Some curiosity may be felt with regard to the doctrine contained in the Quaestiones Nicolai Peripatetici which gave ground for such adverse opinions. M. Renan’s résumé of this treatise is clear and sufficient,[180] and we may reproduce it here, as it will afford a useful supplement to the account already given of the philosophy of Averroës. ‘As to the origin of the different kinds of being,’ says Averroës, ‘there are two exactly opposite opinions, as well as others occupying an intermediate position. The one explains the world by a theory of development, the other by creation. Those who hold the former say that generation is nothing but the outcome and in a sense the multiplication of being; the Agent, according to this hypothesis, doing no more than extricate being from being and make a distinction between them,[181] so that the Agent, thus conceived, has the function of a mere motive power. As to those who hold the hypothesis of creation, they say that the Agent produces being without having any recourse to pre-existent matter. This is the view taken by our Motecallemin, and by the followers of the Christian religion: for example, by Johannes Christianus (Philopon), who asserts that the possibility of creation lies in the Agent alone.’
‘The intermediate views may be reduced to two only, though the first of these admits several subdivisions which show considerable differences. These opinions agree in affirming that generation is only a change of substance; that all generation implies a subject; and that everything begets in its own likeness. The first opinion asserts, however, that the part of the Agent is to create form, and to impress it upon already existent matter. Some of those who hold this view, as Ibn Sina,[182] make an entire separation between matter in generation and the Agent, calling the latter the source of form, while others, among whom we may notice Themistius and perhaps Alfarabi, maintain that the Agent is in some cases conjoined with matter, as when fire produces fire, or man begets man; and in others separate from it, as in the generation of creeping things and plants, i.e. those not produced from seed,[183] which all owe their being to causes that are unlike themselves.’
‘The third theory is that of Aristotle, who holds that the Agent produces at once both form and substance, by impressing motion on matter, and begetting a change therein which rouses its latent powers to action. In this way of thinking the function of the Agent is only to make active that which already existed potentially, and to realise a union between matter and form. Thus all creation is reduced to motion of which heat is the principle. This heat, shed abroad in the waters and in the earth, begets both the animals and the plants which are not produced by seed. Nature puts forth all these both orderly and with perfection, just as if guided by a controlling mind; though nature itself has no intelligence. The proportions and productive power which the elements owe to the motion of the sun and stars are what Plato called by the name of Ideas. According to Aristotle the Agent cannot create forms, for in that case something would be produced from nothing.
‘It is, in fact, the notion that forms could be created which has led some philosophers to suppose that forms have a substantive existence of their own, and that there is a separate source of these. The same error has infected all the three religions of our day,[184] leading their divines to assert that nothing can produce something. Starting from this principle our theologians have supposed the existence of one Agent producing without intermediary all kinds of creatures; an Agent whose action proceeds by an infinity of opposite and contradictory acts done simultaneously. In this way of thinking it is not fire that burns, nor water that moistens; all proceeds by a direct act of the Creator. Nay more, when a man throws a stone, these teachers attribute the consequent motion not to the man but to the universal Agent, and thus deny any true human activity.
‘There is even a more astounding corollary of this doctrine; for if God can cause that which is not to enter into being, He can also reduce being to nothing; destruction, like generation, is God’s work, and Death itself has been created by Him. But in our way of thinking destruction is like generation. Each created thing contains in itself its own corruption, which is present with it potentially. In order to destroy, just as to create, it is only necessary for the Agent to call this potentiality into activity. We must in short maintain as co-ordinate principles both the Agent and these potential powers. Were one of the two wanting, nothing could exist at all, or else all being would reduce itself to action; either of which consequences is as absurd as the other.’
We cannot wonder that Albertus Magnus, and all who held the Christian faith, were alarmed by doctrine of this kind and fiercely opposed it. The orthodox beliefs of Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans alike were declared false by this bold writer, whom several expressions which we have embodied in the above summary show clearly to have been Averroës, and not Michael Scot. In one passage indeed we seem to discover what may have suggested the widely spread fable that Frederick II., or Scot, or some other of their company and party, had produced an atheistic work called De Tribus Impostoribus. The imputation was a false one, yet most natural were the feelings of prejudice which the publication of this philosophy aroused against the great Emperor and Michael Scot who had acted as his agent in the matter.
