Sometimes I dream about nailing copies of my book to church doors around the world a la Luther...

In last week's essay, I noted that when Erasmus was charged with “laying the egg that Luther hatched,” he half admitted the charge but said he had expected quite another bird. Erasmus may have opened the door to formal critique of the Catholic church when he published In Praise of Folly in 1511, but what kind of bird was it that charged through that door?

In 1517, when Martin Luther posted a large sheet on the All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Saxony, his Ninety-Five Theses laid out "a devastating critique of the church’s sale of indulgences and explained the fundamentals of justification by grace alone." This was no mean feat considering that the Spanish Inquisition had recently been established in 1478. Heretics were being burned at the stake (or worse) at the hands of Catholic zealots all over Europe who were defending their dogma. Yet Erasmus kept some of those hounds at bay through the vast weight of his intellect. By the 1530s, for example, his writings accounted for 10 to 20 percent of all book sales. During the early years of the reformation, Erasmus "did much, mostly quietly and through private conferences and correspondence, to ensure that Luther was not abruptly silenced and put to death," even though he didn't fully approve of Luther's ideas and eventually broke publicly with him in 1524. Let's look more at Luther to understand why these enemies of a common enemy could not remain friends. It's a strange tale not often appreciated by all the sects of Christianity that owe their existence to this man.

Luther was born into a peasant family, but one that invested heavily in his education. He was just on the verge of becoming a lawyer in 1505 at the age of 21 when he was caught in very heavy thunderstorm. Afraid that he was going to die, he screamed out a vow: “Save me, St. Anna, and I shall become a monk!” He survived, of course, as most of us do from thunderstorms, but he did keep his promise to that loud rend in the air to enter the monastery, even though it was a difficult decision that Martin knew would greatly disappoint his parents. Beyond the vow, however, Luther had strong internal reasons to join the monastery, haunted by insecurity about his salvation, which he described as an overwhelming terror, calling them his anfectungen or afflictions. Luther was not alone in this experience. The "late medieval piety that Luther was a part of, which stressed Christ primarily as the avenging Judge, made spiritual terror, guilt, and despair the ordeal of many." Fleeing the fear inflicted by the church, Luther sought comfort in the only place that offered it…that very same church. Who could have guessed? Assurance evaded Luther though, as he grew disenchanted with all he saw on the inside of the institution that had offered him condemnation as well as salvation. He threw himself into the life of a monk, but it did not seem to help. Finally, a mentor told Luther to "focus on Christ and him alone in his quest for assurance," and this lead to Luther's break with the need for interventions from a religious hierarchy that he found to be full of abuses—especially nepotism, simony, usury, pluralism, and the sale of indulgences. After a dozen years in service, a mentally tortured Luther nailed his mounting objections to the wall.

Within two weeks, copies of the Ninety-Five Theses had "spread throughout Germany; within two months throughout Europe. In January 1518, friends of Luther translated the Ninety-Five Theses from Latin into German, printed, and widely copied them, making the controversy one of the first in history to be aided by the printing press." Once again, technology enabled progress. It took the Church almost three years to formulate a response, but in June of 1520, Pope Leo X issued a Papal bull outlining forty-one purported errors in Luther's theses. Luther was then summoned by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to either renounce or reaffirm his views in a grand assembly—known as a Diet—that was to take place in the town of Worms, Germany in what later became awkwardly known to English speakers as the Diet of Worms.

At the Diet, an imperial prosecutor asked Luther if a collection of his writings were indeed his and if he was ready to revoke their heresies. Luther requested time to prepare his answer and was given until the following day when he came back with an impassioned speech that encouraged others to take up his fight. He said:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.

Private conferences were held to determine Luther's fate, but before a decision was reached, Luther fled. During his return home, he disappeared though and went into hiding, for one month later the Edict of Worms was issued by Emperor Charles V, which declared:

We forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favour the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic, as he deserves, to be brought personally before us, or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us, whereupon we will order the appropriate manner of proceeding against the said Luther. Those who will help in his capture will be rewarded generously for their good work.

Gimme some of that old time religion!

