However little one may agree with his chief tenets, there can be no doubt that he was the most enlightened man of the entire Middle Age, in Europe at least; and if his spirit and work had been continued, Western Islam might have become a great permanent civilizing power.  But here again, after a brief period of extraordinary philosophic brilliancy, fanaticism got the upper hand.  With the death of Averroes the last hope of a beneficent Muslim civilization came to an end.  Since then, Islam has been a synonym for blind fanaticism and cruel bigotry.  In many parts of the Muslim world, “philosopher” is a term of reproach, like “miscreant.”

But though Islam rejected its philosopher, Averroes’s work was by no means without its effect.  It was through his commentaries on Aristotle that the thought of that greatest of ancient thinkers became known to the western world, both Jewish and Christian.  Among the Jews, his writings soon acquired almost canonical authority.  His system found expression in the works of the best known of Hebrew thinkers, Maimonides (1135-1204), “the second Moses” works which, despite all orthodox opposition, dominated Jewish thought for nearly three hundred years, and made the Jews during that time the chief promoters of rationalism.  When Muslim persecution forced a large number of Jews to leave Spain and settle in Southern France, the works of Averroes and Maimonides were translated into Hebrew, which thenceforth became the vehicle of Jewish thought; and thus Muslim Aristotelianism came into direct contact with Christianity.

Among the Christians, the works of Averroes, translated by Michael Scott, “wizard of dreaded fame,” Hermann the German, and others, acted at once like a mighty solvent.  Heresy followed in their track, and shook the Church to her very foundations.  Recognizing that her existence was at stake, she put forth all her power to crush the intruder.  The Order of Preachers, initiated by St. Dominic of Calahorra (1170-1221), was founded; the Inquisition was legalized (about 1220).  The writings of Aristotle and his Arab commentators were condemned to the flames (1209, 1215, 1231).  Later, when all this proved unavailing, the best intellects in Christendom, such as Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), and Thomas Aquinas (1227-74), undertook to repel the new doctrine with its own weapons; that is, by submitting the thought of Aristotle and his Arab commentators to rational discussion.  Thus was introduced the second or palmy period of Christian Scholasticism, whose chief industry, we may fairly say, was directed to the refutation of the two leading doctrines of Averroes.  Aiming at this, Thomas Aquinas threw the whole dogmatic system of the Church into the forms of Aristotle, and thus produced that colossal system of theology which still prevails in the Roman Catholic world; witness the Encyclical AEterni Patris of Leo XIII., issued in 1879.