Copyright © 1996 R.J. Kilcullen
To follow this lecture you will need either Readings or:
When the works of Aristotle, Avicenna and Averroes were translated into Latin it was a while before the masters in the Schools realised what these writers were saying; some of the earliest references to this material, for example by William of Auvergne (an early 13th century master at Paris) show that at first they saw what they expected to see, not what was there. But soon they realised that Aristotelian natural philosophy constituted a major challenge to many Christian beliefs, and then the Church tried to ban the use of these books in the schools, at least until they had been expurgated, but too late. Different people reacted to the new material in different ways, and controversies arose. They are described in Fernand van Steenberghen, The Philosophical Movement of the Thirteenth Century, and in his Aristotle in the West. One topic was the doctrine of Avicenna and Averroes that there is one intellect for the whole human race; see in our library a translation of Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists. Another topic was Aristotle's doctrine that the physical universe is self-subsistent, uncreated and eternal. In this last section of the course we will have a closer look at this topic.
Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity of the world was a challenge to all three of the major medieval religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
He is an autobiographical passage from Averroes, quoted in A. Mackay, Spain in the Middle Ages, p.85:
When I entered into the presence of the Prince of the Believers, Abu Ya qub, I found him with Abu Bakr Ibn Tufayl alone. Abu Bakr began praising me, mentioning my family and ancestors and generously including in the recital things beyond my real merits. The first thing that the Prince of the Believers said to me, after asking me 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?" Confusion and fear took hold of me, and I began making excuses and denying that I had even concerned myself with philosophic learning; for I did not know what Ibn Tufayl had told him on the subject. But the Prince of Believers understood my fear and confusion, and turning to Ibn Tufayl began talking about the question of which he had asked me, mentioning what Aristotle, Plato and all the philosophers had said, and bringing in besides the objection of the Muslim thinkers against them . . . Thus he continued to set me at ease until I spoke, and he learned what was my competence in that subject . . .
Averroes' fear was because he expected that his Aristotelian opinions would get him into trouble. Here is an autobiographical passage from Bonaventure, one of Thomas Aquinas's contemporaries:
When I was a student I heard about Aristotle, that he had asserted that the world was eternal. And when I heard his reasons and the arguments for this, my heart began to thump and I began to think, how could this be? [Bonaventure's fear was that Aristotle might be right. He adds:] But now those things are so clear that no one could have any doubt about it". (Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexameron, p.515).
Let's look at Bonaventure's question on the eternity of the world in his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, book 2, distinction 1, part 1, article 1, question 2. ("Distinction" means section.) You will find it in Readings p.175. Read the first of the arguments that it was not produced in time, i.e. that it was eternal.
He gives the main argument first, and then gives an argument in support of the first premise of the main argument. There is no argument for the second premise, that whatever begins through motion or change. Read the second argument. This is per impossible because the assumption that everything that comes to be begins through motion leads to an infinite series - which is impossible. "Which is impossible" is left as a tacit premise. Read the third argument, and the remaining arguments on this side of the question. Bear in mind that these are preliminary objections, to which Bonaventure himself is not yet committed. Read the arguments "But to the opposite". Notice that in all except (f) there is some dialogue: an argument is given, then at "If you say" an objection is made to the argument, and then (at "On the contrary", or "I ask") it is answered. This is an echo of class room practice. Written "questions" were based on class-room disputations. In the first stage of disputation the master, or the "determining" bachelor, took no part after stating the question. The lead was taken by two junior bachelors, the opponens and the respondens, opponent and respondent, whose task was to advance and answer short arguments, "objections". The audience of scholars and bachelors visiting from other Schools joined in. So "if you say" corresponds to someone's answer to one of the arguments, "I ask" corresponds to the reply of the opponent or respondent who had given that argument. In a second session the master or determining bachelor restated in a more orderly way the arguments and counter arguments brought up in the first session, then gave his own answer to the question, then replied to the objections he was rejecting.
