an their teacher. Paris became the
centre of a sceptical society, which the decrees of bishops and
councils, and the enthusiasm of the orthodox doctors and knights-errant
of Catholicism, were powerless to extinguish. At Oxford Averroes told
more as the great commentator. In the days of Roger Bacon he had become
an authority. Bacon, placing him beside Aristotle and Avicenna,
recommends the study of Arabic as the only way of getting the knowledge
which bad versions made almost hopeless. In Duns Scotus, Averroes and
Aristotle are the unequalled masters of the science of proof; and he
pronounces distinctly the separation between Catholic and philosophical
truth, which became the watchword of Averroism. By the 14th century
Averroism was the common leaven of philosophy; John Baconthorpe is the
chief of Averroists, and Walter Burley has similar tendencies.

Meanwhile Averrcism had come to be regarded by the great Dominican
school as the arch-enemy of the truth. When the emperor Frederick II.
consulted a Moslem free-thinker on the mysteries of the faith, when the
phrase or legend of the "Three Impostors" presented in its most
offensive form the scientific survey of the three laws of Moses, Christ
and Mahomet, and when the characteristic doctrines of Averroes were
misunderstood, it soon followed that his name became the badge of the
scoffer and the sceptic. What had begun with the subtle disputes of the
universities of Paris, went on to the materialist teachers in the
medical schools and the sceptical men of the world in the cities of
northern Italy. The patricians of Venice and the lecturers of Padua made
Averroism synonymous with doubt and criticism in theology, and with
sarcasm against the hierarchy. Petrarch refuses to believe that any good
thing can come out of Arabia, and speaks of Averroes as a mad dog
barking against the church. In works of contemporary art Averroes is at
one time the comrade of Mahomet and Antichrist; at another he lies with
Arius and Sabellius, vanquished by the lance of St Thomas.

The school of Padua.

It was in the universities of north Italy that Averroism finally
settled, and there for three centuries it continued as a stronghold of
Scholasticism to resist the efforts of revived antiquity and of
advancing science. Padua became the seat of Averroist Aristotelianism;
and, when Padua was conquered by Venice in 1405, the printers of the
republic spread abroad the teaching of the professors in th