Justified True Belief

(●) The Muslim judge of Cordoba who spent thirty years explaining Aristotle, and whom the Christian schools ended up calling simply the Commentator. + For most of the thirteenth century, when a master at Paris or Oxford said "the Philosopher," every student in the room knew he meant Aristotle. When he said "the Commentator," they knew he meant a Muslim judge from Cordoba who had died before their grandfathers were born. That is the short answer to why Averroes belongs on a Christian shelf. The recovery of Aristotle in the West, the event that made Thomas Aquinas and the whole of scholastic theology possible, did not arrive as a bare Greek text with a helpful preface. It arrived wrapped in Averroes’ commentary, carried out of Arabic into Latin by translators working in Spain and Sicily, and for two generations Christian teachers learned what Aristotle meant by reading what Ibn Rushd said he meant. A good deal of what they learned they kept. Some of it they fought, and fought hard: Aquinas wrote a short book for the sole purpose of refuting one of his doctrines, and the bishop of Paris condemned that doctrine twice. His own name was Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, and "Averroes" is what Latin ears made of "ibn Rushd" once it had passed through Spanish. The name is a fair emblem of his afterlife. In the Muslim world his philosophical work was largely set aside, and he went on being read chiefly as a lawyer; in Christendom his commentaries were copied, argued with, condemned, and printed for four hundred years. Dante, who had no reason to be generous to him, put him in Limbo among the great pagans, alongside Homer and Aristotle and Euclid, and named him in a single line as the man "who the great Comment made."

(●) 1126 AD: Born in Cordoba, in the year his grandfather died, into the family that supplied the city its judges. + Some families pass down a farm. This one passed down a courtroom. The grandfather Averroes was named for, Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd, was chief qadi of Cordoba and imam of its Great Mosque, and one of the most respected legal minds in the western half of the Muslim world. A qadi is simply a judge appointed to hear cases under religious law, and in Cordoba that meant hearing everything: marriages, inheritances, market disputes, endowments. The grandfather died in 1126, the year the grandson was born. The father, Abu al-Qasim Ahmad, held the same office in his turn, until 1146, when the Almoravid dynasty that had appointed him was swept away by the Almohads, a rival movement out of North Africa that would go on to rule the whole of Averroes’ adult life. So the boy grew up inside the family trade, and he learned it thoroughly. First came hadith, the reports of what Muhammad said and did, which stand beside the Qur’an as a source of Islamic law, and a student of that generation was expected to carry a great many of them in his head. On top of that went fiqh, the working science of that law, studied in the Maliki school, one of the four recognized Sunni traditions of legal interpretation and the one that governed Spain and North Africa. Medicine came into it as well, and so did kalam, the discipline of arguing about God in a systematic way rather than simply quoting a verse at an opponent. Philosophy came last, and it stayed longest. Cordoba in his childhood was past the height it had reached under the caliphs of the tenth century, when its libraries were the wonder of Europe, but it was still a city where a well-connected boy could read almost anything that had been written in Arabic. That turned out to include Aristotle.

(●) c. 1153 AD: He was in Marrakesh, serving the Almohads, a dynasty that had taken power on a theological argument. + By about 1153 Averroes had crossed to Marrakesh, the capital of the Almohads. The name comes from al-Muwahhidun, "those who affirm that God is one," and it was a manifesto as much as a label. Their founder, Ibn Tumart, had accused the previous rulers of a crude literalism about God, of reading the Qur’an’s talk of God’s hand and God’s throne as though God had hands and furniture. A regime founded on that complaint had reason to tolerate men who could argue carefully, and for a while it did. He was there partly on scientific business. He took astronomical observations, and he lent his weight to the Almohad project of founding colleges. He also came away dissatisfied, and what he was dissatisfied about takes a moment to picture. The astronomy everyone taught was Ptolemy’s, a system of circles turning on circles that predicted where a planet would appear without claiming that the circles were really there. Two devices did most of the work in it. An epicycle is a small circle whose centre rides around the rim of a larger one, so that a planet running on the small circle appears from the ground to loop backwards now and then instead of holding its course; an eccentric is a circle whose centre sits off to one side of the earth rather than on it, which is what lets a planet seem to hurry through one stretch of sky and dawdle through another. Both save the appearances beautifully. Neither one, so far as anybody could show, is actually up there. Averroes could never persuade himself that a mathematical device was the same thing as an account of the heavens, and commenting years afterward on the twelfth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, he said so flatly: the eccentrics and epicycles the astronomers worked with are mathematical conveniences, useful for calculation and foreign to nature, so the astronomy of his own day was not yet a science of what actually moves. It is a small thing, and it tells you what kind of mind he had. He wanted to know how the world is, not merely how to predict it, and he was willing to say out loud that the best available theory was not good enough.