In January 1521, the pope excommunicated Luther, but this only emboldened him. In the summer of 1521, he "widened his target from individual pieties like indulgences and pilgrimages to doctrines at the heart of Church practices." Revolutionary theologians took his lead and embarked on a radical programme of reform that "provoked disturbances, including a revolt by the Augustinian monks against their prior, the smashing of statues and images in churches, and denunciations of the magistracy." Bands of visionary zealots preached "revolutionary doctrines such as the equality of man, adult baptism, and Christ's imminent return." Luther set about reversing or modifying some of these new church practices, but he was unable to stifle the radicalism that had been unleashed by his passion. Preachers helped instigate the German Peasants' War of 1524–25, during which many atrocities were committed, often in Luther's name, but this was only the beginning of many religious wars in Europe that raged from 1524 to 1648.

Luther spent the rest of his days marrying a nun, raising six children, organising the new church he had helped give birth to, and writing numerous volumes. Unfortunately, among Luther's other major works was his 60,000-word treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, published in 1543, three years before his death. Luther argued that the Jews were "no longer the chosen people but 'the devil's people', and referred to them with violent, vile language. Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayerbooks, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews' property and money, and smashing up their homes, so that these 'envenomed worms' would be forced into labour or expelled 'for all time'. Luther's words 'We are at fault in not slaying them' amounted to a sanction for murder." According to the consensus view of historians, this anti-Jewish rhetoric from a man considered by Germans to be a major prophet contributed significantly to the development of antisemitism in Germany, and provided an "ideal underpinning" for the Nazis' attacks on Jews in the 1930s and 1940s almost 400 years later.

And yet there are Lutherans!

Though he does not fare well in my brief analysis of him in the survival of the fittest philosophers.

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Martin Luther (1483-1546 CE) was a German priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation.

Survives

Needs to Adapt
Luther kicked off the Protestant reformation with the publication of his “Ninety Five Thesis” on October 31, 1517, which attacked the church’s sale of indulgences. He was plagued by uncertainty and doubt about his own salvation until he found solace in Paul’s epistle to the Romans discussing God’s graciousness to the individual – this allowed him to rebel against the Catholic Church and its indulgences. He felt indulgences placed dependence on traveling salesmen instead of God. Luther was not a proponent of reason and science, but his forceful revolt enabled Christianity to be opened up to the evolutionary force of competition, which ultimately diminished its powers due to its weak intellectual basis.

Gone Extinct
Luther famously wrote that “reason is the devil’s whore.” He held though, that philosophy and reason are a great aid to society when used properly and a threat only when used improperly. The proper role of philosophy is organizational and as an aid in governance. Reason can be an aid to faith in that it helps to clarify and organize, but it is always second-order discourse; it is faith seeking understanding and never the reverse. Reason is the devil’s whore precisely because it asks the wrong questions and looks in the wrong direction for answers. Revelation is the only proper place for theology to begin, reason must always take a back seat. Reason discovers the truth. Truth must never take a back seat to revelation, faith, or theology. Truth is required for survival. By calling for an abandonment of reason and risking the survival of the species for the sake of its beliefs and its power, religion is the true evil and the true whore selling its soul for its own survival. No more - go extinct already!
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Unfortunately, religion is far from extinct at the moment, though its influence is clearly waning. Fortunately for me, this marks the last of the influential philosophers of history who were primarily concerned with religion. From here on out, we can confine our discussions to more rational debates. Thank goodness!

A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant.
     ---- Desiderius Erasmus in a Letter to Christian Northoff (1497)

Oh mankind. Is it any wonder you cannot help but look upon me and go mad with desire. Just outside your grasp, I keep always a bit ahead. Reach out for a touch, but never can you capture. You call me a diversion, an interruption, a disturbance. You do what you can do to try to spurn me with bad labels, with blaming weaknesses of character for your short span of attention. You even test out pills to give you strength against my lures, while extolling the great uses of grit, focus, and resolve. But where would you all be without me in front of your nose. What joy would be in life without some thing to chase and chase. Spend too much, too much, time in deep and quiet contemplation, and one is always led toward a difficult old question. One whose likely answer we would rather not consider. What's that over there? Oh I see, you've caught me anew. I am your own Distraction. Now let me go and hide again.
     ----  In Praise of Distraction (my own attempt at mingling enjoyment with these studies) 


The Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam with its single, strong, bent tower anchored to one side of a river, enabling dozens of smaller strands to support a path to the other side. Is there a better metaphor for the man himself whose landmark work In Praise of Folly buttressed the revolt in Europe against Catholic control of the spirit—a revolt that led eventually to the humanism that lessened the role of the supernatural in daily life? I think not.

