The Aristotelian Tradition in Syriac (Variorum Collected Studies) [1 ed.] 9781138334663, 9780429445231, 1138334669

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Page
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 From Alexandria to Baghdad: Max Meyerhof revisited
2 From Sergius to Mattā: Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius in Syriac tradition
3 The Syriac Aristotle between Alexandria and Baghdad
4 Sergius of Reshaina on the prolegomena to Aristotle’s logic: the commentary on the Categories, chapter two
5 The prolegomena to the Aristotelian philosophy of George, bishop of the Arabs
6 Why did Ḥunayn, the master translator into Arabic, make translations into Syriac? On the purpose of the Syriac translations of Ḥunayn and his circle
7 The Syriac translations of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and their precursors
8 Greek thought and Syriac controversies
9 Julian’s Letter to Themistius – and Themistius’ response?
10 Themistius and Julian: their association in Syriac and Arabic tradition
11 Literary and philosophical rhetoric in Syriac
12 Greek philosophy and Syriac culture in Abbasid Iraq
13 Graeco-Syriac tradition and Arabic philosophy in Bar Hebraeus
14 Aristotle’s Rhetoric and political thought in the Christian Orient and in al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes
Index

Citation preview

Also in the variorum collected studies series:

STEPHEN KATZ Holocaust Studies Critical Reflections (CS1075)

JOHN W. WATT The Aristotelian Tradition in Syriac (CS1074)

PEREGRINE HORDEN Cultures of Healing: Medieval and After (CS1073)

DAVID LUSCOMBE Peter Abelard and Heloise: Collected Studies (CS1072)

STEPHAN KUTTNER, edited by PETER LANDAU Gratian and the Schools of Law, 1140–1234 Second Edition (CS1071)

JACQUES van der VLIET The Christian Epigraphy of Egypt and Nubia (CS1070)

PETER MEREDITH, edited by JOHN MARSHALL The Practicalities of Early English Performance: Manuscripts, Records, and Staging Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies (CS1069)

MEG TWYCROSS, edited by SARAH CARPENTER and PAMELA KING The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images, and Performance Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies (CS1068)

SEYMOUR DRESCHER Pathways from Slavery British and Colonial Mobilizations in Global Perspective (CS1067)

DAVID JACOBY Medieval Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond (CS1066)

GILES CONSTABLE Medieval Thought and Historiography (CS1065)

GILES CONSTABLE Medieval Monasticism (CS1064)

MICHAEL J.B. ALLEN Studies in the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico (CS1063) www.routledge.com/history/series/VARIORUMCS

VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES

The Aristotelian Tradition in Syriac

John W. Watt

The Aristotelian Tradition in Syriac

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 John W. Watt The right of John W. Watt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-33466-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44523-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1074

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1 From Alexandria to Baghdad: Max Meyerhof revisited

9

2 From Sergius to Mattā: Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius in Syriac tradition

25

3 The Syriac Aristotle between Alexandria and Baghdad

47

4 Sergius of Reshaina on the prolegomena to Aristotle’s logic: the commentary on the Categories, chapter two

73

5 The prolegomena to the Aristotelian philosophy of George, bishop of the Arabs

101

6 Why did Ḥunayn, the master translator into Arabic, make translations into Syriac? On the purpose of the Syriac translations of Ḥunayn and his circle

123

7 The Syriac translations of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and their precursors

141

8 Greek thought and Syriac controversies

163

9 Julian’s Letter to Themistius – and Themistius’ response?

187

10 Themistius and Julian: their association in Syriac and Arabic tradition

201

11 Literary and philosophical rhetoric in Syriac

217

vii

CONTENTS

12 Greek philosophy and Syriac culture in Abbasid Iraq

231

13 Graeco-Syriac tradition and Arabic philosophy in Bar Hebraeus

249

14 Aristotle’s Rhetoric and political thought in the Christian Orient and in al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes

261

Index

289

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the following for their generous permission to republish, in some cases including translating, the articles contained in this volume: Chapter 1: Aschendorff Verlag, Münster. www.aschendorff-buchverlag.de Chapter 4: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris. www.vrin.fr Chapters 5 and 7: Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden. www.harrassowitz-verlag.de Chapter 8: L’Association française ‘Société d’études syriaques’, Paris. www. etudessyriaques.org Chapter 9: The Classical Press of Wales, Swansea. www.classicalpressofwales. co.uk Chapter 10: Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen. www.mohr.de Chapter 11: Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim. www.olms.de Chapter 12: Gorgias Press, Piscataway. www.gorgiaspress.com Chapter 13: Uitgeverij Peeters, Leuven. www.peeters-leuven.be Chapter 14: Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University and Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. https://acmrs.org Full details of the original publications are given in a note to the title of each chapter.

ix

INTRODUCTION

It is now widely known to many with an interest in the history of ideas that Greek thought, especially philosophy and science, profoundly influenced Muslim scholars in the medieval period, among whom it experienced a new phase in its long history. Less well known is the fact that in the two or three centuries prior to the upsurge of Arab interest, Greek thought was enthusiastically embraced by a significant section of Christians in the Middle East whose literary language was Syriac. Arabic translations of Greek works were not therefore the first to have been made in the region, but were preceded by a number of such translations into Syriac. The Arabic translations on which Islamic scholars relied for their knowledge of Greek thinkers were in most cases made by Syriac Christians, who also continued the work of their predecessors in extending and revising these earlier Syriac translations. With the growing importance of Arabic as the principal medium of philosophical and scientific thought, by the tenth century even Syriac Christians in the Abbasid capital Baghdad were choosing to write only in Arabic, but in the background of their work lay the Syriac engagement with Greek thought over the preceding period. To the extent that the Syriac appropriation of Greek thought is judged to have prepared the way for the corresponding Arabic involvement and facilitated it in its early stages, ‘the Syriac tradition’, in the words of one recent historian, ‘through its linkage to the Arabic translation movement, became not just a beneficiary of but a contributor to mainstream intellectual history’.1 While for many its interest will therefore lie particularly in the area of this linkage, the Syriac scholarly tradition is also worthy of study in its own right. It is a significant aspect of the history of the Near East in the sixth to tenth centuries, of the history of Greek thought in late antiquity, and of the history of Christianity in the region. Independently of its impact on Arabic culture, it left a significant mark on Syriac Christianity, a community which, despite many travails over the years which have given rise to a large diaspora, retains a presence in the region to this day. While from the tenth century its leading scholars on secular subjects, as already noted, chose to write in Arabic, a fresh upsurge of writing in Syriac took place particularly during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,2 which, though greatly influenced by contemporary Arabic thought, nevertheless retained some continuity with the earlier 1

INTRODUCTION

Syriac tradition and, particularly through the works of the famous polymath Bar Hebraeus (died 1286), exercised a powerful influence on the learned members of the community in the following centuries. For another reason, however, the Syriac tradition of secular scholarship cannot be adequately studied in isolation from some important Arabic texts produced during the Arabic translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. The history of the Near East since that time has not been one in which favourable circumstances existed for the preservation of Syriac manuscripts. Since Syriac Christians did not hold the reins of power, imperial or other patrons who could build up significant collections of Syriac manuscripts in relatively safe locations, comparable to those in Greek and Arabic, simply did not exist. For the ultimate sources of Syriac manuscripts, we are entirely dependent on monastic libraries, some of which suffered great deprivations over the years, or even total destruction. It is hardly surprising that while a considerable quantity of theological literature has survived in Syriac, much less has done so in the area of secular scholarship. To obtain a rounded picture of Syriac secular studies, it is therefore necessary to take into account not only the extant texts explicitly dedicated to these subjects, but also the indications we possess of Syriac engagement with these fields from other sources. These other sources comprise principally remarks or discussions in various Syriac texts (e.g. letters) providing information about otherwise unknown works, and references in Arabic texts. Occasionally these two will combine. One such case is that of the Aristotle translations of Athanasius of Balad (died 686), the texts of which have not come down to us. His translations of Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations are attested in the Arabic manuscript of the Organon in Paris, while those of Posterior Analytics and Topics are mentioned in the Syriac correspondence of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy (died 823).3 In the medical field, very little of the Galen translations by Sergius of Reshaina (died 536) has survived, but we know that he made many from an Arabic text of the most celebrated translator of the Abbasid period, Ḥunayn (died 873). Ḥunayn tells us in this text that he himself also made around ninety-five Syriac translations of Galen, but only fragments of a small number of them have survived. The Arabic treatise (risāla) in which he tells us these things is itself based on an earlier Syriac treatise, which again has not survived.4 The scattered and limited nature of the relevant manuscript evidence is thus the principal difficulty standing in the way of a clear assessment of the range of Syriac study of Greek thought, but to this one further point should be added. Even if we knew with certainty which Greek texts had been translated into Syriac, and therefore also which had not, that would not necessarily provide us with a complete picture of what interested them and what they studied. It is quite certain that many of those interested in Greek thought were able to read the language, and it does not follow that everything they read in Greek they also translated. It is natural to suppose that the efforts devoted to translation were directed to those texts which the translators considered most important, and which they therefore wished to make available to their fellow Syrians who could not read them in the original. 2

INTRODUCTION

But there is clear evidence that some Greek works, for which we have no evidence of Syriac versions from any of the sources mentioned earlier, were known to Syriac authors.5 Whether the authors in question were reading them in Greek, or alternatively reading a Syriac translation done by a predecessor unknown to us, it is evidently impossible to say. But there can be no doubt that in attempting to assess the range of Syriac engagement with Greek thought, all these indicators, not just the extant translations, need to be taken into account. ‘When Galen and Aristotle agree on something, that’s (the way it is), but when they differ, it is very difficult for reason to find the right answer’.6 This aphorism of Ibn Māsawayh, one of the Syrian doctors in Baghdad who commissioned Syriac translations of Galen from Ḥunayn, concisely encapsulates the Syriac tradition of scholarship on Greek secular thought. Aristotle and Galen were the two Greek authors whose works were brought to the attention of Syriac speakers by the earliest Syriac commentator on Aristotle, Sergius of Reshaina. Sergius was a physician who had studied in Alexandria, where connections existed between the teaching of philosophy and medicine, and such connections are visible again in the Syriac circles in Baghdad among whom Ḥunayn and his son Isḥāq were active. Although this close connection can by no means be assumed for all the significant figures in the history of Syriac secular scholarship, for not all those important in the area of philosophy were medical doctors, an admiration for both authors, far above that accorded to others from classical antiquity (including Plato), can be seen as a notable characteristic of the Syriac tradition. The articles collected in the present volume are primarily concerned with the role of Aristotle in Syriac thought, but the connection with Galen and medicine should be kept in mind, and the evidence we have on the Galen translations of Ḥunayn sheds important light on his translations of Aristotle. On the long view, the Syrians were among the earliest to accord such an exalted status to Aristotle. ‘If we ask who above all others gave Eurasians . . . conceptual tools for ordering their impressions and their knowledge, and so made them more effective social and historical agents, the answer is: Aristotle’.7 With Sergius in Alexandria and Ḥunayn in Baghdad, we have before us the two great cities, one predominantly Greek, the other Arabic, between which, in a very real ‘intellectual’ if not exclusively spatial sense, the Syriac Aristotelian tradition unfolded. The phrase ‘Alexandria to Baghdad’ has become a catchword to designate the transfer of Greek thought to the Arab world, largely on account of the title of a paper by Max Meyerhof from 1930. The set of articles collected here therefore begins with one ‘revisiting’ this celebrated, and for a considerable time highly influential, presentation. Meyerhof conceived the transfer as occurring through the migration of the School of Alexandria to Baghdad. Despite some important points in his account, such as the support that an institution favourable to philosophy or medicine could provide through the intervening years, his thesis is not now generally accepted. While he was aware of some of the evidence for Syriac interest in these fields, further evidence has since become available, which therefore can now enable us to provide a more soundly based account, while still incorporating those of his insights which remain of value. The two 3

INTRODUCTION

following chapters provide further consideration of this theme, also paying attention to the issue of how Syriac Christians came to reconcile the pagan origin of the Aristotelian tradition they espoused with their Christian theological convictions. Beginning with Sergius himself, it is striking that almost all the prominent Syriac Aristotelians can be shown to have been appreciative readers of the Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius, but none of them exhibited any real interest in Plato. On these grounds there is a valid argument for the supposition that Pseudo-Dionysius served among them as a necessary theological complement to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, as the Platonic theology of pagan Neoplatonism, especially in the interpretation of Proclus, completed the philosophy curriculum in the School of Alexandria. The Arabic Theology of Aristotle could be considered an Islamic parallel in the case of Muslim Baghdad. Alexandrian commentaries on the Categories, being the first treatise of the curriculum, began with prolegomena concerning the character and aims of Aristotelian philosophy as a whole, and were formulated as responses to a standard set of questions (usually ten in number). They therefore provide for us a window into the views held by their writers concerning the entire philosophical enterprise. The major treatise on the Categories by Sergius is in many ways close to the Alexandrian commentaries, but is also distinctive in some others, at least partly, no doubt, on account of a wish to make his work comprehensible to a Syriac audience not attuned to the pattern of the Greek commentaries. While he did not therefore proceed through a discussion of this standard set of questions, he did deal with the subject matter of some of them in the first two sections of this treatise. The Syriac text has not yet been edited, but the first section is accessible in a French translation (by Henri Hugonnard-Roche), and the second in an English translation in Chapter 4 of the present volume. Chapter 5 makes available the (fragmentary) Syriac text and an English translation of the prolegomena to the Categories of a later writer, George, bishop of the Arab tribes (died 724), which, by contrast, follows exactly the pattern of the Alexandrian prolegomena and was clearly influenced by that of Philoponus. The same pattern can be seen in a short Arabic work on the necessary preliminaries to the study of Aristotle, probably by al-Fārābī. The three similar texts perfectly illustrate the common understanding of Aristotelian philosophy across the three language groups and the position of the Syriac Aristotelian tradition ‘between Alexandria and Baghdad’. George was one of four Syriac scholars of the seventh century associated with the monastery of Qenneshre (on the Euphrates), evidently the main centre for the study of Aristotle at that time, about whom we are reasonably well informed by Syriac historiographical works. We do not have comparable information concerning Syriac readers of Aristotle in Baghdad during the ninth century, when, as during the seventh, many Syriac translations of treatises of Aristotle were made. From Arabic biographical writings, however, we are quite well informed about several of the prominent Syriac physicians active there in that period. In his celebrated risāla (mentioned earlier), Ḥunayn provides us with valuable information concerning the Galen Syriac translations he made for these doctors and the Arabic 4

INTRODUCTION

translations he made for other patrons. The Syriac translations he and his son Isḥāq made of Aristotle are known not directly from a text from his hand, but from the information in the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm and the marginal notes in the ‘Paris Organon’ (mentioned earlier), the Arabic text of Aristotle’s logical treatises used in the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians. Neither of these sources, unlike the risāla, provides us with the names of the patrons who commissioned the translations. However, by comparing what is known about both sets, those of Galen and those of Aristotle, we can make some reasonable deductions about interest in Aristotle among Syrians for whom these Aristotle translations were made. This is the subject of Chapter 6 of the collection, and the following chapter endeavours to examine the relationship between the period of Ḥunayn and the whole history of Aristotelian translations in Syriac, also looking at various judgements concerning their range and quality, and the reasons for their loss. While the Syriac translations of the Baghdad period (and the interests of the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Aristotelians) cover the whole school corpus of Aristotle, definite evidence for those of the earlier period is confined to a small group of the logical treatises. The conclusion has sometimes thus been drawn that pre-Abbasid Syrians were interested only in the logic, and that simply for the purpose of theological, particularly Christological, disputation between dyophysites and miaphysites. While there is clear evidence from the material presented in the foregoing chapters that Syriac Aristotelianism had a much broader range and purpose, logic could of course still potentially provide a valuable tool in such disputations. Chapter 8 examines what role it played in the disputations of these and subsequent years. While a survey of these disputations yields only meagre evidence for its role in inter-confessional Christian controversies, Syriac translations provide the only extensive evidence for the intervention into such controversies, with the tools of Aristotelian philosophy, of a major Greek thinker, namely John Philoponus. There is, furthermore, evidence, albeit not extensive, that the project for which he is probably best known to posterity, his attack on the (Aristotelian) doctrine of the eternity of the world8 and his related reconciliation of Greek natural philosophy with the biblical doctrine of creation, was also known to the Syrians. The dispute over the eternity of the world was the major point of disagreement between some Christians in Alexandria and the pagan teachers of the school, and the controversy continued in the Near East in the following centuries. These issues, the use of logic in religious (including latterly Christian-Muslim) debate and the eternity or temporal limitation of the world, are the subject of Chapter 8, ranging from the period of Philoponus in sixth century Alexandria to the Baghdad Aristotelians of the tenth. The material discussed thus far has concerned ‘the theoretical (literally “first”) philosopher . . . when the eye of his reason is directed upwards’; but ‘when he turns from that vision to the care of the city and orders it according to the vision of those things (above), he becomes a political philosopher’.9 The role which the philosopher ought to play in public life was a subject of lively debate in late antiquity, and surfaced with particular force in the fourth century, when the obligation 5

INTRODUCTION

of the philosopher to participate in public affairs was vigorously advocated by the Aristotelian commentator and prominent public orator Themistius. However, a purely advisory role for the philosopher, rather than direct holding of political office, was championed by many Neoplatonists, and significantly by the Emperor Julian in an (extant) critical reply to a (lost) letter addressed to him by Themistius, which challenged Themistius’ interpretation of the views of Plato and Aristotle. The significance of this exchange for our present theme lies in the fact that a short treatise or letter attributed to Themistius and connected to Julian10 was known in a Syriac version in tenth century Baghdad. That version, together with the original Greek, has not survived, but is known from the title in one of the two extant Arabic manuscripts of the work. The authenticity of the piece is disputed, but there is a credible case to the effect that it represents Themistius’ reply to Julian’s letter, as its subject is ‘Government and the Administration of the Empire’. The text is particularly intriguing in connection with Syriac translations of Greek philosophy, because two of Themistius’ numerous orations have been preserved in Syriac versions. Whether these two represent the tip of the iceberg as far as Themistius’ influence among Syrians is concerned and whether their translation can be taken, like that of the treatise ‘On Government and the Administration of the Kingdom’, as an indication of interest in his political philosophy, rather than merely his teaching on personal ethics, are issues still open to debate. It is nevertheless striking that this pagan philosopher and orator, for whom Gregory of Nazianzus professed admiration, was clearly a figure of interest to some Syrians, and a prominent counterweight to the despised Julian. The alleged letter of Themistius is the particular subject of Chapter 9, and the broader issue of his influence on Syrians and Arabs that of Chapter 10. Themistius was an orator and philosopher. Fundamental to his thinking was that realms are best ruled by a philanthropic philosopher king, and that philosophers are obliged to engage with the populace through effective oratory. Apart from his paganism, his views on these matters hardly differed from those of Gregory of Nazianzus, whose orations were immensely popular among Syrians. Rhetoric was of course a core element of Greek education, and though evidence for a comparable role in Syriac is hard to find, some indications of its presence among ‘elite’ groups with a proGreek orientation do exist. The only textbook of rhetoric known in Syriac comes from the ninth century, by Antony of Tagrit. While very different from any known Greek manual of rhetoric, there are nevertheless several points of contact in his treatise with Greek rhetorical theory, which point to a tradition of rhetoric teaching in Syriac with connections to that of the Greek. In Arabic a distinction was drawn between balāgha and khiṭāba, the former roughly corresponding to the eloquence of general rhetoric, the latter to the rhetoric employed by the philosopher who has mastered Aristotle’s logic and is therefore in the position to employ his Rhetoric for the benefit of the populace. While Antony’s treatise as a whole belongs to general rhetoric, as discussed in Chapter 11, his model encomium, which on the basis of its content can be considered to apply only to a ‘philosopher king’, indicates that he was aware of the importance of a philosophical rhetoric in the intellectual armoury 6

INTRODUCTION

of such a ruler. Chapter 12 brings together the theoretical and political-rhetorical sides of the Syriac reception of Greek philosophy, particularly during the Abbasid period, taking the account down to Bar Hebraeus (died 1286). Bar Hebraeus was the one other known writer on rhetoric in Syriac, though his treatise on the subject was not a textbook, but a commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the context of his massive exposition of the Organon entitled the Cream of Wisdom. He used a Syriac version of the Rhetoric, but his interpretation of the work was largely dependent upon Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā).11 This is one example of something seen widely across many of his writings: he makes some use of Syriac tradition, particularly the translations, but depends for his interpretation of Aristotle mainly on the Arabic writings of Muslim authors dominant in his day. The reasons for this methodology are investigated in Chapter 13. All three of the best known Arabic Aristotelians, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes, wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but from the Greek commentators of late antiquity we know of none. For the Muslim philosophers, beginning with al-Fārābī, who read Aristotle in the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians, the treatise was directed to the wise who, having become so by virtue of their study of logic, would learn from it how to impart to the many such knowledge of the good and the true as was appropriate to their capabilities. The final chapter discusses this ‘Platonisation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric’. The relationship with the philosophical rhetoric which the Alexandrians perceived in Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus is clear, but none of the Greeks, for whom the corpus of Hermogenes served as the basis for the study of rhetoric, ever connected it to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. This final chapter of the collection considers the possibility that it might have been the Syrians who made that connection. *** The articles collected here were originally published during the years 2009–2016. Since that time research has not stood still, and the opportunity has therefore been taken to revise them to bring them up to date and make such improvements as seemed desirable or necessary. Many of the changes occur in the notes. References have been added to more recent literature and to important publications which ought to have been previously noted but were overlooked. Sometimes on these occasions an older reference which has been superseded by a newer one has been dropped. The consolidation of the articles into a single volume has also allowed some simplification and streamlining: references or details which, while not irrelevant, were nevertheless of marginal significance in the context of one article but of greater importance in another have been replaced in the former by a cross-reference to their appearance in the latter. The diverse referencing styles in the original publications have been harmonised and now conform to that of the new publisher. Some changes have also from time to time been made in the text. Poorly worded or ambiguous passages have been rephrased, some additions made to clarify or strengthen an argument (and consequently superfluous passages omitted), and mention of significant insights from more recent literature 7

INTRODUCTION

added either in the text or in the discursive portions of the notes. Where errors have been noticed, they have been corrected. None of the articles has been altered in any fundamental way, but it is hoped that these revisions will bring them up to date with current scholarship and enhance the clarity of the argumentation. Chapters 1 and 8 were originally published in German and French respectively, and are appearing in English for the first time.

Notes 1 Fowden (2014) 141. 2 The chronological delimitation of this upsurge, generally designated ‘The Syriac Renaissance’, is variously judged by different scholars. Cf. Teule (2010) 3–5. 3 This evidence is repeatedly adduced in several of the following chapters. Cf. e.g. Chapter 3, 49–50. 4 See Chapters 6 and 7 in this volume. 5 For the example of Philoponus’ commentary on the Categories, see Chapter 5 in this volume. 6 Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, Aphorismi ed., tr. Jacquart and Troupeau 116 (no. 8). 7 Fowden (2014) 128. 8 Philoponus, De opificio mundi II 13, ed. Reichardt 82, ed., tr. Scholten 224, 225, claimed that the eternity and non-generation of the world was a new idea introduced by Aristotle. At the beginning of this work he noted that while he had often made the argument for the beginning of the world, he would now rectify the fact that, as many had objected, he had not hitherto made the effort to show that the statements of Moses, coming from God, are consistent with the views of Greek natural philosophers (with the exception of course of Aristotle). 9 Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum ed. Couvreur 221; tr. Bernard 376. 10 In one manuscript Julian is the addressee; in the other (of the two) Themistius is designated a minister of Julian. 11 Cf. Watt (2018).

References Fowden (2014): G. Fowden, Before and after Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum: P. Couvreur (ed.), Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum scholia (Paris: Bouillon, 1901); tr. H. Bernard, Kommentar zu Platons “Phaidros” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). Philoponus, De opificio mundi: G. Reichardt (ed.), Joannis Philoponi De opificio mundi libri VII (Leipzig: Teubner, 1897); ed. and tr. C. Scholten, Johannes Philoponos. De opificio mundi, I–III (Freiburg: Herder, 1997). Teule (2010): H. Teule, ‘The Syriac Renaissance’, in: H. Teule and C.F. Tauwinkl (eds.), The Syriac Renaissance (Leuven: Peeters) 1–30. Watt (2018): J.W. Watt, ‘The Commentary on the Rhetoric by Bar Hebraeus’, in: F. Woerther (ed.), Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric from Antiquity to the Present (Brill: Leiden 2018) 116–31. Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, Aphorismi: D. Jacquart and G. Troupeau (ed. and tr.), Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, Le livre des axioms médicaux (aphorismi) (Geneva: Droz, 1980).

8

1 FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD Max Meyerhof revisited1

In June 1930 the medical historian and Arabic scholar Max Meyerhof presented a paper at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin under the title ‘From Alexandria to Baghdad: A Contribution to the History of Philosophical and Medical Instruction among the Arabs’.2 For many years the content of that lecture had a profound impact on the study of Greek influence on philosophy and science in the Near East, and the title still serves as a catchword designating the remarkable efflorescence of these subjects in medieval Islamic culture. Basing his argument on a passage attributed to al-Fārābī in Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a,3 Meyerhof contended that the manifestation of a philosophical culture of Greek inspiration in the Baghdad of the early Abbasids is to be explained by the fact that the School of Alexandria survived the conquest of the city by the Arabs and in subsequent years was transferred first to Antioch, and then to Ḥarrān, from which eventually four Christian philosophers made their way to Baghdad.4 It has to be said straightaway that despite its earlier influence, Meyerhof’s explanation for the process of the intellectual transfer has little credibility today. Arabic scholarship in particular has undermined its foundations.5 One may therefore well ask what value may be derived from revisiting it now. The answer lies in Meyerhof’s insights into the conditions and circumstances which could have sustained this process, independently of his particular thesis of the transfer of the School of Alexandria. In focusing on this school, Meyerhof was, however, implicitly recognising the importance that educational institutions could have in sustaining philosophical and medical activity. Furthermore, he drew attention to the importance of Christians in late antique Greek culture, and in particular to that of Syriac Christians in the Near East as admirers of Greek thought in the years between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. Both these insights deserve to be developed. Meyerhof sought advice on the Syriac evidence from Anton Baumstark, but not even Baumstark, the grand master of Christian Oriental Studies, could grasp the whole picture, and since 1930 further evidence has become available. Philosophy and Christian theology had been brought together in Alexandria by Origen, and Meyerhof realised that the interweaving of the two might not have been without significance in the years between the last known professors of philosophy in Alexandria and the emergence of the discipline at Baghdad. 9

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

We may therefore begin with a summary of his account of the importance of Christians and Syrians. Recognising that this had not gone unnoticed even before his time, he pointed to the lively description of student life in Alexandria in the Life of Severus by Zacharias Scholasticus, from which we learn of the existence of a Christian group of philoponoi. He mentioned the important Christian figures of John Philoponus and Sergius of Reshaina (died 536), and noted that privileged sons of wealthy Near Eastern families made their way to Alexandria or, if particularly interested in the law, to Beirut. As the principal centres of Greek studies in the Syriac-speaking and Middle Persian regions in pre-Islamic times he singled out Edessa, Nisibis, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and Gundishapur for the Nestorians (East Syrians), and Antioch and Amida for the Jacobites (Syriac Orthodox). He also made reference to the monastic schools, and recognised that for Greek scholarship the most important of these was Qenneshre. Significantly, he noted that the learned men of the time were mostly churchmen, and from the eighth/ninth centuries drew attention to the Catholicus Timothy I. The transfer of the School of Alexandria to Antioch (which he assumed from al-Fārābī and al-Mas‘ūdī) following the fall of Alexandria to the Arabs he considered to be quite natural, believing that thereby it had been transferred into Syriac-speaking territory. ‘Translation into Syriac was undoubtedly carried out at the new School’, he asserted, ‘although we have no reports of this, or indeed of the existence of the School itself, from Syriac sources’. Similarly on the School in Ḥarrān he could produce no sources, apart from the accounts of al-Fārābī and al-Mas‘ūdī. With the mention of four names by al-Fārābī at the end of the Ḥarrān period, all of them Christians who subsequently taught in Baghdad, Meyerhof concluded that in Ḥarrān the school was directed by Christians, not Sabians. Al-Fārābī’s account dated the effective ‘appearance of philosophy in Islam’ with the arrival of these four figures in Baghdad.6 So much for Meyerhof. What in his account needs correction? Let us commence with Sergius. Sergius is arguably more important than even Meyerhof realised. He was not the first Syriac translator of a school treatise of Aristotle (although he did translate the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo), but he was the first Syriac commentator, and his commentary on the Categories clearly belongs within the Alexandrian commentary tradition, with particularly close connections to those of Ammonius and Philoponus. He was the first Syriac translator of Galen, and to his work in philosophy and medicine we must also add theology, for he translated the Corpus Dionysiacum and composed a few small theological treatises. The writings of Pseudo-Dionysius are, to be sure, a very special form of Christian theology and intimately linked to the Neoplatonism of late antique Greek philosophy, which envisaged the Corpus Aristotelicum as preliminary to the greater mysteries to be found in Plato. For Sergius, Aristotelian and medical doctor, but also Christian, the study of Aristotle had greater independent worth in itself than that accorded it by his Alexandrian masters, but he appears to have shared with them the conviction that Aristotelian philosophy ultimately required to be completed by a guide to the supra-mundane mysteries. That guide was not, however, the Platonic theology of pagan Neoplatonism, but the biblical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. The template 10

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

established by Sergius, Aristotle, and Pseudo-Dionysius to the virtual exclusion of Plato set the pattern not only for subsequent Syriac Christianity, but to a considerable extent also, mutatis mutandis, for Islamic philosophy.7 It is noteworthy in this connection that, according to the prologue, Sergius’ commentary on the Categories (and many of his other works) was written for Theodore, bishop of Karkh Juddan (on the Tigris). To be sure, the prologue follows the literary convention according to which a work should be dedicated to an eminent personality, and the commentary was intended to be read by many others in addition to Theodore.8 But the ecclesiastical affiliation of the dedicatee is still of some significance, as we can see here the interest of Syriac clergy in Aristotelian philosophy. It was not necessary that the School of Alexandria be transferred to Antioch for Alexandrian Aristotelianism to penetrate the Syriac linguistic area. It was sufficient that Syrians such as Sergius studied in Alexandria, and others such as Theodore wished to hear about it. Sergius’ intention was to offer an exposition of the entire Aristotelian school corpus from the Categories to the Metaphysics, including in the section on logic the complete sequence of the Organon from the Categories to the Sophistical Refutations and possibly also the Rhetoric. How much of that he actually completed is unknown, for only his commentary on the Categories has come down to us. The seemingly popular introduction to logic based on the ‘truncated Organon’ ending at Prior Analytics I.7 was of no particular interest to him; in accordance with the teaching of his Alexandrian masters he considered the Posterior Analytics to be the most important logical treatise of Aristotle. In the text of al-Fārābī on which Meyerhof based his reconstruction, the study under a teacher of the Organon beyond Prior Analytics I.7 is said to have been forbidden by Christian bishops until the coming of Islam on the grounds that it was dangerous to Christianity, and the effective curtailment of logical study to this restricted domain, if not the cause claimed by al-Fārābī, has often been thought to be operative throughout Syriac Christianity in the pre-Abbasid years.9 Sergius, however, and (as we shall see later) the most important Syriac Aristotelians of the following century were interested in the full Organon.10 Meyerhof acknowledged the presence of monastic schools in Syriac-speaking regions. On the instruction provided at them he wrote that it was ‘mostly theological’, but ‘at many of them secular studies were also permitted’. He also recognised the most important of them: Qenneshre, on the Euphrates.11 But with the evidence then at his disposal, he could hardly have been expected to realise just how important it was. Over against Meyerhof stands Gotthard Strohmaier, who, though also believing in the transfer of the School of Alexandria to Antioch, does not attribute the significance of it accorded by Meyerhof. ‘Everywhere in Syriac Christianity’, he contends, ‘instruction was also provided in secular subjects’.12 That may well be correct, but perhaps Meyerhof was still not wide of the mark in assuming that an ‘elite’ institution could have played a significant role in these years, providing a centre for these studies to which those who were greatly interested in them would be drawn. The fantasies of al-Fārābī concerning Antioch and 11

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

Ḥarrān are not, however, the right places in which to look for such an institution. Meyerhof mentioned the best candidate, although he did not recognise it as such: the monastic school of Qenneshre. Although a Syriac monastery, Qenneshre was celebrated as a centre for Greek studies. Moreover, it had originally been founded in Greek territory, as the monastery of St. Thomas at Seleucia near Antioch, and was transferred between 528 and 531 to Qenneshre under the leadership of John Bar Aphtonia as a consequence of the persecution of miaphysites by Justinian.13 We can reasonably assume that whatever Greek scholarship was cultivated in it before the migration did not suddenly end with its removal to Syriac-speaking territory, but continued uninterrupted in the following years and into the seventh century, when we hear of a number of scholars associated with it who possessed a fine knowledge of Greek. John himself, who had been educated at St. Thomas, probably wrote only in Greek. He came from a privileged, Hellenised family in Edessa. His father was a rhetorician, and John also might have been educated as an advocate (in Beirut?). The account of his life by a monk of Qenneshre is a fine example of classical epideictic rhetoric, although written in Syriac, not Greek.14 Qenneshre was therefore to some degree bilingual from its foundation onwards, and although the most notable Syriac monastery to cultivate Greek culture, it was not alone. Another was Mar Zakkai, where the monks ‘particularly loved to read Gregory (of Nazianzus)’.15 Greek studies in the Syriac monastic schools could therefore include both the secular and the theological. Like John himself, most of the monks of Qenneshre in the years following its migration are likely to have possessed a good knowledge of Greek and therefore to have had no need for Syriac translations if they wished to read Greek philosophy, medicine, or theology. In time, however, a need for translations would have developed as others without the same linguistic equipment sought information on these subjects. The translations from the hands of the Qenneshre scholars were not in idiomatic Syriac, but were intended to mirror the Greek original insofar as that was possible.16 They were probably composed with the intention of being read in association with the Greek or with a teacher, or both. Like Sergius, whose intention was to write expositions but not translations of the Aristotelian school corpus, the Qenneshre scholars appear to have believed at first that deep study of the text of Aristotle himself was possible only on the basis of the Greek original. Later, however, Syriac translations became acceptable as aids, as had already occurred with the Bible and Greek patristic literature. Among the translators associated with Qenneshre we can name Thomas of Ḥarqel (Bible translator, died 640), probably Paul of Edessa (Gregory of Nazianzus and Severus of Antioch, seventh century), Athanasius of Balad (the Organon from the Prior Analytics to the Sophistical Refutations, Gregory of Nazianzus, Pseudo-Dionysius, died 687), Jacob of Edessa (Categories, Severus of Antioch, died 708), and George, bishop of the Arabs (Categories to Prior Analytics, died 724).17 Meyerhof could not have known the full range of the translations of Aristotle at Qenneshre (the sources were either easily overlooked or not yet published),18 and therefore could not have 12

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

seen how closely Aristotelian and theological studies were intertwined there. But we can see that now, and can therefore easily imagine that the Qenneshre Aristotelians would have agreed with Sergius, who, at the conclusion of his commentary on the Categories, maintained that without the discipline of logic it is not possible to comprehend the treatises of medicine, nor understand the doctrine of the philosophers . . . nor uncover the true meaning of the divine scriptures, in which is the hope of our salvation, unless through his exalted way of life someone should receive divine power so that he has no need of human instruction. For there is no possible way or path to all things knowable by human power except through the discipline of logic.19 The most important Syriac translations of Aristotle were not made, as Meyerhof imagined, at Antioch in the transferred School of Alexandria, but at (or at least in association with) Qenneshre in the transferred school of the monastery of St. Thomas. Although many of them are no longer extant, the translations of the Organon are of great historical importance because they were known and read in Abbasid Baghdad, by both Syrians who knew Greek and some who did not. Among the former was the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I (780–823), who was close to the caliphs al-Mahdī (775–785) and Hārūn al-Rashīd (786–809). He was an alumnus of the monastic school of Bashosh near Mosul, where he had probably read the Syriac translations of Aristotle for the first time. He later requested his earlier teacher Pethion and fellow student Sergius to look for various writings in the Syriac Orthodox monasteries of Mār Mattai and Mār Zina, in particular scholia to the latter part of the Organon (Topics to Poetics), commentaries on the logic of Aristotle by Olympiodorus, Stephanus, Sergius, and Alexander of Aphrodisias, the (lost) Book Two of Aristotle’s Poetics, Nemesius, and among patristic writers Gregory of Nazianzus and Pseudo-Dionysius in translations of Paula, Phocas, and Athanasius. He discussed a passage of the Posterior Analytics in the Greek and the translation of Athanasius, and on commission from al-Mahdī translated, together with Abū Nūḥ, the Topics from Syriac into Arabic.20 There can be no doubt therefore that in the late eighth century clergy and others, both East Syrian and West Syrian, who had been educated in one of these Hellenophile monasteries, and some of whom were later to be found in Baghdad, were familiar with and highly esteemed various treatises of Aristotelian philosophy.21 Readers in Baghdad of Syriac translations of Aristotle who did not know Greek include those named by al-Fārābī at the conclusion of his imaginative history of ‘Alexandria to Baghdad’ in a passage which, precisely because he here for the first time provides concrete names, deserves more credibility than all that precede it. Four names are provided of teachers of philosophy in Baghdad, and the reference can be supported from the evidence of the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm. According to these texts two of them (Isra’īl and Yūḥannā ibn Ḥailān) were priests, two (Quwairā and al-Marwazī) were teachers of Abū Bishr Mattā, one (Yūḥannā ibn Ḥailān) was 13

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

the teacher of al-Fārābī, one (al-Marwazī) taught logic and other matters only in Syriac, and two (Isra’īl and al-Marwazī) had, like Abū Bishr Mattā, a connection with the School of Mār Mārī at the East Syrian monastery of Dair Qunnā – all this from al-Fārābī (according to Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a) and the Fihrist.22 The origin of these teachers (according to al-Fārābī Ḥarrān and Merv) is less important than the fact that it was in Baghdad that they taught, where Aristotelian philosophy was already well established in Syriac (and also in Muslim) circles. Al-Fārābī’s reference points us not to the beginnings of Aristotelian philosophy in Baghdad, but to the history, or pre-history, of the particular school to which he himself belonged, initially at least, namely that of the Baghdad Aristotelians,23 the leading members of which included Abū Bishr Mattā (often taken to be the founder) and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. The fact that (with the exception of al-Fārābī) they were all Syriac Christians is not insignificant. Their rigorous focus on Aristotle (quite different from the more eclectic philosophy of al-Kindī, whom al-Fārābī pointedly ignored in his imaginative history) connects them with the earlier Syriac Aristotelian tradition, which had already become well established at Baghdad as evidenced in the activity of Timothy and the Syriac translations of Aristotle by Theophilus of Edessa (died 785) and Ḥunayn (died 873) and his circle. By this time (namely the early tenth century) knowledge of Greek had largely died out and Syriac was becoming less important as a language of philosophy and medicine on account of the rise of Arabic and Muslim interest in these subjects. Abū Bishr Mattā and his Christian successors knew Syriac but not Greek, and made translations into Arabic from Syriac. When they worked on the text of Aristotle, they referred not only to the Syriac translations of Ḥunayn and his son Isḥāq, but also to the earlier ones by Athanasius of Balad, Jacob of Edessa, and Theophilus of Edessa.24 The appearance of Aristotelian philosophy in Baghdad can therefore be understood without the hypothesis of the transfer there of the School of Alexandria. Yet another school does seem to have played a very important role, particularly in the seventh century, namely the monastic school of Qenneshre. The earliest Aristotelian scholar we know of there is Severus Sebokht (died 666/7), but it is not at all unlikely that there were enthusiastic Aristotelians among its membership well before his time. While the school evidently attracted students, such as John Bar Aphtonia, from the Syriac-speaking East, until about 530 it lay in Greek territory near Antioch. If Severus of Antioch and some other Christians who had been students in Alexandria later became monks, as Zacharias’ Life of Severus clearly informs us, it is not difficult to imagine that alumni from the School of Alexandria might be found already among the monks of St. Thomas near Antioch or later at Qenneshre after its migration, perhaps even some who, like John or the Anastasius mentioned at Beirut by Zacharias, originally came from Edessa.25 It is unlikely that the Aristotelian tradition of Qenneshre originated solely from the initiative of one man, especially if he came from Nisibis. More likely is the supposition that Severus rose to a position of leadership because his Aristotelian interests coincided with those already present, or that he learnt about Aristotelian philosophy during his time there. One may well indeed ask where 14

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

his knowledge of the Alexandrian Aristotelian tradition (extending far beyond the ‘truncated Organon’)26 might have come from if not from Qenneshre itself, which had Greek and Syriac ‘in its genes’. It is quite conceivable therefore that the Alexandrian tradition of Aristotelian philosophy was present already in the sixth century in Qenneshre, or at Antioch before the migration of the monastery. Sergius of Reshaina was presumably not the only Syrian to study at Alexandria, nor the only one to have developed an interest in Aristotelian philosophy at that time. On account of his writings, however, we can assume that he was particularly important.27 While as a translator he became well known for his versions of Galen and Pseudo-Dionysius, it is significant that several of his philosophical writings (including his commentary on the Categories) are present in a seventh century Syriac manuscript,28 the century in which Qenneshre evidently served as the premier centre of Aristotelian studies in the Near East.29 At the other end of the school’s history, in the early Abbasid period, its importance for the transmission of philosophy from Alexandria to Baghdad has been challenged from another angle. According to this perspective, ‘the translation movement (into Arabic) was generated and sustained for a very long time by needs and tendencies in the nascent Abbasid society’, and ‘the fact that translation of Greek secular works into languages of the near East, including Arabic, had been going on before the advent of the Abbasids should not be seen, by itself, as explaining the Abbasid translation movement, which cannot be interpreted as the continuation of existing practices’.30 It is hardly very convincing, however, to maintain that the translation into Syriac of Aristotelian treatises, both pre-Abbasid (which comprised far more than the ‘truncated Organon’) and Abbasid, was totally unrelated to the Arabic translation movement. There is no real evidence, despite the vague reference of al-Mas‘ūdī, for the translation of complete logical works of Aristotle in the time of al-Manṣūr,31 while already before the time of his successor al-Mahdī (who commissioned an Arabic translation of the Topics from Timothy),32 the whole Organon (at least to the Sophistical Refutations) existed in Syriac, and Syriac scholars such as Timothy interested themselves in Peripatetic and Neoplatonic commentaries on it. As has rightly been observed, ‘the story of the translation of the Topics thus seems to re-affirm the role of the Christians as custodians of philosophical texts. There were Christians in the monasteries who were interested in its preservation, just as there were people in al-Mahdī’s entourage who were interested and able to understand it’.33 Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ and al-Kindī were largely dependent on Syriac and Greek tradition in their short pieces on logic, while al-Fārābī in his logical writings began from the logical studies of the Baghdad Aristotelians.34 Mattā himself was the advocate of logic in the famous debate in Baghdad over Greek logic and Arabic grammar.35 Syriac Christians in Baghdad were not merely translators of logic, they were its masters, as they had also dominated medical studies in the time of Ḥunayn. The Syriac translations of philosophy and medicine made by Ḥunayn and his co-workers were not designed to be merely intermediaries en route to an Arabic version (although sometimes they secondarily served that purpose), but 15

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

to be used by Syriac experts in philosophy and medicine.36 As Muslim interest in these subjects grew, the demand for Arabic texts grew along with it, which Syrians bilingual in Syriac and Arabic (or trilingual also in Greek) were able to provide, even if some of them such as Mattā (unlike the brilliant translator Ḥunayn) were criticised by native Arabic speakers for their ‘bad Arabic’. Syriac Christians and their monastic schools were thus of decisive significance in the transmission of philosophy from Alexandria to Baghdad. While it is doubtless an error to focus on one line of transmission to the exclusion of any other,37 both the lack of any convincing evidence of other bearers of the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy (or the Galenic tradition in medicine) in the intervening years and the evidence of their importance as scholars and translators during the two centuries of the Abbasid translation movement suggest that no other group was of comparable importance.38 We may therefore return to the beginning of the process, and to the figure of Sergius of Reshaina, and inquire what might have inspired him to bring Aristotelian philosophy into partnership with Christian theology and therefore to create, if not purely by himself, but nevertheless as the first significant author known to us, the Christian Aristotelianism which had such a long lasting influence. The brief notice on Sergius in Pseudo-Zacharias may give us a clue: Sergius, archiatros of Reshaina . . . studied many books of the Greeks and the teaching of Origen and attended for some time in Alexandria lectures on the interpretation of the books of other teachers [of pagan philosophy?]. He was expert in reading and speaking Syriac, and also in the practice of medicine. By intention he was faithful, as is evidenced by the prologue and translation of Dionysius, which he produced very accurately, and by the treatise De fide, which he wrote during the days of the blessed Peter, the faithful bishop.39 The mention of Origen is striking. It may be that Sergius is here merely characterised as an ‘Origenist’, in the common use of the term at the time to designate nothing more specific than an intellectual curiosity and an interest in theological speculation.40 But the possibility that he was known to have studied Origen’s own writings is worth consideration. Of special importance here is his Memra on the Spiritual Life, which he later placed as the prologue to his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius. In this short treatise he links the Aristotelian curriculum (logic, physics, mathematics, metaphysics) to an ascetic-spiritual curriculum inspired by Evagrius of Pontus, finally culminating in the Christianised Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius.41 Since in the sixth century the doctrines of Evagrius and Origen became largely elided or confused,42 Sergius’ dependence upon Evagrius could no doubt have led to him being thought of as a reader of Origen. His appreciation of Evagrius does not, however, rule out the possibility that he also read Origen. In Origen’s writings he might well have been attracted by an approach to the biblical books consistent with that of his philosophy masters to the treatises of Aristotle and Plato. Origen was above all else a biblical exegete. In his 16

