In Our Time - Averroes

Episode Date: October 5, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the philosopher Averroes who worked to reconcile the theology of Islam with the rationality of Aristotle achieving fame and infamy in equal measure In The Divine Comedy Dante subjected all the sinners in Christendom to a series of grisly punishments, from being buried alive to being frozen in ice. The deeper you go the more brutal and bizarre the punishments get, but the uppermost level of Hell is populated not with the mildest of Christian sinners, but with non-Christian writers and philosophers. It was the highest compliment Dante could pay to pagan thinkers in a Christian cosmos and in Canto Four he names them all. Aristotle is there with Socrates and Plato, Galen, Zeno and Seneca, but Dante ends the list with neither a Greek nor a Roman but 'with him who made that commentary vast, Averroes'. Averroes was a 12th century Islamic scholar who devoted his life to defending philosophy against the precepts of faith. He was feted by Caliphs but also had his books burnt and suffered exile. Averroes is an intellectual titan, both in his own right and as a transmitter of ideas between ancient Greece and Modern Europe. His commentary on Aristotle was so influential that St Thomas Aquinas referred to him with profound respect as 'The Commentator'. But why did an Islamic philosopher achieve such esteem in the mind of a Christian Saint, how did Averroes seek to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology and can he really be said to have sown the seeds of the Renaissance in Europe? With Amira Bennison, Senior Lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge; Peter Adamson, Reader in Philosophy at King's College London; Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher and former Master of Balliol College, Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in the divine comedy, Dante subjected all the sinners in Christendom to a series of grisly punishments, from being buried alive to being frozen in ice.

The deeper you go, the more brutal and bizarre the punishments go. Get, sorry, but the uppermost level of hell is populated not, with the mildest of Christian sinners, but with non-Christian writers and philosophers. It was the highest compliment Dante could pay to pagan thinkers in a Christian cosmos. And in Canto four, he names the elite. Aristotle is there with Socrates and Plato, Gael and Zeno and Seneca. But Dante ends the list with neither a Greek nor a Roman, but quote, with him who made that commentary vast Averroes.

Averroes was a 12th century Islamic scholar, who devoted his life to defending philosophy against the precepts of faith, and in writing commentaries on Aristotle so influential that St Thomas Aquinas referred to him simply as the commentator. How did an Islamic philosopher achieve such esteem in the mind of a Christian saint? How did Averroes seek to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology and can he really be said to have sown the seeds of the Renaissance in Europe? With me to discuss Avaros are Amira Venison,

senior lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, Peter Adamson, reader in philosophy at King's College London, and Sir Anthony Kenny, philosopher, and former master of Balliol College, Oxford. Amira Benderson, Averos was born in 1126, in Islamic Spain. Can you give us some idea of the society into which he was born? Yes, the 12th century is a very interesting time in the Islamic world. One tends to think of the Islamic world as being very much centered on the Islamic East,

with cities like Damascus and Baghdad. But in this particular era, the Islamic West had gained a level of centrality, which it hadn't previously enjoyed, mainly as a result of the Crusades, which had disrupted affairs in the Islamic East. There were also various sectarian movements in the Islamic East, which had created fissures in that society, allowing the West to assume a position that one white not have thought it would assume, given its geographical position on the periphery.

But I think it's important to realise that Avaroes is born into a society, which is in the forefront of Islamic civilization for that particular era, the 12th century. And he's born into Andalus here because the Muslims had held most of Spain and he was at the court moved between these two courts between Cordoba and Seville. Can you give us any idea of the intellectual strength of that place was at that time? Yes, for some centuries Cordoba and to some extent Seville had been intellectual centres in the Islamic West. But up until the 10th century, when the Amayyar rulers had declared a caliphate,

the Islamic West had not been an intellectual leader. It had mainly borrowed from the Islamic East. From the 10th century, it assumes a certain intellectual independence. And it's at that point that you begin to see a more thriving intellectual life emerging. For both the Muslim community and indeed the Jewish community, it's at that period that the Jewish community in the peninsula also becomes much more independent and intellectually proactive, one might say. So Avarois is born into a society where there's a great deal of intellectual development taking place.

Political changes had also opened up new avenues of thought. The Amid Caliphate actually fell in 1031. A period of political chaos ensued, but that was quite intellectually promising. in that it opened up many different sources of patronage, whereas previously all patronage in the peninsula was concentrated in Cordoba during what's known as the Taifah period, the 11th century, smaller rulers in many different cities such as Saragossa, Seville, Grenada, began to patronise thinkers of various different types.

