Averroes (1126-1198)

Key dates

Cordoba, born into a dynasty of judges

Averroes was born in Cordoba, the intellectual capital of Almoravid al-Andalus, on 14 April 1126 according to the dating most generally accepted by modern biographers — the early Arabic sources do not always fix the exact day with certainty, and this date must be received with the caution that any medieval chronology demands^[18]. His family belonged to the judicial elite of the city: his grandfather, Abu al-Walid Muhammad, was grand qadi of Cordoba and imam of the great mosque under the Almoravids, while his father, Abu al-Qasim Ahmad, inherited the same office until the fall of the Almoravid regime in 1146^[19]. This pre-eminence explains the nickname posterity would give the philosopher — al-Ḥafīd, "the grandson" — to distinguish him from his namesake ancestor, al-Jadd, "the grandfather", himself a renowned jurist^[20].

His education followed the classic path of an Andalusi scholar's son: hadith, linguistics, Malikite jurisprudence — according to biographical tradition, he memorised Imam Malik's Muwatta' —, then Ash'arite scholastic theology, which he would later criticise vigorously^[21]. His medical training, for its part, was undertaken with Abu Ja'far ibn Harun of Trujillo^[22]. Very early on he frequented the philosophical circles of Seville, where Ibn Tufayl, Ibn Zuhr (the great physician Avenzoar) and the future caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf moved together^[23] — three figures who, each in his own way, would decisively shape his career.

The Almohad conquest and the family's fall from favour (1146-1153)

In 1146, the Almohads, a rigorist Berber dynasty, overthrew Almoravid rule in Cordoba. Averroes's elderly father lost his office as qadi^[24]. The young man, then twenty years old, thus lived through the same political and religious rupture that his contemporary Moses Maimonides would experience barely a generation later — likewise born in Cordoba, in 1138, and driven into exile by that same Almohad dynasty. The Ignispedia article devoted to Maimonides (1138-1204) traces this parallel journey, marked by the same Almohad uprooting, but followed by an opposite trajectory: where Maimonides fled Spain never to return, Averroes chose to come to terms with the new regime and to build an exceptional career within it.

Around 1153, Averroes travelled to Marrakesh, the new Almohad capital, to carry out astronomical observations and take part in the college-building projects commissioned by the authorities^[25]. It was most likely on this occasion that he met Ibn Tufayl, physician, philosopher and future author of the famous philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan, who would become his introducer to the caliph^[26].

1169: the decisive meeting with the caliph and the eternity of the heavens

In 1169, Ibn Tufayl presented Averroes to the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf (r. 1163-1184), a man of letters and a lover of philosophy. The account of this first audience, reported by the Almohad historian Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi in his Kitab al-Mu'jib, has become one of the most famous scenes in the history of Islamic philosophy. Averroes himself, years later, confided the memory of it to a disciple:

"The first question the Commander of the Faithful put to me, after asking my name, my father's name and my genealogy, was: 'What is the opinion of the philosophers concerning the heavens: are they eternal or created?' I was so confused and so terrified that I began making excuses, going so far as to deny ever having occupied myself with philosophy." — Averroes, as reported by Abd al-Wahid al-Marrakushi, Kitāb al-Muʿjib fī Talkhīṣ Akhbār al-Maghrib, ed. Reinhart Dozy, 2nd ed., Leiden, 1881, pp. 174-175^[27]

The caliph, sensing the young scholar's embarrassment, then himself set out before Ibn Tufayl the positions of Plato, Aristotle and the Muslim philosophers on the question — displaying an erudition that put Averroes at ease. The latter ended by presenting his own view, which favourably impressed the sovereign^[28]. This audience marks the starting point of the enterprise that would occupy Averroes for the next three decades: according to biographical tradition, the caliph then asked him to make Aristotle accessible by summarising and commenting on his work^[29]. That same year, Averroes was appointed qadi of Seville^[30].

Grand qadi of Seville, then of Cordoba

Averroes's judicial career advanced rapidly: qadi of Seville in 1169, he became qadi of Cordoba as early as 1171, then returned to Seville in 1179, before being appointed in 1182 grand qadi of Cordoba — the very office his grandfather had held^[31]. The early biographical sources agree in praising his virtuous conduct, his scientific rigour and his fairness as a judge, while noting philosophical positions deemed "bold"^[32]. His work of comparative law, the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid, composed during this period, bears the mark of this dual competence: a sitting judge and a connoisseur of all the Sunni legal schools.

