The House of Wisdom (30 page)

For Aristotle, the whole question of the Eternity of the World was also bound up with his conceptions of infinity and time, the latter of which he defined as the measure of bodies in motion. Here, Augustine and some later Christian thinkers felt they had enough wiggle room to absolve Aristotle of contradicting the word of God, as spelled out in Genesis. They argued that the universe was created not “in time” but together “with time.”
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Before the Creation, there were no bodies or anything else to provide the change and movement that Aristotle’s notion of time required. With the creation of the necessary bodies, however, time could now be said to exist, providing the “beginning” that the book of Genesis demanded. Augustine wrote in his
Confessions
, “If there was no time before the creation of heaven and earth, the question, ‘What were you [God] doing then?’ is meaningless, for when there was no time, there was no then.”
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Augustine may have distorted Aristotle’s views, but he did manage to keep the problem at bay in the West for eight hundred years.

Among the first works to shake Christendom’s complacency were the writings of the prolific Persian polymath Avicenna, who enjoyed enormous popularity among Western philosophers and theologians well into the thirteenth century and beyond. Of particular interest were Avicenna’s discussions of metaphysics and the notion of the soul, excerpted from his comprehensive
Kitab al~Shifa
, or
The Book of Healing
, begun in 1021.
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These excerpts were first rendered into Latin in Toledo no later than 1166, but as with most of the other translations of major Arabic texts, it took considerable time before their full impact was felt. More than one hundred extant Latin manuscripts of Avicenna’s philosophical writings were copied after 1250—three times the figure in circulation before that date, despite a head start of almost one hundred years.
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Avicenna’s teachings had much to commend them to Christian thinkers. Faced with the daunting task of parsing Aristotle’s own work on the subject, particularly the notoriously opaque
Metaphysics
, Avicenna appeared to offer a familiar way into such a complex matter. He himself says he read
Metaphysics
forty times—enough to memorize it—but understood the author’s true intent only after he stumbled on a short guide by his predecessor Abu Nasr al-Farabi in the booksellers’ bazaar. “I returned home and hastened to read it, and at once the purposes of that book were disclosed to me because I had learned it by heart. I rejoiced at this and the next day I gave much in alms to the poor in gratitude to God Exalted.”
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Avicenna defines the “full fruit” of metaphysics as establishing the existence and attributes of God, a notion that would have had the enthusiastic backing of his newfound Christian readers. As a Muslim—and thus, a committed monotheist—Avicenna is naturally far more interested than the pagan Aristotle in connecting metaphysics to the study of God. But thanks to the fortuitous help from al-Farabi’s primer, Avicenna also broadens this notion of metaphysics to encompass the full Aristotelian tradition as well as Islamic theology.
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Throughout, Avicenna attempts to accommodate both philosophy and his fundamental religious convictions, beliefs that dovetailed with many of the concerns of medieval Christendom. This was particularly the case with his complex account of the creation of the world, which was designed to preserve a distinction between an eternal God, perfect in his simplicity, and the transitory and imperfect world of material things.
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The fact that this attempt ultimately incited such opposition in both East and West cannot obscure its inherent worth or the considerable influence that it wielded throughout the late Middle Ages.

The teachings of Avicenna on the soul, and on psychology in general, also entered Western tradition through his voluminous studies of medicine and biology. Michael Scot, who translated Avicenna’s
On Animals
, absorbed the philosopher’s views in the context of his own work as a physician. He freely adopted Avicenna’s ideas on the sensory faculties, the distinction between perception and motion, and the difference between man’s practical and contemplative intellects.
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Avicenna’s comprehensive
Canon of Medicine
, meanwhile, contained important contributions to the scientific method, including keen clinical observations of various diseases.
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It also uncovered a world where man could understand and even use the laws of nature for his own benefit, a central characteristic that would come to define the new world of Western science.
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So pervasive was his influence that
The Incoherence of the Philosophers
, by the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, the foremost attack on Avicenna and perhaps the single most important work of medieval Muslim theology, was generally mistaken in the West as an affirmation of Avicenna’s philosophical views.
⁴⁷