There is a view, and it's not only just a view, people said that there was a while, there was a time in a 12th century when Christians, Jews and Islamic scholars lived in not so much harmony, but coexisted peacefully and were pursuing often a range of the same topics. Is that so? Indeed, yes. The Ibn, sorry, Avarois was born into the Almohad Empire. The Almohads were North African Berbers from the High Atlas Mountains,

and there's a certain ambiguity to the way they approach. society. On the one hand, they do patronise philosophy for a number of different reasons, and Jews participated in that philosophical movement, as did Muslims and to a lesser extent Christians. Obviously, Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, is also active at this period. But on the other hand, the Almohad era is also seen as a time where there was a higher level of persecution of religious minorities, partly as a result of Christian, pressure on the northern frontiers, which created more of a siege mentality amongst the Muslims and made them more suspicious of Jews and Christians. Peter Adamson, if we can go back a century

two, where the Greek ideas came into the Islamic world, didn't they, with translations in I think as early as the seventh, but certainly the eighth century. Can you give us some idea of the way that Greek thought was brought into Arabic? Sure. Well, it does begin, especially, as you said, in the eighth, ninth century, and it's made possible by the abas. caliphs, who are the caliphate that follow the Umayyads. And they, for various political reasons, found it's congenial to have works of Greek philosophy and science translated from Greek into Arabic. Interestingly, this goes to what you were just talking about, the cooperation between Muslims and people of other faiths, because a lot of the translations were actually done by Christians

who were either from Syria or of Syrian extraction. Sometimes the translations were even made by way of Syriac into Arabic. And so what you have very early in the Arabic philosophical tradition is a collaboration between Muslims. So for example, the first Islamic philosopher, Okindi is sort of the head of a translation circle. The translators are Christians. He's Muslim and he's expounding this philosophy and trying to show what is interesting and useful about Greek philosophy from a Muslim point of view. Can you just give us some idea of the of works that were coming out of, because we've talked a lot on this program through the last few years about the Greeks, the range of works that was coming, it was being translated. Right. Well, it depends on what area of intellectual endeavor you're talking about. Something that's worth bearing in mind here is that we're not just talking about what we would now think of as philosophy. We're talking about also what we would think of as science. So, for example, in medicine, the main authority is Galen. But as far as philosophy goes, the main authority by far is Aristotle. So we tend to think of Greek philosophy as being Plato and Aristotle and then all the things that happen after them. For them, Aristotle, though, looms much large.

larger than Plato. In fact, it's possible that they don't have a complete Arabic translation of any platonic dialogue, but they have lots of Aristotle, almost everything. So they're translating philosophy, they're translated to medicine. Are they doing the same in the sciences? Yeah, they're doing, for example, astronomy. They have translations of Ptolemy, for example. They do lots of mathematics. In fact, Okindi, who I just mentioned, was very interested in all of these fields. He wrote works in astrology, astronomy, mathematics, basically, you name it. So they're gathering Greek thought, and as we're taking into their culture, the time when Greek thought is perishing on the vine in other parts of what we now call Europe.

That's fair enough. Now, the first big philosopher, the first greatly important Islamic philosopher was a Persian called Avicena. Yeah, actually, if you don't mind, I'd start a little earlier than that, because it's important for ever ways with Fadabi. Because, so essentially, if you're thinking about the main early, figures would be Kendi, who I just mentioned Avicenna, who's two centuries after Al-Kindi, and then in between them Al-Fadabi. The reason of Fadabi is important for us today, in terms of what we're talking about,

is that of Fadabi was the member of a school of Aristotelians who worked in Baghdad. And by the way, to go back to what Amir was saying, this is all happening in the East, right? This is happening mostly in modern-day Iraq, in fact. So Fadabi's project and the project of his school was to recover the thought of Aristotle as best as they could. So one of the things Averroes, in fact the thing that Averroes likes most in the tradition of Islamic philosophy prior to him is this project, Fadabi's project of recovering Aristotle. Anthony Keanu, can you fit this in, fit what Amira and Peter have said, into the world of Avererese and what he inherited in that sense and then what he did? with it. Well, Aberroes was a man of many parts. He was a judge, and his father and grandfather had been judges before him in Cordoba. He was a doctor. He wrote a great treatise of general principles

