PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH round Back in Spain he was commissioned in 1168 by the caliph, Abu Yakub, to provide a summary of Aristotle’s works In 1182 he was appointed court physician in addition to his judgeship, and he combined these oYces with his Aristotelian scholarship until, in 1195, he fell into disfavour with the caliph al-Mansur He was brieXy placed under house arrest, and his books were burnt He returned to Morocco and died at Marrakesh in 1198 Throughout his life Averroes had to defend philosophy against attacks from conservative Muslims In response to al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers he wrote a book called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, defending the right of human reason to investigate matters of theology He also wrote a treatise, The Harmony of Philosophy and Religion Is the study of philosophy, he asks, allowed or prohibited by Islamic law? His answer is that it is prohibited to the simple faithful, but for those with the appropriate intellectual powers, it is positively obligatory, provided they keep it to themselves and not communicate it to others (HPR 65) Averroes’ teaching in the Incoherence was misinterpreted by some of his followers and critics as a doctrine of double truth: the doctrine that something can be true in philosophy which is not true in religion, and vice versa But his intention was merely to distinguish between diVerent levels of access to a single truth, levels appropriate to diVerent degrees of talent and training Al-Ghazali’s diatribe had been directed especially against the philosophy of Avicenna In his response to al-Ghazali, Averroes is not an uncritical defender of Avicenna; his own position is often somewhere between that of the two opponents Like Avicenna, he believes in the eternity of the world: he argues that this belief is not incompatible with belief in creation, and he seeks to refute the arguments derived from Philoponus to show that eternal motion is impossible On the other hand, Averroes gradually abandoned Avicenna’s scheme of the emanation from God of a series of celestial intelligences, and he rejected the dichotomy of essence and existence which Avicenna had put forward as the key distinction between creatures and creator He came to deny also Avicenna’s thesis that the agent intellect produced the natural forms of the visible world Against alGhazali, Averroes insisted that there is genuine causation in the created cosmos: natural causes produce their own eVects, and are not mere triggers for the exercise of divine omnipotence But in the case of human intelligence he reduced the role of natural causation further even than Avicenna 49