The Long Argument over Aristotle in Three Traditions

Aristotle reached the medieval world by translation rather than by continuity. Syriac Christian scholars carried the logical works into Arabic during the Abbasid translation movement, and Muslim philosophers took up the whole corpus: al-Farabi, then Ibn Sina, then Ibn Rushd, whose commentaries were so thorough that Latin readers called him simply the Commentator. Maimonides worked out of the same Arabic tradition to argue in the Guide of the Perplexed that scripture must be read figuratively wherever it contradicts a demonstrated conclusion, while insisting that the eternity of the world had not in fact been demonstrated. Latin Europe received the natural and metaphysical works late, and reacted first by banning them from the Paris arts faculty.

Three points would not reconcile. If the world is eternal it was not created. If the first mover knows only itself, providence has nothing to work with. And if the intellect that does the thinking is one and shared, no individual soul survives death. Each tradition answered differently and the answers hardened into positions: the Paris condemnations of 1277 list propositions of exactly this kind, and Thomas Aquinas built his synthesis partly by conceding that creation in time is known from revelation and not from reason. The atlas holds Aristotle among religious figures for that reason. He founded nothing and taught no religion, and three of them spent centuries arguing with him.