For Avicenna, God is the only thing in the universe without a cause; he alone is necessary and everything else is contingent upon him. God’s own necessity sets in motion a complex chain of events through a series of intelligent agents, who in turn create the heavenly bodies and the terrestrial world in the best and only way possible. This idea, which runs from the late Greek commentators of the third century
A.D.
through to Avicenna’s Arab predecessors, held out some promise for Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike: It attributes everything in the universe to a single source, and it provides some sort of rational framework for the Creation.
⁴⁸
But Avicenna also argues that God would not be God had he not created the world instantaneously; it was not, as common readings of scripture seem to suggest, an act of divine will in which the idea of Creation and its implementation took place separately. This yields an eternal universe but one that was “created” in that it relies on the first cause, here synonymous with God.
⁴⁹

Born in 1058, twenty-one years after Avicenna’s death, Al-Ghazali famously complains in his
Incoherence of the Philosophers
that Avicenna’s teaching on the Eternity of the World and related matters leaves God with almost nothing to do. Once events are set in motion, God cannot intervene in the subsequent unfolding of his own creation. Nor is he aware of the pulse of daily life among men, the so-called particulars. And any decision to create the universe flows from his very nature and is completely removed from God’s own hands. Al-Ghazali, a brilliant polemicist and notable among the Muslim theologians for his readiness to take on the philosophers on their own terms, asks pointedly whether Avicenna’s God really is God in any meaningful sense of the word.

Al-Ghazali’s biting critique of the Eternity of the World is an assertion of God’s infinite power against what he sees as Avicenna’s impious restrictions on divine freedom of action. Here, the traditional theologians must have felt they were on solid scriptural footing, for they could draw on a literal reading of the Holy Book to support their arguments for God’s absolute knowledge of all things. “There does not escape him the weight of an atom in the heavens or in the earth,” says the Koran (34:3). For al-Ghazali, such knowledge and its attendant power mean the world is in a constant process of divine re-creation, with the atoms that comprise the universe instantaneously reshuffled again and again by God’s hand. Reality is actually a continuing series of “new” realities, each one deliberately created by God but none of them dictated by necessity. If a ball of cotton burns when thrust into a flame, al-Ghazali argues, it is only because God at that instant wills it to burn, and not because burning is a necessary and natural outcome of the introduction of the flame. Our notion of cause and effect, he says, is an illusion.

He includes the doctrine of the Eternity of the World in one of his three allegations of infidelity against the philosophers, a hint of the full-scale attack on the grounds of heresy that would be mounted against the same notion in the Christian West more than 150 years later. It was, perhaps, both al-Ghazali’s great luck and his great misfortune to have come after his first major adversary, in the person of Avicenna, but before his second, the rationalist Averroes. To a remarkable degree, however, al-Ghazali’s
Incoherence of the Philosophers
anticipates many of the arguments that will feature in the later works of Averroes, particularly his direct response to al-Ghazali, tartly titled
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
.

Frederick II, the
stupor mundi
, was not the only medieval ruler tantalized by the Eternity of the World, for it was a similar question, posed fifty years earlier by the Muslim master of al-Andalus, that led to the commentaries on Aristotle that would one day rattle the intellectual foundations of Christendom. Sometime around 1168, Averroes was ushered into the presence of the sultan, Abu Yaqub Yusuf. To his alarm, Averroes found himself drawn into the sultan’s discussion of creation. Abu Yaqub had spent his earlier years as governor of Seville, where he immersed himself in that city’s great libraries and surrounded himself with scientists and philosophers. He had assumed the sultanate in 1163 and was now prepared to indulge his abiding personal interest in a slightly more public fashion. “The first thing that the Prince of Believers said to me, after asking my name, my father’s name and my genealogy, was: ‘What is their opinion about the heavens’—referring to the philosophers—‘are they eternal or created?’ ” Averroes later recalled.
⁵⁰

