Ernest Renan’s Averroism in the Religious Thought of Matthew Arnold

Abstract

Claims Arnold’s inclusion of a passage extolling Averroism and disparaging the Catholic system in the section on Italy in Higher Schools and Universities on the Continent appears inconsistent with his general praise for Italian Catholic schools. Believes the passage reveals the philosophical ancestry of his political and religious agenda: Like Averroes and Arnold, Ernest Renan, whose work is summarized in the passage, promotes the notion of a clerisy disseminating religious myths among the common people in order to create social stability; the Averroistic “Double Truth” provides the linguistic and philosophical tools for doing so. Suggests that neither the Aristotelian Averroes nor the positivist Renan believed truth was undecidable or contradictions were equally true, but Arnold held that only human desire gave the world meaning.