So now read Bonaventure's answer, p.177.
Compare the image of the foot in the dust with Augustine, quoted Readings, p.143 LH. So what is Bonaventure's answer? First, that if we assumed that matter is eternal, and that whatever comes into existence comes to exist through motion, then the eternity of the world would indeed follow, or be reasonable. Nevertheless, it is an error, because matter is not eternal and the world came to be not through motion but instantaneously, by creation, "as has been shown above by many reasons" (top of p.177 RH): i.e. Bonaventure here endorses arguments (a) - (f), and if you glance at p.178 you will find that he does not reply to arguments (a) - (f). Go back to the last sentence on p.177 RH: "If he asserted that the world did not begin according to nature, he said the truth, and his reasons drawn from motion and time are good"; that is, the world did not begin according to nature, through the natural process of movement or change, but by creation, which is not change - it does not presuppose a substrate, it is not the replacement of a form by its opposite. If the only way things can begin to be is by motion or change then there cannot have been an absolute beginning before which there was nothing; but besides motion there is creation.
Read his answers to the objections.
Compare the answer to (5) with Thomas Aquinas, Readings, p.142, LH, reply to objection 6. In Bonaventure's last answer notice the ideas of God's perfection and simplicity, as implying that he can do all that we can do and more, but in a more perfect way beyond our understanding.
Bonaventure endorsed arguments (a) - (f), so it might be a good idea to re-read them. Notice in (a) - (e) ideas about infinities: one infinite cannot be greater than another, infinites cannot be ordered, an infinite series cannot be traversed, an infinity cannot all exist at one time.
Turn now to Thomas Aquinas's disputed question on p.179. This is also based on a class room disputation. Read objections 1 and 2. "Proof of the middle" means proof of one of the premises used in the main argument. ("Middle" here means not middle term, but some statement used as means of proving something - Latin medium means either middle or means.) Read objection 3. "But it is to be said" is a reply to objection 2, "But on the contrary" is a reply to this reply (cf. "If you say . . . I ask" in Bonaventure's question). Read the rest of the objections, including those to the contrary. (In the second objection "on the contrary" "younger" must be a mistake for "older"; otherwise the argument makes no sense.)
Read Thomas's answer. p.181 RH - 183 LH. Notice the historical organisation of the argument; compare Readings, p.148.
Now re-read each of the objections to prove the eternity of the world, together with the reply, to the bottom of 185 LH.
Now read p.185 RH, where he rejects also the arguments on the other side. "The first, which argues from authority", quotes the bible, in which God reveals his will, and that is decisive. Thomas's position is that whether the universe is eternal or not depends only on God's will, which we can know only if he reveals it; there are no sound philosophical arguments to prove either that the world has always existed, or that it has not. So whereas Bonaventure thought that the arguments for the eternity of the world could be refuted but endorsed the arguments on the other side, Thomas Aquinas rejects the arguments on both sides.
The question we have just read comes from a series called Disputed Questions on the Power of God. Thomas Aquinas's works include several such series of disputed questions organised around one topic. His practice as a teacher seems to have been to schedule regular weekly disputations on a series of connected questions, on one topic one year, on another topic the next year. The Summa theologica is an extension of this idea: it is a highly organised collection of such series of disputations. In comparison with classroom disputations like the one you've just read, the articles in the Summa are much briefer; in particular the preliminary objections for and against are much fewer. Compare the question above with the corresponding part of the Summa, Readings, pp.141-3.
