The fourteenth century was the golden age of Jewish scholasticism and the following century sees it in its decay. Ibn Rushd was still studied and commentaries were still compiled. About 1455 Joseph ben Shem-Tob of Segovia produced a commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics which he intended to supplement Ibn Rushd, who had not written a commentary on this portion of Aristotle. Elias del Medigo, who taught at Padua towards the end of the 15th century, is regarded by Rènan as the last great Jewish Averroist. He wrote a commentary on the de substantia orbis in 1485, and also published annotations on Averroes.

The 16th century shows the final decay of Jewish Averroism. In 1560 an abridgment of the logic of Averroes was published at Riva di Trento, and this has remained a standard work amongst Jews, but outside logic Averroes was beginning to fall into disrepute. Rabbi Moses Almosnino (circ. 1538) uses al-Ghazali’s work against the philosophers to oppose Ibn Rushd, and evidences occur of an interest in Plato by those who despised Aristotle as a relic of the dark ages. The later Jewish philosophers such as Spinoza are not in touch with the mediæval tradition, whose continuity is severed towards the end of the 16th century; later work shows the influence of post-renascence non-Jewish thought.

CHAPTER XI

INFLUENCE OF THE ARABIC PHILOSOPHERS ON LATIN SCHOLASTICISM

We have now followed the way in which Hellenistic philosophy was passed from the Greeks to the Syrians, from the Syrians to the Arabic-speaking Muslims, and was by the Muslims carried from Asia to the far West. We have now to consider the way in which it was handed on from these Arabic-speaking people to the Latins. The first contact of the Latins with the philosophy of the Muslims was in Spain, as might be expected. At that time, that is to say during the Middle Ages, we can rightly describe the Western parts of Europe as “Latin,” since Latin was used not only in the services of the church but as a means of teaching and as a means of intercourse between the educated; it does not imply that the vernacular speech in all the western lands was of Latin origin, and of course makes no suggestion of a “Latin race”; it refers only to a cultural group, and we are employing the term “Latin” only to denote those who shared a civilization which may fairly be described as of Latin origin. In Spain this Latin culture was in contact with the Arabic culture of the Muslims. The transmission of Arabic material to Latin is especially associated with Raymund, who was Archbishop of Toledo from 1130 to 1150 A.D. Toledo had become part of the kingdom of Castile in 1085, during the disordered period just before the Murabit invasion. It had been captured by Alfonso VI., and he had made it the capital city of his kingdom, and the Archbishop of Toledo became the Primate of Spain. When the town was taken it was agreed that the citizens should have freedom to follow their own religion, but the year after its capture the Christians forcibly seized the great church, which had been converted into a congregational mosque about 370 years before, and restored it to Christian use. For the most part, however, the Muslims lived side by side with the Christians in Toledo, and their presence in the same city as the king, the royal court, and the Primate made a considerable impression on their neighbours, who began to take some interest in the intellectual life of Islam during the following years. The Archbishop Raymund desired to make the Arabic philosophy available for Christian use. At the moment, it will be remembered, the Muwahhids were established in Spain, and their bigotry caused a number of the Jews and Christians to take refuge in the surrounding countries.

Raymund founded a college of translators at Toledo, which he put in the charge of the archdeacon Dominic Gondisalvi, and entrusted it with the duty of preparing Latin translations of the most important Arabic works on philosophy and science, and thus many translations of the Arabic versions of Aristotle and of the commentaries as well as of the abridgments of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina were produced. The method employed in this college and the method commonly followed in the Middle Ages was to use the services of an interpreter, who simply placed the Latin word over the Arabic words of the original, and finally the Latinity was revised by the presiding clerk, the finished translation usually bearing the name of the revisor. It was an extremely mechanical method; and the interpreter was treated as of minor importance. It seems that the preparation of a translation was done to order in very much the same way as the copying of a text, and was not regarded as more intellectual than the work of transcription. The revisor did no more than see that the sentences were grammatical in form: the structure and syntax was still Arabic, and was often extremely difficult for the Latin reader to understand, the more so as the more troublesome words were simply transliterated from the Arabic. The interpreters employed in this college certainly included some Jews; it is known that one of them bore the name of John of Seville. We have very little information as to the circulation of the translations made at Toledo, but it is certain that about thirty years afterwards the whole text of Aristotle’s logical Organon was in use in Paris, and this was not possible so long as the Latin translations were limited to those which had been transmitted by Boethius, John Scotus, and the fragments of Plato derived through St. Augustine. But this material already in the possession of the West was the foundation of scholasticism, and was developed as far as it would go. Boethius transmitted a Latin version of Porphyry’s Isagoge and of the Categories and Hermeneutics of Aristotle, whilst John Scotus translated the Pseudo-Dionysius. The further development of Latin scholasticism came in three stages: first, the introduction of the rest of the text of Aristotle, as well as the scientific works of the whole logical canon, by translation from the Arabic; then came translations from the Greek following the capture of Constantinople in 1204; and thirdly, the introduction of the Arabic commentators.

The first Latin scholastic writer who shows a knowledge of the complete logical Organon was John of Salisbury (d. 1182 A.D.), who was a lecturer at Paris, but it does not appear that the metaphysical and psychological works of Aristotle were in circulation as yet.

By this time Paris had become the centre of scholastic philosophy, which was now beginning to predominate theology. This takes its form, as yet untouched by Arabic methods, in the work of Peter Lombard (d. 1160 A.D.), whose “Sentences,” an encyclopædia of the controversies of the time but a mere compilation, remained a popular book down to the 17th century. The methods and form used in the “Sentences” shows the influence of Abelard, and still more of the Decretals of Gratian. It is interesting to note that Peter Lombard possessed and used a newly finished translation of St. John Damascene.