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

commentaries Sergius could have seen, in a way hardly possible with any other Christian theologian, a deep connection between biblical exegesis and the exegesis of Aristotle and Plato as practised in Alexandria.43 In his Commentary on the Song of Songs Origen sets forth the introductory ‘philosophical’ questions necessary for the proper understanding of a book, the same questions directed by his philosophy masters to the treatises of Aristotle and Plato: ‘Who are the speakers? What is the genre? What attitudes are required to read this book correctly? What is its theme (skopos)? What place does it occupy among the other books of the cursus? What is the reason for its title?’44 For Origen it was important that only the perfected should read the Song of Songs, and that the sequence of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs should be rigorously followed, corresponding to the disciplines of ethics, physics, and epoptics (‘higher mysteries’).45 The worthy should be stimulated to grasp the higher mysteries, but from the unworthy they should be veiled. From this follows the necessity of literary obscuritas, basic for Origen, Evagrius, and Pseudo-Dionysius in their interpretation of the biblical writers, and for the Alexandrian commentators in their interpretation of Aristotle and Plato.46 For Sergius, as for Origen and Evagrius, spiritual life consists of praxis and theoria, the latter possible only after the former. Because praxis marks the beginning of a godly life and letters the beginning of all teaching, the Holy Spirit, according to Sergius, here and there inscribed the letters alphabetically at the beginning of lines of verses. He remarks that this happens ‘in the writings of the Hebrews’ in Psalm 118 (119), Psalm 144 (145), and Lamentations (although he numbers the Psalms according to the Greek). He also knows how the verse lines are organised in the Hebrew,47 sees deep meaning in the number eight (and in 4 × 2 = 8 and 4 × 22 = 88), and understands these symbolic passages generally as indications that obedience to the commandments constitutes the beginning of a godly life.48 So far as we are aware, Sergius did not know Hebrew; however, we find these interpretations in Origen,49 but (except for Sergius and partially among Jews) hardly any other writer.50 It can scarcely be doubted that Origen was Sergius’ source, possibly indirectly, but possibly directly, as Pseudo-Zacharias claimed. In Origen Sergius could therefore have found an approach to the Bible which allowed him to treat it as a guide for the ascent of the intellect to God, comparable to the way his Alexandrian masters treated Aristotle and Plato. In this way he was able to integrate Aristotle into a cursus for Christians which also included Evagrius and Pseudo-Dionysius.51 It is therefore quite possible that Pseudo-Zacharias was right in his assertion that Sergius studied the teaching of Origen. If that is so, in the narrative ‘From Alexandria to Baghdad’ we should include among the significant Alexandrians not only Aristotelian commentators such as Ammonius and Philoponus, but also Origen.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad. Ein erneuter Besuch bei Max Meyerhof’, in: Alfons Fürst (Hg.), Origenes und sein Erbe in Orient

17

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

und Okzident. Adamantiana Band 1 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2011) 213–26. © 2011 Aschendorff Verlag Gmbh & Co. KG Münster, and translated and republished by permission. Meyerhof (1930). Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a ed. Müller II, 134–5. German translation in Meyerhof (1930) 393–4, 405. English translation in Rosenthal (1975) 50–1. See also al-Mas‘ūdī, Tanbīh ed. de Goeje 121–2, tr. Stern (1960) 39–41. For the significance of the theme within mainstream intellectual history, cf. Fowden (2014) 127–63. Particularly on science, see Debié (2014). Strohmaier (1987); Rudolph (2012a) 22–4, (2012b) 408–9 (‘not a historiographical report, but illuminating as to how [al-Fārābī] situated his own work’). Meyerhof (1930) 390–2, 400–1, 410–11, 413–17. The stance of Christians at the School of Alexandria towards pagan philosophy was more varied than one would assume from Zacharias. Cf. King (2010) 173–8. On Sergius see Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 123–231, (2016); Watt (2018). Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 167–75. Similarly in Syriac at about the same time is the rhetorical prologue of (pseudo-)Joshua the Stylite; cf. Trombley and Watt (2000) xii–xiii, 1–7. Gutas (1999) 169–74, 179–87. Watt (2008–9) 752–8, 765–8; Hugonnard-Roche (2013) 243–4. Meyerhof (1930) 400. Strohmaier (1987) 388. Nau (1902). Watt (1999). Denḥā, History of Marouta, ed. and tr. Nau 70. Brock (1983), (2004). Brock (1982) 23–6. Easily overlooked was the publication of Pognon (1903) containing two letters of Timothy (at xvi–xix, xxi–xxv) mentioning the translations of Athanasius; not yet published was the Paris manuscript of the Arabic Organon, with its important marginal notes providing evidence of the Qenneshre Syriac translations. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 755–8 and on the Aristotelian curriculum at Qenneshre Watt (2017) 173–8. Syriac in British Library Add. MS. 14,658 foll. 60vb-61ra. Timothy ep. 19, ed. Braun 129, tr. Braun 86, epp. 43, 48, ed. Heimgartner 65–8, 88–92, tr. Heimgartner 47–52, 73–7. Cf. Brock (1999) and on Timothy’s Aristotelian interests as a whole Berti (2009) 316–32. Cf. Heimgartner (2015) 179 (‘Here a transmission line is taking shape from Mār Mattai by the Monastery of Mār Gabriel in Mosul and the East Syrian Patriarchate in Baghdad to the caliphal court’). Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a ed. Müller II, 135.14–24, tr. Meyerhof (1930) 405, Rosenthal (1975) 51; Fihrist 262–4, tr. Dodge (1970) 628–31. Cf. Endress (2012) 295–7. Cf. Rudolph (2012b) 370–2. Walzer (1962) 80–8. Zacharias, Life of Severus, ed. and tr. Kugener 55. Watt (2017) 175–8. The other two known to us, Proba and Paul the Persian, both belong to the tradition of Alexandrian Aristotelianism in logic, but we do not have evidence from their extant works of an interest in the entire curriculum, as we have from Sergius. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 233–91, (2018). British Library Add. MS 14,658 (nos. 1, 7, 8, 12). Cf. Wright (1872) 1154–60. The earliest known manuscript with writings of Proba or Paul the Persian is from the ninth or tenth century, British Library Add. 14,660; cf. Wright (1872) 1160–2. A later connection between Qenneshre and Alexandria is suggested by the tradition that Jacob of Edessa studied in the latter; cf. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle ed. Chabot 4, 445, tr. Chabot 2, 471. Similarly Bar Hebraeus, ed. Abbeloos and Lamy 1, 289,

18

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49 50

51

tr. Abbeloos and Lamy 1, 290. Whether philosophy was still taught in Alexandria in Jacob’s time, however, is quite uncertain, but there is no doubt that the astronomical expertise of Severus was of Alexandrian (Ptolemaic) origin; cf. Villey (2015). Gutas (1998) 2, 20. al-Mas‘ūdī, Murūğ ed. de Maynard V, 211. Cf. Gutas (1998) 30–1 (with translation). Cf. Watt (2004). Stroumsa (2013) 288. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 773–8. Endress (1986) 194–200, 235–70. See Chapter 6 in this volume. This point was fairly made by Hugonnard-Roche (2013) 237 in reviewing the original publication of this chapter. The suggestion that a Platonic school at Ḥarrān originating from Athens played an important role has attracted considerable attention in recent years. See Tardieu (1986), (1990). The concentration on Aristotle in the Syriac tradition, to the apparent virtual exclusion of Plato, which is replicated in the Aristotelian focus of Islamic philosophy, makes any influence of such a school appear minimal in comparison with that of Christian Syriac Aristotelianism. However, the hypothesis that such a school ever existed has won little support; cf. Rudolph (2012a) 24–5. Pseudo-Zacharias, Hist. eccl. IX 19, ed. Brooks 136, tr. Brooks 93. King (2011) 208–11. Sergius, Memra ed., tr. Sherwood 6, 122–5 (§79); tr. Fiori (2008) 40 (§78). See Chapter 2, 26–8. Cf. Guillaumont (1962) 124–59. This applies even though Origen cannot be characterised as either an Aristotelian or a Neoplatonist. In the prologue Origen answers as follows: speakers (1,1–2): sponsus, sponsa, amici sponsi, sodales sponsae (i.e. Sermo/Verbum Dei, anima, angeli, animae non perfectae); genre (1,1–3): epithalamium, i.e. nuptiale carmen; required attitudes (1,4–7): sensus ad discretionem boni vel mali; theme (2,1): amor/caritas; place in the cursus (3,1): Proverbia, Ecclesiastes, Canticum Canticorum, i.e. ethica, physica, epoptica; reason for the title (4,14): perveniens usque ad thalamum sponsi. Origen, in Cant. prol. 61–88. Cf. Neuschäfer (1987) I 77–84, II 365–9; Hadot (1987) 111–22, (1989) 36–47; Mansfeld (1994) 10–16. Origen was not the only Christian author to employ this scheme in the exegesis of the Bible. Cf. Mansfeld (1994) 17–19, who produces later examples from Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. But it was Origen who Pseudo-Zacharias mentioned in his notice on Sergius. Psalm 118: eight lines of verse under each letter; Psalm 144: two lines of verse under each letter; Lamentations: four times through the whole alphabet (of twenty-two letters). Sergius, Memra ed., tr. Sherwood 5, 450–7 (§§26–38); 6, 96–9 (§§39–46); tr. Fiori (2008) 22–6 (§§25–37), 27–9 (§§38–45). Origen, in Ps. 118 prol. 182–5; in Lam. superscr. 235. Cf. Harl (1972) 99–111, 545–52. Cf. Harl (1972) 106 n. 1: ‘La composition alphabétique du psaume 118, connue de certains de nos auteurs [namely in the Palestinian catena commentary on Psalm 118], sera vite oubliée en Orient et – ce qui est tout à fait compréhensible – en Occident. Augustin n’en ignore pas le principe, mais dit qu’il ne peut en parler faute de documentation sur ce sujet ([Sancti Aurelii Augustini] Enarrationes in Psalmos, C[orpus] C[hristianorum], t. 40, p. 1775f.)’. That would have been all the easier for Sergius to accomplish if he had conceived Pseudo-Dionysius as well as Evagrius to have been a reader of Origen; cf. Perczel (1999a), (1999b). He need not of course have followed Origen in every respect, for example, on the influence of the stars; cf. King (2010) 186 n. 115. Fiori (2014) 77–88

19

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

also concludes that Sergius read Origen, and that the ideas expressed in the Memra were patterned on his image of Origen and incubated among the philoponoi. Cf., however, King (2010) 173–7, who argues that the anti-pagan militancy of the philoponoi directed against philosophy teachers in Alexandria as portrayed by Zacharias was not shared by Sergius. Even a connection between the philoponoi and John Philoponus (or merely his nickname), who was more critical towards pagan philosophy than Sergius, has little evidence to support it; cf. Scholten (1996) 123 n. 439.

References Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle: J.B. Abbeloos and T.J. Lamy (eds. and trs.), Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon ecclesiasticum (Lovanii: Peeters, 1872–7). Berti (2009): V. Berti, Vita e studi di Timoteo I, patriarca cristiano di Baghdad (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes). Brock (1982): S.P. Brock, ‘From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning’, in: N.G. Garsoian, T.F. Mathews, and R.W. Thomson (eds.), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies) 17–34. Brock (1983): S.P. Brock, ‘Towards a History of Syriac Translation Technique’, in: R. Lavenant (ed.), Symposium Syriacum, 1980 (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum) 1–14. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9, 233–46. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Changing Fashions in Syriac Translation Technique’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 3–14. Debié (2014): M. Debié, ‘Sciences et savants syriaques: une histoire multiculturelle’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 9–66. Denḥā, History of Marouta: F. Nau (ed. and tr.), Histoires d’Ahoudemmeh et de Marouta, métropolitains jacobites de Tagrit et de l’Orient (VIe et VIIe siècles) (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1909). Patrologia Orientalis, 3, 1. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Endress (1986): G. Endress, ‘Grammatik und Logik’, in: B. Mojsisch (ed.), Sprachphilosophie in Antike und Mittelalter (Amsterdam: Grüner) 194–200, 235–70. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2008): E. Fiori (tr.), Sergio di Resh‘ayna: trattato sulla vita spiritual (Bose: Monastero di Bose). Fiori (2014): E. Fiori, ‘Un intellectuel alexandrin en Mésopotamie’, in: E. Coda and C. Martini Bonadeo (eds.), De l’antiquité tardive au Moyen Âge. Études de logique aristotélicienne et de philosophie grecque, syriaque, arabe et latine offertes à Henri Hugonnard-Roche (Paris: Vrin) 59–90. Fowden (2014): G. Fowden, Before and after Muḥammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Guillaumont (1962): A. Guillaumont, Les “Kephalaia gnostica” d’Évagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origenisme chez les Grecs et chez les Syriens (Paris: Éditions du Seuil).

20

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Gutas (1999): D. Gutas, ‘The “Alexandria to Baghdad” Complex of Narratives: A Contribution to the Study of Philosophical and Medical Historiography among the Arabs’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 10, 155–93. Hadot (1987): I. Hadot, ‘Les introductions aux commentaires exégétiques chez les auteurs néoplatoniciens et les auteurs chrétiens’, in: M. Tardieu (ed.), Les règles de l’interprétation (Paris: Éditions du Cerf) 111–22. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Harl (1972): M. Harl, La chaîne palestinienne sur le psaume 118 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf). Heimgartner (2015): M. Heimgartner, ‘Contexts of Christian Education in Baghdad: The Letters of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 173–85. Hugonnard-Roche (2004): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Hugonnard-Roche (2013): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Syriac Studies (Book Announcements and Reviews)’, Studia graeco-arabica 3, 233–44. Hugonnard-Roche (2016): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Sergius de Reš‘ainā’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 214–27. Hugonnard-Roche (2018): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Paul der Perser’, ‘Probus’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §§ 195–6. Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a: A. Müller (ed.),ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’, I–II (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Wahbīyah, 1882). King (2010): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91. King (2011): D. King, ‘Origenism in Sixth Century Syria: The Case of a Syriac Manuscript of Pagan Philosophy’, in: A. Fürst (ed.), Origenes und sein Erbe in Orient und Okzident (Münster: Aschendorff) 179–212. Mansfeld (1994): J. Mansfeld, Prolegomena: Questions to be Settled before the Study of an Author, or Text (Leiden: Brill). al-Mas‘ūdī, Murūğ: B. de Meynard, P. de Courteille, and C. Pellat (eds.), Murūğ al-dahab/ Les prairies d’or, I-VII (Beirut: Université Libanaise, 1965–79). al-Mas‘ūdī, Tanbīh: M. de Goeje (ed.), Kitāb al-Tanbīh wa-l-išrāf (Leiden: Brill, 1894). Meyerhof (1930): M. Meyerhof, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern’, Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse 23, 389–429. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle: J.-B. Chabot (ed. and tr.), Chronique de Michel le Syrien, patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche (1166–1199) (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899–1924). Nau (1902): F. Nau (ed. and tr.), ‘Histoire de Jean bar Aphtonia’, Revue de l’orient chrétien 7, 97–135. Neuschäfer (1987): B. Neuschäfer, Origenes als Philologe (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt). Origen, in Cant.: W.A. Baehrens (ed.), Origenes Werke. 8. Band (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1925). Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte 33. Origen, in Lam.: E. Klostermann and P. Nautin (eds.), Origenes Werke. 3. Band (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1983) 235–79. Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte.

21

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

Origen, in Ps. 118: M. Harl (ed. and tr.), La chaîne palestinienne sur le psaume 118 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1972). Perczel (1999a): I. Perczel, ‘Le Ps.-Denys, lecteur d’Origène’, in: W. Bienert and U. Küneweg (eds.), Origeniana septima: Origenes in den Auseinandersetzungen des 4. Jahrhunderts (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters) 673–710. Perczel (1999b): I. Perczel, ‘Une théologie de la lumière: Denys l’Aréopagite et Évagre le Pontique’, Revue des études augustiniennes 45, 79–120. Pognon (1903): H. Pognon, Une version syriaque des aphorismes d’Hippocrate (Leipzig: Hinrichs). Pseudo-Zacharias, Hist. eccl.: E.W. Brooks (ed. and tr.), Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1919–24). Corpus scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 84 (text), 88 (version). Rosenthal (1975): F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London: Routledge). Rudolph (2012a): U. Rudolph, ‘Der spätantike Hintergrund’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 3–39. Rudolph (2012b): U. Rudolph, ‘Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 363–457. Scholten (1996): C. Scholten, Antike Naturphilosophie und christliche Kosmologie in der Schrift “De opificio mundi” des Johannes Philoponos (Berlin: De Gruyter). Sergius, Memra: P. Sherwood (ed. and tr.), ‘Mimro de Serge de Rešayna sur la vie spirituelle’, L’Orient syrien 5 (1960), 433–57; 6 (1961), 95–115, 121–56. Stern (1960): S.M. Stern, ‘Al- Mas‘ūdī and the Philosopher al-Fārābī’, in: S. Maqbul Ahmad and A. Rahman (eds.), Al- Mas‘ūdī Millenary Commemoration Volume (Aligarh: Indian Society for the History of Science and the Institute of Islamic Studies, Aligarh Muslim University) 39–41. Strohmaier (1987): G. Strohmaier, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: eine fiktive Schultradition’, in: J. Wiesner (ed.), Aristoteles, Werk und Wirkung: Paul Moraux gewidmet II (Berlin: De Gruyter) 380–9. Stroumsa (2013): S. Stroumsa, ‘Philosophy as Wisdom: On the Christians’ Role in the Translation of Philosophical Material into Arabic’, in: H. Ben-Shammai, S. Shaked, and S. Stroumsa (eds.), Exchange and Transmission across Cultural Boundaries: Philosophy, Mysticism and Science in the Mediterranean World (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities) 276–93. Tardieu (1986): M. Tardieu, ‘Ṣābiens coraniques et Ṣābiens de Ḥarrān’, Journal asiatique 274, 1–44. Tardieu (1990): M. Tardieu, Les paysages reliques: routes et haltes syriennes d’Isidore à Simplicius (Louvain: Peeters). Timothy, ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy, epp. 43, 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Trombley and Watt (2000): F. Trombley and J.W. Watt, The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press). Villey (2015): É. Villey, ‘Ammonius d’Alexandrie et le traité sur l’astrolobe de Sévère Sebokht’, Studia graeco-arabica 5, 105–28. Walzer (1962): R. Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (Oxford: Cassirer).

22

FROM ALEXANDRIA TO BAGHDAD

Watt (1999): J.W. Watt, ‘A Portrait of John Bar Aphtonia, Founder of the Monastery of Qenneshre’, in: J.W. Drijvers and J.W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority (Leiden: Brill) 155–68. Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Translators and Greek Philosophy in Early Abbasid Iraq’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 15–26. Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Watt (2018): J. Watt, ‘Sergios (Sargīs) von Reš‘aynā’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §194. Wright (1872): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, Part III (London: British Museum). Zacharias, Life of Severus: M.-A. Kugener (ed. and tr.), Vie de Sévère, par Zacharie le scholastique (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1907). Patrologia Orientalis, 2, 1.

23

2 F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius in Syriac tradition1

Sergius Sergius’ commentary on the Categories of Aristotle addressed to Theodore is the earliest known major work in Syriac on the subject of Aristotelian logic.2 Although the original title of the work is unknown, this designation is a fair description, for five of its seven chapters run broadly in parallel to the text of Aristotle. It is, however, clear that it is a commentary in the tradition of the Alexandrians already through the contents of the first two chapters, in which the Categories is viewed as the first work in a much more extensive curriculum, the overall form of which is presented here before entering into the particular subject matter of the Categories itself. Thus Sergius’ first chapter deals with the divisions of philosophy, the divisions of the works of Aristotle, and the question as to whether logic is a part or instrument of philosophy. In Chapter 2 he presents the divisions and the sequence of Aristotle’s works on philosophy as a whole and logic in particular, the reason why the Philosopher made a point of being obscure, and the aim of the Categories, following which he discusses the species of discourse before going on to a presentation of the ten categories and a discussion of naming (cf. Categories 1–3). These two chapters therefore deal with some, but by no means all, or even the majority, of the standard preliminary questions treated by the Greek Alexandrians at the start of their commentaries on the Categories. Sergius was therefore a disciple of his Alexandrian masters, but a selective one. While accepting, at the start of Chapter 1, the well-known description of philosophy as assimilation to God,3 he did not, like his master Ammonius, pose the question of the utility of the entire Aristotelian philosophy, or answer that it is to ascend to the arkhē of all things and to know that it is the One Goodness itself.4 Nowhere, to the best of our knowledge, did Sergius designate the study of Aristotle as inferior to that of Plato or preliminary to it. In the prologue of the work he named Aristotle as the origin and beginning of all knowledge for all physicians and philosophers. Aristotle had assembled all the scattered parts of philosophy and fashioned from them ‘the perfect and admirable form of the science of all that is’.5 While only an exposition of the logic, and of that only the Categories, is extant from the hand of Sergius, it is clear that logic 25

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

and the Categories are not especially privileged within his overall view of Aristotle’s significance. He intended to treat the whole of the Aristotelian autoprosōpa, not merely the logic or the Categories, although we do not know whether he ever did so. The Categories was the first work of the curriculum, and that was where all the Alexandrians began. His intention was therefore in respect of Aristotle the same as theirs. In Chapter 2 he writes: We will now speak as (well as) we can about the aim of each one of these treatises, beginning the chain with that On Categories, which is about simple namings,6 and similarly treating each one of them in the same way. Then we will go on to his other treatises, those on the parts of practice, (then) physics and mathematics, and (then) the last ones which are called ‘divine’. This in turn reflected, as he believed, Aristotle’s own procedure: Because logic has been shown to be an instrument which clearly differentiates in knowledge truth from falsehood, and in practice marks out good from bad, this philosopher wished to construct this art of logic before his other writings on all these things – namely, on all practical (matters), and on physics, mathematics, and spiritual (matters)7 – for it fulfils for him in each of these the need of an instrument. And because logic is a true demonstration, but a demonstration derived from correctly posited syllogisms, and preceding a syllogism is another combination of two or three terms, and preceding that are simple namings, for this reason Aristotle began in his treatises on the art of logic with the doctrine of simple namings and after these taught about their first and simple combination, and similarly after that, (following) in order, about the syllogism, from which demonstrations arise, and after these (i.e. demonstrations) about things useful in all ways to the support of demonstrations.8 He did this with art and learning, not casually, as in the past.9 Whether or not Sergius ever wrote an exposition of these other works, no Syriac reader of this who followed his line of thought could have supposed that the value of Aristotle’s writings was limited to the logic, or to that of the so-called ‘truncated Organon’ terminating at Prior Analytics I, 7. In the realm of physics, Sergius translated the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo10 and translated and adapted Alexander’s On the Principles of the Universe.11 In that of theology he translated (with adaptations) Pseudo-Dionysius12 and prefaced it with his own previously composed Memra on the Spiritual Life.13 As an intelligent student of Neoplatonic philosophers in Alexandria, Sergius must surely have been aware of the similarities between Dionysius and the Neoplatonism of Proclus, whatever he thought about the identity of ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’. While we have no evidence that he followed his Alexandrian teachers in considering Aristotle inferior 26

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

or propaedeutic to Plato, in his enthusiasm for Dionysius evident in his translation of the corpus we have reason to suppose that he remained nevertheless to some extent true to those Alexandrian teachers in seeing Aristotle as inferior to a ‘more divine’ pedagogue. That pedagogue, however, was not Plato as interpreted by Proclus, but the Holy Scriptures as interpreted by Dionysius. The Neoplatonic curriculum of Plato reading which followed that of Aristotle proceeded in parallel with that posited for Aristotle, the theoretical dialogues proceeding from the logical (those dealing with words and concepts) to the physical and then the theological.14 If we now endeavour to understand how Sergius might have related his reading of Aristotle to the ‘higher’ cycle not of Plato, but of his Christian Bible as interpreted by Pseudo-Dionysius, the key text at our disposal is his Memra on the Spiritual Life. Here he asserts that ‘the science of theoria is divided according to the ranks of the things over which it spreads’, and he enumerates seven parts: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

subsists by means of demonstrations and combinations of worded statements; is made known in the hidden silence of the intellect without word; extends over the visible natures; ascends to the hidden substancies higher than vision; relates to the faculties adjoining the visible natures; resides in the things which afterwards enter from outside into rational natures through their freedom; (7) which is like its finest flower, by means of all those (already) mentioned touches, as far as is permitted, on the exalted radiance of the hidden divinity.15 Subsequently Sergius relates that the men ‘expert’ in (3) call it ‘natural’ (science), and (5) is called ‘mathematics’, (4) ‘spiritual theoria or divine science’, (6) ‘second natural science’, and (7) ‘divine theoria’. The last of these is termed ‘the hidden and veiled vision of the intellect which reaches out, as much as is possible, through some distant similarity between (the two of) them, towards the unfathomable radiance of Being’16 and later on identified in ‘the Lord’s teaching’ as the ‘Kingdom of God’,17 while (4) is identified with the scriptural ‘Kingdom of Heaven’.18 Different sorts of theoria correspond to the difference of the objects, ascending upwards to the first form, ‘which is not a knowledge but an excess of ignorance and superior to knowledge’.19 Elsewhere Sergius presents us with a threefold division of the contemplative life, ascending from ‘knowledge of sensible and visible natures’ or ‘natural knowledge’, through ‘theoria of rational and invisible natures’ or ‘spiritual theoria’, to ‘theoria of that which is beyond nature’ or ‘divine contemplation’.20 We appear therefore to have two parallel, three- or four-part ascending curricula, one philosophical and the other monastic and theological.21 Each has its own organon: in (1) we can recognise Aristotle’s logic, in (2) its theological counterpart, probably (although not exclusively) of Evagrian inspiration.22 In (3), (4), and (5) we recognise (Aristotelian) physics, metaphysics, and mathematics,23 in (6) and (4) Evagrius’ ‘second natural science’ and ‘spiritual theoria or divine 27

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

science’.24 In (7) Pseudo-Dionysius is to the fore,25 but linked with Evagrius (‘divine theoria’).26 The second cycle is thus not constructed from a Neoplatonic Plato, but from two Christian masters, Evagrius and Dionysius. Elsewhere in the treatise27 Sergius divides contemplations into height, depth, and length and breadth (Eph. 3, 18), corresponding to first, intermediate, and last. In the parallel curricula thus posited, mathematics is intermediate between physics and metaphysics in the Aristotelian cycle, ‘second natural science’ in the Evagrian scheme, also designated ‘spiritual theoria’, ‘divine science’, or ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, intermediate between ‘natural science’ and ‘divine theoria’, or ‘Kingdom of God’.28 As the pagan philosophers saw the Platonic corpus as ‘higher’ than the Aristotelian, albeit broadly parallel to it, Sergius no doubt saw the Evagrian-Dionysian cursus as a ‘higher’ parallel to the Aristotelian. Sergius therefore looks to be integrating the Aristotelian philosophy he acquired in Alexandria into a theological cursus which, if not designed solely for monks, was certainly particularly appropriate for them. It was his view, expressed towards the end of the Categories commentary, that without Aristotle’s logic not only medicine and philosophy cannot be understood, but neither ‘can the true sense be uncovered of the divine Scriptures, wherein lies the hope of our salvation29 – unless it should be that someone receives divine ability thanks to the exalted nature of his way of life, with the result that he has no need for human instruction’.30 He allows therefore that some who live an exalted way of life can do without ‘human instruction’, and it may be surmised from this that some could attain to the Evagrian-Dionysian theoria without the benefit (or at any rate the full benefit) of the Aristotelian. This may help to explain the profile of translation and commentary in Sergius’ œuvre: translation (or translation and adaptation) of Galen, Dionysius, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo, but no translation of, only commentary on, the (first treatise of) Aristotle’s autoprosōpa. Even if the old anonymous Syriac version of the Categories existed at the time Sergius wrote his commentary, Sergius did not presuppose it in his exposition.31 If his commentary was thus intended to facilitate philosophical study by Syrians, Aristotle himself had to be studied in Greek. A Syrian elite able to read Greek certainly existed, and they were perhaps quite numerous,32 but in the other strand of Sergius’ ‘two strand curriculum’, the Scriptures, Evagrius, and Dionysius were all available in Syriac, the last of them courtesy of none other than Sergius himself. For Graeco-Syriac bilinguals he therefore provided a Syriac commentary (completed or extant only on the Categories) as an aid to understanding the Greek text of Aristotle; but for other Syrians, especially physicians and monks, whose way of life or divine aid gave them ‘some ability’ without the necessity of direct access to the standard Aristotelian corpus, he provided some translations, principally of Galen and Dionysius. These latter, monolingual Syrians might also, to be sure, have been included in the intended readership of his commentaries, if he considered a derivative and simplified knowledge of Aristotle to be of some value, though this would have differed radically from that of the students in Alexandria, who possessed both the Aristotelian text and the commentators’ expositions. The 28

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

limitation of direct contact with the autoprosōpa to those able to read Greek was, however, removed over time as the treatises of Aristotle were translated into Syriac during the next two or three centuries. Sergius, however, was undoubtedly able to see that the obscurity with which, according to Ammonius, Aristotle veiled his teaching was analogous to that with which, according to Dionysius, the Scriptures veiled the divine mysteries. In explaining Aristotle’s obscurity he asserts, following Ammonius, that just as those celebrating any mysteries do not manifest them in front of everyone, but perform them in inner rooms and behind coverings so that they are known only to those who are partakers of the mysteries, so also he veiled the science of logic by the obscurity of the terms so that it would therefore not be disclosed to undisciplined and deceitful people, but to those whose mind is worthy of teaching such as this and who desire to labour with all their strength at fine (things) . . . those whose mind is brittle and whose will is inclined to laziness and who are eager in everything for corporeal pleasures would immediately become feeble and abstain from the knowledge of things, but those whose nature has kinship with knowledge and are ready for the teachings about everything not only do not become weak and give up when they see obscurity, but all the more strengthen their mind and devote themselves to great effort to get into the knowledge of what is said.33 Sergius wrote this about the obscurity in which the teaching of Aristotle was expressed, but he was well aware that analogous statements were made by Dionysius about the sacred, mystical teachings of the Scriptures.34 Evagrius, too, employed an intentional obscurity in the theological tradition of Origen and the Cappadocians.35 Purity and ‘stretching of the mind’ were therefore necessary in both strands of the curriculum. If the ‘instruments’ of the two strands may therefore appear rather different but nevertheless have an inner coherence, the same also applies to the ‘summits’. The problem of reconciling Aristotle’s Metaphysics with Plato’s theology was already faced by the Alexandrians, who asked why Aristotle called the first principle Mind, while Plato called it the Good. The answer of the later Neoplatonists was that Aristotle wrote the Metaphysics straight after the Physics, and for that reason spoke of Mind as closer to nature than the Good. They had no doubt that Aristotle’s first principle was the One, and cited the Homeric quotation at the end of Metaphysics Λ: ‘let One be the ruler’.36 If Sergius saw in his two-strand curriculum a similar problem between Dionysius and Aristotle’s talk of Mind, his answer could naturally have been taken from Dionysius himself: ‘Of course the mystical traditions of the revealing words sometimes hymn the majesty of the supersubstantial thearchy as Word, Mind and Substance’.37 He might also, however, have seen a solution in the same way as we see it solved by the later Neoplatonists: differences in terminology are to be explained in relation to the context of a treatise within the whole ‘ascending’ curriculum. 29

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

Between Sergius and Mattā Sergius was a physician and translated Galen. It is widely recognised therefore that philosophical studies, already closely associated with the medical in Greek late antiquity, made their entry into Syriac tradition in association with medicine, and this link is evident again in Baghdad in the Abbasid period and the activity of Ḥunayn. Sergius’ integration of Aristotelian studies with an ascetic-spiritual cursus enabled them also to become part of Syriac monastic tradition, at any rate of that segment of Syriac monastic tradition sympathetic to Greek philosophy. Zacharias’ Life of Severus gives us good grounds to suppose that the philosophical school at Alexandria attracted many who would subsequently enter monastic life, and that Sergius was only one of several drawn to the Greek schools of higher education from the Syriac-speaking area.38 Within a number of Syriac monasteries there were those able to read Greek, notably in that of Qenneshre, originally the monastery of St. Thomas in the Greek Seleucia-on-Orontes and transferred from there around 530 to the banks of the Euphrates by John Bar Aphtonia, himself a native of Edessa who probably wrote only in Greek.39 Those who translated Aristotle into Syriac clearly had access to Greek manuscripts, were able themselves to study him through the medium of the Greek text, but for educational reasons – sometimes perhaps in connection with their own teaching – thought it valuable to have a Syriac translation. To posit a ‘Syriac tradition’ of Aristotelian studies separate from the ‘Greek tradition’ between the sixth and ninth centuries40 is therefore, for the bilinguals, quite unrealistic.41 The bilingual tradition of alumni from Syriac monastic schools can be traced right through to the (trilingual) Catholicus Timothy I, who described Syriac as his own language but made clear that he had also studied Greek and Arabic.42 This bilingual tradition was keenly interested in both Aristotle and Dionysius, and the ongoing work of extending and ‘improving’ the Syriac translations of Aristotle (that is, by making them ever more closely mirror the Greek) by the scholars associated with Qenneshre seems to have proceeded alongside similar work on the Syriac version of Dionysius. Athanasius of Balad was, to the best of our knowledge, the first to carry the Syriac Organon as far as the Sophistical Refutations, and he also produced a version of Dionysius (and Gregory of Nazianzus).43 It is very likely that Aristotle was read in Qenneshre together with (at least some of the) Greek commentators who were used or who taught in Alexandria. Jacob of Edessa’s revision of the old anonymous Syriac version of the Categories appears to show evidence of having been produced or read in association with Greek commentaries, as indeed does the old version itself,44 and there is a (late) report that Jacob spent some time in Alexandria.45 George, bishop of the Arabs, issued his translations of the Categories, De interpretatione, and Prior Analytics together with commentaries which clearly are indebted to the Alexandrian tradition.46 There is no need to assume that the monastic school of Qenneshre became a centre of Greek philosophical studies only in the seventh century under the direction of Severus Sebokht; it is likely that it was already such in the 30

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

sixth, and quite possibly even while it was still that of St. Thomas at Seleucia. Furthermore, a bilingual monastic school whose members were interested in both Aristotle and Dionysius is likely to have been interested also in the writings, commentaries, and translations of Sergius.47 We can trace a link from there to Baghdad, for Athanasius’ translations of both Aristotle and Dionysius were known to Timothy, and (for Aristotle) also to the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Aristotelians who produced the Arabic ‘Paris Organon’.48 Timothy, furthermore, was aware of ‘the Commentary of Olympiodorus on the books of the logic, and of Stephanus and of Sergius and of Alexander’,49 as well as translations of Dionysius by Athanasius and Phocas.50 In his famous 1930 essay Max Meyerhof, on the dubious basis of al-Fārābī’s ideologically motivated narrative, had the School of Alexandria relocating to Antioch and Ḥarrān on a peregrination to Baghdad.51 He might have been nearer the mark if in his time more had been known about the activities of the Qenneshre scholars and their influence, and of the migration of that monastery from the Orontes to the Euphrates.52 Phocas’ preface to his translation of Dionysius affords a valuable insight into this bilingual culture towards the end of the seventh century, as also into the influence of Sergius’ edition of Dionysius. Remarking on the writings of Dionysius, interpreted long ago from Greek to Syriac by Sergius in a translation ‘which all of us, Syrians, have read’, he observes that there are obscure interpretations therein too elevated for the multitude, some of which he has omitted and some retained for the advantage of those who ‘like us have penetrated the knowledge of these interpretations’. ‘By divine providence’ Dionysius has come into his hands in the original Greek with the scholia and preface of John of Scythopolis, and a preface by George of Scythopolis. Phocas furthermore notes that many of the difficult words have been researched in the manuals which comment on the Greek of the period and reported in the traditions of other workers such as Athanasius and Jacob of Edessa, who by their ability cleared the way as much as is possible and in some manner conjoined the two languages.53 On the Aristotelian side, the translated works of the Qenneshre scholars were, as far as we know, limited to the Organon, but many of those able to read Greek, like Jacob of Edessa, also studied physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. While among works on astronomy and the natural sciences Syriac scholars of late antique and Umayyad times apparently translated only some elementary treatises, many still had the capacity to read the more advanced Greek writings in the original.54 While the only known Syriac translation of Euclid probably comes from the early Abbasid period,55 the seventh or eighth century undertext of a ninth century Syriac palimpsest copied at the monastery of Qartmin contains the Elements in Greek.56 Apparently study not only of Greek, but of Greek geometry, was alive in that monastery in the seventh or eighth century, although no Syriac translation of Euclid is known from that time. Jacob of Edessa’s engagement with physics and metaphysics – all in association with his theological interests – is shown by his Hexaemeron and his Encheiridion.57 The letters of Timothy are evidence that the study of the whole of the Organon, as also the Syriac translations of Athanasius, had reached Baghdad and the East 31

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

Syrian church by the end of the eighth century.58 Timothy, nevertheless, clearly presupposed that the fullest resources for study of Aristotle were still not to be found in the Abbasid capital, but in the West Syrian monasteries, as we know from his efforts to find further material in the libraries of Mār Mattai and Mār Zina. He himself had been educated at the East Syrian monastery of Bashosh, where he may have first encountered Aristotle.59 He was trilingual, although he considered Syriac to be his own language, and while clearly preferring to read the texts in this language, he could compare a Syriac text with the Greek when occasion required, as he did with a passage in Athanasius’ version of the Posterior Analytics. In asking his correspondent Pethion to look at Mār Mattai for ‘some commentary or scholia by anyone, whether Syriac or not, to . . . the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric and Poetics’, he was evidently happy to receive them in Greek or Syriac, and at Mār Zina he asked his correspondent to look for ‘the two treatises on poets (i.e. Aristotle’s Poetics), for I have one’. As already noted, he knew of the commentaries of Olympiodorus, Stephanus, Sergius, and Alexander (of Aphrodisias), and of versions of Dionysius by Athanasius and Phocas. As is well known, he himself was a translator, or at least the ‘overseer’ of Abū Nūḥ’s translation, of the Topics from Syriac to Arabic, by commission of the caliph al-Mahdī.60 Around a century after Timothy we encounter in Baghdad the East Syrian whose rigorous focus on Aristotle (unlike the more diverse interests of Ḥunayn and al-Kindī) and whose establishment of a group or school of Aristotelian philosophy gave rise to al-Fārābī’s imaginary peregrination of the school of philosophy from Alexandria to Baghdad. Abū Bišr Mattā (died 940) was ignorant of Greek, but was an active translator of Aristotle and Aristotelian commentators from Syriac to Arabic, as were his pupil Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and Yaḥyā’s pupil Ibn Zur‘a, both West Syrians, more of whose works have survived than those of Mattā.61 Among the extant works of the latter two, we have evidence of interest in the writings of Dionysius (see the following). We can therefore trace over a period of around five hundred years (Sergius died in 536, Ibn Zur‘a in 1008) a series of Graeco-Syriac followed by Syro-Arabic translators and commentators of Aristotle who were also closely interested in Dionysius. (Among the following only for Theophilus and Mattā do we currently lack such evidence relating to Dionysius.) Excluding the anonymous translators and others who cannot be associated directly with Alexandria, Qenneshre, or Baghdad, as translators from Greek to Syriac of Aristotle or Aristotelian writings, we can adduce, prior to Ḥunayn and his school, Sergius (pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo and Alexander’s On the Principles of the Universe), Athanasius (died 687, Prior Analytics to Sophistical Refutations), Jacob of Edessa (died 708, Categories), George, bishop of the Arabs (died 724, Categories to Prior Analytics), and Theophilus of Edessa, the astrologer to al-Mahdī (died 785, Prior Analytics and Sophistical Refutations). Both Sergius and Athanasius made translations of Dionysius, while commentaries on Aristotle were written by Sergius (Categories) and George (Categories to Prior Analytics), an epitome of Aristotle’s logic by Athanasius, and an Encheiridion with passages taken (directly or indirectly) from 32

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

Aristotle’s Metaphysics by Jacob of Edessa. As translators in Baghdad of Aristotle and his commentators from Syriac to Arabic we can name prior to Ḥunayn Timothy (died 823, Topics), and subsequent to Ḥunayn Mattā (died 940, Posterior Analytics, Sophistical Refutations, Poetics, De caelo, De gen. et corr., Meteorologica, Metaphysics Λ, commentaries by Alexander, Themistius, and Olympiodorus), Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī (died 975, Categories, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Poetics, Physics, De anima?, Metaphysics Λ and Μ, commentaries by Alexander, Themistius, and Olympiodorus), and Ibn Zur‘a (Sophistical Refutations, Book of Animals). Timothy, Yaḥyā, and Ibn Zur‘a were all familiar with Dionysius, and as already noted Timothy knew of commentaries on Aristotle. Commentaries on Aristotle were written by Mattā (Categories to Topics, Physics, Metaphysics α), Yaḥyā (Categories to Sophistical Refutations, Physics, De caelo?, Metaphysics α), and Ibn Zur‘a (various).62

The school of Mattā The earliest known Syriac translations of treatises of Aristotle other than those of the logic are those stemming from the school of Ḥunayn. Ḥunayn’s translations covered a wider range than those from the school of Mattā, particularly because they included his numerous medical translations. Insight into the curriculum of Mattā’s school can be gained from the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, but also to some degree from The Philosophy of Aristotle of al-Fārābī, the school’s most illustrious pupil. The first twelve treatises of Aristotle listed in the Fihrist appear in the same sequence in al-Fārābī’s work: these are the eight treatises of the Organon (Categories to Poetics) and the four principal physical treatises (Physics, De caelo, De gen. et corr., and Meteorologica),63 thus the eight instrumental and four principal physical treatises of the Alexandrian autoprosōpa.64 Mattā is said to have written commentaries on the first five of these and on the Physics, and to have made translations of commentaries on the last three.65 Of the remaining three of these, Quwairā, with whom he studied, is said to have written a commentary on the Sophistical Refutations, Mattā’s follower al-Fārābī, as is well known, wrote several (partially extant) works on the Rhetoric, and Mattā himself translated the Poetics.66 The only other treatise to be mentioned in connection with Mattā, apart from a cryptic reference in the section On Sense,67 is the ultimate book in the Fihrist’s and al-Fārābī’s lists,68 the Metaphysics, of which Mattā translated Book Λ with the commentaries of Alexander and Themistius69 and, as we know from elsewhere, wrote a commentary on Book α.70 From this information the conclusion can reasonably be drawn that Mattā’s curriculum of Aristotle reading was that of the Alexandrians: the eight organika, the four principal physica, and the one theological treatise, the Metaphysics.71 In the Philosophy of Aristotle, however, al-Fārābī lists, between the Meteorologica and the Metaphysics, many of the biological treatises (including the De anima), several of which also appear (in slightly different form and sequence) as numbers thirteen to fifteen in the Fihrist.72 If we now look at the treatises which 33

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

were known to al-Kindī, a quite different picture emerges. Al-Kindī appears to have been seriously interested in only one of the organika (the Prior Analytics) and two of the four ‘general’ physica (De caelo and Meteorologica), but almost all the biological treatises (the Alexandrians’ biological ‘intermediate’ works) mentioned by al-Fārābī.73 It looks therefore as if al-Fārābī added to the curriculum he knew from Mattā’s school, which was essentially the Alexandrian curriculum, works which had been popular in al-Kindī’s circle.74 Only in the case of Ibn Zur‘a do we find evidence of any interest in the biological treatises on the part of a member of the school of Mattā.75 Even allowing for the ‘asymmetrical’ nature of this evidence (the Fihrist on the one side and modern linguistic analysis on the other), it points fairly clearly to Mattā’s group, not al-Kindī’s, as the inheritors of the Alexandrian tradition. The Alexandrian curriculum of Aristotelian philosophy did not reach Mattā through al-Kindī. The information in the Fihrist on the Greek commentators is also significant. The Organon fell into two parts, each of four treatises: the logical method itself (the Posterior Analytics and its three necessary preliminaries, Categories to Prior Analytics), and secondly the other four useful but less logically rigorous treatises (Topics to Poetics). There were numerous Greek commentaries on part one, many fewer on part two (as Timothy was aware).76 It is when we come to those on the physical treatises and the Metaphysics that three names stand out: Alexander, Themistius, and Olympiodorus.77 It looks as if these three were especially favoured by Mattā, and it is unlikely that the significant overlap with those mentioned by Timothy (died 823) a century or more earlier (Olympiodorus, Stephanus, Sergius, and Alexander)78 is purely coincidental. On the basis of this evidence it may therefore be suggested that the heart (if not the totality) of the teaching in the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians under Mattā’s direction consisted of the eight treatises of the Organon, the four treatises on physics, and the Metaphysics, together with several of their Greek commentators, principally Alexander, Themistius, and Olympiodorus.79 Since they did not know Greek, the Syro-Arabic teachers in Mattā’s school depended on Graeco-Syriac (or Graeco-Arabic) translations from the school of Ḥunayn or from earlier translators, but the identification of most of these works for particular study within an Aristotelian curriculum was not due to Ḥunayn (809–876) or his son Isḥāq (died 911). They had been identified, with the exception of the excluded physica, in the Hellenophile Syriac monastic schools, particularly Qenneshre, which maintained this modified version of the curriculum taught in Alexandria.80 Among the little that is extant from the writings of Mattā is the fragment already noted from his commentary on Metaphysics α.81 We do have some treatises, however, from Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and Ibn Zur‘a, and in these we can observe the continuing interest in Dionysius on the part of Syriac Christian Aristotelians. Yaḥyā’s treatise On the Unity draws both on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Δ 6 and on the Neoplatonic doctrine of the triad known in Proclus and Dionysius, who was probably one of the inspirations of Yaḥyā.82 This is all the more likely in view of the fact that Yaḥyā’s pupil Ibn Zur‘a drew on Dionysius to answer why the 34

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

Scriptures spoke of ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ if the reality embedded in these expressions was the ‘Mind, Intelligizing and Thought’ of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ 9. The answer according to Ibn Zur‘a was not only that holy things should not be given to the dogs and pearls cast before swine (Matthew 7, 6), but also, as explained by ‘the virtuous and excellent Dionysius’, that figurative expressions applied to divine things can push those who seek the truth to understand why these expressions have been employed.83 While the idea that figurative expressions can ‘push those who seek the truth to understand’ is not unique to Dionysius, it is not without significance that it was to Dionysius (among others) that Ibn Zur‘a appealed when bringing together the teachings of Christian theology and Aristotelian metaphysics.84 Yaḥyā might not have been the first Christian to connect Metaphysics Λ 9 with the Trinity; the text was already interpreted theologically by Themistius.85 While Neoplatonic theology joined with Aristotelian philosophy was domesticated in Islam by the Theology of Aristotle,86 for its domestication in Christianity the basis was the corpus of Dionysius. A modern analogy may serve to make clear the conclusion towards which this evidence is leading. It was not the hardware (the institution and its personnel) which migrated by stages from Alexandria to Baghdad, as al-Fārābī fantasised and Meyerhof believed, but the software (the curriculum). Beginning with Sergius, the original Alexandrian ‘program’ was ‘copied’ with various additions and modifications over the years: the substitution of the Bible and Dionysius for Plato and pagan Neoplatonism, of Evagrian-monastic spirituality for the propaedeutic moral instruction (from Epictetus or Pseudo-Pythagoras) of the pagan philosophers, the gradual accumulation of Syriac versions and commentaries of Aristotle alongside the Greek and the Greeks, and the emphasis on the Organon (and to some degree the Metaphysics) at the expense of the physical treatises (in the pre-Abbasid period).87 The ‘hardware’ on which the successive revisions of this ‘program’ was run was the Syriac monastic schools, until it finally lost its Greek language component and acquired a new bilingual version in Syriac and Arabic. In Abbasid Baghdad the hardware for the new Syro-Arabic program was a multi-religious school, the teachers predominantly Christian, the students (and the surrounding environment) increasingly Muslim – somewhat mirroring the pagan teachers and growing body of Christian students and environment in Alexandria. In Alexandria Sergius broke from the Plato and Proclus of his pagan masters and linked Aristotle in the program with the Bible and Dionysius. Around four centuries later in Baghdad, al-Fārābī broke from the Bible and Dionysius of his Christian masters and re-united the Corpus Aristotelicum with (whatever he knew of) Plato and Proclus.88

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘From Sergius to Mattā: Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius in Syriac Tradition’, in: Josef Lössl and John W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity: The Alexandrian Commentary Tradition between Rome and Baghdad (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) 239–57.

