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The century in which the school of Chartres most distin-
guished itself was a time of great intellectual excitement. As the
Christians began to push back their Muslim conquerors in Spain
and defeated them in Sicily in the late eleventh century, Catholic
scholars came into possession of important Arab centers of learn-
ing. Muslims had come into contact with Greek science in the
wake of their conquests of Alexandria and Syria and had studied
and commented on the classical texts. Ancient Greek texts lost to
Europeans for centuries, which Muslims had translated into Ara-
bic, were now recovered and translated into Latin. In Italy, Latin
translations could be made directly from the original Greek.
Among these texts were Aristotle s key physics books, including
Physics, On the Heavens and World, and On Generation and
Corruption.
Many Catholic scholars had simply assumed that there could
be no serious contradiction between the truths of the faith and
the best of ancient philosophy. But contradictions there were, as
these new texts made increasingly evident. Aristotle had
posited an eternal universe, whereas the Church taught that
God had created the world at a moment in time, out of nothing.
Aristotle also denied the possibility of a vacuum. A modern
reader could easily overlook the theological implications of this
point, but a great many Catholics, particularly in the thirteenth
century, did not. To deny the possibility of a vacuum was to
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deny God s creative power, for nothing was impossible to an
omnipotent God. Still other problematic statements could be
found within Aristotle s corpus of work and would have to be
confronted.
One approach was taken by a group of people known as the
Latin Averroists (after Averros, one of the most famous and
respected Muslim commentators on Aristotle). Their position has
often been described, inaccurately, as the doctrine of the double
truth: that what is false in theology could be true in philosophy
and vice versa, and that contradictory statements could therefore
both be true depending on whether they were considered from
the point of view of religion or of philosophy.
What they actually taught was more subtle. They believed
that Aristotle s views, such as the eternity of the earth, were the
certain results of sound reasoning, and that no fault could be
found in the logical process that led to them. Yet these views con-
tradicted divine revelation. The Latin Averroists solved the prob-
lem by arguing that as philosophers they had to follow the
dictates of reason wherever they led, but that since the conclu-
sions they reached contradicted revelation, they could not be
true in any absolute sense. After all, what was feeble human rea-
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son against the omnipotence of God, who transcended it?
To conservative scholars, this solution seemed every bit as
unstable and fraught with difficulty as it does to us, and it turned
some Catholic thinkers away from philosophy altogether. Saint
Thomas Aquinas, who deeply respected Aristotle, feared that a
conservative reaction to the errors of the Averroists might lead
to the abandonment of The Philosopher (as he referred to Aris-
totle) altogether. In his famous synthesis, Saint Thomas demon-
strated that faith and reason were complementary and could not
contradict each other. Any apparent contradictions that arose
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THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 91
indicated errors in one s understanding either of religion or of
philosophy.
In spite of Aquinas s brilliance, apprehension about the new
texts and some scholars responses to them still existed. It was in
this context that shortly after Saint Thomas s death the bishop of
Paris issued a series of 219 condemned propositions known to
history as the Condemnations of 1277 that professors at the
University of Paris were forbidden to teach. These condemned
propositions were statements of Aristotelian teaching or in
some cases merely the potential conclusion of an Aristotelian
claim that were irreconcilable with the Catholic understanding
of God and the world. Although the condemnations applied only
to Paris, there is good evidence that their influence was felt as far
away as Oxford. The pope had not played any role in the con-
demnations; he had merely requested an investigation into the
causes of all the intellectual turmoil that had beset the masters at
Paris. (One scholar argues that there was less than enthusiastic
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papal approval of the bishop of Paris actions. )
Even the Condemnations of 1277, however, had a positive
effect on the development of science. Pierre Duhem, one of the
great twentieth-century historians of science, went so far as to
argue that these condemnations represented the beginning
of modern science. What Duhem and more recent scholars like
A. C. Crombie and Edward Grant have suggested is that the
condemnations forced thinkers to break out of the intellectual
confinement that Aristotelian presuppositions had fastened
upon them, and to think about the physical world in new ways.
By condemning certain aspects of Aristotelian physical theory,
they began to break Western scholars of the habit of relying so
heavily on Aristotle, and gave them an opportunity to begin
thinking in ways that departed from ancient assumptions.
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Although scholars have disagreed over the relative influence of
the condemnations, all agree that they forced thinkers to eman-
cipate themselves from the restrictions of Aristotelian science
and to consider possibilities that the great philosopher never
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envisioned.
Let us consider one example. As we have noted, Aristotle
denied the possibility of a vacuum, and thinkers in the High Mid-
dle Ages typically followed him in this view. After the condemna-
tions were issued, scholars were now required to concede that the
all-powerful God could indeed create a vacuum. This opened new
and exciting scientific possibilities. To be sure, some scholars
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