of medicine and so on. Which lasted until the 17th century. It was still used in the 17th century. So I understand, yes. And he was a philosopher in the broad sense that we've just been talking about, astronomy, biology and so on, would all be thought of as parts of philosophy at that time. And what he was best remembered for in the rest of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was his work on Aristotle. There's a story that one of his older friends, another philosopher, introduced him to the Caliph. And the Caliph asked him some rather searching questions about philosophy. For instance, whether the world had been created in time

or whether the world had always existed. This was a very tricky question. It wasn't quite clear what answer would be in accord with the Quran or not. So Averroes was rather frightened, but he gave candid answers and the Caliph said, you're just the man I want, because I find Aristotle rather difficult to understand. and if you could explain him to me, write explanatory treatises, I'd be most grateful. And what Veras did was he wrote not just one but three sets of commentaries on Aristotle's voluminous works,

the short commentaries, which are really brief executive summaries. And then there are the middle commentaries, which are more or less a side-by-side paraphrase, and the great commentaries, which are what we think of as a commentary, namely, chunks of the text, with then a lot of explanation of the text surrounding it. What is so distinctive and powerful about these commentaries? Because, as we will discuss later, they did have a tremendous effect. So what distinguishes them, Anthony? I think that it's not that they are extremely original.

I think that I would agree with something that was implied earlier, that from the point of view of originality, Abyssena was a greater thinker than Averroes. But I think it's their clarity. And also, I think there was a certain amount of luck in it, in that Averroes wrote at the time just before the works of Aristotle were being translated into Latin for the first time. Latin aristotelianism is good deal.

later than Islamic Aristotelianism, but there were these commentaries of various levels, first, second, third year undergraduate, as it were, ready for to help people understand because the texts of hardly anybody in the Latin West knew any Greek, so that a lot of the texts of Aristotle were known, as it were, through Latin translations, of Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Greek. So any help you could get was important. And for a long time, Averroes, as you said,

St Thomas Aquinas described him as the commentator, and a lot of the, say, early printed texts of Aristotle have Averroes side by side. Is it, on the face of it, it might be rather surprising that in an Islamic society, the Almohads who were supposed to be rather severe, that philosophy should have such a backing at court

and a philosopher which perhaps seem to threaten Islam. So can you just briefly, because we're going to explore this later, tell us why you think that that particular man commissioned Averroes to do it? He said he had been fascinated with it, but how did he get to be in that condition himself? Well, my colleagues will correct me if I've got it wrong, but it seems to me that the political situation was of three days, different groups. There would be fundamentalist, literalist, Islamic lawyers, sticking very close to

the sacred texts. There would be theologians who had a rather elaborate, as we would say, scholastic kind of view of theology. And these were often at odds with each other. And I think that the philosophers who were concentrating on Aristotle rather than on the sacred texts were seen as a kind of balancing group if the caliph was having some trouble with the senior clergy. I don't know. I'd like to know whether you'd like to take that on. Yes, I mean, broadly speaking, I would agree with that. But I think there is a particular context which is provided by al-Mahadism.

Although it is often seen as severe, as you said, on the other hand, it's found. Ibn Tumat, who was regarded as the Mahdi, a Muslim equivalent of a Messiah, had based his ideas about God and the identity of the deity on rationalism, on the idea that you could rationally argue your way to an understanding of what God meant. And there was, therefore, if you like, a space, a particular space created at the Almohad Court for the patronage of philosophy, which didn't necessarily exist at other courts at that period.

And I think you see different reasons in each era why rulers patronise philosophers, because it is primarily rulers who patronise philosophers. But just back to you for one second, there is this difficulty that they say philosophy can be pursued only by very, very few people,

very men, of course, very, very highly educated man in a very small elite society. And even so, there's a movement against it from quite early on, the scholar Al Ghazali, written a book called the incoherence of the philosophers, attacking the idea of bringing these pagans and atheists into monotheistic culture.

Avaroes wrote a book called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, attacking this. And so there's obviously, it's not only controversial, it's quite slightly dangerous around the edges. Yes, and indeed it turned out in the end to be quite dangerous for Averroes himself. there's a story in one of his biographies that quite late on in his life a few years before his death, he quoted in one of his works on astronomy, he quoted a pagan astronomer who referred to the planet Venus as a divinity. And somebody reported him to the Caliph as being a polytheist. He said, look, this in Avaroese works, you find Venus, this planet Venus.

described as a divinity. So he's really a polytheist. He's an unbeliever. And Averroes lost his job, had his books, burnt and was for a time banished. I think there's a lesson here today that if you're going to quote a controversial text in a public statement, it's a good idea right at the outset to dissociate yourself from the content of it. Peter Adamson. Heald Amaroz also produced a work called the decisive treatise, which looks at Zionists, the philosophy's role in this Islamic society. Can you tell us something about that? And we'll move forward to the ideas, yes.

