by order of the Pope, there issued the treatise handed down to us under the title De unitate intellectus contra Averroem which, in all likelihood, was reworked by its author. A far more exact exposition of Averroes' doctrine Albert provides us in the commentary on the De anima, written, it appears, around 1260, and in the two treatises De natura et origine animae and De intellectu et intelligibili. In the discussion of A. and in general in the interpretation of Aristotelian thought, Albert's attitude is profoundly different from that of Thomas. On many points the Dominican of Cologne openly takes a position against his Italian confrere and disciple; indeed, he goes so far as to declare that he abhors the interpretation that the Latin doctors give of Aristotle's doctrine: omnino abborrenna doctorum latiorum verba (De anima, III, 2, 1), and he does not hide that he prefers to it the interpretation of the major Peripatetics, such as Avicenna, Averroes, Alfarabi and Algazali: Nos autem, omissis operibus quorundam modernorum, sequenur tantum peripateticorum sententias, et praecipue Avicennae et Averrois et Alpharabii et Algazalis (De somno et vigilia, I, 1, 1; cf. ibid., III, 1, 12) and to those who objected that Aristotle's thought, thus expounded, was opposed on grave points to theological teaching, he replied by frankly acknowledging this opposition, and reproached those who confundunt philosophiam in theologiam, without realizing that theologica non conveniunt cum physicis principia. Therefore in his paraphrases of Aristotle he avoids every discussion of theological subject-matter: et ideo de illis in philosophia non possumus disputare (Metaphys., XI, 3, 7); dico quod nihil ad me de Dei miraculis, cum ego de naturalibus dissenam (De gener. et corr., I, 1, 22), a phrase, this last, repeated to the letter by Siger of Brabant, by Peter of Abano and by John of Jandun.

This frank acknowledgment, on Albert's part, of the opposition between Peripatetic philosophy (the only one that the medievals designated by the name of "philosophy") and revealed truth, is what modern historians of philosophy call the "doctrine of double truth."

Siger of Brabant is called "disciple of Albert" by Agostino Nifo (De intellectu, I, 3, 26), who at Padua, toward the end of the 15th century, was still reading at least three writings of the Brabantine Averroist today lost. Certainly, not all the theses maintained by these were also defended by the master of Cologne; but some typical Averroistic doctrines are undoubtedly encountered in Albert's commentaries.

As we know, the aim pursued by Averroes had been to free the interpretation of Aristotelian thought from the later Neoplatonic incrustations of Alfarabi and Avicenna. Especially of the latter, whom Averroes reproaches for having polluted his doctrine of the Stagirite with extraneous concerns. When the Scholastics, already prejudiced in their interpretation of Aristotle by Avicennian exegesis, had in hand the commentary of Averroes, they perceived the profound contrast between one manner and the other of understanding Aristotle. It is therefore no wonder that certain masters of the faculty of arts, in Paris and in Bologna, preferred the "great commentary" of Averroes to the interpretation of Avicenna, and, following its lead, set out to restore to Aristotle his true face.

These masters called themselves precisely Averroists. We know the name of a small group of the first Averroists: Siger of Brabant, Bernier of Nivelles and Goswin of La Chapelle, all three masters in Paris, all three canons in Liège and all three cited together by the inquisitor of France on 23 Nov. 1276; to them must be added Boethius of Dacia, whose name is found associated with that of Siger in the manuscript of the National Library of Paris (Lat. 439r) containing the 219 theses censured in 1277. Their philosophical activity must have begun to manifest itself a decade before this date.

