For Lust of Knowing (6 page)

The early translators were keen to translate Aristotle, for he enjoyed enormous prestige, as he was known to have been Alexander the Great's tutor. However, they were poorly equipped to judge what had actually been written by Aristotle and what had not. A great deal of what they translated was not by Aristotle but was drafted by other, crazier hands. Among the many pseudepigrapha that were claimed to be by Aristotle were a Neoplatonist
Theology,
an alchemical treatise,
On the Twelve Waters of the Secret River
, an astrological
Book on the Properties of the Elements and of the Planets
, and above all the
Secreta Secretorum
(‘Secret of Secrets'), which, before being translated into Latin, had circulated widely in the Arabworld under the title
Sirr al-Asrar
. In Europe too it became a popular and influential work and more than two hundred manuscripts of the Latin version have survived. The
Secreta Secretorum
, which originally was put together in Syriac in the eighth century, is an encyclopedic treatise that deals with politics, ethics and medicine, but it also put forward astrological notions, and a belief in the occult virtues of plants and stones pervades
its treatment of many subjects. The book is full of quaint stories, including that of the legend of the poison maiden. The poison maiden was a carefully dosed-up young woman who was sent to Alexander by a hostile potentate and her toxic embrace would certainly have killed Alexander had not the cunning plan been detected by the watchful Aristotle.
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There were also problems with regard to Aristotle's commentator, Avicenna, and the reverence with which he was treated. Avicenna wrote about two hundred books and many of them dealt with occult matters. Avicenna argued in
Liber de anima
(‘The Book of the Spirit') that the imagination could work on a body at a distance, and hence real powers could be ascribed to the evil eye.
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This theme was to be taken up by Christian occultists. Given the quantity of occult material being translated and studied in Toledo, it is not surprising that the city acquired a reputation for magic and the black arts. According to Charles Homer Haskins, ‘Spain became the scene of visions and prophecies, of mystifications like Virgil of Cordova, of legends like the university of demonology at Toledo.'
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Avicenna was as famous as a medical authority as he was as a philosopher and student of the unseen. His
al-Qanun fi al-Tibb
(‘The Canon of Medicine'), which was translated by Gerald of Cremona in the twelfth century, became a standard textbook on medicine in medieval Europe. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, there were sixteen editions in that century alone. Much of what Avicenna recycled in the
Qanun
derived from the Greek physicians Hippocrates (
c.
460–
c.
370 BC) and Galen (AD 129–99). Nothing written by Hippocrates survives, but his medical doctrines were known through the summaries provided by Galen. The latter was a Greek surgeon who had operated on gladiators before becoming Marcus Aurelius's physician. Galen, in his various treatises, compiled the observations and theories of his predecessors and his medical views were shaped as much by philosophy as they were by clinical observation. Galenic medicine was based on the theory of the four
humours (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) and diseases caused by an imbalance between those humours. The health of the body depended upon maintaining the correct balance between hotness, coldness, dryness and wetness. Consequently medicines were divided into four basic types: warmers, coolers, purges and sudorifics (substances that cause the body to sweat). Galen viewed the heart as a furnace (rather than a pump, which would be a more accurate analogy). Galen's version of how the body worked was fundamentally mistaken and Galenic medicine did not actually help anyone to get better.
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It was a systematic way of misunderstanding the world and, in general, a sick person was probably better off going to a wise woman than consulting a learned physician who had immersed himself in Galen.

