AVERROISMO. — From the second half of the thirteenth century through the entire sixteenth century, those who, in the controversies surrounding Aristotle’s thought, gave preference to Averroes’s commentary were called Averroists (averroistae, Averrois sectatores). In the last century, E. Renan, under the name of A., lumped together those philosophical doctrines, Averroist or otherwise, which originated from the various and often opposing currents of Arabic Peripateticism. Later scholars were strongly influenced by Renan’s confusion, particularly Mandonnet in his major monograph devoted to Siger of Brabant and to thirteenth-century Latin A. 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 was further increased by the fact that A. came to be presented as a heretical movement.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Aristotelianism spread throughout the Latin West, ecclesiastical authorities and masters of theology showed serious concern on account 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, moreover, did not succeed in driving it from the schools where it had by then become established. This happened because Peripatetic philosophy met a need. The Latin West possessed a theology, but not a physics, that is, an organic doctrine of nature, indispensable for understanding the works of Hippocrates, Galen, and the other physicians. Aristotelian physics supplied this deficiency; having first been received in the faculty of arts, it could not be ignored by the faculty of theology, which one entered only after passing through that of arts. Only in this way can we understand how it came about that, after 1230, all the Scholastics without exception were Aristotelians, insofar as they all accepted, broadly speaking, the physical framework of Aristo-
telianism, endeavoring to reconcile it, by means of ingenious devices, with the biblical framework.
Nevertheless, in the development of Scholastic Aristotelianism, we must distinguish three different moments or tendencies.
The first and oldest is the one we may call Avicennian-Augustinian. Avicenna’s doctrine, strongly colored, like Augustine’s thought, by Neoplatonic influences, had matured in an atmosphere saturated with religious ideas, which the Muslim philosopher had sought to reconcile with Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics. Not only had he attempted to preserve the individuality of human consciousness and its immortality, the central pillar of both Christian and Muslim dogma, but in his conception of the world he had also made room for miracle, prophecy, and revelation. In particular, his doctrine of the agent intellect seemed capable of being readily reconciled with the Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination and the rationes aeternae. The Stoic-Plotinian theory of the rationes seminales, reaffirmed by the bishop of Hippo, likewise seemed capable of being inserted without difficulty into Avicenna’s system, according to which the forms that, in the Aristotelian conception, are drawn from the potentiality of matter are irradiated into it by the light of the agent intellect. Domingo Gundisalvi, William of Auvergne, the first Franciscan doctors, and, in substance, Albert the Great belong to this Neoplatonizing, Avicennian, and Augustinian tendency.
The movement that came to be called Averroist reacted precisely against this Avicennian and Augustinian tendency. Averroes’s commentary on the writings of Aristotle, translated into Latin by Michael Scot with the help of that Jew Andrea of whom Roger Bacon speaks (Comp. studii philos., ed. J. S. Brewer, p. 472), and perhaps of someone else, became known seventy or eighty years after Avicenna’s philosophical writings. One begins to find traces of it only in works composed around 1230. Albert the Great, in the Summa de creaturis, written approximately twelve years later, cites Averroes a great many times, but often misunderstands his thought, which he shows himself to know only very confusedly. John of La Rochelle, who died in 1245, was still entirely unaware of the characteristic Averroist doctrine concerning the intellect. Only after the middle of the century can it be said that Averroes’s commentary was by then circulating among scholars. The first extensive exposition of Averroist doctrine, made with a sure knowledge of its foundations, is that of St. Thomas in his commentary on the second book of the Sentences (dist. 17, q. 2, a. 1), probably written 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 emerged the treatise transmitted to us under the title De unitate intellectus contra Averroem, which, in all likelihood, was reworked by its author. Albert provides a much more accurate exposition of Averroes’s doctrine in his commentary on the De anima, apparently written 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 position is profoundly different from Thomas’s. 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 which the Latin doctors give of Aristotle’s doctrine: omnino abborrenna doctorum latiorum verba (De anima, III, 2, 1), and he does not conceal that he prefers to it the interpretation of the greater 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). When it was objected to him that Aristotle’s thought, as thus expounded, conflicted on serious matters with theological teaching, he frankly acknowledged this opposition and reproached those who confundunt philosophiam in theologiam, without realizing that theologica non conveniunt cum physicis princi-
pia. Consequently, in his paraphrases of Aristotle he avoids any discussion of theological matters: 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), the latter phrase being repeated verbatim by Siger of Brabant, Peter of Abano, and John of Jandun.