The principal doctrines of A. are the following: 1) the world is necessary and coeternal with God, who is its first moving cause as the end toward which all things tend; 2) the human species is likewise eternal, so that there never was a first man; 3) the power of the first mover is infinite in duration, but finite in intensity and vigor; 4) if there were separate intelligences, not assigned to the movement of a heaven, they would be useless; 5) God cannot change the order of the world; 6) the soul that is the form of the human body is a principle of vegetative and sensitive life, endowed with a disposition to unite with the "material" or potential intellect; 7) the potential or possible intellect is an immaterial and separate substance, one for the whole human species; it is the lowest of the separate intelligences; therefore it cannot be called the form of man in the same way as the other material forms; 8) the possible intellect is ordered by its nature to know the things of the sensible world; therefore it needs to be eternally united to the human species, whose individuals, scattered over the earth, furnish it with sensible images or "phantasms," from which, by a process of abstraction, it draws the concept or "intelligible species"; although it cannot be called the form of the human body in the same way as the material forms, it is united to the human imagination or "cogitative" power by a natural bond that cannot be called accidental, and it can never be thought of as wholly separated from man; 9) in this process of abstraction, the possible intellect is assisted by the agent intellect, which for some Averroists is God, for others a separate intelligence always in act; 10) the agent intellect unites with the possible intellect, at first only as the agent cause of the cognitive process, and forms the speculative intellect; at the end of this process, it unites with it as form and renders it capable of understanding the separate substances in their pure intelligibility, and in this perfect union of the possible intellect with the agent intellect consists the supreme perfection of man and the beatitude which only a few privileged ones are granted to reach in this life; 11) as a separate substance that "is neither body nor a power in a body," the human intellect is immortal and eternal a parte ante et a parte post; mortal, on the other hand, is the vegetative and sensitive soul that is the specific form of each human individual.

It follows from this summary that the current expression "monopsychism" to designate the Averroistic doctrine is erroneous; since the soul, for the Averroists, is multiplied with the number of individuals; the intellect, yes, is one for the whole human species, but not for all the other beings distinct from man.

The third Aristotelian current of Scholasticism is the Thomistic one. The Aquinate, having noticed important divergences between the old Aristotelian translation from the Greek and the translation from the Arabic, and still more the opposing interpretations of the text, induced his Flemish confrere, William of Moerbeke, to revise word for word the Greek-Latin version and, where necessary, to make a new translation perfectly adhering to the Greek text. Then he set about a new literal exposition of the principal works of Aristotle, which would be entirely independent of the interpretation of Avicenna as of that of Averroes. In this way he believed he could combat A. on philological ground as well as on philosophical ground. And Thomas was the most resolute and decided adversary of A., portrayed by him as absurd from the philosophical point of view and as heresy from the theological one. It is undoubtedly due to the vigorous criticism of the Italian Dominican that A., presented as heresy, attracted the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities of Paris, who pronounced against it the condemnation of 1270 and that of 1277.

But A. was not a heresy; since the Averroists declared that they upheld certain theses, not as true, but as a necessary consequence of the principles of Aristotelian philosophy. If these conflicted with the revealed truths, so much the worse for Aristotle and for those who had labored to make him Christian at all costs and to establish a kind of concordism between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian truth. This is the exact meaning of the so-called "doctrine of double truth."

Thanks to these declarations, which had a precedent in analogous declarations of Albert the Great, the Averroists did not lay down their arms either before Thomistic criticism or before the double Parisian condemnation. True it is that the situation counseled prudence. And in Bologna Taddeo Alderotto, in his commentary on Ioannitius, written before 1283, refused to resolve the problem of the unity of the intellect, "since there is disagreement between the Church and the philosophers." But toward the end of the 13th century and at the beginning of the 14th the disputes flared up more vigorously than before, as the writings of Raymond Lull against the Averroists show.

The major representative of A. in the first decades of the 14th century was John of Jandun. His quaestiones on the De anima, on the Physics, on the De caelo, on the Metaphysics, on the Parva naturalia, on the De substantia orbis, by their breadth and by the many precious notices they contain, offer us a complete panoramic view of what were the Averroistic positions at the beginning of the century. The writings of this companion of Marsilius of Padua had the widest manuscript diffusion, especially in Italy, and, through printing, down to the end of the 16th century. Only the commentary of Averroes, among the works of Averroists, had a greater number of editions. Master Taddeo of Parma, who between 1318 and 1321 taught in Bologna, a colleague of another Averroist, Angelo of Arezzo, drew inspiration from the doctrines of J. of Jandun.