Physician to the Almohad court

In 1182, Averroes also succeeded Ibn Tufayl as the caliph's personal physician^[33]. He had already composed, around 1162, even before entering the court's service, his great medical treatise, the Kitāb al-Kulliyyāt fī al-Ṭibb ("Book of Generalities on Medicine")^[34]. In 1184, on the death of Abu Yaqub Yusuf, his son Abu Yusuf Yaqub, surnamed al-Mansur ("the Victorious"), succeeded him; Averroes initially retained the favour of the new caliph^[35].

The disgrace of 1195: humiliation, book-burning and exile in Lucena

In 1195, Averroes's fortunes turned brutally. A tribunal convened in Cordoba tried him on various charges brought by the city's Malikite and Ash'arite theologians, long hostile to philosophy^[36]. The tribunal condemned his writings, ordered the book-burning of his books and banished him to Lucena, a small Andalusi town forty miles from Cordoba, then partly populated by Jews^[37]. According to the best-established biographical tradition, the philosopher was exposed and humiliated in the great mosque of Cordoba before being forced to leave his native city^[38].

The exact causes of this disgrace remain debated among historians, and this should be stated honestly rather than settled artificially. The early biographers mention supposed insults towards the caliph in some of his scientific writings^[39]. Modern specialists tend rather towards a political explanation:

• The Encyclopaedia of Islam suggests that al-Mansur, engaged in a difficult war against the Christian kingdoms of the north (the battle of Alarcos, won against Castile on 19 July 1195, falls precisely in that year), needed the support of the orthodox theologians (the ulama) and sacrificed Averroes to secure their loyalty^[40].
• The historian Majid Fakhry stresses the decisive role of popular pressure exerted by the traditional Malikite jurists, long hostile to the philosopher^[41].
• The Egyptian writer Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad emphasises more personal causes: unlike Ibn Tufayl or Ibn Bajja, Averroes is said to have lacked diplomatic tact — one incident has remained famous, in which he reportedly designated the caliph, in a zoological commentary, by the simple title of "king of the Berbers" rather than by his official titles, as al-Marrakushi precisely reports^[42].
• The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abed al-Jabri argues, more radically, that Averroes was punished for explicitly condemning political tyranny in his commentary on Plato's Republic — the religious trial thus masking a political purge^[43].

This cluster of competing explanations, none of them definitively settled by scholarship, illustrates a constant rule of Almohad history: the learned philosopher and the upright judge could, overnight, become a convenient scapegoat whenever power needed tokens of orthodoxy.

Rehabilitation and death in Marrakesh (1197-1198)

After an exile whose exact length varies according to the sources — a year and a half according to some reconstructions, longer according to others^[44] —, Averroes was recalled to Morocco and received the pardon of the caliph al-Mansur, though without regaining his official offices as qadi or court physician^[45]. He died in Marrakesh on 10 or 11 December 1198^[46] — the sources differ by a day, a minor divergence that should be flagged out of historiographical honesty rather than settled arbitrarily —, without ever returning to his native Andalusia^[47]. His body, first buried in Morocco, was then transferred to Cordoba for a second burial^[48]. The mystic philosopher Ibn Arabi, then a young man and already acquainted with the deceased — the two men had met in Cordoba some fifteen years earlier, in a dialogue that has remained famous and which the Ignispedia article devoted to Ibn Arabi develops —, attended this second burial. According to the biographical tradition, he retained a striking memory of it: the coffin, loaded onto a beast of burden, was balanced on the other side by the deceased's own works — an image that has remained famous and which Claude Addas reports in particular in his biography of Ibn Arabi^[49].

The contrast between the man and his books, physically counterbalancing each other on the back of a mule, would remain one of the most powerful images in Arab memory surrounding Averroes — the unwitting symbol of a life wholly devoted to writing, and of a reception that would, on that very soil, almost die out with him.