35

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

2 The work is still unedited, but there is a partial Italian translation in Furlani (1922) 135–72. There is a French translation of the prologue and chapter one, together with introduction and commentary, in Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 165–231, and an English translation and commentary on chapter two in Chapter 4 of the present volume. On the shorter treatise to Philotheos, see Aydin (2016). 3 Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 191. The ‘inserted’ passage on the species of discourse – inserted in the sense that generally in the commentators it does not appear at this point – is, however, close to their commentaries on De interpretatione 4; cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 154, 158–9. 4 Ammonius, in Cat. 6.9–16. 5 Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 168. 6 Kunnāyē (lit. ‘namings’, but perhaps also including the idea of ‘predications’). Cf. the discussion of naming/predication in King (2011) 227–8. 7 The Alexandrian curriculum of logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. 8 The Organon: Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, and the other two, three, or four (Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics). 9 For the context of these citations, cf. Chapter 4 in this volume, 75–6. 10 Aristotle, De mundo (Syriac). On the translation, cf. McCollum (2011). 11 Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Principles of the Universe. On the adapted translation, cf. King (2010). 12 Pseudo-Dionysius (Syriac). Cf. Fiori (2011) 189–93, who shows Sergius subtly giving a more ostensibly Christian colouring to Dionysius in some passages. Similarly King (2010) 167–83 demonstrates his Christianisation of Alexander’s Peripatetic cosmology. 13 Sergius, Memra. The Italian translation of Fiori (2008) is preferable to the French of Sherwood. 14 Cf. O’Meara (2003) 61–3. While in Ammonius’ Alexandria there may have been more concentration on Aristotle than previously at Plato’s expense (thus Sorabji [2005] 208), Plato still appears to have remained ‘superior’, at least among the pagan philosophers. Cf. Olympiodorus, Prolegomena 18: ‘One should not consider Plato inferior to Aristotle, but superior’. 15 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 6, 122–5 (§79); tr. Fiori (2008) 40 (§78). 16 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 6, 124–5 (§81); tr. Fiori (2008) 41 (§80). 17 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 6, 128–9 (§88); tr. Fiori (2008) 44 (§87). 18 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 6, 132–5 (§§92–3); tr. Fiori (2008) 46–7 (§§91–2). 19 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 6, 124–5 (§80); tr. Fiori (2008) 40–1 (§79). 20 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 6, 138–9, 144–5 (§99, 112); tr. Fiori (2008) 49, 54 (§98, 111). 21 Fiori (2014) 81 prefers to speak not of two curricula, but of a single way in which Evagrian asceticism is enriched with new elements. 22 Cf. Evagrius Ponticus, Gnosticus 132–5, 166–9 (§§27, 41). 23 In the two passages cited earlier from the Categories commentary, Sergius indicates that the last of the Aristotelian treatises are called ‘divine’ and that they deal with ‘spiritual (matters)’. The surprising inversion of mathematics and metaphysics (in comparison to the doctrine that mathematics was intermediate between physics and metaphysics) will probably be on account of the general conviction that Aristotle wrote the Metaphysics immediately after the Physics, while mathematics was to be studied not from Aristotle but from mathematicians. Cf. Watt (2017) 190 n. 106. 24 On (6), the entry ‘into rational natures through their freedom’, see Evagrius, Letter to Melanie 618 (cf. Guillaumont [1962] 105). On (4), (6), and (7), ‘second natural science’, ‘spiritual theoria’, and ‘divine theoria’, cf. e.g. Evagrius, Kephalaia gnostica I, 70; III, 24, 26; VI, 49 (ed., tr. Guillaumont 51, 107, 237); and in general Guillaumont (1962) 37–9. On ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, cf. Evagrius, Practicus 498–502.

36

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

25 Cf. his phrase ‘superabundance of non-knowledge and above knowledge’ (6, 124, §80 yattīrīt lā īda‘tā wa-l‘al men īda‘tā) with Dionysius’ term huperagnōstos (‘superunknown’, De divinis nominibus, 592D, 593B, 640D, De mystica theologica 997A) or a statement such as De divinis nominibus VII, 2. 869A: God is not-Mind by superabundance, not deficiency, and similarly not-Reason being above (huper) Reason. Cf. the remarks on the translation of Dionysius’ ‘superessential’ in Fiori (2011) 190–2. 26 Fiori (2014) 81 considers that (7) derives from Pseudo-Dionysius alone, since Evagrian ‘divine theoria’ and Dionysian mysticism are quite different. This may be so, in which case I would assign ‘divine theoria’ to (4), splitting it into two ‘Evagrian’ sub-sections, while Fiori attributes it to (2). It is open to question, however, whether Pseudo-Dionysius’ apophaticism was truly incompatible with the apophaticism (especially the ‘infinite ignorance’) of Evagrius, or would have been seen as such by Sergius. Cf. Konstantinovsky (2009) 61–5, who concludes (65) that the view that Evagrius’ ‘infinite ignorance’ bears no resemblance to the mystical darkness of thinkers such as Pseudo-Dionysius ‘necessitates a re-evaluation’. 27 Sergius, Memra ed. Sherwood 5, 438–9 (§3); tr. Fiori (2008) 15–16 (§2). 28 The Aristotelian strand in this text of Sergius was noted by Hugonnard-Roche (2004b) 107–8; the Evagrian component by Guillaumont (1962) 226; the Dionysian strand by Perczel (2009) 30–1. Similarly Beulay (2005) 99–100: ‘des expressions de Denys se mêlent à des concepts typiquement évagriens, le tout dans une orientation générale également évagrienne’. See now also Hugonnard-Roche (2009) 320–2. 29 With this remark Sergius (in a work formally addressed to a bishop) makes it clear that he is referring to the Christian ‘divine Scriptures’, not the pagan, such as the Orphic texts and the Chaldean Oracles. It is probably such texts as these latter, with the associated explicit inclusion of pagan religion within the philosophical curriculum, which were excised from the teaching of Ammonius’ school in the 480s; cf. Watts (2006) 222–7; Sorabji (2005) 204–8. Sergius probably studied at the school in the years following this agreement between Ammonius and the city and ecclesiastical authorities. 30 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (1989) 12; Brock (2004) 8. Sergius’ allowing of ‘the reception of divine ability thanks to an exalted way of life’ to supplant human instruction (in effect Aristotelian philosophy) may be seen as a Christian parallel to the exaltation by some Neoplatonists of theurgy over philosophy; cf. Sorabji (2005) 208–11. Sergius was doubtless referring especially to Christian holy men. Christian reluctance to exclude ‘divine power’ even when discussing Aristotle can be seen in Philoponus’ qualification of the impossibility of the blind seeing again ‘unless by divine power’; see in Cat. 169.19 and Sorabji (2015) 5. In placing Aristotelian philosophy in a religious setting, Sergius was of course not doing something entirely new, but rather switching the context from paganism to Christianity. Cf. Hadot (2002) 198: ‘Die Erklärung der Schrift des Aristoteles wird als Werk der Frömmigkeit aufgefaßt. Die Einstellung des neuplatonischen Exegeten gleicht somit der des christlichen Exegeten, der die Bibel erklärt’. 31 This is clear from the different renderings in the version and the commentary of Greek technical terms, pointed out by Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 24–33. Fiori (2011) 180–2 considers the possibility that Sergius may have been more at home in Greek than in Syriac. Watts (2011) 140–3, 147–50 notes that in classroom instruction the Greek commentators on Plato (or Aristotle) assumed that their students had the Greek text of the ancient author to hand, and argues that Sergius, being familiar with the method of instruction in Alexandria, sought – successfully, as the subsequent history of Aristotelian scholarship in Syriac shows – to replicate this situation in a Syriac language setting. Cf. Watt (2010) 29–34. 32 Brock (2011) 202–6 considers the possibility that the Syriac Aristotelian commentator Probus and the Greek theologian Probus might have been one and the same. 33 Commentary on the Categories, chapter two. See Chapter 4 in this volume, 77. Cf. Ammonius, in Cat.7.7–14.

37

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

Cf. e.g. De caelesti hierarchia II, 2. 140A-B; 5. 145A-B. Evagrius, Gnosticus 37–40. Cf. Hadot (1991) 181–2. Dionysius, De caelesti hierarchia II, 3. 140C. Cf. De divinis nominibus VII, 2. 868C-D: ‘How can God the Superwise be hymned as Wisdom, Mind, Word, and Knower? How can he, not having an intellectual activity, intelligize anything of the intelligibles?’ On the close association between monasticism and the Christian students of philosophy at Alexandria, cf. Watts (2006) 210–31; and particularly on the Christian current there most closely reflecting the attitude of Sergius, King (2010) 171–81. Zacharias, Life of Severus 55 mentions at Beirut a student from Edessa named Anastasius. Cf. Nau (1902) 97–135; Baumstark (1922) 180–1. This life of John, written in Syriac by a monk of Qenneshre, is a fine example of classical panegyric. Cf. Watt (1999). Qenneshre was probably the most Hellenophile of all the Syriac monasteries, but it was not alone in its scholarly interests. See Brock (2007) 299–301. Gutas (1999). Watt (2008–9). Timothy ep. 19 (ed. Braun 127, tr. Braun 85). Timothy ep. 43 (ed. Heimgartner 67–8, tr. Heimgartner 50–2). Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 49–51. According to Michael the Syrian, Chronicle ed. Chabot 4, 445, tr. Chabot 2, 471. Similarly Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle ed. Abbeloos and Lamy 1, 289, tr. Abbeloos and Lamy 1, 290. But whether philosophy was still taught in Alexandria in Jacob’s time is quite uncertain. Furlani (1923). It is significant that several of his philosophical writings (including his commentary on the Categories) are already present in the seventh century Syriac manuscript British Library Add. MS 14,658 (nos. 1, 7, 8, 12); by contrast, the earliest known manuscript with writings of Proba or Paul the Persian is from the ninth or tenth century, British Library Add. 14,660. Cf. Wright (1872) 1154–60, 1160–2. Fiori (2014) 88–90 considers Sergius to have been ‘an isolated figure’, but in his adherence to the Alexandrian philosophical tradition, even as a Christian, he was hardly isolated. Athanasius’ translations of Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations are cited in the marginalia of the Paris Arabic Organon manuscript, his translations of Posterior Analytics and Topics by Timothy. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 755–9. Jacob of Edessa’s translation of the Categories is (probably) also cited in the ‘Paris Organon’; cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) 33–5. Timothy ep. 19 (ed. Braun 129; tr. Braun 86). Timothy ep. 43 (ed. Heimgartner 68; tr. Heimgartner 52). Meyerhof (1930). Cf. Chapter 1 in this volume. Phocas, Preface 198–9 (commentary 167–8); tr. van Esbroeck (1996) 171–2. On the date, cf. Brock (1979) 21. Treiger (2015) 60–1 considers that while Chalcedonian Christians in the Near East read Pseudo-Dionysius in Greek, miaphysite and East Syrian Christians read him almost exclusively in Syriac (in the translations of Sergius or Phocas). Treiger relates these two diverse strands of Christianity to the later differences between al-Kindī and al-Fārābī. Cf. Saliba (2007) 8, 58–64. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2014) 80–3. Brock (2007) 300–1. Cf. Watt (2017) 181–8 and Chapter 8 in this volume, 167–8, 175–6. As argued there, Philoponus’ criticisms of Aristotelian natural science, especially his theory of the eternity of the world, together with a Christian antipathy to that doctrine, are likely to have

38

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

58

59

60

61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73

been responsible for the lack of interest in Aristotle’s physics at Qenneshre. In the multi-religious environment of Abbasid Baghdad, interest in the Aristotelian physica revived, although most Christian Aristotelians (and indeed al-Kindī) still rejected the eternity of the world. The extension of the wide-ranging study of Greek philosophy from the West Syrians to the East Syrians, possibly via the West Syrian monasteries in the Tigris region, appears to have occurred during the middle to late eighth century. Brock (1982) 24–5 pointed to the activity of David Bar Paulus. The background to the opening of the East Syrian schools to West Syrian influence has been illuminated by Berti (2009). Heimgartner (2015) 185 observes that ‘Timothy makes large endeavors for the schools of Mosul and Gundešāpūr, but there is no sign of school activity in Baghdad . . . [where] one has the impression that the East Syrian Church had just arrived at the headquarters of the new capital’. Timothy, epp. 19, 43, 48. In passing it may be noted that Timothy’s wish for commentary on ‘the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics’ indicates that he knew the text of the complete eight-volume Organon (since he is hardly likely to have wanted scholia on a text he did not know) and commentaries on the first four (since otherwise he would presumably have sought commentaries on all eight). Cf. Watt (2010) 39–40. Cf. Endress (2012) 297–301 (Mattā), 301–24 (Yaḥyā), 325–33 (Ibn Zur‘a). The information on the Aristotelian translations and commentaries by Mattā, Yaḥyā, and Ibn Zur‘a comes from Fihrist 248–52, 263–4, some of which in the case of the Organon also finds confirmation in the marginal and interlinear notes of the Paris manuscript of the Arabic Organon (BN 2346). English translation of the former in Dodge (1970) 598–606, 630–2. Cf. in general D’Ancona Costa (2002–4) 232–43, and on Yaḥyā Endress (1977) 25–41. Fihrist 248–5, tr. Dodge (1970) 598–604). Al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭāīis 72–111, tr. Mahdi (2001) 82–114. On the Alexandrian curriculum, cf. Hadot (1989) 80–91. The De anima possessed an intermediate status, belonging partially to the main group of four physical treatises, and partially to the following biological treatises; cf. ibid. 86–7. Fihrist 248.26; 249.3, 10, 14, 23–4; 250.22, 29; 251.4–5, 8; tr. Dodge (1970) 598–601, 603–4. Fihrist 249.27; 250.2, 4. Fihrist 251.20. Cf. Peters (1968) 45–7. But see following n. 86. Fihrist 251.28–30. Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī, Ghāyat al-ḥakīm 283; tr. Ritter and Plessner (1962) 292–3. Among the treatises on nature, only on the four principal physical treatises (with to a lesser extent the De anima), the Alexandrians’ ‘general works’, were there any Neoplatonic Greek commentators; cf. Hadot (1989) 85–7. To what extent mathematics or the ethical treatises of Aristotle were studied in Mattā’s school can hardly be determined, but the Fihrist 252.1–4 mentions a ‘Book of Ethics’. Hugonnard-Roche (2004b) 108 notes that Aristotelian ethics were totally absent from Sergius’ Memra on the Spiritual Life. Christian Aristotelians from Sergius to Ibn Zur‘a seemingly derived their philosophical ethics not from Aristotle, but from the Platonism of the Greek Fathers and even from ‘acceptable’ ethical and political pagan thinkers in the Platonic political tradition such as Themistius. Cf. Watt (2004). Al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs 111–29, tr. Mahdi (2001) 114–28. (Cf. thereto Vallat [2004] 134–5, 138–40.) Fihrist 251.11–24, tr. Dodge (1970) 604–5. Cf. Endress (1997) 56–8; Endress (2007) 345–8. Endress identifies the Prior Analytics, De caelo, Meteorologica, De anima, the zoological works, and the Parva naturalia. On metaphysics and theology, see the following.

39

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

74 The biological works, however, were not excluded by all the Alexandrians. The fuller listing is found in Elias (David), who in enumerating all the physical treatises of Aristotle followed a Peripatetic classification. A certain inconsistency is also found in Philoponus and Olympiodorus, probably because they were following Alexander. Cf. Hadot (1989) 85, 88–90. 75 Fihrist 251.23–4, 264.20–7, tr. Dodge (1970) 604–5, 632. 76 A graphic demonstration of this point is made by D’Ancona Costa (2002–4) 250. 77 Fihrist 250.7–8, 22, 29–30; 251.4–6, 8–9, 27–30. 78 Timothy ep. 19 (ed. Braun 129; tr. Braun 86). The paganism of Alexander, Themistius, and Olympiodorus was evidently not felt to be threatening, while Sergius and Stephanus were Christian. An interesting piece of evidence suggesting that the Baghdad Aristotelians did indeed know a significant amount from the writings of the later Alexandrians is the analogy in al-Fārābī’s large commentary on the Rhetoric between the structure of the Organon and the myth of the cave in Plato’s Republic. Vallat (2004) 189–90 suggests concerning this analogy that if al-Fārābī followed a work later than Elias or David, it would be ‘sans doute à cette source qu’il aura puisé l’idée qu’on trouve exposée dans le commentaire sur la Rhétorique’. 79 Zimmermann (1981) civ-cv notes that Alexander and Themistius were ‘the pillars of the Baghdadian renaissance’, but continues: ‘neither of whom had been connected to Alexandria’, and that although ‘the Alexandrians migrated to Baghdad, when they arrived at the city gates they were ready to retire’. That is hardly true for Timothy or Mattā. Alexander and Themistius were not ‘Alexandrians’, but their commentaries were influential in the Alexandria of Ammonius; cf. e.g. Sorabji (1990) 16–17. Olympiodorus and Stephanus were ‘genuine’ Alexandrians – as indeed was Sergius. ‘Tracing and translating the Greek commentaries [into Arabic by] . . . translators [such as] . . . Isḥaq ibn Ḥunayn and Abū Bishr Mattā’ (Zimmermann ci) would not have been such an ‘enormous task’ (ibid.) if a good number of these commentaries had been known, or whose existence had been known, to Timothy, whether in Greek or Syriac. Watts (2006) 258 observes that ‘Stephanus had peacefully Christianized philosophical teaching’. Mutatis mutandis, the same might be said of Sergius, and it was precisely such Christianisation that enabled philosophical teaching to pass from Alexandria to Baghdad. 80 It may be noted here that al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda 88, tr. Mahdi (2001) 43, wrote that the science of demonstration (after existing among Chaldeans and Egyptians) ‘was transmitted to the Greeks, where it remained until it was transmitted to the Syrians and then to the Arabs’. 81 Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī, Ghāyat al-ḥakīm 283; tr. Ritter and Plessner (1962) 292–3. 82 Cf. Endress (1977) 72–3; Platti (1983) 113–14; Endress (2012) 318–22. 83 Ibn Zur‘a, On Questions Posed by Some of His Brothers 10–11. Cf. Endress (2012) 329. 84 Ibn Zur‘a might have had De caelesti hierarchia 2 particularly in mind. This chapter was explicitly cited by Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V ed. Watt 83, tr. Watt 71, in his discussion of figurative speech. 85 Themistius, in Metaph Arabic ed. Badawī 21.10–12, Hebrew ed. Landauer 30.9–10, tr. Brague (1999) 113–14. Themistius’ paraphrase of Metaphysics Λ (not extant in Greek) was translated into Arabic by either Mattā (which would imply the existence of a prior Syriac version) or Ḥunayn (cf. Brague 16–17). On this ‘Aristotelian Trinitarianism’ in Yaḥyā, cf. Watt (2007). 86 At the conclusion of the section on Aristotle, Fihrist 252.1–4, tr. Dodge (1970) 606, mentions ‘in the handwriting of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī from the catalogue of his books’ ‘The Book of Ethics’, ‘The Book of al-marā’a’, and ‘The Book of Theology’. This might be held to support the view that al-Fārābī did not intend that his Philosophy of Aristotle should be understood to end with the Metaphysics. Cf., however, the discussion of the matter by Vallat (2004) 146–52. The Theology of Aristotle appears to have become

40

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

important to Islamic philosophers first within the circle of al-Kindī, and thus not within the more focused Syriac Aristotelian (plus Dionysian) tradition. Cf. Endress (1997) 52–6, 62–4; Endress (2007) 330–4. 87 On physics and metaphysics, see Chapter 8 in this volume, 171–7, and Watt (2017) 181–92. 88 Cf. Vallat (2011).

References Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Principles of the Universe (Syriac epitome): E. Fiori (ed. and tr.), ‘L’Epitomé syriaque du traité Sur les causes du tout d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise attribué à Serge de Reš‘aynā’, Le Muséon 123 (2010), 125–58. Ammonius, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1895). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 4. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), The Fifth Book of the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit (Lovanii: Peeters, 1986). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 480 (text), 481 (version). Aristotle (Ps.), De mundo (Syriac): P.A. de Lagarde, Analecta syriaca (Leipzig: Teubner, 1858) 134–58. Aydin (2016): S. Aydin, Sergius of Reshaina: Introduction to Aristotle and His Categories, Addressed to Philotheos (Leiden: Brill). Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle: J.B. Abbeloos and T.J. Lamy (eds. and trs.), Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon ecclesiasticum (Lovanii: Peeters, 1872–7). Baumstark (1922): A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: Marcus und Webers). Berti (2009): V. Berti, Vita e studi di Timoteo I, patriarca cristiano di Baghdad (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes). Beulay (2005): R. Beulay, ‘Quelques axes de l’enseignement de Denys l’Aréopagite chez les mystiques syro-orientaux, et leur continuité possible en mystique musulmane’, in: Patrimonie syriaque, Actes du colloque IX. Les syriaques transmetteurs de civilisation (Antélias-Paris: Lazourey&Ané) 97–106. Brague (1999): R. Brague, Thémistius: Paraphrase de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, livre lambda (Paris: Vrin). Brock (1979): S.P. Brock, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s Discourse on the Myron’, Oriens Christianus 63, 20–36. Brock (1982): S.P. Brock, ‘From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning’, in: N.G. Garsoian, T.F. Mathews, and R.W. Thomson (eds.), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies) 17–34. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Changing Fashions in Syriac Translation Technique’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 3–14. Brock (2007): S.P. Brock, ‘A Syriac Intermediary for the Arabic Theology of Aristotle? In Search of a Chimera’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 293–306. Brock (2011): S.P. Brock, ‘The Commentator Probus: Problems of Date and Identity’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 195–206.

41

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

D’Ancona Costa (2002–4): C. D’Ancona Costa, ‘Commenting on Aristotle: From Late Antiquity to the Arab Aristotelianism’, in: W. Geerlings and C. Schulze (eds.), Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter: Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung (Leiden: Brill) 201–51. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Endress (1977): G. Endress, The Works of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī: An Analytical Inventory (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert). Endress (1997): G. Endress, ‘The Circle of al-Kindī’, in: G. Endress and R. Kruk (eds.), The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism (Leiden: Research School CNWS) 43–76. Endress (2007): G. Endress, ‘Building the Library of Arabic Philosophy: Platonism and Aristotelianism in the Sources of al-Kindī’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 319–50. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. Evagrius Ponticus, Gnosticus: A. Guillaumont and C. Guillaumont (eds. and trs.), Évagre le Pontique: le gnostique (Paris: Cerf, 1989). Sources chrétiennes, 356. Evagrius Ponticus, Kephalaia gnostica: A. Guillaumont (ed. and tr.), Les six centuries des Kephalaia gnostica (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1958). Patrologia Orientalis, 28, 1. Evagrius Ponticus, Letter to Melanie: W. Frankenberg (ed.), Euagrius Ponticus (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912). Evagrius Ponticus, Practicus: A. Guillaumont and C. Guillaumont (eds. and trs.), Traité pratique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1971). Sources chrétiennes 170–71. al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs: M. Mahdi (ed.), Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs (Beirut: Dār Majallat Shiʿr, 1961). al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda: J. Āl Yāsīn (ed.), Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿādah (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2008): E. Fiori (tr.), Sergio di Resh‘ayna, Trattato sulla vita spirituale (Bose: Monastero di Bose). Fiori (2011): E. Fiori, ‘Sergius of Reshaina and Pseudo-Dionysius: A Dialectical Fidelity’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 179–94. Fiori (2014): E. Fiori, ‘Un intellectuel alexandrin en Mésopotamie’, in: E. Coda and C. Martini Bonadeo (eds.), De l’antiquité tardive au Moyen Âge. Études de logique aristotélicienne et de philosophie grecque, syriaque, arabe et latine offertes à Henri Hugonnard-Roche (Paris: Vrin) 59–90. Furlani (1922): G. Furlani, ‘Sul trattato di Sergio di Rêsh‘aynâ circa le categorie’, Rivista trimestrale di studi filosofici 3, 135–72. Furlani (1923): G. Furlani, ‘La versione e il commento di Giorgio delle nazioni all’ Organo aristotelico’, Studi italieni di filologia classica 3, 305–33. Guillaumont (1962): A. Guillaumont, Les “Kephalaia gnostica” d’Évagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origenisme chez les Grecs et chez les Syriens (Paris: Éditions du Seuil). Gutas (1999): D. Gutas, ‘The “Alexandria to Baghdad” Complex of Narratives: A Contribution to the Study of Philosophical and Medical Historiography among the Arabs’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 10, 155–93. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill).

42

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

Hadot (1991): I. Hadot, ‘The Role of the Commentaries on Aristotle in the Teaching of Philosophy According to the Prefaces of the Neoplatonic Commentaries on the Categories’, in: H. Blumenthal and H. Robinson (eds.), Aristotle and the Later Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 175–89. Hadot (2002): I. Hadot, ‘Der fortlaufende philosophische Kommentar’, in: W. Geerlings and C. Schulze (eds.), Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter: Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung (Leiden: Brill) 183–99. Heimgartner (2015): M. Heimgartner, ‘Contexts of Christian Education in Baghdad: The Letters of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 173–85. Hugonnard-Roche (1989): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Aux origins de l’exégèse orientale de la logique d’Aristote: Sergius de Reš‘aina, médecin et philosophe’, Journal asiatique 277, 1–17. Hugonnard-Roche (2004a): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Hugonnard-Roche (2004b): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Ethique et politique au premier âge de la tradition syriaque’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 99–119. Hugonnard-Roche (2009): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Platon syriaque’, in: M.-A. Amir Moezzi et al. (eds.), Pensée grecque et sagesse d’orient. Hommage à Michel Tardieu (Turnhout: Brepols) 307–22. Hugonnard-Roche (2014): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Mathématiques en syriaque’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 67–106. Ibn Zur‘a, On Questions Posed by Some of His Brothers: P. Sbath (ed.), Vingt traités philosophiques et apologétiques d’auteurs arabes chrétiens du IXe au XIVe siècle (Cairo: Maktabat H. Frīdrīkh, 1929) 6–19. King (2010): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91. King (2011): D. King, ‘The Genesis and Development of a Logical Lexicon in the Syriac Tradition’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 225–37. Konstantinovsky (2009): J. Konstantinovsky, Evagrius Ponticus: The Making of a Gnostic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). Mahdi (2001): M. Mahdi (tr.), Alfarabi: Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). McCollum (2011): A. McCollum, ‘Sergius of Reshaina as Translator: The Case of the De mundo’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 165–78. Meyerhof (1930): M. Meyerhof, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern’, Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse 23, 389–429. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle: J.-B. Chabot (ed. and tr.), Chronique de Michel le Syrien, patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche (1166–1199) (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899–1924). Nau (1902): F. Nau (ed. and tr.), ‘Histoire de Jean bar Aphtonia’, Revue de l’orient chrétien 7, 97–135. Olympiodorus, Prolegomena: A. Busse (ed.), Prolegomena et In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1902). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XII, 1.

43

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

O’Meara (2003): D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Perczel (2009): I. Perczel, ‘The Earliest Syriac Reception of Dionysius’, in: S. Coakley (ed.), Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell) 27–41. Peters (1968): F.E. Peters, Aristoteles Arabus (Leiden: Brill). Philoponus, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1898). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XIII, 1. Phocas, Preface: G. Wiessner (partial ed.), ‘Zur Handschriftenüberlieferung der syrischen Fassung des Corpus Dionysiacum’, Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen, phil.-hist. Klasse (1972) 165–216. Platti (1983): E. Platti, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Théologien chrétien et philosophe arabe (Leuven: Departement Oriëntalistiek). Pseudo-Dionysius: B.R. Suchla, G. Heil, and A.M. Ritter (eds.), Corpus Dionysiacum I-II (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990–1). Patristische Texte und Studien, 33, 36. Pseudo-Dionysius (Syriac): E. Fiori (ed. and tr.), Dionigi Areopagita: Nomi divini, Teologia mistica, Epistole. La versione siriaca di Sergio di Rēšʻaynā (Lovanii: Peeters, 2014). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 656 (text), 657 (version). Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī, Ghāyat al-ḥakīm: H. Ritter (ed.), Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (Das Ziel des Weisen) (Berlin: Teubner, 1933). Ritter and Plessner (1962): H. Ritter and M. Plessner (trs.), “Picatrix”. Das Ziel des Weisen von Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī (London: Warburg Institute). Saliba (2007): G. Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Sergius, Memra: P. Sherwood (ed. and tr.), ‘Mimro de Serge de Rešayna sur la vie spirituelle’, L’Orient syrien, 5 (1960), 433–57; 6 (1961), 95–115, 121–56. Sorabji (1990): R. Sorabji, ‘The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth) 1–30. Sorabji (2005): R. Sorabji, ‘Divine Names and Sordid Deals in Ammonius’ Alexandria’, in: A. Smith (ed.), The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Peter Brown (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales) 203–13. Sorabji (2015): R. Sorabji, ‘Introduction’, in: R. Sirkel, M. Tweedale, J. Harris, and D. King (trs.), Philoponus: On Aristotle Categories 1–5, and a Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts (London: Bloomsbury) 3–34. Themistius, in Metaph. Arabic: ‘A. Badawī (ed.), Arisṭū ‘inda al-‘Arab (Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahḍah al-Miṣrīyah, 1947); Hebrew: S. Landauer (ed.), Themistii in Aristotelis Metaphysicorum librum Lambda paraphrasis (Berlin: Reimer, 1903). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, V, 5. Timothy, ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy, epp. 43, 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Treiger (2015): A. Treiger, ‘Palestinian Origenism and the Early History of the Maronites: In Search of the Origins of the Arabic Theology of Aristotle’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 44–80. Vallat (2004): P. Vallat, Farabi et l’École d’Alexandrie: des prémisses de la connaissance à la philosophie politique (Paris: Vrin).

44

F R O M S E R G I U S T O M AT T Ā

Vallat (2011): P. Vallat, ‘Al-Fārābī’s Arguments for the Eternity of the World and the Contingency of Natural Phenomena’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 259–86. van Esbroeck (1996): M. van Esbroek (tr.), ‘La triple preface syriaque de Phocas’, in: Y. de Andia (ed.), Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en occident (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes) 167–86. Watt (1999): J.W. Watt, ‘A Portrait of John Bar Aphtonia, Founder of the Monastery of Qenneshre’, in: J.W. Drijvers and J.W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority (Leiden: Brill) 155–68. Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 121–49. Watt (2007): J.W. Watt, ‘Christianity in the Renaissance of Islam. Abū Bishr Mattā, al-Fārābī, and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī’, in: M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages (Beirut/Würzburg: Ergon) 99–112. Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2010): J.W. Watt, ‘Commentary and Translation in Syriac Aristotelian Scholarship’, Journal of Late Antique Culture and Religion 4, 28–42. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Watts (2006): E.J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press). Watts (2011): E.J. Watts, ‘Translating the Personal Aspect of Late Platonism in the Commentary Tradition’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 137–50. Wright (1872): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, Part III (London: British Museum). Zacharias, Life of Severus: M.-A. Kugener (ed. and tr.), Vie de Sévère, par Zacharie le scholastique (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1907). Patrologia Orientalis, 2, 1. Zimmermann (1981): F.W. Zimmermann, Al-Farabi’s Commentary and Short Treatise on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (London: Oxford University Press).

45

3 THE SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA AND BAGHDAD1

In the years towards the end of late antiquity there was a lively culture of philosophical study and writing, particularly (following the departure of some philosophers from Athens) in Alexandria. In the ninth and tenth centuries CE a comparable endeavour could be found in Baghdad. In Alexandria the medium of philosophical discourse was Greek, and in Baghdad it was Arabic; but despite the difference in language, a certain similarity between the two is quite clear. In both locations there was intense interest in the works of Aristotle, and in both, the philosophers who interpreted his writings did so within the conceptual framework of Neoplatonism. For the historian of philosophy, an obvious question thus presents itself: how did this similarity come about? And what happened in the interval, not only the temporal but also the spatial interval? In a famous paper presented at the Prussian Academy in Berlin in 1930, the historian of medicine Max Meyerhof offered an enticing answer to these questions.2 Arguing from a section within the History of the Physicians, the author of which, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa, identified as coming from a work dealing with the appearance of philosophy in Islam by al-Fārābī,3 Meyerhof proposed that the school of Ammonius in Alexandria did not die out in subsequent years, but at some point after the Muslim conquest of the Near East transferred itself first to Antioch and later to Ḥarrān, from where a few of its members finally settled in Baghdad. For many years Meyerhof’s paper was considered to provide a satisfactory answer to the question as to how late antique philosophy found new life in Abbasid Baghdad, but the evidence for his theory was highly suspect, and this solution has now been universally abandoned. I mention it here because its popularity for many years alerts us to the fact that the questions it proposed to solve do not disappear merely because the solution he offered turned out to be untenable.4 These questions still exist. Did the Arab interest in Greek philosophy emerge without immediate antecedent in the late eighth or ninth century, and if so, why did it closely reflect the Neoplatonic Aristotelianism of late antiquity, rather than the wider range of Greek philosophy available in (unread) manuscripts in Byzantium or elsewhere on which, on this assumption, the Arabs would have been entirely dependent? Alternatively, did it spring from a living tradition of philosophy in the region, a tradition going back to late antiquity? 47

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

My initial characterisation of late antique philosophy as purely Greek, and the philosophy of Abbasid Baghdad as Arabic, was not quite the whole truth. Among the students at Alexandria there were also Syrians and Armenians, and philosophy was studied in Baghdad not only in Arabic, but also in Syriac. Traditionally Syrians (that is, those who used the Syriac language) have been considered, even if in a rather undefined way, as ‘intermediaries’ between Greeks and Arabs, and indeed in a purely philological sense this is undeniably the case. The Syrians were the master translators, by whom most of the Arabic translations of Greek philosophy were made, either from Greek or sometimes from Syriac versions. One school of thought, however, would limit their ‘intermediate’ role merely to their translation activity, and indeed attribute even that not primarily to an interest in the texts themselves, but only to servicing an Arab interest which had arisen independently of them. On this view, philosophy had been as good as dead in the Near East (as elsewhere) between the sixth century (or earlier) and the late eighth or ninth, and Syriac involvement with the subject during the Baghdad period was merely a by-product of the Arabic interest, separate in all but the most superficial aspects from the Syriac Aristotelianism of late antiquity.5 This chapter offers a presentation of the evidence for the alternative interpretation, namely that philosophy remained alive in the Near East during that period, and that its impressive flowering in Abbasid times did not spring from a desert, but from fertile soil. On this interpretation, it is reasonable to suppose that among Abbasid Arabs familiar with Syrians, the Syriac philosophical tradition was one of the factors which gave rise to Graeco-Arabic philosophy, while it can also be true that the stimulus of the developing Arab interest enlivened and broadened the older Syriac one. A key difference between the focus of philosophical study in Greek late antiquity and that in Abbasid Baghdad is the near (albeit not quite) total absence of Plato from the latter. Not only in late antique Greek philosophy but also in the Byzantine renaissance, while Aristotle was of course well known, Plato was held in higher esteem. By contrast, the dominant position of Aristotle both in pre-Abbasid Syriac and in Arabic philosophy may well be thought to constitute a powerful argument in support of the view that the preceding Syriac tradition was a significant factor in the early Abbasid period. However, before this thesis can be assessed in greater detail, two preliminary points need to be made. Syrians who studied in Alexandria evidently had to know Greek, and there is no doubt that many Syrians, at any rate among the elites, were effectively bilingual. This was clearly the case with the first known Syriac commentator on Aristotle, Sergius of Reshaina, a priest and physician (died 536), who studied in Alexandria and translated many treatises of Galen, as well as one of Alexander of Aphrodisias, and one of pseudo-Aristotle.6 The misconception is still to be found that he was the first translator of any part of the school corpus of Aristotle, but while he wrote his commentary on the Categories in Syriac, he expected his readers, if they wished to consult the text of Aristotle himself, to read it in Greek. The earliest, anonymous translation of the Categories was probably made after Sergius’ commentary, perhaps in response to a demand created by its appearance, but whatever 48

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

the chronological relation of the commentary and the translation, it is certain that Sergius did not assume that his readers would have this translation.7 Knowledge of Greek remained quite common among the Syriac elites during the seventh and eighth centuries. The tradition we label ‘Syriac’ was thus largely, though not exclusively, a bilingual Graeco-Syriac tradition, and the majority of its prominent members were familiar with both languages. Some texts were translated, for the benefit of those who knew little or no Greek, but the bilingual scholars had Greek texts as well as Syriac at their disposal, and it is not necessary to assume that they translated everything that they knew or studied. In the ninth century many (majuscule) Greek manuscripts were still available in the region, as Ḥunayn’s risāla shows (as regards Galen),8 and presumably they had not been preserved simply as pious secular relics, but had been read and studied. Only when the knowledge of Greek became rare even among the scholarly elite were Greek manuscripts discarded or reused, as occurred from the ninth to eleventh century.9 When therefore we find knowledge of Greek commentators among learned Hellenist Syrians such as Jacob of Edessa, we may not be able to determine whether they were consulting a Greek or Syriac text, or possibly both, unless we have some explicit evidence to settle the matter. The decline of Greek among the Syriac scholarly elite was particularly precipitate during the ninth century, and that in turn is likely to have been a factor in the corresponding increasing volume of Greek-to-Syriac translations.10 The second point concerns the very limited quantity of Syriac manuscript evidence from the period with which we are concerned. Almost all known Syriac manuscripts written prior to the thirteenth century come from a single monastic library, that of Dayr al-Suryan in Egypt.11 Of course literary studies of the ancient world are generally based on manuscripts copied from their earlier exemplars by scribes living long after the period of the authors. But after the thirteenth century, Syriac scribes had little interest in copying texts of Aristotle or early Greek or Syriac commentators. If they copied philosophical texts at all, it was more likely to be those of the compendium of Aristotelian philosophy by the thirteenth century polymath Bar Hebraeus. Much Aristotelian material that was once available in Syriac, originating both before and during the Abbasid era, has thus not come down to us, and is known only either from references in Arabic or from a brief mention or citation in other Syriac works.12 For example, there is no manuscript extant of Aristotle’s Poetics in Syriac, but the single manuscript of an Arabic version states that it was translated from the Syriac, as does the notice on the Poetics in the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, and an extract from a Syriac version is quoted by the thirteenth century Syriac writer Jacob bar Shakko in his philosophical compendium The Book of Dialogues.13 The situation in this respect is not completely different from that in Arabic, where there are many more manuscripts extant of the compendia and commentaries by Avicenna and Averroes than of Aristotle or the Greek commentators. These two points may be illustrated in connection with the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I, who resided in Baghdad. At the end of the eighth century he 49

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

commissioned a priest named Sergius to send him a memorandum of the books in the library of the West Syrian monastery of Mār Zina (in northern Iraq), where he thought Sergius might find (inter alia) ‘the commentary of Olympiodorus on the books of the logic, or of Stephanus or of Sergius or of Alexander’.14 Unfortunately the text is too brief for us to ascertain whether Timothy knew some of the works of the commentators here mentioned and was hoping to find more, or whether he knew of them only from the hearsay of others. However, even if the latter was the case, the mention of Sergius among the three Greek writers strongly suggests that these ‘others’ would have been Syrians, among whom all four commentators were known. It is possible that Syriac versions were known of the three Greek commentators, but since Timothy tells us (in the same letter) that while he considered Syriac his native language he had also studied Greek and Arabic,15 it is also possible that his hope was for Sergius to find texts of these three in either Syriac or Greek. In another letter he asks a different correspondent, Pethion, to look in the monastery of Mār Mattai for commentaries or scholia on the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics, whether in Syriac or not (for which we can only assume Greek as the alternative),16 and in yet another he discusses passages in the Greek and in Athanasius of Balad’s Syriac versions of the Posterior Analytics and the Topics.17 Athanasius’ Syriac versions of Aristotle have not survived, and are known only from this mention by Timothy and from some references to their readings in the marginalia of the Paris Arabic manuscript of the Organon (MS. Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 2346).18 Translations therefore, whether extant or (more often) known only through references in other writings, are neither the only evidence for Syriac interest in Aristotle, nor the only form that interest took.19 Nevertheless, they are important on both these counts. It is hardly credible that translations of treatises of Aristotle would have been made merely for the private satisfaction of the translator himself if the spirit so moved him.20 Such major tasks would surely have been undertaken only by those who were not only deeply interested in the subject of the texts, but also greatly concerned that they be taught to others, in this case to those who could not read them in Greek, or only read the Greek with difficulty. Where Aristotle was taught in Syriac, and especially at the monastic school of Qenneshre, which appears to have been the main centre for such studies, it may well be that he was expounded in lectures in Syriac to students who, in the early period at least, were expected to read the texts of the philosopher himself in Greek. Translations, however, were in time provided of some of the texts for students whose Greek was insufficient or nonexistent. Meanwhile the teachers, and those students who had an adequate knowledge of Greek, could have employed the works of the Greek commentators, even if they had not been translated.21

