Abstract:
This paper is about the condemnation of 1277 that was issued by the bishop of Paris (Etienne Tempier) against the Aristotelian, Thomistic and Averroist theological teachings. This condemnation was initially aimed at protecting the doctrine of God's absolute power and critique of the philosophical and theological reasoning about God, but later it led to new developments that were outside of the initial goals of its founders and were in conflict with it.
This research, using an analytical approach, tries to provide an analysis of the backgrounds and philosophical and theological disagreements that led to the condemnation of 1277, and to present a map of its conceptual scope. Then, we have discussed some of the epistemological and theological implications of this condemnation, among which the doctrine of God's absolute power is the most prominent and one of the main goals of this condemnation. But we have also raised and analyzed the long-term implications such as nominalism, secularism, and the development of modern science and its departure from the Platonic perspective, and it has shown that these are hidden implications that were not only unintended by the founders of the condemnation but also in conflict with their main lines of thought.
 
Keywords:
Condemnation of 1277, Absolute power of God, Nominalism, Modern Science, Secularism, Latin Averroists, Thomas Aquinas.
 
Introduction:
In 1277, Etienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, was ordered by the Roman Catholic Church to examine the philosophical and theological teachings presented at the University of Paris and prevent the intellectual deviations of its teachers and students. Then on March 7, 1277, Tempier issued a condemnation against the philosophical and theological teachings of the Aristotelians of his time. This declaration was later known as the Condemnation of 1277.
In this article, we have discussed the historical background of this condemnation since the beginning of the 13th century, its activists in the late Middle Ages, and also the analysis of its content. Then we have analyzed its theological, scientific and philosophical results and implications. Some of these results were not initially predicted by Tempier and his colleagues but have occurred over time.
 
Materials and Methods:
Documentary analysis of this condemnation was the first step we have taken in this paper. We have examined both the content structure of its introduction and the content of the 219 condemned philosophical and theological propositions attached to it and then we have provided a secondary analysis of the results of issuing this condemnation.
 
Discussion:
In the introduction of the condemnation of 1277, two major objections were made to the teachers and students of the University of Paris and their curriculum: 1. Violation of the law; This probably refers to the rules laid down in the regulations and curricula that the Church defined for the University of Paris in 1231 during the reign of Pope Gregory IX. and 2. violation of the principles of the Catholic faith; The principles that the 219 deviant propositions attached to this condemnation violate, and the university president has been asked to inspect these violations within 5 days and find a solution for them.
Although "students and teachers of the University of Paris" have been condemned in the condemnation of 1277, in fact the opinions of three groups of philosophers and theologians have been condemned in this condemnation: 1. Latin Averroists, 2. Thomas Aquinas, medieval Thomists and Scholastic Theologians, as well as 3. Muslim Aristotelian philosophers who transmitted Aristotelian teachings and some Islamic theological teachings to medieval thinkers through their interpretations and translations. The most important charge against these three categories of people was that they presented a reasonable and lawful image of God and his action in nature and in relation to man and the world; In this way, these philosophers and theologians, wanted to violate the Absolute Power of God and show it as conditional.
In the list attached to this declaration, 219 propositions and doctrines have been mentioned and condemned. According to the research done by Hissette (‏Hissette, 1977, p.1), 79 propositions are explicitly mentioned in the works of some or all of the above three categories of thinkers; 72 propositions are similar and close to some teachings and opinions of these philosophers and theologians and 68 statements are basically not found in the works of these philosophers. If we want to make an optimistic judgment about the 68 recent doctrines that did not have actual believers, we must say that the founders of this condemnation wanted to prevent future people from believing in these bad doctrines; But the pessimistic view is that the condemnation of 1277, by exaggerating, intends to make the danger of these philosophers appear more serious and beyond what it is.
Anyway, two things are certain: one is that some of these doctrines that have been condemned were not popular at all in the works of Aristotelians or other works of that time and secondly, it is not possible to find a specific philosopher, school or circle of thought that believed in all these teachings at the same time.
 
Conclusion:
Some of the epistemological, Scientific and theological elements of the condemnation of 1277 that we analyzed in this article are as follows: 1. This condemnation clearly favors a dogmatic reading over a rational approach to the Bible. The intellectual basis of this condemnation was sometimes the theological attitude of Augustinian thinkers in the Middle Ages and sometimes it was similar to the purely dogmatic and superficial approach that existed in the anti-rational behavior of advanced thinkers such as Tertullian. 2. Focusing on an absolutist, capricious, unpredictable and lawless image of God's behavior, under the pretext of not violating "God's absolute power", is one of the most important examples of the previous point. 3. From the point of view of Tempir and his colleagues, one of the essentials of believing in the "absolute power of God" and that nothing is impossible for him is the doctrine of the multiplicity of created worlds; This means accepting the existence of other created worlds whose natural laws and metaphysical rules governing them are different from the laws and rules governing our world, and this has no contradiction with the basic principles of reason. 4. The method that Tempir and his colleagues took to defend the doctrine of the "Absolute Power of God" theoretically led to a naïve ontological and theological nominalism and the negation of universals and natures. In this way, God's action does not fall under any general rules and instead, it is unpredictable. 5. From the point of view of Pierre Duhem, the condemnation of 1277 can be considered as the beginning of modern sciences, especially because it freed natural science and cosmology from the Aristotelian and Scholastic views (Duhem, 2018, p.2) and then it opened the way for new hypotheses and attitudes in the field of science. 6. After the condemnation of 1277, theology and philosophy (which included science at that time) were gradually separated from each other. This happened not only in the University of Paris but also in other medieval universities. The cause of this separation was the separation of the philosophers from the theologians who rejected and excommunicated them. This independence led to the appearance of an early form of secularism in the Christian community.
Here, the founders of the declaration of 1277 not only did not foresee the fourth to sixth points, but the fifth and sixth points were actually in conflict with their original goals and against their basic teachings.