The year 1200 may be taken to symbolize the middle of a period notable for the enlargement of knowledge. If one should take the time of this increase to extend fifty years on either side of the central point, one might say that the student of the year 1250 stood to his intellectual ancestor of the year 1150, as a man in the full possession and use of the Encyclopaedia Britannica would stand toward his father who had saved up the purchase money for the same. The most obvious cause of this was an increasing acquaintance with the productions of the so-called Arabian philosophy, and more especially with the works of Aristotle, first through translations from the Arabic, and then through translations from the Greek, which were made in order to obviate the insufficiency of the former.
It would need a long excursus to review the far from simple course of so-called Arabian thought, philosophic and religious. It begins in the East, and follows the setting sun. Even before the Hegira (622) the Arabs had rubbed up against the inhabitants of Syria, Christian in name, eastern or Hellenic in culture and proclivity. Then in a century or two, when the first impulsion of Mohammedan conquest was spent, the works of Aristotle and his later Greek commentators were translated into Arabic from Syrian versions, under the encouragement of the rulers of Bagdad. The Syrian versions, as we may imagine, were somewhat eclecticized and, more especially, Neo-Platonized. So it was not the pure Aristotle that passed on into Arabic philosophy, but the Aristotelian substance interpreted through later phases of Greek and Oriental thought. Still, Aristotle was the great name, and his system furnished the nucleus of doctrine represented in this Peripatetic eclecticism which was to constitute, par excellence, Arabic philosophy. Also Greek mathematical and medical treatises were translated into Arabic from Syrian versions. El-Farabi (d. 950) and Avicenna (980-1036) were the chief glories of the Arabic philosophy of Bagdad. These two gifted men were commentators upon the works of the Stagirite, and authors of many interesting lucubrations of their own.[532] Arabian philosophy declined in the East with Avicenna’s death; but only to revive in Mussulman Spain. There its great representative was Averroes, whose life filled the last three quarters of the twelfth century. So great became his authority as an Aristotelian, with the Scholastics, that he received the name of Commentator, par excellence, even as Aristotle was par excellence, Philosophus. We need not consider the ideas of these men which were their own rather than the Stagirite’s; nor discuss the pietistic and fanatical sects among the Mussulmans, who either sought to harmonize Aristotle with the Koran, or disapproved of Greek philosophy. One readily perceives that in its task of acquisition and interpretation, with some independent thinking, and still more temperamental feeling, Arabic philosophy was the analogue of Christian scholasticism, of which it was, so to speak, the collateral ancestor.[533]
And in this wise. The Commentaries of Averroes, for example, were translated into Latin; and, throughout all the mediaeval centuries, the Commentary tended to supplant the work commented on, whether that work was Holy Scripture or a treatise of Aristotle. By the middle of the thirteenth century all the important works of Averroes had been translated into Latin, and he had many followers at Paris; and before then, from the College of Toledo, had come translations of the principal works of the other chief Arabian philosophers. Of still greater importance for the Christian West was the work of Jews and Christians in Spain and Provence, in translating the Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin, sometimes directly, and sometimes first into Hebrew and then into Latin. They attempted a literal translation, which, however, frequently failed to give the significance even of the Arabic version. These Arabic-Latin translations were of primary importance for the first introduction of Aristotle to the theologian philosophers of Christian Europe.
They were not to remain the only ones. In the twelfth century, a number of Western scholars made excursions into the East; and the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 enlarged their opportunities of studying the Greek language and philosophy. Attempts at direct translation into Latin began. One of the first translators was the sturdy Englishman, Robert Grosseteste. He was born in Suffolk about 1175; studied at Lincoln, then at Oxford, then at Paris, whence he returned to become Chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was made Bishop of Lincoln in 1236, and died seventeen years later. It was he who laid the foundation of the study of Greek at Oxford, and Roger Bacon was his pupil. But the most important and adequate translations were the work of two Dominicans, the Fleming, William of Moerbeke, and Henry of Brabant, who translated the works of Aristotle at the instance of Thomas Aquinas, possibly all working together at Rome, in 1263 and the years following. Aquinas recognized the inadequacy of the older translations, and based his own Aristotelian Commentaries upon these made by his collaborators, learned in the Greek tongue. The joint labour of translation and commentary seems to have been undertaken at the command of Pope Urban IV., who had renewed the former prohibitions put upon the use of Aristotle at the Paris University, in the older, shall we say, Averroistic versions.