In Praise of Folly, published in 1511, starts off with "a satirical passage, in which Folly praises herself; it then takes a darker tone in a series of orations as Folly praises self-deception and madness and moves to a satirical examination of pious but superstitious abuses of Catholic doctrine and corrupt practices in parts of the Roman Catholic Church and the folly of pedants. The essay ends with a straightforward statement of Christian ideals." This short book (less than 100 pages), supposedly written in one week as a gift to Erasmus' friend Thomas More (he of Utopia), laid the foundations of the Protestant Reformation with an impervious critique against the practices of the Church and its political allies. Over the past four weeks, I've been stuck in the medieval religious musings of Islamic and Christian philosophers--Avicenna, Anslem, Averroes, and Aquinas—who represented the stagnation of European thought from AD 1000-1250 with something akin to a stutterer trying to begin a recitation of the alphabet. A, a, a, a… But then, a further 250 years later, after that stagnation left society rotting in corrupt practices among the powerful, someone finally became more concerned with human affairs than with finding proofs for the existence of beings that offer no such evidence of being.

Erasmus was the most famous and influential humanist of the Northern Renaissance. He was, to quote the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy at length, "a phenomenally productive writer (the most complete edition of his collected works fills ten large folio volumes) and was the first European intellectual to exploit fully the power of the printed word, making the true center of his career not a university or the court of a secular prince or high prelate but the greatest publishing houses of the Netherlands, Paris, Venice, and—above all—Basel. He was a prolific and influential author in many genres. He was a leading writer on education, author of five influential treatises on humanist educational theory, and even a greater number of widely used and often reprinted textbooks taught in humanistic schools throughout Europe. The guides to theological method and exegesis of the Bible that he wrote as prefaces to the 1516 and 1518 editions of the New Testament mark a major turn in theology and the interpretation of Scripture and posed a serious challenge to the scholastic theology that had dominated university faculties of theology since the thirteenth century. The one genre in which Erasmus wrote no works at all was philosophy, though he often cited ancient philosophers and dealt (normally in a non-philosophical way) with several intellectual problems of interest to philosophers."

In those days, humanism was not so much a philosophy, but more of a method of learning that stood in contrast to the medieval scholastic mode. While scholastics focused on resolving contradictions between authors, humanists studied ancient texts in the original and appraised them through a combination of reasoning and empirical evidence. This is exactly what I am trying to do with my analysis of the survival of the fittest philosophers. So even though he's less of a philosopher and more of a social critic, Erasmus nevertheless marks an important shift in thinking that took place so he is worth noting in this series of essays on the evolution of human philosophy. With that in mind, let's see how Erasmus stacks up.

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Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536 CE) was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, early proponent of religious toleration, and theologian. He has been called the Prince of the Humanists, and the crowning glory of the Christian humanists.

Survives
Erasmus is most famous for “In Praise of Folly” in which the personification of Folly praises foolish activities of the day, including superstitious religious practices, uncritical theories held by traditional scientists, the vanity of Church leaders, folk beliefs in ghosts and goblins, Christian rituals involving prayers to the saints, and the sale of “indulgence certificates” by the Catholic church to raise money for lavish building projects in return for less time in purgatory. It’s always good to call for an end to wasteful practices that do harm to the species.

Needs to Adapt
Erasmus marks the point where the “new learning” had arrived at the parting of the ways. He tried to free the methods of scholarship from the rigidity and formalism of medieval traditions. His life seems full of fatal contradictions, but it was his conviction that what was needed to regenerate Europe was sound learning, applied frankly and fearlessly to the administration of public affairs in Church and State. All great, except the applications of this learning would eventually undermine the very existence of a church at all.

When Erasmus was charged with “laying the egg that Luther hatched,” he half admitted the charge but said he had expected quite another bird. Unfortunately he showed cowardice or a lack of purpose by writing that a man may properly have two opinions on religious subjects - one for himself and his intimate friends, and another for the public. Truth should never be hidden from the public. Erasmus probably would not have felt the need to hide his beliefs in later ages, but at least he was another thin wedge cracking the hegemony of the church.

