Having opened the door to the
Islamic repository of Aristotelianism with Avicenna, I have no choice but to
let the illustrious Averroes (1126-1198) slip through it as well. In fact, it
was Averroes, and not Avicenna, who succeeded in bringing the writings of
Aristotle to the Christian world, at that point in love with Plato, but
generally unfamiliar with Plato’s great successor.
Averroes was yet another
prodigious Islamic polymath, like Avicenna, but his greatest service to
humanity was his titanic effort of translating all extant Aristotelian works
(except Politics) into Arabic, and writing a large body of commentary on
them. It was by virtue of Averroes’s remarkable labor having been reverently
translated into Latin, that Christianity was able to familiarize itself with
Aristotle, and having found in him a kindred scholastic spirit, it loved what
it had discovered.
As for Averroes himself, he
quickly became an immensely influential philosophical figure inside Christian
Europe, much more influential, in fact, than he intellectually deserved. For,
he was hardly a major original thinker, but rather, a brilliant commentator on
Aristotle’s works, for which reason his European followers, calling themselves
Averroists, were able to take enormous liberties with his comments, and their
infamous Doctrine of double truth, discussed in the Philosophy section
(The Shocking Revelation Of Double Truth), although often ascribed to
Averroes, has nothing to do with him, but everything to do with his nonchalant
followers. The only authentic part of it is the separation of philosophy and
religion as two distinct ways of approaching truth, but, as he insisted
explicitly, there was always only one truth, not two, or more. (I have a
different take on how many truths there are, expressed in several entries like The
Truth Of All Creation, but my disagreement with the “monoverists” is
totally beside the point in the present context.)
Summarizing now this short but
important entry, the by now familiar standard question “Why Averroes?” is answered not so much by
quoting Averroes’ personal philosophical accomplishments, as by citing his huge
world-historical significance in influencing the course of Western
Civilization.
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