Pursuing our investigation of the works which came from the Toledan College we discover that these were not confined to the books of Aristotle already noticed, but that the translators took a wider range in their labours. The Venice manuscript of Averroës,[185] besides the De Coelo et Mundo, the De Anima, the Meteora, the De Substantia Orbis, the De Generatione et Corruptione, and the Parva Naturalia, contains several other treatises that deserve attention. Two of these were compositions of Averroës; the one a commentary on the book of Proclus, De Causis, then commonly ascribed to Aristotle,[186] and the other an independent work, as it would seem, bearing the following title: ‘Qualiter intellectus naturalis conjungitur Intelligentiae abstractae,’ in short a treatise on the ittisal. The volume also contains the Latin version of a book by the Rabbi Moses Maimonides, entitled ‘De Deo Benedicto, quod non est Corpus, nec Virtus in Corpore.’[187] Maimonides, like Averroës, was a native of Cordova, and hence no doubt arose the interest that was felt in his works by the Toledan translators.
That the Venice manuscript is to be understood as a collection of the versions which came from that school appears plainly in the dedication to Stephen of Provins. This is generally prefixed to the De Coelo et Mundo, thus forming an introduction to the versions which follow; but here it has been placed at the end of the volume, occurring immediately after the short article De Vita Aristotelis which closes the whole series. We may see in this fact a certain probability that some at least of these additional versions may have been the work of Michael Scot himself. Nor will the five years which he spent at Toledo appear too scant a space of time for the production of the whole body of the Latin Averroës and something more, when we remember the ample and able assistance he enjoyed in the prosecution of his labours as a translator.
There is one other version of which we must speak before leaving the subject which has engaged our attention so long. The library of St. Omer contains a manuscript collection of the works of Aristotle in Latin which was written during the thirteenth century.[188] The fly-leaf at the commencement of this volume shows the same handwriting as the other pages, and has proved upon examination to be the last relic of a work which has unfortunately perished. What that work was may be seen from the closing words, which are as follows: ‘Here end the Nova Ethica of Aristotle, which Master Michael Scot translated from the Greek language into the Latin.’ This colophon opens a curious question. Are we to consider that the scribe wrote Greek when he should rather have said Arabic? It was by a mistake of such a kind that the writer of the Victorine manuscript asserted that Averroës had commented on the De Anima in Greek.[189] Taking it in this way the version of the Nova Ethica would fall into line with the others which Scot and Gerard of Cremona composed at Toledo. But it deserves notice that none of the manuscript collections usually considered to contain the work of that school comprises among its contents the Nova Ethica. We know, further, that a Latin version of the Ethics with the commentary of Averroës was made from the Arabic by Hermannus Alemannus.[190] This work was completed on the third of June 1240, and we can hardly suppose that it would have been entered on if Michael Scot had already accomplished the same task but twenty years earlier. These facts and considerations make it very unlikely that the St. Omer fragment represents a version of the Arabic text.
Assuming then the literal truth of this interesting colophon, we are confirmed in the conclusion to which an examination of the De Partibus Animalium in the Florence manuscript has already inclined our minds.[191] Michael Scot, it must now be held, did not confine his studies altogether to the Arabian authors, but undertook to form translations directly from the Greek. These two versions, and especially that of the Nova Ethica, open up a new and striking view of the scholar’s literary activity. When Aquinas moved Pope Urban to order a new translation of Aristotle from the original, William of Moerbeka and those others who presently entered upon this work were tilling no virgin soil, but a familiar field in which the plough of Scot at least had left deep furrows. Even the renowned Grostête, Bishop of Lincoln, who executed a version of the Ethica from the Greek about 1250, was but following in the path which this earlier master had opened up. Michael Scot here takes rank with Boëthius and Jacobus de Venetiis, who were among the first to seek these pure and original sources of Aristotelic doctrine. He appears as one who not only completed the knowledge of his time with regard to the Arabian philosophy by translating Averroës, but who gave some help at least to lay the foundation of a more exact acquaintance with the works of Aristotle by opening a direct way to the Greek text. We may even see a sign of this remarkable position in the place of honour given, perhaps accidentally, to Scot’s version of the Nova Ethica at the opening of the St. Omer manuscript. He stands between two ages, and lays a hand of power upon each.