of 219 theses. The Dominican Kilwardby, in his capacity as archbishop of
Canterbury, issued much the same condemnation 11 days later, making the
prohibition effective for Oxford as well. The Franciscan Peckham carried on
the battle in the spirit of his master Bonaventure. The so-called “Averroism”
of the 1260s and 1270s may well have been rather mild; nothing very radical
made its way into the surviving texts. The condemnation made it into a symbol
of opposition to conservative dogmatism, an emblem for the self-styled pro-
gressive faction. This faction continued to have an underground existence at
Paris, and even more openly at other universities, especially in Italy over the
next 200 years. Opposition outside the university became even more pointed.
Intellectual life was becoming more cosmopolitan. Contact with the Muslim
world was fading, but the rationalistic wing of the Jewish network had moved
north, driven out of Spain in the atmosphere of increasing intolerance after the
success of the reconquest in the early 1200s. Maimonidist Aristoteleans and
Averroists found their niche primarily as translators in the Latin world. Jewish
cosmopolitans (15, 16, 23, and 26 in Figure 9.5) active in southern France and
in Italy may well have been the leaders in spreading a purer Averroism in the
generations after the condemnation of Siger of Brabant.
As a philosophical doctrine within Christendom, Averroism was not par-
ticularly creative. It advocated a finished system of truth, already perfected in
Aristotle (or, more precisely, in Averroës’s interpretation of him). The Aver-
roists became the structural equivalent of the Epicureans in the Greek net-
works, anchored in an extreme, and thus immune to new idea combinations
emerging in the conflicts which made up the creativity of the network center.
The significance of the struggles at Paris lay not so much in the doctrine
of the “Averroists,” although they served as the catalyst, as in the rearrange-
ment brought about in other intellectual factions. At first the counterattacks
of the conservatives were too weak to do more than goad the conflict. The
condemnation in 1270 of 15 propositions was evaded. The conservatives were
infuriated, and charged the radicals with using transparent dodges, declaring
that the Averroist themes were false opinions set forth for purposes of debate
or by the doctrine of a double truth—that what is true in philosophy is not
necessarily true in theology. The charges may well have been exaggerated, but
the resistance was real.
By the time of the more sweeping condemnation of 1277, the circles of
conflict had widened on all sides. Kilwardby and Peckham attacked Aquinas
along with Siger, despite the fact that Aquinas himself had led the critique of
the doctrine of double truth. For Kilwardby, the conflict was part of an internal
struggle within the Dominicans; for the Franciscan Peckham, it was an oppor-
tunity to attack the rival Dominican order itself. Some of Aquinas’s doctrines
were themselves included in the 1277 condemnation, but within a few years
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^477