Gone Extinct
After his death his writings were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Roman Catholic Church. It’s not his writings that have gone extinct, but the idea that a book should ever be banned by a religion. What a shame this Catholic practice occurred for over 400 years from 1559 to 1966.
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Not bad. Erasmus is also the man who coined the following famous phrase:

In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.

And while he did, unfortunately live in very blind times, Erasmus managed to open one eye and also had this sage advice to offer:

You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.

Would that we all could take such a path and avoid the madness many of our childhoods inflicted…

Phew. Got a satire you'd like to write for fun? Share it in the comments below. I think we could all use a giggle.

This is a picture of a lecture hall where the very first public dissection of a human body was performed in the oldest university in the world. Do you know where it is? Shouldn't this be a place of pilgrimage for anyone wanting to cherish the role that learning has played in our history? I think it should.

University. The word is derived from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars." Prior to their creation, apprentices were taught in separate guilds; there was no "one place" you could go to for any and all learning. And most scholarly work (if you can call it that) took place in monasteries where Christian dogma was passed down unchallenged during the 500-600 years after the fall of Rome. Finally though, around 1080 AD,  “scholasticism" was introduced into religious studies by Anselm who wanted to use reason to (ontologically) prove the existence of his god and thereby justify all the monastic work that had gone toward that belief. These new scholastics became focused on applying logic and facts about natural processes to biblical passages in an attempt to prove their viability. This became the primary mission of lecturers, and the expectation of students in monasteries. As more and more of the products of these monasteries interacted with the world though, reason finally leaked into the general public. All over Europe "rulers and city governments began to create universities to satisfy a European thirst for knowledge and the belief that society would benefit from the scholarly expertise generated from these institutions. Princes and leaders of city governments perceived the potential benefits of having a scholarly expertise develop with the ability to address difficult problems and achieve desired ends." The first universities in Europe were thus formed in Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford (1167), Modena (1175), Palencia (1208), Cambridge (1209), Salamanca (1218), Montpellier (1220), Padua (1222), Naples (1224), and Toulouse (1229). The rediscovery of Aristotle's works during this time (which we saw in the story of Averroes last week) also fuelled this general spirit of rational inquiry that had now re-emerged into the world.

Also emerging into this world, just after the 10th ever university was founded, was Thomas Aquinas. Born in 1225 in Roccasecca, a small village midway between Rome and Naples, Aquinas "lived at a critical juncture of western culture when the arrival of the Aristotelian corpus in Latin translation reopened the question of the relation between faith and reason that had remained intact for centuries." The fact that this crisis flared up just as universities were being founded meant that Aquinas (who came from a wealthy family intent on educating him) was well positioned to study these questions of faith and reason and ended up becoming the one to find a new way of coexisting between these two poles. The result was one that survived in secular society until the rise of physics tore the religious universe apart. Even today though, in the religious world, Aquinas is "honored as a saint by the Catholic Church and is held to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. In modern times, under papal directives, the study of his works have long been used as a core of the required program of study for those seeking ordination as priests or deacons, as well as for those in religious formation and for other students of the sacred disciplines (Catholic philosophy, theology, history, liturgy, and canon law)."

This sounds crazy, relying on 13th century writings for modern education, until you realise that religion does not use evidence to progress and Aquinas led the way for that stagnation with quotes such as:

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.

This perfectly illustrates the unbridgeable divide between the faithful and the secular that has kept religion mired in simplistic thinking for thousands of years. I sometimes grow weary of entering the religious debate over and over, but it is worth remembering this quote from Aquinas to find the strength to continue on:

Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.

Isn't that a good motto for philosophers to follow. And like the unsettled times that Aquinas lived in, when Aristotelean reason butted heads with Christian faith, our current information age is a new time of diverse ideas coming together. Like the universities that brought communities of scholars together for the first time, the internet is now bringing together vast new universes of knowledge that are mixing together and being distilled for truth. Those who take the time to open-mindedly contemplate the diverse beliefs that existed in their own niches for hundreds or thousands of years can eventually discover the truths that survive the competition of combination and appraisal. Once that task is done, those truths must, as Aquinas said, be shared to illuminate others who remain stuck in their secluded mindsets. I'll continue my own efforts now to illuminate—and to find others who can illuminate me—by sharing my analysis of how Aquinas fared in my survival of the fittest philosophers. Please point out to me where I am wrong so that I may cease being wrong as soon as possible.