The Threefold Commentary on Aristotle

The enterprise that would earn Averroes his title of "Commentator" consists in commenting, over nearly thirty years, on almost the entire surviving Aristotelian corpus — with the exception of the Politics, which he never had in his hands, and which he replaced with a commentary on Plato's Republic^[50]. For this purpose he developed three distinct levels of commentary, of which only five works — the Physics, the Metaphysics, the De Anima, the De Caelo and the Posterior Analytics — received all three treatments in full^[51]:

This structure serves a precise aim: to restore the authentic Aristotle, whom the earlier Muslim philosophers — al-Farabi, Avicenna — had, according to Averroes, distorted by mixing in Neoplatonic elements foreign to the original Greek text^[52]. Averroes thus rejects al-Farabi's attempt to fuse Plato and Aristotle, criticizes Avicennian emanationism as containing sophisms absent from Aristotle's own text, and directly opposes Avicenna's thesis that existence is an accident added to essence — for Averroes, the reverse holds: existence is per se^[53].

Bidāyat al-Mujtahid: The Handbook of Comparative Law

The only major juridical work of Averroes to have come down to us, the Bidāyat al-Mujtahid wa Nihāyat al-Muqtaṣid ("The Beginning for the Independent Jurist and the End for the Economical Student"), systematically sets out the divergences (ikhtilāf) between the Sunni legal schools — not only in their practical conclusions, but in the very reasons that make these divergences inevitable^[54]. Although himself a Maliki qadi, Averroes here fairly discusses the positions of the other schools, including the most liberal ones, identifying several structural causes of disagreement: competing interpretations of the same verse (general sense versus particular sense), lexical ambiguities, divergent uses of analogical reasoning (qiyās)^[55]. This work, still studied today in Islamic law faculties, shows an Averroes very different from the image of the abstract metaphysician: a judge in the field, concerned to explain the legal plurality of his own tradition rather than to unify it by force.

Kitāb al-Kulliyyāt fī al-Ṭibb: The Medical Treatise That Became the Colliget

Composed around 1162, even before he entered the service of the Almohad court, the Kitāb al-Kulliyyāt fī al-Ṭibb ("Book of General Principles of Medicine") sets out the general principles of the medical art rather than its particular applications — the latter having been treated, in the original plan, by the complementary work of his friend Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar), the Kitāb al-Juz'iyyāt fī al-Ṭibb ("Book of Particulars of Medicine")^[56]. Averroes there defines medicine as "an art whose action consists in preserving health and curing disease, founded on science and on experience"^[57]. Translated into Latin under the title Colliget, the work became, for several centuries, one of the reference manuals of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim medical faculties of Europe^[58]. He is also credited, according to several historians of medicine, with identifying the retina — and not the crystalline lens, as the dominant theory of his time held — as the primary organ of light perception, as well as with one of the earliest known clinical descriptions of the symptoms of what would much later be called Parkinson's disease^[59].

Faṣl al-Maqāl: "truth does not contradict truth"

Written around 1178-1179, the Faṣl al-Maqāl ("The Decisive Discourse") is the work in which Averroes most clearly sets out his central project: to show that Islamic law itself commands the study of philosophy. Drawing on Quranic verses inviting reflection on creation (for example Quran 59, 2: "Reflect, you who have eyes")^[60], Averroes formulates the principle that sums up his entire approach:

"Since this Law is true [...] we, the Muslim community, know with certainty that demonstrative reasoning does not lead to disagreement with what the Law establishes. For truth does not contradict truth, but agrees with it and bears witness to it." — Averroes, The Book of the Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection Between the Law and Wisdom, English trans. Charles E. Butterworth, Brigham Young University Press, Provo (Utah), 2001, pp. 8-9^[61]

To this end, Averroes distinguishes three modes of discourse by which one and the same religious truth can be reached, according to each person's intellectual capacities: rhetorical discourse, addressed to the mass of believers, which relies on images and concrete examples; dialectical discourse, proper to theologians (mutakallimūn), which argues from commonly accepted premises; and demonstrative discourse, reserved for philosophers, alone capable of reaching rigorously necessary conclusions^[62].

When the result of philosophical demonstration seems to contradict the apparent sense of a verse, Averroes prescribes an allegorical interpretation (ta'wīl), reserved for qualified scholars alone — "those who are firmly rooted in knowledge," in the words of Quran 3, 7^[63]. It is precisely this method of allegorization restricted to an elite that would, a few decades after his death, be one of the grievances held against him by his own coreligionists, as the Ignispedia article on Islam briefly recalls regarding the broader problem of Quranic abrogation.

