. Less than a century after the death of Muhammad in 632, most of Spain had come under Muslim jurisdiction, while inroads had been made into the areas of Narbonne and Carcasonne and even into south-central France, until Charles Martel turned the tide at Poitiers and Tours in 732. As the Muslims were consolidating their power, they were also changing the lingua franca of the Byzantine and Roman-Visigothic empires that they had superseded. Arabic, however, had no religious and philosophical texts of its own besides the Qur’an. Thus, Arabic intellectual activity in the sciences and in philosophy began with translation of the Greek writings of the very civilizations that had been overrun. The ensuing work helped make Arabic into a medium for absorbing and developing originally non-Muslim scientific and scholarly concepts and ideas and for transmitting this new synthesis to Latin Christendom.
In the East, this intellectual work was stimulated by the ‘Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad in the second half of the 8th and the 9th centuries, beginning with al-Mansur and Harun al-Rashid and finding its culmination in the rich patronage of al-Ma’mun. Al-Ma’mun scoured libraries in the formerly Hellenistic Middle East and even in Byzantium for Greek scientific and philosophical works that were then translated into Arabic. Especially for this purpose, he instituted at Baghdad the influential Bait al-Hikmah (“House of Knowledge” or “Wisdom”); here worked for a time Hunain ibn Ishaq, a Nestorian Christian, who besides putting many Greek texts into Arabic also developed a methodology for precise translation. In the course of a century and a half, much of the work of Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, Hippocrates, Galen, Nicolaus, Albinus, Nemesius of Emesa, and parts of Plotinus and Proclus were made available to Muslim scholars. The intensive contacts between the East and the West of the Muslim sphere of influence soon ensured the availability of these texts throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Many were translated again, this time into Latin, and in the late 12th and the 13th centuries they entered western Europe—at first Italy and especially France—via Sicily and Spain for the use of Latin Christian scholars.
In the Spanish West of the Arabic world, interest in scholarship and learning began in earnest under the Umayyad rulers at the end of the 9th century, but it was not until the end of the 10th century that Cordova became a center of Muslim culture and learning that could rival Baghdad. Caliph al-Hakam II’s library at Cordova in the third quarter of the 10th century is said to have contained around 500,000 volumes. Toledo, too, was a repository of learning, especially of the sciences (including astronomy) and medicine. Thus, philosophy came relatively late to Muslim Spain. But, once it arrived, it exerted enormous influence on western Christianity. In the East, crusading Franks tended to destroy the cultural infrastructure—for example, after the fall of Tripoli they destroyed the 100,000-volume library that had been assembled by Abu Talib. In the West, however, the victorious Spanish and French largely saved the Muslim inheritance and incorporated it into Christendom. In its turn, the scholastic movement in medieval French schools and universities played a decisive role in the preservation and synthesis of this Greco-Arabic knowledge.
The place of philosophy in medieval Islam—at least until the synthetic work of al-Ghazali (Algazel; 1058–1111) and the condemnation for heresy of Ibn Rushd (Averroes; 1126–1198) at Cordova in 1195—differed from that in western Christendom. Latin Christians, following the lead of Augustine of Hippo, who associated the term theologia with pagan religious rites and Neoplatonist religious thought, preferred the term vera philosophia for reflections on the moral Christian life and its thought, and they used such words as doctrina and studia sacrae scripturae for exegetical studies of the Bible. It was not until Peter Abélard in the 12th century that the term theologia again began to receive currency as a description of a specific subject of pious scholarly endeavor. Yet even then, philosophy and theology were still practiced by the same group of people: Christian monks and clerics, whether in monasteries or at the ecclesiastically dominated cathedral schools and later the universities. On the other hand, in ‘Abbasid Baghdad and Umayyad Spain a clearcut division was made—not generally to the liking of religious leaders—between Islamic theology (‘ilm al-kalam) and philosophical discussion (al-falsafa). Kalam was the study of the Word of God revealed in the Qur’an and of the Hadith (the traditional acount of the prophet Muhammad’s sayings and actions); falsafa concerned itself with natural-scientific and philosophical knowledge deriving mostly from Greek but also from Persian and Indian non-Arabic sources. Unlike its place in the Latin world, philosophy here was not the prerogative of theologians but was associated closely with the study of medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. This is illustrated clearly by the medical interests of such important philosophers as Ibn Sina (Avicenna; 980–1037) and Ibn Rushd.