Alexandria Sergius of Reshaina’s intention had been to comment on the entire Aristotelian school corpus of Categories to Metaphysics, but how much of it he achieved we 50

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

do not know, for only the commentary on the Categories is extant.22 The intention is clearly formulated in this work, where he writes that after his exposition of the logical treatises of Aristotle, ‘we will go on to his other treatises, those on the parts of praxis [ethics], and on all natures [physics], teachings [mathematics], and the last ones which are called “divine” [metaphysics]’.23 The closest affinities of his commentary are with those of Ammonius and Philoponus, and it may therefore be appropriate to consider the commentaries of both Sergius and Philoponus, along with those of Simplicius and Olympiodorus, as independent witnesses to the teaching of Ammonius, supplementing the material contained in the commentary which bears Ammonius’ name. One feature absent from the latter but present in some form in all the others is a comparison between the design and construction of a house and that of Aristotle’s logical treatises. The respective aims are in one case protection from rain, and in the other the provision of an instrument differentiating truth from falsehood and good from evil. In one an architect first designs the roof, and in the other Aristotle first conceived his demonstrations. Subsequently the architect designs supporting walls and foundations, while Aristotle conceived syllogisms, propositions, and simple names. Implementation, however, has to be in the reverse order from the design, so the building of the house begins with the foundations and proceeds to the walls and roof, and Aristotle analogously began with the Categories and proceeded through the De interpretatione and the Prior Analytics to the Posterior Analytics/Apodeictics. The remaining treatises – Sergius mentions those up to the Rhetoric – are those ‘useful to it (logic) in any way’.24 Clearly, if Sergius knew anything about the ‘truncated Organon’ (which ended at Prior Analytics I, 7), he had no interest in it.25 Since the Categories was the first work of the curriculum to be studied, the introductions to it commonly provide us with the commentator’s understanding of the character and purpose of the Aristotelian philosophy as a whole. In the introduction to his commentary, Sergius deals with some of the ten introductory questions seemingly formulated by Proclus and known to the subsequent commentators. Number four in the series, the aim of Aristotelian philosophy, was answered by Ammonius as the ascent to the common arche of all, and by Philoponus, perhaps with a Christian twist, as the knowledge of the arche of all, the creative (‘demiurgic’), eternal, and unchanging cause of all things, which philosophy demonstrates to be one and incorporeal.26 While the question was not explicitly raised by Sergius, in discussing the divisions of philosophy he declares the aim of theoretical philosophy to be the knowledge (or theoria) of all beings in the world, a clear allusion to one of the definitions of philosophy (usually the first one) in the commentators’ prolegomena to philosophy as a whole.27 Like the Greek commentators he considers logic an instrument which in the theoretical division of philosophy separates truth from falsehood and ignorance, and in the practical good from evil. In the rhetorical prologue addressed to bishop Theodore of Karkh Juddan, which precedes the stricter philosophical prolegomena, Sergius writes that 51

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Aristotle was the origin of all knowledge, not only for Galen and all medical doctors, but also for all subsequent philosophers.28 Thus, far from following the usual course of his philosophical masters in asserting the superiority of Plato to Aristotle and treating the Aristotelian curriculum as propaedeutic to the Platonic, he pointedly avoids mention of Plato as ‘the origin of all knowledge for all subsequent philosophers’ – a passage which might point to Sergius himself as the likely originator of the dominance of Aristotle in Syriac philosophy. He does, however, make reference to Plato in another passage of his Commentary, attaching to ‘Plato and all the Academics’ the doctrine of genera and species as demiurgic forms, and setting opposite them ‘Aristotle and all the Peripatetics, among whom is Alexander of Aphrodisias, who in no way acknowledge these primary forms with the Demiurge, but very much hold to those in matter and those in our thought’.29 He does not explicitly come out against Plato, but merely states the two contrasting positions, nevertheless giving considerably more space to the Platonic. Yet since he had previously told his readers that Aristotle is the origin of all knowledge for all subsequent philosophers, they would surely have assumed they were to believe that Aristotle was right. Why then did he bother to present, at some length, the Platonist position? In addition to the medical and philosophical texts mentioned earlier, Sergius made one other highly significant translation from the Greek: the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (hereafter referred to as ‘Dionysius’).30 Furthermore, he attached as a prologue to his translation a short treatise which he had composed at an earlier date, but which is extant only in this connection.31 Its original title is therefore unknown, and it is conventionally identified by that given to it by its editor, ‘A Memra (Discourse) on the Spiritual Life’. In this treatise Sergius identifies seven divisions of theoria. Four of them are easily recognisable as the principal parts of the Aristotelian curriculum: demonstrations and combinations of worded statements (logic), theoria of the visible natures (physics), that of the faculties adjoining the visible natures (mathematics), and that pertaining to the hidden substances higher than vision (metaphysics). Two (that made known in the hidden silence of the intellect without word, and that residing in the things which afterwards enter from outside into rational natures through their freedom) are derived from the writings of the Christian spiritual master Evagrius of Pontus.32 The final and highest division, echoing Proclus’ ‘flower of the intellect’,33 he terms ‘the finest flower, which by means of all those (already) mentioned touches, as far as is permitted, on the exalted radiance of the hidden divinity’.34 He goes on to declare it ‘not a knowledge but an excess of ignorance and superior to knowledge’,35 a clear allusion to the negative theology of Neoplatonism, but in this context evidently referring to Dionysius. We thus have here a two-strand curriculum, one strand of which is Aristotle, as in the Neoplatonic curriculum which Sergius himself studied under Ammonius, the other constituted not by the Neoplatonic reading of Plato, but by the works of Evagrius and Dionysius, both of whom saw themselves as interpreters of the

52

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Bible. This enables us to understand another important passage in Sergius’ commentary on the Categories, where he declares: Without [the logical treatises] it is not possible to comprehend the treatises of medicine, nor understand the doctrine of the philosophers. Nor, furthermore, (is it possible without them) to uncover the true meaning of the divine scriptures, in which is the hope of our salvation, unless through his exalted way of life someone should receive divine power so that he has no need of human instruction. For there is no possible way or path to all things knowable by human power except through the discipline of logic.36 As in the pagan cursus Plato was held to be incomprehensible without prior study of logic and the rest of the Aristotelian curriculum, so in Sergius’ scheme the Aristotelian curriculum (particularly the logic) appears as the necessary preparation for the Dionysian interpretation of the Bible. In one sense therefore Sergius was a faithful disciple of his Alexandrian masters, envisioning a curriculum embracing both the Aristotelian corpus from logic to metaphysics and a yet higher one leading to ‘an excess of ignorance superior to knowledge’. He does not explain how Aristotelian metaphysics, culminating in the pure self-thinking nous of Metaphysics Lambda, is related to the unknowable but creative Christian divinity of Dionysius. We might reasonably suppose, however, that he conceived it in a fashion somewhat analogous to that between Aristotle and Plato in the Alexandrian philosophical tradition, where it was held that Aristotle treated theology from the standpoint of natural philosophy, and thus never fully transcended it, but Plato treated natural philosophy from the standpoint of theology.37 For Sergius, however, the theology beyond Aristotle lay in the Bible, interpreted by Dionysius, who claimed for his interpretation a sacred ecclesiastical tradition, although, as we now know, that was merely an image of the Platonist one claimed by Proclus. Sergius’ text gives us no ready answer as to how he came to this position, but it is not too difficult to construct a plausible hypothesis. As a student in Ammonius’ school he will probably have come into contact with the writings of Proclus, Ammonius’ own teacher, even if, whatever the deal was which Ammonius struck with the patriarch in Alexandria, it involved some diminution in the teaching of Platonic theology. But while evidently deeply impressed by his teachers, as a Christian he could not accept the pagan implications of the school’s Platonic theology. In Dionysius, however, he could have found a kindred spirit who shared much with the Neoplatonic theology Sergius encountered in Alexandria, but in a form he believed consistent with Christianity, with the Bible rather than Plato as the canonical text. Whether Sergius knew (or guessed) that the supposed ‘Areopagite’ was in reality an admirer of Proclus who had cleverly recast his theology into a Christian form,38 or whether already he was of the belief that Proclus had

53

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

borrowed from ‘the blessed Dionysius’,39 we may never know. But if the real author of the Dionysian corpus wanted, among other things, to ensure that what he considered valid insights of the pagan philosophical tradition were not swept away by a triumphalist, anti-philosophical Christianity, then Sergius for his part wanted to preserve, in the Syriac sphere, the valuable legacy of the Aristotelian curriculum. It is in this perspective that we can understand his guarded reference mentioned earlier to ‘Plato and all the Academics’ in connection with the demiurgic forms (paradeigmata). That Sergius to some extent believed in them is highly likely, for Proclus and Dionysius did so, but Dionysius did so in his own Christianised way. Proclus had maintained in commenting on the Timaeus: The Peripatetics say that there is something separate from matter, but it is not an efficient cause, only a final. And this is why they also removed the paradeigmata (‘paradigms’), and set at the head of all things an Intellect without multiplicity. Plato, however, and the Pythagoreans hymned the demiurge of the universe as something separate from matter, far removed, the creator of everything and providence of all, and this is the most reasonable view.40 In the Divine Names Dionysius wrote: We say that logoi (‘principles’) in God, creating the substance of beings and pre-existing as a unity, are paradeigmata (‘paradigms’) – which theology calls proorismoi (‘pre-definings’) and divine and good acts of will (thelēmata), defining and creating the beings – according to which the Supersubstantial pre-defined and brought about all beings.41 The paradeigmata and creative logoi in the divine Intellect of Platonism are thus given a Christian meaning by their ‘theological’ (i.e. biblical) re-designation as divine ‘pre-definings’ in accordance, as John of Scythopolis recognised,42 with Romans 8,30 (‘whom he pre-defined [proōrisen], those he also called’), and Ephesians 1,5 (‘having pre-defined us . . . according to the good pleasure of his will’). There could thus be some truth in what Platonists asserted in the sphere of theology, in particular their doctrine of God as the efficient cause of the world, not the merely Aristotelian final cause. Sympathetic to Proclus inasmuch as he realised that the pagan philosopher was the inspiration of (or borrower from) the Christian Dionysius, Sergius was willing to allow his readers a glimpse into the limitation of Aristotelianism as understood by Proclus (and others) and to signal the opposed virtues of its rival. Yet being on the whole enthusiastic towards the ‘neutral’ Aristotle and critical of the paganism embedded in the Platonic theology of his time, he may have pondered in his own mind whether Ammonius’ interpretation of Plato might have been correct, namely that the paradeigmata were internally created within the divine Intellect, and that Aristotle was in agreement with this.43 54

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Qenneshre One of the merits of Max Meyerhof’s 1930 paper was the recognition that the argument for a continuous tradition of philosophical study in the Near East would be strengthened if one or more teaching institutions could be found there which might have supported it. Since the demise of his hypothesis concerning the transfer of the School of Alexandria, it has been commonly assumed that some Aristotelian philosophy, at any rate the logic of the ‘truncated Organon’, was widely taught in Syriac monastic schools.44 This may be true, but we have no direct evidence for it. We do, however, have convincing indirect evidence for the study of Aristotelian philosophy at one important monastic school, that of Qenneshre on the Euphrates. This monastery, dedicated to St. Thomas, was originally located at Seleucia, the port of Antioch, thus in Greek-speaking territory. It relocated to Qenneshre around 530 CE for confessional, anti-Chalcedonian reasons, under the leadership of John Bar Aphtonia, a native of Edessa, whose literary production appears to have been entirely in Greek.45 Bilingualism therefore was very much ‘in Qenneshre’s genes’. It was well known as a centre of Greek studies in the Syrian-Mesopotamian region, and its transfer to the Euphrates did not cut it off from Greek culture, at least for many years.46 While the evidence for the eastward transfer of the School of Alexandria is flimsy, that for the monastery of St. Thomas is sound. The reason for believing that Aristotelian philosophy was taught there is that the four most important Syriac Aristotelian scholars of the seventh century were all associated with it at some time. Severus Sebokht wrote on the De interpretatione and the Prior Analytics, Athanasius of Balad wrote an introduction to logic and translated into Syriac the Eisagoge, the Prior Analytics, the Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, Jacob of Edessa translated the Categories, and George, bishop of the Arabs, translated and wrote commentaries on the Categories, De interpretatione, and the complete Prior Analytics.47 Some of these works have survived in manuscripts; others are known only from the references of others, and as was hinted earlier, failure to take into account the latter group is a principal cause of the misperception concerning the level of Syrians’ engagement with philosophy in the pre-Abbasid period, particularly the view that their interest was confined to the ‘truncated Organon’. This last point is perhaps worth some elaboration here. The old Anonymous of the Categories is preserved only in a Dayr al-Suryan manuscript,48 Jacob of Edessa’s version in one Dayr al-Suryan manuscript49 and several later ones,50 and possibly referenced in the Paris Arabic Organon.51 The version of George, bishop of the Arabs, is preserved only in a single Dayr al-Suryan manuscript.52 Old translations of De interpretatione and Prior Analytics to I, 7 are preserved in the same Dayr al-Suryan (Vatican) manuscript as Jacob of Edessa’s Categories and again in some late ones, but are not mentioned in the Paris Organon. George’s translations of the De interpretatione and the complete Prior Analytics are preserved only in the same Dayr al-Suryan manuscript as that of his Categories and again are not 55

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

mentioned in the Paris Organon. The complete translation of the Prior Analytics by Athanasius of Balad (and the later one by Theophilus of Edessa) are mentioned only in the Paris Organon, Athanasius’ translation of the Posterior Analytics only in a letter (ep. 48 above) of Timothy, the same scholar’s version of the Topics both by Timothy and by the Paris Organon, and his (and Theophilus’ version) of the Sophistical Refutations only in the Paris Organon (Theophilus’ also in the Fihrist).53 Commentaries on the De interpretatione and the Prior Analytics to I, 7 are preserved in three Dayr al-Suryan manuscripts54 and several later ones, on the complete Prior Analytics in the already mentioned Dayr al-Suryan manuscript of George. A Syriac Rhetoric was almost certainly used by Bar Hebraeus,55 and a Syriac Poetics certainly by Bar Shakko and mentioned by the Fihrist and the Paris Organon,56 but neither is extant, and we cannot tell whether or not these ‘disputed’ members of the Organon were translated into Syriac in the pre-Abbasid period. In this context it is worth noting that none of the many Syriac versions of Aristotle and the Greek commentators made by Ḥunayn and Isḥāq mentioned in the Paris Organon and the Fihrist is extant. In order therefore to know what was studied by Syrians, both before and also during the early Abbasid period, we have to broaden our inquiry beyond the extant Syriac manuscripts. It would be arbitrary to deduce from three Dayr al-Suryan manuscripts (namely BL Add. 14,660, BL Add. 17,156, and Vat. syr. 158) that pre-Abbasid Syrians at all times and in all places studied only the ‘truncated Organon’, when another Dayr al-Suryan manuscript (BL 14,659) and the evidence of Timothy and the Paris Organon, not to mention the indications of Sergius and Severus, tell us something quite different. From the group of three mentioned earlier, only Vat. syr. 158 includes the complete ‘truncated Organon’ (i.e Categories to Prior Analytics I,7), and it uses the translation of the Categories by Jacob of Edessa (died 708), which was probably made after the full Organon (to Sophistical Refutations) had been rendered into Syriac by Athanasius of Balad (died 687). All three manuscripts are later than Athanasius. From the assemblage of texts copied in manuscripts from other locations (the earliest from the thirteenth century, but the majority much later), we might be justified in making some speculative deductions about the range of philosophical study among some pre-Abbasid Syrians, but would not be entitled to extrapolate these to pronounce judgements that apply to all of them – or indeed to Syrians of the early Abbasid era, for none of these later Syriac manuscripts includes any of the Aristotle translations of Ḥunayn or Isḥāq, or Theophilus of Edessa, or any other Syriac versions from which Abū Bišr Mattā, Yaḥyā ibn ʻAdī, and Ibn Zurʻa made their Syriac-to-Arabic translations. Neither can the oldest manuscript of all, BL Add. 14,658 from Dayr al-Suryan, tell us anything about the range of pre-Abbasid Syriac study of the Aristotelian school corpus, as the only such works with which it deals are the Eisagoge and the Categories. Al-Fārābī’s well-known assertion (apud Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa) that Christian bishops forbade the teaching of the Organon beyond the assertoric syllogisms, fanciful as it is, at least has the merit of attempting to justify his claim that quite generally in the Christian era ‘prior to the coming of Islam’ the teaching of logic was confined to 56

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

the ‘truncated Organon’. The modern hypothesis, by contrast, which dismisses his assertion concerning the bishops but accepts that prior to the Abbasid period all Syrians (including Graeco-Syrians) operated within this confine, provides no credible explanation for why all of them should have done so.57 Less is known about Syriac engagement with other areas of philosophy outside logic, but Jacob of Edessa knew Aristotle’s Metaphysics58 and had an interest in physics, evident in his Hexaemeron,59 while Severus Sebokht was well versed in mathematics and astronomy.60 The Qenneshre scholars clearly considered logic to be the instrument of ‘the whole of philosophy’, not the whole of philosophy in itself, and envisioned ‘Aristotelian philosophy’ as proceeding from logic through physics and mathematics to metaphysics.61 That they knew no texts of Aristotle on mathematics is unsurprising, since none were known in Alexandria, where the subject was studied from mathematicians,62 but the lack of any evidence that they studied his physical treatises is striking. The criticism of Aristotle’s cosmology by Philoponus, in particular his attack on the theory of the eternity of the world and his reconciliation of Genesis with many other aspects of Greek natural philosophy in his De opificio mundi, is the likely cause of their neglect of Aristotle’s physical treatises, while still maintaining a broad interest in physics from other sources.63 While there is no evidence that they read the physical treatises of Aristotle, there is on the contrary much that they read the writings of Dionysius. It is merely possible that Jacob of Edessa used Philoponus in his Hexaemeron, but it is clear that he did use Dionysius.64 Athanasius of Balad, the most prolific of the Aristotle translators, also made a translation of Dionysius. This was probably a revision of Sergius’ version, and was probably itself further revised by Phocas of Edessa, whose version is the one preserved in most extant Syriac manuscripts of Dionysius.65 Phocas’ preface to his translation affords a valuable insight both into this bilingual culture towards the end of the seventh century, and into the influence of Sergius’ edition of Dionysius. Remarking on the writings of Dionysius, interpreted long ago from Greek to Syriac by Sergius in a translation ‘which all of us, Syrians, have read’, he writes that ‘by divine providence’ Dionysius has come into his hands in the original Greek with the scholia and preface of John of Scythopolis, and a preface by George of Scythopolis. He furthermore notes that many of the difficult words have been researched in the manuals which comment on the Greek of the period and reported in the traditions of other workers such as Athanasius and Jacob of Edessa, those who have shown the route as much as possible and have joined the two languages.66 We have no evidence that the Qenneshre scholars linked Aristotle and Dionysius together in a curriculum in the same way as Sergius, but such a curriculum constitutes a far more plausible reason for the study of Aristotle in Qenneshre (where the Aristotelian curriculum was envisaged as leading up to the Metaphysics)67 than that sometimes offered to account for their interest in his logic, namely its value for Christological controversy between rival Christian confessions.68 If Sergius’ translation of Dionysius was known in Qenneshre before that of Athanasius and Phocas, we may reasonably suppose that his prologue was included 57

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

with it, the Memra on the Spiritual Life, where his Christianised version of the Alexandrian curriculum is presented. The close association of Aristotle and Dionysius also appears later (see the following) in a Christian Arabic text from tenth century Baghdad. Whether some Christian Syrians also read works of pagan Neoplatonists remains uncertain. The only clear evidence for a Syriac version of any of these is quotations from the Enneads in Phocas’ translation of John of Scythopolis’ scholia to Dionysius, and some sayings of Plotinus wrongly attributed to Plato in a Syriac gnomology.69 However, the circles around Stephen bar Sudhaili, author of the Book of Hierotheos, and the Origenistic circles in which Evagrius of Pontus’ works were much admired, are milieus in which it is possible to imagine that readers of Plotinus or Proclus might have existed.70 Although there is no further evidence of Syriac translations, it remains possible that bilingual Syriac speakers read them in Greek, and that the Arabic versions and adaptations which appeared in Abbasid times were derived from Greek manuscripts, some of which had been read and copied in the Syrian-Mesopotamian area by bilingual Syrians.

Baghdad The Qenneshre school was important not only because it appears to have been the centre to which in the seventh century Syrians interested in Aristotle were primarily drawn, but also because translations of Aristotle made by its teachers or alumni were well known in eighth to tenth century Baghdad. The earliest witness is Timothy (probably born around 740),71 whose references (ep. 48) to the translations of the Posterior Analytics and Topics by Athanasius were mentioned earlier, and from a later date we have the witness of the marginal readings in the ‘Paris Organon’. It is significant that Timothy also knew of Athanasius’ and Phocas’ translations of Dionysius, and was as keen to have copies of (either of) these as he was to have copies of texts of Aristotle and the Aristotelian commentators.72 Timothy himself had been educated in an East Syrian monastery, Bashosh near Mosul, but was anxious to locate as much as he could of Aristotle and Dionysius from the Syrian Orthodox monasteries of Mār Zina and Mār Mattai in that region, which suggests that in his day (i.e. the late eighth century)73 it was still in the libraries of Syrian Orthodox monasteries, of which Qenneshre was one, that the fullest resources for these studies could be found. In subsequent years, Christians of Syrian tradition were active in philosophical activities in Baghdad, now clearly the centre of such studies, doubtless in some measure due to Timothy’s own labours.74 Two groups can be identified. The earlier (ninth century) is that of the translators, readers, and patrons around Ḥunayn and his son Isḥāq. Ḥunayn himself was primarily a doctor, but clearly also interested in philosophy. From his risāla on the translations of Galen, we know that the numerous Syriac translations by him and his associates were made for practising Syrian physicians, who dominated medical practice in ninth century Baghdad. Numerous Arabic translations were also made by this group, although not so 58

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

many by Ḥunayn himself, mostly from the Greek but sometimes, especially by those translators who were more proficient in Syriac than Greek, from an existing Syriac version.75 Although we have no corresponding missive on his Aristotelian translations, we have no reason to assume they differed from the Galenic. That is to say, the Syriac translations were made to be read by Syrians, the Arabic to be read by Arabs. Isḥāq seems to have made more into Arabic than Syriac, the reverse of the case of his father, which doubtless indicates a shift over the period in the relative importance of the two languages in the realm of philosophy, but the fact that he translated the Posterior Analytics into Syriac (possibly revising the translation of Athanasius), but not Arabic, can be taken as evidence that it was particularly among Syrians that the Alexandrian tradition of the study of the Organon remained effective in Baghdad in his time.76 The later group (tenth century) is that around Abū Bišr Mattā, usually designated the Baghdad School (of Aristotelians). Unlike those around Ḥunayn, the group did not know Greek, and when its members made Arabic translations, they made them from the Syriac. The earliest Arabic version of the Posterior Analytics, for example, was translated by Mattā from Isḥāq’s Syriac version.77 They knew both the translations of Ḥunayn’s group and the earlier Syriac versions of Athanasius and of Theophilus of Edessa. Unlike Ḥunayn, few if any of them were physicians, and they wrote numerous commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus, as far as we know entirely in Arabic. Among their pupils was al-Fārābī. While in his work dealing with the appearance of philosophy in Islam, mentioned earlier as the basis for Meyerhof’s theory, the story he tells is a quite fictional one of anonymous personages, that assessment does not apply to his statements about the four named teachers of his own time, all of them East Syrians.78 One of them, al-Marwazī, under whom Mattā studied, is reported in the Fihrist to have written about logic and other subjects only in Syriac.79 This last comment shows that right up to the period immediately before Mattā, Syriac remained in use as a significant medium of philosophical thought. The fact that the works of Quwairā, also a teacher of Mattā and the other writer among the four, ‘lacked fluency and were hard to understand’80 might indicate that he was more at home in Syriac than in Arabic. Aside from al-Fārābī, the two leading scholars from the school after Mattā were Yaḥyā ibn ʻAdī and his pupil Ibn Zurʻa, both Syrian Orthodox. Like Mattā they made translations from Syriac to Arabic, but as far as we know composed their philosophical works only in Arabic. The change of language did not, however, mean an abandonment of the main contours of the Syriac tradition. Inasmuch as the texts used for teaching in Mattā’s school, that of the Baghdad Aristotelians, can be discerned from the information provided concerning texts and their translators in the Fihrist, Mattā’s efforts were directed to the school corpus of Categories to Metaphysics taught at Alexandria, and among the commentators principally to Alexander, Themistius, and Olympiodorus, two of the four previously noted as being of interest to Timothy.81 Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda 9 on the triad of Mind, Thinking, and Thought was much used by the Christians of the Baghdad 59

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Aristotelians in their Trinitarian theology and apologetics, certainly from Yaḥyā ibn ʻAdī onwards. A short treatise by Yaḥyā’s pupil, Ibn Zurʻa, reveals that an inquiry had been put to him as to why Christians spoke about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit rather than Mind, Thinking, and Thought as in Aristotle.82 There is a clear implication here that Christian Baghdad Aristotelians considered some religious truths to be identical to those of Aristotelian philosophy, but that conventional religious language was figurative, an idea which may have been a source for al-Fārābī’s more radical theory that religion itself was a symbolic representation of philosophy designed for the unphilosophical multitude. Ibn Zurʻa answered the question in a conventional philosophical way differentiating the unworthy, for whom figurative language concealed the higher mysteries, from the worthy, whom it stimulated to achieve deeper insight by challenging them to inquire into the reasons for the choice of the figure. However, the authority he cited for this was, significantly, ‘the virtuous and excellent Dionysius’,83 probably alluding to the exposition in Celestial Hierarchy 2 of the use of poetic figures by the Scriptures to arouse and stimulate the minds of the pure.84 The interpretation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in the light of Metaphysics Lambda 9 was a significant feature in the thought of Yaḥyā,85 who may also have read Dionysius, whether the inspiration for his concept of a triad of attributes (goodness, power, and wisdom) within the Unity of God came from Proclus himself or Dionysius.86 In the context of the entire Syriac philosophical tradition, these observations suggest that the seamless integration of Aristotle and Dionysius into a single curriculum culminating in a Christian Neoplatonic theology persisted all the way in Syriac from Sergius to the Baghdad Aristotelians. Establishing a continuous Syriac tradition of study of Aristotle across these centuries does not necessarily imply that it was the only means by which Greek philosophy became known to Arab thinkers. Since Meyerhof’s theory, another channel between Alexandria and Baghdad has been proposed by Michel Tardieu in the form of a pagan Platonic Academy in the Syriac-speaking city of Ḥarrān. The central contentions here are that the philosophers who fled Athens, Simplicius in particular, eventually settled in this largely pagan city, where a Platonic Academy already existed, that a number of reports by Arab authors point to the presence of a Platonic institution there, and that the pagan Sabians from Ḥarrān among the scholars and translators of Abbasid Baghdad came from this institution.87 The thesis has been hailed with great enthusiasm in some quarters and sharply rejected in others.88 All that need be noted here is that any significant interaction between this alleged centre of pagan Neoplatonism and Christian monastic schools seems rather unlikely, and it is the concentration on Aristotle in the Syriac tradition, to the apparent virtual exclusion of Plato, which is replicated in the Aristotelian focus of Islamic philosophy. Although Plato’s political philosophy was influential in both Christian and Muslim circles, probably through intermediaries such as Themistius or Galen’s epitome of the Republic, very little of the Platonic corpus was known in Arabic, and the only persons named by the Fihrist as translators 60

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

of his works are Ḥunayn, Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, Yaḥyā ibn ʻAdī, and Ibn al-Batrīq,89 none of whom were from Ḥarrān. There are good grounds to suppose that the Ḥarrānians were important in the Abbasid era in the realms of mathematics and astronomy,90 but their significance for the Arab appropriation of Aristotelian philosophy appears fairly minimal in comparison with that of the Christian Syriac. Among the numerous works attributed to their most important scholar, Thābit ibn Qurra, who moved in the circle of al-Kindī, only a few are connected to the Aristotelian school corpus.91 The circle of al-Kindī clearly differs in important ways from that of the Syriac Aristotelians. Al-Kindī knew some Aristotle, but far less than was known in the Syriac circles, and there is no evidence that the translators he commissioned recreated anything in Arabic comparable to the late antique Aristotelian curriculum.92 He nevertheless knew much more of Aristotle than of Plato, to whom he had access mostly in extracts or epitomes.93 While most of his translators were Christian and probably, like Thābit, knew Syriac, they do not seem to have also made Syriac versions, as did those of the circle of Ḥunayn. There is no doubt that his own thinking was more indebted to Neoplatonism, and in general more eclectic, than that of the Syriac Aristotelians.94 While he therefore did not stand directly in the line of the Syriac Aristotelian tradition, it does not necessarily follow that tradition was of no significance in his intellectual development. The interest shown by Muslim Arabs of the ninth century CE in some of Aristotle’s treatises, manifested earlier, for example, in the well-known commission of al-Mahdī to Timothy for an Arabic version of the Topics, is unlikely to have arisen totally independently of the long and continuing tradition among the neighbouring Syrians of the study of Aristotle. Al-Kindī’s work on The Quantity of All the Books of Aristotle (like that of the earlier logic compendium of Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ) may have been based on a comparable Syriac text.95 More important to him, however, was The Theology of Aristotle, the adapted and enlarged Arabic translation of Enneads IV-VI.96 The translation is due to Ibn Nāʻima, from whom he commissioned a number of Aristotelian translations. There is no evidence of a Syriac version, but as noted earlier, portions of the Enneads were translated into Syriac in the seventh century in the scholia of John of Scythopolis to Dionysius, translated by Phocas.97 All the sources of the adaptations to Plotinus have not yet been identified, but Aristotle was certainly one of them, and a strong argument has been made that Dionysius was another.98 Ibn Nāʻima, from Emesa, who would doubtless have been familiar with Dionysius, has also been put forward not only as the translator, but also as the author of the adaptations.99 One cannot but wonder whether the Theology was envisaged by al-Kindī as a Muslim, or at least non-Christian or neutral, counterpart to Dionysius.100 Al-Fārābī, an alumnus of the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians, wrote that ‘everything comprised by this science’ – in effect his own philosophy – ‘was expounded in the Greek language, then in the Syriac language, then in the Arabic language’.101 Inasmuch as he was himself an Aristotelian philosopher, al-Fārābī’s assessment was a valid one, and points to the Syro-Arabic Baghdad School of 61

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Mattā and its Syriac antecedents as the foundation of his own thought, but works that came into Arabic through the circle of al-Kindī also contributed to it, whether or not they previously circulated (possibly in Greek) among Syrians. Scholarship is divided as to whether al-Fārābī’s works should be chronologically separated into earlier and later phases, based on a seeming difference between, respectively, those presenting a creationist cosmology, and those presenting an emanationist one. In the former he more closely resembles the Christian Aristotelian commentators, in the latter the pagan Neoplatonists, but the alternative to the developmental view interprets the ‘creationist’ works (if accepted as authentic) in the light of the more systematic and markedly Neoplatonic treatises.102 However this is resolved, with al-Fārābī the story that began with Sergius has come around full circle. It is not clear what texts he had at his disposal which would have brought him close to the system of Proclus, but excerpts available in Arabic from Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus and his Examination of Aristotle’s Objections to Plato’s Timaeus preserved in Philoponus’ Contra Proclum have been suggested.103 Whatever his source, in the more systematic works the elaborate metaphysics of pagan Neoplatonism is to some extent restored. Thus while in late antique Alexandria Sergius broke from the Hellenic Neoplatonism of his pagan masters and linked Aristotle into a curriculum with the Bible and Dionysius, around four centuries later in Baghdad, al-Fārābī broke from the Dionysian Aristotelianism of his Christian masters and reinstated the old Hellenic Neoplatonism.104

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Aristotle between Alexandria and Baghdad’, Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 7 (2013), 26–50. Various portions of the chapter were previously presented at the conference in London in December 2012 to celebrate the publication of the hundredth volume in the series of the Aristotelian Commentators in Translation directed by Richard Sorabji, at the annual meeting of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies in Cardiff in June 2013, and at a workshop of the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin in August 2013 as part of its project on the Aristotelisation of the world. I am very grateful to Richard Sorabji, Josef Lössl, and Sonja Brentjes for the respective invitations to these meetings, and to participants in them for their comments on the presentations. 2 Meyerhof (1930). 3 Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa II, 134–5. 4 Cf. Chapter 1 in this volume. 5 Gutas (1998) 20–2, 62, 133, 137–41; Gutas (2010) 11–25. 6 On Sergius see Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 123–231, (2016); Watt (2018). 7 Cf. King (2010a) 12–14, 30–5. 8 Ḥunayn, Risāla. Cf. Chapter 6 in this volume. 9 Cf. Brock (2007) 300–1. 10 Cf. Strohmaier (1991) 167–8: ‘The need for translations occurs in general when society assumes an interest in foreign literature of any kind. This need, on the other hand, does not arise when the prospective readers are bilingual . . . (as) holds true for Syrian territory before the Arab invasion . . . it was only at the end of the eighth century under Arab rule and again in the East that a second wave of medical translations came into being. . . . The first cause of this new development lay in the fact that the

62

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

old Syro-Greek bilingualism had further declined in favour of the now obligatory Syro-Arabic bilingualism’. These manuscripts are now located in the British Library (BL) and the Vatican. On the importance of the Dayr al-Suryan collection, cf. Brock (2004) 15–24; more briefly Coakley (2011) 262–4. Cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, 144–7. Cf. Tarán and Gutas (2012) 92, 96–7, 98–103. Timothy ep. 19 (ed. Braun 129; tr. Braun 86). Timothy ep. 19 (ed. Braun 127, tr. Braun 85). Timothy ep. 43 (ed. Heimgartner 66, tr. Heimgartner 49–50). Cf. Brock (1999) 236, 241–2. Timothy ep. 48 (ed. Heimgartner 89–92, tr. Heimgartner 74–7). Cf. Brock (1999) 238–9, 245–6. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 755–8. Rudolph (2012) 25–30 recognises the importance of the Syrians in the ‘Wege der Vermittlung’ linking late antique and Arabic philosophy, and in particular (28–9) their dedication to Aristotle alone in contrast to the view of his philosophy as preliminary to that of Plato. He also notes the Organon translations (beyond the ‘truncated Organon’) of Athanasius and George and Jacob of Edessa’s acquaintance with texts from the Metaphysics (see the following). Concerning his point that ‘as a rule Syriac authors knew only a few texts’, caution is required on account of the two observations made earlier (the bilingualism of some Syriac authors, and the loss of much early material). A case in point is George’s knowledge of Philoponus’ commentary on the Categories; cf. Chapter 5 in this volume. Against Gutas (2010) 15; Tarán and Gutas (2012) 86 n. 18. Cf. Watt (2015) 13–14 and Chapter 7 in this volume, 147–9. Cf. Furlani (1923) 305–33; Furlani (1942–3) 47–64, 229–38. The work is not yet edited, but a translation and commentary of the prologue and first chapter can be found in Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 143–231, and of chapter two in Chapter 4 of the present volume. Chapter 4 in this volume, 76 (Syriac in MS. BL Add. 14,658, fol. 3rb). See following, 76 (Syriac in MS. BL Add. 14,658, foll. 2rb-3rb). Cf. Philoponus, in Cat. 10.21–11.33; Simplicius, in Cat. 14.5–15.8; Olympiodorus, Proleg. 2.10–12, 24.22–9. On this subject, cf. Watt (2008–9). Ammonius, in Cat. 6.9–12; Philoponus, in Cat. 5.34–6.2. Cf. Westerink (2003) xlix. Syriac īda‛tā d-kolhōn hwāyē corresponds to Greek gnōsis pantōn tōn ontōn. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 168. See following, 78–9 (Syriac in MS. BL Add. 14,658, foll. 5rb-6vb). Pseudo-Dionysius (Syriac), ed. and tr. Fiori. Whether or not the Dionysian corpus was known to Sergius when he composed the treatise is uncertain, but in making it the prologue to his translation, his eventual intention was evidently to have them read together. Cf. in more detail Chapter 2 in this volume, 27–8. Proclus, Platonic Theology I, 3 (ed. Saffrey-Westerink 15). Sergius, Memra 6, 122–5 (§79), tr. Fiori (2008) 40 (§78). Memra 6, 124–5 (§80), tr. Fiori (2008) 41(§79). Cf. Watt (2017) 189 (Syriac in MS. BL Add. 14,658, foll 60va-61ra). Cf. Hadot (1989) 100, 111–12. Cf. Perczel (2000). An interpolated passage in John of Scythopolis’ Prologue to the Dionysian corpus maintains that Proclus borrowed from Dionysius. The author of the passage may have

63

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

40 41 42 43

44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

been Philoponus, Sergius’ younger contemporary. Cf. Rorem and Lamoreaux (1998) 106–7. Sergius, however, may have known (or guessed) the true direction of the borrowing, for in his lifetime the apostolic credentials of Dionysius were still far from generally accepted; ibid. 21–2, 99–106. Proclus, in Tim. 1 (ed. Diehl 266.28–267.4). English Translation in Sorabji (1988) 251–2. Pseudo-Dionysius, De Div. Nom. 5, 824C (ed. Suchla 188.6–10). John of Scythopolis, Scholia 329B; tr. Rorem and Lamoreaux (1998) 222. Cf. Saffrey (1979) 13–14. Much of the passage in Sergius mentioned earlier (52 and n. 29) depends on Ammonius, in Isag. 41.10–45.2. In the course of the latter, Ammonius declares (43.25–44.4) that while Aristotle thought as a natural philosopher (phusikōs), Plato was a theologian (theologikōs), but the two were in harmony, for Aristotle believed that Plato’s demiurgic forms were within, not external to, the demiurge’s Intellect. Cf. Hadot (1989) 100, 111–12 and on the whole topic Sorabji (1988) 273–9. Cf. Strohmaier (1987) 387–8. Cf. Childers (2011). Cf. Brock (2007) 299–301. Without pressing the parallel too closely, it is interesting to compare the role of Qenneshre in the maintenance of Greek literary culture in a Syriac-speaking environment with that of the monastery of Fulda in the preservation of Latin literary culture in a German-speaking environment during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. Cf. Smith (2005) 47–9. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2018). Although we have a work of Severus only ‘about the kinds of categorical syllogisms in the Book of Prior Analytics’, he describes this as ‘useful for us and very advantageous towards (the acquisition of) the full knowledge of the logical and demonstrative theoria of what is said in the Book of Apodeictics (i.e. Posterior Analytics)’. Cf. Wright (1872) 1160. For Severus therefore, as for Sergius, the point of studying the (Categories to) Prior Analytics was to be able to understand the Posterior Analytics. Athanasius of Balad, translator of the four treatises from Prior Analytics through to Sophistical Refutations, was a pupil and confidant of Severus. BL Add. 14,658 (seventh century), ed. King (2010a). Vatican syr. 158 (ninth/tenth century). Ed. Georr (1948). Cf. King (2010a) 21–9. BL. Add. 14,659 (eighth/ninth century). Fihrist 249.27, tr. Dodge (1970) 601. BL Add. 14,660 (ninth/tenth century), BL Add. 17,156 (ninth century), and the already mentioned Vat. syr. 158 (ninth/tenth century). Cf. Watt (2005) 6–8, 20–9. Cf. Tarán and Gutas (2012) 92, 96–7, 98–103. All Syriac manuscripts related to the Organon, including the later ones, are listed in Brock (1993). I do not understand the point in Tarán and Gutas (2012) 86 n. 18 that ‘we have no evidence whatsoever of a school tradition of (the) study (of the last four books of the Organon) in Greek in late antiquity . . . much less in Syriac’. No late antique Greek commentaries are extant on these four books, apart from Alexander on Topics and pseudo-Alexander on Sophistical Refutations, but it is manifestly clear, both in Greek commentators and in Sergius, that they were prescribed for study within the curriculum, even though not considered as important as the first four of the usual sequence. There was, however, also an alternative sequence placing the Topics between the Prior and Posterior Analytics; cf. Hadot (1989) 81–4. We have no evidence of any Greek commentary on Aristotle between around the time of Stephanus

64

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

( floruit 610) and the eleventh century, although in Byzantium reading of late antique commentaries probably continued throughout the interim; cf. Sorabji (1990) 20–1. In Syriac, however, we have the evidence of the commentaries of George (died 724) in the unique Dayr al-Suryan manuscript BL Add. 14,659. Furlani (1921). Cf. Debié (2014) 30–2. Cf. Villey (2014), (2015). Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, and Watt (2017). Cf. Scholten (1996) 395–400. Cf. Chapter 8 in this volume, and Watt (2017) 182–6. Sergius was more cautious about rejecting the eternity of the world (and was therefore prepared to comment on the physical treatises of Aristotle); cf. King (2010b) 175–8. Cf. Greatrex (2004); Wilks (2008). Timothy, ep. 43 (ed. Heimgartner 68, tr. Heimgartner 52). Cf. Brock (1999) 237, 244. Cf. van Esbroeck (1996) 171–2. Treiger (2015) 60–1 considers that while Chalcedonian Christians in the Near East read Pseudo-Dionysius in Greek, miaphysite and East Syrian Christians read him almost exclusively in Syriac. Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, 104–8, and Watt (2017) 173–6, 187–92. The view that the ‘pre-Abbasid Syrians’ were interested in Aristotle primarily for his use in Christological controversy implies of course a radical disjunction between Sergius and these ‘pre-Abbasid Syrians’. The evidence that Aristotelian logic played a significant role in Syriac Christological controversy is minimal or nonexistent, while that their interest in philosophy was for its own sake and consistent with that of the pagan Greek Neoplatonists, albeit Christianised, is plentiful in comparison; cf. King (2013), (2015). Frank (1987) 101–8; Brock (2007) 296–7. Brock (2007) 301–6. For the date see Berti (2009) 135–6. Timothy, epp. 19, 43. For the dates of the letters, see Berti (2009) 60–2. The Syriac translations of Theophilus of Edessa (died 785), which included the Prior Analytics and the Sophistical Refutations, are also indicative of an active Syriac readership for Aristotelian philosophy in Timothy’s time. It is hardly credible that, as argued by Gutas in Tarán and Gutas (2012) 87, Timothy sought Syriac or Greek Aristotelian texts merely as Vorlagen for Arabic translations in order to satisfy the interests of ‘Muslim elites’. Timothy’s letters not only show his interest in the content of Aristotelian texts, but also his efforts to obtain Christian patristic texts at the same time and with the same vigour as he sought the Aristotelian. ‘Muslim elites’ were not clamouring for Arabic versions of the Christian fathers. Cf. Heimgartner (2015) 180–1, and the list of patristic authors sought in 180 n. 49. Cf. Strohmaier (1991) 163–70, (1994) 1999–2011. Cf. Chapter 6 in this volume, 126–7. Manṭiq Arisṭū II, 309; Fihrist 249.11–12, tr. Dodge (1970) 600. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa II, 135.16–19. Fihrist 263.15–17, tr. Dodge (1970) 629. Fihrist 262.31–2, tr. Dodge (1970) 628. Cf. Chapter 2 in this volume, 31, 34. Cf. Chapter 2 in this volume, 34–5; Endress (2012) 329. Ibn Zur‘a, On questions posed by some of his brothers 10–11. Pseudo-Dionysius, De Coel. Hier.2, 137A-B, 140A-B, 141B, 145A-B, 145C. Cf. Platti (1983) 109; Endress (1977) 101–3. Endress (1977) 72–3.

65

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

87 Tardieu (1986), (1990). 88 A prominent supporter is Hadot (1987), English version in Sorabji (1990) 275–303. Among the more numerous sceptics mention may be made of Lameer (1996); Luna (2001); Lane Fox (2005); Watts (2005). Cf. Rudolph (2012) 24–5. 89 Fihrist 246.5–24, tr. Dodge (1970) 592–4. There are also dubious mentions of Olympiodorus and Qusṭā. 90 Cf. Pingree (2002). Pingree supported the thesis of Tardieu, but the evidence he presented for the mathematical interests of the Ḥarrānians is not dependent upon it. 91 The Fihrist mentions an epitome of the De interpretatione and a partial commentary on the Physics (249.4, tr. Dodge 599, 250.24–5, tr. Dodge 603), and a short exposition of the Metaphysics is extant (see the following). The attribution to him by a manuscript of the Hebrew translation of Themistius’ commentary on Metaphysics Lambda of a supporting role in the Arabic translation of the work is treated with some reserve by Brague (1999) 16–17. The Fihrist (254.14–16, tr. Dodge 612) also attributes to him a translation of Epaphroditus’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Account of the Halo of the Moon and the Rainbow. Most of his translations and works are in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. Cf. Rashed and Rashed (2009); and for his exposition of the Metaphysics, Reisman and Bertolacci (2009). 92 Cf. Chapter 6 in this volume, 128–30. 93 Cf. Endress (2007) 327–33. 94 Cf. ibid. 333–50. 95 Cf. Tarán and Gutas (2012) 88–9. On Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ and the Syriac tradition, cf. Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 203–4, and on al-Mahdī’s commission to Timothy, Watt (2004) 15–26. 96 Cf. Endress (2007) 333–4. 97 Gutas (2012) 69 notes that ‘this casts an interesting light on the selective Arabic translation of Books IV-VI of the Enneads a century later by Ibn Nā‛ima . . . (and) gives some indication as to the intellectual milieu in which the Arabic Plotiniana may have their roots’. Treiger (2015) considers that the difference between al-Kindī and al-Fārābī reflects two diverse strands of foregoing Middle Eastern Christian thought: with the former a Chalcedonian Neoplatonism and Origenism (in which Pseudo-Dionysius was read exclusively in Greek), with the latter the Aristotelianism of the Syrian Orthodox and East Syrians (who read him only in Syriac). 98 Cf. D’Ancona (1993); Adamson (2002) 106–9, 162–5. 99 Cf. Adamson (2002) 171–7. 100 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2011) 71. 101 Al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl, ed. al-Yāsīn 88, tr. Mahdi (2001) 43. 102 Cf. Janos (2012) 235–332. Janos himself argues for ‘the developmentalist hypothesis’, but considers the work just quoted, Taḥṣīl al-saʻāda, to belong to the later phase. 103 Cf. Vallat (2011) 281–4. 104 Cf. ibid. 285: ‘In this scheme [of al-Fārābī], the attribution of the final-formal causality to the First and Second Causes and that of the efficient-afficient causality to the Active Intellect and the celestial bodies . . . owes little to Aristotle and Alexander and almost all to Ammonius and beyond him to Proclus’.