Avicenna's
Qanun
was an unoriginal compilation which drew heavily upon Galenic medical misapprehensions. ‘No personal experiences of the author and no new ideas are found in it,' according to Manfred Ullman. Avicenna does not seem to have carried out any dissections and, in fact, Islamic law bans the dissection of human bodies. The
Qanun
's chief value lay in the way it laid out older materials in a systematic fashion. But much of the material so presented was both bizarre and useless. For example, Avicenna, following his predecessors, declared that madness was caused by an imbalance in the biles. In particular, a predominance of black bile was the cause of melancholia (though Avicenna accepted that jinn (demons) could also cause melancholia). Excessive hairiness was one of the symptoms of this sad affliction. Lycanthropia, or werewolfism, was another possible version of melancholia. It is unlikely that Avicenna ever had to treat a werewolf; rather he was unthinkingly transmitting a piece of ancient Greek folklore that had found its way into the medical textbooks. According to Galen and to Avicenna following him, bleeding was a cure for all sorts of diseases (and one wonders if, in an age before sterilization became the norm, more people did not die of the cure than the complaint). Cauterization was another painful but trusted standby in this sort of medicine. The activities of the jinn apart, Avicenna denied that there were magical causes and cures and he also wrote a refutation of astrology. However, though he sought to adopt rationalist positions, his great medical work was really an
antiquarian and bookish reworking of Greek learning that had little practical relevance to the real health problems of the medieval Near East – or those of Europe.
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A loosely analogous problem arose regarding the transmission of Greek astronomical learning via the Arabs to the West. It was essentially the Ptolemaic system that was being transmitted, studied and elaborated upon and the problem with this picture of the universe was that it was predicated upon the assumption that the earth was at the centre of the universe, so that the sun and the rest of the planets circled around it, with the sphere of the fixed stars serving as the universe's outer shell. This system was set out in the immensely influential
Almagest
of Claudius Ptolemy (
c.
AD 100–178). The Ptolemaic system had the advantage of providing a framework for observations and calculations, even if the system was over-elaborate and based on a false premise. The
Almagest
(which was translated from Arabic by the tireless Gerald of Cremona) was an extremely complex work. Although it did allow one to predict the position of stars from year to year, in fact most medieval students of astronomy (including Dante) preferred to use abridged or simplified versions of Ptolemy's work written by other hands. Not until the sixteenth century did figures like Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus succeed in thinking their way out of the increasingly unwieldy Ptolemaic model. In the Middle Ages Ptolemy's astronomy tended to be bundled in with his astrology.
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Like the writings of Galen and Avicenna, the Ptolemaic treatises gave aspiring scholars something to exercise their minds on, but, at the end of all the mental exercising, not so very much was likely to have been achieved. Translations of scientific works from Arabic, which had begun in the twelfth century, petered out in the early thirteenth century. After the fourteenth century, there were no more such translations. Greek learning, mediated by Arab scholarship, had provided stimulus and misinformation in equal measure.

To return to philosophy, the impact of Averroes on Western scholastic philosophy was in some respects even greater than that of Avicenna. Averroes (the name is a Latinate distortion of the actual Arabname Ibn Rushd) was born in 1126 in Cordova and died in 1198 in Marrakesh. Like Avicenna, Averroes, who was known as the ‘Commentator', was chiefly valued in the West for his expositions of Aristotle's philosophy. What was distinctive in his thinking was that he held (or at least was thought to hold) that there was no necessary harmony between faith and reason. He taught that the existence of God could be proved by reason and that the world had always existed and he rejected the immortality of the personal soul. Averroes was translated into Latin in the early thirteenth century by Michael Scot and, from the 1230 s onwards, Averroism was an important and somewhat contentious issue first in Paris and then in Oxford. Averroist Christian philosophers, like Siger of Brabant, believed that Averroes had demonstrated the unity of the intellect shared by all humanity. Also Siger and his partisans argued that, though the Averroist interpretation of the world might not be correct, it was the correct reading of Aristotle. Although Aquinas fiercely opposed Siger's interpretation of Averroes, Dante decided retrospectively to smooth over their differences and placed them side by side in the Heaven of the Sun in
Paradiso
, where Aquinas is made to praise Siger's logic. Averroes's writings attracted careless readers and partisans on both sides and, for a while, anybody suspected of any kind of freethinking was likely to be labelled an Averroist. Curiously, despite the denunciations and attempts to ban the teaching of Averroism in the universities, his views were actually more widely known and discussed in Christian Europe than they were in the Islamic world.
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Despite Averroism's association with suspect and vaguely atheistic ideas, nevertheless the Arabphilosopher was studied with great attention and respect by perfectly orthodox figures like St Thomas Aquinas and Dante. In his massive theological treatise,
Summa contra Gentiles
, Aquinas proposed to use reason rather than scripture to convert the
unbelieving and Averroes was cited 50 3 times in the course of the
Summa
's arguments. (Impressive although this was, it is doubtful whether a single infidel has ever been converted by wading through Aquinas's Latin.) In the
Summa
,
chapter 6
of book 5 dealt with Islam. Predictably Aquinas presented Muhammad as the founder of a heresy who cunningly made use of both truth and falsity. Muhammad delivered his message first to ‘men not learned in divine method… but bestial people living in deserts'.
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Although Averroism was for a while the rage among high-flying scholastics, from the mid-fourteenth century onwards it was on the wane and, more generally, there was a steep decline in Arabic studies. In the fifteenth century, as we shall see, several leading humanist thinkers went out of their way to express doubts about the reliability or value of studying Greek philosophy via what were usually inelegant and inaccurate Arabic translations. A great deal of Aristotle and his Arab commentators had been badly translated into barbarous Latin of a sort that made the fastidious Latin stylists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries wince. After Averroes had been rendered into Latin, there were no important translations from Arabic until the seventeenth century.

