Digital Continent Digital Continent_Template amended | Page 22

St. Albert the Great is a representative of the University of Paris from 1241 to 1252.
Albert interpreted Aristotle’s arguments for the eternity of the world as simply amounting to “the
claim that the world did not arise and cannot end through generation and motion and thus teach
nothing contrary to faith.” 28 According to Albert, Aristotle’s arguments were not concerned with
creation but with change and hence only concluded the impossibility of the world coming into
existence by means of change. Since creation is not a type of change, Aristotle’s argument was
not contradictory with the doctrine of creation. Creation, for Albert, was beyond the reach of
philosophy: “Philosophers cannot come to understand the notion of creation; creation is an opus
miraculi transcending reason only knowable to faith." 29
These Christian Scholastics from Oxford and Paris were responding to Averroist
commentators of Aristotle who were responsible for two major heretical positions “(1) the
unicity of the intellect in mankind, and (2) the eternity of the world.” 30 Averroists held that the
eternity of the world, which for them meant that the world had no beginning and no end, was
28
Ibid, 290.
Ibid.
30
John Pecham, Questions Concerning the Eternity of the World, tr. Vincent G. Potter (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1993), x.
29
Page 12 of 62