(●) 1169 AD: A caliph asked him whether the heavens had a beginning, he denied being a philosopher, and he left with the commission of his life. + The story comes from the historian al-Marrakushi, writing several decades later, and it is the best scene in Averroes’ life. Ibn Tufayl, the caliph’s physician and the author of a famous philosophical novel about a child raised alone on an island, brought his younger friend to the court of Abu Yaqub Yusuf. The caliph, after the courtesies, asked what the philosophers held about the heavens: were they eternal, or did they come to be? Averroes, by his own account, was terrified. Answering honestly meant admitting in front of a ruler that he had spent years on books that many jurists thought no believer should touch. So he said he had never studied philosophy at all. Then the caliph turned to Ibn Tufayl and began to discuss the question himself, quoting Plato and Aristotle and the objections the Muslim theologians had made to both, and Averroes realized that the man on the throne had read the books too. He relaxed and spoke, and the audience ended with a robe of honour and a purse. Afterward Ibn Tufayl told him what the caliph really wanted. Aristotle in Arabic was hard going, the translations were rough, and the caliph wished someone would explain him properly. Ibn Tufayl said he was too old for the work. Averroes took it, and it occupied him for the next thirty years. In the same year he was appointed qadi of Seville, which meant he did the work in the evenings.

(●) 1171 to 1182 AD: He judged cases by day and commented on Aristotle by night, and rose to be chief judge of Cordoba and physician to the caliph. + In 1171 he came home to Cordoba as its qadi. Eight years later, in 1179, he was posted back to Seville. Then in 1182 the old friend who had put him in front of the caliph stepped aside for him a second time: he succeeded Ibn Tufayl as court physician in Marrakesh, and later the same year was appointed chief qadi of Cordoba, the office his grandfather had held. None of this was honorary. A chief judge in a city of that size spent his days on the ordinary griefs of ordinary people, on a disputed will and a bad marriage and a neighbour’s encroaching wall, and the commentaries were written around the edges of it. The scale of what he produced in those edges is hard to take in. He worked through nearly the whole surviving body of Aristotle, and often three times over. There were short commentaries, compact summaries a student could carry; middle commentaries, paraphrases that reworded Aristotle sentence by sentence so a reader could follow the argument; and long commentaries, which set out a passage of Aristotle and then examined it line by line, and in which Averroes did his own hardest thinking. Five works got all three treatments: the Physics, the Metaphysics, On the Soul, On the Heavens, and the Posterior Analytics. When he wanted to comment on political philosophy he found that Aristotle’s Politics had never reached him, so he commented on Plato’s Republic instead. His biographers report that from the day he came of age he missed only two nights of study: the night he married, and the night his father died. Traditions like that grow on famous scholars and cannot be checked. This one at least fits the output.

(●) 1178 to 1180 AD: In three years he wrote the three books that defend philosophy rather than do it. + Every one of the commentaries assumed something that a great many of his neighbours denied: that a believer is allowed to reason freely about God and the world. Around 1178 he stopped assuming it and argued it, in a short treatise called Fasl al-Maqal, the Decisive Treatise. A year later came al-Kashf, an examination of how the Qur’an itself argues for God and what the professional theologians had done to those arguments. A year after that came the longest of the three. Eighty-five years earlier, al-Ghazali had written The Incoherence of the Philosophers and had very largely won. He had gone through the philosophers’ system point by point, judged most of it merely mistaken, and judged three doctrines so bad that holding them put a man outside the faith, the eternity of the world among them (T4). Averroes answered him with a book whose title is a joke that survives translation: Tahafut al-Tahafut, the Incoherence of the Incoherence. Its method is unusual and worth picturing. He quotes a paragraph of al-Ghazali, replies to it, quotes the next paragraph, replies to that, and keeps it up for hundreds of pages, so that the reader gets both sides in full and can decide. He is not always gracious about it. He accuses al-Ghazali of writing one thing for the learned and another for the crowd, which, given his own view of who should be told what, is a charge that cuts both ways.

