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 John the Spaniard (v. GIOVANNI ABEN DAHUT), according to a method that is hinted at in the accompanying letter of the translation of Avicenna's De anima to the archbishop of Toledo: John the Spaniard 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, in Castilian) preferente et Dominico archidiacono singula in latinum convertente ex arabico translatum». In this way G. translated works of al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, Avicebron (of the translation of Avicebron's Fons vitae [Ibn Gabirol] there is 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 world and the Western world, which came into contact in Toledo, recently conquered by the Christians.
But G. also contributed to these mutual contacts not only as a translator, but also with works of his own, albeit 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, cit., 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 cit., 2 [1897]). Probably this last work is by G. of Auvergne (cf. A. Masnovo, Da Guglielmo d'Auvergne a s. Tommaso d'Aquino, III, Milan 1945, pp. 119-23).
The Eastern world, under the influence of Neoplatonic thought, represented to itself the origin of things from the One through emanative intermediaries. G., while insisting on the origin of things from God, spoke to the medieval Latin Christian world of a creationist intermediarism: whence there later arose problems about the possibility, at least, if not the reality, of creation on the part of creatures, whether as instrumental cause or as principal cause. G.'s position, although not rigorously conforming to Christian dogma, brought Eastern thought closer to Western thought on the Christianizing platform of the De causis, written originally in Arabic, perhaps by his colleague Iohannes Hispanus, translated into Latin later in the second half of the 12th century by Gerard of Cremona (another man of the Toledan circle), and commented on by the most authoritative representatives of medieval Christian thought (cf. A. Masnovo, loc. cit., pp. 1-28).
The work of Toledo, and in particular of G., cannot have left the Eastern world unmoved, if the treatise De anima in 1300 obtained two translations into Hebrew (albeit partial) by two Jewish scholars, Gêrôn ben Selômôh and Hillel of Verona (as appears from a note by J. Teicher presented by C. A. Nallino to the Accademia nazionale dei Lincei).