The diffusion of Aristotle’s works in the West during the 13th century

The complete knowledge of Aristotle’s works, translated into Latin, either from Arabic or from Greek, open up to philosophical thought a field hitherto almost unknown and give for the first time the direct revelation of a pagan thought, which has not been modified in any way by its contact with Christian thought.

From the middle of the 13th century, in Toledo, a college of translators, under the impetus of Bishop Raymond (1126-1151), begins to translate from Arabic the Posterior Analytics with the commentary of Themistius as well as the Topics and the Sophistical Refutations; Gerard of Cremona (died in 1187) translated the Meteorology, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, not to mention the apocrypha, the Theology, the treatise Four causes , that On the Causes of the Properties of the Elements. Then knowledge of Greek spread; we find in manuscripts of the 12th century a translation and even a commentary of the Metaphysics (minus books M and N which were not yet known in 1270); and William Le Breton, in his chronicle of the year 1210, says that the Metaphysics was read in Paris “recently brought from Constantinople and translated from Greek into Latin”. During the 13th century, Henry of Brabant, William of Moerbeke (1215-1286), a friend of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste, Bartholomew of Messina were Hellenists who translated all or part of the works of Aristotle, and in particular the Politics, ignored by Arab philosophers.

The works of Arab or even Greek commentators and Jewish philosophers were also translated; Al Kindij Al Farabi, Avicenna, Avicebron are known; and, in the middle of the 13th century, all of Averroes’ commentaries were in Paris, except that of the Organon.

One can imagine the devastating effect of these discoveries on minds eager for bookish instruction, very poorly prepared to understand and judge Aristotle, because they lacked the historical sense necessary to replace him in his framework, because they approached him only through translations which, following the custom of the time, were barely comprehensible word for word, and, finally, because they had to oppose to the solid Aristotelian construction only a rather vague neo-Platonism. Of Plato himself – apart from the Timaeus commented by Calcidius, only the Phaedo and the Meno had been translated in the 11th century, which were little read and hardly understood; in the second half of the same century the Hypotypōseis of Sextus Empiricus were known; none of this balanced the peripateticism. Now this doctrine, so strong from the weakness of others, contained something quite different from what theologians demanded of philosophy; philosophy, always a servant, had to be used as a preliminary and auxiliary; one wanted to hold from it only a method of discussion and not an affirmation on the nature of things. And here Aristotle brings a physics which, with the theology linked to it, suggests an image of the universe completely incompatible with that implied by the Christian doctrine and even life: an eternal and uncreated world, a god who is simply the motor of the heaven of the fixed and whose providence and even knowledge do not extend to the things of the sublunary world; a soul which is the simple form of the organized body and which must be born and disappear with it, which consequently has no supernatural destiny and consequently suppresses all meaning in the drama of salvation: creation, fall, redemption, eternal life, this is all that Aristotle ignored and, implicitly, denied. It was no longer a question of that eclectic Platonism which, no doubt, offered a certain danger since it led to the erroneous solutions of Scotus Eriugena and Abelard, but which, at least, besides being able, thanks to Saint Augustine and the Areopagite, to accommodate itself quite well with dogma, manifested the preoccupation with divine reality and the supernatural life of the soul: Aristotelianism, for its part, refused even to pose the problems and to give them any meaning whatsoever.

In formal disagreement with Christian theology, it must be added that the doctrinal bloc, formed by the physics of Aristotle, did not agree any better with experimental science which was the only one in the Middle Ages to truly deserve this name, that is to say with astronomy; the very certain knowledge that was then had of the variation of the distances of the planets in relation to the Earth during the course of one of their revolutions, should have made impossible a theory of the two which embedded the planet on a sphere which had the Earth as its centre and which was in retreat on the doctrine of Ptolemy (the Almagest had been translated by Gerard of Cremona in 1175) or the Pythagorean doctrine of the movement of the Earth, known since the early Middle Ages: a circumstance which, at the beginning, did not stop the progress of Aristotelianism but which, later, once it had triumphed, was one of the most important causes of its ruin. What mattered at that time was that Aristotelianism, far from serving the university policy of the popes, threatened to be a major obstacle. Did not Albert the Great himself denounce the influence of Aristotle’s physics on the heterodox ideas of David of Dinant? Also, as early as 1211, the Council of Paris forbade the teaching of Aristotle’s physics; the papal legate, Robert de Courçon, in giving his statutes to the University of Paris in 1215, while allowing the logical and ethical books of Aristotle, forbade the reading of Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy. A vain prohibition, no doubt, in the face of public enthusiasm, since Gregory IX limited himself to ordering the production of editions of Aristotle expurgated of any assertion contrary to dogma. It is no less true that, in 1255, Physics and Metaphysics were on the program of the Faculty of Arts, that, from that moment on, the authority condemned not Aristotle, but those who drew from his books doctrines contrary to orthodoxy, finally that Aristotle gradually became an indisputable authority: it is the story of this Christianization of Aristotle that we are now going to tell.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu