The Platonism for which the school of Chartres was conspicuous meant, apparently, not much more than the traditional Platonism of the Timaeus with its sundry exponents. The Phaedo and the Meno, which had been translated by Henry Aristippus of Catania (ob. 1162), produced no immediate effect on the interpretation of Plato. The Chartres account of universals, for example, identified them with the Platonic ideas, and understood idea in the sense of exemplar aeternum, a sense traditional in the Latin interpretation of the Timaeus, but certainly not derived from the Phaedo. And again, when followers of Bernard of Chartres, such as William of Conches, strayed on to dangerous theological ground, they were inclined to imitate Abelard in Platonising the Trinity and in identifying the Holy Spirit with the anima mundi. Perhaps it was the reminiscence of Abelard, as well as the widespread influence of Chartres, that caused fresh anxiety to ecclesiastical authority. The most famous disturbance connected with any scholar of Chartres was the trial of Gilbert de la Porrée (ob. 1154), the learned and venerable Bishop of Poitiers, himself sufficiently distinguished to rank as the founder of a school. The story of the trial, which took place at Rheims in 1148, is related by Otto of Freising and by John of Salisbury in his Historia Pontificalis. John was present throughout the proceedings, as were also Peter the Lombard, Robert of Melun, and other prominent divines, some to support St Bernard (once more the chief prosecutor), others to aid in the defence of the bishop. On this occasion Bernard fell short of victory. His followers refused to confess the defeat, but Gilbert returned safely to his diocese and was immune from all further attacks.

Apart from this political incident, the fame of Gilbert rests chiefly on his exposition of the theology of Boethius, and on his Liber de Sex Principii, a logical text-book more highly esteemed than any other composed in the Middle Ages. For the most part Gilbert sticks to the "old logic," though there is some evidence of his acquaintance with the "new." He refers in one place to the Analytics, and his commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius perhaps implies more knowledge of Aristotle than could well be derived from the more elementary treatises. His treatment of time and space has even been thought to involve some reference to the Physics, but that is improbable. So again, his theory of universals, which he called formae nativae, does not agree with the ordinary Platonism. A forma nativa is an exemplum inherent in created things, related to the exemplar in the Creator's mind as eidos to idea. The origin of such a view might well be Aristotelian, but the evidence is not clear.

Passing over with regret many other names associated more or less closely with the teaching of Chartres, we have space only to raise the general question, whether in the course of the twelfth century much advance was made towards a wider conception of philosophical problems. A certain restlessness and a certain feeling of expansion, greatly assisted by the enlargement of logic, there undoubtedly is. At the beginning of the century Adelard of Bath was wandering from country to country and realising the advantage of visiting different schools. In Spain he learnt enough Arabic to make a translation of Euclid, and to acquire some notion of the uses of mathematics for the purposes of scientific measurement. His general outlook, however, is reminiscent of what John of Salisbury imputes to Bernard of Chartres. At the close of the same century, Alan of Lille (Alanus de Insulis), who survived till 1203, is far from suspecting the immediate advent of a great intellectual revolution. In his own age he won the title of doctor universalis by his manifold learning; in modern times his taste for a rigid, quasi-mathematical method has suggested a comparison with Spinoza. Yet his appetite for novelty was not striking. The first of the Latins to cite the Liber de Causis, he is but little affected by the peculiar qualities of that work. The new logic, far from arousing his enthusiasm, seems rather to have persuaded him that Aristotle loved to wrap himself in majestic obscurity. Thus, without disparaging his work, which deserves a much fuller account, we may fairly infer from his case that in the last hours of the twelfth century it was possible for a man of the highest reputation to enjoy no premonition of the great movement of thought which the coming century was immediately to witness.