This frank acknowledgment, on Albert’s part, of the opposition between Peripatetic philosophy—the only philosophy which medieval thinkers designated by the name “philosophy”—and revealed truth is what modern historians of philosophy call the “doctrine of double truth.”
Siger of Brabant is called “Albert’s disciple” by Agostino Nifo (De intellectu, I, 3, 26), who, at Padua, toward the end of the fifteenth century, was still reading at least three writings by the Brabantine Averroist that are now lost. Certainly, not all the theses defended by the latter were also defended by the master of Cologne; but some characteristic Averroist doctrines undoubtedly occur in Albert’s commentaries.
As we know, Averroes’ aim had been to free the interpretation of Aristotelian thought from the later Neoplatonic accretions of Alfarabi and Avicenna, especially from those of the latter, whom Averroes reproaches for having polluted his doctrine of the Stagirite with extraneous concerns. When the scholastics, already predisposed toward a particular interpretation of Aristotle by Avicennian exegesis, came into possession of Averroes’ commentary, they perceived the profound contrast between the two ways of understanding Aristotle. It is therefore not surprising that some masters of the faculty of arts, in Paris and Bologna, preferred Averroes’ “great commentary” to Avicenna’s interpretation and, following its lead, set out to restore Aristotle’s true face.
These masters were precisely called Averroists. We know the names of a small group of the first Averroists: Sigieri di Brabante, Bernieri di Nivelles, and Gosvino della Chapelle, all three masters in Paris, all three canons at Liège, and all three cited together by the inquisitor of France on 23 November 1276; to them must be added Boethius of Dacia, whose name is associated with that of Sigieri 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 that date.
The principal doctrines of Averroism 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 has never been a first man; 3) the virtue 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 alter 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, unique for the whole human species; it is the lowest of the separate intelligences and therefore cannot be called the form of man in the same way as the other material forms; 8) the possible intellect is by its nature ordered to knowing sensible things; therefore it needs to be eternally united with the human species, whose individuals, scattered throughout the earth, provide it with sensible images or “phantasms,” from which, through a process of abstraction, it derives the concept or “intelligible species”; although it cannot be called the form of the human body in the same way as material forms, it is united to human fantasy or “cogitative” power by a natural bond that cannot be called accidental, and it can never be conceived as wholly separate from man; 9) in this process of abstraction, the possible intellect is assisted by the agent intellect, which for some Averroists is God, and for others a separate intelligence that is always in act; 10) the agent intellect unites with the possible intellect, initially only as the efficient cause of the cognitive process, and forms the speculative intellect; at the end of this process, it unites with it as its form and makes it capable of understanding the separate substances in their pure intelligibility. In this perfect union of the possible intellect with the agent intellect consists man’s supreme perfection and the beatitude that only a few privileged individuals are permitted to attain 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, which is the specific form of every human individual.
It follows from this summary that the now-established expression “monopsychism” is erroneous when used to designate Averroist doctrine, since for the Averroists the soul is multiplied according to the number of individuals; the intellect, indeed, is one for the whole human species, but not for all other beings distinct from man.
The third Aristotelian current of scholasticism is the Thomistic one. Having noted important divergences between the old Aristotelian translation from Greek and the translation from Arabic, and even more so between the opposing interpretations of the text, the Aquinate induced his Flemish confrere, William of Moerbeke, to revise the Greek-Latin version word for word and, whenever necessary, to prepare a new translation perfectly faithful to the Greek text. He then undertook a new literal exposition of Aristotle’s principal works, wholly independent both of Avicenna’s interpretation and of Averroes’. In this way he believed he could combat Averroism on philological as well as philosophical grounds. Thomas was the most resolute and determined opponent of Averroism, which he presented as absurd from the philosophical point of view and heretical from the theological one. There is no doubt that it was owing to the vigorous criticism of the Italian Dominican that Averroism, 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 Averroism was not a heresy, since the Averroists declared that they upheld certain theses not as true, but as necessary consequences of the principles of Aristotelian philosophy. If these conflicted with revealed truths, so much the worse for Aristotle and for those who had undertaken 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 the twofold truth.”
