Some Arab respondents had their doubts about the depth of Frederick’s understanding of philosophical matters, yet the fact remains that the emperor was an important figure in the scientific development of the West—not least because he exhibited a new spirit of inquiry and cultural receptivity that broke with centuries of self-imposed intellectual isolationism. His Sicilian Questions prefigured one of the major battlegrounds for the conflict between traditionalist Christian theologians and a new generation of Western philosophers, inflamed by the works of the leading Arab thinkers: “Aristotle the sage in all his writings declares clearly the existence of the world from all eternity. If he demonstrates this, what are his arguments, and if not, what is the nature of his reasoning on this matter?”31
Earlier, Frederick posed a similar question to Michael Scot. It is not clear whether al-Emberor was satisfied with the answers from his enigmatic science adviser, but there can be no doubt that his intense curiosity about the subject was inspired by the latest in Arab philosophical thinking to reach his court. Here, too, Michael’s hand was crucial, for his reputation for black magic surely pales beside the profound and lasting shock waves from his translations of the works of Abul-Walid Ibn Rushd, the greatest in a long line of eminent medieval Arab philosophers. Ibn Rushd was known to the Latins as Averroes, but his explanations of Aristotelian philosophy were so fundamental to the West’s emerging understanding of science, nature, and metaphysics that he was commonly referred to simply as the Commentator.
The son and grandson of famous Muslim jurists in the Andalusi capital of Cordoba, Averroes could bring to bear both a first-rate Arab education—he was trained in medicine, religious law, and theology and even dabbled in astronomy—and the political acuity gleaned from his family’s long experience in senior state and religious posts. Despite widespread suspicion toward philosophy among the mainstream local clerics, it is clear that Averroes also received competent instruction in the discipline, which had quietly made its way to al-Andalus from the eastern Muslim lands. Following the family tradition, Averroes served as the qadi, or religious judge, of Seville from 1169 to 1172, when he was appointed chief justice of Cordoba.
Unable to open the gates of heaven to non-Christians, Dante nonetheless celebrated Averroes by placing him in limbo, alongside Aristotle and members of his “philosophic family.” The Italian poet and philosopher also referred to him approvingly as the one “who made the Great Commentary.” Raphael’s masterful fresco The School of Athens has given Averroes a permanent home inside the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. But it was Michael Scot’s translations, underwritten, transcribed, and forwarded to the universities at Frederick’s command, that did more than anything to bring the Commentator’s comprehensive views on philosophy, particularly his reading of Aristotle, to the immediate attention of the Latin-speaking world.
For Averroes’s Western readers, who tended to take his often-subtle positions to their most extreme conclusions, these works were a revelation. Among his most incendiary philosophical teachings was his insistence on the doctrine of the Eternity of the World, in contradiction to the traditional Muslim, Christian, and Jewish understanding that God made the universe at a time of his choosing and then controlled each and every event in it. After all, Genesis tells us, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.” The Christian world, following the lead of the Jews and followed in turn by the Muslims, generally took this to mean the universe had a distinct starting point and was created “from nothing.” Against this, Averroes laid out the Aristotelian view that both time and matter were eternal and that the Creator had simply set the entire process in motion.
Implicit in the teachings of this Arab philosophical tradition was the notion that God did not bother with the details of everyday human life, that he was blissfully unaware of what the medieval theologians called “particulars.” Likewise, God was effectively removed—prevented, even—from day-to-day management of the universe. Instead, he relied on the timeless functioning of universal laws of nature that stemmed from his own perfection. In the eyes of their many critics, such notions contravened the scriptural promise of Judgment Day, when God would personally assess each man’s adherence to the moral code spelled out by revelation. They also raised serious doubts about scriptural accounts of miracles. But they helped create the necessary opening for man to pursue and uncover the laws of existence, otherwise known as natural science.
Centuries earlier, St. Augustine had quipped that a place in hell had been set aside for anyone who dared to ask what God was up to before the Creation.32 But the growing legion of Averroes’s followers in the West would not be put off so lightly. Adelard of Bath had already given the Christian world permission to explore the universe. Now, with the help of Michael Scot, Averroes opened the door to a brave new world. For this Arab thinker, like Aristotle before him, God had created the universe but then left it to man to make his own way through it.
The doctrine of the Eternity of the World has a long history in Christianity. The faith itself was born into a world still very much under the sway of Greek philosophy, and it enjoyed much of its initial success within the Greek cultural sphere. Thus, it was important for the early church to adopt and preserve as much as it could of this rich classical inheritance, particularly where it might be used to support the church’s claim for the truth of Christ’s revelation. However, the problematic issue of the Eternity of the World lay mostly dormant for centuries at a time, obscured by the complexity of the writings of the leading Greek authorities. On those occasions when it was examined, the church fathers and some later Christian theologians effectively conspired to assert, notwithstanding the evidence to the contrary, that there was no real contradiction between scripture and Aristotle’s natural philosophy.33
True engagement with the natural world was possible only once this intellectual fiction had begun to unravel, but first Christendom would have to follow doggedly the trail blazed earlier by the Arab thinkers in their own attempts to harmonize the demands of philosophy with the demands of religious faith. Writing in the ninth century, the philosopher al-Kindi acknowledges his debt to the Greeks. But he also makes it clear that the Arab thinkers were intent on advancing classical wisdom and adapting it to the needs of Muslim culture: “It is fitting then to remain faithful to the principle which we have followed in all our works, which is first to record in complete quotations all that the Ancients have said on the subject, secondly to complete what the Ancients have not fully expressed, and this according to the usage of our Arabic language, the customs of our age, and our own ability.”
Al-Kindi goes on to note that “research, logic, preparatory sciences, and a long period of instruction” are the only way for ordinary people—meaning those who are not blessed by God with prophecy—to attain knowledge.34 This proved of enormous value to the Latin scholars of the late Middle Ages, for much of the debate that later roiled Paris, Oxford, and other centers of church teachings had already been well rehearsed for them. All they had to do was master the Arabic texts and follow along.
The Greek teachings on the origins of the universe are often couched in difficult language and are not entirely without equivocation. Nonetheless, there are passages in Aristotle’s major works that make it clear what he had in mind. Writing in Metaphysics, for example, Aristotle says; “There is something which is always moved with an unceasing motion; but this is circular motion. And this is not only evident from reason, but from the thing itself. So that the first heaven will be eternal. There is, therefore, something which moves. But, since there is that which is moved, that which moves, and that which subsists as a medium between these, hence there is something which moves without being moved, which is eternal, and which is essence and energy.”35 This is Aristotle’s famous Unmoved Mover. The full implications of his position—if they were even fully understood at the time—either did not really penetrate the early Christian consciousness or were conveniently ignored.36
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.”37 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.”38 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 1021.39 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.40
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.”41
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.42 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.43 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.44 Avicenna’s comprehensive Canon of Medicine, meanwhile, contained important contributions to the scientific method, including keen clinical observations of various diseases.45 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.46 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.’ ”51 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.52
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