The first intellectual contacts of French scholars with Arabic learning were restricted to scientific fields. Paradigmatic is the case of Gerbert of Aurillac (ca. 945–1003), who studied mathematics and astronomy in Catalonia between 967 and 970, albeit not from the Arabic sources but from Latin translations collected in the library of the monastery of Ripoll. Arabic medical works, among others, were soon to be translated by Constantinus Africanus (d. ca. 1087), a Muslim who had been converted to Christianity. He is famous for his Pantegni, a reworking of ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbas’s Kitab al-maliki. This work was to help William of Conches (ca. 1085–ca.1154) in his formulation of a new philosophy of nature, which was criticized forcibly by William of Saint-Thierry (1070/90–1148) for its strong materialism and its independence from theology. William of Conches’s Dragmaticon, which incorporates Greek and especially Arabic ideas, substantially influenced the cosmological and encyclopedic writings of Alain de Lille (ca. 1115/20–1203) and Thomas de Cantimpré (1201– ca. 1270). In general, it might be said that the influx of Arabic medical and astronomical writings helped develop an awareness in medieval Europe—especially in the 12th-century French schools—that the cosmos and the natural world could be understood without recourse to Christian mystical and religious interpretations of the Middle Platonist or Neoplatonist sort.
Another important aspect of these early contacts between French and Muslim scholars was the apologetic one. Peter the Venerable (1092/94–1156), reform abbot of Cluny, held a high regard for “Saracen” learning and wrote that Christians had gone to Muslim Spain to seek out manuscripts on the liberal arts and “physics” (the study of nature). Peter’s main purpose in stimulating the translation of Arabic texts into Latin, however, lay in trying to understand Islamic religion in order thereby to find ways of converting the Muslims. Translations of the Qur’an and of other Islamic religious writings were collected with Peter’s polemical and apologetic writings against Islam to form the so-called Corpus/Collectio Toletanum/a. This collection was employed extensively to counter Islam throughout the Middle Ages; it was still being quoted by Nicholas of Cusa, Denis the Carthusian, and Torquemada in the 15th century.
From ca. 1150, translations began to appear of Arab philosophers and of arabicized Greek authors. Central to this movement was the Spanish city of Toledo, which had been taken by the Christians in 1085. While scientific works continued to receive attention, Dominicus Gundissalinus (d. after 1181), archdeacon of Toledo, in collaboration with Ibn Dawud (Avendeath; fl. 1150), was perhaps the greatest of the early translators of Muslim and Jewish philosophical works. He translated works by Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and the Jewish thinker Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron; ca.1021– ca.1058), but no doubt his most important work was a synthesis of Arabic and Latin scholarship in four of his own works: De anima, De unitate, De divisione philosophiae, and De processione mundi. Through this work, western philosophers of the Middle Ages were stimulated to discuss psychological, noetic, and epistemological problems in the context of a Neoplatonic Avicennan reading of Aristotle. Traces of Gundissalinus’s efforts can be found in a succession of authors from William of Auvergne (1180/ 90–1249) to Bonaventure (ca. 1217–1274), Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224–1274). The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), who wrote in Arabic, was also translated and often used. Aquinas derived his third way of proving that God exists from Maimonides’s analysis. The Neoplatonism of Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Gabirol’s Fons vitae found fertile ground in the developing Augustinian, Pseudo-Dionysian, Chartrian, and Victorine Platonist interpretations of Christian theology; for example, a form of Ibn Gabirol’s doctrine on matter was fundamental to Bonaventure’s conception of all created beings, including souls and angels, as partly material, and thus made its way into Franciscan spirituality.
