The Schoolmen and the Averroists

9. Plato’s Soul of the World has been taken in this sense by some.

The Stoics succumbed to that universal soul which swallows all the rest.

Those who are of this opinion might be called ‘Monopsychites’, since according to them there is in reality only one soul that subsists.

Bernier observes that this is an opinion almost universally accepted amongst scholars in Persia and in the States of the Grand Mogul.

It has even gained a footing with the Cabalists and with the mystics.

A German of Swabian birth converted to Judaism some years ago He who taught under the name Moses Germanus, having adopted the dogmas of Spinoza, believed that Spinoza revived the ancient Cabala of the Hebrews.

A learned man who confuted this proselyte Jew appears to be of the same opinion.

Spinoza recognizes only substance in the world, whereof individual souls are but transient modifications.

Valentin Weigel, Pastor of Zschopau in Saxony, was a man of excessive wit. Some think that he was a visionary. He also thought like Spinoza.

Johann Angelus Silesius, author of pleasing devotional German verses as epigrams.

In general, the mystics’ doctrine of deification was liable to such a sinister interpretation.

Gerson already has written opposing Ruysbroek, a mystical writer, whose intention was evidently good and whose expressions are excusable.

But it would be better to write in a manner that has no need of excuses: although I confess that oft-times expressions which are extravagant, and as it were poetical, have greater force to move and to persuade than correct forms of statement.

10. The annihilation of all that belongs to us in our own right, carried to great lengths by the Quietists, might equally well be veiled irreligion in certain minds, as is related, for example, concerning the Quietism of Foë, originator of a great Chinese sect.

After having preached his religion for 40 years, when he felt death was approaching, he declared to his disciples that:

• he had hidden the truth from them under the veil of metaphors
• all reduced itself to Nothingness, which he said was the first source of all things.

I think that is worse than the opinion of the Averroists.

Both of these doctrines are indefensible and even extravagant.

Nevertheless, some moderns have made no difficulty about adopting this one and universal Soul that engulfs the rest.

It has met with only too much applause amongst the so-called freethinkers, and M. de Preissac, a soldier and man of wit, who dabbled in philosophy, at one time aired it publicly in his discourses.

The System of Pre-established Harmony is the one best qualified to cure this evil. For it shows that there are of necessity substances which are simple and without extension, scattered throughout all Nature; that these substances must subsist independently of every other except God; and that they are never wholly separated from organic body.

Those who believe that souls capable of feeling but incapable of reason are mortal, or who maintain that none but reasoning souls can have feeling, offer a handle to the Monopsychites. For it will ever be difficult to persuade men that beasts feel nothing; and once the admission has been made that that which is capable of feeling can die, it is difficult to found upon reason a proof of the immortality of our souls.

11. I made this short digression to defend natural religion.

The Averroists were persuaded that their dogma was proved conclusively in accordance with reason.

They declared that man’s soul is mortal, while they protested their acquiescence in Christian theology, which declares the soul’s immortality.

But this distinction was held suspect, and this divorce between faith and reason was vehemently rejected by the prelates and the doctors of that time, and condemned in the last Lateran Council under Leo X.

On that occasion also, scholars were urged to work for the removal of the difficulties that appeared to set theology and philosophy at variance. The doctrine of their incompatibility continued to hold its ground incognito.

Pomponazzi was suspected of it, although he declared himself otherwise; and that very sect of the Averroists survived as a school.

It is thought that Caesar Cremoninus, a philosopher famous in his time, was one of its mainstays. Andreas Cisalpinus, a physician (and an author of merit who came nearest after Michael Servetus to the discovery of the circulation of the blood), was accused by Nicolas Taurel (in a book entitled Alpes Caesae) of belonging to these anti-religious Peripatetics.

Traces of this doctrine are found also in the Circulus Pisanus Claudii Berigardi, an author of French nationality who migrated to Italy and taught philosophy at Pisa: but especially the writings and the letters of Gabriel Naudé, as well as the Naudaeana, show that Averroism still lived on when this learned physician was in Italy.

Corpuscular philosophy, introduced shortly after, appears to have extinguished this excessively Peripatetic sect, or perhaps to have been intermixed with its teaching.

There might have been Atomists who would be inclined to teach dogmas like those of the Averroists, if circumstances so permitted.

But this abuse cannot harm such good as there is in Corpuscular philosophy, which can very well be combined with all that is sound in Plato and in Aristotle, and bring them both into harmony with true theology.