Avicenna and Western Thought in the Thirteenth Century

Extract

There was something indefinite about the effect of Avicenna on the West in the thirteenth century. Constant and pervasive as his influence was—from its beginnings in Spain in the twelfth century, through the confusion of its first contacts with the Cathedral Schools and the nascent University of Paris, down to Albert and Aquinas and Scotus—yet it nowhere crystallised into a definite set of doctrines accepted by a clearly marked group or school, as did, later in the century, the influence of Averroes. Some years ago Père De Vaux brought into circulation the term ‘Latin Avicennism’, parallel to the ‘Latin Averroism’ which Mandonnet had disclosed in his great work on Siger of Brabant. But Père De Vaux’s term, unlike Mandonnet’s, has not gained general acceptance; there is too much difference between the confused eclecticism at the turn of the century, studied by De Vaux, and the clear-cut, far more unified position of the Averroists of the 1270’s. More acceptable perhaps as a name for that earlier phase is Gilson’s ‘augustinisme avicennisant’, though this denoted originally only one aspect of it—the attempt to adapt an Avicennian theory of the ‘agent intellect’ to the Augustinian tradition of the human mind’s dependence upon illumination from God. And in any case one must not overstress the Augustinian element in the currents of thought that were running at the end of the twelfth century, and that largely derived from other sources—Boethius, for example, and Erigena.