Right, this goes back to what Amir was saying about the rationalism of Amahad society. And you can think of the view that Averroes puts forth in that text as a kind of ultimate version of this rationalism. So this is, interestingly, not really a philosophical text, but a legal text, because as Anthony mentioned, and Rush Averroes was also a judge. And the question that's posed by the text is,

what is the legal status of doing philosophy? So is it required? Is it forbidden? Is it allowed, but neither required nor forbidden? And the answer turns out to be, on the basis of quoting the Quran, that for those who are able to do it, it's required by God to do philosophy.

So he found authority in the Quran. Absolutely. Because there are all these passages in the Quran that say things like look around and see the majesty of the creator, in the created world, and he takes that to be an injunction to do philosophy. And so then the question becomes, how does philosophy relate to things like the theologians that Anthony mentioned, and how does it relate to the teachings of Islam itself?

And basically, the answer is as follows. There's a problem about the Quran and any revealed text, which is that people can fight over what it means. And as Everroes points out, people sometimes come into violent conflict over what their revealed text means. So ideally what you need is someone who's qualified to tell you the true meaning of the text, and different people make various claims to this. But what Averroes' position is, is that the philosophers are the ones who are entitled to say what the Quran means. The reason why they're entitled to say this is that they are the only ones who have

absolute demonstrative proof of what is true and what is not true. So since they, on their own, using reason, have a hold on the truth. And since, as he says in the decisive treatise, the truth cannot contradict the truth, quoting Aristotle, he therefore says, well, if you have differing views about what the Quran means, since you know that the Quran is true, and since the philosophers already know what's true on the basis of philosophical argument, ask the philosophers.

That's basically his position. Sorry, Anthony O'Sah. Can I ask you a question about that treatise? because it reads as a very pious work, really. There are usual pious formulas occur everywhere, and towards the end of it, Ovarice says that there are some things that are heresies and some things that are positive unbelief.

And one of the things that he regards as a crucial, a crucially bad bit of unbelief, is not believing in survival after death. in the now if you go to his philosophical works it seems as if

his own system has no real room for individual immortality after death we can talk later about why it doesn't I'd like to ask you whether you

how sincere you think that treaties is I think it's completely sincere but I think that what he would say is well I mean there's a question about if the philosophy

have the truth, why don't we just tell everyone philosophical truths and dispense with the Quran? And he has an answer for that, which is that the Quran is a presentation of the same truth that philosophers grasp, but in a way that most people can understand and accept and find persuasive. That's what's special about revealed texts, is that they're more persuasive, they're easier for people to grasp because they use imagery and so on. And since most people are not capable of doing philosophy, either because they don't have the requisite talent, or if they do, they don't have time, they're too busy putting food on their table. You have a very small number of people who are able to figure this stuff out on their own and by using the works of the great Greek philosophers.

So for everybody else, there's religion. Now, what that means is that people who believe in religion are believing in the truth, but they're maybe believing in a way that's not the most perspicuous. So, for example, when they believe in life after death, what they believe is that their body, will be resurrected and they'll go to a garden where there will be lots of water and trees, and it'll be very nice, or they'll go to hell if they've been bad and they'll burn in fire. What Averroes would say is, well, that's close. Actually, you'll be an immaterial intellect, which will exist for all time.

But at least you've grasped the key point, which is that you will live on after you die. Amira, how did this, as it would, double track, play in the society of Averroes at the time? Well, I think again... The religion and philosophy, because... Yes, I think this again brings us back to this, the specificity of the Almohad era in the Islamic West. The al-Mahadism itself had this sort of... Yes, the Almohads are the rulers.

