Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · Philosophy
The two doctrines that made Averroes notorious - that the world is eternal, and that God does not know particulars the way we do. This lesson separates what Averroes actually argued (a subtle, careful position) from the caricature for which he was condemned as an enemy of faith.
When al-Ghazali branded the philosophers’ teaching as unbelief, he singled out three doctrines as beyond the pale: that the world is eternal (uncreated in time), that God knows only universals and not particular things, and that there is no bodily resurrection. These were the charges Averroes had to answer, and two of them - the eternity of the world and the nature of God’s knowledge - drove him to some of his most careful and most misunderstood thinking. Centuries later, when his works reached Christian Europe in Latin, these same theses would be condemned again at Paris in 1277, and Averroes’s name would become a byword for the philosopher who follows reason off the cliff of faith. The reality is more interesting than the reputation: Averroes did not simply assert these doctrines against religion. He tried to show that, rightly understood, the philosopher’s positions and the believer’s need not collide.
Averroes’s way through the eternity dispute is to notice that everyone already agrees about the two extreme cases and only quarrels about the middle. At one extreme is an ordinary thing - a plant, a house - brought into being out of some pre-existing matter, by a cause, and after not existing: everyone calls this ‘originated’ or ‘created in time.’ At the other extreme is God: made from nothing, by nothing, preceded by nothing - everyone calls this ‘eternal.’ The world as a whole, Averroes argues, falls into neither pure category. Unlike a plant, it was not made out of some earlier stuff at a moment after which it began; but unlike God, it is caused and dependent. It is a third kind of being - eternally and continuously produced - and because it shares features with both extremes, the philosophers, stressing its eternity, call it eternal, while the theologians, stressing its dependence, call it created. Name the middle thing carefully, Averroes says, and much of the heat drains out of the dispute.
The key to Averroes’s view of divine knowledge is the direction of dependence. When we know a thing, the thing comes first and our knowledge conforms to it; the object causes the knowledge. But God is the cause of all things, so His knowledge cannot be a copy taken from objects that exist independently of Him - rather, things exist because God knows and wills them. Divine knowing is productive, not receptive. From this single point much follows. God’s knowledge does not change as the world changes, because it is not tracking events from outside but grounding them from their source. It is not ‘universal’ in the human sense (an abstraction from many cases) nor ‘particular’ (a sense-image of one case), because it is not abstracted or sensed at all. Averroes is content to leave the positive nature of this knowing in shadow: we can say what it is not, and that it is supremely perfect, but its inner character exceeds the human intellect. Reverence, here, takes the form of admitting a limit.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Averroes held the world to be eternal yet caused by God, argued the quarrel with the theologians over creation was largely about naming, and said God’s knowledge is neither universal nor particular but a divine mode that causes things instead of being caused by them - and that he rejected Avicenna’s f…
Leads to Ibn Sina.
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