The School of Toledo and Gundissalinus

In the middle of the twelfth century, the geographical center of the translations from Arabic into Latin was established in Toledo which became home to a more professional enterprise. The city, conquered in 1085 by the Christian armies, offered a number of advantages: the availability of Arabic books, the predominance of the Arabic language, the presence of learned Latin clergy and of Jewish scholars who had escaped from the persecutions in Almohad al-Andalus. The ‘‘School of Toledo’’ produced translations of works of Aristotle and his Greek commentators from their Arabic versions as well as of later commentaries and more independent works originally written in Arabic. Its two protagonists were Dominicus Gundissalinus (or Gundisalvi) (c. 1110-1190), Archdeacon of Cuellar (in the Diocese of Segovia), and Gerard of Cremona (1114-1187). Both of them were assisted by native speakers of Arabic, among them Abraham b. Daud (Avendauth), a Jewish philosopher who had left Almohad Cordoba and who cooperated with Gundissalinus. While Gerard’s translations reflect the interest in Aristotle himself and the ‘‘second teacher’’, al-FarabI, which was predominant among Muslim philosophers of Spain, the texts translated in Gundissalinus’ circle, most notably parts of Avicenna’s Shift’, al-(Gazall’s Maqtsid al-falasifa, and Ibn Gabirol’s Fons vitae, mirror philosophical tendencies among the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula.

Al-Farabl’s Enumeration of the Sciences (Ursa’ al-ulum) had an important impact on Gundissalinus as well as on Gerard. While the former based his own De scientiis on it, the latter used it as a program for his translation activities. As is obvious from a list of his translations posthumously compiled by his students, Gerard followed al-Farabl’s catalog, which offers short descriptions of Aristotle’s works on logic and natural sciences, by translating the Posterior Analytics first and then proceeding with the Physics, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, and Meteora, books I-III (Burnett 2001). Of particular significance is the fact that the place of Aristotle’s Metaphysics among Gerard’s translations was occupied by the Liber de causis, an anonymous treatise that circulated in Arabic under the title Kitab fl khayr al-mahd (Book of the Pure Goodness). The Latin version became enormously popular and, since 1255, part of the curriculum at the Faculty of Arts in Paris (Fidora and Niederberger 2001:226). Based on Pro-clus’ Elements of Theology, it presented a Neoplatonic cosmology and metaphysics. It is here that the Arabic contribution to the transmission of Greek philosophy becomes visible, since the Neoplatonic interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy and the assumption that Aristotle and Plato agreed on key philosophical matters were - although not unprecedented in the Latin West - part of the Arabic legacy. Thomas Aquinas, however, identified the author correctly with Proclus. Aristotle’s Metaphysics only became prominent in the Latin West in the thirteenth century after the translation of Averroes’ Long Commentary which included the complete text in the form of lemmata, and later through William of Moerbeke’s translation. The term “metaphysics”, which had already appeared in manuscripts of Boethius’ works, was established as a term for a philosophical discipline in the Latin West only through Gundissalinus’ On the Division of Philosophy which was informed by various Latin and Arabic texts translated in Toledo. The impact of this text was even greater - Gundissalinus introduced here basic principles such as the division of disciplines according to their subject matter or that a science cannot demonstrate the existence of its own subject matter (Fidora 2003). While the sciences remain independent, they are also interrelated since they can be considered subordinate to one another. This principle had further implications for metaphysics. Gundissalinus endorsed Avicenna’s argument presented in the Metaphysics (Ilahiyyat) of his Shift’, that since metaphysics is concerned with proving the existence of God, its subject matter cannot be God, but rather being as being.

Averroes was to disagree with Avicenna, assign the proofof the existence of God to the area of physics, and include God among separable beings as the subject matter of metaphysics (Bertolacci 2006, 2007). Later Latin authors continued to disagree about the subject. The distinction between essence and existence is another important concept derived from Avicenna’s Metaphysics. His influence is obvious too in Gundissalinus’ De processione mundi, which is also informed by Ibn Gabirol, Hugh of Saint Victor, Abraham b. Daud, and Hermann of Carinthia. Following Avicenna, Gundissalinus describes the first cause as necessary being from which all created beings, which have only possible existence, emanate. Another Farabian legacy mediated by Gundissalinus is the division of logic into eight parts including the Rhetoric and Poetic, and the distinction of five kinds of syllogisms.

The translations made in Gundissalinus’ circle reflect his personal philosophical interests, in addition to the issues mentioned above, most notably, in the subject of soul and intellect. The Latin interest in these matters may have been inspired by Qusta b. Luqa’s On the Difference Between the Spirit and the Soul, translated by John of Seville for Raymond, the archbishop of Toledo (11251152) (Burnett 2005:376). While the text itself enjoyed great popularity, further texts were added from the Gundissalinus circle, among them the part on the soul from Avicenna’s Shifa’ and texts on the intellect by Alexander of Aphrodisias, al-Kindl, and al-Farabl. The great importance of Arabic works suggests that Aristotelian philosophy may have been found wanting in this respect. An influential concept included in the Shifa’ was the fourfold division of the states of the human intellect: the material, in habitu, in effectu, and the acquired intellect. While the first three stages are characterized by different degrees of potentiality, the acquired intellect is in actuality when it connects with the active intellect and considers the middle terms of the syllogism (Hasse 1999).

Related to this area was another original import from Arabic philosophy, namely, the notion of happiness involving divine knowledge as the conjunction of the individual human intellect with the active intellect as conveyed by Averroes and his son Abu Muljammad 'Abdallah in two texts translated in the thirteenth century (Burnett 1999a). The very concept of the active intellect as a separate entity is prominent among Arabic authors such as al-FarabI, Avicenna, and Averroes, and following Avicenna, this active intellect has been identified with God by authors such as Vincent of Beauvais and Roger Bacon (Gilson’s Augustinisme avicennisant), a theory rejected by others including Thomas Aquinas (Hasse 2000:200-221).

Among Avicenna’s contributions to Latin philosophy, the five ‘‘inner senses’’ (common sense, imagination, cogitative faculty, estimation, and memory) which are not present in Aristotle’s works and are closer to Galen also deserve mentioning. Another import was the definition of the subject matter of logic as presented in the Shifa’, that is, as dealing with second-order concepts (‘‘second intentions’’), which made logic an independent discipline and not merely a tool. Post-Avicennian developments in Arabic logic, however, were largely ignored by the Latin recipients (Street 2005:248). Likewise, philosophical concepts of prophecy which are prominent in al-Farabl’s works remained unknown in the Latin West.

The program of the ‘‘School of Toledo’’ was continued by Alfred of Shareshill (late twelfth century), Michael Scot (left Toledo after 1217, d. before 1236), and Hermann the German (mid-thirteenth century). They merged the two traditions of Gundissalinus and Gerard and tried to complete the program extracted from al-Farabl’s list of philosophical disciplines. Hermann is credited with the translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentaries on the Poetics (the only text relating to Aristotle’s Poetics available in the Middle Ages), on the Nicomachean Ethics, and on the Rhetoric as well as Aristotle’s Rhetoric proper, which Hermann supplemented with passages from the corresponding works by al-FarabI, Avicenna, and Averroes. These translations reached Paris within a short period and some of them became very influential.