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Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 CE) was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism. The works for which he is best known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. He is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher.

Survives

Needs to Adapt
Aquinas was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology. Natural theology is a branch of theology based on reason and ordinary experience. Thus it is distinguished from revealed theology (or revealed religion), which is based on scripture and religious experiences of various kinds. At least this continued the crack in religious leadership that allowed the light of the scientific method to eventually shine through.

Aquinas defined the four cardinal virtues as prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. There are, however, three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. These are supernatural and are distinct from other virtues in their object, namely, God. The four cardinal virtues do fold into the six categories of virtue enumerated by positive psychology. Hope and charity are contained in two other categories. Faith, if defined as belief in positivity, is a virtue. The religious definition of faith though - belief without proof - is a detriment to life and therefore a vice. None of these virtues are supernatural. All are evolved behaviors that aid in the continued life of the species.

Gone Extinct
Thomas believed that the existence of God is neither obvious nor unprovable. In the Summa Theologica, he considered in great detail five reasons for the existence of God, which he termed the Quinque Viaa or Five Ways. (1) The argument of the unmoved mover. Infinite regression questions leave us with the same question, not god as an answer. We still don’t know how the universe began. (2) The argument of the first cause. This is the same infinite regression that leads us back to the question of what happened before the Big Bang. (3) The argument from contingency. Even if something has always existed, there is nothing to say that it is a god who designed the universe and watches over us. (4) The argument from degree. Actually, there is no evidence of varying degrees of perfection. There is only change and adaptation to the environment in order to remain alive. (5) The teleological argument. This precursor of intelligent design ignores the ignorance of life and the blindness of evolution. For those that cannot adapt, the universe is a changing place with no mercy. The search for a proof for the existence of god continues without success.

In Thomas's thought, the goal of human existence is union and eternal fellowship with God. Specifically, this goal is achieved through the beatific vision, an event in which a person experiences perfect, unending happiness by seeing the very essence of God. This vision, which occurs after death, is a gift from God given to those who have experienced salvation and redemption through Christ while living on earth. How sad that the purpose of life was thought to be death. The meaning of life is to live! With further definitions, religion can allow for long-term thinking and living a good life, but the false promises lead too often to wasted sacrifice, missed opportunities, and enabling self-destructive behavior.

Aquinas believed that truth is known through reason (natural revelation) and faith (supernatural revelation). Supernatural revelation (faith) and natural revelation (reason) are complementary rather than contradictory in nature, for they pertain to the same unity: truth. When supernatural revelations contradict each other, they cannot be said to contain any elements of truth. By definition, no supernatural revelation can ever be proven to be better than any other supernatural revelation. Reason is still the only path to truth.

Aquinas never considered himself a philosopher, and criticized philosophers, whom he saw as pagans, for always "falling short of the true and proper wisdom to be found in Christian revelation.” This philosopher is happy to exclude Aquinas from our ranks. Christian revelation falls well short of the wisdom and truth discovered by philosophy and science.
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So the world went to university and Christianity immediately and forever found its highest thinker. But he wasn't very bright. Meanwhile, universities went on and on with their own discoveries, and so shall we...

in Ancient Greece, an Islamic scholar came along to rebuff Avicenna with a more natural existentialist explanation of what we see. Unfortunately, it took 200 years for this second bright light of this Islamic period to arise, and he did so on the opposite end of the empire some 4500 miles away in Cordoba Spain. This Islamic Aristotelian was Averroes.

If you remember from my profile of Aristotle, we only have 31 of his approximately 200 treatises, and the writing that survives, "makes heavy use of unexplained technical terminology, and his sentence structure can at times prove frustrating...haphazardly organized, if organized at all…(which) helps explain why students who turn to Aristotle after first being introduced to the prose in Plato's dialogues often find the experience frustrating." One of the reasons Aristotle survives at all is because of the translations and summaries that Averroes undertook for these works. Reporting how he was inspired to write his famous commentaries, Averroes said, "Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl summoned me one day and told me that he had heard the Commander of the Faithful complaining about the disjointedness of Aristotle's mode of expression and the resultant obscurity of his intentions. He said that if someone took on these books who could summarize them and clarify their aims after first thoroughly understanding them himself, people would have an easier time comprehending them. 'If you have the energy,' Ibn Tufayl told me, 'you do it. I'm confident you can, because I know what a good mind and devoted character you have, and how dedicated you are to the art.'"

