We cannot wonder that Albertus Magnus, and all who held the Christian
faith, were alarmed by doctrine of this kind and fiercely opposed it.
The orthodox beliefs of Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans alike were
declared false by this bold writer, whom several expressions which we
have embodied in the above summary show clearly to have been Averroës,
and not Michael Scot. In one passage indeed we seem to discover what may
have suggested the widely spread fable that Frederick II., or Scot, or
some other of their company and party, had produced an atheistic work
called _De Tribus Impostoribus_. The imputation was a false one, yet most
natural were the feelings of prejudice which the publication of this
philosophy aroused against the great Emperor and Michael Scot who had
acted as his agent in the matter.
Pursuing our investigation of the works which came from the Toledan
College we discover that these were not confined to the books of
Aristotle already noticed, but that the translators took a wider range
in their labours. The Venice manuscript of Averroës,[185] besides the
_De Coelo et Mundo_, the _De Anima_, the _Meteora_, the _De Substantia
Orbis_, the _De Generatione et Corruptione_, and the _Parva Naturalia_,
contains several other treatises that deserve attention. Two of these
were compositions of Averroës; the one a commentary on the book of
Proclus, _De Causis_, then commonly ascribed to Aristotle,[186] and the
other an independent work, as it would seem, bearing the following title:
‘Qualiter intellectus naturalis conjungitur Intelligentiae abstractae,’
in short a treatise on the _ittisal_. The volume also contains the
Latin version of a book by the Rabbi Moses Maimonides, entitled ‘De Deo
Benedicto, quod non est Corpus, nec Virtus in Corpore.’[187] Maimonides,
like Averroës, was a native of Cordova, and hence no doubt arose the
interest that was felt in his works by the Toledan translators.
That the Venice manuscript is to be understood as a collection of the
versions which came from that school appears plainly in the dedication
to Stephen of Provins. This is generally prefixed to the _De Coelo et
Mundo_, thus forming an introduction to the versions which follow; but
here it has been placed at the end of the volume, occurring immediately
after the short article _De Vita Aristotelis_ which closes the whole
series. We may see in this fact a certain probability that some at
least of these additional versions may have been the work of Michael
Scot himself. Nor will the five years which he spent at Toledo appear
too scant a space of time for the production of the whole body of the
Latin Averroës and something more, when we remember the ample and able
assistance he enjoyed in the prosecution of his labours as a translator.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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