The first philosophical reputations among those congregating at Paris (and
to a lesser degree at Oxford) arose from the struggle to assimilate or refute the
Arab ideas (see Figure 9.4). William of Auxerre produced a Christianized
version of Avicenna; he was appointed by the pope in 1228 to a commission
to correct the dangerous newest import, the Averroist texts of Aristotle. Wil-
liam of Auvergne, theology master and then bishop of Paris from 1228 to
1249, systematized a doctrine in reaction against the Arab Aristoteleanism,
drawing on Saint Augustine but bolstered by pieces of Avicenna. Alexander of
Hales produced a scholastic Summa that compiled conservative Augustinian
and Victorine ideas while dealing with problems posed by Aristotle.
At the same time, specialized branches of knowledge were expanding and
pulling free of theology, finding niches in the differentiating organization of
university studies. Scientific texts were being translated from Arabic, compris-
ing ancient Greek works in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other
sciences, together with Arab advances. Those individuals who were closest to
this inflow were able to carve out a distinctive niche in the field. Albert of
Bollstadt, a German nobleman who as a young man studied near the Italian
centers of translation, became filled with the ambition of compiling and com-
pleting the scientific works of the Greeks. He became Albert the Great out of
the sheer energy with which he pursued this goal, ranging through all the fields
of knowledge from theology to botany, and from plants and gems to occultism
and magic.
Albert’s encyclopedic works are impressive mainly for their scope. Albert
regarded himself as following Aristotle, which he did in the arrangement of
the sciences, and in holding that knowledge is based on the senses, and that
there is no certainty regarding insensibles. Yet Albert’s ontology is much closer
to Neoplatonism. For him the soul is an intellectual substance, not the form
of the body (as it was for Aristotle and for Aquinas). Universals are divine
Ideas situated in God; the human soul has knowledge of universals by divine
illumination, much along the lines of Augustine’s doctrine of the inner light.
Albert and several generations of followers remained more Neoplatonist than
Aristotelean. Here the Europeans repeated the stance of the Muslims before
Averroës; although Aristotle was available in his own words, he was inter-
preted conservatively, as close to an idealist religious metaphysics as possible.
An independent Aristoteleanism awaited the radical Averroists and Albert’s
own independent pupil, Thomas Aquinas.
Natural scientists and encyclopedists are concentrated in these two genera-
tions, 1200–1265.^5 The most famous are those who combined these secular
imports with theology. In England, Robert Grosseteste, ahead of other schol-
ars of his day in acquiring Greek, synthesized what he had learned from
geometry texts with the older Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination (on
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^469