The deeper you go the more brutal and bizarre the punishments get, but the uppermost level of Hell is populated not with the mildest of Christian sinners, but with non-Christian writers and philosophers. It was the highest compliment Dante could pay to pagan thinkers in a Christian cosmos and in Canto Four he names them all. Aristotle is there with Socrates and Plato, Galen, Zeno and Seneca, but Dante ends the list with neither a Greek nor a Roman but 'with him who made that commentary vast, Averroes'. Averroes was a 12th century Islamic scholar who devoted his life to defending philosophy against the precepts of faith and in writing a commentary on Aristotle so influential that St Thomas Aquinas referred to him simply as 'The Commentator'.
How did an Islamic philosopher achieve such esteem in the mind of a Christian Saint, how did Averroes seek to reconcile Greek philosophy with Islamic theology and can he really be said to have sown the seeds of the Renaissance in Europe?
陷得越深，受到的惩罚就越残酷越奇特，待在地狱最顶层的，不是最仁慈的基督教犯戒者，而是邪教作家和哲学家。在基督的世界里，但丁却把最高的赞美辞给予了异教徒的思想者，在第四章中，列出了他们的名字。亚里士多德以及苏哥拉底，柏拉图，伽林，季诺，塞尼加都在那里，可是，但丁结尾罗列的不是希腊，也不是罗马，而是和他作集注的阿渥柔斯。阿渥柔斯是十二世纪伊斯兰学者，为捍卫哲学，反对基督箴言，他献出了一生，编写了亚里士多德集注，深刻影响了阿亏那厮而直呼其为‘集注家’。伊斯兰哲学家，如何在基督圣人的心目中，得到如此敬重；阿渥柔斯是如何寻求希腊哲学和伊斯兰教义的和谐；他播下了欧洲文艺复兴的种子，确实能这么说吗