ascendancy? to what extent were the Schoolmen acquainted with the works of the Arabian philosophers? The first at least of these questions has found a satisfactory solution. During all the earlier period, from Anselm and Abélard to the time of Albert the Great, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, the name of Aristotle was great and authoritative in the West, but it was only as the teacher of logic, as the master of Dialectics. Even this logic, which may be traced in the darkest times, was chiefly known in a secondary form, through Augustine, Boethius, and the Isagoge of Porphyry; at the utmost, the Treatises which form the Organon, and not the whole of these, were known in the Church. It was as dangerously proficient in the Aristotelian logic, as daring to submit theology to the rules of Dialectics, that Abelard excited the jealous apprehensions of St. Bernard. Throughout the intermediate period, to Gilbert de la Porée, to the St. Victors, to John of Salisbury, to Alain de Lille, to Adelard of Bath, Aristotle was the logician and no more. Of his

• This question has been, if I may so say, judicially determined by M. Jourdain, Recherches Critiques sur l'Age et l'Origine des Traductions Latines d'Aristote, new edition, revised by his son, Paris, 1843. These are the general conclusions of M. Jourdain: I. That the only works of Aristotle known in the West until the twelfth century were the Treatises on Logic, which compose the Organon. (The Analytics, Topics, and Sophistic Refutations are more rarely cited.) II. That from the date of the following century, the other parts of his philosophy were translated into Latin. III. That of those Translations some were from a Greek, some from an

q

Morals, his Metaphysics, his Physics, his Natural History, there is no knowledge whatever. His fame as a great, universal philosopher hardly lived, or lived only in obscure and doubtful tradition.

On a sudden, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, there is a cry of terror from the Church, in the centre of the most profound theological learning of the Church, the University of Paris, and the cry is the irrefragable witness to the influence of what was vaguely denounced as the philosophy of Aristotle. It is not now presumptuous Dialectics, which would submit theological truth to logical system, but philosophical theories, directly opposed to the doctrines of the Church; the clamour is loud against certain fatal bookss but newly brought into the schools. Simon of Tournay," accused of utter infidelity, may have employed the perilous weapons of Dialectics to perplex his hearers and confute his adversaries; but he was also arraigned as having been led into his presumptuous tenets by the study of the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle. The heresies of Amaury de Bene, and of David of Dinant, were traced by the theologians of Paris to the same fertile source

These books are said by the continuator of Rigord, William the Breton, to have contained the Metaphysics of Aristotle ; and in two other writers of the period, in Casar of Heisterbach, and Hugh the Continuator of the Chronicle of Auxerre, to have been the Physics. The Decree for burning the books (see below) determines the point.

Crevier, t. i. p. 338, or rather Du Boulay, asserted that these books had been brought from Constantinople about 1167, and translated into Latin. M. Jourdain, Note, p. 46, has shown

the inaccuracy of this statement.

Simon of Tournay delivered with wonderful applause a Lecture, in which he explained or proved all the great Mysteries of religion by the Aristotelic process. "Stay," he closed his Lecture; "to-morrow I will utterly confute all that I have proved to-day by stronger arguments." He was struck on that morrow with apoplexy, and lost his speech.-Crevier, i. p. 309. It should seem that Simon de Tournay was rather an expert dialectician than an inquiring philosopher.

X

of evil. An exhumation of the remains of Amaury de Bene, who, though suspected, had been buried in consecrated ground, was followed by a condemnation of his followers, the teachers of these dreaded opinions. Some were degraded and made over to the secular arm (to the State), some to perpetual imprisonment. There was a solemn prohibition against the reading and copying of these books; all the books which could be seized were burned. Six years after, Robert de Courçon, the Papal Legate, interdicted the reading of the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle in the schools of Paris. A milder decree of Gregory IX. ordered that they should not be used till they had been corrected by the theologians of the Church; yet two years before this Gregory had fulminated a violent Bull against the presumption of those who taught the Christian doctrine rather according to the rules of Aristotle than the traditions of the Fathers," against the profane usage of mingling up philosophy with Divine revelation. But the secret of all this terror and perplexity of the Church was not that the pure and more rational philosophy of Aristotle was revealed in the schools; the evil and the danger more clearly denounced were in the Arabian Comment, which, inseparable from

- All kinds of incongruous charges | penitus sæculari curiæ relinquendi ;" were heaped on the memory of Amaury another list, "perpetuo carceri mancide Bene: he was an Albigensian, pandi." The Books of David de Dinant believed in the Everlasting Gospel. are to be burned, " nec libri Aristotelis de Naturali Philosophia, nec Commenta legantur Parisiis publice vel secreto." z "Non legantur libri Aristotelis de Metaphysicâ et Naturali Philosophiâ, nec summa de eisdem, aut de doctrinâ Mag. David de Dinant, aut Almerici heretici, aut Mauritii Hispan."-Stat. Univ. Par.