(●) 1195 AD: At sixty-nine he was tried at Cordoba, his philosophical books were burned, and he was banished to a country town. + The caliph who had protected him died in 1184, and his son Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur inherited both the throne and a war. In the summer of 1195 al-Mansur crossed to Spain and destroyed the army of Castile at Alarcos, and a campaign like that needed the jurists behind it, preaching and raising money and vouching for the piety of the man who had called it. The jurists had a standing complaint. Here was the chief judge of Cordoba writing that the study of philosophy was not merely permitted but commanded, that a verse of the Qur’an could be read against its surface when a proof required it, and that on the eternity of the world the philosophers and the theologians were mostly quarrelling over words. A tribunal at Cordoba condemned his teaching. His philosophical works were publicly burned, philosophy was banned, and the old man was banished to Lucena, a small town southeast of the city. Why exactly, nobody can say with certainty, and the honest answer is that we do not know. The reading most historians favour is that al-Mansur did not much care about the philosophy and cared a great deal about the war, and that Averroes was the price the jurists named. What can be said is that he was sixty-nine, that he had served three caliphs, and that he watched his own books burn.

(●) 1198 AD: Restored to favour, he died at Marrakesh, and his body went home to Cordoba balanced against his own books. + The disgrace did not last. Within about two years the ban was lifted, Averroes was summoned back to court at Marrakesh, and he died there at seventy-two on the ninth of Safar in the year 595 of the Muslim calendar, the second week of December 1198. Three months later his remains were carried across to Cordoba for burial, and a young Andalusian who would become the most famous mystic in Islam was standing in the street to watch. Ibn Arabi, then in his thirties, had met Averroes once as a boy and never forgotten it. In his account of the funeral, the coffin was loaded on one side of a pack animal and the dead man’s own books were piled on the other side to balance the weight. A companion beside him, the copyist Abu al-Hakam, nodded at the load and asked whether they saw what was serving as the counterweight to the Master on his mount. Ibn Arabi, who thought the whole philosophical enterprise a poor substitute for knowing God directly, took it as a sermon. It reads better the other way. The books did balance the man, and they went on doing it. Within thirty years of that funeral, Latin translations of the books on the mule were being copied at Paris, and Christian theologians who could not read a word of Arabic were learning Aristotle from a Muslim judge whose own community had lately burned his books.

What He Taught

(T1) Truth cannot contradict truth, so a believer is not merely permitted to reason about the world but commanded to. + Suppose two surveyors measure the same field, one with a chain and one with a theodolite, and come back with different acreages. Nobody concludes that the field has two sizes. Somebody has misread an instrument, and the way to find out which is to check the working. That is the whole of Averroes’ position on faith and reason, and everything else he wrote about religion follows from it. He starts, in the Decisive Treatise, from a question a jurist would ask: is the study of philosophy forbidden, discouraged, permitted, recommended, or required? He answers that it is required, and he argues it the way a lawyer argues, from the text. The Qur’an repeatedly tells its readers to look at the created world and draw a conclusion from it. Looking carefully and drawing a valid conclusion is exactly what philosophy is. If the book commands the end, it commands the means, and the means include learning what a valid inference is and what it is not. Then comes the load-bearing step, and it turns on a word he uses far more strictly than we do. A demonstration, in the sense he had learned from Aristotle’s logical works, is not simply a good argument or a persuasive one. It is a chain of reasoning that starts from premises which cannot be false and moves by steps which cannot fail, so that the conclusion is not merely likely but certain, the way the angles of a triangle come to two right angles and could not have come to anything else. Hold that meaning and the rest follows quickly. Revelation is true. Whatever a demonstration actually proves is true. Two truths cannot collide. So a proof and a revealed text can never really be in conflict, and where they seem to be, one of the two has been misunderstood. Christians should recognize this, because it is their own principle with different furniture. Augustine had said that if reason establishes something and Scripture seems to deny it, we have misread Scripture. Aquinas would say the same in the next century, and the Christian tradition has kept saying it ever since. Where Averroes goes further, and where the trouble starts, is in who he thinks is qualified to do the checking (T3).

