The House of Wisdom (32 page)

The startling success of natural philosophy and its expanding hold on the Western imagination throughout the thirteenth century was accelerated by the steady transformation of the medieval university into a powerful social, intellectual, and cultural institution in its own right. The university remained within the general orbit of the church for centuries, but it was first and foremost a product of the growing need for trained clerks, lawyers, doctors, and secular officials and bureaucrats.
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The bounties of the
studia Arabum
offered a ready-made curriculum to help meet this demand.

It is easy to see why philosophy, as put forward by the Arabs and the Greeks, held enormous appeal for the late medieval mind as it slowly began to shed its isolationism and confront the natural world. This new science was breathtaking in its scope and offered a coherent explanation of just about everything. While it covered elements of the traditional Christian view that it confronted, it also contained much new material on questions left effectively untouched by religious teachings, such as the workings of the physical world and the inner mind of man. It proceeded logically from basic assumptions and self-evident principles, promising order in a seemingly haphazard world.
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Best of all, it carried the powerful Aristotle “brand,” already well established through the practice of dialectics and through the underlying principles of Arab astrology, popularized by the Latin translations of Albumazar.

At Paris, Europe’s leading center of higher learning and preeminent seat of religious studies, the arts faculty swelled dramatically until it dwarfed those of theology, law, and medicine. Within one hundred years of Michael Scot’s translations of Averroes there were more than eight times as many arts masters as there were teachers in the other faculties combined.
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Early figures are sketchy, but modern estimates put the total number of students who matriculated at Europe’s universities between 1350 and 1500 at 750,000.
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The exciting new ways of university life, with its loose guilds of masters, its rough-and-tumble student associations, and its heated rivalries among the faculties and between individual professors, challenged the sleepy monopoly long enjoyed by the cathedral schools and, by extension, the control over advanced education by the church.

Such a state of affairs alarmed many traditional theologians who saw the rising influence of the arts masters—for all practical purposes now professional philosophers—as a danger to the faith and to their own standing. Armed with the translations of Averroes and Avicenna, these masters were actively promoting a number of problematic ideas that questioned established Christian doctrine. Adding to the rancor between the arts and theology faculties was the growing presence in the latter of the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who were widely suspected of putting loyalty to Rome ahead of the academic interests of the university. Nor were religious orders exempt from a bitter rivalry of their own, which further roiled the university scene.

By the time of Thomas Aquinas’s arrival in the late 1260s, things in Paris had deteriorated still further. Many among the arts masters were openly asserting their right to pursue philosophical speculation wherever it might take them. This generally meant incursions into territory the theologians guarded jealously for themselves, including speculation on the Creation, the soul, and the attributes of God. In response, the theologians, backed by the more cautious secular scholars, went on the attack against these growing Aristotelian tendencies. Their inspiration was the Franciscan John of Fidanza, later canonized as St. Bonaventure, who reminded his rivals that theology remained the queen of sciences and that reliance on philosophy as anything but preparation for more advanced study guaranteed a “fall into darkness.”
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One of Bonaventure’s allies, meanwhile, warned his theological colleagues, such as Thomas, not to indulge in philosophizing: “It is not seemly that a theologian should have recourse to the errors of the philosophers.”
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In their zeal, this conservative faction greatly inflated the threat from a maximalist reading of Arab philosophy at its most hostile to the Christian religion, a reading Western scholars later dubbed “Latin Averroism.” According to their critics, the militant philosophers left no role for God or revelation and denigrated theology in the cause of advancing science. The theologians even accused these so-called Averroists of hiding their secret secularist leanings behind professions of faith.

Certainly, Averroes himself believed that no such sleight of hand was required. The Commentator was unequivocal in asserting that the truth of the philosophers and that of the theologians was one and the same, although he was never in any doubt that philosophical thinking was superior. Besides, he respected revelation and the prophets Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, who could reach the masses in ways philosophy never could. But Averroes’s actual views were rarely discussed in any detail, and even his most faithful Latin readers still had no access to his important works on the relationship of philosophy and religion. What mattered was the way both sides, the clergy and the independent-minded arts masters, saw Averroes and the entire Arab tradition as the fulcrum of their own struggles with each other.

As it had with the Muslims before, the question of the Eternity of the World provided the medieval Christians with one of their central intellectual battlegrounds. Bonaventure used Lenten conferences in 1267 and 1268 to denounce philosophy not illuminated by faith, and he listed the Eternity of the World among the most dangerous errors of the day. Such a notion was heretical, he argued, and could not possibly be proved by reason. Bonaventure and his supporters then went a step further. They asserted that they could demonstrate, with the help of philosophy, that the world had been created “in time” in accordance with their reading of the book of Genesis. In December 1270, the hard-line bishop of Paris followed Bonaventure’s lead and issued a list of thirteen condemned errors that could not be taught or held in any way. Singled out for special attention were the Eternity of the World and God’s indifference to particulars. Like earlier condemnations, they were generally ignored in both the arts and the theological faculties.