If only by weight of materials, the thirteenth century stands apart from those through which we have rapidly travelled. The briefest catalogue of names such as Alexander of Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, is enough to banish the thought of any detailed analysis. The only practicable course will be to sketch the line of development and the general character of the problems with which these and other authors, only less famous, were engaged. Nearly eight centuries had passed since Boethius presented Aristotle to the Latins, but during the whole of that period less had happened to disturb the intellectual atmosphere than was now to be accomplished in a single generation by the Aristotelian invasion of Paris. Customary and right as it is to place the name of Aristotle in the foreground, it would be idle to pretend that the mere recovery of his writings was enough to account for all the subsequent events. Without the organisation of studies in the new universities, and without the intervention of the Friars in educational and ecclesiastical politics, the story of the thirteenth century must have been very different. And again, it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of another fact, the conjunction of the new Aristotle with an interpretation of him developed by a series of Muslim philosophers, whose object had not been to keep on terms with Christian orthodoxy, but to avoid open collision with the Koran. The fragments of Arabian mathematics and medicine which had drifted from time to time into the Latin world had brought no anticipation of the tumult immediately aroused by the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes. The roughly established modus vivendi with Pagan philosophy was of no avail when there suddenly appeared a new Aristotle, the author of a vast and comprehensive system, in which were contained, if the Muslims could be trusted, many doctrines incompatible with the Christian position. And most of this was brought about by the enterprise of a Christian, Archbishop Raymond of Toledo, who had instituted, in the second quarter of the twelfth century, a college of translators under the supervision of Dominic Gundisalvi, himself the author of a De Divisione Philosophiae and other philosophical works.

The unparalleled importance of translations in the Middle Ages was not diminished by the prevalence of a single literary language among the peoples of the West. Absence of linguistic barriers between the scholars of different European countries may even have helped to strengthen the frontiers dividing the larger units of culture denoted as the Arabs, the Latins, and the Greeks. We cannot, however, pursue that complicated question, but must be content to glance at the golden age of translators, which began early in the twelfth century and lasted about a hundred and fifty years. Visits of Western scholars to Byzantium had produced the translations of the Organon and of John of Damascus; another centre was the court of Palermo, where Greek and Arabic learning were united; but the widest diffusion of Muslim knowledge came from Toledo, and it is necessary to enquire how far the Latin Aristotelianism was affected by the mediation of the Arabic language. The story, once lightly bandied about, that the medieval Aristotle was only a Latin parody of an Arabic version of a Syrian translation of a Greek original is little more than a fable. It is true that the Muslims were first introduced to Aristotle by Syrians, chiefly Nestorian Christians; it is true also that Arabic Aristotelianism was coloured to the last by the commentators, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, who had influenced the Syrians. But long before there was 812 Translations from Greek and from Arabic any question of extensive Muslim influence on the Latins, direct translations of Aristotle from Greek into Arabic had been made in abundance. The name of "philosophers," in the Arabic transcription of the word, was especially applied to those who had studied Greek originals; and among these "philosophers" were the whole series of writers, beginning with Kindi in the ninth century, whose names we encounter in the works of the Latin schoolmen. Strange to say, the most famous of all (at least in Latin estimation), Ibn Rushd or Averroes (ob. 1198), was an exception to the rule. For it is said that he never thought it worth while to learn Greek. If that be so, we must suppose that he saw no reason, after three centuries of Aristotelian scholarship, to doubt the adequacy of the Arabic translations. It was left for his Latin critics to entertain that doubt.

While the relation of the Latins to the Arabs is, at first sight, analogous to that of the Arabs to the Syrians, further scrutiny of the facts does not strengthen the analogy. There never was a time when the Latins depended entirely on translations from the Arabic; there never was a time when the Muslim inferences from Aristotle were not disputed and opposed; least of all was there a time when Christians could imitate Muslims in taking Aristotle as an infallible authority. To adopt that attitude was, in fact, to be an Averroist; and Averroism, as we shall see, was a movement destructive of all that Christian philosophers were striving to establish.

Now that the earlier researches of Jourdain have been supplemented by Grabmann and other recent scholars, it is possible to speak with some confidence about the translations of Aristotle used by the Latins. No simple generalisation can be accurate, for the case of each of Aristotle's works has to be separately considered. Yet on the whole it is safe to maintain that translations from the Greek relieved the schoolmen of undue dependence on the Arabs, and enabled them, thus far at least, to form an independent judgment on the meaning of Aristotle. To illustrate the facts from a few of the more important works, we find that the earliest version of the Metaphysics came to Paris from Byzantium before 1210. Next to arrive (apparently before 1217) was a translation from the Arabic ascribed to Gerard of Cremona. This, too, was imperfect, for it omitted altogether Books K, M, and N, and mixed up the first book with the second. With this, however, the Latins had to content themselves until after 1260, when a Graeco-Latin version of the first twelve books, probably by William of Moerbeke, was put into circulation. Upon these twelve books St Thomas wrote his commentary, the last two being still untranslated when he saw a Greek manuscript of the whole fourteen in 1270. The history of the Nicomachean Ethics is rather similar: first a Graeco-Latin version of three books, disguised as four; then, in 1240, a paraphrase from the Arabic by Herman the German; lastly a full translation from the Greek, often explicitly attributed to Robert Grosseteste (ob. 1253), but more probably, in Grabmann's opinion, by William of Moerbeke. Both the Physics and the De Anima were known first in Graeco-Latin versions, while the Politics, a book neglected by the Arabs, was derived only from the Greek. Evidently, then, it would be less than a half-truth to say that the Latins depended on second-hand translations for access to those works of Aristotle which most deeply affected their thought. It remains to ask whether the quality of the translations was such as to debar them from a sound understanding of the text.

