On the Soul: A Philosophical Exploration of the Active Intellect in Averroes, Aristotle, and Aquinas

ON THE SOUL: A PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION OF THE ACTIVE INTELLECT IN AVERROES, ARISTOTLE, AND AQUINAS I INTRODUCTION The Issues THIS ARTICLE IS AN exploration of two issues that arose in the medieval analysis of Book III of Aristotle's De Anima as diversely interpreted by Averroes and Thomas Aquinas, viz., (I) the Active Intellect in its relation to body as form (in what sense, if any, is the soul the form of the body's matter) ; (2) on the question of the unicity or multiplicity of the Active Intellect (is the active aspect of the intellective soul a single unique entity in which all men somehow participate or are there intellective souls multiplied according to the number of individual men) . The Historical Thesis In the history of the Western world there have appeared only two periods in which a really great philosophy was developed. These were the 4th century B. C. when Plato and Aristotle reached the highest point of development of Greek philosophy in establishing the relationship between the material and the spiritual, a synthesis acceptable to the classical world, and the 13th century when Thomas Aquinas worked out. equally satisfactorily to medieval man a continuity between the supernatural and the natural, a connubium of the rational and the mystical. Except for Augustine's ingenious notion of creation in time 131 13~ RUTH REYNA and his doctrine of " illuminational intuition," 1 an influence felt in greater measure in the later medieval and modern periods than in Augustine's own century, there appears to have been little philosophical genius manifested during the first thirteen centuries of medieval thought. Between the closing of the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century and the advent of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th, there arose a paucity of philosophical thinking in the West. Greek thought was distinguished by the high value it placed on man and his achievement; it held the universe to be basically one whose parts are all in consonance. Man, a part of a great cosmic world, was on equal footing with the gods and with nature. With this bulwark pulled from beneath them through the banning of Greek philosophy as wicked paganism by the early Christian church, men floundered and grasped for an ideal that would again place them at ease with the world and with themselves. Such salvation was offered in the sacramental 2 and in the casuistical system of the Church. It is interesting to note that no real progress was made in science and the humanities in the interim when Greek philosophy in its greater part was lost to the Western world. Only the Timaeus of Plato and portions of the logic of Aristotle were available in the universities; and upon recovery of the Aristotelian writings (the Physics, Metaphysics, and the De Anima) in the l~th and 13th centuries, human progress again was evidenced. That is to say, with the return of traditional humanism 3 there was a return to scientific and humanistic progress. 1 An avenue of knowledge of eternal and immutable truths transcending that of the process of reasoning. • The conception that this world is but the visible sign of an invisible reality, impregnated with energy, purpose, and love of its Creator who dwells in it as he dwells in the bread and wine on the altar; that medieval men conceived this world to be a sacrifice which they dedicated to the Beneficent Giver. Cf. W. T. Jones. A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 195!l), p. 524. • Traditional Platonic: (1) the highest good of man lies in the fulfillment of his ON THE SOUL 133 Greek thought, while lost to the West in its more meaningfulness for some eight centuries, was being seriously preserved by the Arabian philosophers in the East where Aristotle's chief works were translated into Syrian and then into Arabic versions from the Syrian translations. It was through the conquest of Spain by the Muslims in the 8th century that Aristotle was re-introduced into Europe, but in Arabic of which Hebraic and Latin translations were made by the 12th and 13th century scholars. The Arabs...