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VI
ARISTOTELIAN SYNTHESIS
Aristotle’s
Categories and
De Interpretatione, together with Boethius’s commentaries
on them, had long been translated and available to Latin philosophers. From the
mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth centuries, most of the remaining works of Aristotle
were translated and became available. Avicenna and Averroës, both of whom com-
mented extensively on Aristotle, also became available in Latin. These new writ-
ings, which contained much hitherto unknown natural science, dazzled Latin
intellectuals, who were accustomed to the otherworldly speculations of Christian
Neoplatonists. Aristotle’s wide-ranging, systematic approach to scientific knowl-
edge meshed nicely with the new spirit of secular naturalism that independently
had begun to make its appearance. To a whole cadre of Christian intellectuals, hun-
gry for a more scientific approach, Aristotle became known as
the philosopher , a title
that he retained until the seventeenth century.
The newly translated works of Aristotle, which for the next century would
stimulate and confuse European intellectuals, provoked novel questions and cast
old ones in a new light. So far as the self and personal identity are concerned, the
essential problem was that since Origen most Latin philosophers had been used
to thinking that each human has just one soul, a simple, incorporeal substance
which inhabits the body but does not have much else in common with it. On the
views inspired by Aristotle’s De anima, there is not just one soul per human but
several, each of which has a great deal in common with the body. The trick, for
Christian European thinkers struggling to assimilate Aristotle, was to explain
the relationship of Aristotelian souls to one another and to the body in an account
that preserves personal immortality. For the first time in Europe since Christian
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