Natural Reason and God’s Infinite Power: Diversity of Approaches in the Late 13th and 14th Century Commentaries on Averroes’s De substantia orbis

Abstract

The subject of this article is Latin reception of Averroes’s treatise De substantia orbis, with special regard to the commentary practice in the late Middle Ages. Numerous philosophical problems were taken up in these commentaries following Averroes’s lead. The most controver-sial among them were these concerning divine attributes, i.e., infinite power, efficient and final causality, and, consequently, God's ability to create out of nothing. Three different commentaries were therefore chosen to exemplify the key differences be-tween the doctrinal approaches of the commentaries on the De substantia orbis. The first two of them—composed by Fernand of Spain and Maino de’ Maineri—represent the Averroistic approach, adopting and developing Averroes’s ideas; the third commentary—composed by an anonymous author in Erfurt around 1362—represents the non-Averroistic approach referring to the questions raised in the De substantia orbis in order to propose orthodox solutions being far from these adopted in the treaty by Averroes himself. The article aims at scrutinizing the problems of infinite power of God and divine causali-ty as they have been taken up by Latin philosophers from the late XIIIth to the second half of the XIVth century by elucidating the key differences between the two lines of inquiry and highligh-ting the variety of approaches to Averroes’s De substantia orbis.