Thanks to these declarations, which had a precedent in similar declarations by Albert the Great, the Averroists did not surrender either before Thomistic criticism or before the two Parisian condemnations. It is true that the situation counseled prudence. Thus, 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 thirteenth century and at the beginning of the fourteenth, the disputes flared up again with greater intensity than before, as the writings of Raimondo Lullo against the Averroists demonstrate.
The leading representative of Averroism in the first decades of the fourteenth century was Giovanni di Jandun. His quaestiones on the De anima, the Fisica, the De caelo, the Metafisica, the Parva naturalia, and the De substantia orbis, by their breadth and the many valuable pieces of information they contain, offer us a complete panoramic view of the Averroist positions at the beginning of the century. The writings of this companion of Marsilio da Padova enjoyed the widest manuscript circulation, especially in Italy, and, through the medium of print, continued to circulate until the end of the sixteenth century. Among the works of Averroists, only Averroes’ commentary had a greater number of editions. The doctrines of G. di Jandun inspired maestro Taddeo da Parma, who taught at Bologna between 1318 and 1321, as the colleague of another Averroist, Angelo d’Arezzo.
Indirect assistance to the Averroists then came from certain theologians, who openly began 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 Jacere catholicum, and thinks that, for the Stagirite, the intellectual soul cannot be called the form of the body. The Carmelite Gerard of Bologna held the same view; he regarded Averroes as « maximum Aristotelis interpretem », and not as a « corrupter of Peripatetic philosophy », as Thomas had judged him. Similarly, the Franciscans Peter of Auriol and William of Ockham thought that it could not be demonstrated philosophically that the rational soul is the form of the human body. In turn, another Franciscan, Giovanni da Ripatransone, in an extensive and 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, held that only Averroes had understood Aristotle. Baconthorp (v.) also advanced vigorous criticisms of the Thomistic arguments against Averroism; because he had suggested a single way of making the Averroistic doctrine on the union of the intellect with man less implausible, he was hailed by the Averroists of the late fifteenth century even as « averroistarum princeps ». In the fifteenth century, Cardinal Bessarion (In column. 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 who later became chancellor and canon of London, was a resolute supporter of Averroism in England. At Oxford, no less than at Paris and Bologna, Averroistic centers remained active for a long time. From Bologna, Averroism spread to Florence. Taddeo Alderotto was a Florentine, and he certainly had Florentine disciples at Bologna. As we now know, Guido Cavalcanti was an Averroist, « un de' migliori loci che avesse il mondo et ottimo filosofo naturale » (Boccaccio, Dec., VI, 9), and Dante’s first friend. Even Dante’s thought contains evident traces of Averroistic doctrines.
In the fifteenth century, Padua was the stronghold of Averroism. Although many reservations must be made concerning Pietro d'Abano (v.), it is nevertheless certain that Averroes must have been held in high regard at Padua, since in the chapel of the Cortellieri, annexed to the church of the Hermits, the painter Giusto de' Menabuoi was commissioned, before 1397, to paint the figure of the Arab philosopher among the order’s patron saints and beside the master Alberto da Padova, whereas it is known that in paintings inspired by the Dominicans Averroes was depicted as a heretic at the feet of St. Thomas. And it was precisely a Hermit, Paolo Veneto (v.), who had gone to study at Oxford, who began teaching at Padua, after 1408, a moderate Averroism, striving, through judicious distinctions, to reconcile the typically Averroistic thesis of the unity of the possible intellect with the thesis that regards the intellectual soul as the « inherent form » or « informing form » of the human individual.