This was dangerous territory. Philosophy, and even its sparring partner theology, had never really enjoyed more than a tenuous hold on intellectual life in al-Andalus. Islamic Spain had long been under the influence of the conservative Maliki school of religious jurisprudence, whose founder had once declared that human wisdom could not go beyond the writings of the Koran and the teachings of the sunnah, the lived example of the Prophet and his early companions: “Knowledge is threefold: the clear Book of God, past Tradition, and ‘I know not.’ ”
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As a result, scholars generally operated discreetly, or under the direct protection of the local rulers, who shielded them from censure by the clerical authorities. These conservative jurists saw no need for theology, let alone philosophy. Even the books of al-Ghazali—seen today as the great defender of Muslim theological orthodoxy against the Arab and Greek philosophers—were burned on the say-so of the conservative jurists. The first real Andalusi philosopher, known in Latin as Avempace, once compared himself to a lonely weed—unwanted, isolated, and unappreciated.
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Things began to improve somewhat with the arrival from North Africa in 1146 of the Berber Almohad dynasty, whose founder, Ibn Tumart, quietly began to loosen the reins on theology and even philosophy. Ibn Tumart believed in a strict literal reading of the Koran and had little time for the formularized interpretations of the legal schools, such as the Malikites, that had grown up around the religious texts. For him, man was endowed with reason that would allow him to make sense of religious teaching. Ibn Tumart and other like-minded Muslim thinkers believed that reason and revelation were complementary and in no way stood in opposition to each other. The faculty of reason established the grounds for man’s belief in revelation. Thus, reason could establish the existence of God.
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The Almohad leader and his successors, however, remained cautious in public lest they anger the powerful religious jurists.

No wonder Averroes was terrified when the sultan first broached a taboo subject like the Eternity of the World: “Confusion and fear took hold of me, and I began making excuses and denying that I had ever concerned myself with philosophic learning.” However, Averroes had been introduced at court by his friend and mentor Ibn Tufayl, a philosopher and the physician to the sultan, and the ruler then launched a discussion of the very topic, exhibiting considerable knowledge of the matter. “Thus he continued to set me at ease until I spoke, and he learned what was my competence in that subject,” reports Averroes. “And when I withdrew he ordered for me a donation in money, a magnificent robe of honor, and a steed.”
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By the time of his meeting with the sultan, Averroes had already written works on religious law and philosophy, as well as a major medical textbook, which enjoyed great popularity for centuries among Christian, Jewish, and Muslim doctors. Years later, he would be summoned to replace his aging friend Ibn Tufayl as the sultan’s personal physician. But first, Abu Yaqub charged him with a fateful commission, with Ibn Tufayl acting as go-between. Averroes later recalled for one of his students: “Ibn Tufayl summoned me one day and told me, ‘Today I hear the prince of Believers [the sultan, Abu Yaqub] complain of the difficulty of expression of Aristotle and his translators, and mention the obscurity of his aims, saying if someone would tackle those books, summarize them and expound their aims, after understanding them thoroughly, it would be easier for people to grasp them.’ ” Ibn Tufayl at once recommended the sultan assign the task to Averroes, who leaped at the offer of royal patronage for his philosophical work. “This is what led me to summarize the books of the philosopher Aristotle.”
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Despite a full roster of duties as a jurist, Averroes threw himself into the Aristotle project. With the political and financial backing of the sultan, he turned out three types of works devoted to explicating specific texts for his Muslim readers: the epitomes, summarizing Aristotle’s central points; the so-called middle commentaries, which paraphrased and explained the material; and the “great” commentaries, which examined the text line by line and brought to bear a wide range of Arab and Greek philosophical writings as well as his own interpretations. In all, thirty-eight commentaries are extant in Latin, Arabic, or Hebrew, covering most of Aristotle’s major works.
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Together, they represent a remarkable effort to reveal the “true” Aristotle, shorn of many of the accretions of later Greek commentators and the esoteric tendencies of Avicenna, and to assert an Andalusi philosophical tradition as opposed to that of the Muslim East.
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This was in keeping with Averroes’s own inclinations as well as those of the rationalist Almohad sultans, who were determined to establish the place of reason alongside revelation.