(Q) "As this Law is true and leads to the consideration of the knowledge of God, we Muslims should believe that rational investigation is not contrary to Law, for truth cannot contradict truth, but verifies it and bears testimony to it." + Source: Averroes, Fasl al-Maqal, the Decisive Treatise (Jamil-ur-Rehman translation, 1921). "The Law" here translates al-shar, the revealed law of Islam taken as a whole, roughly what a Christian would mean by revelation rather than by a legal code. The sentence is the hinge of the treatise: everything before it argues that the Law commands investigation, and everything after it works out what to do when investigation and the surface of the text appear to disagree.

(T2) When the plain sense of a sacred text collides with something proved, the plain sense is not the whole meaning. + Every reader of Scripture already does this, and knows it. When the psalmist says God will cover you with his feathers, nobody starts looking for the feathers. The words are being used the way words get used all the time, one thing named by another, and a competent reader picks it up without effort. Averroes gives that ordinary move a technical name, ta’wil, usually translated "interpretation," and defines it narrowly: carrying a word from its first sense across to a related one, cause for effect, or a thing for the thing it resembles, and only in ways the Arabic language itself allows. He is not licensing a free hand. The metaphor has to be one a native speaker could have meant. His rule, then, is this. Where a demonstration establishes something, and a revealed text on its face says otherwise, the text is to be read according to one of the metaphorical senses its own language permits. And he points out that no Muslim can really object to the procedure, because the lawyers do it constantly with legal texts, and on thinner grounds. The jurist reasons from probability. The philosopher, when he has a genuine demonstration, reasons from certainty. If the weaker method licenses interpretation, the stronger one hardly forfeits it. The obvious question is who decides when a demonstration is genuine, and Averroes has an answer that Christians will find harder to swallow than the rule itself (T3).

(Q) "We hold it to be an established truth that if the Law is apparently opposed to a truth proved by philosophy it admits of an interpretation according to the canons of the Arabic language." + Source: Averroes, Fasl al-Maqal, the Decisive Treatise (Jamil-ur-Rehman translation, 1921). The qualifier at the end is doing real work. An interpretation has to be one the language will bear, which rules out reading whatever one likes into a text and calling it depth. A few lines earlier he had defined the operation itself: "Interpretation means to carry the meaning of a word from its original sense to a metaphorical one."

(T3) People come in three kinds, and each kind is owed the argument it can actually follow. + A doctor explaining a diagnosis to a colleague, to a nurse, and to a frightened patient says three different things, all of them true. Averroes thought a revealed book has the same problem on a larger scale, and solves it the same way. He sorts hearers into three groups, borrowing the categories from Aristotle’s logic. Some people are convinced by demonstration, a chain of reasoning from premises that cannot be false; these are the philosophers, and they are few. Some are convinced by dialectic, argument from premises that are widely accepted rather than proved; these are the theologians, the practitioners of kalam, who argue about God from premises their hearers already grant. Most people are moved by rhetoric and vivid images, and there is nothing wrong with them for it. A revealed book meant for everybody, he says, must therefore contain all three kinds of speech, and its images are not concessions to stupidity but the proper address to the majority of the human race. So far this is close to something Christians say often enough, that God speaks to us in ways we can take. Then Averroes adds the part that makes it his. Because the deeper reading belongs to demonstration, it should be kept where demonstration lives. Allegorical interpretations belong in learned books, in technical language, where the general reader will not stumble over them; a scholar who broadcasts them to the crowd damages people who cannot follow the reasoning and are left with nothing but the wreck of the plain sense. His word for such a scholar is not gentle. He calls him an unbeliever, for leading others into unbelief, and he names al-Ghazali as an offender. He had a real problem in view, and the pastoral instinct behind it is not stupid. But a gospel preached to fishermen (Matthew 11:25; 1 Corinthians 1:26–29) cannot finally accept the arrangement, and that is where the deepest disagreement with him lies.