66

See the Decree of the Archbishop of Sens and the Council, unknown to Launoi and earlier authors, Martene, Nov. Thes. Anec. iv. 166. Corpus Magistri Amaurici extrahatur a cemeterio et projiciatur in terram non benedictam et idem excommunicetur per omnes ecclesias totius provinciæ." A list of names follows, "isti degradentur,

VOL. IX.

the Arabo-Latin translation, had formed a system fruitful of abuse and error.a

The heresy of Amaury de Bene, and that of David de Dinant, was Pantheism.b The Creator and the Creation were but one; all flowed from God, all was to be reabsorbed in God-a doctrine not less irreconcileable with genuine Aristotelism than with the doctrine of the Church. But the greater Schoolmen of the next period aspired, with what success it may be doubted, to the nobler triumph of subjugating Aristotelism to the science of Theology, not the logical science only, but the whole range of the Stagirite's philosophy.d It was to be an obsequious and humble, though honoured ally, not a daring rival; they would set free, yet at the same time bind its stubborn spirit in their firm grasp, to more than amity, to perfect harmony.

Albert the Great, in his unbounded range of knowledge, comprehends the whole metaphysical, moral, physical, as well as logical system of Aristotle. He had read all, or, with but few unimportant exceptions, his whole works. He had read them in Latin, some translated directly from the Greek, some from the Arabic; some few had been translated from the Arabic into Hebrew, and from the Hebrew into the Latin. Those which came through the Arabic retain distinct

a "On voit dans ces trois condamnations une diminution successive de sévérité. La première est la plus rigoureuse, les autres s'en vont s'adoucissant." Crevier blames this mildness, p. 312.

b 66 Roger Bacon nous apprend que l'on s'opposa long temps à Paris à la philosophie naturelle et à la metaphysique d'Aristote exposées par Aricenne et Averroes; ceux qui s'en ser

vaient furent excommunies."-P. 194. See the following quotation from Roger Bacon, and the whole passage.

• See the sources of their doctrines, Jourdain, p. 196.

a See in Jourdain the works cited by William Bishop of Paris, who died 1248.-P. 31.

e Works quoted by Albert the Great also, p. 32.

and undeniable marks of their transmission — Arabic words, especially words untranslated, Arabic idioms, and undeniable vestiges of the Arabic vowel system. These versions from the Arabic came: I. From Spain and from Spanish scholars in the South of France, at Marseilles, Montpellier, Toulouse. II. From Sicily, where Frederic II. had fostered Arabic learning, and had encouraged translations from that tongue. Under his auspices the famous Michael Scott had translated, at least, the books of Natural History. Besides these some had come through the Hebrew; the great age of Jewish philosophy, that of Aben-Esra, Maimonides, and Kimchi, had been contemporaneous with the later Spanish school of Arabic philosophy. There had been an intercommunion or rivalry in the cultivation of the whole range of philosophy. The translations from the Greek were as yet few, imperfect, inaccurate. The greater Thomas Aquinas has the merit of having encouraged and obtained a complete translation of the works of Aristotle directly from the Greek. The culti

f "Jamais une version dérivée d'un h Among the earliest Translations texte Arabe ne presenta, fidèlement from the Greek was the Nicomachean orthographie, un mot qui aura passé Ethics, by no less a man than Robert par l'intermédiare de l'Arabe, langue Grostête, Bishop of Lincoln. M. où la prononciation n'est réglée que Jourdain satisfactorily proves this repar les points diacritiques qui sont markable fact.-P. 59, et seqq. rarement bien places. Souvent aussi les traducteurs ne connaissant pas la valeur d'un terme l'ont laissé en Arabe." -Jourdain, p. 19. See the whole passage, and also p. 37.

On the translation by M. Scott, from the Arabic, not through the Hebrew, Jourdain, p. 124, et seqq., and Herman Alemannus, with whom the older Herman Contractus (the Lame) has been confounded.-Jourdain, p. 93.

i "Scripsit etiam super philosophiam naturalem et moralem et super metaphysicam, quorum librorum procuravit ut fieret nova translatio quæ sententiæ Aristotelis contineret clarius veritatem." Tocco. Vit. C. Th. Aquin. Act. SS. March. "On sait que ce fut par les conseils et les soins de S. Thomas d'Aquin que fut faite une traduction Latine d'Aristote."-Tenneman, Manuel, French Translation.