Averroist "Apocalyptic Humanism"

From Stuart MacClintock's article "Averroes" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Paul Edwards, 1967, p. 222):

From Aristotle, Averroes [Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198 C.E.] understood that the knowing process in man comprised a passive aspect--adumbrant concepts capable of being fully activated--and an active aspect--a power of dynamically activating such concepts. This power, termed during the medieval period the "active intellect," was taken to operate against a "passive intellect" to actualize concepts and thus constituted the thinking activity; and the resulting fusion of function was termed the "acquired intellect."... God, as the First Intelligence, provides through the next subordinate level of intelligences--the celestial bodies, upon which he exercises immediate control--activating power for the active intellect controlling man's thought.

It is difficult at this point in history to understand what was at stake for medieval thinkers in these abstruse speculations. Some insight may be gleaned from
Fazlur Rahman's analysis in Prophecy in Islam (1958, re-issued 2011 by the University of Chicago Press, p. 110):

... For Averroes, the eternal existence of the Universal Intellect and of thinking humanity are co-relates, as it were. This quasi-immanentism and humanism perhaps seemed to orthodox Islam even more dangerous than the temporary identity of the prophet with the divine in the act of revelation. For, even though the involvement of the divine in the creation and especially in man is great and, indeed, crucial for man's fate, to exhaust the meaning of the divine--the transcendent eternal truth--in man's destiny is even far more intolerable than the emptying of man's being in the divine [i.e., fana'].

The argument here must be viewed against the background of Islamic "orthodoxy's" desire to defend the position that the tradition had staked out centuries before vis a vis Christian orthodoxy. Unwilling to deify a proto-Rabbinic figure from an obscure Mediterranean backwater (i.e., Jesus of Nazareth), and yet equally unwilling to deny an active Divine presence in human life, the Islamic intellectual tradition followed the Qur'anic practice of endowing the prophetic lineage with a unique intimacy with the Divine--one that falls short, however, of incarnation or literal "sonship." Once established, this fine-line was vigilantly defended. Averroes, however, took no heed of this line--not because he wished to contest it but, rather, because it would not occur to him that anything he might think or write would be construed as crossing it. He was the commentator on Aristotle par excellence; Islam's radical (i.e., unitarian as opposed to trinitarian) monotheism was never in question for him. He honored Jesus as a prophet, not a god, and left it at that. But in speculating upon the ontologized Aristotelian epistemology of his day (i.e., Aristotle as read through a Neo-Platonic lens), he brought the Divine intelligence into contact not only with the prophets, but with all men--and not just for the purposes of producing revelation, but for thinking--something all men do all the time. From such a premise, one might draw the conclusion that Divine Reality is ever-present in the functioning of the human mind. If human beings may be said to reason "through" God, what becomes of the Divine-human distinction?

I have never encountered a comparison of Averroes to Blake--probably because of the latter's vehement anti-rationalism. But the parallel between Blakean Christology and Averroist anthropology is striking. For if Blake can be considered a Christian at all, it is only as a heterodox one. Blake's God is the imagination--the "poetic genius" as he would say--and every human being possesses such a genius. Christ, for Blake, was simply the paradigm case. Consequently, if we are willing to ignore all Blakean qualms and substitute reason for poetic genius, we find in Averroes a view quite similar to what Northrop Frye called Blake's "apocalyptic humanism." Fazlur Rahman called Averroes's position "quasi-immanentism and humanism." Pragmatically, I would suggest that the Averroist view anticipated Blake's.