Averroes' Doctrine of Immortality: A Matter of Controversy

Thomas Mathien was working on the Bibliography of Philosophy in Canada at the University of Toronto.

The author is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Regis College in the Toronto School of Theology. The book, a published version of his doctoral dissertation, discusses the views of Averroes (Ibn Rochd), a twelfth century Islamic philosopher and commentator on Aristotle, about the soul, its immortality, and the relation of reason to revelation.

As his medieval European readers understood him, Averroes was thought to deny the immortality of individual human souls because they were the forms of perishable bodies. He was seen, therefore, as denying personal immortality while maintaining that there was a kind of personal immortality to be found in a single separable intellect carrying out the immaterial operations of thought which others attribute to individual souls. Averroes’ defenders and detractors agreed that these positions conflicted with what they believed to be revealed Christian doctrine and disputed the relation of reason to revelation. Recent European commentators on Averroes have tended to see him as holding that philosophically established truths are at best expressed metaphorically in revelation.

Professor Mohammed claims that standard European readings of Averroes misunderstand both his theory of the soul and his views on revelation. He maintains that Averroes saw reason and revelations as distinct but not conflicting roads to truth. Reason functions to justify and clarify revealed truth. For Averroes, this revelation is the revealed law of the Qur’an rather than the revealed doctrine of the Bible as understood by commentators influenced by Platonic philosophy. The Qur’an licenses the use of reason as a route to truth. It also suggests that the genuine hope for life after death lies in a resurrection of the body, not in disembodied existence. Truly immaterial operations, such as those of reason, are things of God alone. Averroes’ philosophical teachings that human souls are inactive (not annihilated) after death and that there is an ontological separation between the activities of the intellect and those of human sense and imagination are consistent with at least one reading of the Qur’an legitimized by the text itself. Moreover, the author claims the Qur’anic position on death and resurrection is similar to the Jewish and the early Christian views. Averroes’ position fits a reading of the New Testament uninfluenced by the Platonic philosophical tradition.

If this had been a philosophical rather than a theological discussion of Averroes, certain questions left unanswered by Professor Mohammed’s interpretation would have to be faced. These include the way in which souls, regarded as perfections of bodies, could have even an inactive individuated existence after death, and the way in which the passive intellect can be one but associated with many individuals.