Tahāfut al-Tahāfut: The Refutation of al-Ghazali

In 1180, Averroes completed the Tahāfut al-Tahāfut ("The Incoherence of the Incoherence"), a frontal reply to the attack launched nearly eighty years earlier by the Ash'arite theologian al-Ghazali in his Tahāfut al-Falāsifa ("The Incoherence of the Philosophers")^[64]. Al-Ghazali had there accused the Muslim philosophers — foremost among them Avicenna — of unbelief (kufr) on three precise points: the eternity of the world, the denial of divine providence toward individuals, and the denial of bodily resurrection. Averroes takes up each of these accusations point by point, without however systematically defending Avicenna: on the contrary, he turns several of al-Ghazali's criticisms back against Avicennian emanationism, which he too judges tainted by elements foreign to the authentic Aristotle^[65].

On substance, Averroes challenges al-Ghazali's very method, that of Ash'arite occasionalism, which denies all stable natural causality in favour of direct and unmediated divine action at every instant. For Averroes, such a position makes scientific knowledge of the world quite simply impossible:

"A complete explanation of any event or existence requires taking into account the material, formal, efficient and final causes." — Averroes, Tahāfut al-Tahāfut, quoted in H. Chad Hillier, "Ibn Rushd (Averroes)," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy^[66]

To deny this stable causality — as, in his view, al-Ghazali's Ash'arite theology does — amounts, Averroes further writes, to rendering all scientific inquiry into reality "counterproductive"^[67].

The Eternity of the World: A Point of Rupture with Revelation

The most controversial question of the Tahāfut al-Tahāfut concerns the eternity of the world. Against the classical Quranic doctrine of a creation in time, Averroes, following Aristotle, maintains that "the world has always existed, eternally"^[68]. In his eyes this is not a denial of God as First Cause: Averroes distinguishes essential causality, by which God eternally causes the existence of the world as its proper cause, from accidental causality, which alone requires a temporal beginning^[69]. He even argues that the doctrine of eternity is compatible with a careful reading of the Quran, which mentions a "throne" and a "water" pre-existing the visible creation of the world as we know it — so that only the present form of the universe was created in time, not its very existence^[70].

Ingenious as this thesis may be in terms of Quranic exegesis, it remains a point of frontal rupture with the biblical teaching of creation ex nihilo professed by Christianity, as with the letter of the Quranic text as the immense majority of Muslim theologians themselves have always received it — which explains, as will be seen, why it was one of the principal charges brought against the Latin disciples of Averroes at Paris in 1277. For accuracy, let it be said that St Thomas himself held that the temporal beginning of the world is held by faith and cannot be demonstrated by reason alone^[71]: his refutation of Averroes therefore concerns not the right to philosophize, but precise conclusions judged philosophically untenable — beginning with the single intellect.

The Unity of the Material Intellect: The Most Controversial Doctrine

It is, however, his doctrine of the material intellect, developed in his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, that would earn Averroes the most lasting controversy. After following, in his Short Commentary, the theory of Ibn Bajja (the material intellect retains the particular images encountered by each individual), then adopting, in his Middle Commentary, a position close to al-Farabi and Avicenna, Averroes arrives, in his late Long Commentary, at a radically new thesis: the material intellect — the very faculty of receiving universal concepts — is a single incorporeal substance, shared by the whole human race, and not a faculty proper to each individual soul^[72]. Averroes himself claims the novelty of this conclusion:

"This assertion came to me after long reflection and intense care, and I have seen it in no one before me." — Averroes, Long Commentary on the De Anima, III, quoted in Fouad Ben Ahmed and Robert Pasnau, "Ibn Rushd [Averroes]," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy^[73]

To account for the manifest diversity of individual thoughts — if the intellect is one and single, how is it that each person thinks differently? — Averroes introduces the notion of fikr (in Latin, cogitatio): a cerebral process proper to each individual, which does not contain universal knowledge itself, but an active consideration of the particular things that this individual encounters in his own experience^[74]. The single universal intellect is thus articulated, in each man, with this individual faculty of discursive thought — without the one being reduced to the other.

