“Building on a broad array of sources and studies, Beckwith highlights one of the early information circuits that crossed the Old World. Once again, Central Asia serves as the pivot of not only the political and military history of Eurasia, but of its intellectual development as well. Beckwith’s erudite and wide-ranging study traces the complex paths via which these ideas and institutions spread, giving us a deeper understanding of the interconnections of Eurasian civilization and the underpinnings of modern science and thought.”–Peter B. Golden, Rutgers University

“The insights contained in this book could not have come from anyone else but the inquisitive and resourceful Beckwith. Warriors of the Cloisters draws on research into an extraordinarily broad range of subjects and is certain to elicit debate.”–S. Frederick Starr, Johns Hopkins University

“An outstanding and original contribution. Beckwith’s interdisciplinary skills and linguistic versatility support a crucial and critical evaluation that challenges orthodox interpretations of the scholastic method as a solely European invention. Warriors of the Cloisters is likely to fuel scholarly debates and inspire new avenues of comparative research in Eurasian studies.”–Georgios T. Halkias, Ruhr University

Christopher I. Beckwith is professor of Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. His books include Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present and The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages (both Princeton).

Warriors of the Cloisters

The Central Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval WorldBy Christopher I. Beckwith

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15531-9

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………ixAcknowledgments………………………………………………………………….xvAbbreviations and Transcription of Foreign Languages…………………………………xviiChapter One Introduction…………………………………………………………1Chapter Two The Recursive Argument Method of Medieval Science………………………..11Chapter Three From College and Universitas to University…………………………….37Chapter Four Buddhist Central Asian Invention of the Method………………………….50Chapter Five Islamization in Classical Arabic Central Asia…………………………..76Chapter Six Transmission to Medieval Western Europe…………………………………100Chapter Seven India, Tibet, China, Byzantium, and Other Control Cases…………………121Chapter Eight Conclusion…………………………………………………………147Appendix A: On the Latin Translations of Avicenna’s Works…………………………….167Appendix B: On Peter of Poitiers…………………………………………………..171Appendix C: The Charter of the Collège des Dix-huit……………………………..186References………………………………………………………………………187Index…………………………………………………………………………..199

Chapter One

Introduction

The recursive argument method was “the basic vehicle for the analysis of problems in natural philosophy and theology” from the medieval intellectual revolution to the scientific revolution. It was the actual medieval “scientific method,” and it is apparently the source of what may be called the “ideal” modern literary scientific method. The origin of the recursive argument method has long been a mystery. Those who have tried to solve it have sought to explain it as an outgrowth of one or more earlier European traditions, but their proposals do not answer the most important questions, so the problem has remained unsolved. The same is true for the history of the college.

This book shows how the recursive argument method, the actual medieval scientific method, was transmitted along with the college to medieval Western Europe from Classical Arabic civilization, and how the Central Asian Muslims had earlier adopted both from Buddhist Central Asian civilization. The recursive argument method is analyzed in detail, and examples are given showing its formation and development at each stage and in each of the relevant languages.

The present chapter attempts to place this topic and related issues, especially the college, in the context of the full scientific culture that developed in medieval Western Europe in connection with the transmission of these two cultural elements.

The difficulty of understanding a complex problem as a whole is well summed up in the folk expression, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” It means that one needs to actually leave the forest and stand some distance away from it in order to understand it as a discrete entity—a forest—composed most saliently of trees, and to see that it is different from other discrete entities such as a city, or a mountain range, which similarly are understood as entities from an external vantage point. A complex entity with many constituent elements, whether diverse or homogeneous, cannot be comprehended as a whole from the inside; it is necessary to step outside it. Similarly, understanding the scientific culture that developed in medieval Western Europe requires a perspective from which it can be seen as a discrete entity. In this particular case, the culture in question was similar to other medieval cultures that had some science of one kind or another, but it was different from them in one essential way: the others did not develop a full scientific culture. It is only by comparison with them that the distinctiveness of the Western European development is apparent. This chapter examines the appearance of a full scientific culture in thirteenth-century Western Europe from the external, holistic viewpoint gained by study of the contrasting “control” cases, which are examined one by one in chapter 7.

The Constituent Elements of a Full Scientific Culture

Western Europeans came into intensive, long-lasting contact with the Islamic world in a very direct and personal way from the beginning of the Crusades in 1096 onward. Leaving aside the purely military aspects of this contact, countless thousands of civilians traveled to the Islamic world as merchants or pilgrims, or both. During this period Western Europeans copied practically every significant nonreligious cultural element of Islamic civilization that they encountered, including Classical Arabic science (the Classical Arabic version of largely Aristotelian “natural philosophy”), Arab-Indian mathematics, the poetry and music of Islamic Spain, and much else. All this is well known.

However, it has long been asserted that the recursive argument method developed independently in medieval Western Europe, although it is unattested in any text composed in Latin before the early thirteenth century. It is traditionally known as the “scholastic method,” or quaestiones disputatae ‘disputed questions’ method, and was used in major works of “natural philosophy” (medieval science) and theology by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and many others. The recursive argument method is the “scientific method” of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when science was mostly not done by experiments—so that one can hardly speak of a regular “experimental method,” which did not come to the fore until the scientific revolution—but by public oral or literary disputation. As shown below, the earliest examples of the recursive argument method in Latin are actually found in some of the most famous, important, and influential texts translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century in Spain from Arabic originals written a century earlier.