An indirect help to the Averroists came later from certain theologians, who began openly to attack the Thomistic arguments against Averroism. Thus, for example, Henry of Harclay, master and later chancellor of the University of Oxford (d. 1317), openly censures those who strive de Aristotele haeretico facere catholicum, and thinks that, for the Stagirite, the intellectual soul cannot be called the form of the body. Of the same opinion is the Carmelite Gerard of Bologna, who holds Averroes to be "maximus Aristotelis interpres," and not a "depraver of Peripatetic philosophy," as Thomas had judged him. Likewise, the Franciscans Peter of Auriol and William of Ockham think it cannot be demonstrated by philosophy that the rational soul is the form of the human body. In his turn another Franciscan, John of Ripatransone, in a lengthy original exposition of Averroistic doctrine (In I Sent., super prol., q. II, cod. Vat. lat. 1082, f. 23ᵗʰ-30ᵗʰ) concerning the union of the possible intellect with man, written between 1350 and 1357, holds that only Averroes understood Aristotle. Lively criticisms of the Thomistic arguments against Averroism are also advanced by the English Carmelite John Baconthorp (v.), who, for having suggested a single way of rendering less implausible the Averroistic doctrine on the union of the intellect with man, was hailed by the Averroists of the late 15th century as nothing less than "averroistarum princeps." In the 15th century, Cardinal Bessarion (In calumn. Plat., III, 22) likewise held that Aristotle was well understood by Averroes.

T. of Wilton, who had attended the University of Paris when the echo of Siger's teaching had not yet died away, and later became chancellor and canon of London, was a resolute supporter of Averroism in England. At Oxford, no less than at Paris and Bologna, Averroist centers long maintained themselves. From Bologna Averroism spread to Florence. Taddeo Alderotti was Florentine, and at Bologna he certainly had Florentine disciples. An Averroist, as we now know, was Guido Cavalcanti, "one of the best minds the world had and an excellent natural philosopher" (Boccaccio, Dec., VI, 9) and Dante's first friend. Even in Dante's thought there are evident traces of Averroistic doctrines.

In the 15th century, the stronghold of Averroism was Padua. If many reservations must be made about the alleged Averroism of Pietro d'Abano (v.), it is nonetheless certain that at Padua Averroes must have been held in great esteem, if in the chapel of the Cortellieri, annexed to the church of the Eremitani, the painter Giusto de' Menabuoi was commissioned to paint, before 1397, the figure of the Arab philosopher among the patron saints of the order and beside master Albert of Padua, whereas it is well known that in paintings of Dominican inspiration Averroes was depicted as a heretic at the feet of St. Thomas. And it was precisely a Hermit, Paul of Venice (v.), who had studied at Oxford, who began to teach at Padua, after 1408, a tempered Averroism, striving to reconcile, by shrewd distinctions, the typically Averroistic thesis of the uniqueness of the possible intellect with the thesis that holds the intellectual soul to be an "inherent" or "informing" form of the human individual.

This attempt of Paul of Venice gave rise within Averroism itself to a particular current, which we shall call Sigerian, and which had not a few followers. While the majority of Italian Averroists, such as Gaetano da Thiene, Pietro Trapolino, Ludovico Boccadiferro, Marcantonio Zimara, Luca Prossicio, Marcantonio Passeri called il Genoa, Francesco Vimercati, Rinaldo Odoni, Gian Paolo Pernumia and Francesco Piccolomini, stopped at the concept that the human intellect could be called only an "assisting" form, but not an "informing" form of man, the followers of the Sigerian current conceded that, according to Averroes, the intellect is united by a substantial bond to the sensitive soul and, more precisely, to the "cogitative" power, in such a way as to constitute together "a single soul," as Dante says with Albert the Great (Purg., XXV, 74), which as a whole is the informing form of the human individual and gives man his being as a rational animal. This doctrine, according to the testimony of Agostino Nifo, who was a follower of it in the early years of his teaching at Padua (1490-98), derives from the Tractatus de intellectu that Siger had written in reply to that of St. Thomas and which was still being read at Padua, together with other writings of the Brabantine, toward the end of the 15th century. To this doctrine, which Siger had elaborated in the effort to resolve the Thomistic arguments against Averroism, adhered G. Pico della Mirandola, Alessandro Achillini, professor of philosophy and medicine at Bologna from 1484 to 1512, Tiberio Bacilieri, who, after teaching at Bologna and Padua, passed in 1503 to the studium of Pavia, and Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, who was a teacher at Bologna (1533-59) and later bishop of Caserta.