(Q) "There are three methods of verification open to people: philosophy, dogmatics and exhortation." + Source: Averroes, Fasl al-Maqal, the Decisive Treatise (Jamil-ur-Rehman translation, 1921). The translator’s three words map onto Aristotle’s three kinds of argument: demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric. In the same passage Averroes draws the practical conclusion: "A learned man who discloses the discussions of these things to the common people helps them towards unbelief and one who abets another in that direction is himself no better than an unbeliever."

(T4) The world has no beginning in time, and it is still God’s making. + Here is the question that had split Muslim thought for two centuries, and it is worth stating plainly because the Christian stake in it is large. Did the universe begin, or has it always been? The theologians said it began, and built a proof of God on the fact: whatever begins needs a cause, the world began, so the world has a cause. That is the argument Christians now call the kalam cosmological argument, and it came to them through al-Ghazali. Aristotle said the world had no beginning, and his Muslim followers agreed. Averroes takes Aristotle’s side, and then does something more interesting than taking a side. He argues that the two camps have talked past each other. Both agree, he says, that there are three sorts of thing. There is what is made out of pre-existing material and has time before it, which is everything we see: a table, an oak, a horse. There is what is not made out of anything, has nothing before it in time, and has no cause at all, which is God alone. And there is a third sort in between, which is not made out of anything and has no time before it, yet does depend on a cause. Into that third box he puts the universe. Take the ordinary picture apart and you can see what he is claiming. A carpenter makes a table on Tuesday, and before Tuesday there is no table; making, for us, always sits inside time. But if God is the cause of time itself, "before" has nothing to stand on. The world can hang on God the way a reflection hangs on a face rather than the way a table hangs on a Tuesday: utterly dependent, never absent. On that account the world is caused at every instant and yet has no first instant, and Averroes thinks the theologians, who agree that there was no time before the world, have already conceded most of what they are fighting about. Christian readers should hold two things together here. Aquinas, who is not a soft touch on this, agreed with Averroes that no philosophical argument settles it: reason alone cannot prove the world had a beginning, and a beginningless created world is not a contradiction. He then held, on the authority of Genesis rather than of Aristotle, that in fact it began (Genesis 1:1; Hebrews 11:3). Averroes never made that move, and the difference is not a technicality. A world that could not have failed to be there is not the same as a world spoken into being by someone free to have done otherwise.

(Q) "But in reality it is neither truly originated nor eternal. For the originated creation is necessarily subject to destruction while the eternal is without a cause." + Source: Averroes, Fasl al-Maqal, the Decisive Treatise (Jamil-ur-Rehman translation, 1921). He is describing the universe, the third and middle kind of being in his scheme. It is not "originated" in the ordinary sense, since nothing preceded it and it will not perish; it is not "eternal" in the way God is eternal, since it has a cause and God does not. His conclusion from this is that the two parties should stop calling each other unbelievers over a distinction neither had drawn carefully.

(T5) God is known by studying what he made, which makes natural science an act of religion. + The professional theologians of his day proved God’s existence with an abstract argument about substances and accidents. A substance is a thing that stands on its own, a horse or a stone; an accident is a feature it merely happens to carry, the horse’s brown coat, the stone’s being warm by afternoon and cold again by midnight. Following the argument built out of those two words took a term’s worth of training. Averroes thought this was a mistake, and not only a tactical one. The Qur’an, he says, does not argue that way, and the arguments it does use are open to anybody with eyes. He finds two of them running through the text. The first he calls the argument of solicitude, the old word for care taken deliberately for somebody else’s good: everything in the world turns out to suit human life, the day and the night, the seasons, the rain, the ground underfoot, the organs of the body, and a fit that thorough is not the sort of thing that happens by itself. The second he calls the argument of creation, or of invention: look at what things actually are, at the fact that there is life in what was inert matter, at sensation, at intelligence, and you are looking at something that had to be given. Neither argument asks the reader to master a technical vocabulary first. Both ask him to look harder at what is in front of him. The practical upshot is the striking part. If God is known through the make of things, then finding out how things are made is religious work, and a man who wants to know God as he ought to be known has an obligation to study the world in detail. Botany, anatomy and astronomy stop being distractions from piety and start being instruments of it. Christians have their own version of this and a name for it, general revelation: the knowledge of God available to anyone through the creation and the conscience, as distinct from the special revelation given in Scripture. Paul states it directly in Romans 1:20, and the Psalms and Job assume it (Job 12:7–9). What Averroes adds is the insistence that the ordinary reader, not merely the trained one, is the person the argument is aimed at, which sits oddly beside his own three-tier scheme (T3) and is much the better instinct.

