During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the growing influx into Europe of Latin translations from Arabic and Hebrew manuscripts had a dramatic effect on the directions that philosophy would take. Many of these works entered the Christian monastic world by way of Spain. From the ninth through the twelfth centuries the courts of the Muslim caliphs of Spain were the most cultured in Europe. The “Moors” (Arab, Berber, and other Muslim groups) had invaded Chris- tian Spain in the year 711 C.E. as part of the militant expansion of Islam. Islam is the third of the three dominant Western religions, all of which derive from roughly the same area of the Middle East. The key figure in Islam is Muhammad, who was born at Mecca in today’s Saudi Arabia in 570 and died in Medina in 632 C.E. According to the tradition, when he was forty years old he received a direct revelation from the angel Gabriel while meditating in a cave on a desert moun- tain. Over the next twenty years Muhammad continued to receive rev- elations that designated him as the latest in a long line of prophets of God that were to be accepted by the new religion, including all the great prophets from the Jewish Bible, but also Jesus of Nazareth. Muhammad copied the words that were revealed to him, and they
became the Qur’an (or Koran), the holy book of the Islamic religion. The main idea in this religion is monotheism, just as it is in Judaism and Christianity (though Jews and Muslims often see the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as a backsliding into polytheism). Even more than Judaism or Christianity, Islam preaches the power of God (Allah) over the world and in everyday life. The words “Islam” and “Muslim” both derive from the Arabic word for “submission” or “sur- render.” Like the other two religions—but unlike the tribal religions of Muhammad’s native Arabia—Islam forbids the use of idols. Like Judaism and Christianity it sees its patriarch in the biblical figure of Abraham. Islam preaches the brotherhood of all believers, and it requires charity to the poor. In addition, it stresses prayer (five times daily), purification, and fasting during holy days (Ramadan), and it enjoins the faithful to make a holy pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during one’s lifetime.
Islam had tremendous appeal because of its theological sim- plicity, its ability to address the spiritual and material needs of great numbers of people who lived in chaotic times, its capacity to transcend tribal rivalries, and its offer of community and personal salvation. Its survival against great odds and bloody oppression in its first years gave it a militant cast. Its leaders believed in the idea of holy war (jihad), and through conquests and conversion Islam spread rapidly in all directions. In the West, by the year 732—a little more than 100 years after Muhammad’s first revelations—Muslim armies had penetrated deeply into France, where they were finally defeated at the Battle of Tours by Charles the Sledgehammer, Charlemagne’s grandfather. The Arab-dominated Muslim army retreated behind the Pyrenees, where the Moors developed a splen- did Islamic culture in Spain that contained beautiful cities, magnifi- cent gardens with flowing water everywhere, great architectural monuments, and spacious centers of learning. There Muslim, Chris- tian, and Jewish scholars worked side by side studying the manu- scripts of the Greek philosophers, whose surviving copies were slowly being discovered and gathered in the great libraries of Seville,
Granada, Cordoba, and Toledo. These libraries had no match in the Christian world. The products of the Mus- lim schools of transla- tors slowly worked their way into Catholic- dominated Europe and caused a great stir, especially the transla- tions of Aristotle and many commentaries on his works, most of which had been lost to the Christian world.