To claim distinction of style for the medieval translations would indeed be courageous. Their rudeness, however, was perfectly deliberate. It was not due to inability to write Latin, but to a frank mistrust of elegance where the sole object was to get an exact reproduction of the original. This they imagined they would best secure by simply replacing, so far as possible, every Greek word by its Latin equivalent. For reasons then potent, but now no longer operative, they demanded the letter rather than the spirit; not a transformation of idiom into idiom, but a raw and formless text. The task of the translators may have been wrongly conceived, but in its way it was faithfully done. The belief, still extant in some quarters, that the medieval understanding of Aristotle was hopelessly vitiated by faulty translations is unsupported by the facts. The prime author of this libel was Roger Bacon, whose bitter denunciations, often repeated as oracles, were in truth the product of ignorance and spleen. Bacon's judgments on the translation and study of Aristotle range over a quarter of a century, from about 1266 to 1292. Starting from the excellent principle that a translator requires both a knowledge of the languages and an understanding of the sciences concerned, he repeatedly declares that only Boethius possessed the first qualification, only Robert Grosseteste the second. And here at once we begin to suspect him. For Grosseteste's scientific attainments, as Bacon knew, were in mathematics and optics, neither of which would have helped him in the least to understand the greater part of Aristotle.

The rest of the translators, Bacon continues, were ignorant of science, of Greek, and even of Latin. The result of their labors was erroneous and unintelligible; so great, indeed, was the consequent misapprehension of Aristotle that it would have been better for all his works to be burnt. In the Opus Tertium (cap. 25), composed not later than 1268, Bacon had not yet heard of William of Moerbeke, but in the later Compendium Studii Philosophiae he attacks him, under the name of William the Fleming, with peculiar venom, and thinks him no better than Gerard of Cremona, Herman, or Michael the Scot (the three chief translators from the Arabic), or than any of the pretended experts in Greek. William of Moerbeke (ob. 1286), Archbishop of Corinth during the last years of his life, was actually the most important of the translators, if only because so much of his work was instigated by Thomas Aquinas, when both were attached to the court of Urban IV. His dated works, which include translations of Proclus, Simplicius, Galen, and Hippocrates, cover the period from 1260 to 1280. As it happens, only one of his Aristotelian translations (the De Partibus Animalium) is dated, and there is also some uncertainty how far he made use of earlier versions. We know, however, that he was the first translator in that age of the Politics, and we know that a scholar of Susemihl's rank thought it worth while to print this translation with his own edition of the text. Bacon's judgment on William of Moerbeke has, in fact, no more value than a spiteful review in a modem periodical of a book which the reviewer has omitted to read.

Not even on sheer questions of fact can Bacon be trusted. He invents, for example, an intimacy between Gerard of Cremona and Herman the German, though one of them was about eighty-five years senior to the other. It is more than doubtful, too, if he is accurate in his account of Robert Grosseteste, one of the very few among his contemporaries whom he deigned to admire. Depreciation of other men was a passion with him, almost a disease. He was out of sympathy with the whole Aristotelian movement, and out of humour with all the world. As to the contemporary interpretation of Aristotle, his verdict is yet more ludicrous than his contempt for the translations. With all the disadvantages from which they inevitably suffered, Albertus Magnus and his still more famous pupil were two of the greatest Aristotelians the world has yet seen. Bacon himself was incompetent to judge them, but he resented the intellectual dictatorship, as he thought it, of Albert, and attacked him with such animosity that the great Dominican was moved at last to administer a weighty rebuke. To Bacon, at least, he is thought to be referring, when he speaks of those who seek a solace for their own indolence by looking only for objects to attack; who resemble the humor fellis that spreads through a body, by provoking all other students to bitterness and forbidding them in dulcedine societatis quaerere veritatem. As a critic of others Bacon well deserves the rebuke; it is fortunate that, as an original thinker, he still can deserve our respect.

Character of Muslim philosophy