Scot, at the Sicilian court of Frederick II, in the first third of the 13th century. By 1250,
most of the works of natural philosophy, logic, and metaphysics were translated and were
basic texts for the arts faculty in Paris. The anonymous Liber de causis, thought to be by
Aristotle, was also highly influential, although it is in fact Platonic. By ca. 1240, the
Rhetoric, Ethics (very influential), Politics, and Economics were also available, mostly
through translations by James of Venice. In the mid-13th century, Thomas Aquinas and
Albert the Great (the greatest Christian Aristotelian philosophers of the theology faculty;
the most important Aristotelians in arts were Boethius of Dacia and Siger de Brabant)
recognized the need for better translations, and Thomas persuaded William of Moerbecke
(1215–1286) to revise and retranslate much of the work. In fact, however, Aristotelian
ideas long were best known through Averroes and Avicenna.
The two key theological problems that Aristotle raised were the eternity of the world
(an affront to the Creation) and the notion of the unity of the intellect (which, if true,
would deny the resurrection of the individual person). As well, later readers of Averroes
thought that he taught a double-truth theory: that some things might be true for
philosophy but not for theology, and that in such cases philosophy should have priority.
The public or private teaching of Aristotle in theology was first prohibited at the
Council of Sens in 1210. Robert de Courçon’s statutes (1215) for the University of Paris
forbade the teaching of the Metaphysics and all books on physics and natural science; the
works on logic were allowed. This was restated in Gregory IX’s bull Parens scientiarum
(1231). The tide was irresistible, however, and in 1255 the statutes of the university
allowed all of Aristotle’s works to be taught. The first theologians to use Aristotle in
theological works were Alexander of Hales, Philip the Chancellor, and William of
Auvergne, all writing at the beginning of the 1230s, soon after the new Latin translations
appeared. All were orthodox theologians who chose from Aristotle whatever suited their
purposes, without engaging with the implications of his doctrines as a whole.
Thomas Aquinas, and to some extent Albert the Great before him, made the exemplary
synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian ideas, but some of Thomas’s propositions were
condemned as errors by Bishop Étienne Tempier at Paris, in 1270 and again in 1277. It
was not until Thomas’s canonization in 1323 that the final nail in the anti-Aristotelian
coffin was driven.
It can be argued that what Aristotle provided, and what was so much needed, was a
means of approach rather than particular ideas. His ideas of logical argument and of
categories, and his four causes (formal, material, final, efficient), were taken up
zealously. God could be defined as the First Cause, the Uncaused Causer. The joy of
Aristotle, and the danger, was his comprehensiveness: he had addressed almost every
branch of knowledge; this held deep appeal for the medieval sense of the unity and
knowability of the world.
The followers of strictly Aristotelian ideas were known as Latin Averroists, from their
use of Averroes’s Commentary.
Lesley J.Smith
[See also: ALBERT THE GREAT; ALEXANDER OF HALES; AQUINAS,
THOMAS; ARABIC PHILOSOPHY, INFLUENCE OF; ÉTIENNE TEMPIER; GILES
OF ROME; PARENS SCIENTIARUM; PHILIP THE CHANCELLOR; PHILOSOPHY;
SIGER DE BRABANT; WILLIAM OF AUVERGNE]
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