Averroës
One of the most influential of the Muslim philosophers in both the Islamic and Catholic worlds was Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd, better known in the West as Averroës (1126–1198), who was born in Cordoba, Spain. His most impressive writings were his careful explications and analyses of Aristotle’s phi- losophy. Aristotle’s rediscovery had sent shock waves through the Muslim intellectual community. Averroës’s commentaries were written in the context of a debate among Arab-speaking theologians as to whether the claims of Aristotle’s philosophy were compatible with Muslim dogma. The Arab theologian al-Ghazali (1058–1111) had writ- ten against Aristotle, and the Persian Avicenna (980–1037) had defended the Greek philosopher. Averroës rejected the arguments of both al-Ghazali and Avicenna, claiming that they had both misread Aristotle. There still exists today a scholarly debate as to how Aver- roës himself should be read. According to one group of interpreters, Averroës wrote two types of commentary: one for more general
consumption in which he asserted that all of Aristotle is compatible with Islam and that Aristotle’s ideas can be used to explore and clar- ify Muslim belief, and another for a more sophisticated audience in which he defended Aristotle against Islam. According to a second group of scholars, Averroës’s message is consistent throughout and is somewhere between the two extremes demarcated by the other two groups.2Averroës’s commentaries came into the Christian world appearing to claim that there were two kinds of opposing truths, philosophical truth (i.e., Aristotelian) and religious truth, yet also claiming that the contexts of philosophical and theological discourse were so distinct that both truths could be accepted at the same time. Averroës’s writings had a dizzying effect on the philosophers of the monasteries and newly established universities of the Catholic world. On the one hand, Averroës’s work was indispensable for the understanding of Aristotle, but on the other, it was felt that his the- ory of the discrepancy between religion and philosophy would have to be refuted in the name of Christian dogma. Thomas Aquinas (whom we will study shortly) wrote a book called On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists, yet he so respected Averroës’s explanations of Aristotle that he simply called him “the Commentator.” Some Western theologians, led by Siger of Brabant (ca. 1240–ca. 1284), went against the grain (and got in trouble for it), defending what they took to be Averroës’s doctrine of double truth. They were called the Latin Averroists.
Maimonides
What Averroës was to Muslim philosophy and Thomas Aquinas was to Catholic philosophy, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) was to Jew- ish philosophy. Like his contemporary Averroës, Maimonides was born in Cordoba and also was most influential in the Catholic world for his insights into the philosophy of Aristotle. Thomas Aquinas revered Maimonides, and Thomas’s demonstrations of God’s existence were clearly influenced by those of Maimonides. In fact, Maimonides’ first book,A Treatise on Logic, is a compendium of the categories of Aris-
totle’s logic and an analysis of them. It was written in Arabic when Maimonides was sixteen years old.
Maimonides’ most celebrated book is calledGuide of the Perplexed. It purports to conduct educated but intellectually confused Jews through the labyrinth of philosophy and Judaic theology in their quest to resolve the con- flicts between science and reli- gion. The problem is, the Guide itself needs a guide, for it is a very difficult work, and it raises questions about its author’s
intentions similar to those raised about Averroës’s. The most com- mon way of understanding the book is to treat it as an attempt to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Jewish theology, showing that the Greek’s theories provide tools for exploring and expanding on Judaism. Maimonides calls Aristotle “the chief of the philosophers” and calls Moses “the master of those who know.”3But there have been very respectable scholars who see the book as subversive of reli- gious values. Despite appearing to support religious values, the book in fact undermines them in a subtle and sophisticated way. For instance, Maimonides insists on what he claims to be the primary commandment of Judaism, to know God. Yet his theology is a nega- tive theology, apparently showing that God cannot know us (an idea of Aristotle’s, as you may recall) and that we can only know what God is not (a Neoplatonic idea that we have already seen in the work of John Scotus Eriugena). One Maimonidean scholar states the prob- lem like this: Maimonides “records the duty to know God as the very first commandment. . . . Yet when we examine it in the total context and full development of his own analysis, we seemingly must conclude that this ideal is not only impossible, but empty of content and meaning.”4
But if some scholars have seen Maimonides as a heretic destroying Jewish doctrine with Aristotelian logic, others have seen him as an anti-Aristotelian rabbi whose intention was to demon- strate the incoherence of so-called philosophical wisdom. Still others have seen him as holding a version of the doctrine of double truth attributed to Averroës, whose work he knew and admired. Whatever Maimonides’ true intentions were, his astute clarification of Aris- totelian categories and the use of Aristotelian arguments in his books left the impression in the world of Latin-speaking scholars that he was indeed a guide for those readers perplexed by Aristotle.
Despite the small minority of vociferous critics calling Maimoni- des a heretic, Jewish culture has for the greatest part been very proud of him from his day to ours. When Christian troops under Ferdi- nand and Isabella conquered the Moors in 1492 and expelled the Jews from Spain, there emerged this adage in Ladino, the Spanish spoken by the exiled Jews: “De Moisés a Moisés no ha habido nadie como Moisés” (From Moses to Moses there has been nobody like Moses).