And al-Mahadism, if you like, is a particular interpretation of Islam, which is a supporting philosophy. Because it was in itself inherently hierarchical, right from the period of the founder, whom I mentioned earlier, Ibn Tumat, There was this emphasis on, if you like, a very complicated, rational profession of faith,

which only the inner circle of the Almohads could understand and then a hierarchy of Almohad followers from the top down. And at each level, you needed to present material in a more simplified way until you got to the masses at the bottom. There had, you know, traditionally within Islamic society being the concept of a division between the Amma, the common people and the Khasa, the elite. Now, whether you were talking about society or intellectual life,

that those terms actually have quite different meanings. But they were taken by the philosophers to denote this distinction between the common people who, as Peter was saying, can't understand philosophical truths, but can understand truth presented as revelation through a revealed text. So you had inherent in al-Mahadism,

this sense of a hierarchy, and Averroes' thought then fitted into that. But we are talking about parallel, we are talking about tracks going in much the same direction, that religion was a metaphor for truth that could be appreciated by everybody, whereas philosophy was an instrument for getting into truth much finer and more incisive,

but they were not in contradiction. But I think that you, I mean, exactly that is what Averroes says. I think it's very difficult to accept that his philosophical system is not really in contradiction with either... I mean, he said that politically, you say? Muslim or Christian thought.

I mean, there are two doctrines in particular that caused difficulty. One was that, like Aristotle, Averroes believed that the world had always existed. There was never a beginning. of the world or a beginning of time. Whereas on the face of it, in the sacred text, both Muslim and Christian,

God created the world at a specific time at a beginning. And Valeris has to go through a lot of rather sophisticated philosophy to show that he's not contradicting the doctrine of creation that at every moment the world does depend on God who keeps it in existence. He says that he claims that the difference between him and those who say that the world was created in time is just a verbal difference, really. The other doctrine is the question of personal immortality.

I think you said that he believed that when you, that when you die, you don't go to the beautiful garden or anything, you are just a disembodied intellect. But I think you aren't you anymore either, because the disembodied intellect in Averroes system is a single world intellect. It's not something that belongs to you and me. I mean, we would naturally think of the four of us

as each having our own intellect and our own thoughts and so on. For Averroes, that's not really so. Each of us has our own imagination. That's something personal and private. But really intellectual thought, that is something that happens in a single universal intellect. It's very difficult to understand this. I try to explain it to people that he thought of the intellect

as being something like the Internet, that as the, you know, there's all this information on the Internet. and occasionally we tune in to bits of it. And so for Averroes, as it were, the imagination is a kind of Google that links up from time to time into the great body of disembodied science. And when you die, of course, your body and your brain,

your imagination, they all vanish. And all that happens, all that remains, is this single intellectual mind. Now, if that counts as personal survival, I think most people who believe in an afterlife would say that it's a complete cheat. I certainly agree with that. Can I just, please say what you're going to say,

but can I just add something else, Peter, that you... Everything you said there was Averroes, and yet we talked about Averroes translating... Aristotle, so Aristotle talking through Averroces, Averro is bending Aristotle in any way to Peter Adamson to accommodate the opposition that there will inevitably be? The text that Averroes is dealing with here are some of the most difficult and controversial texts Aristotle wrote

in the third book of his work on The Soul, and you have a long history of different interpretations. Something that's interesting about Averroes is that he goes through a whole series of different interpretations of this, the one that was just described, is his mature, his most famous view that he comes to in his great commentary on this work on the soul. And what's interesting about it is that in general, we were talking before about how Avicenna is the most original thinker of the Islamic tradition. In general, Averroes doesn't like Avicenna.

So he thinks that Avicenna is departing too much from Aristotle. And in fact, in the work that you mentioned, Ghazali's incoherence of the philosophy, philosophers. When Averroes criticizes that, usually what he says is, well, Ghazali is right that Avicenna's views are wrong. But since Avicenna's views don't represent those of the philosophers, because he's got Aristotle wrong, we can ignore this entire debate. For example, on the eternity of the world. Right. He agrees with Avicenna and Aristotle that the world is eternal, but he doesn't agree with Avicenna's reasons for him the world is eternal. Now, the case of the intellect is an interesting one because in this case he takes a view that's somewhat like Avicenna's but goes even further than Avicenna in what we would probably think of as a departure from Aristotle. So in terms of the philosophy of why you would think all of this craziness about all of humanity having only one intellect, actually this all makes perfect sense. And the reason it makes perfect sense is that Aristotle says that when your intellect grasps an idea, what that is for your