The most serious consequence of this doctrine, for a Christian theologian as for a Muslim theologian, concerns personal immortality: if the intellect properly so called is not individual but universal and unique, the soul of each man could not, properly speaking, survive as a singular person after death — only the individual consideration of particular things (fikr), bound to the body, would disappear with it, while the unique, impersonal intellect would subsist eternally for humanity as a whole. The 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia thus summarizes, with a severity called for by this conclusion, the problem posed by the doctrine: Averroes openly admitted his inability to uphold, on purely philosophical grounds, the doctrine of individual immortality^[75]. It is precisely this point that Saint Thomas Aquinas would choose to attack head-on, a century later, in his own treatise against the Latin Averroists.

Opposition from the Ash'arite theologians and the Malikites

The disgrace of 1195 is no isolated accident: it crowns a long-standing hostility between Averroes and the Ash'arite theologians and the conservative Malikite jurists of his time. This opposition, as we have seen, concerned precise points: the very legitimacy of philosophical study, the method of allegorical interpretation reserved for an elite, the thesis of the eternity of the world, and the questioning of individual divine providence as defended by Ash'arite occasionalism. The Faṣl al-Maqāl itself, by reserving philosophical demonstration for a qualified minority while maintaining that the mass of believers must content themselves with the rhetorical register, sketched an intellectual hierarchy that popular Sunni orthodoxy could only receive with suspicion.

The meeting with Ibn Arabî: two paths of knowledge

Averroes also experienced, around 1180 in Cordoba, a meeting that has remained famous in the history of Islamic thought: that with the young Ibn Arabî, the future greatest theoretician of speculative Sufism, then an adolescent. Intrigued by the account of a mystical experience of the young man reported to him by his own father, a friend of the philosopher, Averroes asks to meet him. The interview, preserved in Sufi memory in the form of an elliptical dialogue — "Yes" and "No" exchanged before Ibn Arabî delivers an enigmatic reply about the flight of spirits "out of matter" — stages the symbolic encounter of two distinct paths of classical Islam: the rationalist Peripatetic philosophy of Averroes and the intuitive mystical path of which Ibn Arabî would become the great theoretician. The Ignispedia article devoted to Ibn Arabî develops this scene and its meaning in detail; it is mentioned here only for what it reveals about Averroes himself: a man whose intellectual reputation, even in his own lifetime, aroused curiosity well beyond strictly philosophical circles — including among those who would devote their lives to a path of knowledge entirely different from his own.

A legacy neglected by classical Islam, rediscovered at the Nahda

In contrast to the spectacular fortune he would enjoy in the Latin West, Averroes exercised, in his lifetime and long after his death, a minimal influence on Islamic philosophical thought itself^[76]. Two factors explain this eclipse: on the one hand, Spain lay at the far western edge of the Islamic world, geographically and intellectually off-center from the great Eastern centers; on the other, his very project — restoring the authentic Aristotle against Neoplatonic distortions — arrived, for the Muslim intellectual centers of the East, already engaged in other schools since Avicenna, as an already dated project^[77]. Only with the nineteenth-century Arab intellectual revival movement, the Nahda, was Averroes rediscovered in the Arabic-speaking world as a source of inspiration for the modernization of Muslim thought^[78].

The Latin translation and dissemination of the commentaries

Averroes's Western influence rests almost exclusively on his commentaries on Aristotle, translated into Latin and Hebrew over the course of the 13th century. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Latin Europe had lost direct access to nearly the entire classical Greek heritage, Aristotle included; Averroes's commentaries, as they penetrated the Latin West, provided a learned access to and restoration of this corpus^[79]. The first Latin translator was Michel Scot (c. 1175–c. 1232), trained at Oxford and Paris, who translated at Toledo from 1217, then in the service of Frederick II in Sicily, the Great Commentaries on the Physics, the Metaphysics, the De Anima and the De Caelo, along with several middle and short commentaries^[80]. Other translators followed, notably Hermann l'Allemand and Guillaume de Luna^[81]. Having become the obligatory reference for reading Aristotle, Averroes was soon designated, in Latin scholastic writings, no longer by his name, but simply by the title of "the Commentator"^[82].