But with G. Pico, friend and correspondent of the Jewish Averroist Elijah del Medigo, Paduan Averroism begins to enter a new phase. He was the first to use Simplicius's commentary on the De anima. Nifo, who discussed with Pico the Sigerian doctrine and the possibility of reconciling the thesis of the uniqueness of the intellect with the individuality of the human personality and the immortality of the soul, believed he had found in Simplicius's commentary confirmation of the Sigerian theory. But his knowledge of the work of the Greek commentator was hasty and confused. Nevertheless other Averroists seized upon the idea, and set about demonstrating that Averroes's commentary agreed almost entirely with that of Simplicius. To developing this thesis there applied himself, with great learning and acumen, Marcantonio de' Passeri called il Genoa. He, who was professor at Padua from 1517 until the year of his death, that is, until 1563, has left us an ample and learned commentary on the De anima (printed at Venice in 1576; ms. Vat. lat. 4705-7 in a somewhat different reportatio), in which the Simplician exposition is continually cited to confirm Averroistic doctrine. He persists in affirming that the human intellect is an "assisting" and not an "informing" form of man; nevertheless he maintains that it has with the "cogitative" power a natural and essential relation, insofar as it is intrinsecum operans et homini appropriatum, as Siger thought; so that the union cannot be called merely accidental. A disciple of il Genoa, the Paduan Giovanni Fascolo, publishing in 1543 his Latin translation of Simplicius's commentary on the De anima, laid it down that whatever good there is in the Averroistic commentary comes from Simplicius, and in the name of good taste invited his readers to set aside the writings of the Arab, translated into a barbaric language devoid of all elegance, and henceforth to study only Themistius and Simplicius.

Not all Averroists, however, accepted this invitation. Indeed F. Piccolomini, in the Capita sententiae Simplicii ex commentariis librorum de anima deprompta, warned against the enthusiasms for Simplicius, demonstrating that the Simplician interpretation of Aristotle had arisen from the attempt to reconcile the Stagirite with Plato, and that it had nothing to do with the Averroistic commentary. Nevertheless the attempt of Pico and of il Genoa, channeling Averroism into the great Platonic current, saved its central kernel of truth; while the Averroists who continued obstinately to repeat the old formulas, and did not feel the breath of new life that blew powerfully around them, consumed their days in quarrelsome and sterile diatribes, soon forgotten together with their writings, which spoke a language that had become incomprehensible.

To the decline of Averroism there contributed not a little also the new physics and the new astronomy, since the Averroists, even more than the other Aristotelian currents, were stubborn adversaries of the new philosophy of nature.

In the great dispute with Alexandrism, which dominated the entire 16th century, the Averroists were the adversaries of Pomponazzi, Porzio, Madio and Castellani, against whom they polemicized. But the immortality they defended was not that of the individual personality. Therefore in practice they ended up agreeing, on this point, with their adversaries.

Openly professed from the chair and in works disseminated even "cum privilegio superiorum" and sometimes dedicated to high ecclesiastical dignitaries, by men who did not have to suffer any molestation on the part of the inquisitors (the prohibitions at Padua by Bishop Pietro Barozzi and by the inquisitor Fra' Martino da Lendinara, in 1489, are one of the rare cases of excessive zeal), Averroism enjoyed the most unprejudiced freedom that has ever been granted both for teaching and for printing. The disappearance of Averroism from the philosophical horizon is due neither to persecutions nor to prohibitions, but to the natural exhaustion of its vitality, without curses and without regrets, after it had exercised an effective action of criticism and control over the other doctrines opposed to it.

Bruno Nardi