. The importance of the introduction of translated works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) into medieval Christian thinking is one of the most often stated and least clear aspects of 13th-century history.
Aristotle’s Categories (Praedicamenta), On Interpretation (Perihermeneias), Topics, and Prior Analytics were widely known through the 6th-century Latin translations of Boethius. With his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge, they were the source of Aristotelian ideas in the West until the translation of Averroes’s commentary on Aristotle by Michael Scot, at the Sicilian court of Frederick II, in the first third of the 13th century. By 1250, most of the works of natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics were translated and were basic texts for the arts faculty in Paris. The anonymous Liber de causis, thought to be by Aristotle, was also highly influential, although it is in fact Platonic. By ca. 1240, the Rhetoric, Ethics (very influential), Politics, and Economics were also available, mostly through translations by James of Venice. In the mid-13th century, Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great (the greatest Christian Aristotelian philosophers of the theology faculty; the most important Aristotelians in arts were Boethius of Dacia and Siger de Brabant) recognized the need for better translations, and Thomas persuaded William of Moerbecke (1215–1286) to revise and retranslate much of the work. In fact, however, Aristotelian ideas long were best known through Averroes and Avicenna.
The two key theological problems that Aristotle raised were the eternity of the world (an affront to the Creation) and the notion of the unity of the intellect (which, if true, would deny the resurrection of the individual person). As well, later readers of Averroes thought that he taught a double-truth theory: that some things might be true for philosophy but not for theology, and that in such cases philosophy should have priority.
The public or private teaching of Aristotle in theology was first prohibited at the Council of Sens in 1210. Robert de Courçon’s statutes (1215) for the University of Paris forbade the teaching of the Metaphysics and all books on physics and natural science; the works on logic were allowed. This was restated in Gregory IX’s bull Parens scientiarum (1231). The tide was irresistible, however, and in 1255 the statutes of the university allowed all of Aristotle’s works to be taught. The first theologians to use Aristotle in theological works were Alexander of Hales, Philip the Chancellor, and William of Auvergne, all writing at the beginning of the 1230s, soon after the new Latin translations appeared. All were orthodox theologians who chose from Aristotle whatever suited their purposes, without engaging with the implications of his doctrines as a whole.
Thomas Aquinas, and to some extent Albert the Great before him, made the exemplary synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian ideas, but some of Thomas’s propositions were condemned as errors by Bishop Étienne Tempier at Paris, in 1270 and again in 1277. It was not until Thomas’s canonization in 1323 that the final nail in the anti-Aristotelian coffin was driven.
It can be argued that what Aristotle provided, and what was so much needed, was a means of approach rather than particular ideas. His ideas of logical argument and of categories, and his four causes (formal, material, final, efficient), were taken up zealously. God could be defined as the First Cause, the Uncaused Causer. The joy of Aristotle, and the danger, was his comprehensiveness: he had addressed almost every branch of knowledge; this held deep appeal for the medieval sense of the unity and knowability of the world.
The followers of strictly Aristotelian ideas were known as Latin Averroists, from their use of Averroes’s Commentary.