Important work, these summaries of philosophers too lost in their obtuse thoughts for their own good… Speaking of which, here's how I viewed the contributions of Averroes in my own analysis of the survival of the fittest philosophers.
 
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Averroes (1126-1198 CE) was a Muslim polymath, a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics.

Survives
In ontology, Averroes rejects the view advanced by Avicenna that existence is merely accidental. Avicenna held that “essence is ontologically prior to existence.” The accidental, i.e. attributes that are not essential, are additional contingent characteristics. A hat may be red, it may be old, and (for Avicenna) it may exist. Averroes, following Aristotle, holds that individual existing substances are primary. One may separate them mentally; however, ontologically speaking, existence and essence are one. Yes. More existentialism in history.

Averroes’ most important original philosophical work was The Incoherence of Incoherence, in which he defended Aristotelian philosophy. Other works were the Fasl al-Maqal, which argued for the legality of philosophical investigation under Islamic law. Averroes, following Plato, accepted the principle of women’s equality. He thought they should be educated and allowed to serve in the military; the best among them might be tomorrow’s philosophers or rulers. Averroes had no discernible influence on Islamic philosophic thought until modern times though. What a shame for such a large swath of humanity.

Needs to Adapt
Arab philosophers did not have access to Aristotle's Politics. Averroes commented on Plato's Republic, arguing that the state there described was the same as the original constitution of the Arabs. Averroes, following Plato’s paternalistic model, advances an authoritarian ideal. Absolute monarchy led by a philosopher-king creates a virtuous society. This requires extensive use of coercion, although persuasion is preferred and possible if the young are properly raised. Kings, even philosopher-kings, are an untenable inconsistency in a cooperative society. Representative government is required to strengthen social bonds since that is philosophically consistent with the ideal society’s principles. Force may be required to ensure that cheaters do not win, and cooperation increases when punishment from the group is allowed, but no one should be coerced to do the right thing. Raising the young properly would go a long way toward creating this kind of society.

Gone Extinct
According to Averroes, there is no conflict between religion and philosophy; they are different ways of reaching the same truth. He believed in the eternity of the universe. He also held that the soul is divided into two parts, one individual and one divine; while the individual soul is not eternal, all humans at the basic level share one and the same divine soul. Averroes has two kinds of Knowledge of Truth. The first being his knowledge of truth of religion being based in faith and thus could not be tested, nor did it require training to understand. The second knowledge of truth is philosophy, which was reserved for an elite few who had the intellectual capacity to undertake its study. The beliefs he held show just how incompatible religion is with philosophy. The universe is not eternal - we can now roughly date it. There are no souls separate from existence. And no one should take religious views blindly. Philosophy, evolutionary philosophy anyway, finds justification for laws and morality that are useful for everyone, not just an intellectual elite.
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Influenced by the empirical worldview of Aristotle, Averroes' thoughts could have been a great influence on the direction of the Islamic world. Unfortunately, that empire was about to crumble and have little time for well thought out progress. There is "little agreement on the precise causes" of the decline of the golden age of Islam, but in addition to invasions by Mongols and crusaders that brought the destruction of libraries and madrasahs, it has also been suggested that political mismanagement and the stifling of ijtihad (independent reasoning) in the 12th century in favor of institutionalised taqleed (imitation) thinking played a part. The destruction of Baghdad in 1258 by Hulagu Khan (Genghis Khan's grandson and Kublai Khan's brother) is traditionally seen as the approximate end of the Golden Age—a mere 60 years after the death of Averroes. Just as the fall of the Roman Empire stalled scientific explorations and progress by the Aristotelian disciples of that age, any further explorations the Islamic world may have made were halted by yet another disastrous political upheaval.

Fortunately, Averroes' thoughts took hold in a Europe that was ready to listen to Aristotle and the wisdom of ancient greece again after several centuries of stagnation. Averroes was "the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe" and his detailed commentaries on Aristotle earned him the title of "The Commentator" in Europe. Latin translations of Averroes' work led the way to the popularisation of Aristotle and were responsible for the development of scholasticism in medieval Europe, which we saw the beginnings of last week with Anselm and will continue a bit further next week with our penultimate religious scholar. Stay tuned!