Similarly, it has been asserted that the highly distinctive college developed independently in medieval Western Europe, despite the fact that no one has ever been able to find any convincing native roots for the college in earlier medieval Europe or classical antiquity. Yet it is unquestioned that the first college in Western Europe was founded in Paris by a man who had just returned from Jerusalem, a landlocked city. That means he had necessarily traveled overland through some area of the Near East—which already was overwhelmingly Islamic—in order to get to Jerusalem. Most pilgrims and warriors traversed at least part of Syria, where an absolutely identical Islamic institution, the madrasa, was widespread by that time. It is also well known in Islamic studies that this institution had first apppeared several centuries earlier in Islamic Central Asia. And it has long been known that an identical institution, with identical functions and the same highly distinctive architectural form, existed already in pre-Islamic times in Buddhist Central Asia, having developed there slowly and organically out of earlier local forms.

That these two cultural elements—the recursive argument method and the college—appeared at the same time in Western Europe, amid a great deal of acknowledged borrowing from the Islamic world during the period of the Crusades, would seem to be sufficient cause for scholars to look to borrowing as their source, too. However, with very few exceptions, that has not been the case, and the Islamic world has been resolutely ignored in connection with them.

The path that other major constituent elements of science followed before their transmission from the Islamic world to medieval Western Europe has also been muddied for a very long time. Moreover, it is remarkable that the Central Asian origin of most of the leading natural philosophers of the great age of Classical Arabic civilization has been generally overlooked.

Similar unclarity is widespread in Islamic studies. From the early Middle Ages onward it has been continuously known that the major works of Indian science were translated into Classical Arabic in the late eighth century, well before the flood of translations from Classical Greek began. Indian (and Buddhist Central Asian) thought had a formative influence on early Islamic civilization. Why then do Islamicists continue to argue that Classical Arabic intellectual civilization developed almost exclusively under Graeco-Roman influence?

Medievalists have known for at least a century that the recursive argument method first appears in Latin texts at the very beginning of the thirteenth century, having no known antecedent in earlier Latin or Greek literature. So why do so many medievalists, ignoring the data and the scholarship on these topics, continue to assert that these elements of medieval science developed purely internally in Europe?

Similarly, it has been known for many decades, from literary and archaeological sources, that the Islamic college, or madrasa, is simply a “converted” Buddhist college, or vihara. Why then do Islamicists continue to argue that the madrasa developed purely internally, under Graeco-Roman or even Persian influence, in the Islamic world?

As remarked above, it is well known that medieval Western Europe came under massive cultural influence from Classical Arabic civilization during the period of the Crusades, and that Europeans borrowed all of the other essential elements of a full scientific culture, along with many other things, from the Islamic world, mostly via Spain. So why did Europeans not borrow the recursive argument method and the college too? Those who advocate a native European origin for the college and the recursive argument method would have us believe that Western Europeans eagerly borrowed everything else from Classical Arabic civilization, but not these two particular elements, which are the key elements of a full scientific culture. Well, why not? Since they existed in the Islamic world, with which Western Europe was then in intensive contact, the usual argument forces us to imagine medieval Western Europeans saying to themselves triumphantly, “We see that the Muslims have the recursive argument method and the college, but we shall not copy them! We shall brilliantly invent precisely the same complex cultural constructs all by ourselves! It will be a pure coincidence!” Since all of the other significant elements of a full scientific culture were borrowed from Classical Arabic civilization, it goes far beyond reasonable doubt to expect any sensible person to believe that medieval Western Europeans just happened to suddenly and independently invent complex cultural constructs that were purely coincidentally precisely the same as the earlier recursive argument method and college long possessed by the neighboring culture. Surely historians, above all, should hesitate to believe in so many miraculous coincidences and other marvelous exceptions to the normal course of events in the world.

The late George Makdisi, a medievalist knowledgeable in both Arabic and Latin sources, courageously proposed that both the “scholastic method” and the college were borrowed from the Islamic world. Unfortunately, despite some convincing arguments, he was unable to support either proposal well enough to gain acceptance. Nevertheless, some decades ago the origin of the Islamic madrasa ‘college’ itself became firmly known from archaeology, and a few years ago the present writer found actual textual evidence of the transmission of the recursive argument method from the Islamic world to Western Europe.

As shown in this book, the recursive argument method was neither a native European invention nor an isolated borrowing. It came in from the Islamic world along with the college, translations of Classical Arabic scientific works, and translations of Classical Arabic commentaries on Aristotle and works in the tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The method was immediately integrated into the existing Western European tradition of Sentences or Questions, literary argument formats that list different positions on problems in theology, law, and other fields.