This attempt by Paolo Veneto gave rise within Averroism itself to a particular current, which we shall call Sigerian, and which had quite a few followers. While most of the Italian Averroists, such as Gaetano da Thiene, Pietro Trapolino, Ludovico Boccadiferro, Marcantonio Zimara, Luca Prossicio, Marcantonio Passeri known as il Genoa, Francesco Vimercati, Rinaldo Odoni, Gian Paolo Pernumia, and Francesco Piccolomini, stopped at the view that the human intellect could be called only the « assisting form », but not the « informing form », of man, the followers of the Sigerian current conceded that, according to Averroes, the intellect is united by a substantial bond with the sensitive soul and, more precisely, with the « cogitative » faculty, so as to constitute together « one single soul », as Dante says, following Albert the Great (Purg., XXV, 74), which in its entirety 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 followed it during the first years of his teaching at Padua (1490–98), derived from the Tractatus de intellectu that Siger had written in reply to St. Thomas’s work and that was still being read at Padua, together with other writings by the Brabantian, toward the end of the fifteenth century. 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, moved in 1503 to the university of Pavia, and Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, who taught at Bologna (1533–59) and later became bishop of Caserta, adhered to this doctrine, which Siger had developed in an effort to resolve the Thomistic arguments against Averroism.
But with G. Pico, friend and correspondent of the Jewish Averroist Elia del Medigo, Paduan Averroism began 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 unity of the intellect with the individuality of human personality and the immortality of the soul, believed that he had found confirmation of the Sigerian theory in Simplicius’s commentary. But his knowledge of the Greek commentator’s work was hurried and confused. Nevertheless, other Averroists took up the idea and undertook to demonstrate that Averroes’s commentary agreed almost entirely with that of Simplicius. Marcantonio de' Passeri, known as il Genoa, pursued this thesis with great learning and acumen. He, who was professor at Padua from 1517 until the year of his death, 1563, left us an extensive 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 in confirmation of Averroistic doctrine. He persisted in asserting that the human intellect is the « assisting form » and not the « informing form » of man; nevertheless, he maintained that it has a natural and essential relationship with the « cogitative » faculty, insofar as it is intrinsecum operans et homini appropriatum, as Siger had thought; thus the union cannot be called merely accidental. A disciple of il Genoa, the Paduan Giovanni Fascolo, publishing his Latin translation of Simplicius’s commentary on the De anima in 1543, declared that whatever was good in the Averroistic commentary came from Simplicius, and, in the name of good taste, urged that the writings of the Arab, translated into a barbarous language devoid of all elegance, be set aside and that henceforth only Themistius and Simplicius be studied.
Not all Averroists, however, accepted this invitation. Indeed, F. Piccolomini, in the Capita sententiae Simplicii ex commentariis librorum de anima deprompta, warned against enthusiasm for Simplicius, demonstrating that the Simplician interpretation of Aristotle had arisen from an attempt to reconcile the Stagirite with Plato, and that it had nothing to do with the Averroistic commentary. Nevertheless, the attempt of Pico and il Genoa, by channeling Averroism into the great Platonic current, preserved its central kernel of truth; whereas the Averroists who continued obstinately to repeat the old formulas, and failed to sense the breath of new life that was blowing powerfully around them, spent their days in quarrelsome and sterile disputes, soon forgotten together with their writings, which spoke a language that had become incomprehensible.
The decline of Averroism was also contributed to in no small measure by the new physics and the new astronomy, since the Averroists, even more than the other Aristotelian currents, were stubborn opponents of the new philosophy of nature.
Nella grande disputa con l'alessandrismo, la quale domina tutto il sec. XVI, gli averroisti furono gli avversari del Pomponazzi, del Porzio, del Madio e del Castellani, contro i quali polemizzarono. Ma l'immortalità che essi difendevano non era quella della personalità individuale. Perciò in pratica finivano per trovarsi d'accordo, su questo punto, con i loro avversari.
Professato apertamente sulla cattedra e in opere divulgate perfino «cum privilegio superiorum» e dedicate talora ad alti dignitari ecclesiastici, da uomini che non ebbero a subire alcuna molestia da parte degli inquisitori (i divieti a Padova da parte del vescovo Pietro Barozzi e dell'inquisitore fra' Martino da Lendinara, nel 1489, sono uno dei rari casi di zelo eccessivo), l'a. gode della più spregiudicata libertà che sia mai stata concessa sì per l'insegnamento che per la stampa. La scomparsa dell'a. dall'orizzonte filosofico non è dovuta né a persecuzioni né a divieti, ma al naturale esaurirsi della sua vitalità, senza maledizioni e senza rimpianti, dopo aver esercitato un'efficace azione di critica e di controllo sulle altre dottrine ad esso contrastanti.