Book of Causes

In the autumn of 1876, the newly founded Görres Society for the cultivation of science in Catholic Germany entrusted me with the honorable commission to work on the book de causis. This work was to encompass, in detail, a critical production of the Arabic original text as well as the text of the Latin translation used by the Scholastics, the preparation of a German paraphrase, and the writing of prolegomena on the origin, transmission, and literary-historical significance of the book. Subsequent agreements necessitated some extensions of this framework. In particular, it did not seem appropriate to exclude the already mentioned Hebrew versions entirely.

Thus, my work was divided into three parts: the first is devoted to the Arabic text of the book de causis, the second to the aforementioned Latin translation, and the third to the Hebrew versions.

In the first part, the main task was the production of a readable recension of the Arabic text. However, due to a lack of sufficient manuscript resources, this task could only be solved in a manner that satisfied me very little. The more I believed I had to deviate from the wording of the only manuscript of the original that I could use, the less I could relieve myself of the duty of fully communicating its readings.

In the second part, the focus of interest fell on the history that the Latin translation underwent in the Christian philosophy and theology of the Middle Ages.

The lack of a more comprehensive knowledge of Scholasticism was brought to my awareness quite often and quite vividly during the search for traces of the book de causis required here. Moreover, an immeasurably vast field opened up in the literature of Scholasticism, while preliminary work for my purposes was completely lacking.