mind to become identical with the idea. So if I grasp what frogs are, what that means is that my mind is somehow becoming conformed or identical with frog. Now, there's only one idea of frog. There's lots of frogs, but there's only one idea of frog. So that means that there can't really be any difference between what's going on when I grasp frog and what's going on when a mirror grasp frog, frog. Although, of course, we have different imaginations and things that go along with it. So I imagine Kermit because I'm from the States. Amira imagines whatever British people think of when they think of frogs. Now, Averro, so if you think about the difference between Avicenna and Averroes on this,

what Avicenna thinks follows from all of this is simply that what happens when we die is that we become an immaterial soul that just does intellection. It doesn't do anything else. Averroes goes to that one better and says, well, if we take that really seriously, then we have to admit that there's only one of them. these because there's only one set of ideas, there's only one set of universal principles, and that's what we will become identical to after we die. So it all makes perfect sense. Amira, when did these ideas of Averos crash into conflict with the court to such an extent

that he was exiled? I'm not sure, yes, I'm not sure they did come into conflict at the court. As Tony was saying earlier, you still have these different groups. of the religious scholars, the theologians, and the court itself. Averrois had a long career as a court physician, but he did fall foul, I think, of the jurists, the most sort of legal-minded Islamic scholars of the Iberian Peninsula at that time. And they put a quite considerable pressure on the caliph. The caliph at that time was Al-Mansur.

to do something about the irreligiosity of this individual who is so highly placed. And it's at that point that you then get, so the story that Tony was mentioning coming in, this reference to a peg to Venus and naming her as a divinity, which was used, if any way, as a sort of an excuse to remove him from the court. Whilst we talk in terms of banishment, I mean, I tend to think of it more in terms of the case.

Caliph himself sort of apologising profusely in saying, look, I think you better go undercover for a bit. You know, things are a bit hot here. The scholars are on my tail. I think you really need to move out of the limelight. And the caliph didn't want to be seen to be patronising philosophy at that particular moment. So Avarois was sent to Le Chena, which was slightly humiliating. This was seen as a city inhabited primarily with Jews. On the positive side, it's quite possible that it was in that milieu that he,

came into contact with Jews and helped transmit his ideas into the Jewish Spanish milieu. But he was subsequently recalled to court. I think it's important to realise that he was recalled by Al Mansoor. When Al Mansoor left the Iberian Peninsula for Marrakech in 1198, he wanted to take his philosopher with him. And he summoned Evaro's back, took him down to Marrakech. I mean, again, that's sometimes been seen in a negative light, but I think we have to remember that Marrakech was the Almohad capital

and it was there that Averrois actually passed away shortly afterwards. I'd like to move on to the legacy now. Anthony, Kenny, arguments about faith and reason that involved Averroes in the Islamic world of Andalusia. We're also emerging the Christian world with the scholastic movement. Can you briefly say, excuse me, what Averroes contributed to the scholastic movement and how that pushed things forward as you go, well, forward anyway,

towards the Renaissance. I think that the two things that were characteristic of Latin medieval philosophy, scholastic philosophy. One was scholastic method, which was the adversarial method in philosophy. I mean, there's a difference between scholastic philosophy and, say, post-Renic philosophy, parallel to the difference between the English legal system and the continental legal system. The continental system is inquisitorial. you go after the truth, and Descartes and his followers all had that idea. Scholastic philosophy, like the English law courts, is adversarial.

You stake two contrasting positions, and then you try to find out which is the one to be preferred. Now, the originator of the adversarial method of philosophy was Abelard, he was overlapsed to some extent in time, with Averroes, and he wrote a famous treatise Siket, non, yes and no, in which he piles up authoritative texts on two sides of the question. And I think he was the ancestor.

Abelah, of course, is better known as a lover than as a philosopher, but he is, I think, the originator of scholastic method. The originator, the other half of scholasticism is its essential content, which is Aristotle. and I think one can see Averroes as being the progenitor of that side of scholasticism. It was his Aristotle on the whole that was taken over in the West. But Thomas Aquinas, who was the best known scholastic philosopher in the century after, the 13th century later than Averroes, he had the same problems in a way that,

Averroes had, how does he reconcile Aristotle's teaching that the world has always existed with the first books of Genesis? And while Aquinas always treats Averroes with enormous respect as a commentator on Aristotle, he's very anxious to distinguish between the extra things that he thinks Averroes introduced the single intellect which would go right against the idea of rewards and punishments in heaven and hell for us. But a lot of the junior generation at St. Thomas's time were rather more excited by Averroes and particularly by these heterodox ideas of Averroes.

