That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure attend his share of the offense, is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to virtue. In this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished; but without presuming to look forward to a juster appointment hereafter, we may fairly consider a man of sense, like Henry Crawford, to be providing for himself no small portion of vexation and regret--vexation that must rise sometimes to self-reproach, and regret to wretchedness--in having so requited hospitality, so injured family peace, so forfeited his best, most estimable, and endeared acquaintance, and so lost the woman whom he had rationally as well as passionately loved.
AVERROËS
(1126-1198)
verroës (Abu 'l Walid Muhammad, ibn Achmad, ibn Muhammad, IBN RUSHD; or more in English, Abu 'l Walid Muhammed, the son of Achmet, the son of Muhammed, the son of Rushd) was born in 1126 at Cordova, Spain. His father and grandfather, the latter a celebrated jurist and canonist, had been judges in that city. He first studied theology and canon law, and later medicine and philosophy; thus, like Faust, covering the whole field of mediæal science. His life was cast in the most brilliant period of Western Muslim culture, in the splendor of that rationalism which preceded the great darkness of religious fanaticism. As a young man, he was introduced by Ibn Tufail (Abubacer), author of the famous 'Hayy al-Yukdhan,' a philosophical 'Robinson Crusoe,' to the enlightened Khalif Abu Ya'kub Yusuf (1163-84), as a fit expounder of the then popular philosophy of Aristotle. This position he filled with so much success as to become a favorite with the Prince, and finally his private physician. He likewise filled the important office of judge, first at Seville, later at Cordova.
He enjoyed even greater consideration under the next Khalif, Ya'kub al-Mansur, until the year 1195, when the jealousy of his rivals and the fanaticism of the Berbers led to his being accused of championing philosophy to the detriment of religion. Though Averroës always professed great respect for religion, and especially for Islam, as a valuable popular substitute for science and philosophy, the charge could hardly be rebutted (as will be shown later), and the Amir of the Faithful could scarcely afford openly to favor a heretic. Averroës was accordingly deprived of his honors, and banished to Lacena, a Jewish settlement near Cordova--a fact which gives coloring to the belief that he was of Jewish descent. To satisfy his fanatical subjects for the moment, the Khalif published severe edicts not only against Averroës, but against all learned men and all learning as hostile to religion. For a time the poor philosopher could not appear in public without being mobbed; but after two years, a less fanatical party having come into power, the Prince revoked his edicts, and Averroës was restored to favor. This event he did not long survive. He died on 10th December 1198, in Marocco. Here too he was buried; but his body was afterward transported to Cordova, and laid in the tomb of his fathers. He left several sons, more than one of whom came to occupy important positions.
Averroës was the last great Muslim thinker, summing up and carrying to its conclusions the thought of four hundred years. The philosophy of Islam, which flourished first in the East, in Basra and Bagdad (800-1100), and then in the West, Cordova, Toledo, etc. (1100-1200), was a mixture of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism, borrowed, under the earlier Persianizing Khalifs, from the Christian (mainly Nestorian) monks of Syria and Mesopotamia, being consequently a naturalistic system. In it God was acknowledged only as the supreme abstraction; while eternal matter, law, and impersonal intelligence played the principal part. It was necessarily irreconcilable with Muslim orthodoxy, in which a crudely conceived, intensely personal God is all in all. While Persian influence was potent, philosophy flourished, produced some really great scholars and thinkers, made considerable headway against Muslim fatalism and predestination, and seemed in a fair way to bring about a free and rational civilization, eminent in science and art. But no sooner did the fanatical or scholastic element get the upper hand than philosophy vanished, and with it all hope of a great Muslim civilization in the East. This change was marked by Al-Ghazzali, and his book 'The Destruction of the Philosophers.' He died in A.D. 1111, and then the works of Al-Farabi, Ibn-Sina, and the "Brothers of Purity," wandered out to the far West, to seek for appreciation among the Muslim, Jews, and Christians of Spain. And for a brief time they found it there, and in the twelfth century found also eloquent expounders at the mosque-schools of Cordova, Toledo, Seville, and Saragossa. Of these the most famous were Ibn Baja, Ibn Tufail, and Ibn Rushd (Averroës).
During its progress, Muslim philosophy had gradually been eliminating the Neo-Platonic, mystic element, and returning to pure Aristotelianism. In Averroës, who professed to be merely a commentator on Aristotle, this tendency reached its climax; and though he still regarded the pseudo-Aristotelian works as genuine, and did not entirely escape their influence, he is by far the least mystic of Muslim thinkers. The two fundamental doctrines upon which he always insisted, and which long made his name famous, not to say notorious, the eternity of matter and of the world (involving a denial of the doctrine of creation), and the oneness of the active intellect in all men (involving the mortality of the individual soul and the impossibility of resurrection and judgment), are both of Aristotelian origin. It was no wonder that he came into conflict with the orthodox Muslim; for in the warfare between Arab prophetism, with its shallow apologetic scholasticism, and Greek philosophy, with its earnest endeavor to find truth, and its belief in reason as the sole revealer thereof, he unhesitatingly took the side of the latter. He held that man is made to discover truth, and that the serious study of God and his works is the noblest form of worship.
However little one may agree with his chief tenets, there can be no doubt that he was the most enlightened man of the entire Middle Age, in Europe at least; and if his spirit and work had been continued, Western Islâm might have become a great permanent civilizing power. But here again, after a brief period of extraordinary philosophic brilliancy, fanaticism got the upper hand. With the death of Averroës the last hope of a beneficent Muslim civilization came to an end. Since then, Islam has been a synonym for blind fanaticism and cruel bigotry. In many parts of the Muslim world, "philosopher" is a term of reproach, like "miscreant."