Most of the translation work was done in Spain and, to a lesser extent, in Sicily. It might have been thought that the establishment of the Crusader principalities in the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century might have served as a channel of cultural influence that would have allowed Franks or Westerners to become more familiar with Arabic and Islamic high culture. However, scholars tended not to go on Crusades or settle in the East and a Paris-trained intellectual, like William Archbishop of Tyre, was a rarity. The twelfth-century scientific translator Adelard of Bath also seems to have visited Crusader Syria, though there is no evidence about what he did there. It was also the case that, unless the Franks had chosen to interest themselves in the study of the Qur'an and the orally transmitted traditions concerning the Prophet Muhammad and his contemporaries, there
was probably not so very much they could have learned from their Muslim subjects and neighbours in the twelfth century. The places that the Crusaders had conquered in Syria and Palestine were small towns that traded in soap, leather and glass. These places were intellectual backwaters and a long way from the great Islamic cultural centres of Baghdad or Isfahan. The last great age of cultural efflorescence in Syria had taken place under the Hamdanid princes in Aleppo in the tenth century. The famous poets al-Mutanabbi and Abu Tammam, the philosopher al-Farabi, the preacher Ibn Nubata and many others had flourished under the benign patronage of this great Arab dynasty. By the 1090 s, Syria and Palestine boasted no philosophers, scientists, poets or historians of any real eminence or originality. Doubtless the cultural decline was exacerbated by the coming of the Crusaders, as the latter killed scholars and either destroyed libraries or redistributed their contents. (We know that they ransomed the Arabic books looted in Jerusalem to the Fatimid garrison in Ascalon.)

Proximity to the Muslims in Palestine and Syria did not at first encourage any understanding of Islam. In his early twelfth-century chronicle of the First Crusade,
Gesta Dei per Francos
, Guibert of Nogent, when he came to write about the career of Muhammad, observed that ‘it is safe to speak evil of one whose malignity exceeds whatever ill can be spoken'. In other words, when faced with something so bad, it was not necessary to check one's facts and Guibert seems to have relied on misinformation brought back by pilgrims from the Holy Land. However, Guibert was at pains to correct one popular misconception, as he pointed out that it was not true that Muslims regarded Muhammad as God.
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In the thirteenth century, prominent thinkers such as Roger Bacon and Ramon Lull came to advocate preaching and conversion as the way for Christianity to triumph over Islam. Also, the preaching orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans sent out preachers to the Middle East and other infidel regions. It was inevitable that those preachers had to acquire some knowledge of Islam and Arabs in order to inform their preaching. Though James of Vitry (
c.
1160–1240) was not a friar, he was primarily a preacher and he had travelled up and down the coast of the Crusader principalities, preaching especially to the Muslims before he was appointed Bishop of Acre in 1219. He claimed
to have converted a few and he suggested that more would have come over but for the contrast Muslims saw between the earthly delights offered by their religion and the stringent demands made by Christian morality. Presumably James of Vitry preached to the Muslims in Arabic, though this is not clear. Although he had some knowledge of Muslim beliefs, this was not due to systematic study. Rather he relied on scraps of oral information, not all of which were accurate. For example, he claimed that Muslims secretly worshipped an idol of Muhammad that was kept inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
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