The Latin Averroism of Siger de Brabant

A circle of enthusiastic disciples formed, at the Paris faculty of arts, around this radical reading of Aristotle-Averroes: this is Latin Averroism, whose most prominent figures are Siger de Brabant and Boèce de Dacie^[83]. These masters took up on their own account, on the ground of natural philosophy, the eternity of the world and the unity of the intellect — two theses which, as we have seen, were already in tension with Islamic orthodoxy in Averroes's own lifetime, and which would likewise collide head-on with Catholic theology. The detail of this Parisian quarrel — the formation of the Averroist school, the controversial doctrine known as "double truth" (in reality a Latin slogan, nulla lex est vera licet possit esse utilis, which simplifies and distorts Averroes's real position^[84]), the role of Bishop Étienne Tempier — is developed in the Ignispedia article devoted to the University of Paris and scholasticism, and is not repeated here to avoid redundancy.

It matters, however, to note here, for the sake of accuracy, a point often overlooked: the medieval philosopher himself never upheld the so-called "double truth" theory — the idea that one and the same proposition could be true in philosophy and false in theology, or vice versa. Quite the contrary: the entire project of the Faṣl al-Maqāl consists in affirming the unity of truth, attained by different paths according to the capacities of the knowing subject. It is a Latin polemical construction, born of the simplified scholastic reception of his thought by the Parisian Averroists and their opponents, which made Averroes say more than he ever said — even the opposite of what he thought^[85]. Doing justice to the real thought of an adversary, even one mistaken on essentials, is a requirement of rigor that the Ignispedia article on Islam applies symmetrically to the Muslim sources themselves: one honestly refutes only a position that has been correctly reported.

Saint Thomas Aquinas against the unity of the intellect

It is Saint Thomas Aquinas who strikes, in the West, the most rigorous blow against the Averroist doctrine of the intellect. In 1270, in the precise context of the first Parisian condemnation, Thomas writes an entire treatise devoted to this single question, the De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas ("On the Unity of the Intellect, against the Averroists")^[86]. The text opens with an unambiguous declaration of intent:

"For a long time now an error concerning the intellect has spread, drawing its origin from the writings of Averroes: he strives to maintain that what Aristotle calls the possible intellect is one and the same for all men [...] our intention is to write anew against this error, and in such a way that it may be decisively refuted." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas, preamble, c. 1270^[87]

The Thomist argument, developed also in the Summa Theologiae — whose precise passages are traced in the Ignispedia article devoted to the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas — rests on the Aristotelian analysis of the soul as the substantial form of the body: if the intellect were a separate, unique and impersonal substance, each man could no longer be said to know personally — at most, the separate intellect would know in him, not he himself knowing by himself. Such a consequence, Thomas stresses, contradicts the most immediate experience each one has of his own act of thinking, and ruins, at the same time, any philosophical possibility of personal retribution after death.

The condemnations of 1270 and 1277

Two Parisian episcopal condemnations would directly target the Latin Averroist theses: that of 10 December 1270, thirteen propositions centered on the eternity of the world, the denial of individual divine providence, the unity of the intellect and determinism; then, on 7 March 1277, at the instruction of Pope John XXI, a far broader condemnation of 219 articles, promulgated by the Bishop of Paris Étienne Tempier^[88]. These two episodes, already treated in detail in the Ignispedia articles devoted to the University of Paris and scholasticism and to John XXI (1276-1277) — notably the pontifical letter Relatio nimis implacida of 18 January 1277 — are recalled here only for their common starting point: the radical reading of Aristotle through the prism of Averroes, which Tempier judged incompatible with the Christian faith.

Dante, Raphael, Chaucer: the Western artistic memory

The Western memory of Averroes runs, paradoxically, through both literary damnation and pictorial consecration. Dante Alighieri, in Canto IV of the Inferno — that of Limbo, where the virtuous but unbaptized great spirits dwell — places Averroes among the most illustrious, in the very last line of the canto, which closes the list of sages:

"Averroes, who made the great commentary." — Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto IV, line 144^[89]

Two centuries later, the painter Raphael, in his fresco of The School of Athens (1509–1511, Room of the Segnatura, Vatican), depicts, according to the identification generally accepted by art historians — although this identification remains, as is often the case for the secondary figures of the fresco, debated — a man in a light turban and green garment, leaning behind Pythagoras: Averroes thus becomes, according to several commentators, the first pictorial representation ever made of the philosopher, even though no authentic portrait had existed in his lifetime to guide it^[90]. Geoffrey Chaucer, in the general prologue of the Canterbury Tales (late 14th century), finally cites him among the medical authorities known to his character the Physician, alongside Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna^[91].