References Adamson (2002): P. Adamson, The Arabic Plotinus: A Philosophical Study of the “Theology of Aristotle” (London: Duckworth). Ammonius, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1895). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 4.

66

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Ammonius, in Isag.: A. Busse (ed.), In Porphyrii Isagogen commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1891). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 3. Berti (2009): V. Berti, Vita e studi di Timoteo I, patriarca cristiano di Baghdad (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes). Brague (1999): R. Brague, Thémistius: Paraphrase de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, livre lambda (Paris: Vrin). Brock (1993): S.P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Commentary Tradition’, in: C. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and Medieval Latin Traditions (London: Warburg Institute) 3–18. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9, 233–46. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Without Mushē of Nisibis, Where Would We Be?’, in: R. Ebied and H. Teule (eds.), Symposium Syriacum VIII (Leuven: Peeters) 15–24. Brock (2007): S.P. Brock, ‘A Syriac Intermediary for the Arabic Theology of Aristotle? In Search of a Chimera’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 293–306. Childers (2011): J.W. Childers, ‘John Bar Aphtonia’, in: S.P. Brock et al. (eds.), Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 229. Coakley (2011): J.F. Coaklet, ‘Manuscripts’, in: S.P. Brock et al (eds.)., Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 262–4. D’Ancona (1993): C. D’Ancona, ‘Il tema della docta ignorantia nel platonismo arabo’, in: G. Piaia (ed.), Concordia Discors (Padua: Antenore) 3–22. Debié (2014): M. Debié, ‘Sciences et savants syriaques: une histoire multiculturelle’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 9–66. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Endress (1977): G. Endress, The Works of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī: An Analytical Inventory (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert). Endress (2007): G. Endress, ‘Building the Library of Arabic Philosophy: Platonism and Aristotelianism in the Sources of al-Kindī’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 319–50. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl: J. Āl Yāsīn (ed.), Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿādah (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2008): E. Fiori (tr.), Sergio di Resh‘ayna, Trattato sulla vita spirituale (Bose: Monastero di Bose). Frank (1987): R.M. Frank, ‘The Use of the Enneads by John of Scythopolis’, Le Muséon 100, 101–8. Furlani (1921): G. Furlani, ‘Di alcuni passi della Metafisica di Aristotele presso Giacomo d’Edessa’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 5, 268–73. Furlani (1923): G. Furlani, ‘La versione e il commento di Giorgio delle nazioni all’ Organo aristotelico’, Studi italiani de filologia classica 3, 305–33. Furlani (1942–3): G. Furlani, ‘Sul commento di Giorgio delle nazioni al primo/secondo libro degli Analitici anteriori di Aristotele’, Rivista degli studi orientali 20, 47–64, 229–38.

67

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Georr (1948): K. Georr, Les Catégories d’Aristote dans leurs versions Syro-Arabes (Beirut: Institut français de Damas). Greatrex (2004): M. Greatrex (Wilks), ‘The Angelology in the Hexaemeron of Jacob of Edessa’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 33–46. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Gutas (2010): D. Gutas, ‘Origins in Baghdad’, in: R. Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) I, 11–25. Gutas (2012): D. Gutas, ‘Die Wiedergeburt der Philosophie und die Übersetzungen ins Arabische’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 55–91. Hadot (1987): I. Hadot, ‘La vie et l’œuvre de Simplicius d’après des sources grecques et arabes’, in: I. Hadot (ed.), Simplicius: sa vie, son œvre, sa survie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) 3–39. English version in Sorabji, Aristotle Transformed 275–303. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Heimgartner (2015): M. Heimgartner, ‘Contexts of Christian Education in Baghdad: The Letters of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 173–85. Hugonnard-Roche (1991): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘L’intermédiaire syriaque dans la transmission de la philosophie grecque à l’arabe: le cas de l’Organon d’Aristote’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 1, 187–209. Hugonnard-Roche (2004): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Hugonnard-Roche (2011): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Le mouvement des traductions syriaques: arrière-plan historique et sociologique’, in: R. Goulet and U. Rudolph (eds.), Entre Orient et Occident: la philosophie et la science gréco-romaines dans le monde arabe (Geneva: Fondation Hardt) 45–86. Hugonnard-Roche (2016): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Sergius de Reš‘ainā’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 214–27. Hugonnard-Roche (2018): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Die Schule von Keneschre’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §197. Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; New edition by J.C. Lamoreaux (ed. and tr.), Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, On His Galen Translations: A Parallel English-Arabic Text (Provo: Brigham Young University Press). Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a: A. Müller (ed.),ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’ (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Wahbīyah, 1882). Ibn Zur‘a, On Questions Posed by Some of His Brothers: P. Sbath (ed.), Vingt traités philosophiques et apologétiques d’auteurs arabes chrétiens du IXe au XIVe siècle (Cairo: Maktabat H. Frīdrīkh, 1929) 6–19. Janos (2012): D. Janos, Method, Structure, and Development in al-Fārābī’s Cosmology (Leiden: Brill). John of Scythopolis, Scholia: Migne, Patrologia Graeca IV. King (2010a): D. King, The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (Leiden: Brill). King (2010b): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91.

68

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

King (2013): D. King, ‘Why Were the Syrians Interested in Greek Philosophy?’, in: P. Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 61–82. King (2015): D. King, ‘Logic in the Service of Ancient Eastern Christianity: An Exploration of Motives’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 97, 1–33. Lameer (1996): J. Lameer, ‘From Alexandria to Baghdad: Reflections on the Genesis of a Problematical Tradition’, in: G. Endress and R. Kruk (eds.), The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism (Leiden: Brill) 181–92. Lane Fox (2005): R. Lane Fox, ‘Harran, the Sabians, and the Late Platonist “Movers”’, in: A. Smith (ed.), The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales) 231–44. Luna (2001): C. Luna, ‘Review of R. Thiel, Simplikios und das Ende der neuplatonischen Schule in Athen’, Mnemosyne 54, 482–504. Mahdi (2001): M. Mahdi (tr.), Alfarabi: Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Manṭiq Arisṭū: A. Badawī (ed.), Manṭiq Arisṭū/Organon Aristotelis (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīyah, 1948–52). Meyerhof (1930): M. Meyerhof, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern’, Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse 23, 389–429. Olympiodorus, Proleg.: A. Busse (ed.), Prolegomena et In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1902). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XII, 1. Perczel (2000): I. Perczel, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius and the Platonic Theology’, in: A. Segonds and C. Steel (eds.), Proclus et la théologie platonicienne (Leuven: Leuven University Press) 491–532. Philoponus, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1898). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XIII, 1. Pingree (2002): D. Pingree, ‘The Ṣābians of Ḥarrān and the Classical Tradition’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9, 8–35. Platti (1983): E. Platti, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Théologien chrétien et philosophe arabe (Leuven: Departement Oriëntalistiek). Proclus, in Tim.: E. Diehl (ed.), In Platonis Timaeum commentaria (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–6). Proclus, Platonic Theology: H.D. Saffrey and L.G. Westerink (eds. and trs.), Théologie Platonicienne, livre I (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968). Pseudo-Dionysius: B.R. Suchla, G. Heil, and A.M. Ritter (eds.), Corpus Dionysiacum I-II (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990–1). Patristische Texte und Studien, 33, 36. Pseudo-Dionysius (Syriac): E. Fiori (ed. and tr.), Dionigi Areopagita: Nomi divini, teologia mistica, epistole. La versione siriaca di Sergio di Rēšʻaynā (Lovanii: Peeters, 2014). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 656 (text), 657 (version). Rashed and Rashed (2009): R. Rashed and M. Rashed (eds.), Sciences and Philosophy in 9th Century Baghdad. Ṯābit Ibn Qurra (826–901) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). Reisman and Bertolacci (2009): D.C. Reisman and A. Bertolacci, ‘Ṯābit Ibn Qurra’s Concise Exposition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics’, in: R. Rashed and M. Rashed (eds.), Sciences and Philosophy in 9th Century Baghdad. Ṯābit Ibn Qurra (826–901) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) 715–76. Rorem and Lamoreaux (1998): P. Rorem and J. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite (Oxford: Clarendon).

69

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Rudolph (2012): U. Rudolph, ‘Der spätantike Hintergrund’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 3–39. Saffrey (1979): H.D. Saffrey, ‘Nouveaux liens objectifs entre le Pseudo-Denys et Proclus’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 63, 3–16. Scholten (1996): C. Scholten, Antike Naturphilosophie und christliche Kosmologie in der Schrift “De opificio mundi” des Johannes Philoponos (Berlin: De Gruyter). Sergius, Memra: P. Sherwood (ed. and tr.), ‘Mimro de Serge de Rešayna sur la vie spirituelle’, L’Orient syrien 5 (1960), 433–57; 6 (1961), 95–115, 121–56. Italian translation in Fiori (2008). Simplicius, in Cat.: C. Kalbfleisch (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1907). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, VIII. Smith (2005): J.M.H. Smith, Europe after Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Sorabji (1988): R. Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (London: Duckworth). Sorabji (1990): R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth). Strohmaier (1987): G. Strohmaier, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad – eine fiktive Schultradition’, in: J. Wiesner (ed.), Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung. Paul Moraux gewidmet, II (Berlin: De Gruyter) 380–9. Strohmaier (1991): G. Strohmaier, ‘Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq: An Arab scholar Translating into Syriac’, Aram 3, 163–70. Strohmaier (1994): ‘Der syrische und der arabische Galen’, in: W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II. 37, 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) 1987–2017. Tarán and Gutas (2012): L. Tarán and D. Gutas, Aristotle: Poetics (Leiden: Brill). Tardieu (1986): M. Tardieu, ‘Ṣābiens coraniques et Ṣābiens de Ḥarrān’, Journal asiatique 274, 1–44. Tardieu (1990): M. Tardieu, Les paysages reliques: routes et haltes syriennes d’Isidore à Simplicius (Louvain: Peeters). Timothy, ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy, epp. 43, 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Treiger (2015): A. Treiger, ‘Palestinian Origenism and the Early History of the Maronites: In Search of the Origins of the Arabic Theology of Aristotle’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 44–80. Vallat (2011): P. Vallat, ‘Al-Fārābī’s Arguments for the Eternity of the World and the Contingency of Natural Phenomena’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 259–86. van Esbroeck (1996): M. van Esbroek (tr.), ‘La triple preface syriaque de Phocas’, in: Y. de Andia (ed.), Denys l’Aréopagite et sa postérité en orient et en occident (Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes) 167–86. Villey (2014): É. Villey, ‘Qennešre et l’astronomie aux VIe et VIIe siècles’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 149–90. Villey (2015): É. Villey, ‘Ammonius d’Alexandrie et le Traité sur l’astrolobe de Sévère Sebokht’, Studia graeco-arabica 5, 105–28.

70

SYRIAC ARISTOTLE BETWEEN ALEXANDRIA, BAGHDAD

Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Translators and Greek Philosophy in Early Abbasid Iraq’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 15–26. Watt (2005): J.W. Watt, Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac (Leiden: Brill). Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2015): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Aristotelian Tradition and the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Philosophers’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 7–43. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Watt (2018): J. Watt, ‘Sergios (Sargīs) von Reš‘aynā’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §194. Watts (2005): E. Watts, ‘Where to Live the Philosophical Life in the Sixth Century? Damascius, Simplicius, and the Return from Persia’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 45, 285–315. Westerink (2003): L.G. Westerink, Prolégomènes à la philosophie de Platon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). Wilks (2008): M. Wilks, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s Use of Greek Philosophy in His Hexaemeron’, in: B. ter Haar Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day (Leiden: Brill) 223–38. Wright (1872): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, Part III (London: British Museum).

71

4 SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON THE PROLEGOMENA TO ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC The commentary on the Categories, chapter two1 The works of Sergius of Reshaina (died 536), who in all probability studied at the school of Ammonius in Alexandria, inaugurate the long tradition of Syriac engagement with the philosophy of Aristotle, and the most significant of his works, his commentary on the Categories,2 marks the beginning of a series of commentaries on the Aristotelian corpus in Near Eastern languages comparable in approach to that of the Greek commentators. That Sergius’ work is now much better known and appreciated than was the case a few decades ago is due above all to Henri Hugonnard-Roche, and although there is as yet no edition of the commentary on the Categories, his translations and commentaries of its prologue and first chapter (mēmrā) have made Sergius’ philosophical writing directly available to interested readers in a way never before possible.3 The text of this commentary makes clear that Sergius intended to write an exposition of the entire school corpus of Aristotle’s works, but for whatever reason only that on the Categories has come down to us. Commentaries on the Categories, however, because they generally begin with introductory issues concerning the Aristotelian philosophy as a whole, have an additional interest beyond that of the commentator’s interpretation of the text of the Categories itself. In the case of Sergius’ (seven chapter) commentary, the discussion of prolegomena extends beyond the first chapter into much of the second. It seems appropriate therefore in a volume in honour of Henri Hugonnard-Roche to offer a translation and brief commentary on the prolegomena material contained in the second chapter of Sergius’ commentary. The following pages therefore present a translation of and commentary on much of Chapter 2 of Sergius’ treatise.4 The text survives in three manuscripts in Europe: London, British Library, Add. 14,658 (seventh century), (L); Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, syr. 354 (thirteenth century), (P); and Birmingham, Mingana Collection 606 (twentieth century), (M). While the London manuscript is evidently the most important on account of its age, many of its leaves have gone missing, and the early part of the chapter is extant only in the later two manuscripts.5 Variant readings in the portion translated here are few in number. They have been recorded only where the translation is affected, but the beginning of the London manuscript6 has been noted. Divisions have been introduced into the text ([1]–[10]) to facilitate cross-reference with the commentary (§1–§10). 73

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Translation [1] In the previous chapter, brother Theodore, the first of this dissertation, three headings were rigorously discussed and examined. The first concerned the technical division of the entire science of philosophy; the last one was the heading opposing those who make the logical art a part of philosophy, or both a part and an instrument; while in the middle heading, the second one, we established the proper division of the treatises of Aristotle. This division (of the treatises of Aristotle), when it was treated technically and proceeded downwards from the general to the particular, ended at the treatises which he wrote on the logical art, which we showed to be an instrument of philosophy. However, they also divide these treatises, properly into three parts, and we rightly said that some, (which form) the first (part) of the art, are about (the principles of) demonstrations, some are written about the art itself, and some composed about things which are useful in connection with this art in all kinds of ways. It therefore seems to me, brother (Theodore), that it would be appropriate to construct this whole chapter, the second of the dissertation, from the aim of these treatises at which this division came to an end, especially of those which we consider the first (part) of this art, because they are the first (part) of logic. However, in order that what I say should be transparent to those who have plunged into this book, I am assuming (what was said) just above, (at) the beginning of the exposition, and (that) this is comprehensible and clear to all (my) readers. [2] One should therefore know that the aim of the entire logical art is to produce demonstrations (which are) correct through linked discourse, true, and (applicable) to every one of the things which are in the world. Now because, as they say, philosophy is divided in two parts, theoria7 and praxis,8 one must know that the conclusion of praxis is the choosing of the good, while the conclusion of theoria is correct understanding and knowledge of all beings. Therefore because there is a contrary linked to each one of these – that is, to the conclusion of praxis and theoria – the intervention of logic is necessary9 to separate for us the contrary from the true conclusion of each of the parts of philosophy. For if the conclusion of praxis is the choosing of the good, as we have said, it is evident that the contrary of good is evil. Therefore we need logic in the practical part (of philosophy) to separate for us good from evil, lest while pursuing good, we happen through ignorance to choose evil and forsake good, for evidently no one of his own volition would glorify and embrace evil and forsake good.10 That which is demonstrated by this art to be good is truly good, while that demonstrated to be evil must necessarily be evil. Therefore in the part (of philosophy which is) praxis, logic is an instrument for us by which we may separate natural good from evil which is truly evil. In the other part, theoria, because theoria is true knowledge of all beings, one should know that in this also there is a contrary, which is ignorance. Therefore here also we are greatly in need of the logical art, which is for us the correct measure by which we may separate truth from falsehood. What is demonstrated by logic to be truth, we may confidently acknowledge to be knowledge of things, 74

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

but what is shown by demonstrations to be falsehood, that we may forsake (as) outside of all record of truth. Therefore in the scientific11 part (of philosophy), logic is what enables us never to embrace falsehood as truth or to suppose about truth that it is falsehood. [3] It is evident that without logic neither of these is rightly separable, nor knowable to those who judge things humanly, for the teaching of whoever does not speak through the Divine Spirit needs logical demonstrations to be credible to the listeners.12 Therefore because logic has been shown to be an instrument which clearly differentiates in knowledge truth from falsehood, and in praxis marks out good from evil, this philosopher wished to construct this art of logic before his other writings on all these – namely, on all praxis, and on theoria of natures, teachings, and all spiritual (things)13 – which (art) fulfils for him in each one of these the need of an instrument. And because logic is a true demonstration, but a true demonstration coming from the linkage of correctly posited propositions, and preceding the linkage of propositions is another combination of two or three terms, and preceding this simple namings14 – for this reason Aristotle began the treatises on the art of logic with the teaching about these simple namings. After these he taught about their first and simple combination, and similarly after that in sequence taught about that linkage of discourse from which demonstrations come, and then after that constructed the teaching about demonstrations themselves. Subsequently (he taught) about things which in all ways are useful in supporting demonstrations. This he did with art and science, not haphazardly or by chance. Let that henceforward be sufficiently persuasive for you about these (issues). [4] In any art whatsoever the end of theoria is the beginning of action, and the end of action coincides with the beginning of theoria. What I mean is (something) like the following. If a builder is commissioned to build a house, he considers (the matter) in his mind, saying, ‘I have been commissioned to make a canopy giving protection against wind, rain, and other destructive (forces) like these. However I cannot make the canopy unless I first raise load-bearing walls for it, and I cannot build these unless I first dig out and lay the foundations’. Accordingly he first lays down the foundations, then builds the walls, and finally puts over them the roof, which is the end of building. Therefore in these the beginning of theoria, namely the consideration in his mind begins from the canopy and ends with the foundations, but the action, namely the labour of (his) hands, begins from the foundations and ends with the roof. Therefore, as we said just above, the beginning of theoria is the end of action, and the beginning of action the end of theoria. In the same way Aristotle dealt with the art of logic. First he considered (the matter) in his mind, (saying), ‘I wish to create an instrument of discrimination which defines for me in praxis good from evil and separates for me in the knowledge of things truth from falsehood. But because this instrument is an art which generates all demonstrations constituted by discourse, it is evident that I must first create this art of demonstrations. And because this art of demonstrations comes from the linkage of discourse which is composed with art, I must first teach about this. And because there is a prior combination of terms, from which this linkage of 75

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

discourse comes, I must first write about this. Furthermore, because simple namings precede this, I must first teach about these’. So in his thinking he began from the art of demonstrations and proceeded in sequence to the simple namings; but he made the simple namings the beginning of the (action of) teaching about all these, after them taught about the first combination of terms, similarly after this wrote about the correctly and properly composed linkage of discourse, and then taught about the art of demonstrations itself. Subsequently (he taught) about everything useful to it in all (kinds of) ways. So the end of his action in (writing) these things coincides with the beginning of theoria on them, as the end of theoria on them coincides with the beginning of writing about them. [5] The book written by him about simple namings is called Categories,15 that which he wrote about their first combination On Interpretation,16 that about the linkage of discourse is named Prior Analytics,17 and that about the art of demonstrations itself is named Apodeictics.18 Together with this there is that called Topics,19 and that about the refutation of sophists which he named Sophistical Refutations.20 With these, therefore, this philosopher completed the whole art of logic, which is, as we have said, an instrument of philosophy and not a part of it. Some people say that the Art of Rhetoric21 which was composed by him is also part of the same (art) of logic. However, let us turn now to the subject itself and start to speak as (well as) we can about the aim of each one of these treatises, beginning the sequence with that on Categories, which is about simple namings, and similarly treating each of them one by one in the same way. Then we will go on to his other treatises, those on the parts of praxis, and on all natures, teachings, and the other ones which are called ‘divine’.22 So (now) we hope to set forth the aim of this treatise, which (is what) we intend to do about (the rest) of them, when saying concisely what we can about all of them in accordance with our promise above. [6] But after these (points), let us add also this (one): for what reason did the Philosopher employ obscure language23 in the majority of his treatises? Some say that the (natural) form of his language was of this kind, his whole nature and his investigation into what is obscure being like this, and therefore even if he had wanted, he could not have composed his treatises in simple language. Clearly, however, they assert these things erroneously, not understanding the mind of the Philosopher, for if (the truth) were according to their reasoning, there would have been no need for anyone to seek (another) reason. If he had employed such obscurity not by intention, but because such was his nature, it is evident that there would have been no (other) cause on account of which he chose a way such as this. But we say that if this had been the case, he would have been seen to employ that obscurity everywhere. However, because we see that in some of his treatises (things) are said in simple language not far removed from what I am using now – all his letters are like this, and the book he wrote about all the accidents subsisting in air24 – it was evidently not because his nature was thus, but (because) he intentionally employed obscure language here and there. If his nature, not his intention, had been the cause of the obscure language, it is clear to everyone that 76

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

he would have used it in like manner everywhere. Therefore, from the fact that sometimes he speaks obscurely but sometimes teaches plainly, it is quite evident that he employed obscurity with intention. It is therefore incumbent upon us to seek the cause on account of which he trod this path of profundity of language. So we say that just as those who perform any mysteries do not manifest them in front of everyone, but enact them in inner rooms and behind coverings so that they are known only to those who are partakers of the mysteries, so also he veiled the whole science of logic and natures in the obscurity of the terms so that it would not be disclosed to undisciplined and deceitful people, but to those whose mind is worthy of teaching such as this and who desire to labour with all their strength at excellencies. He also (did it) because he knew that those whose mind is brittle and whose will is inclined to laziness, and who are eager in everything for corporeal pleasures, would immediately give up and forsake the knowledge of things when they saw obscurity such as this. But those whose nature has a kinship with knowledge and are ready for teaching about every thing, not only do not give up and forsake (knowledge) when they see the obscurity, but all the more strengthen their mind and devote themselves to great effort to penetrate into the knowledge of what is being said. For this reason he veiled his knowledge in the obscurity of the naming, in order to test the nature of the disciples from the outset of the studies, as to whether or not it had a kinship with knowledge and was worthy of discipleship. When he did this, the true disciples were immediately revealed and separated from those who were not worthy of discipleship. Therefore this is the cause of the employment of obscure language. [7] About the aim of this book of Categories, the first of the whole art of logic, all the commentators do not agree. Each one of them has taken some point from what is said in the book, and in this way supposed that this, more than the others, is the aim of the treatise. About these, therefore, I will henceforward speak. The (entities) which are simple, and knowledge of which is necessary before anything else, are three (in number). They are, namely, simple things which are in the world, simple concepts which we possess about them, and simple words by means of which we signify them. What I mean is like this. Socrates, Plato, Alcibiades, or some other individual person is said to be a simple thing, and in like manner stone, wood, or other (things). Similarly simple concepts about them are a thought about any one of them which is set in motion in us. And simple words which signify any one of them are the term or naming placed on it by which it is known. Therefore things (which have) their nature, and the concepts which we possess about them, are by nature in the world, and are consequently the same everywhere. But the terms and namings which signify things are not (in the world) by nature, but by convention, (conventions) established by assemblies of people who have gathered together as one. Therefore they are not the same among all peoples. A stone, man, animal, plant or any one other thing, and the thoughts we possess about each of them, are the same in all places and among all peoples, but the namings, their signifier, are not everywhere (the same), for the things are named differently among Greeks, Persians, Indians, Scythians, and, speaking generally, among each 77

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

individual people. Thus the namings are diverse, so that in fact a single naming cannot be found among two (different) peoples that would signify the same thing. Now some of those who have sought to reach an understanding of this book of Categories have supposed that the aim of the book is about those simple things which we have said exist by nature; others have said that this book was written by the Philosopher about the simple concepts; and others about the simple words which, as we have said, are the signifier of things. However, those who have said that it was composed by Aristotle in order to teach about simple things in this book have led themselves astray from the passage after the beginning of the book in which he says that some things exist universally and others particularly, some possess subsistence in themselves and others (possess subsistence) through these which subsist (in themselves). ‘Look’, they say, ‘at the very beginning of the book the Philosopher makes this very division of things, and therefore it is evident that in this book he teaches about simple things’. Those who have supposed that the teaching in the Categories is only about simple words have also derived such a supposition from another passage from the beginning of the book. ‘Look’, they say, ‘directly at the beginning of the treatise he makes a division of words when he says that of all (things) which are said, some are said with combination and some are without combination. Therefore, because what is said is not anything other than words, (and) because he begins with a division of these, it is evident that he teaches about simple words’. Those who have said that the aim of the treatise of Categories is only about the simple concepts we acquire about things derive the reason for what they wish to assert from other considerations, about which it is not otherwise possible to speak unless we interrupt our account (of skopos) here and stay with the subject of these (other considerations mentioned) just above. [8] In investigating genera and species, philosophers have not agreed with each other, but have introduced various and diverse concepts into the doctrine of them. Plato and all the Academics held a concept about genera and species as follows. They say that every thing which exists naturally in the world has some form,25 (namely that) of its substance,26 and also possesses a form with its creator, which is its subsistence in itself, by which (form) it was imprinted and came into being here. Furthermore, when someone sees it, he also takes into his memory its form, and (thereby) subsistence emerges for it in his thought, so that the form exists in three ways: with the creator, in the thing, and in the memory of him who knows it. Just as they say that a craftsman or any other artist first imprints in his thought the forms and shapes of the things which come into being from him, and then engraves and fashions them; and when someone else subsequently comes and sees them, he takes them from the (artist’s) works into his memory, and holds and retains them in his thought, (so that) they exist while subsisting in three ways – namely, in the thought of the artist, in (his) works, and in the memory of someone else who sees them – so also (they say) the Demiurge27 of this All formed concepts about the natures of things according to (their) essence.28 These concepts, as they emanated from Being (in itself), instantaneously became hypostases, and with them he imprinted, engraved, and provided subsistence to all the things here 78

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

(in the world), and both until now and eternally with these primary concepts he forms and establishes the nature of all, using his creative art. We men, who from time to time come into being, see natural things, attain to knowledge of them, and possess within our memory concepts about them. Therefore the concepts with the Demiurge which, they say, are hypostatically with him, are, they say, the primary genera and species of things; the imprints and engravings which come into being from them here in the matter of natures, they term the natural genera and species of things; and the concepts gathered in our memory from the things concerning the knowledge (we have attained) of them, they call the posterior genera and species of things. In order that the account may be made manifestly clear, let me immediately give (you) another example, (one) which they (themselves) introduce. They say that just as on some ring the image of some or other man may be imprinted; and some wax, ordinary and plentiful, may be taken, and someone may impress many imprints with the ring on all the wax; and (then) someone else may subsequently come and see the imprints on the wax, assemble the design of all of them and place (it) in his memory, without seeing the ring itself – then it is evident that the design is here in three ways. First (it is) on the ring, subsequently in the wax, and finally in the memory of him who comes and sees (the imprints) in the wax. However, on the ring the design is singular in its form and in its number; in the wax many have come into being from it, designs which differ from each other not in form, but in number; and in the mind of him who finally sees them in the wax, a single is assembled and a design emerges which is derived from the many. So also (they say), with the Demiurge of beings there are genera and species of things, like the design on the ring; but they are imprinted and given subsistence in the natures of things by (his) action,29 like the designs in wax; and furthermore, we come to the knowledge of natures and assemble in our thought the genus and species of each thing which exists among natural (things). And, as (they say), just as on the ring the design is singular, so also with the Demiurge, all the forms of things are simple. And as in the wax the singularity of the design on the ring is divided into a number, so also in the matter of natures each one of the simple forms with the Demiurge is divided into innumerable individual substances30 which differ from each other not in form, because the (form) of all of them is one, but in number, which separates their individuality from each other. And in our thought, furthermore, from the multiple individual substances which are separate from each other only in number, the forms proper to the things are assembled and become singulars which are derived from the multiple. All those of the tradition of Plato have thought about these (things) in this way, but Aristotle and all the Peripatetics, among whom is also Alexander of Aphrodisias, in no way acknowledge these primary forms with the Demiurge, while strongly holding to those in matter and those in our thought. All their teaching about them is about these (two). They term those in matter ‘natural’, and those in our thought and memory ‘conceptual’ and ‘posterior’. In all their treatises on natures they teach about those natural forms, because they are the natures and 79

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

subsistence of things, while in the books they wrote about the whole art of logic they introduce genera and species, which we said they term ‘conceptual’ and ‘posterior’, because their subsistence is only in thought and word. Therefore, in the teaching on the whole art of logic, look for these species and genera, whose subsistence is only in thought, as we have said, but of whose divisions, because they are assumed in all the books of logic, I shall shortly speak. [9] But now let us return to what we had intended to say (on the skopos). We had intended (to say) that those (who) have supposed that the aim of the treatise on Categories is only about simple concepts have sought to establish the demonstration of this in the following manner. They have said that if (Aristotle) had intended to say in this book about the ten genera that they contain everything which there is in the world – those (ten genera) which they also call categories – but the genera which are accepted in the logical art are concepts gathered in the memory from things, it is evident that the aim of the whole treatise is about simple concepts. But those who have thought correctly about the aim of this book, among whom is Iamblichus, have said that the aim of the treatise is not about simple things only, nor about simple words only, nor about simple concepts only, but about all of them together. That is, (it is) about simple words which signify simple things through simple concepts. That is enough on the aim of the treatise. [10] Why therefore, because here the teaching is about simple words which signify simple things through simple concepts, does the Philosopher now introduce (the point) that the number of words or things or concepts is limitless? Look, it is not possible to contain their number, but the science of philosophers is not perturbed over that, for universal rules are always established which cover multiple things for the sake of true knowledge of realities. Therefore in teaching about these Aristotle stays away from the unlimited number of words, raises his doctrine to their primary genera, and contains them in universal rules, so that in this way he is able to construct the doctrine with art and insight. But let us stop here (with what has been said) just above, for in this manner all the knowledge in this book (of Categories) is being shown (only) concisely to those reading (my exposition).

Commentary §1. Having treated the second of the standard (ten) questions of the prolegomena to Aristotelian philosophy, the division of the treatises of Aristotle, Sergius proceeds in Chapter 2 to discuss the division of the logical treatises, before taking up ([6]) the seventh question and then going on to the subject matter (skopos) of the Categories ([7] to [10]).31 That he restricted his exposition to these parts of the prolegomena to Aristotle does not of course mean that he was unfamiliar with the others. When in the following sections he describes the end of theoretical philosophy as knowledge of all beings, he is no doubt aware that this was one of the definitions of philosophy (usually the first one) offered by the Greek commentators (whom he refers to collectively as ‘they’) in the prolegomena to philosophy.32 It is noticeable that the aim of philosophy in the prolegomena to Aristotle 80

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

(point number four), which receives a ‘theological’ (but of course not Christian) answer from the commentators (the ascent to the One),33 is not formally included among these introductory issues by Sergius. That, again, does not mean that he was unaware of it, or himself held a totally different view. In fact, as will appear later (§2), he may have implicitly agreed with a Christianised version of it, or at least a version of it also espoused by Philoponos. The tripartite division of the logical treatises of Aristotle is common to all the commentators. Typical terminology for the first two (containing respectively Categories to Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics) is ‘the principles of the method’ and ‘the method itself’ (Ammonius, the ‘method’ being demonstration), or ‘that which precedes the method’ and ‘the method of demonstration itself’ (Simplicius). The terminology for the third part (Topics to Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, or Poetics) varies.34 Whatever the terminology, the point is always the same. The first three treatises are essential for the art of demonstration, but do not achieve it by themselves. That aim is reached only with the Posterior Analytics, alternatively designated the Apodeictics. The remaining treatises are not about demonstration itself, but are useful complements to it. Presumably Sergius intends to concentrate especially on the aim of the first part not only because that is most immediately relevant for those starting out on the curriculum with the Categories, but also because the aim of the single treatise of the second part being obvious (demonstration), and that of the treatises of the third part less important, he particularly wishes to clarify the aim of each of the first three. The ‘brother’ (Theodore), the individual to whom the treatise (in conformity with a common contemporary practice) was addressed, was the bishop of Karkh Juddan (on the Tigris).35 The three issues discussed in Chapter 1 and the threefold division of the logical treatises are presumably what the reader is now to assume as established as s/he moves on to the content of Chapter 2. §2. Among the Greek commentators, Simplicius expresses (in point four of the prolegomena to Aristotle) a double aim for philosophy, ‘the attainment of perfection by the practice of the virtues’ for the practical division, the ‘ascent to the unique principle of all things’ for the theoretical. The others mention only the theoretical when treating the aim,36 but the differentiation of both true and false and good and bad when dealing with the division of the works of Aristotle.37 Despite the view of Aristotle himself that evil-doing is voluntary, Sergius follows the commentators in focusing on the need of demonstration for its avoidance.38 Sergius’ description of the end of the theoretical (‘correct understanding and knowledge of all beings’, ‘true knowledge of all beings’) is, as noted earlier, derived from the definitions of philosophy in the prolegomena to philosophy. His readiness to use this expression, while avoiding an explicit discussion of the aim of Aristotelian philosophy as in question four of the prolegomena and the associated Neoplatonist terminology of ascent to the common arkhē of all, may be due to Christian reservation in relation to the implied pagan theology. This is probably also the reason for Philoponus’ expansion of the terminology when dealing with that question, qualifying the arkhē of all with the addition of ‘the creative cause of 81

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

all things, existing always and in the same manner’,39 even though the inclusion of the attributive ‘creative’ in Philoponus’ formulation, while unique to him among the Greek commentators, is not inconsistent with Ammonius’ interpretation of Aristotle’s God.40 ‘Linked discourse’ is Sergius’ Syriac rendering of ‘syllogism’.41 By restricting the demonstrative method to ‘every one of the things which exist in the world’, he excludes God from its sphere of applicability, as his teacher Ammonius restricted it to perceptible things and excluded its application to God (divine substance).42 Sergius provides more information on his interpretation of theoria in a work he originally conceived as an independent treatise, but which he later placed as a prologue to his Syriac translation of the Pseudo-Dionysius. It has been transmitted only in this form, and its original title is therefore unknown. It is commonly designated by that given to it by its editor, a Memra on the Spiritual Life.43 In it Sergius asserts that ‘the science of theoria is divided according to the ranks of the things over which it spreads’, and he enumerates seven divisions: (1) subsists by demonstrations and syllogisms; (2) is revealed in the hidden silence of the intellect without word; (3) extends over the visible natures; (4) ascends to the hidden substances higher than vision; (5) applies to the faculties adjoining the visible natures; (6) resides in the things which afterwards enter from outside into rational natures through their freedom; and (7) as its finest flower (‘ayk habbābeh meddem rīšāyā),44 by means of all those (already) mentioned, touches, as far as is permitted, on the exalted radiance of the hidden divinity.45 In (1), (3), (4), and (5) one can clearly see a representation of the standard cursus of Aristotelian philosophy: logic, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, on all of which, in subsequent paragraphs ([3] and [5]) of the commentary, Sergius indicates he intends (in future treatises) to comment. Those numbered (2) and (6) relate to the spiritual theoria according to the teaching of Evagrius of Pontus.46 Number (7) connects the Memra with the writings it prefaces in Sergius’ translation, the works of Pseudo-Dionysius. In the prologue of the present work, Sergius has already declared Aristotle to be the origin of all knowledge for all subsequent philosophers, pointedly making no mention of Plato.47 Most members of the Alexandrian School would have surely objected to this assertion, since the Aristotelian curriculum was envisaged as preparatory to the Platonic, and Plato considered superior to Aristotle.48 In this Memra on the Spiritual Life Sergius effectively acknowledges a realm of theoria superior to Aristotelian metaphysics (‘hidden substances higher than vision’), namely an apophatic theology.49 This is of course perfectly in line with the commentators’ teaching,50 but from both the content of the Memra and its prefacing to his translation of Dionysius, it is clear that Sergius is referring not to the Neoplatonists’ reading of Plato, but to Dionysius’ reading of the Bible.51 This ‘integration’ of the Aristotelian curriculum into a Christian scholarly cursus, whether by Sergius alone or in combination with (or dependence upon) others unknown to us, is what made possible the Syriac Christian Aristotelianism of subsequent years, which flourished especially at the great monastic school of Qenneshre. These considerations will be important when 82

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

we come to the passage later in this chapter ([8]) where Sergius does in fact make mention of Plato. §3. Sergius apparently believes that while the attainment of virtue and knowledge is humanly achievable only through logic and philosophy, the direct illumination of ‘the Divine Spirit’ may for certain individuals obviate the need for them. The point is made again near the end of the commentary when he writes that without the treatises on logic it is impossible ‘to uncover the true meaning of the divine scriptures, in which is the hope of our salvation, unless through his exalted way of life someone should receive divine power so that he has no need of human instruction’.52 As a Christian writing a work dedicated to a bishop, Sergius was probably thinking of the Christian holy man, but his point could be seen as a Christian parallel to the exaltation by some Neoplatonists of theurgy over philosophy.53 Sergius then touches on the order of writing of Aristotle’s treatises, no doubt with questions three and five of the prolegomena to Aristotle at the back of his mind, the ‘point of departure’ and the ‘means to the end’.54 While various starting points and sequences of study had their advocates, Sergius’ scheme – logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, and metaphysics (here designated ‘all spiritual’ matters) – is that of the majority.55 He then breaks down the order of the logical treatises, following the standard scheme of ‘simple namings’, their ‘simple combination’ in propositions, the ‘linkage of discourse’ (syllogisms), demonstrations, and finally useful additional things supportive of demonstrations.56 The first of the four-part scheme leading up to ‘demonstrations’ is called by Sergius ‘simple namings (kunnāyē)’. He will probably have chosen to describe the first part in this way because he learnt from Ammonius that between syllables, which do not signify anything, and propositions composed of nouns and verbs, there is something intermediate, namely the first placing (thesis) of simple words (phōnai) by which all words name (onomazontai) what they signify (to sēmainomenon).57 The same Syriac term and its verbal root are used (with one exception)58 to render the Greek for predication (katēgoria, katēgorein) in the old anonymous version of the Categories. Given the numerous differences in terminology between that translator and Sergius, this can hardly be counted as evidence that one of them took the term from the other. It could be the case, however, that two points from the text of the Categories, identified as possibly significant in leading the translator to use this term, may also have had an influence on Sergius. These are the fact that the Categories begins with a discussion about names (homonyms, synonyms), and the possibility that some analogy was seen between prosēgoria at 1a13 and katēgoria at 1b12.59 If the old translation preceded Sergius’ treatise (although the balance of probability is that it was later),60 he evidently either did not know it or took no account of it. The Greek commentaries were orally delivered or written on the assumption that the text being commented on was available to the audience or readers,61 and it is natural to suppose that Sergius might have envisaged a comparable situation in a Syriac setting. Monolingual Syrians may well have been one of his target 83

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

audiences,62 but many Syrians (like himself) were bilingual or had some knowledge of Greek, and this ‘elite’ group is the most likely to have been interested in an exposition of Aristotle. It may therefore also have been a target audience, and he may have thought or hoped that they would also consult the Greek text of Aristotle himself, contemporaneously with or subsequently to their encounter with his commentary, in which he often makes the point that he is offering merely a ‘concise’ (b-pāsīqātā) account of Aristotle’s teaching.63 Syrians able to read Greek were not confined to his ‘concise’ exposition, but could consult Aristotle himself (in Greek) and also other (Greek) commentaries (when they became available). That this happened in the years following Sergius’ work is indicated both by George of the Arabs’ translations and commentaries,64 and by Timothy’s quest for ‘the commentary (puššāqā) of Olympiodorus on the books of the logic, or of Stephanus, or of Sergius, or of Alexander’.65 §4. The analogy of a builder and a house to Aristotle’s ‘building’ of the logical art is found in Philoponus (under the skopos of the Categories) and, expressed in a rather different way, in Simplicius (under ‘utility’),66 but not in the commentary bearing Ammonius’ name. Since the chronology of Philoponus’ writings is still uncertain, and that of Sergius’ completely unknown (except that he died in 536), it would be rash to assume that Sergius took it from Philoponus, or from Simplicius. Since the commentary issued under Ammonius’ name undoubtedly represents only a selection of his teaching, it is most likely that Sergius, Simplicius, and Philoponus each took it independently from Ammonius.67 It also receives mention in Olympiodorus.68 The analogy and its accompanying explication emphasise the point that Sergius believed the study of logic involves four steps, for each of which Aristotle composed a treatise: terms, propositions, syllogisms (in general), and (the apodeictic syllogism which produces) demonstration. It is clear that some who studied logic were content merely with the ‘truncated Organon’, involving only the first two steps plus the categorical syllogism, to the exclusion of modal syllogisms and the demonstrations ‘which come from the linkage of discourse (syllogisms) composed according to the art’. Traces of this curriculum of a ‘truncated Organon’ are discernible from late antiquity through to the Abbasid period in Baghdad (Ibn al-Muqaffa‛ and probably al-Kindī). It is clear that some Syriac-speaking Aristotelians adopted it, since there is a Syriac version and commentary ending at this point of the Prior Analytics (I.7), but it is equally clear that Sergius, if he knew of it, had no interest in it. The full Organon, consisting of the four essential treatises plus the additional ‘useful’ ones (which might or might not include the Rhetoric and the Poetics), was also what interested the Syriac scholars associated with the monastery school of Qenneshre from Severus Sebokht to George, bishop of the Arabs, and the Syriac Aristotelians known to us from Abbasid Baghdad from Patriarch Timothy through Ḥunayn and his associates to the ‘Baghdad Aristotelians’(Abū Bišr Mattā, his predecessors, and his successors).69 §5. Sergius now identifies by name the Aristotelian treatise identified with each stage of the foregoing course of logic (Categories, On Interpretation, Prior 84

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Analytics, Apodeictics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations, and, for some, the Rhetoric), using a Syriac transcription of the Greek name. Aristotle is said to have ‘completed the whole art of logic’ with the Sophistical Refutations, but as Sergius notes, ‘as some people say’, the Rhetoric can be considered to belong to the art of logic. He is therefore aware of the view, which later became entrenched in the Syro-Arabic tradition, that the logical corpus could be considered to extend beyond the Sophistical Refutations, but he is reserved towards it, or at least clear that it was not held by everyone. Like Simplicius, he does not mention the Poetics, which by most other commentators was attached to the Rhetoric and thereby formed the final treatise of the extended Organon. This extended Organon was already known to Ammonius, who treated the Rhetoric and Poetics as asullogista; the other (and later) view was that they dealt with rhetorical and poetical syllogisms respectively, as the Topics and Sophistical Refutations dealt with dialectical and sophistical syllogisms.70 Sergius is speaking about the order in which, he maintains, Aristotle wrote the treatises, but one may presume that he considered this corresponds to the order in which they should be read. The one departure discussed by some commentators from this common reading order, namely the location of the Topics at various alternative points,71 is not discussed by Sergius. All three extant manuscripts read not Prior Analytics as I have rendered the text, but Prior and Posterior Analytics. This could naturally have given a reader the impression that a book called the ‘Prior and Posterior Analytics’ deals with ‘the linkage of discourse’ (i.e. the syllogism), and another one called the Apodeictics deals with demonstration. There is of course no book called the ‘Prior and Posterior Analytics’, while Posterior (or Second) Analytics and Apodeictics are alternative designations of the same book (treatise in two books).72 Previously I have mooted the possibility that despite this apparent absurdity the text might nevertheless be correct, Sergius referring to the one book initially by the former title because it dealt with the (apodeictic) syllogism, and subsequently by the latter because it dealt with apodeixis.73 This solution, however, is really ruled out by the clear implication of the text as it now stands that ‘Prior and Posterior Analytics’ is the title of one book.74 The misapprehension could not conceivably have been held by Sergius, but could have been by a Syriac scribe ignorant of Greek who did not know these books directly, but had heard of the Posterior Analytics (and that it dealt with syllogisms) and the Apodeictics without realising that these were alternative titles of the same book.75 The text must therefore have been corrupted at an early stage by a scribe (or scribes) who added ‘and Posterior’ to Sergius’ ‘Prior’, or possibly ‘Prior and Posterior’ to Sergius’ simple ‘Analytics’.76 Apodeictics, rather than Posterior Analytics, is the regular title of the treatise in Syriac. Severus Sebokht wrote a treatise ‘about the kinds of categorical syllogisms in the Book of Prior Analytics (Anauluṭiqa qadmāyē) . . . for this is useful for us and very advantageous towards (the acquisition of) the full knowledge of the logical and demonstrative theoria of what is said in the Book of Apodeictics (Apodeiqṭiqa)’;77 and Patriarch Timothy I referred to ‘the translation that Athanasius (of Balad) made of the Book of Apodeiqṭiqa from Greek to Syriac’.78 85

