SCHOLASTICISM

I1t was in passing through their hands that the peripatetic doctrine engendered scholasticism. It is certain that, in the interminable wrangle between Realists and Nominalists the former leaned on the authority of Avicenna, the others on that of Averrhoës; it is certain, according to the observation of M. Hauréau,[j] that the philosopher Al-Kendi is often quoted by Alexander of Hales, Henry of Ghent and St. Bonaventura, whilst Al-Farabi furnished his aphorisms to William d’Auvergne, Vincent de Beauvais, and Albertus Magnus; and that this same William d’Auvergne prefers the Arabs far above the Greeks, finding the Greeks too much of philosophers and the Arabs more of theologians. Doubtless scholasticism was a vain and regrettable learning, for the schools of the Middle Ages, as Condillac says, resembled the knights’ tournaments, but, all the same, it produced some free thinkers, such as Johannes Scotus Erigena, Berengarius, Abélard, and William of Occam; and it was from it that, in after time, proceeded John Huss, Savonarola, Luther, Bruno, and Campanella.

2After having laid hands on the various branches of the knowledge possessed by the ancient Greeks, who had remained superior to the Latins, in the sciences even more than in letters and not less than in the arts, and after having enlarged its domain in all directions, the Arabs laid it open to the nations of Europe, all of whom they had outdistanced. Spain was naturally the first to receive and spread their gifts. In the tenth century, in the most profound darkness of the Middle Ages, that country “to which,” says Haller,[o] “the humanities fled together,” was the only one which accepted and welcomed those solid studies, which were everywhere else repelled and destroyed, even in Constantinople, since the time of Leo the Isaurian (717).

3Indeed, as early as the tenth century, when the Muzarab, John of Seville, translated the Holy Scriptures into Arabic, and when another Muzarab, Alvaro of Cordova, reproached his compatriots with forgetting their language and their law (_legem suam nesciunt christiani et linguam propriam non advertunt Latini_), in order to train themselves in the Arab doctrine (_Arabico eloquio sublimati_), Spain counted several illustrious scholars, Ayton, bishop of Vich, a Lupit of Barcelona, and a Joseph, who instructed Adalbero, archbishop of Rheims, all versed in mathematics and astronomy.