(Q) "Thus it is necessary for one who wants to know God as He ought to be known, to acquaint himself with the essence of things, so that he may get information about the creation of all things." + Source: Averroes, al-Kashf an Manahij al-Adilla, the Exposition of the Methods of Proof (Jamil-ur-Rehman translation, 1921). The sentence closes his account of the argument of creation. "The essence of things" means what a thing actually is, as against what it looks like from outside, so the demand is for real investigation and not for pious admiration of scenery.

(Q) "It is quite immaterial whether that man is our co-religionist or not; for the instrument by which purification is perfected is not made uncertain in its usefulness, by its being in the hands of one of our own party, or of a foreigner, if it possesses the attributes of truth." + Source: Averroes, Fasl al-Maqal, the Decisive Treatise (Jamil-ur-Rehman translation, 1921). He is arguing that a Muslim may learn logic and metaphysics from the Greeks, who were pagans, because a tool that works does not stop working in a stranger’s hand. The principle would shortly be turned back on him, by Christian scholars with exactly the same problem and exactly the same solution.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Latin schools called him the Commentator, and for three centuries read Aristotle through his eyes. + Picture a lecture hall at Paris around 1250. On the desk is a manuscript with Aristotle’s text set in the middle of the page and, wrapped around it in a smaller hand, the commentary of a man from Cordoba. That physical arrangement is most of the story of thirteenth-century theology. The translations began within a generation of Averroes’ death. Michael Scot, a Scotsman working first at Toledo and then at the Sicilian court of the emperor Frederick II, had begun turning the long commentaries into Latin by about 1220, and others followed him; Hermannus Alemannus added the middle commentary on the Ethics in 1240 and the one on the Poetics in 1256. Toledo mattered because Christians had taken the city in 1085 with its Arabic libraries intact, and because Jewish scholars there could work between the three languages. A great deal of Averroes reached Europe by that route and by Hebrew, and some of his books survive today only in those translations, the Arabic having been lost. The effect on vocabulary tells you how deep it went. Aristotle became simply "the Philosopher." Averroes became simply "the Commentator," a title the schools gave to no one else. Albert the Great and his student Thomas Aquinas quote him constantly, and usually respectfully, on the meaning of a passage; when Aquinas wants to know what Aristotle meant by prime matter, the bare stuff a thing is made of considered before it has been made into anything in particular, or by the agent intellect, the power that takes what the senses hand over and draws the general idea out of it, the Commentator is the authority he reaches for, sometimes to agree and sometimes to argue. And when Dante assembled the noble pagans of Limbo, he set Averroes at the end of the list beside Avicenna, in a line that names him only by the work: "Averroes, who the great Comment made."

(†) Aquinas took his Aristotle and refused his one shared mind for all people, writing a whole treatise against it. + One doctrine of Averroes’ was more than the Christian schools could take, and it needs explaining before the fight makes sense. Aristotle had said that the mind, in the part of it that receives ideas, must be unmixed with the body, since a thing that is going to take on every form cannot already have a form of its own, the way a clear pane takes every colour because it has none. Averroes pressed that argument to a conclusion nobody had drawn so boldly. If the receiving mind, the material intellect, has no bodily organ, then there is nothing to individuate it, nothing to make this one yours and that one mine the way two bodies are told apart by standing on two different patches of ground. And where nothing tells one off from another, there is no way to count off one for each person. So there is one, and it is shared. When you and I both grasp that a triangle’s angles come to two right angles, we are not each holding a private copy of the thought; we are two bodies with two sets of images hooked up to a single intellect that does the understanding. He arrived at it late and by stages. His earlier commentaries on On the Soul try other answers, and the doctrine in this bold form belongs to the long commentary, which is his last word on the subject. Christian theologians saw at once what it cost. If the thinking part is one and shared, then it is not your soul that survives you, and there is nobody left to be judged, rewarded or raised. Thomas Aquinas answered it twice over, once inside his larger works and once in a short treatise written at Paris in 1270 for that single purpose, On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists. His central complaint is beautifully concrete: on Averroes’ account it is not this man who understands, and if that is so, no argument any of us makes is our own. Aquinas held instead that the rational soul is the form of the individual body, one per person, and immortal. The condemnations followed the argument. In 1270 Bishop Étienne Tempier of Paris condemned thirteen propositions, the unity of the intellect and the eternity of the world among them, and in 1277 he issued a far longer list of two hundred and nineteen. The masters in view were Christians, chiefly Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who had pushed Aristotle in Averroes’ direction. The result was not the end of Averroes in Christendom, and his commentaries went on being printed alongside Aristotle in Venice into the sixteenth century. It was a boundary drawn: read him for Aristotle, and do not follow him on the soul.