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Subsequently in the Arabic of the Abbasid period the treatise could be designated either by a term indicating ‘Demonstration’ (the Greek/Syriac loan or the Arabic al-burhān) or by ‘Posterior/Second Analytics’.79 Sergius then appears to be ready to ‘turn to the subject itself’, and speak ‘about the aim of each one of these treatises’, which, it is immediately made clear, includes not only the logical treatises but also all the others up to those ‘which are called divine’ (i.e. the Metaphysics). From this it is evident that he did not intend his efforts to be limited to the Categories, the sole treatise discussed in the present work, or even to the logical treatises, but that eventually he intended to cover the entire cursus. The present work is all that has come down to us, but whether this is due to the loss of some others, or whether he did not get around to writing any more,80 we cannot now say. §6. Sergius still has one more general question to deal with (despite the last remark about being ready to ‘turn to the subject itself’) before moving to the specific issues of the Categories, namely the reason for the obscurity of Aristotle, one of the ten preliminary questions to the study of Aristotle in the scheme of Proclus and Ammonius. That Aristotle’s obscurity was intentional, and not as a result of his nature, was a point made in all the commentaries (except that of Ammonius), as were its twin aims, the veiling of truth from those unworthy to see it (like the performance of the mysteries behind curtains), and the strengthening of those who are worthy by stimulating them to penetrate the obscurity.81 These ideas were not, however, peculiar to the philosophical tradition, but had been appropriated by Christian theologians as early as Clement of Alexandria.82 This common feature of the philosophical and Christian traditions will hardly have escaped Sergius, but what may have been particularly significant for him is its employment in Pseudo-Dionysius.83 It is nevertheless pertinent to ask what other reason or reasons might have led him, given his selective appropriation of the themes of the standard prolegomena, to include this one in particular, since the point just made seems hardly sufficient by itself to do so. It may be because he wished to back up, by reference to the supposed case of Aristotle himself, his own exhortation in the prologue to read his treatise ‘two or three or even four times’ if necessary, and not blame him if it was not comprehensible on the first reading.84 However, he does not make any explicit connection between, in the prologue, the difficulty some readers might find with his own treatise, and here, the obscurity of (some of) the treatises of Aristotle. An alternative possibility is that the inclusion of the theme here is for the sake of those of his readers who he thought might also read (necessarily in Greek) the works of Aristotle himself.85 A short treatise (‘On questions posed by some of his brothers’) by one of the Baghdad Aristotelians, Ibn Zur‛a, suggests that among Christian Aristotelians in the Syro-Arabic sphere the theme might have been more closely associated with Dionysius than with any of the earlier patristic theologians. In this treatise Ibn Zur‛a replies to the question of why Christians speak of Father, Son, and Spirit rather than the (supposedly more exact) Intellect, Intelligising, and Intelligised of 86

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda 9.86 His twofold answer is that from the unworthy the divine realities must be veiled, as written in the Gospel (Matthew 7, 6), while to the contemplatives (al-nāẓirūn) they are presented in related (qarība) expressions, to encourage them to inquire into the causes and to seek the reason why the related expression is appropriate.87 Ibn Zur‛a attributes this explanation to ‘the virtuous and excellent Dionysius’,88 a striking testimony to the association of Aristotle and Dionysius in Syriac Aristotelian circles over the five centuries separating Sergius and Ibn Zur‛a,89 even though this text does not allow us any insight, as the Memra on the Spiritual Life and this commentary on the Categories do with Sergius, into the way Ibn Zur‛a related the pure Intellect of Aristotle to the creative Divinity of Dionysius (cf. §8 later in the chapter). §§7 and 9. Sergius now moves from the prolegomena to Aristotelian philosophy as a whole to that of the individual book, the Categories, for which the first question is that of the skopos (‘aim’, Sergius nīšā).90 For all the commentators the question at issue was whether in this book Aristotle discusses simple words (phōnai, Sergius bnāt qālē), concepts (noēmata, Sergius re‛yānē), or things (pragmata, Sergius ṣebwātā). For Ammonius and his school it was axiomatic that in the Categories as the beginning of the entire Aristotelian philosophy the Philosopher should be discussing ‘things that have a real and independent existence’, rather than those merely existing in bare thought. At the same time, as the first of the logical works, it teaches about them by means of words, not meaningless words or the modifications of words as studied by grammarians, but words signifying things, which is possible only if prior to the expression of the words one first has the concepts of the things.91 The Philosopher’s aim, according to Ammonius, was ‘to treat (the first placing of simple) words that mean (simple) things through (simple) mediating concepts’,92 in view of which Sergius says ‘the (entities) which are simple and knowledge of which is necessary before anything else are three . . . simple things which are in the world, simple concepts which we possess about them, and simple words by means of which we signify them’. There does not appear to be any trace in Sergius of the Neoplatonic idea that words became necessary only with the fall of the soul into the body,93 but there is a clear statement of the difference between things and concepts, which are ‘by nature in the world’, and ‘the terms and the namings which signify things, (which) do not exist by nature, but by convention (syāmā, “placing”), (conventions) established by gatherings of people who have gathered together as one. Therefore (the terms and namings) are not the same among all peoples’. That nature gave men speech ( phōnē) in order to make communal life possible was common belief among the Greek commentators, names being the result of the ‘first placing (thesis) of simple words’, the second being the distinction of nouns and verbs.94 Sergius shows no interest here in this ‘second placing’, but rather that different gatherings of peoples result in different namings. That Aristotle considered names significant by convention would have been familiar to him from the text of Aristotle (De int. 2, 16a19) and, if Simplicius is a guide,95 from the teaching of Ammonius’ school on the prolegomena to the Categories, but while Aristotle recognised that names, 87

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

whether written or spoken, were not the same for all men (ibid., 16a5), neither he nor the Greek commentators pursued the difference of languages. The topic was, however, familiar to thinkers in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and would have struck a chord with the Syrian Sergius, as it was later to do with al-Fārābī.96 He may have been familiar with its exposition by Porphyry.97 The arguments for simple things or simple words as the skopos are then rehearsed. The Greek commentators cite Cat. 2, 1a20–21 (‘said of a subject/not in a subject’) as the passage quoted by the advocates of the former.98 What is briefly adduced by Sergius ‘from the passage after the beginning of the book’ is taken not from the Categories itself or its reproduction by the commentators at this point in the prolegomena, but on their exposition of universals, particulars, substance, and accident in their commentary on Cat. 2, 1a20–2. In Chapter 3 of his treatise, Sergius presented his account of ‘the logical square’ with its diagrammatic representation and four corners marking universals, particulars, substances (ūsiyas), and accidents (gedšē).99 The passage he cites as the rationale for a skopos of simple words, Cat. 2, 1a16–17, is, by contrast, consistent with both Aristotle and the commentators here.100 For Aristotle’s kata sumplokēn and aneu sumplokēs (‘in combination’ and ‘without combination’), Sergius uses b-rukkābā and dlā rukkābā, while the old anonymous Syriac version reads ba-gdīlūtā and bel‘ād gdīlūtā.101 The notion that the Categories is only about simple concepts is discussed by Sergius only in [9] after a long digression on genera and species ([8], see §8 later in the chapter). It follows the argument in the Greek commentators, referring to Cat. 11b15, that the book is about the ten genera, and the genera are concepts.102 He concurs, finally, with the interpretation of the other commentators from the school of Ammonius that each of the three interpretations taken individually is mistaken, but that the book is about simple words which signify simple things through simple concepts.103 He does not identify any of those who held only one of these to be the skopos, but names Iamblichus as among those who have ‘correctly’ considered all three, as does Philoponus.104 Simplicius ascribed this view not only to Iamblichus, but also to Alexander of Aphrodisias and Porphyry among others.105 The parallel passage near the beginning of the Memra on the Categories merely identifies and differentiates simple things, concepts, and words, without entering into the skopos of the Catergories.106 §8. Before completing his treatment of the skopos of the Categories, Sergius embarks on a lengthy digression on genera and species.107 The immediate cause of its introduction here could be the conventional position of the topic of ‘the reason for the title’, following skopos, ‘utility’, and ‘order’ in the points to be explicated before embarking on each treatise of Aristotle. In the Categories Aristotle teaches about genera and species, and since genera are predicated of species, that is the reason for the title (‘predications’).108 More likely, however, is the commentators’ allusion to the view (sometimes ascribed to Porphyry) that the skopos is about concepts and thus about the ten genera.109 The lengthy digression is nevertheless quite surprising, having no clear parallel in the Greek commentaries at this point in the exposition.110 88

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

His source in much of it is a section in Ammonius’ Commentary on the Isagoge,111 the overarching intention of which is to resolve the disagreement of Plato and Aristotle. While very close to Ammonius in many ways, Sergius’ exposition is by no means merely a translation, and his elaboration sometimes involves the use of rare Syriac terminology without any known parallel.112 In his discussion, Ammonius, from whom Sergius draws the analogy of the seal and wax, makes the explicit connection of genera and species to Plato’s demiurgic forms. ‘Let the same be thought’, he writes, ‘about genera and species. For the Demiurge has beside (para) him the exemplars (paradeigmata) of all things, so that when making a man, he has beside him the form (eidos) of a man, looking towards which he makes all of them’.113 Later he observes that ‘Aristotle and Plato seem to disagree about (genera and species), for Aristotle says they are inseparable from matter, but Plato separable, yet whether the Philosophers disagree with each other or not – for Aristotle seems to consider them as natural – this is not the time to examine it’.114 Subsequently, however, he notes that while Aristotle thinks physikōs, it is also possible to consider genera and species theologikōs, and that the opinion of Plato that God has the genera and species within himself is true.115 This is consistent with the information from Asclepius and Simplicius that Ammonius considered Aristotle to have accepted Plato’s forms as logoi in the divine Intellect, and that, these being the cause of the existence of the physical world, Aristotle’s God could be seen as the efficient cause of the world (and therefore compatible with the Christian Creator, even if not intentionally ‘designed’ as such).116 In the prologue to the present work Sergius announced that Aristotle is the origin of all knowledge for all subsequent philosophers.117 Why then does he devote all this space to the view of ‘Plato and all the Academics’ on the ‘primary forms with118 the Demiurge’, while ‘Aristotle and all the Peripatetics . . . in no way acknowledge these primary forms with the Demiurge . . . and all their teaching is about those in matter and those in our thought’?119 One can hardly avoid the conclusion that he presents the Platonic view because he considers it to have some relevance for theology. Ammonius, however, was a pagan who exalted Plato above Aristotle, Sergius a Christian who mostly ignored Plato and favoured Aristotle. We know, however, from the Memra on the Spiritual Life, where Sergius believed a Christian theoria more exalted than that obtainable from Aristotle could be found: Pseudo-Dionysius. And we have good reason to suppose that, as a ‘second generation’ pupil of Proclus (i.e. a pupil of Proclus’ pupil Ammonius), he would have been able either to have recognised that the Dionysian corpus was a recasting of Proclus’ Platonic theology into a Christian form,120 or to have believed that Proclus had borrowed from ‘Dionysius’ (i.e. the supposed first century convert of Paul).121 In Proclus himself Sergius could have found a Platonist criticism of Aristotelian theology consistent with his own Christian belief in God as the effective, not merely final, cause of the world: The Peripatetics say that there is something separate from matter, but it is not an efficient cause, only a final. And this is why they also removed the 89

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

paradigms, and set at the head of all things an Intellect without multiplicity. Plato, however, and the Pythagoreans hymned the Demiurge of the universe as something separate from matter, far removed, the creator of everything and providence of all, and this is the most reasonable view.122 In theology therefore, from Sergius’ perspective, there were truthful elements in Plato, but of course also pagan error, especially in his contemporary exegesis. Platonism could not therefore be embraced in the same manner as the ‘neutral’ Aristotelian philosophy. Its valid insights needed to be Christianised, and this was what ‘Dionysius’ had done. In a chapter containing clear links to Proclus’ Platonic Theology, he wrote: We say that logoi (‘principles’) in God, creating the substance of beings and pre-existing as a unity, are paradeigmata (‘paradigms’) – which theology calls proorismoi (‘pre-definings’) and divine and good acts of will (thelēmata), defining and creating the beings – according to which the Supersubstantial pre-defined and brought about all beings.123 The paradeigmata and creative logoi in the divine Intellect of Ammonius’ Platonism are given a Christian meaning by their ‘theological’ (i.e. biblical) re-designation as divine ‘pre-definings’ in accordance, as John of Scythopolis recognised,124 with Romans 8,30 (‘whom he pre-defined [proōrisen], those he also called’), and Ephesians 1,5 (‘having pre-defined us . . . according to the good pleasure of his will’). The Platonic concept is therefore, in Sergius’ view, not inherently wrong, but requires elucidation from the perspective of Christian theology. Thus it is the Bible in the interpretation of Dionysius, not Plato in that of Proclus, which shows the way beyond the logic, physics, and metaphysics of Aristotle to ‘the exalted radiance of the hidden divinity’. Sergius was a pupil of Ammonius, not Proclus, and Ammonius, contrary to Proclus’ position, is reported (by Asclepius and Simplicius) to have maintained that Aristotle did indeed consider God to be the efficient cause of the universe.125 Sergius’ desire both to affirm Aristotle as the origin of all knowledge for all philosophers and to show the Platonic position here differing from the Aristotelian, simply presenting both, probably stems from this divergence within Neoplatonism on the interpretation of Aristotle’s God, and from Sergius’ rejection of those pagan aspects of Platonic theology he held to be incompatible with Christianity. Sympathetic to Proclus inasmuch as the pagan philosopher was the inspiration of – or a borrower from – the Christian ‘Dionysius’, he was willing to allow his readers a glimpse into the limitation of Aristotelianism as it was (correctly) understood by Proclus (and others) and to signal the opposed virtues of its rival. Yet being on the whole enthusiastic towards the ‘neutral’ Aristotle and critical of the paganism embedded in the Platonic theology of his teachers, he nevertheless probably adopted Ammonius’ interpretation, namely that Plato’s paradeigmata were internally created within the divine Intellect, and may 90

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

have believed that, had Aristotle been presented with it, he would have been in agreement with it. Adhering to this position of an eternally creating and motion-causing creator, Sergius, while ‘de-paganising’ several other aspects of contemporary natural philosophy, maintained a discreet silence on the question of the eternity of the world.126 Somewhat later, Philoponus in his later years launched a full scale attack on this doctrine and on Aristotle as its originator, possibly abandoning Ammonius’ harmonisation of Plato and Aristotle on the concept of God and transforming Plato into an epigone of Moses.127 Sergius’ elimination of Plato from his Christian philosophical curriculum and Philoponus’ defence of ‘Moses’ (and Plato) against Aristotle on the creation of the world were both of importance in moulding the character of subsequent Syriac Aristotelianism and differentiating it from late antique pagan philosophy, even though that Aristotelianism still held Aristotle’s Metaphysics to be, in a limited way, compatible with Christianity.128 That limitation was transcended by the adoption of the Dionysian corpus,129 but it remains uncertain as to whether the re-emergence in Abbasid Baghdad of interest in the pagan Neoplatonic authors who had been ‘displaced’ from a Christian curriculum by Sergius’ ‘substitution’ of Dionysius is in any way dependent upon any continued interest in them in the interim among Syriac circles. There is no evidence that any extensive Syriac versions were made of their works, but among the groups around Stephen bar Sudhaili, and the Origenistic circles in which Evagrius’ works were much admired, sympathetic readers of Plotinus or Proclus might have been found.130 Bilingual Syriac speakers could have read them in Greek, and it was to Christians that al-Kindī turned for translations of the pagan Neoplatonists, but the precise background of these translators and the circumstances that enabled them to read these texts with understanding have still not been fully clarified.131 §10. The grounds for reducing the scope of the book’s analysis from all simple words, concepts, and things to ten genera or ‘categories’ is normally treated in the commentators within the discussion of skopos, though Sergius appears to treat it as an additional point. His brief explanation is closest to Ammonius, who asserts that apeira (‘infinities’) are not amenable to epistēmē (‘science’).132 The fullest discussion is that of Simplicius, where the emergence of the ten categories is attributed to the result of a division (diairesis) of beings not into innumerable individuals, but into their ten highest genera.133 Other questions in the prolegomena tradition (utility, title, authenticity, division into chapters) are not raised by Sergius. The remainder of his second chapter deals with the forms of speech (adšē d-meltā), and nouns and verbs by themselves and in combination;134 individual subjects, genera and species, and the ten highest genera;135 and homonyms, polyonyms, and heteronyms, as well as names and defining accounts.136 His third chapter begins with an exposition of ‘the more general fourfold division’ of universal, particular, substance, and accident parallel to that of the Greek commentators under the lemma of Cat. 2, 1a20.137 91

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Sergius of Reshaina on the Prolegomena to Aristotle’s Logic: The Commentary on the Categories, Chapter Two’, in: Elisa Coda and Cecilia Martini Bonadeo (éd.), De l’Antiquité tardive au Moyen Âge. Études de logique aristotélicienne et de philosophie grecque, syriaque, arabe et latine offertes à Henri Hugonnard-Roche. Études Musulmanes XLIV (Paris: Vrin, 2014) 31–57. © Librairie Philosophique J. VRIN, 2014 and republished by permission. 2 The original title of the work is unknown, on account of the loss of the beginning of the London manuscript (see the following), but on the basis of the content it is reasonable to designate it In Categorias Commentarium. 3 Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 165–86, 187–231. There is a partial Italian translation of the treatise in Furlani (1922), but Furlani used only the deficient London manuscript (see the following), and his translation is so disjointed, skipping from one portion of text to another, that the reader can hardly get a very clear picture of Sergius’ treatise from it. Furthermore, his brusque comment (172), attributing its contents virtually entirely to Philoponus, is, as Hugonnard-Roche has shown, rather wide of the mark. On the shorter ‘Commentary to Philotheos’, see Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 143–64 and now the edition, Memra on the Categories. Generally on Sergius’ life and works, cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 123–42, (2016), Watt (2018). 4 The final part of the chapter, not translated here, begins the exposition of the Categories itself. Together with the two articles of Hugonnard-Roche cited earlier on the prologue and chapter one, the present chapter enables readers without access to the (unedited) Syriac text to read in translation the complete introductory portion of the work. 5 There are two further manuscripts (nineteenth century) in Baghdad; cf. HugonnardRoche (2004) 187–8. 6 On folio 2. Folio 1 is an isolated leaf of chapter one. 7 te’ōryā, Greek theōria. I use the transcription, rather than the English ‘theory’, to signal the wider semantic range of the Greek and Syriac (‘knowledge’, ‘contemplation’). 8 sā‘ūrūtā. 9 Literally: logic is necessary in the middle. 10 Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III 5. 1113b3–27, where ‘no one is voluntarily wicked’ is said to be partly true and partly false. Volition, ignorance, and compulsion can all lead to wicked acts. 11 yaddu‛tānītā. 12 L (fol. 2ra) commences in the middle of this sentence. 13 I.e. on all the parts of practical philosophy, and on physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. 14 kunnāyē, ‘namings’, or ‘predications’. Cf. the commentary. 15 Qaṭēgorias. Cf. Gk. Katēgoriai. 16 Peri’ermēneias. Cf. Gk. Peri hermēneias. 17 Analuṭiqa Qadmāyē. Cf. Gk. Analutika Protera. MSS.: Analuṭiqa Qadmāyē w-Aḥrāyē (‘Prior and Posterior Analytics’) – see the commentary. 18 Apodeiqṭiqa. Cf. Gk. Apodeiktika. 19 Ṭopiqa. Cf. Gk. Topika. 20 Sopisṭiqū Elenkū. Cf. Gk. Sophistikoi Elenchoi. 21 ‘ummānūtā d-Rhēṭrūtā. Cf. Gk. Technē Rhētorikē. 22 I.e. after logic the (three) parts of practical philosophy, and then physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. 23 ‛asqūt mamllā (literally ‘roughness of speech’). 24 I.e. the Meteorologica.

92

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

25 As in Greek (eidos), so in Syriac (ādšā), the one term signifies both ‘form’ and ‘species’. 26 qnōmā. 27 ‛ābōdā (‘creator’). 28 ītyā’īt (‘according to essence’)? Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2006) 109 (‘de manière essentielle’). 29 sā‛ūrūtā LM; bārūyūtā (‘creative power’) P. 30 qnōmē. 31 Cf. Westerink (2003) xliv–xlviii. 32 Syriac īda‛tā (šarrīrtā) d-kolhōn hwāyē, corresponding to Greek gnōsis pantōn tōn ontōn. Cf. Westerink (2003) xlix, liii. 33 Cf. Westerink (2003) xlv; Hadot (1989) 97–103. 34 Cf. Hadot (1989) 11, 80–2. 35 Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 126 n. 2. 36 Simplicius, in Cat. 6.8–9; contrast Ammonius, in Cat. 6.9–12, Philoponus, in Cat. 5.34–6.2. Cf. Hadot (1989) 97–8. 37 Ammonius, in Cat. 4.29–30, Philoponus, in Cat. 4.25–7. 38 Cf. preceding n. 10, and Philoponus, in Cat. 10.15–16. While Philoponus claims that the soul ‘often’ mistakes the bad for the good, Sergius asserts that no one of his own volition would glorify and embrace evil and forsake good. 39 Philoponus, in Cat. 5.34–5. 40 Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, 107–8, and Hadot (1989) 103. 41 Syriac mamllā mqaṭṭrā, rendering Greek sullogismos. 42 Ammonius, in Cat. 33.22–34.2; 37.1–20; 41.8–11. 43 Sergius, Memra (ed. and French translation by Sherwood). There is a better translation, in Italian, in Fiori (2008). 44 An allusion, probably, to Proclus, Platonic Theology I 3. 15.3–4: tou nou kai, hōs phasi, to anthos. Although less likely, it is also possible that Sergius took it from the Chaldean Oracles fragment 1, ed., tr. Des Places 66, etc. 45 Memra, ed., tr. Sherwood 122–5, tr. Fiori (2008) 40. 46 The interweaving of philosophy and Christian theology in Sergius’ scheme is a little more complex than implied in the simple division just enunciated. He states that there are various spiritual kinds within a theoria, so that, for example, theoria number four (metaphysics) is also called ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ (Sherwood 132–5, Fiori 46–7). This theoria, in other words, comprises both Aristotelian metaphysics and Evagrian spirituality and cosmology. By contrast, number five, ‘which is compiled from the faculties of the visible natures, is sometimes called mathematics, and sometimes showing its parts . . . geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music’ (Sherwood 124–5, Fiori 41), is purely ‘philosophical’. For present purposes, however, the essential point is that Sergius envisions an ‘ascending’ Aristotelian philosophical curriculum from logic to metaphysics, intertwined with and eventually topped by another, ‘religious’ curriculum. For further detail and pertinent literature, cf. Chapter 2 in this volume, 27–8, and nn. 15–28. 47 Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 168. 48 Cf. Olympiodorus, Prolegomena 18.3–6. 49 Later in the Memra (Sherwood 124–5, Fiori 41) Sergius refers to it as ‘not a knowledge but an excess of ignorance and superior to knowledge’. 50 The commentators generally regarded Aristotle as having approached theology from the standpoint of natural philosophy, while Plato approached natural philosophy as a theologian. Cf. Hadot (1989) 111–12 (David [Elias], in Cat. 124.17–23), and 13 (Simplicius, in Cat. 6.27–30). 51 Bettiolo (2005) 97–8 for this reason appropriately characterised Dionysius as a Plato christianus for Sergius. In placing Aristotelian philosophy in a religious setting,

93

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62

63 64 65

66 67 68

Sergius was not doing something entirely new, but rather switching the context from paganism to Christianity. Cf. Hadot (2002) 198: ‘Die Erklärung der Schrift des Aristoteles wird als Werk der Frömmigkeit aufgefaßt. Die Einstellung des neuplatonischen Exegeten gleicht somit der des christlichen Exegeten, der die Bibel erklärt’. L fol. 60v. Cf. Sorabji (2005) 2008–11. David (Elias) explicitly compares the different stages of the rites of initiation into the mysteries with the stages of the Aristotelian curriculum: Hadot (1989) 105. Pagan Neoplatonists of course also had their ‘divine scriptures’, such as the Orphic texts and the Chaldean Oracles, but Sergius is clearly referring to the Bible. Whether Sergius really believed that the gift of the Divine Spirit as a result of an exalted way of life compensated for a lack of human instruction in logic, or whether he was just extending an olive branch to the ascetic movement, is perhaps impossible to decide. Westerink (2003) xlv. Hadot (1989) 94–6. Hadot (1989) 80–3. Ammonius, in Cat. 11.4–14. 10b19, where a transcription of the Greek is used. Transliteration was generally employed in the later versions by Jacob of Edessa and George, bishop of the Arabs. Cf. King (2010a) 142.27, 319. King (2010a) 58–63. King also observes that, despite the use of the Greek loan word in the later Syriac versions of the Categories, the Syriac term does not appear to have lost the connotation of predication at a later date (in the tenth century lexicon of Bar Bahlūl). King (2010a) 30–5. Cf. Praechter (1909) 528; Watts (2011) 137–50. The dedicatee Theodore might have been monolingual, but as with other treatises from the ancient world ostensibly, in the rhetorical fashion, written for an individual at his request, its intended readership was no doubt far wider. Cf. the mention of ‘all (my) readers’ in [1] earlier, and ‘those who read’ at the conclusion of the prologue (Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 169–70). Cf. Simplicius, in Cat. 1.10–14: ‘Some set out to make manifest the thoughts put forth by Aristotle, and these alone, concisely (syntomōs), as Porphyry did in a book by question and answer. Others pursued certain inquiries in a limited way (metriōs)’. Furlani (1923), (1942–3). Timothy, ep. 19, ed. Braun 129.16–18, tr. Braun 86. Hugonnard-Roche (2017) 384–5 considers that the treatise was definitely not composed with a view to a parallel reading of the Categories, and points out that it does not strictly follow its sequence. However, the rough concurrence of the two for much of the way (similarly in the Memra on the Categories) leads me to think that an association of the two need not be excluded. Sergius’ work is selective, pedagogic, and not rigidly tied to any one model, but Timothy or his informants, in the text cited immediately preceding, presumably thought (assuming it was this treatise to which they referred) that it was comparable to those of the Greek commentators they mentioned. As noted earlier (n. 2), the title in L is lost. That in the later manuscripts, ‘On the Aim of All the Treatises of Aristotle’, while derived from Sergius’ remarks, bears scant relation to the overall content. Expounding ‘the aim’ of the book appears to be Sergius’ way of explaining what he was doing (writing a commentary) to Syriac readers unfamiliar with the Greek commentary tradition. Cf. §6 later in the chapter. Simplicius, in Cat. 14.5–15.8; Philoponus, in Cat. 10.21–11.33. Cf. also Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 168, 208 n. 3. Olympiodorus, Prolegomena 2.10–12; 24.22–9.

94

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

69 Hugonnard-Roche (2013) 243 suggests the two curricula represent two different literary genres, the school manual (the truncated Organon) and the exegetical commentary (the full version). 70 Cf. Black (1990) 17–51. 71 Hadot (1989) 83–4. 72 Cf. Ammonius, in Cat. 15.1–2: ‘. . . up to the Second Analytics, which is the Apodeictics’. The latter designation may go back to Andronicus, if he is the source of the text in the catalogue of Ptolemy al-Ġarīb; cf. Hein (1985) 368, 425; Baumstark (1900) 63–4, 101. 73 Watt (2008–9) 766 n. 55. 74 hau d-‛al quṭṭar mamlā d-meštammah Analuṭiqa qadmāyē w-aḥrāyē. Similarly in the diagrammatic summary of contents at the end of the chapter we find ktābā hau d-Analuṭiqa qadmāyē w-aḥrāyē. 75 The confusion seems to have been quite widespread among those (or those Syrians) with only a vague knowledge of Aristotle. Cf. Severus Sebokht’s response to Yonan in Hugonnard-Roche (2015) 60–5, 76–7. 76 The former may be thought the more likely, in the light of Severus Sebokht’s usage cited immediately following, but either is possible. 77 Wright (1872) 1160. 78 Timothy, ep. 48, ed. Heimgartner 89, tr. Heimgartner 74. Heimgartner notes (tr. 74 n. 371) that the confusion noted earlier also extended to Bar Bahlūl, but the reason will not be that each treatise was composed of two books, but that the text of Sergius known to him will be that of our manuscripts. 79 Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ, Al-Manṭiq 93.16: ‘The Book of Afūḏiqṭīqā’. Al-Kindi, The Quantity of the Books of Aristotle 392: ‘Second Analytics, which has the specific title Afūdiqṭīqā’; ibid. 401: ‘Afūdiqṭīqā’. Ḥunayn, Risāla, ed. Bergsträsser 47.10–12, ed. Lamoreaux 117.6–8: Galen’s K. fī al-burhān has the same aim as Aristotle’s ‘Fourth Book of Logic’. The title of Mattā’s translation from Isḥāq’s Syriac in Manṭiq Arisṭū 2, 309: ‘The Book of Posterior Analytics, which is known as the Book of al-burhān of Aristotle’. Fihrist 249.11: ‘Abūdīqṭīqā, which is the Second Analytics’. 80 He died unexpectedly (mīt ‛gal) at Constantinople: Pseudo-Zacharias, Hist. eccl. IX 19, 138.11. 81 Cf. Ammonius, in Cat. 7.7–14 and in general Hadot (1989) 113–18. 82 Hadot (1989) 119–22. 83 Cf. De Coel. Hier.2, 137A-B; 140A-B; 141B; 145A-B; 145C (Corpus Dionysiacum II 10.9–12; 11.11–20; 13.13–18; 15.21–16.13; 16.19–17.2). Cf. Chapter 2 in this volume, 29. 84 Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 169, 180–1. 85 Cf. §3 earlier. On the subject of astronomy, Villey (2015) 116 observes that the Syriac explanations of Greek technical terms in Severus Sebokht’s Treatise on the Astrolabe were designed as a pedagogical aid for Syrians who, after reading Syriac commentaries, wished to read the Greek texts themselves, and she compares this with Sergius’ procedure in his works. 86 Cf. Pines (1961) 157; Endress (2012) 329. 87 Ibn Zur‘a, On Questions Posed by Some of his Brothers 10–11. 88 Dionysius referred to Matthew 7, 6 at De Coel. Hier.2, 145C (Corpus Dionysiacum II 17.1–2; cf. preceding n. 83). 89 Cf. Chapter 2 in this volume. 90 Cf. Westerink (2003) xlvii. 91 Cf. Hoffmann (1987). 92 Ammonius, in Cat. 9.17–18; 11.18–12.1. 93 Philoponus, in Cat. 9.31–4; Simplicius, in Cat. 12.25–13.11.

95

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

94 95 96 97 98 99

100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Cf. Hoffmann (1987) 78–81. Simplicius, in Cat. 13.26. On the Perfect State 280.1–4, with commentary 476. On Abstinence III 3–4, ed. Patillon 154.13–155.1. Porphyry also mentions Greek, Persian, Indian, and Scythian, as well as Syriac (not mentioned by Sergius!) and Thracian. Ammonius, in Cat. 9.5–7; Philoponus, in Cat. 9.1–4; Simplicius, in Cat. 9.19–28. Ammonius, in Cat. 25.5–20; Philoponus, in Cat. 28.9–29.13; Simplicius, in Cat. 44.11–25. Corresponding to substance and accident, Sergius here uses ‘possess subsistence in themselves (qyāmā d-yathēn)’ and ‘(possess subsistence) through those which subsist (metqaymān) (in themselves)’. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2006) 104–6. Ammonius, in Cat. 9.3–5; Philoponus, in Cat. 8.29–33; Simplicius, in Cat. 9.8–19. King (2010a) 96.19–20 with commentary 175. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 26. Ammonius, in Cat. 9.7–11; Philoponus, in Cat. 9.4–12; Simplicius, in Cat. 9.31–10.4. Ammonius, in Cat. 9.7–18; Philoponus, in Cat. 9.4–15; Simplicius, in Cat. 9.31–10.19. Philoponus, in Cat. 9.12. Simplicius, in Cat. 10.8–19, 13.12–18. For the confusing assignation of the three plus one interpretations to different sources, cf. Sorabji (2015) 123–4 (n. 32–9). Memra on the Categories, ed., tr. Aydin 96–9; tr. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 154. There is a briefer account in the Memra on the Categories, ed., tr. Aydin 98–101, tr. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 154. Ammonius, in Cat. 13.12–19; Philoponus, in Cat. 12.17–27; Simplicius, in Cat. 16.31–18.6. Cf. preceding n. 102. Simplicius’ treatment of the skopos (in Cat. 9.4–13.26) seems to be the closest parallel in the context of the prolegomena to Sergius, with its lengthy digression (12.16– 13.11) on Intellect and soul. The parallel passage in the Memra on the Categories noted earlier makes no mention of ‘Aristotle and all the Peripatetics’ as is done here, but only of Plato and the Academy. Philoponus, in Cat. 58.13–59.2, touches on the theme, under Cat. 2b5, in discussing universals. On this passage, and the interpretation that Philoponus considers universals ‘after the many’ to be concepts, cf. Sorabji (2015) 136–8. Ammonius, in Isag. 41.10–45.2. This will also have been Philoponus’ source for the passage mentioned immediately preceding. This terminology, used by Sergius to represent (Middle- and Neo-)Platonist concepts, has been analysed by Hugonnard-Roche (2006) 107–10. The translation offered here makes use of his fine analysis. Ammonius, in Isag. 41.20–3. Cf. Plato, Timaeus 28A, 39E. Ammonius, in Isag. 42.22–6. Ammonius, in Isag. 43.25–44.4. Cf. Sorabji (2015) 22–3. Sorabji also notes, 21, that the analogy of a seal and its impression goes back to Porphyry’s Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics (and that some of the time Porphyry was following Thrasyllus). Cf. Verrycken (1990) 215–24. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 168. Sergius uses lwat, corresponding to para. In the source passage, Ammonius’ in Isag., the Demiurge has the paradeigmata para him, while the eidē are en him. The same question applies to the shorter parallel passage near the beginning of the Memra on the Categories (preceding n. 106). Cf. Perczel (2000). It seems likely that Sergius would have known Proclus’ Platonic Theology (cf. preceding n. 44), even though, as pointed out by Sorabji (2005) 207, no comparable theological tract appears to have emerged from Ammonius’ school. An interpolated passage in John of Scythopolis’ Prologue to the Dionysian corpus maintains that Proclus borrowed from Dionysius. The author of the passage may have been

96

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

122 123

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

135 136 137

Philoponus. Cf. Rorem and Lamoreaux (1998) 106–7. The older Sergius, however, may have known (or guessed) the true direction of the borrowing, for in his lifetime the apostolic credentials of Dionysius were still far from generally accepted; cf. ibid. 21–2, 99–106. Proclus, in Tim. I, 266.28–267.4. English translation in Sorabji (1988) 251–2. De Div. Nom. 5, 824C (Corpus Dionysiacum I 188.6–10). The aforementioned links are between Proclus, Platonic Theology I 3, 14.1–4 and II 3, 23.15–19, and PseudoDionysius, De Div. Nom. 5, 820A (Corpus Dionysiacum I 183.14–15). Cf. Saffrey (1979) 13–14. Rorem and Lamoreaux (1998) 222 (Greek in Migne, Patrol. Graec. IV, col. 329B). Cf. Saffrey (1979) 14. Cf. preceding n. 116. King (2010b) 167–70. Cf. Verrycken (1990) 223–6; Scholten (1996) 375–7. Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, and Watt (2017). Cf. Chapter 2 in this volume. Cf. Brock (2007) 293–306. Cf. Treiger (2015). Ammonius, in Cat. 12.1–4. Simplicius, in Cat. 10.12–19; 11.1–8. Cf. Hoffmann (1987) 71–4. Cf. the similar but shorter account in the Memra on the Categories, ed., tr. Aydin 98–9, tr. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 154. The fact that in the section of Ammonius’ in Isag. on which Sergius drew in [8] there is a comparable section (43.3–24) on the parts of speech (merē tou logou) may have had some influence on Sergius’ decision to include this topic here. Cf. Ammonius, in Cat. 13.12–19; Philoponus, in Cat. 12.17–27; Simplicius, in Cat. 16.31–17.28. These passages are all under the heading of ‘title’, i.e. an explanation of ‘Categories’. Sergius, however, does not relate his exposition to an explanation of the title. Cf. Ammonius, in Cat. 15.3–24.20; Philoponus, in Cat. 14.1–27.32; Simplicius, in Cat. 21.1–43.31. Cf. Ammonius, in Cat. 24.21sqq.; Philoponus, in Cat. 28.1sqq.; Simplicius, in Cat. 44.1sqq.

References Ammonius, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1895). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 4. Ammonius, in Isag.: A. Busse (ed.), In Porphyrii Isagogen commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1891). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 3. Aydin (2016): see Sergius, Memra on the Categories. Baumstark (1900): A. Baumstark, Aristoteles bei den Syrern vom 5. bis 8. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Teubner). Bettiolo (2005): P. Bettiolo, ‘Scuole e ambiente intellettuali nelle chiese di Siria’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale (Turin: Einaudi) 48–100. Black (1990): D. Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Brill: Leiden). Brock (2007): S.P. Brock, ‘A Syriac Intermediary for the Arabic Theology of Aristotle? In Search of a Chimera’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 293–306. Chaldean Oracles: E. des Places (ed. and tr.), Oracles chaldaïques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971).

97

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

David [Elias], in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1900). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XVIII, 1. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State: R. Walzer (ed. and tr.), Al-Farabi On the Perfect State (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2008): E. Fiori (tr.), Sergio di Resh‘ayna, Trattato sulla vita spirituale (Bose: Monastero di Bose). Furlani (1922): G. Furlani, ‘Sul trattato di Sergio di Rêsh‘aynâ circa le categorie’, Rivista trimestrale di studi filosofici 3, 135–72. Furlani (1923): G. Furlani, ‘La versione e il commento di Giorgio delle nazioni all’ Organo aristotelico’, Studi italieni di filologia classica 3, 305–33. Furlani (1942–3): G. Furlani, ‘Sul commento di Giorgio delle nazioni al primo/secondo libro degli Analitici anteriori di Aristotele’, Rivista degli studi orientali 20, 47–64, 229–38. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Hadot (2002): I. Hadot, ‘Der fortlaufende philosophische Kommentar’, in: W. Geerlings and C. Schulze (eds.), Der Kommentar in Antike und Mittelalter: Beiträge zu seiner Erforschung (Leiden: Brill) 183–99. Hein (1985): C. Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: von der spätantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur arabischen Enzyklopädie (Frankfurt: Peter Lang). Hoffmann (1987): P. Hoffmann, ‘Catégories et langage selon Simplicius – la question du skopos du traité aristotélicien des Catégories’, in: I. Hadot (ed.), Simplicius. Sa vie, son oeuvre, sa survie (Berlin: De Gruyter) 61–90. Hugonnard-Roche (2004): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Hugonnard-Roche (2006): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Le vocabulaire philosophique de l’être en syriaque d’après des texts de Sergius de Reš‛aina et Jacques d’Édesse’, in: J. Montgomery (ed.), Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy: From the Many to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank (Leuven: Peeters) 101–25. Hugonnard-Roche (2013): H. Hugonnard-Roche, Review of U. Vagelpohl, ‘The Prior Analytics in the Syriac and Arabic Tradition’, Vivarium 48 (2010), 134–58; Studia graecoarabica 3, 242–4. Hugonnard-Roche (2015): Henri Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Questions de logique au VIIe siècle. Les épitres syriaques de Sévère Sebokht et leurs sources grecques’, Studia graecoarabica 5, 53–104. Hugonnard-Roche (2016): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Sergius de Reš‘ainā’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 214–27. Hugonnard-Roche (2017): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Review of Aydin (2016)’, Studia graecoarabica 7, 384–90. Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed. and tr.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; ed. and tr. J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, On his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Ibn al-Muqaffaʻ, Al-Manṭiq: M.T. Dānish’pazhūh (ed.), Al-Manṭiq (Tehran: Anjuman-i Shāhanshāhī-i Falsafah-’i Īrān, 1978).

98

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Ibn Zur‘a, On Questions Posed by Some of His Brothers: P. Sbath (ed.), Vingt traités philosophiques et apologétiques d’auteurs arabes chrétiens du IXe au XIV e siècle (Cairo: Maktabat H. Frīdrīkh, 1929) 6–19. al-Kindī, The Quantity of the Books of Aristotle: R. Walzer and M. Guidi (ed. and tr.), Uno scritto introduttivo allo studio di Aristotele (Rome: G. Bardi, 1940). King (2010a): D. King, The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (Leiden: Brill). King (2010b): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91. Manṭiq Arisṭū: A. Badawī (ed.), Manṭiq Arisṭū/Organon Aristotelis (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Miṣrīyah, 1948–52). Olympiodorus, Prolegomena: A. Busse (ed.), Prolegomena et In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1902). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XII, 1. Perczel (2000): I. Perczel, ‘Pseudo-Dionysius and the Platonic Theology’, in: A. Segonds and C. Steel (eds.), Proclus et la théologie platonicienne (Leuven: Leuven University Press) 491–532. Philoponus, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1898). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XIII, 1. Pines (1961): S. Pines, ‘La loi naturelle et la société: la doctrine politico-théologique d’Ibn Zur’a’, in: U. Heyd (ed.), Studies in Islamic History and Civilisation (Jerusalem: Hebrew University) 154–90. Porphyry, On Abstinence: J. Bouffartigue and M. Patillon (ed. and tr.), De l’abstinence (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1977). Praechter (1909): K. Praechter, ‘Die griechischen Aristoteleskommentare’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 18, 516–38. Proclus, in Tim.: E. Diehl (ed.), Procli . . . in Platonis Timaeum commentaria (Leipzig: Teubner, 1903–6). Proclus, Platonic Theology: H.D. Saffrey and L.G. Westerink (ed. and tr.), Théologie Platonicienne, I–VI (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968–97). Pseudo-Dionysius: B.R. Suchla, G. Heil, and A.M. Ritter (eds.), Corpus Dionysiacum, I–II (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990–1). Patristische Texte und Studien, 33, 36. Pseudo-Zacharias, Hist. eccl.: E.W. Brooks (ed. and tr.), Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1919–24). Corpus scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 84 (text), 88 (version). Rorem and Lamoreaux (1998): P. Rorem and J. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Areopagite (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). Saffrey (1979): H.D. Saffrey, ‘Nouveaux liens objectifs entre le Pseudo-Denys et Proclus’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 63, 3–16. Scholten (1996): C. Scholten, Antike Naturphilosophie und christliche Kosmologie in der Schrift “De opificio mundi” des Johannes Philoponos (Berlin: De Gruyter). Sergius, Memra on the Categories: S. Aydin, Sergius of Reshaina: Introduction to Aristotle and His Categories, Addressed to Philotheos (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Sergius, Memra: P. Sherwood (ed. and tr.), ‘Mimro de Serge de Rešayna sur la vie spirituelle’, L’Orient syrien 5 (1960), 433–57; 6 (1961), 95–115, 121–56. Simplicius, in Cat.: C. Kalbfleisch (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1907). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, VIII. Sorabji (1988): R. Sorabji, Matter, Space and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (London: Duckworth).

99

SERGIUS OF RESHAINA ON ARISTOTLE’S LOGIC

Sorabji (2005): R. Sorabji, ‘Divine Names and Sordid Deals in Ammonius’ Alexandria’, in: A. Smith (ed.), The Philosopher and Society in Late Antiquity: Essays in Honour of Peter Brown (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales) 203–13. Sorabji (2015): R. Sorabji (ed.), with R. Sirkel, M. Tweedale, J. Harris, and D. King (trs.), Philoponus: On Aristotle Categories 1–5, and a Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts (London: Bloomsbury). Timothy, ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy, ep. 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Treiger (2015): A. Treiger, ‘Palestinian Origenism and the Early History of the Maronites: In Search of the Origins of the Arabic Theology of Aristotle’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 44–80. Verrycken (1990): K. Verrycken, ‘The Metaphysics of Ammonius Son of Hermeias’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth) 199–231. Villey (2015): É. Villey, ‘Ammonius d’Alexandrie et le Traité sur l’astrolobe de Sévère Sebokht’, Studia graeco-arabica 5, 105–28. Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Watt (2018): J. Watt, ‘Sergios (Sargīs) von Reš‘aynā’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §194. Watts (2011): E.J. Watts, ‘Translating the Personal Aspect of Late Platonism in the Commentary Tradition’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 137–50. Westerink (2003): L.G. Westerink, Prolégomènes à la philosophie de Platon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). Wright (1872): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, Part III (London: British Museum).

