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His works on Medicine were known to and appreciated by the Arabs, who translated them and brought them to Spain and Sicily when they conquered those countries. Averroes commented on them and added notes of his own which contributed not a little to the development of the healing art.
Averroes in this his blasphemous doctrine denies creation, providence, revelation, the Trinity, the efficacy of prayers, of alms, and of litanies; he disbelieves in the resurrection and immortality; he places the summum bonum in mere pleasure. So, too, among the Jews who were then the leading intellects of the world, Averroism had been largely propagated.
Europeans generally regarded Averroes as the author of these heresies, and the orthodox branded him accordingly, but he was nothing more than their collector and commentator.
Messer Blondel thought the carelessness overdone, and, his interest aroused, he followed the manuscript, he scarcely knew why, with his eyes. "I think I have heard the name of Averroes?" he said. "Was he not a physician?" "He was many things," Basterga answered negligently. "As a physician he was, I believe, rather visionary than practical.
After his death Averroes gained in prestige and influence until he succeeded in putting into the shade his Arabian predecessors and was regarded by Jew and Christian alike as the Commentator of Aristotle par excellence. His works were rapidly translated into Hebrew and Latin, and the Jewish writers learned their Aristotle from Averroes.
The fifth Lateran Council proclaimed anew the tenet of the imperishability of the spirit of man. The Padua University adopted a system of materialism taught in the works of Alexander, of Aphrodisias. A form of pantheism known in the philosophy of Averroes soon became a center of skepticism. In the latter part of the seventeenth century modern unbelievers began their assaults.
When Aristotle began to be studied in his larger treatises and the details of the psychology and the metaphysics became known especially through Averroes, we find among the Jews also an interest in the finer points of the problem of knowledge. He realizes the difficulty involved in the problem. Knowledge must be of the real and the permanent.
The Mutakallimun were indebted to the Stoics, the Pure Brethren to the Neo-Platonists; and it was only gradually that Aristotle became the sole master not merely in logic, which he always had been, but also in physics, metaphysics and psychology. Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes represent so many steps in the Aristotelization of Arabic philosophy.
But his family had been Christian for a hundred years. Before I left forecastle for poop I had discovered that he was learned. Why he had turned sailor I did not then know, but afterwards found that it was for disappointed love. He knew Arabic and Hebrew, Aristotle and Averroes, and he had a dry curiosity and zest for life that made for him the wonder of this voyage far outweigh the danger.
The "sages of the Gentiles," Hillel tells us, regard Averroes's notion as heretical, and leading besides to the absurd conclusion that the same soul is both rewarded and punished; a view which upsets all religion. Averroes employs a number of arguments to prove his point, among them being the following.
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