The Scientific & the Divine by James A. Arieti & Patrick A. Wilson

Author:James A. Arieti & Patrick A. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

AVERROËS

About the life of ibn Rushd (1126–1198), known in the West by the inexact Latin transliteration “Averroës,” not very much is known for sure, beyond his birth into a prominent family in Cordoba. He represents the last burst of Islamic philosophic endeavor. With his death, the attempt to reconcile science and religion comes to an end in the Muslim world. At just about the same time, Aristotle is translated directly into Latin, and philosophy is energetically pursued in the Christian West.

As we study Averroës, we are reminded of the inexorable logic of Parmenides struggling against the world of apparent change and diversity. The average man of the Middle Ages must have viewed the world as al Ghazali did, a world with an active deity, actual miracles, and the possibility of personal immortality providing an incentive to virtue and piety. The “incoherent” world of the philosophers, with their emanations and their distant, unchanging God, would have been utterly alien. God and his agents called the faithful to prayer five times a day. Ritual affirmed the ever-present deity. The “always existent One,” if mentioned at all, was highfalutin jargon. Nevertheless, Averroës devoted his efforts to defending philosophy and has certainly become the Islamic philosopher best known and most quoted in the West, the one to whom Aquinas refers as “the Commentator.”

The great work of Averroës, of course, is his commentaries on Aristotle, the goal of which is to remove from Aristotle the Neoplatonic influences that contaminated the work of al Farabi and Avicenna. In particular, the notion of the emanations of the Existent One had to go, so that the resulting science would be more purely Aristotle’s. Obviously, if Averroës had not believed Aristotle’s work to represent the highest truth, he would not have devoted his life to studying the Greek philosopher. Al Ghazali’s attack on philosophy was a real threat to the value of the philosophic enterprise itself and a matter of great practical consequence as well, especially since al Ghazali decreed death for infidel philosophers. Al Ghazali’s work demanded a vigorous and authoritative reply. In attempting that reply, Averroës claims that theologians, among whom he counts al Ghazali, as distinct from philosophers, like himself, are not capable of understanding the highest truths of metaphysics.

Perhaps the best way to treat Averroës is to look at his responses to the various problems that al Ghazali raised concerning creation in time and the related questions of the nature of causality, the omniscience of God, the resurrection of the body, and the language of religion, that is, whether there is one truth for both science and religion.

Al Ghazali devoted about one-fourth of Incoherence to the philosophers’ assertion of the eternity of the world. Aristotle, the primary source of the view, theorized that there was no absolute beginning of the universe but that, like motion, the universe is continuous and eternal. Al Ghazali objected that if one posits an infinite series of causes, as Aristotle did, then it is contradictory also to posit a first cause, as Aristotle did with his Prime Mover.

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