100

5 THE PROLEGOMENA TO THE ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE, BISHOP OF THE ARABS1

George, bishop of the Arab tribes, who died in 724, was the last of the known Syriac Aristotelian scholars connected with the monastery of Qenneshre. This monastery, transferred around 530 from Seleucia, the port of Antioch, to its new location on the Euphrates under the leadership of John Bar Aphtonia, a native of Edessa, was well known throughout the Syriac-speaking area as a centre of Greek studies during the subsequent two hundred or more years.2 It is quite possible that Aristotelian philosophy was studied and taught in the institution (in Syriac or Greek or both)3 even before or shortly after its transfer to Qenneshre, but the series of known Aristotelian scholars associated with it who wrote in Syriac begins with Severus Sebokht (died 666/7) and continues through Athanasius of Balad (died 686) and Jacob of Edessa (died 708) to George. Extant works from these authors include Severus’ Discourse on Syllogisms in the Prior Analytics, Athanasius’ Introduction to Logic, Jacob’s version of the Categories and his Encheiridion, and George’s versions of and commentaries on the Categories to the Prior Analytics. Not extant, but known from the letters of Patriarch Timothy I and from the marginalia of the Paris manuscript of the Arabic Organon, are Athanasius’ translations of the books of the Organon from the Prior Analytics to the Sophistical Refutations.4 Almost all extant Syriac manuscripts written prior to the twelfth century come from a single library, that of Dayr al-Suryan in Egypt, most of that collection being now located in either the British Library or the Vatican.5 The scribes of extant later Syriac manuscripts (which comprise the Syriac holdings of all other European or American libraries) had little interest in (or possibly knowledge of) the philosophical works of the Qenneshre scholars, or of the Syriac scholars and translators of ninth and tenth century Baghdad.6 Of the extant works of Qenneshre scholars mentioned earlier, all transmitted in manuscripts from Dayr al-Suryan, only Severus’ Discourse and Jacob’s Categories translation are also found in later manuscripts.7 Thus it is on those which by good fortune happen to have been taken to the famous Egyptian monastery from their Mesopotamian homeland – many of them by Moses of Nisibis in 932 CE – that our knowledge of the philosophical endeavours of the Qenneshre Aristotelians is mainly based, particularly those on logic. 101

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

It is therefore possible (and indeed quite likely) that more works than are known to us were written on Aristotelian philosophy, especially commentaries on books of the Organon, by teachers or alumni of Qenneshre. Fortunately, however, we do at least have George’s commentary (and version) of Categories to Prior Analytics in a single manuscript from Dayr al-Suryan, now British Library Add. 14,659. The manuscript is notable for both its age and its length. It dates from the eighth or ninth century and currently consists of 263 folios. (Perhaps a second volume, now lost, contained a version and commentary from his hand of Posterior Analytics to Sophistical Refutations.) Unfortunately, there is a downside to its great age: there are missing leaves (at the beginning and end, and after fol. 2), and many of the existing leaves are badly stained or torn.8 Substantial portions of the text are thus illegible or readable only with great difficulty and uncertainty. A future editor of the commentary undoubtedly faces a herculean task. As the Categories was the first treatise to be studied in the Aristotelian curriculum of late antiquity, commentaries on the Categories generally began with the prolegomena (in ten sections) to that curriculum as a whole, to be followed by the specific questions (six in number) posed in turn to each individual treatise. (Introductory questions to philosophy in general preceded the introductions to commentaries on Porphyry’s Eisagoge.)9 These prolegomena provide us with an insight into the commentators’ understanding of the philosophical endeavour and their motive in studying the subject. The proemium to George’s commentary on the Categories comprises both these prolegomena, the ten sections introductory to the Aristotelian curriculum, and the six posed about the Categories. As the beginning of the manuscript is lost, our text commences after the start of section three of the prolegomena to Aristotle, while as a consequence of staining and the loss of a leaf after folio two some surviving parts are nearly or totally illegible and much of the prolegomena to the Categories itself is lost. Nevertheless, enough remains for us to gain significant information about George’s approach to his philosophical work. The present chapter is directed towards his prolegomena to the Aristotelian philosophy as a whole, and the conclusions which may be drawn from it on the view of Aristotelian philosophy held by this Christian scholar in the Muslim world. The text has previously been studied by Furlani.10 Instead, however, of providing the Syriac, a translation into a modern language, or both, he offered an (ancient) Greek version. The reason for this bizarre procedure was his belief that George did little more than translate the introduction to Philoponus’ Categories commentary, on the text of which Furlani drew for his ‘retroverted Greek of George’. Where he found no comparable word or phrase in Philoponus, he employed Italian, thus producing a Greek text with some interspersed Italian. Unless he was able to read a great deal more than I was (which is of course possible), he was liberal in his extrapolations from Philoponus to produce a Greek text which seems to me therefore to be both meaningless and deceptive. His procedure withholds from his readers direct information on the content of the Syriac

102

‫‪ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE‬‬

‫‪manuscript (insofar as an editor can read it), and consequently does not provide‬‬ ‫‪them with what they would need to assess the validity of his thesis.‬‬ ‫‪In what follows therefore, I offer my reading of the Syriac of this unique man‬‬‫‪uscript of George’s prolegomena to Aristotelian philosophy, accompanied by a‬‬ ‫‪translation. What I present here is the best I could achieve at this time with the‬‬ ‫‪naked eye under the ambient lighting in the British Library. A future editor may‬‬ ‫‪be able to improve upon it, perhaps with enhanced reading aids provided by illu‬‬‫‪minating or digital technology. Square brackets enclose uncertain readings or pure‬‬ ‫‪conjectures; dots represent illegible text.11 Folio divisions have been made clear,‬‬ ‫‪and from these it can be seen that the worst damage has occurred on the upper‬‬ ‫‪parts of the folios, most seriously affecting about the first half dozen lines.‬‬

‫)‪British Library, MS. Add. 14,659, foll. 1r-2v (line 22‬‬ ‫‪] . . .‬ܐܪܝ[ܣܛܘܛܠܝ]ܩ[‪] ...‬ܣ[ܝܕܢܝ]ܐ[ ܐܡܪ ܕ‪ ...‬ܦܪܓܡܛܝ]ܐ[ ‪ ...‬ܕܢܫܪܐ ܡܢ ݁ܗ]ܝ[ ܕܡܥܝܕܐ ܘܩܪܝܒܐ‬ ‫ܠ]ܢ[ ‪ ...‬ܐܢܕܪܘ]ܢܝ[ܩܘܣ ܪܕܝܐ ܡܠܦܢܐ ܕܗܢܐ ‪ ...‬ܚܬܝܬܐܝܬ ܡܥܩܒ ݁‬ ‫ܐܡܪ ܕܡܢ ‪ ...‬ܡܠܝܠܬܐ ܙܕܩ ܕܢܫܪܐ‪.‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܡܟܬܒܢܘܬ]ܗ[ ܒܡܚܘܝܢܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܗܘ ܦܝܠܣܘܦܐ ܒܟܠܗܝܢ‬ ‫݁ܗܝ ܕܡܠܦܐ ܠܢ ܡܚܘܝܢܘ]ܬܐ[ ܡܜܠ ܕܐܦ ݂‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܡܬܚܫܚ‪̈ .‬‬ ‫ܐܚܖܢܝ]ܢ[ ܐܡܪܘ ܕܡܢ ܥܝܕܢܝܬܐ ܙܕܩ ܕܢܫܪܐ ܘܗܝ]ܕܝܟ[ ܢܐܬܐ ܠܘܬ ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫ܐܢܫܝܢ ܕ]ܝܢ[‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܚܖܢܝܬܐ ܐ]ܝܟܢ[ܐ ܕܟܕ ܩܕܡܐܝܬ ܡܨܒܬܝܢܢ ܘܡܕܟܝܢܢ ̈‬ ‫ܥܝܕܐ ܒܚܘܫܒܐ ܐܠ ܕܠܝܚܐ ܕܝܢܐ ܚܬܝܬܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܣܘܥܖܢܐ ܢܝܬܐ ܐܐܠ ܘܟܕ ܗܟܢ ܚܐܝܢܢ‪ .‬ܐܐܠ ܒܪܡ ܡܢ ܡܠ]ܝ[ܠܬܐ ܢܫܪܐ‪ .‬ܘܢܩܦ ܠܡܚܘܝܢܘܬܐ‪.‬܀‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܐܖܒܥܐ ܕܡܢܐ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܫܘܠܡܐ ܕܦܝܠܘܣܦܘܬܐ ܐܪܝܣܜܘܜܠܝܬܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܡܪܝܢܢ ܕܢܕܥ ܠܚܕ‬ ‫ܩܦܐܠܘܢ‬ ‫ܗܘ ܦܝܠܣܘܦܐ ܒܟܬܒܐ ݁‬ ‫ܗܘ ܕܡܬܩܪܐ ܒܬܪ ̈‬ ‫ܟܝܢܝܬܐ ܕܚܕ‬ ‫ܓܝܪ‬ ‫ܡܚܘܐ‬ ‫ܕܟܠ‪.‬‬ ‫ܘܥܒܘܕܐ‬ ‫ܥܠܬܐ‬ ‫ܪܝܫܐ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܐܬܐ ݁‬ ‫ܠܗܘܝܐ܀ ܩܦܐܠܘܢ ܕܚܡܫܐ ܕܡܢܐ ܐܝܬܝܗܝܢ‬ ‫ܟܠ‬ ‫ܕܡܢܗ‬ ‫ܓܫܘܡ‪.‬‬ ‫ܕܐܠ‬ ‫ܐܝܬܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܘܥܠܬܐ‬ ‫ܪܝܫܐ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ ̈‬ ‫ܕܡܘܒܠܢ ܠܢ ܠܘܬ ܫܘܠܡܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܡܪܝܢܢ܇ ܕܡܠܦܢܘܬܐ ܕܗܠܝܢ ܕܒܙܒܢܐ ܘܒܫܘܚܠܦܐ ܐܝܬܝܗܝܢ‪ .‬ܡܢ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܗܘ ܗܟܘܬ ܐܝܬ ܠܗܝܢ܆ ܘܗܟܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܒܟܠܙܒܢ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫ܠܘܬ‬ ‫ܡܬܥܠܝܢܢ‬ ‫ܠܦܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܝܘ‬ ‫ܡܨܥܝܘܬܐ‬ ‫ܒܝܕ‬ ‫ܓܝܪ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܡܢ ܒܬܪ ̈‬ ‫ܐܘܣܝܣ ܕܐܠ ܓܫܘܡ ܠܘܬ ܥܠܬܐ ܩܕܡܝܬܐ ܕܟܠ܀ ܩܦܐܠܘܢ ܕܫܬܐ ܕܡܢܐ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ‬ ‫ܐܕܫܐ ܕܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܗ‪ .‬ܒܟܘܠ ܕܘܟ ܚܬܝܬܐ ܘܢܗܝܪܐ ܒܦܘܫܩܐ ܕܡܠܬܐ‪ .‬ܒܟܠ ܙܒܢ ܓܝܪ ݁ܥܪܩ ܡܢ‬ ‫ܡܨܒܬܘܬܐ ܕܡܠܬܐ ܪܗܜܪܝܬܐ‬

‫‪fol. 1v‬‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕ]ܣܘ[ܥܖܢܐ ‪ . . .‬ܘܐܠ ܢܗܝܪܐܝܬ ܡܠܒܫ܆ ܠܘ ܡܛܠ ܟܝܢܐ ܕܡ]ܟܬܒܢ[ܘܬܐ ܐܐܠ ]ܨ[ܒܝܢܐܝܬ‬ ‫‪ . . .‬ܟܝܢܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܥܒܕ ܗܕܐ܀ ܩܦܐܠܘ]ܢ ܕܫܒܥܐ[ ‪ . . .‬ܗܟܝܠ ܐܠ ܢܗܝܪܘܬܐ܆ ܡܛܠ ‪ . . .‬ܕܝܬܝܪ ܚܖܝܦܐ ܢܥܒܕ ܐܢܘܢ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܫܘܘܕܐ ܢܗܦܟ ̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܫܡܘܥܐ ̈ܡܗܝܡܢܐ‪.‬‬ ‫ܕܡܬܡܠܠܢ‪ .‬ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܡܢܗܘܢ‬ ‫ܘܡܗ]ܝܡܢܐܝ[ܬ ܢܫܡܥܘܢ ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܡܬܡܠܠܢ‪ .‬ܟܠܗ ܗܢܐ ܝܬܝܪܐܝܬ‬ ‫ܫܡܘܥܐܓܝܪ ̈ܚܬܝܬܐ‪ .‬ܟܠ ܟܡܐ ܕܐܠ ܢܗܝܪܘܬܐ ܐܝܬܝܗܝܢ ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫ܝܨܦܝܢ ܕܐܓܘܢܐ ܥܒܕܝܢ‪ .‬ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܠܗ ܠܥܘܡܩܐ ܢܡܜܘܢ‪ .‬ܩܦܐܠܘܢ ܕܬܡܢܝܐ܀ ܕܐܝܟ ܐܝܢܐ ܙܕܩ‬ ‫ܠܩܪܘܝܐ ܕܢܗܘܐ‪ .‬ܟܐܢܐ܆ ܘܚܪܝܦܐ ܒܬܪܥܝܬܐ܆ ]ܘܚ[ܦܝܛܐ ܠܘܬ ̈ܡܐܠ܆ ܘܡܡܫܚܐ ̈‬ ‫ܒܥܝܕܐ ܐܝܟܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܒܟܠܗܝܢ ܢܗܘܐ ܡܨܒܬ‪ .‬ܕܬܫܥܐ‪] .‬ܘܠ[ܡܦܫܩܢܐ ܗܟܢܐ ܙܕܩ ܠܗ ܕܢܗܘܐ‪ .‬ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕ]ܠ[ܐ ܒܫܦܝܪܘܬ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܡܝܖܢ܇ ܐܝܟ ݁‬ ‫ܗܘ ܕܡܢ ܜܪܝܦܘܕܐ ܠܗܠܝܢ ܢܩܒܠ‪ .‬ܘܐܠ‬ ‫ܬܪܥܝܬܐ ܢܣܥܐ ܕܢܩܝܡ ܘܢܚܘܐ ܗܠܝܢ ܕܒܝܫܐܝܬ‬ ‫ܠܗܠܝܢ ̈‬ ‫ܜܒܬܐ ܒܒܝܫܘܬ ܙܢܐ ܢܩܒܠ ܡܜܠ ܣܢܐܬܐ‪ .‬ܐܐܠ ݁ܕܝܢܐ ܐܠ ܚܫܘܫܐ ݁‬ ‫ܙܕܩ ܠܗ ܕܢܗܘܐ ܕܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫݁‬ ‫݁‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܕܝܢܐ‬ ‫ܘܗܝܕܝܢ‬ ‫ܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܫܦܖ‬ ‫ܢ‬ ‫ܕܠܗܘ‬ ‫ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫ܘܢܦܫܩ‬ ‫ܗܪ܆‬ ‫ܢܢ‬ ‫ܩܐ‬ ‫ܕܥܬܝ‬ ‫ܠܬܪܥܝܬܐ‬ ‫ܢ‬ ‫ܡ‬ ‫ܘܩܕܡܐܝܬ‬ ‫ܢ‪.‬‬ ‫ܕܡܬܐܡܖ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܕܡܢܗ ܢܝܬܐ܀ ܩܦܐܠܘܢ ܕܥܣܪܐ܀ ܕܩܕܡ ܟܠܗܝܢ ܦܪܓܡܜܝܐܣ ܕܐܪܝܣܜܘܜܠܝܣ܆ ܫܬܐ ̈ܩܦܐܠܐ‬ ‫ܐܝܬܝܗܘܢ ݁ܕܘܐܠ ܕܢܩܕܡܘܢ ܢܬܐܡܪܘܢ܀ ܢܝܫܐ‪ .‬ܚܫܚܬܐ‪ .‬ܥܠܬܐ ܕܪܘܫܡܐ‪ .‬ܜܟܣܐ ܕܩܪܝܢܐ‪ .‬ܕܐܢ‬ ‫ܗܘ ܕܚܬܝܬܐܝܬ ܕܦܝܠܣܘܦܐ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܟܬܒܐ‪ .‬ܦܘܠܓܐ ̈‬ ‫ܕܐܠܝܕܐ ܨܒܘܬܐ ݁‬ ‫݁‬ ‫ܠܚܡ‪.‬‬ ‫ܕܠܩܦܐܠܐ‪ .‬ܐܘ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫ܕܦܪܓܡܜܝܐ‪ .‬ܘܐܝܟ ܗܘ ݁‬ ‫ܘܢܝܫܐ ݁ܡܢ ܢܬܦ ܘܡܠܩܜ ܠܟܝܢܐ‬ ‫݂‬ ‫‪103‬‬

‫‪ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE‬‬

‫‪fol. 2r‬‬ ‫ܕܪܓܬܐ‪݁ 12‬ܝܗܒ ݁‬ ‫ܠܗܘ ݁ܕܩܪܐ‪ .‬ܕܕܐܝ]ܟܢ[ܐ ]ܠܗ[ ܙܕ]ܩ[ ܕܢܣܬܟܠ ܠܟܠ ܚܕܐ‪ .‬ܡܥܬܕ ܓܝܪ ܕܟܠ ܚܕܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܡܬܐܡܖܢ ܠܘܬ ܢܝܫܐ ܕܟܬܒܐ ‪. . .‬܀ ܚܫܚܬܐ ܕ]ܝܢ[ ܚܦܝܜܘܬܐ ܘܚܘܝܚܘܬܐ ]ܬܣ[ܝܡ‬ ‫]ܡܢ[ ܗܠܝܢ‬ ‫݁‬ ‫ܒܫܡܘܥܐ‪݁ .‬‬ ‫ܙܕܩ ܓܝܪ ܠܗܘ ܕܥܬܝܕ ܕ]ܢܫܪܐ ܡ ܕܡ[ ܕܩܕܡܐܝܬ ܢܐܠܦ ܕܐܢ ܚܫܚܬܐ ܕ]ܠܗ[ ܡܘܬܪܐ܀‬ ‫ܥܠܬܐ ܕܝܢ ܕܪܘܫܡܐ܆ ܡܜܠ ܕ]ܠܘܬ[ ̈‬ ‫ܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܐ ܡܕܡ ܐܠ ܝܕܝܥܐ ܐܝܬܘܗ ܪܘܫܡܐ܆ ܚܫܚܐ ܕܢܒܥܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫݁‬ ‫ܒܗܝ ܓܝܪ ܕܡܜܠ‬ ‫ܕܡܜܠ ܡܢܐ ܗܟܝܠ ܟܬܝܒ܇ ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܒܩܜܝܓܘܖܝܣ ܘܒܦܪܝܪܡܢܝܣ ܘܒܐܚܖܢܐ‪.‬‬ ‫ܫܡܝܐ ܐܘ ܒ]ܗ ݁ܝ[ ܕܡܜܠ ܢܦܫܐ܆ ܐܠ ݁‬ ‫ܓܐܠ‬ ‫ܙܕܩ ܕܥܠܬܐ ܕܪܘܫܡܐ ܢܒ]ܥܐ[ ܡܜܠ ܕܡܢܗ ܕܫܡܥܐ ݂‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܘܢܗܝܪ܀ ܒ]ܥܝܢܢ[ ܕܝܢ ܘܕܐܢ ܚܬܝܬܐܝܬ ܕܡܟܬܒܢܐ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ܟܬܒܐ‪ .‬ܬܠܬ ܓܝܪ ܥܠܠܬܐ ܗܘܝ‬ ‫ܕܦܖܨܘܦܐ‪̈ .‬‬ ‫ܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܗ ܕܐܪܝܣܜܘܜܠܝܣ‪ .‬ܚܕܐ ܡܢ ܫܘܝܘܬ ܫܡܐ ̈‬ ‫ܕ‪̈ . . .‬‬ ‫ܕܬܖܬܝܢ ܕܝܢ ܫܘܝܘܬ ܫܡܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫݁‬ ‫ܕܡܟܬܒܢܘܬܐ‪ .‬ܕܬܠܬ ܕܝܢ ܡܜܠ ܝܘܬܖܢܐ ܜܢܦܐ‪ .‬ܡܜܠ ܓܝܪ ܕܦܜܐܠܡܘܣ ܣܓܝ ܡܖܗܜܐ ܝܗܒ ܗܘܐ܆‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܐܝܟ ܕܢܩܢܐ ܟܬܒܘܗܝ ܕܐܪܝܣܜܘܜܠܝܣ܆ ܡܜܠ ܗܕܐ ܥܠܬܐ ܣܓܝܐܐ ܐܡܪܚܘ ܕܒܫܡܗ ܕܦܝܠܣܘܦܐ‬ ‫ܢܟܬܒܘܢ܀ ܜܟܣܐ ܕܝܢ ܕܩܪܝܢܐ ܒܥܝܢܢ܆ ܐܝܟܢܐ ܕܐܠ ܒܗܠܝܢ ̈ܪܘܪܒܬܐ ܩܕܡܐܝܬ ܢܪܡܐ ܐܝܕܐ܇ ܟܕ ܜܥܝܢܢ‬ ‫ܕܠܩܦܐܠܐ ܡܜܠ ܕܙܕܩ ݁‬ ‫ܢܬܝܕܥܢ܀ ܦܘܠܓܐ ܕܝܢ ̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܗܘ ܕܠܟܝܢܐ ܕܟܠܗ ܡܕܡ‬ ‫ܕܐܝܠܝܢ ܩܕܡܐܝܬ ݁ܘܐܠ ܕܠܢ‬ ‫݁ ݁‬ ‫̈‬ ‫݁‬ ‫ܒܥܐ ܠܡܐܠܦ܇ ܕܐܦ ܠܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܗܢܐ ܚܬܝܬܐܝܬ ܢܥܩܒ‪ .‬ܗܟܢܐ ܗܟܝܠ ܙܕܩ ܕܩܕܡܐܝܬ‬ ‫ܚܬܝܬܐܝܬ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܟܘܠ ܟܬܒܐ ܢܕܥ܆ ܕܠܟܡܐ ܘܐܠܝܠܝܢ ܡܬܦܠܓ‪.‬‬

‫‪fol. 2v‬‬ ‫ܕܢܕ]ܥ[ ܕܝܢ ܙܕܩ ܕܠܘ ܕܟܠ ܕܘܟ ܟܠܗܝܢ ܗܠܝܢ ]ܙܕܩ[ ܕܢܒܥܐ‪ .‬ܐܐܠ ܒܗܠܝܢ ܕ ݁‬ ‫ܗܝ ܕܢܗܝܪܐ ‪ . . .‬ܐܟܙܢܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܒܐܬܖܘܬܐ ܕܠܘ ܟܠܗܝܢ ̈‬ ‫ܝܕܝܥܢ ܐܐܠ ܘܐܠ ܟܕ ܢܝܫܐ ܡܬܝܕܥ ܡܚܕܐ ܥܡܗ ܡܬܝܕܥܐ ܚܫܚܬܐ‪ .‬ܢܝܫܐ‬ ‫ܓܝܪ ܐܝܬܘܗܝ ‪ . . .‬ܐܘܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܝܠܩܜܝܩܝܬܐ ݁‬ ‫ܗܝ ܕܡܜܠ ]ܕܝ[ܢ ܡܣܪܚܢܘܬܐ ܕܡܬܬܣܪܚܐ ܠܢ܆ ܢܐܠܦ‬ ‫ܠܢ ܕܢܥܒܕ ̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܚܘܫܒܐ ܡܢ ܗܠܝܢ ̈‬ ‫ܡܬܬܣܖܚܢܢ ܠܢ ܕܝܢ ܠܘ‬ ‫ܡܫܬܒܚܢܝܬܐ‪ .‬ܐܢ ܕܝܢ ܡܜܠ ܟܠ ܡܕܡ ܕܡܬܬܣܪܚ܆‬ ‫̈‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܠܚܘܕ ̈‬ ‫݁‬ ‫݁‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܫܖܝܪܬܐ܆ ܐܐܠ ܐܦ ܕܓܬܐ܆ ܡܢ ܐܝܬܝܗ ܚܫܚܬܐ ܡܢ ܗܪܟܐ ܕܢܕܥ ܐܘܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܒܐܝܕܗ‬ ‫݁‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܗܘ‪،‬ܢܚܬ ܠܢܝܫܐ ܕܦܪܓܡܜܝܐ ܡܠܦ‬ ‫ܗܘ ܟܕ ݂‬ ‫ܘܠܗܠܝܢ ܕܓܠܬܐ ܣܘܠܝܓܝܣܣܬܐ ܥܒܕܝܢ ܚܢܢ‪ .‬ܐܐܠ ݂‬ ‫݁‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܠܢ܆ ܕܡܜܠ ܬܠܬ‬ ‫ܐܘܡܢܘܬܐ ܕܒܦܝܠܣܘܦܘܬܐ‪.‬‬ ‫ܐܝܬܝܗ‪ .‬ܗܢܘ ܕܝܢ ܠܘܬ ܕܘܪܫܐ‪ .‬ܠܘܬ ݁ ̈ܥܢܝܢܐ‪ .‬ܠܘܬ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܒܩܜܝܓܘܖܝܘܣ ܕܝܢ ܘܒܦܪܝܪܡܢܝܣ ܥܡ ܢܝܫܐ ܐܟܚܕܐ ܘܚܫܚܬܐ ܡܬܚܘܝܐ‪ .‬ܐܝܟ ܕܒܬܪ ܟܝܢ ܡܚܘܝܢ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫݁‬ ‫݁‬ ‫ܚܢܢ‪ .‬ܘܗܠܝܢ ܡܢ ܡܜܠ ܟܠܗ ܦܝܠܣܘܦܘܬܐ ܐܪܝܣܜܘܜܝܠܝܬܐ ܢܬܐܡܖܢ‪ .‬ܢܐܡܪ ܕܝܢ ܘܡܛܠ ܟܬܒܐ‬ ‫̈‬ ‫ܕܩܛܝܓܘܖܝܣ ܕܩܕܝܡ ܣܝܡ܆ ܟܠܗܘܢ ܗܠܝܢ ̈ܩܦܐܠܐ܀܀‬ ‫ܗܢܐ‬

‫‪Translation‬‬ ‫‪[Aristotel]ian . . .13 of [S]idon says that . . . treatise14 . . . that we begin from what‬‬ ‫)‪is familiar and present to [us] . . .15 Andronicus of Rhodes, the teacher who (most‬‬ ‫‪accurately investigated this . . . says that it is necessary to begin from the logi‬‬‫‪cal . . . which teaches us demonstration, because the Philosopher employs demon‬‬‫‪stration in all [his] treatises. But others have said that it is right that we begin from‬‬ ‫‪the ethical and then come to the others, so that after we first put in order and purify‬‬ ‫‪(our) character, with unperturbed thought we may produce an accurate judgement‬‬ ‫‪of things; but also, after we (have come to) live in this manner, we should never‬‬‫‪theless begin from the [logical] and apply ourselves to demonstration.‬‬ ‫)‪Point Four. What is the end of the Aristotelian philosophy? We say (it is‬‬ ‫‪that we may know the one principal, cause, and creator of all. For the‬‬ ‫‪104‬‬

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

Philosopher demonstrates in the treatise called Metaphysics16 that the principal and cause is one, bodiless, from which everything has come into being. Point Five. What are the things which lead us to the end? We say that (it is) the doctrine of the things which exist in time and (are subject to) change. For from these, by the intermediation of mathematics, we may ascend to those which exist always in the same manner, and thus after bodiless substances (ascend) to the first cause of all. Point Six. What is the form of his account? Everywhere (it is) accurate and clear in the explanation of the argument, for he always shuns the ornamentation of rhetorical discourse (fol. 1v) . . . the nature of [the things]17 . . . and wrapped in obscurity,18 not because of the nature of [the writing], but [voluntarily] he did this. [Point Seven.] . . .19 therefore obscurity on account of . . .20 to make them especially sharp and [faithfully] attend to what is said, so as to turn the faithful listeners away from the signs. For so long as what is said is obscure, so long will genuine listeners all the more insist on struggling to reach the bottom (of it). Point Eight. What must the reader be like? Just, sharp of intellect, [careful] with words, and measured in behaviour, so that he may be adorned in all of them. Nine. It is necessary [also for] the commentator to be like that, so that he does [not] through virtuosity of intellect presume to exalt and demonstrate that which is badly said, like him who accepts things (merely because they are) ex cathedra, nor (conversely) on account of hatred oppose the good things in a bad way. Rather, he must be a dispassionate judge of what is said, and first clarify the thought of the ancients and explain what is appropriate to them, and then come to his own judgement. Point Ten. Before all of the treatises of Aristotle, there are six points which must be first discussed: the subject, the utility, the reason for the title, the order of reading, whether the book is truly the Philosopher’s, (and) the division into chapters, or (one may also add) to which matter (in philosophy) it is appropriate.21 The subject draws out and identifies the nature of the treatise, and as it were (fol. 2r) confers on the reader the state as to [how he must] think of each one, for it prepares (him) . . .22 each one [of] the things said towards the subject of the book. The utility [inspires] diligence and enthusiasm in the listener, for he who is prepared to [begin something] must first learn if the utility for him is advantageous. (As for) the explanation of the title, because [with] some treatises the (meaning of the) title is not evident, it is useful that we seek why it is so written, as in Categories, or On Interpretation, or others, while with On Heaven or On the Soul it is not necessary [to seek] the explanation of the title, because it is manifest and clear from the wording itself. We do, however, ask whether a book is genuinely from the (named) author, for there were 105

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

three reasons for . . .23 of the writings of Aristotle. First was homonymy of persons; second homonymy of writings; and the third was for illegitimate profits, for because Ptolemy put great efforts into obtaining the books of Aristotle, for this reason many ventured to write in the name of the Philosopher. We seek the order of reading, lest we first set our hand to great matters, being ignorant of things which first need to be known to us. (As for) the division into chapters, because he who seeks accurately to learn the nature of a whole thing must also accurately grasp the parts of it, similarly therefore we must accurately know the parts of the whole book, how many (there are), and into which (the book) is divided. (fol. 2v) It is right, however, that we should [know] that it is not [appropriate] to seek all of these everywhere, but in those (places) where that which is clear24 . . .25 as in the Topics, where not all of these are evident, but even when the subject becomes known, the utility does not also immediately become known with it. For the subject is . . . the dialectical art, which [however] (being) about a problem set before us, teaches us to construct arguments from generally recognised premises.26 But if about everything which may be presented, not only truths but also falsehoods are set before us, is the utility therefore that we know the art by means of which we may make a syllogism even with falsehoods? However, proceeding down (the text of the Topics), the same (Aristotle) on the subject27 of the treatise teaches us that it is for three things, namely: for exercise, for conversations, (and) for the arts in philosophy.28 However, in the Categories and On Interpretation the subject and the utility are manifest together, as we shall subsequently demonstrate. These things are said about the whole Aristotelian philosophy, but (now) also about the Book of the Categories we shall discuss all these points which (must) be prefaced (to it).

Commentary It is clear from the surviving sections that George’s proemium is closely modelled on the late antique prolegomena to Aristotle. There are some small differences in the order of the points between the five similar extant Greek prolegomena, but the content is comparable in all of them.29 The differences in order are confined to the five latter questions. George’s is in perfect agreement with that of Philoponus, that of Simplicius differs only in the reversal of numbers eight and nine, while there is slightly more variation in those of Ammonius, Olympiodorus, and David (Elias).30 It is easy to see therefore why Furlani characterised George’s proemium as a translation of Philoponus’; and similarly as regards the content, George is undeniably closest to Philoponus. Furlani’s characterisation, however, is perhaps not the best way to think of George’s text, any more than it would be to think of one of the later Greek proemia as a ‘copy’ of an earlier one. George wrote a proemium following the standard pattern, and among the various examples of it that may have been available to him, he chose to follow Philoponus. 106

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

How closely he did so we may examine in finer detail in the case of the two questions, numbers four and five, with which this chapter is mainly concerned: the end (šullāmā, telos) of the Aristotelian philosophy, and the means to that end. Philoponus’ response to these is as follows:31 What is the end of the Aristotelian philosophy? We say that (it is) to know the principal of all things, the creative cause of all things, existing always and in the same manner. For he demonstrates that the principal of all is one and bodiless, from which all things come. What things lead us to this end? We say that (it is) the doctrine of things existing in time and subject to change – these are the things (subject) to generation and corruption. For from these, by the intermediaries of mathematics, we may raise ourselves up to the things which exist always and in the same manner – these are the celestial things – and thus after the bodiless substances (raise ourselves) to the first cause of all things. All movement being either according to substance, quantity, quality, or place,32 things (subject) to generation and corruption are moved according to every motion, but the celestial things only according to place. Therefore it is necessary to proceed in proper order from the things moved in multiple ways to those moved in only one, and similarly to the principal which exists motionless and always in the same manner, in accordance with the oracle not overstepping (a stage).33 For if we wished to proceed directly from the embodied beings to the first principal of all things, we might imagine it to be a body and to have a form. For this reason Plotinus said, ‘Give the young mathematics, to accustom them to bodiless nature’.34 A comparison of the two writers’ answers to these questions leaves little doubt that George made use of Philoponus, but his text is not purely a translation of the Alexandrian’s. There is selection and adaptation in George’s account, indicating that he did not thoughtlessly follow his model. Furlani’s work in recognising the link between the two deserves recognition, a point which it is only fair to make clear, given my earlier strictures on his fabricated Greek text. The frame of reference, however, has to be broadened. If some of the other commentators were known to George, it would be interesting to know why he chose Philoponus in particular, but if no others were known to him, the question would be why that was the case. Philoponus was the only late antique Greek commentator, in response to question four, to speak of a creative cause of all things,35 with which George concurs (‘cause and creator’), and which, it has been proposed, might have arisen from Philoponus’ Christian faith.36 The wording, however, is consistent with Ammonius’ interpretation of Aristotle’s God (according to the reports of Asclepius and Simplicius) as not only a final, but also an efficient, cause.37 Nevertheless, the fact that Philoponus alone used the ‘creative’ term might still be on account of 107

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

some Christian uneasiness in relation to the general tenor of the theological apex of the Alexandrian curriculum, even though his uneasiness had not yet advanced as far as his later radical critique expressed in his rejection of the eternity of the world and his repudiation of the Neoplatonic doctrine of the harmony of Plato and Aristotle.38 A comparable uneasiness can be detected in the thought of Philoponus’ elder Christian contemporary at Alexandria, Sergius of Reshaina, who in his ‘Treatise on the Causes of the Universe According to the View of Aristotle’ – in fact an adaption of a work of Alexander of Aphrodisias – clearly had some reservations concerning the eternalist cosmology of Aristotle and his Neoplatonic teachers, but declined to attack it directly.39 His commentary on the Categories does not have a formal set of introductory questions in the standard manner of the Greek commentators, although it does deal with some of them (but not that of the ‘end’) in a less formalised framework. In a rhetorical prologue, he wrote that Aristotle was the origin of all knowledge, not only for Galen and all medical doctors, but also for all subsequent philosophers. Thus, far from following the usual course of his Alexandrian masters in asserting the superiority of Plato to Aristotle and treating the Aristotelian curriculum as preliminary to the Platonic, he pointedly avoided mention of Plato as ‘the origin of all knowledge for all subsequent philosophers’ – which may point to Sergius himself as the originator of the dominance of Aristotle in subsequent Syriac philosophy.40 He does not seem, however, to have considered all aspects of Plato’s philosophy to be worthless, for in discussing genera and species he discusses Platonic theories, without rejecting them, at much greater length than Peripatetic ones, and following Ammonius’ Commentary on the Eisagoge41 appears not totally unsympathetic to Plato’s picture of the Demiurge (Timaeus 28A). It is likely that he was influenced in this by Pseudo-Dionysius, whose works he translated and whom he probably considered a Plato christianus.42 Thus the Platonic concept of a creator seems to have been acceptable to him, as long as the paradeigmata of the Timaeus could be interpreted in the manner of PseudoDionysius as the logoi or (biblical) proorismoi (‘pre-definings’) of God.43 The explicit reference to the Metaphysics is especially noteworthy in George’s prolegomenon, given that it is not mentioned here by Philoponus, nor by Ammonius or Simplicius. Among the five prolegomena falling within the same general pattern, there is a specific reference to the treatise only by Olympiodorus and David (Elias), and there is no other evidence to suggest that George knew either of these. Simplicius, Olympiodorus, David, and possibly Ammonius,44 but not Philoponus, cite in question four the quotation of Iliad 2.204 (‘the rule of many is not good; let the ruler be one’) with which Aristotle concluded Metaphysics Λ (1076a5). While it is not impossible that George knew Olympiodorus or David, if he did not know them he would have needed to know the Metaphysics to realise that the reason these words were used in the other Greek prolegomena was that they came from that treatise of Aristotle.45 It is thus very probable that the Metaphysics was known in Qenneshre,46 a conclusion consistent with Jacob of Edessa’s citation of passages from Metaphysics Δ in his Encheiridion.47 108

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

Whether or not one therefore chooses to characterise George’s response to these two questions as merely a translation of Philoponus, he did not deal with them thoughtlessly. In the final part of this chapter, I should like to explore the implications of this for one aspect of an issue which has been the focus of much of the work of Martin Tamcke, to whom this article was offered at its original publication on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.

Aristotelian philosophy among Christians and Muslims Aristotelian philosophy was first (as far as we know) introduced into Syriac literature by Sergius of Reshaina, physician and priest, who studied in Alexandria, and died in 536. Sergius’ main work on Aristotle was his commentary on the Categories, and we have no writing from his hand on anything in the Aristotelian curriculum beyond that. In it, however, it is clear that he intended to comment on the entire curriculum from the Categories to the Metaphysics,48 and while, as indicated earlier, he did not treat the ten introductory questions in the formal manner of the Greek commentators of his time, it is nevertheless evident that his conception both of the extent of the curriculum and of the reasons for studying Aristotelian philosophy was in basic agreement with his Alexandrian masters – with the proviso, as already noted, that he did not consider it preliminary to the study of Plato’s philosophy (as interpreted as a pagan theology by Proclus), but rather as preliminary to the study of the Christian Scriptures in the interpretation of (Proclus’ literary follower) Pseudo-Dionysius, whose works he translated into Syriac. Throughout the two centuries between Sergius (died 536) and George (died 724), there is evidence of continuing interest in Aristotelian philosophy in Syriacspeaking circles, but there is a widely held hypothesis which, in effect if not intention, assumes a radical disjunction in both the curriculum of philosophy and the reasons for its study between Sergius and subsequent Syriac writers on the subject, at any rate up to the time of the Abbasids. This hypothesis assumes that the late antique curriculum known from the Greek commentators (and indeed from Sergius) was studied only as far as Prior Analytics I,7 (i.e. a radically reduced logical curriculum, the ‘truncated Organon’, and nothing else), and that this was studied for its use in theological (i.e. mainly Christological) disputation between different Christian confessions.49 The basic grounds for the first of these two beliefs are the assumption that Syriac-speaking scholars studied only texts which had been translated into Syriac (rather than both Syriac and Greek texts), that the only texts translated were those which now happen to be extant in Syriac manuscripts, and that an assertion by al-Fārābī (died 950) to the effect that Christian bishops forbade the teaching of logic beyond the assertoric syllogisms (i.e. beyond Prior Analytics I,7) may be taken to represent correctly the study of logic among Syrians prior to his own reading of Aristotle with his (Syro-Arabic) teacher, even if the alleged episcopal origin of the restriction is false.50 The second belief, concerning the Syrians’ motive for the study of Aristotle, is pure supposition, based 109

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

presumably on the idea that Christological disputation was the principal cerebral activity of Syriac scholars during the period in question. George’s proemium to Aristotelian philosophy points to no radical disjunction between Sergius, or Philoponus, and subsequent Syriac writers on philosophy, but on the contrary to a basic continuity in their conception of both the range of the Aristotelian curriculum and their reason for studying it. Before pursuing this point further, however, something should be said about Syriac schools. Al-Fārābī’s imaginary narrative concerning the transfer of philosophy ‘from Alexandria to Baghdad’ postulated a single school of philosophy, that of Alexandria, which migrated by stages to Baghdad.51 Since the imaginary character of this account was demonstrated, it has been commonly assumed that Aristotelian philosophy, or at any rate a portion of it, was widely taught in Syriac schools in the period after Sergius.52 This may be correct, but there is no concrete evidence for it. There is, however, not direct evidence, but indirect evidence of overwhelming weight that Aristotelian philosophy was studied at one major school, that of the monastery of Qenneshre. The evidence in question is the point mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that the four major Syriac Aristotelians of the seventh century (Severus Sebokht, Athanasius of Balad, Jacob of Edessa, and George) were all associated at one time or another with this monastery. The fact that it was originally located in Greek territory (near Antioch) and remained well known as a centre of Greek studies after its transfer to Qenneshre is naturally entirely consistent with this. A problem with the hypothesis of the ‘truncated Organon’ in connection with pre-Abbasid Syriac Aristotelianism is the lack of any specific location where this curriculum is supposed to have been studied. By contrast, at the one school where we have genuinely good, albeit indirect, evidence for the study of Aristotle, it is clear that study, at least among its leading lights, involved far more than the truncated Organon. It is therefore entirely reasonable for us to assume that this was the school to which Syrians with a strong interest in philosophy or other elements of the classical Greek heritage were predominantly drawn.53 George was the last of the known Syriac Aristotelians connected with Qenneshre. He was therefore at a greater temporal remove from the school of Ammonius in Alexandria than any of the others. What is most striking, however, about his proemium is its complete adherence to the late antique model (with the slant shared by Philoponus and Sergius on the subject of the creator of the universe). Syriac philosophers have never won plaudits for originality (they are of course not alone in this), and the significance of the proemium might be challenged on the ground that its author was ‘merely translating Philoponus’. But this was no thoughtless translation; on the contrary, it was clearly deliberate. However low an opinion one might have of George’s originality as a philosopher, it is incredible to suppose that he mindlessly translated the late antique answers to the questions on the end (telos) of Aristotelian philosophy, and the means to the end, while in fact believing something quite different. There is no reason to consider that, because George was following a model when he wrote his answers to these questions, he did so without giving any thought to them, any more 110

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

than the Greek commentators who also followed the scheme, or later al-Fārābī (or pseudo-al-Fārābī).54 And his answer to that about the means to the end, as also his reference to the Metaphysics, shows that his interest extended beyond logic to other areas of the curriculum, and his knowledge to other treatises of Aristotle, in Greek if not in Syriac. George both modified, albeit not radically, what he read in Philoponus and left out some of it. We can be confident that what remained represented his own view. Because he thought that the end of Aristotelian philosophy was to know the one principal, cause, and creator of all, considered that this was demonstrated in the Metaphysics, and that the Metaphysics had to be approached, after dealing with logic, through physics and mathematics, it would have been quite pointless, in his view, to embark on the study of the Aristotelian curriculum with the intention of limiting it to the initial parts of the Organon.55 What we learn in this way about George is consistent with our information, limited as it is, about his Qenneshre predecessors. Although from the hand of Severus Sebokht we have a short treatise on the syllogisms of the Prior Analytics but not the Posterior Analytics, it is clear that he believed the purpose of the former was to prepare his readers for the study of the latter, and that logic was an instrument for the whole of philosophy, the culmination of which was ‘assimilation to God’. At the end of this treatise he wrote: The student should first know that this book of the Analytics is not for itself (law meṭṭul yāteh). On the contrary (’ellā), as the book of Categories, which teaches (us) about simple namings, (leads us up) to the Peri hermeneias, which (teaches us) about the first combination of simple namings, (which in turn) leads us up (masseq lan) to this book of the Analytics, so also this book of the Analytics, which teaches us about the construction together with the resolution (šrāyā) again of categorical syllogisms, leads us up to the use (ḥšaḥtā) of the logical treatise (pragmateia) of the book of the Apodeictics, which is the aim and fulfilment (nīšā w-šumlāyā) of the whole logical art, which (in turn) is the instrument (organon) of the whole of philosophy, which (in turn), according to a fine Platonic word or definition, is assimilation to God according to what is possible for man.56 In philosophy proper (according to the Alexandrian classification), as distinct from logic, its instrument, Severus is known particularly for his work in mathematics, especially astronomy.57 His pupil and confidant, Athanasius of Balad, produced Syriac versions of both the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and the Sophistical Refutations, and Jacob of Edessa one of the Categories.58 The latter’s knowledge of the Metaphysics appears in his Encheiridion,59 and his interest in physics (but not the physical treatises of Aristotle) in his unfinished Hexaemeron, which was completed by George.60 Also of significance is the fact that for Athanasius, Jacob, and George we have evidence of their interest in PseudoDionysius. From the letters of Timothy we have testimony to a translation of 111