The statue of Cordoba and contemporary Arab memory

The city of Cordoba has likewise sought to honor its most illustrious child: a stone statue, depicting the philosopher seated, a book on his knees, in an attitude of intense meditation, stands today before the wall of the old city, not far from the Puerta de Almodóvar^[92]. The Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine also devoted to him the film Le Destin (Al-Massir), presented in 1997 ahead of the eighth centenary of his death (1198–1998)^[93].

A Catholic may, without any reservation, recognize in Averroes one of the most powerful minds produced by medieval Islamic civilization, and one of the greatest services rendered, albeit involuntarily, to Christian culture: without his commentaries, the Western rediscovery of Aristotle in the 13th century — the very one that would make the Thomist synthesis possible — would have been considerably slower and more uncertain. His method of literal commentary, his lawyer's rigor accustomed to weighing the reasons of opposing positions before deciding, his conviction that the universe obeys an intelligible causal order rather than the pure arbitrariness of a will without measure: all this constitutes an authentic legacy, which Catholic theology received, discussed, and in part integrated — to the point that Thomas Aquinas himself, while refuting him on essentials, models the form of his own commentaries on Aristotle on that of Averroes's "Great Commentary"^[94].

But this real debt to the commentator cannot conceal what separates, irreducibly in substance, the doctrine of Averroes from Christian Revelation. His thesis of the eternity of the world flatly contradicts the doctrine of creation ex nihilo professed, each in its own way, by Genesis and the Creed. His doctrine of the unique material intellect dissolves, by philosophical construction, the very possibility of personal immortality — which the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia states bluntly by recalling that Averroes himself acknowledged being unable to defend, on purely rational grounds, the immortality of the individual soul^[95]. It is precisely this point that Saint Thomas refutes in his De Unitate Intellectus: without a personal intellect, there is no longer a subject capable of meriting, of converting, of loving God or refusing Him in his own right — and therefore no more rational foundation for the eternal retribution revealed by Scripture. It is not irrelevant, in this regard, that Latin posterity — some time after Saint Thomas and Dante themselves, notes the Catholic Encyclopedia — came to depict Averroes as "the sworn enemy of the faith"^[96]: a formula no doubt excessive in its polemic, but revealing of the real theological stakes that his Latin disciples had carried to their most dangerous conclusion.

Averroes remains, finally, by his faith and by his life, a man of the Islamic tradition: a rigorous qadi, a sincere believer according to his own lights, he never intended to renounce Islam, but on the contrary to demonstrate, against its very detractors, its full compatibility with rational inquiry. The Second Vatican Council, in its declaration Nostra Aetate, recalls in what terms the Catholic Church must regard Muslim believers, of whom Averroes remains one of the most rigorous minds:

"The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men." — Second Vatican Council, Declaration Nostra Aetate on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 28 October 1965, § 3^[97]

It is in this spirit — of genuine esteem for a considerable intellectual legacy, and of entire fidelity to the Revelation received in Christ, which alone grounds the personal immortality that Averroes could not, by his own philosophical powers, secure — that the Catholic reader may approach the great qadi of Cordoba: not as a mere adversary to be refuted, but as a mind whose intelligence, placed despite itself at the service of Aristotle, furnished Christian theology with tools it would then have to surpass and bring to their full measure in the light of faith.

• Fouad Ben Ahmed and Robert Pasnau, "Ibn Rushd [Averroes]", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-rushd/ — the reference academic synthesis on his biography and doctrine.
• H. Chad Hillier, "Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (1126-1198)", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, iep.utm.edu/ibnrushd/.
• Majid Fakhry, Averroes (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works and Influence, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, 2001.
• Averroes, Le Livre du discours décisif, Engl. trans. Charles E. Butterworth, The Book of the Decisive Treatise, Brigham Young University Press, Provo (Utah), 2001.
• Alain de Libera, Averroès et l'averroïsme, Presses universitaires de France, coll. "Que sais-je ?", Paris, 1991.
• Ernest Renan, Averroès et l'averroïsme : essai historique, Auguste Durand, Paris, 1852 (digitized text on Gallica, gallica.bnf.fr).
• See also, in Ignispedia, the articles Maimonides (1138-1204), Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas, The University of Paris and Scholasticism, John XXI (1276-1277), Ibn Arabi, Dante Alighieri and Edward Feser, each of which extends a precise aspect of Averroes's philosophical legacy.