The sudden influx of cultural borrowing from the Islamic world was fundamental to the development of science in Medieval Latin civilization. Rega Wood writes that “James of Venice’s translations [directly from the Greek] had been available since about 1150, but Aristotelian analytics, metaphysics, and natural philosophy” had very little impact in Western Europe until after “the Michael Scot translations [which were accompanied by Arabic commentaries] became available around 1225.” The revolutionary changes in European science occurred not because of the appearance of “a series of isolated works by Greek authors” but because of the translations from the Islamic “tradition of Aristotelian natural philosophy” that framed many of the problems that became “central to scholastic natural philosophy…. This is true for topics in metaphysics and epistemology and in psychology and biology.” The “sciences of metaphysics and meteorology, physics and chemistry, biology and pyschology were introduced together with Arabic Aristotelianism, and it is difficult to imagine what shape they would have taken without that foundation.” Without the contributions of Muslim natural philosohers such as Avicenna and Averroës, “comprehensive scientific views of the cosmos focused on significant physical problems might not have arisen in the Latin West.” In short, the insights of great Classical Arabic writers are ultimately what got Europeans so excited about science.

The salient elements of the new scientific culture complex that developed in Western Europe in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries all existed in the Islamic world—the works of Aristotle and other ancients, Classical Arabic works on Aristotelian natural science, Indian mathematics, the recursive argument method, and the college—but because the latter two elements were not integrated into Islamic culture, a full scientific culture, or scientific culture complex, did not develop there, and eventually science declined and largely disappeared. In fact, Aristotelian science was considered a “foreign,” non-Islamic science and was viewed with suspicion even during its heyday there, while the recursive argument method and the college were used in Islam almost exclusively for religious purposes, not scientific ones. By contrast, when Western Europeans borrowed these things, they put them to use right away in the pursuit of science, and European culture changed to accomodate them. This accomodation was not superficial or grudging, as science is today in some cultures where it has been adopted or retained for purely practical reasons. With the help of the Arabic commentaries, Western Europeans understood what was exciting about “Aristotelian” science and enthusiastically accepted all these alien cultural elements. Moreover, despite popular belief, the Church did not suppress science; on the contrary, its success was due mainly to the support of the Church. The focus of Western European intellectual culture thus shifted emphatically to Graeco-Arabic natural science, which was made the official curriculum of the new college-universities by the middle of the thirteenth century.

Although this medieval intellectual revolution affected all aspects of Western European culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was above all about science. As Edward Grant has shown, medieval science laid “the foundations of modern science.” The scientific revolution “could not have occurred in Western Europe in the seventeenth century if the level of science and natural philosophy had remained what it was in the first half of the twelfth century, that is, just prior to the translation of Greco-Arabic science that was under way in the latter half of that century. Without the translations, which transformed European intellectual life, and the momentous events that followed from them, the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century would have been impossible.” Moreover, it is absolutely clear that medieval science—and even more so, a full scientific culture—was not the natural outcome of a gradual, centuries-long evolution from the late Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages. “The Greco-Arabic science that entered Western Europe in the twelfth century was not merely the enrichment of a somewhat less developed Latin science. It signified a dramatic break with the past and a new beginning. Logic, science, and natural philosophy were henceforth institutionalized in the newly developed universities.” The new learning quickly became “a torrent of new ideas” that “radically altered” the intellectual life of Western Europe. It brought about an intellectual revolution there that was centered on science.

Most of the essential elements in the development of medieval science and a full scientific culture have been treated quite well by previous scholars, most recently and clearly by Grant. However, the structure and lineage of the recursive argument method has hitherto been unclear, and it has not been shown how it and the college were borrowed by Latin Europe from Classical Arabic civilization at about the same time, nor that they originally came from beyond the Islamic world, nor why these particular elements should have been so decisive in establishing the scientific culture of Western Europe.

It is shown in this book that the original, native cultural context or home of the recursive argument method and the college was not in the Near East or the Islamic world at all, but in ancient Buddhist Central Asia. These two constituent elements were the determining factors that distinguish earlier science from a full scientific culture. Although the very same factors had become part of Islamic civilization when Central Asia converted to Islam, they never became crucially important to Classical Arabic science, which eventually declined drastically. But when the same elements were transmitted to Western Europe, they became of central importance in Medieval Latin culture and were responsible for the development of the world’s first full scientific culture. It is this culture that led eventually to the scientific revolution of the Enlightenment, the direct forerunner of modern science.

The current scholarly consensus is that the practical differences between actual medieval science and actual Enlightenment science (or early modern science), and between the latter and contemporary science, are substantial, regardless of terminology. However, the word science in its contemporary usage is fully “modern,” and it is also undeniable that the Medieval Latin term philosophia had a very different field of reference from that of the Modern English term philosophy and its equivalents in other modern European languages. The goal and methods of Aristotelian science are what al-Ghazali (Algazel) argues against in his famous book translated into Latin as Destructio philosophorum, which does not really mean ‘The Destruction of the Philosophers’ in Modern English but rather more like ‘The Destruction of the Scientists’, taking ‘science’ here in its Aristotelian sense, in which metaphysics is considered to be the most important of all the sciences comprised by philosophia naturalis ‘natural philosophy’.

(Continues…)

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