Averroes and the Recovery of Aristotle: How Islam Shaped European Thought

In Dante's Inferno, written in the early fourteenth century, the poet descends into Hell and finds a group of philosophers gathered together in a relatively comfortable part of the first circle — Limbo, reserved for the virtuous pagans who lived before Christ. Among them is a Muslim: Ibn Rushd, whom Dante calls Averroes, "who made the great commentary." He stands alongside Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato.

This is a remarkable thing for a devout medieval Italian Catholic to have written. Dante places a twelfth-century Muslim scholar among the greatest thinkers of antiquity, damned only by the accident of birth, not by any failure of intellect or virtue. The detail reflects something real: by the time Dante was writing, Averroes was not an exotic foreign import but a central figure in European intellectual culture — one whose arguments had shaped the Church he belonged to, whether it wanted to acknowledge that or not.

The Man Called "The Commentator"

Ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba in 1126, into a family of legal scholars. His grandfather had been the chief judge of the city. He studied law, medicine, and philosophy in the Andalusian tradition, and in 1169 was introduced to the Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, who complained that he found Aristotle's texts opaque and difficult to follow. The Caliph wanted someone to write clear, authoritative explanations of the philosopher.

Ibn Rushd spent the next several decades producing a complete series of commentaries on the works of Aristotle — short commentaries (paraphrases), medium commentaries, and long commentaries that interwove the full Aristotelian text with extended analysis. This project was unprecedented in scope and rigor. He became known simply as "The Commentator" — a title that implied there was nothing more to say.

His commentaries were not merely explanatory. He argued, against al-Ghazali and others, that Aristotelian philosophy was a legitimate and necessary activity for the educated Muslim. He defended the eternity of the world, the unity of the intellect (arguing controversially that human reason participates in a single universal intellect), and the separation of philosophical from theological truth — not as a contradiction, he insisted, but as two different kinds of discourse appropriate to different audiences.

His Fall

In 1195, the political winds shifted. The Almohad Caliph al-Mansur, facing pressure from conservatives who objected to philosophy, summoned Ibn Rushd and publicly condemned him. His books were burned — or at least the copies in circulation in the Muslim west. He was exiled for two years before being rehabilitated shortly before his death in 1198.

The irony is sharp. The philosopher who had defended Aristotelian inquiry, who had argued that philosophy and religion were compatible if properly understood, died with his books burned by a Muslim ruler. Meanwhile, those books were being translated into Latin in Toledo and other centers of cross-cultural scholarship, where they were about to become the most important philosophical texts in European university education.

The Translation and Its Impact

The translation movement that had brought Greek texts into Arabic in the ninth century ran in reverse in the twelfth and thirteenth. Scholars in Toledo, Sicily, and other points of contact between Islamic and Christian civilization translated Arabic texts into Latin. Ibn Rushd's commentaries were among the most sought after.

By the early thirteenth century, his works had reached the University of Paris, the most prestigious theological institution in medieval Europe. The effect was immediate and disruptive. Here was a rigorous, systematic, and compelling account of the most important philosophical authority in the Western world — written by a Muslim. And the positions it defended were not always comfortable for Christian theology.

A group of scholars at Paris — Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia among them — pushed Ibn Rushd's positions in directions that alarmed Church authorities. If philosophical truth could be genuinely different from theological truth, as the Averroists seemed to argue, then the relationship between faith and reason became much more complicated. In 1270, Bishop Etienne Tempier condemned a list of propositions associated with the "Latin Averroists."

Thomas Aquinas's Response

Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican friar writing in Paris in the 1260s, saw the Averroist challenge clearly and chose to engage it directly rather than dismiss it. His Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles are written in sustained conversation with Ibn Rushd — sometimes agreeing on the value of philosophical inquiry, more often disagreeing on specific positions, always treating his interlocutor as a serious thinker whose arguments require actual refutation.

Aquinas disagreed with Ibn Rushd's doctrine of the unity of the intellect, writing a specific treatise against it (On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists). He disagreed with the eternity of the world. He insisted that reason and faith, while distinct, pointed toward the same truth rather than potentially different ones.

But in making these arguments, Aquinas absorbed the Aristotelian framework that Ibn Rushd had made available and authoritative. The theology that emerged — what became Thomism, the dominant philosophical tradition in Catholic intellectual life to the present day — was built on Aristotelian foundations that had been transmitted through, and systematized by, a Muslim philosopher.

This is not merely an intellectual curiosity. It means that the most influential tradition in Catholic intellectual history bears the structural imprint of Islamic philosophy. Not as an influence that was later superseded, but as a constitutive element.

The Lost Common Ground

The story of Averroes and European thought is often told as a story of influence and transmission — the Islamic world gave Aristotle back to Europe, Europe took it and ran. This framing misses something.

Ibn Rushd was not simply transmitting Aristotle. He was a philosopher in his own right, making his own arguments about the relationship between reason and religious authority, about the nature of the intellect, about the proper interpretation of scripture. His positions were contested in his own tradition and shaped by the specific intellectual culture of twelfth-century Al-Andalus. What traveled to Europe was not just Aristotle but a particular Islamic reading of Aristotle — and that reading shaped European thought in ways that are still present.

The debates of the thirteenth-century University of Paris — about the soul, about eternity, about the limits of reason — are in part debates that were seeded by Islamic philosophy. Aquinas's answers are not Ibn Rushd's answers. But the questions are shared.

Dante's gesture — placing Averroes in Limbo, honoring him with the proximity of Aristotle, acknowledging the debt while maintaining the theological distance — is perhaps the most honest medieval acknowledgment of this complicated relationship. Damned, yes, by the accident of not being Christian. But placed among the great minds. Acknowledged as the man who made the commentary.

How often do we acknowledge the sources of our intellectual inheritance? And what happens when those sources come from traditions we have been taught to see as alien or opposed to our own?

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Continue exploring with our articles on Córdoba's intellectual heritage and Ibn Sina's philosophy.