Note 243 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Now, however, began to be seen once for all the impossibility of rational freedom in or under a church which depended for its revenue on the dogmatic exploitation of popular credulity. For a time the Aristotelian influence, as had been seen by the churchmen who had first sought to destroy it,243 tended to be Averroïst and rationalist.244 In 1269, however, there begins a determined campaign, led by the bishop of Paris, against the current Averroïst doctrines, notably the propositions “that the world is eternal”; “that there never was a first man”; “that the intellect of man is one”; “that the mind, which is the form of man, constituting him such, perishes with the body”; “that the acts of men are not governed by divine providence”; “that God cannot give immortality or incorruptibility to a corruptible or mortal thing.”245 On such doctrines the bishop and his coadjutors naturally passed an anathema (1270); and at this period it was that Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas wrote their treatises against Averroïsm.246