The Dominicans dispatched Thomas, their star theologian, from Rome to Paris in the hopes of addressing the main sources of turmoil at the university. These included the growing radicalism of the Averroists in the arts faculty and the general hostility of the secular masters toward the mendicant orders. The Dominicans also saw a serious threat from conservatives opposed to all natural philosophy, which included teachings the Dominicans believed were invaluable in combating heretics, such as the Cathars, whom the church eventually crushed in a bloodthirsty Crusade in southern France. Before joining the Dominicans, Thomas studied at Frederick II’s University of Naples, where he first encountered natural philosophy in an environment shaped by the works of the Arab and Jewish thinkers favored by the emperor. These included Avicenna and Averroes, as well as the Jewish scholar Maimonides, who wrote his philosophical treatises in Arabic. One of Thomas’s first teachers later joined a circle of Christians and Jews studying Maimonides, whose
Guide for the Perplexed
and other works may have been translated or summarized at the Sicilian court by Michael Scot.
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Several early treatises by Thomas from the 1250s reveal a careful and thoughtful engagement with both Avicenna and Averroes, a feature that would run through all his writings, even when he disagreed violently with his Arab predecessors. Avicenna was at the time still the leading authority for Western philosophers, and the list of his ideas that can be found in Thomas’s works is an impressive one. These include two proofs of God’s existence and the distinction between divine and human knowledge.
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Similarly, Maimonides’s approach to the Eternity of the World provided a powerful impetus for Thomas’s later thinking on the subject and its broader implications for philosophy and faith. In his
Guide for the Perplexed
, Maimonides argues that one could accept Creation in time on faith but still admit the existence of knowable natural causes. Like Averroes a native of al-Andalus, Maimonides sought to reconcile reason and revelation by arguing that the Aristotelian laws of nature took over only after God created the world from nothing.
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Thomas had already sided decisively with his fellow theologians—and against Averroes—in a dispute with the radical philosophers over the immortality of the soul, but his
On the Eternity of the World
, written in 1270 toward the height of the troubles in Paris, was a bitter disappointment to many in the theology faculty. In a direct blow to Bonaventure and his circle, Thomas dismisses as “fragile” the church’s accepted view that reason can demonstrate with certainty that the world was created in time. Proponents argued, for example, that God, as the cause of all things, must have come before the world that he created, thus establishing the Creation as a specific temporal event. Drawing on the formulation that Averroes adopted earlier in
The Incoherence of the Incoherence
, Thomas responds that these traditionalists fail to understand that both God’s creative actions and his will must be seen as instantaneous.
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“Since people are accustomed to think of productions that are brought about by way of motion, they do not readily understand that an efficient cause [that is, God] does not have to precede its effect in duration. And that is why many, with their limited experience, attend to only a few aspects, and so are overhasty in airing their views.” He also dismisses fears that this would deprive God of his will, which likewise does not have to precede its effect in duration. “The same is true of the person who acts through his will, unless he acts after deliberation. Heaven forbid that we should attribute such a procedure to God!”
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Such reasoning leads Thomas to acknowledge the logical possibility that the Arab philosophers were correct: The world is both eternal and created by God. What is more, his approach avoids the danger of making the world co-eternal with God—a notion that Jews, Christians, and Muslims would all abhor as polytheism. Of course, Thomas notes at the very outset of
On the Eternity of the World
that it is an absolute article of Catholic faith that the world was created by God at a specific time, but he concludes somewhat testily that the traditionalists’ tiresome philosophical arguments do no credit to the cause: “Some of them are so feeble that their very frailty seems to lend probability to the opposite side.”
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Thomas revisited the question of the Eternity of the World throughout his lifetime, addressing the subject in at least six different works.
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Only one philosophical challenge to eternal creation, first investigated by al-Ghazali in the eleventh century, ever seemed to give Thomas pause: If the world had existed always, then the number of souls left behind by the dead would be of infinite magnitude, something that medieval thinkers saw as a logical impossibility. Thomas concedes that the matter is indeed “difficult,” but then brushes it aside by suggesting that perhaps God made men some time after the creation of an eternal world. “Besides, no demonstration has as yet been forthcoming that God cannot produce a multitude that is actually infinite.”
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Debate over the eternal creation served as a platform for Thomas’s undoubted scholastic virtuosity, but it also went to the heart of one of the most pressing questions of the late Middle Ages, the relationship between revelation and reason. For the theologians and philosophers in Paris, this effectively meant the relationship between the powers of an omnipotent God, as spelled out in scripture, and the laws of nature, as cataloged by the new men of science. Such disparate figures as al-Ghazali and Bonaventure, one a revered Muslim theologian and the other a Christian saint, allowed for no real distance between God and the natural world. In their eyes, what science perceived as natural laws were in fact the continuous creative powers of God, processes that could be interrupted and even reversed at any time and without warning.

By contrast, Thomas afforded the natural philosophers far more freedom, an approach that effectively narrowed the field for theology at the same time. This reflected, perhaps, an abiding respect for the great Greek, Arab, and Jewish philosophers, dating back to his university days in Naples.
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In
On the Eternity of the World
, Thomas points out with a certain satisfaction that none of these great thinkers saw any contradiction in the idea of an eternal universe created by God. With characteristic sarcasm, he does not show the same respect for his contemporary rivals: “Thus only they who so cleverly detected this inconsistency are men with whom wisdom is born!”
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But Thomas also astutely recognized the pressing need to hammer out an intellectual and theological compromise that defended the fundamental doctrine of the church yet still made room for the science unleashed by the Arabs. Anything else would condemn the church to a debilitating and possibly fatal struggle with the forces of reason. Directed in 1271 by the head of the Dominican order to rule on a mixture of doctrinal and cosmological questions, Thomas was cautious in his response: “A number of these articles pertain more to philosophy than to faith. We do a great disservice … [to holy doctrine], when we affirm or we reprove in its name things that do not belong to it.”
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Likewise, he says, it is no concern of doctrinal faith how one interprets Aristotle.
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