PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH matter and form There is spiritual matter as well as corporeal matter: the universe is a pyramid with the immaterial godhead at the summit and formless prime matter at the base Since one can no longer equate ‘material’ with ‘bodily’ in his system, Ibn Gabirol has to introduce, like Avicenna, a form of corporeality to make bodies bodies Ibn Gabirol’s universal hylomorphism was to have a considerable inXuence on thirteenth-century Latin Aristotelianism (PMA 359–67) Meanwhile, both in Christianity and in Islam, the eleventh century saw a reaction against philosophy on the part of conservative theologians St Peter Damiani (1007–72), angered by philosophical criticisms of Catholic beliefs about the Eucharist, trumpeted that God had not chosen to save his people by means of dialectic He did, however, himself make use of philosophical reasoning when discussing divine attributes, and it led him to some strange conclusions If these fell foul of the principle of contradiction, so be it: logic was not the mistress, but the maidservant, of theology.20 Towards the end of the century the Persian philosopher and mystic alGhazali (1058–1111) wrote a work, Tahafut al-falasifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’), in which he sought to show not only that Muslim philosophers, in particular Avicenna, were heretical to Islam, but also that they were fallible and incoherent by their own philosophical lights His criticisms of Avicenna’s arguments for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul were often well taken But he is now best remembered because his Incoherence provoked a reply from a twelfth-century philosopher of greater weight, Averroes Anselm of Canterbury Despite these clashes between dialecticians and conservatives, the eleventh century produced one thinker who was both an original philosopher in his own right and a theologian suYciently orthodox to be canonized: St Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) Born in Aosta he became, at the age of 27, a monk at the abbey of Bec There he studied the works of Augustine under its abbot Lanfranc, himself a highly competent scholar, who later became the Wrst archbishop of Canterbury after the Norman conquest of 20 Damiani’s unusual views on omnipotence are discussed below in Ch 40