Gundisalvo, Domingo

Domingo Gundisalvo, Latin Dominicus Gundissalinus, (flourished 12th century, Spain), archdeacon of Segovia, philosopher and linguist whose Latin translations of Greco-Arabic philosophical works contributed to the Latin West’s knowledge of the Eastern Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions and advanced the integration of Christian philosophy with the ancient Greek intellectual experience.

Gundisalvo may have studied in France about 1140, and his views reflect those of the Neoplatonic school of Chartres, Fr., and the mystical tradition centred at the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris. Two of his works, De anima (“On the Soul”) and De immortalitate animae (“On the Immortality of the Soul”), suggest the Neoplatonic argument for the soul’s natural immortality that markedly influenced later Scholastic philosophers—e.g., Bonaventure and Albertus Magnus—at the University of Paris.

While a member of the cathedral chapters of Toledo (c. 1150) and Segovia (c. 1190), Gundisalvo collaborated with linguists versed in Arabic in making Latin translations of Arabic philosophical treatises, among them works by Avicenna. Gundisalvo was influenced by the Neoplatonic Christian views of St. Augustine, and he strove to relate the Augustinian illuminationist theory of knowledge (the thesis that ideas are the consequence of supernatural enlightenment) with the Greco-Arabic tradition. In De processione mundi (“On the Procession of the World”), by ascribing the emergent force of the universe to God’s causality, he attempted to harmonize the Neoplatonic-Arabic doctrine of emanationism with the Christian teaching on creation.