Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-fmk2r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-12T11:36:03.494Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Creation and Science in the Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

William E. Carroll
William E. Carroll*
Affiliation:
Thomas Aquinas Fellow in Theology and Science, Blackfriars, University of Oxford
*
OX1 3LY, Email: william.carroll@bfriars.ox.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The reception of Greek learning in mediaeval Islam, Judaism, and Christianity was the occasion for a profound analysis of many theological doctrines. In particular, Neoplatonism and Aristotelian philosophy led to renewed thinking about what it means for God to be the Creator of all that is. In the Latin West, Thomas Aquinas benefited from the works of Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides as he fashioned his understanding of creation, understood both philosophically and theologically. The recognition that creation is not a change and as a metaphysical dependence in the order of being does not challenge claims in the natural sciences (e.g., that something cannot come from absolutely nothing) are crucial features of the mediaeval heritage on the relationship between creation and the natural sciences. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas argued that an eternal, created universe was intelligible.

Keywords

AquinasAverroesAvicennacreationMaimonides
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 88 , Issue 1018 , November 2007 , pp. 678 - 689
Copyright
Copyright © The author 2007. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 This essay was given as a lecture at the symposium, “Science, Faith, and Culture,” jointly sponsored by Blackfriars and the Pontifical Council for Culture, at Oxford in March 2005.

2 Quoted in Goodman, L. E., Avicenna (London: Routledge, 1992), 49Google Scholar. An Ash’arite theologian, he taught al‐Ghazali at Nishapur.

3 The vast project of translation into Arabic lasted from the middle of the eighth century until the middle of the eleventh century.

4 The specific debate concerned whether Aristotelian logic transcended the Greek language and was, thus, appropriate to use by those who spoke and wrote in Arabic.

5 al‐Shifa’: al‐Ilahiyyat, VI. 1, quoted in Hyman, A. and Walsh, J. (eds.), Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions, second edition (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 248Google Scholar.

6 Maimonides, commenting on what he thinks Jews, Christians, and Muslims hold in common, does not include the unity of God, because he thinks that it may be doubted that Christians are monotheists, and observes that “temporal creation” (vs. the eternity of the world) is such a common doctrine. The Guide of the Perplexed, (Pines, S., trans., Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963), Book I, c. 71, vol. 1, 178Google Scholar.

7 “This world of shared intellectual discourse could exist because, in origin and content, much of it was neither Islamic nor Jewish nor Christian: it was Greek. Moreover, Arabic was not just the language of the dominant, and hostile majority religion, but also the linguistic medium of mathematics, logic, and medicine, subjects which we call (and they felt were) secular.” Cohen, Mark R., “Medieval Jewry in the World of Islam,” in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Goodman, Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 204Google Scholar.

8 Alain de Libera, in Raison et Foi: Archéologie d’une crise d’Albert le Grand à Jean Paul II (2003), argues for the importance of Albert and Thomas in working out the relations between theology and philosophy – as part of the reactions (both positive and negative) to the heritage of Arabic Aristotelianism. He thinks that the separation they work out is condemned in the ecclesiastical censure of 1277 and that it is not the position which triumphs in the Middle Ages. Thomas and Albert are opposed by an Augustinian party which will always insist that philosophy must teach what faith contains: that is, there can be no existence of philosophy separate from revealed theology and the Church must maintain control over philosophical life.

9 John Paul II, “A Dynamic Relationship of Theology and Science,” 1 June 1988, published in L’Osservatore Romano, 26 October 1988. Letter to George Coyne, Director of the Vatican Observatory.