Increasingly, western scholars began to be interested in the Aristotelian corpus. A generation after Gundissalinus, translations from the Arabic were taken up with great vigor by Michael Scot (d. ca. 1236), who worked in Spain but also in the scientific environment of the Sicilian court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. To get an impression of the influx of Latin versions of the Arabic Aristotle and his Muslim commentators in the University of Paris, the following can be noted. The Statutes of the Arts Faculty in 1255 prescribed the study of Aristotle from the following works (the availability of a translation from the Arabic is noted in parentheses): Ethics, Physics (translated by Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot), Metaphysics (translated by Michael Scot, who also translated Ibn Rushd’s great commentary on it), De animalibus (translated by Michael Scot), De caelo (translated by Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot), Metereologica (translated by Henricus Aristippus and Michael Scot), De anima (translation by Michael Scot, who also translated Ibn Rushd’s commentary on it), De generatione et corruptione (translated by Gerard of Cremona), the Pseudo-Aristotelian De causis, actually by Proclus (translated by Gerard of Cremona), De somno (translation of Ibn Rushd’s epitome, perhaps by Michael Scot), the Pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis actually by Nicolaus Damascenus (translated by Alfred of Sareshel), De memoria (translation of Ibn Rushd’s epitome, perhaps by Michael Scot), De differentia (translated by John of Seville), De morte, and the logical works (some translations from Arabic available). Some of these works were also translated directly from the Greek, but those from the Arabic can be shown to have been immensely popular by the number of manuscripts that have come down to us. From this list, it can also be learned that at Paris by the mid-13th century Avicennan Neoplatonism had made way for an Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle, in particular of the Metaphysics and De anima.
Perhaps the most important philosophical debate of the second half of the 13th century was the Parisian controversy between Siger de Brabant (ca. 1240–ca. 1284) and Thomas Aquinas, on the noetic problem of the structure and the function of the soul. Much of the argument was based on the various interpretations of texts of Aristotle, his Greek and Arab commentators, and to a lesser extent of Muslim thinkers. Siger agreed with Ibn Rushd that for all people there is one intellect, which comes from without and joins with the different activities of the human body (life and sensation) to become a composite soul (anima composita). The intellect, however, does not become an integral part of the body, because it would then not be able to be separated from it; it operates much in the way—Siger here adopts Aristotle’s famous analogy in De anima—of a sailor on a ship. It thus follows that it is not the individual human being who thinks but rather the unitive intellect in the human being. According to Aquinas, this is a misrepresentation of Aristotle, and thus philosophically untenable, and it also leads to conflict with Christian theology, that is, with regard to individual human responsibility and in the end beatitude for the personal soul.
The strong rationalism and the secularizing naturalism of Ibn Rushd’s interpretation of Aristotle and that of the Latin Averroists, such as Siger, indeed brought on the infamous condemnation of 219 propositions by Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, in 1277. Yet Jean de Jandun (ca. 1289–1328) continued to defend Ibn Rushd’s interpretations of Aristotle. Compelled to flee Paris because of his defense of Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis, he went to Ferrara and became the great stimulator of North Italian Averroism in the 14th and 15th centuries.
A different aspect of Arabic influence on medieval French thinking is by way of the Catalan polymath Ramon Lull (ca. 1232–1316). Lull’s system is decidedly nonscholastic in method, and this can account for its popularity in mystical and even in courtly circles outside the academic system of medieval universities. When he was just over thirty years old, Lull dedicated his life to serving God by taking it upon himself to convert the Muslims. He spent a decade in Mallorca learning Arabic, studying Latin Christian theology and philosophy, and reading Muslim authors. Lull himself was a prolific author in Arabic, Catalan, and Latin; besides mystical and philosophical works, he wrote romances and even a handbook of chivalry. The Arabic elements in his universalist philosophy of Christian Neoplatonism and his project of transforming courtly love into religious mysticism—a kind of philosophy of love—derive especially from such authors as Ibn Sina and alGhazali. Lull’s creation of a “dynamic” metaphysics and epistemology shows great affinity with and may even have been derived from the ideas of Lull’s Muslim contemporary Ibn Sab’in (d. 1270) of Murcia. Lull later taught at Paris, Montpellier, and Naples, and his works were widely distributed throughout France and Europe. He taught especially against Averroism and adhered to a curious amalgam of Arabic and Latin Neoplatonism.
Although Lull’s philosophical system and his polemical thought were adopted by many in France, they became the object of virulent controversy at the end of the 14th century. A Dominican inquisitor of Aragon, Nicolas Eymerich, in 1376 obtained a papal bull that prohibited teaching Lullism, and between 1395 and 1402 Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, forbade Lull’s works. Still, Lullism continued to have its adherents: through the work of the Neoplatonist Heimeric van de Velde (1395–1460), who had studied at Paris and later taught at Cologne, it influenced deeply the thought of Nicholas of Cusa and through him Leibniz and a whole string of thinkers leading to Hegel at the beginning of the 19th century.
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Jolivet, Jean. “The Arabic Inheritance.” In A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 113–48.
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