Let's look now at Thomas Aquinas's commentary on the part of Aristotle's Physics in which Aristotle argues that the world is eternal. Open Reading at p.186, which is Thomas's commentary, and Supplement at p.120, which is Aristotle's text. Look first at the commentary. Notice that it is divided into numbered sections (the numbers were supplied by the modern editor). Read section 965. This is like the prologue to a question of the Summa theologica, setting out the structure of the text. Locate the points referred to at footnotes 4, 5 and 6 in Aristotle's text, Supplement pp.120-1. I have written into Aristotle's text numbers corresponding to the sections of the commentary. At 968 you will find "But those who say", at 970 "we must consider then", at 967 "now the existence of". On Supplement p.119 you will find a tabulation of the structure of Aristotle's argument as Thomas analyses it, with the section numbers. Spend a little while examining this tabulation, and then I suggest you read Aristotle's text, Supplement pp.120-124, without referring to the commentary, and then the commentary and text together. Turn the tape recorder off while you do that. It will take a while. Notice that in the commentary Thomas disputes Averroes' interpretation in section 966, 973-5. He also criticises Aristotle's arguments, e.g. in sections 983-4, 986-90.
When we began to read the Summa theologica I pointed out that the prologue indicates that Thomas was offering his book as a replacement for the current textbook, the Sentences of Peter Lombard. His commentaries on Aristotle, which cover all Aristotle's major works, are an attempt to replace the commentaries of Averroes, "The Commentator". In effect Thomas Aquinas was trying to reshape the teaching in both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Theology. In his writings he may seem modest and self-effacing, quiet-spoken, clear and calm; but his projects were on a very ambitious scale. He had a third major project; the Summa contra gentiles is on almost the scale of the Summa theologica, a comprehensive work on philosophy and theology, designed apparently for the training of intellectual missionaries to Muslim lands. In these projects he had plenty of backing from his order, the Dominicans. They provided him with collaborators. They provided secretaries to write at his dictation or from his drafts (he was left-handed and his own writing was almost unreadable - to avoid smudging he had to hold his pen at an odd angle and write from below the line, which gave the letters a twist. There is a specimen of his writing in the front of Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino.) The order also provided a translator, William of Moerbeke, a Flemish Dominican who had mastered Greek: William translated some of Aristotle's works for the first time, revised the existing translations of other works, and gave Thomas advice on the meaning of the text.
As I said earlier, the eternity of the world was just one of the matters that became controversial after the translation of Aristotle and the Muslim philosophers. To give you an idea of the range of topics I have included in the Readings the list of propositions condemned in 1277 by the bishop of Paris, and booklet on The Errors of the Philosophers by Giles of Rome. (You may have met Giles of Rome in POL167: he is the author of On Ecclesiastical Power, from which there are extracts in the Readings book.) Turn to Readings, p.214 and read the preamble to the condemnation of 1277. The "important and serious persons" referred to in the fourth line seem to have been the masters in the faculty of theology, the doctors (i.e. teachers) of Sacred Scripture mentioned near the beginning of the second paragraph; they have been complaining that the masters in Arts have been teaching errors.
Now follows the list of errors. In the original they are in no particular order, but the modern editor, Mandonnet, has arranged them more systematically. Errors 1-6 assert the superiority of philosophy to theology; compare errors 180-183. Read the whole list, then turn to Readings, p.200 and read chapters 1-3. Giles's refutation of Aristotle's fundamental error seems to have been the standard answer that we've met already in Bonaventure and in Thomas: creation is not motion. The list in chapter 2 is a handy summary; if you were one of Giles's students I suppose you would have learnt it off by heart.
There are chapters on Averroes and Avicenna, and then two chapters on Alkindi's errors. Read chapters 10 and 11, pp.209-211. Some of these errors relate to astrology and to natural magic (religious acts as causing desirable things to happen; see Supplement, p. 5 RH on theurgy (Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Plato and Platonism"). If the movement of the heavenly spheres makes earthly causes cause, then what we do and what happens to us is in principle predictable from the movements of the stars; and since the heavens revolve in circles unceasingly, the whole of history has been and will be repeated in identical detail from eternity to eternity.
This completes our survey of early medieval philosophy. If you want to read further, over the summer vacation, I suggest James Weisheipl's Friar Thomas d'Aquino, E. Gilson's History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, and van Steenberghen's Philosophical Movement of the 13th Century. This is the end of tape 11, and of the course. Farewell.
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