(†) The charge of two contrary truths was pinned on him, and it was never his position. + The preface to Tempier’s condemnation of 1277 complains about men who say a thing is true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, "as if there were two contrary truths, and as if against the truth of Sacred Scripture, there is truth in the sayings of the condemned pagans." Out of that sentence grew a label that stuck to Averroes for six hundred years: the doctrine of double truth, the idea that a proposition can be true in philosophy and false in religion at the same time. He never held it, and it is close to the opposite of what he wrote. The Decisive Treatise exists to argue that there is one truth, reached by different roads by different sorts of people, and that a demonstration and a revealed text can never really conflict (T1). What he did hold is that the same truth wears different clothes for different hearers, plain speech for the crowd and demonstration for the trained (T3), and it is easy to see how a hostile reader could slide from that to the caricature. Historians of medieval philosophy now generally agree that nobody in the thirteenth century actually taught two contradictory truths, and that Tempier was describing, unfairly, men who separated what philosophy could establish from what faith held. The episode is worth keeping in view for its own sake. A man was condemned for a position he had argued against, by people who had learned their Aristotle from him, and the label outlived every one of them.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a world with no beginning, a God who does not know you by name, a mind that is not your own, and a truth held back from ordinary people. + The debt is real, and so is the distance. Four points, drawn from what Averroes himself wrote rather than from what his readers made of him. - A world that never began. He held that the universe has no first moment, and defended the position against al-Ghazali at book length (T4). Scripture opens somewhere else: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), and the New Testament reads that as making from nothing rather than shaping of something (Hebrews 11:3). Christians can grant, with Aquinas, that reason alone does not settle the question, and still hold that revelation does. - A God who does not know you by name. Pressed on whether God knows individual things, Averroes refused both the answer that God’s knowledge is like ours and the answer that God is ignorant of particulars, and said instead that God’s knowing is neither universal nor particular but of a kind we cannot name. Whatever else that saves, it does not deliver the God of the sparrows. "Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether" (Psalm 139:4), and "even the hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matthew 10:30). The Christian claim is not that God knows in general; it is that he knows you. - A mind that is not your own. His unicity of the intellect, the doctrine that all of us think with one and the same mind, leaves no individual thinker to survive death. In al-Kashf he affirms the life to come and then holds that the body raised is not the body that died, and that the physical pictures of it are the form of the teaching best fitted to move ordinary people. Scripture will not trade the body away: "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:44), and it insists that it is you who will stand there, once, and be judged (Hebrews 9:27). - A truth held back from ordinary people. This is his own rule, stated in his own words: interpretations belong in learned books, and a scholar who takes them to the crowd is no better than an unbeliever (T3). It is the point of deepest disagreement, and not because the pastoral worry behind it is silly. It is that the gospel runs the other way. Jesus thanked his Father for hiding these things from the wise and revealing them to little children (Matthew 11:25), and Paul told a congregation to look around and notice that not many of them were wise by the world’s standard (1 Corinthians 1:26–29). Christianity has no inner doctrine for the qualified. The thing hardest to believe is the thing preached in the street. Set that against the debt, which is every bit as real, and the shape of his life comes clear. He argued that a believer must reason, that truth cannot fight truth, and that a tool works in a foreigner’s hand. His own community burned the books for it. The foreigners picked them up.