Abstract

Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa contra Gentiles, cites by name and quotes Avicenna seventeen times explicitly. A detailed examination of all these passages reveals that Thomas sometimes, although rarely—in fact, only with regard to the discussion of the divine attributes of truth and liberality—makes a positive assessment of Avicenna’s ideas. Much more often, Thomas is highly critical of the latter’s doctrines. It comes as no surprise that Thomas strongly opposes Avicenna’s theories of emanation and of knowledge acquisition by an illumination of the agent intellect. However, it is astonishing that he qualifies Avicenna as a “Platonist.” This understanding seems to result partly from Averroistic influences, partly from Thomas’s desire to make Avicenna’s system—in spite of the presence of obvious tensions in it—completely coherent, and partly from some rewordings which fit better Thomas’s own system. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Avicenna was for Thomas a real “auctoritas.”