Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 20:58:17 -0500
From: Gregory {Greg} Downing <downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Maimonides, Averroes, Corbin (was Dante's sources)


At 11:59 AM 11/23/97 -0800, you (Michael Chase) wrote:
>it ought to be forgotten that Arist. was never
>*completely* forgotten in the Medieval West; the Latin translations of e.g.
>Boethius (for the Organon) were used throughout the Middle Ages.

True, but it was mostly translations of late-antique digests like the
_Eisagoge_ ("Introduction"), many of which are in fact not so much straight
Aristot as neoplatonzing (etc.) attempts at syncretism of Plato and
Aristotle, let alone sometimes of the whole philosophical tradition.

>>Weren't both Averroes and Moses Maimonides in Sevilla or thereabouts for at
>>least part of their careers? No time to check. They I think were the
>>respective high-water-mark Aristotelians of the high middle ages in Islam
>>and Judaism, if memory serves (no time to check that either).
>
>M.C.: Well, both were pretty damned important, that's for sure. Maimonides
>(1135-1204) and Averroes (1126-1198) were indeed contemporaries; both were
>born in Cordoba; but I don't know of any proof they ever met. Maimonides
>als lived in Fez, Palestine, and Alexandria, and died in Cairo.
>

That's right, C=F3rdoba! My wife was saying "Get in the shower already. You
are wasting water," when I wrote this Sunday morning, and I knew it was one
of those three southern interior cities in Spain -- C., Sevilla, Granada --
but I just couldn't recall for sure which, and had no time to run and check
a map. I don't think they'd ever have had any huge reason to meet either,
but must have run across each other at least in the street in youth.

My point was that C=F3rdoba was at a certain period the largest and most
flourishing city and intellectual center in western Europe (and had even
been important in Roman times--both Senecas and Lucan were from there), with
at one point in the Middle Ages more than a million inhabitants, when Paris
and London and even Rome (let alone Dublin since my link into this is a
passage in Ulysses, episode 14) weren't remotely in the same class. It had
one of the most important of islamic universities, a magnificent alc=E1zar or
palace-complex (now replaced by a 14C Christian one), one of the most
impressive of all mezquitas or mosques, certainly size-wise, in the islamic
world (24,000 square meters), with a Christian cathedral rather dwarfed
within it, and the remains of the 11C moorish baths just behind it,
presumably setting of Averroes' bath-impregnation anecdote. A bit further
north is the (barrio de la) juder=EDa or Jewish quarter for the sephardic
population, complete with one of the three still-extant early synagogues in
Spain (the other two are in Toledo) on the Calle Maimonides. The site of the
Jewish baths is perhaps two hundred yards north from the moorish ones.

Both Averroes and Maimonides were Cordobans, and in fact were virtual
coevals: Averroes lived 1126-1198, his Jewish contemporary 1135-1204 or
1206. It is the cluster of cordoban cultural strands which most basically
explains Stephen's linkage of Averroes and Maimonides in episode 2 and
likewise in episode 14.

Stephen first thinks of Averroes and Moses Maimonides together in Ulysses in
connection with the medieval origins of modern mathemetical notation while
helping the young-Stephen-like Sargent do his math homework in the middle of
Ulysses episode 2. After Stephen sits and helps him work out the problem
after class, and waits for him to work it out and write it out himself,
Stephen sees the numbers as dancing a stately dance (`morrice,' with perhaps
a play on `moor(ish)') along the page, `imps of fancy of the Moors'
(2.157/28.13-14).

In episode 14, St. links the two guys as possible sources for the sixth and
last in his list of weird nonsexual modes of impregnation, laid out while
trying to impress the young medicals in the conference room of the Holles
Street National Maternity Hospital in Dublin: it's the idea that a woman
could get pregnant from a bath. This mode of impregnation is in fact
mentioned in Averroes, who cites a case along these lines in Colliget, a
medical work (in medieval terms anyway).

The most likely source for this information on Stephen's part is not
Averroes directly, but Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, often
referred to by an English version of the title, Vulgar Errours. Stephen as a
turn-of-the-cent English and Mod Langs major at Univ. College Dublin has
read heavily in Renaissance and early-modern literature (in the broadest
sense), and Browne is an author he would quite properly have read as one of
the major prose authors of the mid 17C. That's where he got this
sperm-in-the-bath item, not Averroes directly: and like the rest of the
items in Stephen's list, this contributes to the Renaissance/early-modern
tonality of the epsiode-14 passage where St dominates the conversation (all
of episode 14 is in a series of historical styles from ancient to 20th cent
slang and dialect).

Pat also wanted to know something else -- about how Dante and Bernard fit
into Stephen's theology or something? Let me know. The above is more than
enough for one post.

Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing-AT-nyu.edu or downingg-AT-is2.nyu.edu



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