Race and premodern epistemology

Epistemology means «theory of knowledge». It aims at defining what knowledge is, separating true knowledge from what is not. Epistemology designs which objects are knowable and analyzes how the subject can know the object, thereby establishing what modes of knowledge production are legitimate and valid. As such, the language wherein epistemology is articulated informs the content of epistemology itself. Even the modern term «epistemology» which is current in global English-speaking world, results absent in pre-modern Europe. The Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier introduced «epistemology» in XIX century: it corresponds to a premodern transversal field of knowledge, wider than the one that the same term designs in modern philosophy. In Latin-speaking world, from late antiquity to late medieval times, such a wider space extended across philosophy, natural science, ethics and metaphysics, and it licked theology to which it inextricably related. Premodern epistemology underwent transformations in response to the mobilization of institutional racism by European Catholic elites, due to political, geopolitical and ideological reasons. In the Mediterranean, between XII and XV century, four factors of instability intervened in shaping the historical context for premodern epistemology. First, the shifting balance of power between Christendom and Islam due to the alternate military fortunes in the Crusades. Second, the challenge to the Catholic secular power raised by the Latin Christian Empire and kingdoms. Third, the mounting threat that heretic movements launched to the established doctrinal orthodoxy of the Church; forth, the circulation of Aristotle’s texts through Arab commentaries, whose relevance Christian intellighentsia had ignored for centuries. These four factors of instability conjured to led the Roman Church to produce a different hierarchical system of racial classification for people, their cultures and knowledges, in the Mediterranean world and beyond it. This system was grounded on the stigmatization of whatever idea associated with Islamic intellectual influences. Epistemology was the pillar of such a system, which proved less cosmopolitan and flexible than the Christian philosophy in use since late antiquity, that is, Augustinian theology, as well as its late medieval reformulation, that is, scholasticism. Both Augustinian theology and Scholasticism had attempted to accommodate ancient knowledges and cultures in a non-conflictual way with Christendom: «pagan» knowledges before Christ, such as Greek philosophy or Babylonian astrology, enjoyed respect even though considered less true than revealed Truth. At the turn of XII century, missing texts from the Corpus Aristotelicum were translated into Latin from Greek through Arab language but Catholic religious authorities opposed their diffusion to learned elites through universities. For their content conflicted with the official doctrine of the Church under crucial respects and their Arab imprint provoked fear and suspicions of external pernicious intrusions into the realm of thinking. Fear and suspicion became xenophobia as much as Islam appeared to grow in power both politically and intellectually along XIII century. The most unacceptable thesis for the Church was Ibn-Rushd’s (Averroè) idea that human intelligence is not an attribute of the single individual but a general collective immortal substance, therefore separated by the single individual soul. There logically followed that the single individual soul would be mortal, thus not susceptible to be eternally damned. For this reason, Averroè thought and taught that religion was useful for giving a horizon of sense to ordinary people while it was useless to whom embrace philosophy, whereas philosophy is not a discipline nor a field of knowledge but an intellectual tension to grasp the Cosmos through reason. This is why on the Islamic side of the Mediterranean, Averroè and many of his followers Islamic authorities persecuted, while persecuted on the Christian side, his Christian followers, the so-called Latin Averroists. Thomas Aquinas elaborated the most sophisticated version of the attempt to find an equalizing balance between faith and reason in the middle 1250s, but even his scholasticism began to fall under political and ideological attack when it did not served the political needs of Christian European elites anymore. New needs emerged, organized around the principle of affirming white, Catholic, Western absolute primacy over whatever form of knowledge forcedly put under the rubric of «Eastern influences». Eastern influences were labeled «Arabism» in a pejorative fashion and associated with heresy and religious authorities at university La Sorbonne in Paris prohibited them in 1270 and 1277. Following this racist reactionary path that run across the borders between politics and knowledge, premodern epistemology passed to set forth the superiority of faith over reason and the ultimate supremacy of Revelatio (revelation) over Scientia (knowledge), thereby ideologically and unilaterally setting the universal boundaries that human mind should not trespass and the questions human being should not ask