GUNDISALVI, DOMENICO (Gundissalinus). — Spanish philosopher, archdeacon of Segovia, who lived at the court of the archbishop of Toledo around 1150.
He translated works from Arabic together with Giovanni Ispano (v. GIOVANNI ABEN DAHUT), according to a method mentioned
in the accompanying letter to the translation of Avicenna’s De anima addressed to the archbishop of Toledo: Giovanni Ispano translated the Arabic word for word into Castilian or Spanish, and G. translated the Castilian word for word into Latin: «me (G. Ispano) singula verba culgariter (that is, into Castilian) preferente et Dominico archidiacono singula in latinum convertente ex arabico translatum». G. translated in this manner works by al-Firâbi, al-Gazzâlî, and Avicébron (of the translation of Avicébron’s [Ibn Gêbhirôl’s] Font vitae, an excellent edition by C. Baeumker, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philos. des Mittelalters, 1 [1891], fasc. II, III, IV). G. was therefore a means of union between the Eastern and Western worlds, which had come into contact in Toledo, recently conquered by the Christians.
But G. also contributed to their mutual contacts not only as a translator, but also through personal works, even though these were of a popularizing character. The following are remembered: De processione mundi (ed. by M. Menéndez y Pelayo, in Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, I, Madrid 1880, pp. 691-711; and by G. Bulow in Beiträge, cited above, 24 [1925]); De Unitate (ed. by P. Correns, ibid., 1 [1891]); De divisione philosophiae (ed. by L. Baur, ibid., 4 [1903]); De anima (partial ed. by A. Löwenthal, Königsberg 1890); De immortalitate animae (ed. by G. Bulow in Beiträge, cited above, 2 [1897]). Probably this last work is by G. d’Auvergne (cf. A. Masnovo, Da Guglielmo d'Auvergne a s. Tommaso d'Aquino, III, Milano 1945, pp. 119-23).
The Eastern world, under the influence of Neoplatonic thought, conceived the origin of things as proceeding from the One through emanationist intermediaries. G., while insisting on the origin of things from God, spoke to the medieval Christian Latin world of a creationist intermediary principle: hence there later arose problems concerning the possibility, at least, if not the reality, of creation by creatures, whether as instrumental cause or as principal cause. G.’s position, although not rigorously conforming to Christian dogma, brought Eastern and Western thought closer together on the Christianizing platform of the De causis, originally written in Arabic, perhaps by his colleague Iohannes Hispanus, translated into Latin later, in the second half of the twelfth century, by Gerardo di Cremona (another man of the Toledan milieu), and commented on by the most authoritative representatives of medieval Christian thought (cf. A. Masnovo, loc. cit., pp. 1-28).
The Eastern world cannot have been unaffected by the work of Toledo, and especially by G., since in 1300 the treatise De anima received two translations into Hebrew (albeit partial ones) by two Jewish scholars, Gêrôn ben Selômôh and Hillel da Verona (as appears from a note by J. Teicher presented by C. A. Nallino to the Accademia nazionale dei Lincei).