It will be necessary to explain this system with a little detail. It has been already stated that Averroes was a noted commentator on Aristotle in the twelfth century. The two ground principles of his philosophy were, the eternity of matter and the impersonality of mind. On this high subject there can be only two theories; the one theistic, which declares that God is free, a personal first Cause, and the Creator of matter, and that other minds are free and personal; the other pantheistic, which asserts that matter is eternal, and that individual minds are only the manifestation of the impersonal mind, into which the individual is reabsorbed. Averroes held the latter theory, claiming to derive it from Aristotle. It must be confessed however that Aristotle's views are uncertain on this point: he distinguished between mind, immortal and relative, the latter of which, being connected with body, ceased at death; the former outlived it. But he hardly stated the doctrine that all souls are part of the universal soul, and is silent about their reabsorption into it. These points were added by Averroes.[321]
The influence of the philosophy of Averroes is observable in three classes of thinkers; viz., the Spanish Jews of his own century, the scholastic philosophers of the thirteenth, and the philosophers of the university of Padua in the fourteenth and succeeding ages. The second of these effects has been already traced: we must now notice the third.
Padua was the great medical university of the fifteenth [pg 101] and sixteenth centuries, and was a type of the tendency which at that time manifested itself in the north-eastern part of Italy toward material and rational studies, as in Tuscany to ideal and humanistic. It was the medical philosophy of Averroes which had first attracted attention to him. But the influence of his teaching was innocuous there until the sixteenth century, during the whole of which this university became the home of free thought.
Strict accuracy would require the separation of two tendencies in the Peripatetic school of Padua, each derived from one of Aristotle's commentators.[322] The one was the Averroist just named, which consisted in the disbelief of immortality on the ground of absorption. Man's soul, being part of the great soul which animates the universe, both emanates from it, and is again reabsorbed. The other was the Alexandrist, so called from following Alexander of Aphrodisias,[323] which consisted in a tendency to pure materialism, an absolute denial of immortality and of religion, which almost reaches the incredulity earlier expressed in the legend of the Three Impostors. Pomponatius is the declared representative of the latter view soon after the beginning of the century.[324] Frequently however the unbelief was secret, and a seeming show of orthodoxy was maintained by drawing a broad distinction between philosophy and theology; and by teaching that these views, though seen to be true in the one, were to be accounted false in obedience to the teaching of the other.
It is customary to class along with the Averroists some philosophers of a more original turn; some of whom were only indirectly connected with Padua, but rather were examples of an attempt to substitute a philosophy [pg 102] in place of that which was expiring. They are said to have manifested the same kind of pantheism, and to have been led by it to similar disbelief. Such are Cesalpini, Cardan,[325] Bruno, and Vanini. The charge is perhaps unfair against the two former, as they seem to have held the separate immortality of souls, which is more compatible with theism. The two latter represent the two schools just noticed, about the end of the sixteenth century.
Bruno[326] belonged mainly to the Averroist school, though his views were probably formed independently, and certainly extended farther. He not only held the existence of a soul pervading the universe, which is the form of Pantheism which has been already considered, but followed the earlier philosophy of the Neo-Platonists in identifying the soul with the matter which it animates; regarding the one as an emanation from the other, in the same manner as an effect is merely cause or force transferred. It is this belief which occurs in Spinoza, which is properly denominated Pantheism, [pg 103] where the Creator is forgotten in creation. The former line of Pantheism noticed in Averroes approaches more nearly to theism. Bruno's unbelief was not gay and flippant, but sombre and earnest. With a fantastical conceit which can hardly be explained, he travelled as the missionary to propagate his own views like a knight errant tilting at all opinions, with a soul especially embittered against the Christian priesthood.[327] On his return to Italy from his travels he fell into the hands of the church, and suffered death for his opinions.
Vanini[328] similarly led a wandering life, but is a character of less seriousness: occasionally he manifested the inconsistency of indifference to his own opinions. Reverencing the memory of Pomponatius, he expressed the same disbelief of the spiritual and of immortality. He was possibly an atheist. Certainly his views were tinged with deep bitterness against religion; and after leading a restless life, he suffered a cruel martyrdom for his belief.
Bruno and Vanini were the apostles of a doctrine which the world would no longer hear. The dawn of physical knowledge was turning men to a truer study of the universe, and caused their labours to be in vain. The age of indifference was gone. The alarm caused by the Reformation had kindled a strong ecclesiastical reaction, especially in Italy, and the religious earnestness and intellectual activity of Germany had awoke an intelligent reaction on the part of the Catholic church.[329] Hence these two writers incurred a danger unknown to their predecessors. Martyrs are men who are before their age or behind it. Their sad fate throws an interest around their lives. Unbelief must always have its confessors. It is to be hoped that the inhumanity of [pg 104] Christendom will never again cause it to have its martyrs.
The survey is now complete of the crisis which occurred in the transition from the middle ages to modern history, forming the third of those enumerated in a former lecture, we have witnessed amidst its complexity the manifestation of the same principles as in former epochs; the restlessness of the human mind struggling to be free, intellectually, politically, religiously; and we have endeavoured to trace the operation of the influence of classical literature and metaphysical philosophy in inducing the decay of Christian feeling and belief.
The means adopted for counteracting the movement were similar to those used in former periods, viz. an intellectual argument and a spiritual awakening. In some instances, indeed, in accordance with the spirit of the time, or more truly with the spirit of human nature, material force and cruelty were employed, and the unbeliever was silenced by martyrdom. But neither material power nor the autocratic unity of the Roman church was able to repress the growth of the human mind. Conviction must be directed, not crushed. The revival of books of evidences, as soon as printing became common, about the close of the fifteenth century, which were designed to confirm faith, was a more lawful form of warfare.[330] They were constructed however on a basis unsuited to an age when first principles were being reconsidered, being an attempt to establish the authority of the church and the duty of submission to an external form of faith, and lacked the surer basis adopted in Protestant works of evidence, which is found in the external divine authority of the Bible rather than the church. The creation of the order of the Jesuits, though directed more against Protestantism than against [pg 105] unbelief, was a witness, like the previous reactionary movement of the scholastic writers in the thirteenth century, to the wish to wrest the use of learning out of the hands of the opponents of the church, and to employ the weapons of reason in defence of it.