And towards the end of his life, St. Thomas was constantly scribbling treatises saying, no, the world wasn't eternal, in spite of Aristotle and Leverroes saying it was, every one of us had our own intellect which would survive death. There were two versions of two periods in which Averroes was very important in the West. The first one was the one I've just mentioned at the end of the 13th century. But then he became important again at the Renaissance. The Renaissance Plato's philosophy was being revived in Florence. Meanwhile, in Venice and Padua, which was kind of the Latin quarter of Venice at that time,

Padua, there was a revival of Aristotelianism, not the kind of modified Aristotle that Thomas Aquinas had taught, but exactly what Averroes had taught with no immortality of the soul. Peter Herbson, can you take it into the legacy further because he's, excuse me, he was taken, I'm sorry to use this trite phrase, but he was taken on or taken up by Christian and Jewish scholars, but not very much by Islamic scholars. Can you just push that forward? Anteneghan has taken us into the Renaissance. Can you just hold that and develop it? Right. An interesting feature of Haruiz's legacy is precisely this, that he's not very influential in the Arabic-speaking world. And an interesting question is why. I think one reason, Part of it will be luck, as has already been mentioned, as a reason for why he was influential in Latin and Hebrew. But I think a deeper philosophical reason is that, as we've said, Averroes was very opposed to the teaching of Avesena. So wherever Avesena had developed some new idea that departed from Aristotle, Averroes would say, no, we're not bringing that in. We're going back to Aristotle.

But in fact, some of the novelties that Avicenna introduces in his own system become the dominant problems and themes of what you might call post-classical Islamic philosophy, so into the time that's contemporaneous with the Latin Renaissance. So they're always arguing about the meaning and truth of things like the essence existence distinction and other things that Avicenna had brought in that were clearly properly Avicenna ideas that. Averroes didn't use and in fact argued against. However, in more recent centuries, there's been a kind of attempt, both in Europe and in the Muslim world, to recover Averroes as some kind of figure of free thought and rationalism. At one level, you can see why, because we've seen that he does put forward this very rationalist understanding, according to which the philosophers are the ones who are entrusted with the job of understanding the core meaning of the Quran.

But actually, I think that there's something, in a way, very misleading about this, because as we've also seen, he thinks that that is something that's available only to a very, very small number of people. So the idea, for example, that Averroes would be in favor of something like free speech is completely wrongheaded. I think the one thing you could say, though, to maybe redeem Averroes from this rationalist point of view is that his theory might be accepted except for the fact that it has one key false factual premise,

which is the premise that very, very few people are able to do philosophy. So he looks around him, he sees a vast number of people, almost none of whom know anything about philosophy. He's assuming that none of them could do philosophy. But if you just disagree with him about that, and you say, no, actually, pretty much everybody can do some philosophy, so everyone can have some kind of rational hold on the truth then his view starts to look a lot more congenial to these rationalist interpreters.

Amir, do you want to take that on? Yes, I mean, I think that the fact that Averroes was not particularly well known in his own world after his own era also has a historical dimension to it. I mean, I think there are the intellectual problems and barriers which Peter's mentioning, but also the situation in the Iberian Peninsula after his death, went from bad to worse in tense of the conflict between Islam and Christianity and the Almahad Empire fragmented and collapsed shortly afterwards in the early 13th century. Muslim power was pushed south and restricted to Grenada.

And from that time onwards, in most of the North African and Spanish Muslim kingdoms, there was a move away from philosophy. Certain philosophical ideas were integrated into full. in a more general way. We have people like Ibn al-Khattib in Grenada or Ibn Khaldun in North Africa who certainly have incorporated some philosophical ideas into their work, but they're not philosophers.

They're historians, they're commentators of various different kinds on literary matters, on poetry. So intellectual life moves in a different direction which also reflects, I think, political circumstances. Finally, and very briefly out now, I think we're running out. You understand. you understand. I'll forget the question. Could

I just add one postcript about the reformation and Averroes? In the beginning of the 16th century, the papacy was pretty universally regarded as corrupt and in need of reform. To distract attention from this, the Pope called

a council to denounce the Averroism of Venice. The immortality of the soul is more important than papal taxation, so that was all they talked about. Seven years later, comes Luther. What a perfect segue. I've never had one of these. I've never had the perfect subject.

Next week we're going to talk about the diet of worms where Luther crashes into history. Thank you very much, Anthony. Thank all the interview. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.