If these prohibitions, which did not touch the logical treatises, were meant to be taken absolutely, such had been far from their effect. In 1210 and again in 1215, an interdict was put upon the naturalis philosophia and the methafisica of the Stagirite. It was not revoked, but rather provisionally renewed, in 1231, until those works should be properly expurgated. A Commission was appointed which accomplished nothing; and the old interdict still hung in the air, unrescinded, yet ignored in practice. So Pope Urban referred to it as still effective—which it was not—in 1263. For Aristotle had been more and more thoroughly exploited in the Paris University, and by 1255 the Faculty of Arts formally placed his works upon the list of books to be studied and lectured upon.[534]
So the founding of Universities and the enlarged and surer knowledge brought by a study of the works of Aristotle were factors of power in the enormous intellectual advance which took place in the last half of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth century. Yet these factors could not have operated as they did, but for the antecedent intellectual development. Before the first half of the twelfth century had passed, the patristic material had been mastered, along with the current notions of antique philosophy, for the most part contained in it. Strengthened by this discipline, men were prepared for an extension and solidifying of their knowledge of the universe and man. Not only had they appropriated what the available sources had to offer, but, when we think of Abaelard and Hugo of St. Victor, we see that organic restatements had been made of what had been acquired. Still, men really knew too little. It is very well to exploit logic, and construct soul-satisfying schemes of cosmogonic symbolism, in order to represent the deepest truth of the material world. But the evident sense-realities of things are importunate. The minds even of spiritual men may, in time, crave explanation of this side of their consciousness. Abaelard seems to have been oblivious to natural phenomena; Hugo recognizes them in order to elicit their spiritual meaning; and Alanus de Insulis, a generation and more afterwards, takes a poet’s view of Nature. Other men had a more hard-headed interest in these phenomena; but they knew too little to attempt seriously to put them together in some sense-rational scheme. The natural knowledge presented by the writings of the Church Fathers was little more than foolishness; the early schoolmen were their heirs. They observed a little for themselves; but very little.
There is an abysmal difference in the amount of natural knowledge exhibited by any writing of the twelfth century, and the works of Albertus Magnus belonging say to the middle of the thirteenth. The obvious reason of this is, that the latter had drawn upon the great volume of natural observation and hypothesis which for the preceding five hundred years had been actually closed to western Europe, and for five hundred years before that had been spiritually closed, because of the ineptitude of men to read therein. That volume was of course the encyclopaedic Natural Philosophy of Aristotle, completed, and treated in its ultimate causal relationships, by his Metaphysics. The Metaphysics, the First Philosophy, gave completeness and unity to the various provinces of natural knowledge expounded in his special treatises. For this reason, one finds in the works of Albertus a fund of natural knowledge solid with the solidity of the earth upon which one may plant his feet, and totally unlike the beautiful dreaming which drew its prototypal origins from the skyey mind of Plato.
The utilization of Aristotle’s philosophy by the Englishman, Alexander of Hales, who became a Franciscan near the year 1230, when he had already lectured for some thirty years at Paris; its far more elaborate and complete exposition by the very Teutonic Dominican, Albertus Magnus; and its even closer exposition and final incorporation within the sum of Christian doctrine, by Thomas,—this three-staged achievement is the great mediaeval instance of return to a genuine and chief source of Greek philosophy. These three schoolmen went back of the accounts and views of Greek philosophy contained in the writings of the Fathers. And in so doing they also went back of what was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boëthius and other “transmitters.”[535]
But the achievement of these schoolmen had other import. Their work represents the culmination of the third stage of mediaeval thought: that of systematic and organic restatement of the substance of the patristic and antique, with added elements; for there can be no organic restatement which does not hold and present something from him who achieves it. The result, attained at least by Thomas, was even more than this. Based upon the data and assumptions of scholasticism, it was a complete and final statement of the nature of God so far as that might be known, of the creature world, corporeal and incorporeal, and especially of man, his nature, his qualities, his relationship to God and final destiny. And herein, in its completeness, it was satisfying. The human mind in seeking explanation of the phenomena of its consciousness—presumably a reflex of the universe without—tends to seek a unity of explanation. A unity of explanation requires a completeness in the mental scheme of what is to be explained. Thoughtful men in the Middle Ages craved a scheme of life complete even in detail, which should educe life’s currents from a primal Godhead, and project them compacted, with none left straying or pointing nowhither, on toward universal fulfilment of His will.