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

the Dionysian corpus by Athanasius,61 and in Jacob’s Hexaemeron and George’s letters and exposition of the Jacobite liturgy, the influence of the Areopagite is evident.62 There is reason to suppose therefore that as for Sergius, so also for the Qenneshre Aristotelians, Pseudo-Dionysius’ reading of the Bible represented the completion (as did Proclus’ reading of Plato in the school of Ammonius) of the curriculum of Aristotelian philosophy. These observations are also consistent with the recent wider surveys and analyses of King, which show little or no evidence that syllogistic was of any importance in inter-confessional Christological debate, but that ‘the Neo-Platonist dream of reaching the heavens by way of philosophy might be expressed either in traditional Greek or in more Christian terms without much, if any, real change of meaning, not because the two are opposed, but precisely because a significant mainline stream within the Church viewed its pagan philosophical past as essential and valuable’.63 Certainly the Syriac Aristotelians of Qenneshre viewed the pagan philosophical past, particularly the Aristotelian component of it, as essential and valuable, and through the Dionysian corpus could accommodate much of the pagan Neoplatonic legacy within their Christian theology. A subsequent proemium in the manuscript (foll. 83r-94v), that to Prior Analytics Book I,64 confirms that what we learn from the proemium to the Categories concerning the theological ‘end’ of Aristotelian philosophy truly represents George’s view, despite its dependence on Philoponus. In this later proemium65 George explicitly names God ‘the cause of the universe’ (‘elltā d-kol), speaks about the divine gift of ‘true philosophy’, which gives ‘exact knowledge of the first cause’ (‘elltā qadmāytā), ‘even if some or almost all of those among the pagans were unable truly to preserve among themselves the accurate exemplars and inexpressible beauties of this gift’.66 The aim of God’s gift of true philosophy is that ‘the intellect might see the whole truth, and by the trinity that is in it [three syllogistic figures], it might see the Trinity which exists eternally in unity, that which is properly the Truth’.67 Although the gift of true philosophy is to be ascribed to God, no one should find fault with philosophy68 (as distinct from those who make wrong usage of it), or desist from that which is advantageous from (study of) words, names, thoughts, disputations of questions and answers and the ordered art of speech – things to be especially found and assembled from the treatises of Aristotle the philosopher more than all the others.69 In this proemium the blending (going back to Sergius) of the Neoplatonic goal of attaining to knowledge of the cause of the universe through philosophy with Christian faith in the triune creator God comes clearly into view. There is no hint here that philosophy was studied merely for the sake of inner-Christian Christological disputation, and it is hardly conceivable that in George’s mind true philosophy which gives knowledge of the First Cause and Trinity could be confined to logic, let alone the ‘truncated Organon’. There are some traditional polemical clichés directed against ‘pagan error’, but some of the pagans are said to be ‘not very badly placed with respect to the truth of the teaching of philosophy when they are compared to their fellows’.70 It is only with respect to the doctrine of the Trinity 112

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

that George’s account of true philosophy takes on a particular Christian hue, unacceptable to pagans or Muslims, and there is no reference here to Christology. As is well known, Pseudo-Dionysius’ position on the Christological controversies is obscure, but his Trinitarian stance is clear. One may wonder whether, if we had at our disposal a commentary from George on the Metaphysics, it would have contained an argument for the doctrine of the Trinity based on the threefold ‘intellect-thinking-thought’ of Metaphysics Λ 9, for this argument is prominent in the later Christian Baghdad Aristotelians, particularly Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and Ibn Zur‘a,71 and seems a much more obvious potential point of contact between the Aristotelian corpus and the doctrine than George’s on syllogistic figures. However, we do not have such a commentary from George. There is of course a huge increase in the number and range of attested Syriac commentaries and translations from the Abbasid period over those known from earlier times, but when we consider how few even in Arabic from the Abbasid period of those attested in Arabic documents72 have actually survived, let alone the complete loss of all those in Syriac attested in these same documents,73 it would hardly be surprising, if more Syriac Aristotelian works than are now known were indeed written in the earlier periods, that they too have not survived. The circumstances and conditions of the later Syriac communities were far less favourable to the ongoing transmission of philosophical and scientific texts in Syriac than those applying to Arabic or Greek texts.74 To emphasise this point, one may note that without the single imperfect manuscript from Dayr al-Suryan forming the basis of the present study, we would hardly have known anything of George’s work as an Aristotelian translator and commentator, for all other Syriac manuscripts of his works, including later ones from other locations, deal with different, mostly theological, matters.75 It is unlikely that Qenneshre alumni such as Athanasius and George who went on to become high dignitaries in the Syrian Orthodox church would have had the opportunity to devote the same time and effort to Aristotelian scholarship as that of the Baghdad scholars, and to this extent the point is no doubt valid that ‘the difference here is surely due to the fact that the former . . . worked without a supporting social, political, and scientific context that would demand such a task’.76 While we cannot tell how many Syriac translations and commentaries on the Aristotelian school corpus were made in pre-Abbasid times by those from Qenneshre (or elsewhere), it is clear that their motive for the study of that entire corpus was no different (apart from the Christianisation of the pagan Neoplatonic theology) from that of the Alexandrian philosophers of late antiquity. It is also clear that, however much of the corpus was rendered into Syriac, the bilingual (or latterly trilingual) Syriac elite could read it, along with its late antique commentators, in Greek. George’s death occurred only a few decades before the start of the Abbasid caliphate, during which it is generally thought that sustained Muslim interest in Greek philosophy first arose. As long as it is supposed that pre-Abbasid Syriac Christian interest in Aristotle was limited to the ‘truncated Organon’, and was motivated merely by inner-Christian disputation, it is not surprising that it can be 113

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

held to be of little relevance to the rise of Islamic philosophy. But if the range and motivation of earlier Syriac Aristotelian study were in fact quite different, its relevance to the early stages of Arabic philosophy needs to be assessed anew. Muslim Arabs evidently took up the study of Aristotelian philosophy because it interested them, not because they were somehow forced to do so against their inclinations by Syrians. But the fact that, close to the dawn of sustained Arabic interest in the subject, a Syrian such as George studied Aristotle in a manner consistent with that of the late antique Alexandrian school can hardly be dismissed as irrelevant to the rise and early development of Islamic philosophy. As some Muslims were eager to learn from Syrian physicians who for historical reasons had a head start over them in the field of Galenic medicine,77 it is likely that the same applied in Aristotelian philosophy. In the early Abbasid period the interest in Aristotelian scholarship previously evident at Qenneshre can be seen in the Syriac Aristotle translations of Theophilus of Edessa (died 785),78 the activities of Patriarch Timothy I (died 823),79 the scholia of Sylvanus of Qardu (probably late eighth or early ninth century),80 and subsequently the Greek-to-Syriac translations of Ḥunayn and Isḥāq81 and the Syriac-to-Arabic translations and (Arabic) commentaries of the Baghdad Aristotelians.82 Evidently relations between scholars of the two religions were generally very cordial, and Ḥunayn, if not perhaps the first, was certainly one of the most significant Christians in the Islamic world ‘to espouse the view that philosophy provides an intellectual space in which Christians and Muslims could enter a realm of common discourse about reason, ethics and public policy’.83 The common intellectual space provided by philosophy is particularly evident in the case of al-Fārābī, who studied Aristotle at the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians founded by the East Syrian Abū Bishr Mattā.84 The same chapter of Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ 9, which Christians used to argue for the Trinity, was employed by al-Fārābī in the exposition of Muslim tawḥīd (Unity).85 And it is from a work attributed (rightly or wrongly) to al-Fārābī86 that we have a version in Arabic of the ten introductory questions concerning Aristotelian philosophy, George’s Syriac version of which it has been the aim of this chapter to elucidate. I may thus conclude with a translation of the Arabic of question four, on the end of Aristotelian philosophy, which may be compared with those of Philoponus and George preceding:87 Four. The end pursued in the study of philosophy is the knowledge of the Creator Sublime, who is one, unmoved, the efficient cause of all things, and disposer to this world of his generosity, wisdom, and justice. In the works in which the Philosopher accomplishes this, there is assimilation to the Creator to the extent of the human faculty.88

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘The Prolegomena to Aristotelian Philosophy of George, Bishop of the Arabs’, in: Sidney H. Griffith und Sven Grebenstein (Hg.),

114

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Christsein in der islamischen Welt. Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2015) 141–63. © Otto Harrassowitz Gmbh & Co KG, Wiesbaden 2015, and republished by permission. Hugonnard-Roche (2018). John Bar Aphtonia’s own literary legacy seems to have been entirely in Greek. Cf. Baumstark (1922) 181; Childers (2011) 229. Brock (1993) provides the essential bibliographical information on these works. Brock (2004). A few manuscripts are still preserved at Dayr al-Suryan itself; cf. Brock and Van Rompay (2014). Cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, 144–6. Baumstark (1922) 246 n. 11, 251 n. 4; Brock (1993) 14; Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 41 n. 4. Wright (1872) 1163–4. Westerink (2003) xliii–lvi; Hadot (1989) 44–5. Furlani (1923) 310–16. To clarify: where I can see enough to make a probable restoration, either with reference to Philoponus or more generally to the sense, the restoration appears within square brackets. Where not enough is visible to allow a reasonable guess, there is a run of dots, even though by reference to Philoponus the sense of what George intended may be surmised. In these latter cases I have completed the sense from Philoponus in a note to the translation. The corresponding passage in Philoponus is in Cat. 5.15–8.27, tr. in Sorabji (2015) 43–6. Read? ‫ܕܪܓܐ‬ Philoponus: third point. Where must one begin the Aristotelian writings? Philoponus: Boethus of Sidon says it is necessary to begin from the physical treatise. Philoponus: seeing that it is most familiar and best known to us, and it is always necessary to begin from the most familiar and best known. Syriac bātar kyānyātā (‘after the natural things’) corresponding to Greek meta ta physika. Philoponus: and only presents the nature of the things. Philoponus: but often compressed and hedged by obscurity. Philoponus: he practised. Philoponus: the readers. This rather cryptic phrase following ‘division into chapters’ may be connected to an additional (seventh) point mentioned by Simplicius, in Cat. 8,12–13 and Philoponus, in Anal. priora 1.9–10, that one can also ask to which part of philosophy the book belongs. Cf. Hadot (1989) 138–9. Philoponus: to direct. Philoponus: the adulteration. Philoponus: to saphes. Philoponus: is hidden. Syriac mštbḥnyt’, Greek endoxa. Cf. Aristotle, Topics Α 1 100a19–20. Sic! Clearly an oversight for ‘utility’. Philoponos: utility. Cf. Aristotle, Topics Α 2 101a25–28. See the detailed commentary on this material, covering the prolegomena of all five (Ammonius, Philoponus, Simplicius, Olympiodorus, and David) in Hadot (1989). Hadot (1989) 108–9. Philoponus, in Cat. 5.34–6.16. It will be obvious from the comparison that George, if working from the Greek text of Philoponus, had at least a reasonably good knowledge of the language. The idea is sometimes put forth, e.g. in Gutas (2010) 15 and more generally (1998) 137–41, that the Qenneshre translations were ‘hopelessly inadequate’, on the basis of Ibn Suwār’s negative assessment of the lost translation of the Sophistical Refutations by Athanasius. It is unusual to accept the assessment of a translation, now

115

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

lost, by someone (i.e. Ibn Suwār) who was ignorant of the source language, and none of the extant Aristotelian translations of Athanasius (the Eisagoge), Jacob (Categories), or George (Categories to Prior Analytics) can fairly be characterised in this way. While the Sophistical Refutations is an exceptionally difficult text to render comprehensibly into another language, Ibn Suwār’s difficulty will have been more generally that Athanasius’ translations were designed to reflect the Greek as faithfully as possible, to be studied by a bilingual student or with the aid of a teacher familiar with the original. They were not composed in idiomatic Syriac or specifically designed to be readily comprehended by a monolingual Syriac reader. Cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, 150–1; Watt (2008–9) 756–7 n. 20; and King (2010a) 15 n. 58. It is not surprising that a monastery which migrated from the environs of Antioch under the leadership of someone (John Bar Aphtonia) whose literary production was seemingly only in Greek (cf. preceding n. 3) maintained a tradition of study in that language. Ḥunayn’s criticism of Sergius’ (mostly lost) translations of Galen was not about his knowledge of Greek in general (which was clearly excellent), but about his (early) options for the translation of the medical terminology – the options of a pioneer more than three centuries earlier than Ḥunayn himself. Cf. Brock (1991) 150–6; Bhayro (2005), (2017); Fiori (2011) 180–8, and Chapter 7 lin this volume, 151 n. 75. Cf. Aristotle, Physics Ε, but with the inclusion, not exclusion, of substance. The reading of Chaldean Oracles frg.176, ed. des Places 108 (‘[not] overstepping the threshold’), was used by Philoponus (and others) to stress the need to go through each stage of the curriculum. George, who did not reproduce this passage, probably did not understand the allusion. Proclus, in Primum Euclidis 21.20–1. Hadot (1989) 104–5 notes that it is this passage, not Plotinus, Enneads 1.3.3, which is the direct or indirect source of Philoponus’ citation. Philoponus, in Cat. 5.35. Hadot (1989) 103, 179. Verrycken (1990) 215–26. The commentary on the Categories was an early work, Contra Proclum, Contra Aristotelem, and De opificio mundi all later. Cf. Sorabji (2010) 78–81. Verrycken (1990) 225–6 thinks of Ammonius’ Aristotelian God as a reaction against Christianity, and while this may be right, it could hardly have been viewed in this way by Philoponus. Cf. King (2010b) 175–8. On Sergius’ Categories commentary, see Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 165–231; and Chapter 4 in this volume. Ammonius, in Isag. 41.10–45.2. The phrase was first used in this context, I believe, by Bettiolo (2005) 98. See Chapter 4 in this volume, 78–9, 89–91. On the Dionysian proorismoi, cf. (the cognate verb in) Romans 8,30 and Ephesians 1,5. Cf. Hadot (1989) 98–100. For Ammonius, the mention was relegated by the editor to the apparatus: in Cat. 6.16; but cf. Hadot (1989) 98–9 n. 3. Even if George did know Olympiodorus or David, one could still ask why he would not have read the Metaphysics, given that he believed it to be the goal of Aristotelian philosophy. In question five, Philoponus’ discussion of movement and the unmoved mover evidently relates to (Physics Θ and) Metaphysics Λ 6–10, but George could not have known that without knowing the treatises themselves. Cf. in more detail Watt (2017) 187–8. Furlani (1921). Cf. Chapter 4 in this volume, 76, Watt (2008–9) 765–7. Cf. e.g. Gutas (2010) 14–15. The thesis, if intended to characterise all study of Aristotle in Syriac, is untenable. It does, however, have an element of truth to it, namely that some Syrians, and others,

116

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

were probably content merely with the ‘truncated Organon’, at any rate in the area of logic. On the whole issue, cf. Watt (2008–9), (2015) 13–14 n. 22, and on the dubious relevance of late Syriac manuscripts in contrast to those coming from Dayr al-Suryan, see Chapter 3 in this volume, 55–7 and Chapter 7 in this volume, 149–50. Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa II, 134–5, tr. Meyerhof (1930) 394, 405. Strohmaier (1987) 388 (‘. . . da überall in der syrischen Christenheit der Unterricht auch in weltlichen Fächern gepflegt wurde . . .’). Cf. Chapter 3 in this volume, 55; Hugonnard-Roche (2018). See the text cited later, at the end. The content of this manuscript of George, in which his translations appear between his introductions and his commentaries, may be worth noting here. Approximately thirty-three folios are devoted to the introduction and commentary on the Categories, nine to the introduction to the De interpretatione, fifty-eight to the introduction and commentary on Prior Analytics I, and twenty-one to the introduction and commentary on Prior Analytics II; cf. Wright (1872) 1163–4. Whatever may be the reason for the absence of a commentary on the De interpretatione, it is clear that George’s thinking was not focused on the ‘truncated Organon’. MSS. BL Add. 14660, foll. 53v-54r and Add. 17156, fol. 5v. Cf. the similar passage at the beginning of the treatise concerning the relation of the Prior and Posterior Analytics quoted in Wright (1872) 1160, noted and translated in Miller (1993) 312 and Watt (2008–9) 768 n. 60. In the light of what we now know about the Qenneshre Aristotelians (Severus, Athanasius, Jacob, and George), as also of Sergius, it is not possible to maintain the idea (derived from al-Fārābī and the evidence of the limited number of texts transmitted in predominantly late Syriac manuscripts) that no significant group of pre-Abbasid (Graeco-)Syrians had any interest in the Aristotelian corpus beyond the truncated Organon ending at Prior Analytics I,7. That the Posterior Analytics/Apodeictics was considered the aim and fulfilment of the logical art does not mean that the remaining books of the (six- or eight-volume) Organon were not read, but only that they were considered merely useful supplementary material, not part of the essential core. Villey (2014), (2015). Cf. preceding n. 4. Furlani (1921). Wilks (2008). On the reasons for the neglect of Aristotle’s physical treatises by preAbbasid Syrians, cf. Chapter 8 in this volume, 171–5, and Watt (2017) 181–7. Timothy ep. 43, ed. Heimgartner 68, tr. Heimgartner 52; cf. Brock (1999) 237, 244. For Jacob, see Greatrex (Wilks) (2004) 39–42. For George, see e.g. his expositions of the chrism and the sacraments, and a letter to John the Stylite, tr. Ryssel (1894) 9–43, 75–7 (comments thereon at 152–66, 191–2). Daiber (2012) 47 notes the ‘Neoplatonic tinge’ in George’s treatise ‘On Souls, Spirits and Intellects’, tr. Ryssel (1894) 142–4. No doubt it owed much to his reading of Pseudo-Dionysius, and possibly Evagrius. King (2013) and (215) 9 (for the citation). The text is unedited. Furlani (1939–40) provides only selected portions in Syriac and in his ‘versione greco-italiana’. See Miller (1993). Miller (1993) 303, 312; Add. 14659, fol. 83v-84r. Miller (1993) 314–15; Add. 14659, fol. 94r. As Miller (1993) 318–19 suggests, this remark is likely to be directed against antiphilosophical Christians, probably monks. Miller (1993) 314; Add. 14659, fol. 84r-84v. Miller (1993) 313; Add. 14659, fol. 84r. As Miller notes, this no doubt refers to the philosophers (or at least some of them, Aristotle in particular) vis-à-vis the rest of the pagan populace.

117

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

71 Platti (1983) 109–14; Pines (1961) 157; Endress (2012) 321, 332. The possibility of such an application of this chapter of the Metaphysics is already evident as early as Themistius’ commentary; cf. Brague (1999) 113–14. However, the Qenneshre Aristotelians probably did not go so far as the Baghdad Aristotelians in the conflation of the Christian God and the Aristotelian Mind. A letter of Jacob of Edessa (MS. BL Add. 12172, fol. 65r-71r) distinguishes three separate ‘creators’, namely God, Nature, and Mind (hawnā), the first creative as it wills, the latter two according to their capacity. Cf. Wright (1872) 592. 72 Principally in the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, the ‘Paris Organon’ (MS. BNF arabe 2346), and the Leiden Physics (MS. Leiden Warner 583). 73 To which may be added, for medicine, the loss of almost all the Syriac translations of Galen mentioned in Ḥunayn’s Risāla, the Syriac original of which is also lost. 74 Brock (2004); cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, 144–6. 75 The manuscripts are listed by Baumstark (1922) 257–8. The only other hints we would have received of George’s interest in Aristotle are some passages from his letters to John the Stylite. See the translations in Ryssel (1894) 64–7, 72–3, with his comments 183–5 and 190. 76 Gutas (1998) 22. If there was no scientific context that would demand such a task, that is largely due to the fact that many ‘elite’ Syrians who wished to study Aristotle will have had the ability to read him in Greek, a point made for medicine and the writings of Galen by Strohmaier (1991) 167. By the ninth century, that ability was in steep decline, except among a few specialists such as Ḥunayn. 77 Cf. Strohmaier (1991) 168. 78 Brock (1993) 4–5; Watt (2008–9) 756–7. 79 The hypothesis of Tarán and Gutas (2012) 86–7 that Timothy sought texts of Aristotle merely as Vorlagen for Arabic versions is not credible; cf. Chapter 3 in this volume, 58 n. 74. On the specific case of the commission of al-Mahdī to Timothy for a translation of the Topics, cf. Watt (2004) 17–19. 80 Sylvanus of Qardu, ed. Hespel 34–46, tr. Hespel 29–39. Cf. King (2015) 22–4. 81 Contrary to what is often supposed, Ḥunayn’s Syriac Galen translations were not made for the purpose of further translation into Arabic, but to be read in Syriac, by Syrian physicians. Similarly there is no reason not to assume for his Syriac philosophical translations that they were to be read in Syriac, by Syrians with an interest in philosophy. Cf. Chapter 6 in this volume. 82 Among the Baghdad Aristotelians, al-Marwazī is reported to have written about logic and other subjects only in Syriac: Fihrist 263.15–17, tr. Dodge (1970) 629. 83 Griffith (2007) 98. 84 Cf. Rudolph (2012) 370–1. 85 al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State I.1.6, ed. and tr. Walzer 70 and 71 (commentary 343). 86 Cf. Rudolph (2012) 381. 87 al-Fārābī, On What Should Precede the Study of (Aristotle’s) Philosophy, ed. and tr. Schmölders 8.12–16 and 22; ed. and tr. Dieterici 53.13–22 and 88–9. 88 For ‘assimilation to God according to what is possible for man’ in Syriac, cf. the text of Severus cited earlier (111 n. 56). The phrase was well known as one of the definitions of philosophy; cf. Westerink (2003) xlix.

References Ammonius, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1895). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 4. Ammonius, in Isag.: A. Busse (ed.), In Porphyrii Isagogen commentarius (Berlin: Reimer, 1891). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, IV, 3.

118

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

Baumstark (1922): A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: Marcus und Webers). Bettiolo (2005): P. Bettiolo, ‘Scuole e ambiente intellettuali nelle chiese di Siria’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale (Turin: Einaudi) 48–100. Bhayro (2005): ‘Syriac Medical Terminology: Sergius and Galen’s Pharmacopia’, Aramaic Studies 3, 147–65. Bhayro (2017): ‘Galen in Syriac: Rethinking Old Assumptions’, Aramaic Studies 15, 132–54. Brague (1999): R. Brague, Thémistius: Paraphrase de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, livre lambda (Paris: Vrin). Brock (1991): S.P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Background to Ḥunayn’s Translation Techniques’, Aram 3, 139–62. Brock (1993): S.P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Commentary Tradition’, in: C. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and Medieval Latin Traditions (London: Warburg Institute) 3–18. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9, 233–46. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Without Mushē of Nisibis, Where Would We Be?’, in: R. Ebied and H. Teule (eds.), Symposium Syriacum VIII (Leuven: Peeters) 15–24. Brock and van Rompay (2014): S.P. Brock and L. Van Rompay, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts and Fragments in the Library of Deir al-Surian, Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt) (Leuven: Peeters). Chaldean Oracles: E. des Places (ed. and tr.), Oracles chaldaïques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971). Childers (2011): J.W. Childers, ‘John Bar Aphtonia’, in: S.P. Brock et al. (eds.), Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press) 229. Daiber (2012): H. Daiber, ‘Die syrische Tradition in frühislamischer Zeit‘, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 40–54. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State: R. Walzer (ed. and tr.), Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). al-Fārābī, On What Should Precede the Study of (Aristotle’s) Philosophy: A. Schmölders (ed. and tr.), Documenta philosophiae Arabum (Bonn: E. Weber, 1836) 3–10, 17–25; ed. and tr. F. Dieterici, Alfārābī’s philosophische Abhandlungen (Leiden: Brill, 1890–92) 49–55, 82–91. Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2011): E. Fiori, ‘Sergius of Reshaina and Pseudo-Dionysius: A Dialectical Fidelity’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 179–94. Furlani (1921): G. Furlani, ‘Di alcuni passi della Metafisica di Aristotele presso Giacomo d’Edessa’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 5, 268–73. Furlani (1923): G. Furlani, ‘La versione e il commento di Giorgio delle Nazioni all’ Organo Aristotelico’, Studi italieni di filologia classica 3, 305–33.

119

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

Furlani (1939–40): G. Furlani, ‘Il proemio di Giorgio delle Nazioni al primo libro dei Primi Analitici di Aristotele’, Rivista degli studi orientali 18, 116–30. Greatrex (Wilks) (2004): M. Greatrex (Wilks), ‘The Angelology in the Hexaemeron of Jacob of Edessa’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 33–46. Griffith (2007): S.H. Griffith, ‘From Patriarch Timothy I to Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq: Philosophy and Christian Apology in Abbasid times’, in: M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages: Christlich-muslimische Gespräche im Mittelalter (Beirut: Orient-Institut and Würzburg: Ergon) 75–98. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Gutas (2010): D. Gutas, ‘Origins in Baghdad’, in: R. Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) I, 11–25. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Hugonnard-Roche (2004): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Hugonnard-Roche (2018): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Die Schule von Keneschre’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §197. Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed. and tr.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; ed. and tr. J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, On his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Ibn Abī Uṣaybi’a: A. Müller (ed.), ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’, I–II (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Wahbīyah, 1882). King (2010a): D. King, The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (Leiden: Brill). King (2010b): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91. King (2013): D. King, ‘Why Were the Syrians Interested in Greek Philosophy?’, in: P. Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 61–82. King (2015): D. King, ‘Logic in the Service of Ancient Eastern Christianity: An Exploration of Motives’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 97, 1–33. Meyerhof (1930): M. Meyerhof, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern’, Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse 23, 389–429. Miller (1993): D. Miller, ‘George, Bishop of the Arab Tribes, on True Philosophy’, Aram 5, 303–20. Philoponus, in Anal. Priora: M. Wallies (ed.), In Aristotelis Analytica Priora commentaria (Berlin: Reimer, 1905). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XIII, 2. Philoponus, in Cat.: A. Busse (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1898). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XIII, 1. Pines (1961): S. Pines, ‘La loi naturelle et la société: la doctrine politico-théologique d’Ibn Zur’a’, in: U. Heyd (ed.), Studies in Islamic History and Civilisation (Jerusalem: Hebrew University) 154–90. Platti (1983): E. Platti, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Théologien chrétien et philosophe arabe (Leuven: Departement Oriëntalistiek). Proclus, in Primum Euclidis: G. Friedlein (ed.), Procli . . . in Primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii (Leipzig: Teubner, 1873).

120

ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE

Rudolph (2012): U. Rudolph, ‘Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 363–457. Ryssel (1894): V. Ryssel, Georgs des Araberbischofs Gedichte und Briefe (Leipzig: S. Hirzel). Simplicius, in Cat.: C. Kalbfleisch (ed.), In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1907). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, VIII. Sorabji (2010): R. Sorabji, ‘John Philoponus’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2nd edition 2010) 41–81. Sorabji (2015): R. Sorabji (ed.), with R. Sirkel, M. Tweedale, J. Harris, and D. King (trs.), Philoponus: On Aristotle Categories 1–5, and a Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts (London: Bloomsbury) 3–34. Strohmaier (1987): G. Strohmaier, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: eine fiktive Schultradition’, in: J. Wiesner (ed.), Aristoteles, Werk und Wirkung: Paul Moraux gewidmet II (Berlin: De Gruyter) 380–9. Strohmaier (1991): G. Strohmaier, ‘Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq: An Arab Scholar Translating into Syriac’, Aram 3, 163–70. Sylvanus of Qardu: R. Hespel (ed. and tr.), Théodore bar Koni, Livre des scolies (recension d’Urmiah). Les collections annexeés par Sylvain de Qardu (Lovanii: Peeters, 1984). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 464, 465. Tarán and Gutas (2012): L. Tarán and D. Gutas, Aristotle: Poetics (Leiden: Brill). Timothy, epp. 42–58: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Verrycken (1990): K. Verrycken, ‘The Metaphysics of Ammonius Son of Hermeias’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth) 199–231. Villey (2014): É. Villey, ‘Qennešre et l’astronomie aux VIe et VIIe siècles’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 149–90. Villey (2015): É. Villey, ‘Ammonius d’Alexandrie et le traité sur l’astrolobe de Sévère Sebokht’, Studia graeco-arabica 5, 105–28. Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Translators and Greek Philosophy in Early Abbasid Iraq’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 15–26; reprinted in ‘Syriac Translators and Greek Philosophy in Early Abbasid Iraq’, Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) chapter XIII. Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2015): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Aristotelian Tradition and the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Philosophers’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 7–43. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Westerink (2003): L.G. Westerink, Prolégomènes à la philosophie de Platon (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). Wilks (2008): M. Wilks, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s Use of Greek Philosophy in His Hexaemeron’, in: B. ter Haar Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of His Day (Leiden: Brill) 223–38. Wright (1872): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, Part III (London: British Museum).

121

6 W H Y D I D Ḥ U N AY N , T H E M A S T E R T R A N S L AT O R I N T O A R A B I C , M A K E T R A N S L AT I O N S I N T O SYRIAC? ON THE PURPOSE OF T H E S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E 1 Ḥunayn’s medical translations In a well-known anecdote from around the middle of ninth century Baghdad, al-Ǧāḥiẓ tells of an Arab doctor who, explaining why he has no patients, complains that his name is Asad, not Ṣalībā, Yūḥannā, or Bīrā; that he wears a white cotton garment, not a black silk one; and that his speech is pure Arabic, not that of the people of Gundishapur.2 This anecdote provides a simple answer to the question which forms the title of this chapter. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, the master translator into Arabic, translated more Greek medical works into Syriac than Arabic because the leading doctors were predominantly Syrians, mostly hailing from Gundishapur, and Syriac translations were what they wanted. The eminence of the Syrian doctors in early Abbasid Baghdad is well recognised, as is also that the patrons of Ḥunayn for whom he made his numerous Syriac translations were practising doctors, whereas the patrons of the Arabic translations made by the master or his associates were mostly cultivated wealthy officials or courtiers or, as with the Banū Mūsā, scholars of other disciplines. Ḥunayn’s Syriac translations of Greek medicine were not, as sometimes supposed, merely ‘intermediate’ en route to the Arabic. On the contrary, they were made to be read in Syriac by the people who best appreciated their content, and the Arabic translations were by no means always – and never by Ḥunayn – made from the (usually) preceding Syriac. Ḥunayn and his associates also occupy, however, an important place in the history of Greek philosophy in the Middle East, and what is known about their medical translations may have implications for our understanding of their parallel endeavours in the field of philosophy which have not yet been fully explored. In the most important source of our information on the medical translations, the Risāla to ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā,3 Ḥunayn lists (from a total of a hundred and twenty-nine treatises correctly or incorrectly ascribed to Galen) ninety-six which he has

123

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

translated into Syriac and thirty-five into Arabic.4 Fifty-three of these Syriac versions were written for six patrons known to have been practising physicians,5 seven for his son Isḥāq (also a physician), and four more for three others.6 In addition to the eighteen he commissioned from Ḥunayn, the celebrated physician Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh also commissioned three Syriac translations from Ḥubaysh, and another leading physician, Bakhtīshū’ ibn Jibrīl, commissioned two from Isḥāq.7 Two further Syriac translations are mentioned from the hand of Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalt.8 Among thirty-five Arabic translations of Ḥunayn together with thirty-seven of Ḥubaysh, eighteen of ‘Īsā ibn Yaḥyā, nine of Isḥāq, eight of Stephanus, and two of Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalt, we find four significant patrons: Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā (forty-seven commissions), Aḥmad ibn Mūsā (seventeen), ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā (six), and Isḥāq ibn Sulaymān (four),9 none of whom is known to have been a physician, with the exception of Isḥāq ibn Sulaymān.10 With the single exception of ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā, there is thus no overlap between the Syriac and Arabic patrons, or with the exception of the Jewish Isḥāq ibn Sulaymān, their professions. As is well known, Ḥunayn also mentions earlier Syriac translators: Sergius of Reshaina (26), Job/ Ayyūb of Edessa (37), Sahdā (nos. 3–5), Theophilus of Edessa (no. 84), Thomas of Edessa (no. 118), Josef the priest (no. 53), and Manṣūr the Sabian (no. 119).11 In addition to the significant difference of patrons, Ḥunayn’s comments in some individual cases clearly show that the Syriac versions were not designed as intermediaries for the Arabic. Thus in four cases a Syriac version was commissioned by Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh even though an Arabic version already existed.12 While in a small minority of cases Ḥunayn indicates that an Arabic version was derived from a Syriac (e.g. no. 16), in the vast majority he gives no such indication.13 In fact the reverse could occur, as it did with the three Syriac versions of Ḥubaysh among the four mentioned earlier made for Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, and Ḥunayn himself on several occasions made a Syriac version even after he or someone else had made one in Arabic.14 It is clear therefore that the Syriac versions were, at least in most cases, produced in response to, and in support of, a vibrant Syriac medical culture, and not because it was easier (given the long history of Graeco-Syriac translations) to produce an Arabic version by way of a Syriac intermediary, or with its aid, than by starting afresh from the Greek.15 One can reasonably assume that the same applies to the thirty-two Syriac versions for which no patron is mentioned. Ḥunayn’s references in the Risāla to his son Isḥāq are of special interest, as Isḥāq is the only translator mentioned here (apart from the briefest of references to Yaḥyā ibn al-Biṭrīq, Thābit ibn Qurra, and Shamlī) in addition to Ḥunayn himself, who, to the best of our knowledge, played a significant role in the translations of Aristotle. Two Syriac translations (nos. 2 and 77) are attributed to him, both made for Bakhtīshū’; his father also made an Arabic version of the former of these two treatises. In the case of the nine Arabic versions with which Isḥāq is credited (nos. 41, 48, 61, 84, 104, 113, 115, 122, 127), all were translated into Syriac by Ḥunayn,16 but only one of them (no. 113) is said to have been translated for Isḥāq (who made the Arabic translation for ‘Abdallāh ibn Isḥāq). The other six Syriac 124

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

translations of Ḥunayn said to have been made for Isḥāq were translated into Arabic by Ḥunayn himself (nos. 17, 50, 68, 103) or Ḥubaysh (nos. 51, 74).17 It is clear therefore that Syriac was still vibrant as a language of medical science in Ḥunayn’s time. As many learned people, including Muslims such as Yūsuf ibn Ibrāhīm, attended the classes of Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, where lectures were presumably given in Syriac using the Galen translations of Sergius of Reshaina, and perhaps also some Greek works of Galen not yet translated, not only Christian Syrians but also Muslims who wished to take his instruction presumably knew some Syriac.18 Many of the medical elite in Baghdad had come from Gundishapur, a city which, having been made the capital of Khuzistan and greatly expanded by Shapur I using prisoners of war from Roman imperial lands, had long retained not only special privileges within the East Syrian church but also a ‘Western’ (i.e. Greek) cultural and linguistic orientation, and the liturgy was held there in Greek and Syriac.19 The Syrian medical elite in Ḥunayn’s time clearly preferred Syriac to Greek texts, but it was probably only shortly before this that most of them had begun to feel uneasy with, or fail to understand, their medical texts in Greek. Already in the following century Ḥunayn’s work in Syriac was disappearing from sight and being overshadowed by that in Arabic. Ibn al-Nadīm, noting from the Risāla that many things Ḥubaysh, ‘Īsā, and others had translated into Arabic were now being attributed to Ḥunayn, recognised that most of what Ḥunayn translated was into Syriac, although he may have corrected and examined the Arabic of other people’s translations.20 Scarcely anything of Ḥunayn’s Syriac translations has survived,21 and neither of course has the Syriac prototype of the Risāla itself. Similarly, hardly any independent medical treatises by Ḥunayn or any of the Syrian physicians who commissioned his translations are extant or known to us in Syriac;22 we know of only works in Arabic, even then frequently only through bibliographers or citations.23 Furthermore, other independent medical works written earlier than, or approximately contemporary with, Ḥunayn which we do know to have been written in Syriac have left traces only in Arabic.24 It seems very unlikely that Ḥunayn or any of the physicians who commissioned his Syriac versions of Galen wrote almost exclusively in Arabic on medical subjects,25 yet since Arabic texts, citations, and testimonies constitute most of the extant material, that is how it now appears to our eyes. In his Syriac Chronicle Bar Hebraeus writes that apart from translations into Syriac and Arabic, twenty-five books of Ḥunayn are extant, but unfortunately he gives no information on their titles or language.26 One reason why neither independent Syriac works in medicine nor Syriac versions of Greek medical writers have survived is that Arabic replaced Syriac as the main language of medicine and science even among Syrians.27 The fact that Arabic subsequently assumed this dominant role was in no small part made possible by Ḥunayn himself, who, as is well known, developed Arabic nomenclature and syntax to make it a fit instrument for dealing with complicated logical and scientific matters.28 In this sense therefore the Syriac material was indeed ‘intermediate’ and ‘transitory’. It was not designed to be so, but became such as a result of ongoing historical

125

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

change. The loss of Syriac material is not, however, confined to the medical area, but also extends to the philosophical and theological.29

Ḥunayn’s Aristotelian translations Nothing corresponding to the Risāla on Galen translations has come down to us on the translations of Aristotle. As a result we have no information about those who commissioned them or for whom they were designed. We do, however, from more than a century after the Risāla, have the evidence of the Fihrist and two extant Arabic manuscripts, the Paris Organon (P) and the Leiden Physics (L),30 on the translations known to Ibn al-Nadīm and to members of the school of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Of the thirteen to fifteen treatises forming the late antique Alexandrian curriculum of Aristotelian philosophy which reappears to our view in the translations and studies of the Baghdad school of Abū Bishr Mattā and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī,31 Ḥunayn probably translated into Syriac eight treatises in whole or in part32 (Categories,33 De interpretatione,34 Prior and Posterior Analytics in part,35 Physics Book Two,36 De gen. et corr.,37 De anima,38 and Metaphysics Lambda)39 and corrected or revised the Arabic of two (Prior Analytics and De caelo).40 Isḥāq completed his father’s partial Syriac translations of the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and made a Syriac version of the Topics,41 and possibly up to nine Arabic versions in whole or in part, individually or in association with another translator (Categories, De interpretatione, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, Physics, De gen. et corr., De anima, Metaphysics, Ethics).42 The other Arabic translators who worked with Ḥunayn and Isḥāq were Taḏārī, al-Dimashqī, Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abdallāh, Ibn Bakūsh, and possibly Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalt (on the Physics). The profile of Ḥunayn’s translations of Aristotle is therefore entirely consistent with that of the Galen. His own versions were predominantly into Syriac, while Isḥāq made a few into Syriac, but a greater number into Arabic. The other translators known to us belonging to the group all made Arabic translations of Aristotle, as was also the case with the translations of Galen recorded in the Risāla (although there we also hear, as mentioned earlier, of a small number of Syriac translations made by Ḥubaysh [from the Arabic] and Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalt). Only very occasionally in the sources is it explicitly stated that an Arabic translation of Aristotle from a member of Ḥunayn’s circle is derived from Syriac43 (although some modern studies have come to this conclusion)44 – unlike the explicit mention of Arabic translations made from Syriac by Mattā (Posterior Analytics and Poetics)45 and Yaḥyā (Topics, Sophistical Refutations, and Physics).46 That the Syriac translations of Ḥunayn’s group were made primarily to serve as a base for the Arabic is also rendered unlikely by the fact that there is no Arabic translation known by them of the Posterior Analytics, the capstone of the Alexandrian Organon; only Syriac is mentioned from the hands of Ḥunayn and Isḥāq, and Isḥāq’s complete Syriac version was only later translated into Arabic by Mattā.47 If, as Ḥunayn’s Risāla shows, the Syriac Galen translations made by him and his circle were made to be read in Syriac by Syriac physicians, it is very probable 126

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

that their Syriac translations of Aristotle were similarly made to be read in Syriac by Syriac philosophers, and not made primarily for the purpose of further translation into Arabic, unless there are compelling reasons to suppose otherwise. Nevertheless, the key question to arise from such an assumption is clearly this: was there a Syriac readership for translations of Aristotle in Ḥunayn’s time, as there clearly was for translations of Galen? This can confidently be answered in the affirmative, because both shortly before and shortly after the lifetime of Ḥunayn (died 873) we have clear evidence of an interest in Aristotle in East Syrian circles in Baghdad. The Patriarch Timothy I (died 823), who studied both Greek and Arabic but considered Syriac his principal language, puzzled over passages in the Posterior Analytics and Topics in Greek and in the Syriac translations of Athanasius of Balad, and sought information on commentaries or scholia in either Syriac or Greek on the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics and on commentaries on the ‘Logic’ (Organon?) by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Sergius, Olympiodorus, and Stephanus.48 After Ḥunayn, in the early tenth century, the East Syrian Abū Bishr Mattā (died 940) was the head and probable founder of the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians, and a prolific Aristotelian commentator and translator from Syriac to Arabic. From the generation prior to Mattā, al-Fārābī in his Appearance of Philosophy in Islam mentions the names of four Aristotelian philosophers, all East Syrians: Bishop Isrā’īl and Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān, both of whom occupied themselves with religious matters, although Yūḥannā had been al-Fārābī’s own teacher in logic, al-Marwazī, who taught Mattā, and Quwairā.49 According to the Fihrist both Quwairā and al-Marwazī were teachers of Mattā,50 and ‘everything that (al-Marwazī) wrote about logic and other things was in the Syriac tongue’, to which it adds that ‘he was also a well-known physician in Baghdad’.51 All this is consistent with what al-Fārābī states elsewhere: ‘Everything comprised by this science [the science, the purpose of which is supreme happiness and the final perfection to be achieved by man] was expounded in the Greek language, later in Syriac, and finally in Arabic’.52 In another respect also the Galen and Aristotle translations bear a striking similarity to each other. Galenic medicine and Aristotelian philosophy were the two fields of Greek scholarship which ever since the sixth century, beginning in the work of Sergius of Reshaina, had attracted the Syrians.53 The earlier Syriac translations of Galen, predominantly those of Sergius and Job/Ayyūb of Edessa, were well known to Ḥunayn, and he revised and (according to his own estimation) improved many of them.54 Since the earlier Syriac translations of treatises of the six-part Organon (i.e. Categories to Sophistical Refutations) by Athanasius of Balad, Jacob of Edessa, and Theophilus of Edessa were known in Baghdad (but mostly not to the Fihrist),55 it is likely that Ḥunayn also knew them and considered that the translations he and Isḥāq made similarly constituted an improvement upon them. We cannot be sure whether the translations made in Ḥunayn’s group of the physical treatises and the Metaphysics, the remainder of the old Alexandrian curriculum which reappears in the school of Mattā, were the first to be produced in Syriac, or were preceded by earlier translations of which we have no record. It 127

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

could be unwise to rule out the latter possibility, since it is only by a thin thread – brief references in a letter of Timothy and some notes in P, the single extant Arabic manuscript of the Organon – that we know of the Syriac translations of four treatises of the Organon by Athanasius of Balad. Nevertheless there are good reasons to believe that on account of their disagreement with his cosmological views, Aristotle’s physical treatises were intentionally put aside by pre-Abbasid Syrians.56 It is clear, however, that as a result of the combined efforts of Ḥunayn and Isḥāq, Syrians had at their disposal not only a new Syriac version of the six-volume Organon (or five of the treatises if there was no version by Isḥāq of the Sophistical Refutations),57 but also much of the remainder of the late antique Alexandrian Aristotle curriculum which was taught, and where he found it necessary translated into Arabic, by Abū Bishr Mattā. Of that remainder, older versions of the Rhetoric and Poetics probably already existed in Syriac, but the Poetics, if not both of them, may have been freshly rendered into Syriac by Isḥāq.58 Of the five to seven others, the Fihrist records that Ḥunayn made full Syriac versions of the De gen. et corr.59 and De anima, and partial versions of the Physics (Book Two, or the whole?)60 and Metaphysics (Book Lambda). If the Arabic version by Ibn al-Biṭrīq of the Meteorologica was derived from Syriac,61 and a Syriac version was at the base of the same translator’s Arabic De caelo, a version which can also be inferred from the Fihrist on account of Mattā’s (Syriac-to-)Arabic translation, no treatise in the core Alexandrian curriculum (excepting possibly on ethics) was unrepresented in Syriac by the time of Mattā.62 On the Arabic side, somewhat less, but still a great part, of the Alexandrian curriculum existed in translations from Ḥunayn’s school. In the Organon the significant absences are those of the Posterior Analytics and the Poetics, both translated by Mattā. Translations of the Rhetoric by Isḥāq and Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abdallāh are tentatively mentioned by the Fihrist,63 and Ḥunayn’s revision of Ibn al-Biṭrīq’s translation of the De caelo has already been noted. Ibn al-Biṭrīq’s translation of the Meteorologica and Ḥunayn’s compendium are both extant,64 neither of which is mentioned in the Fihrist. Isḥāq translated a Book of Ethics, and a commentary on it by Themistius in Isḥāq’s handwriting existed in Syriac.65

The circles of Ḥunayn and al-Kindī The profile of both Syriac and Arabic Aristotle translations from this circle therefore differs markedly from that of the contemporary circle of al-Kindī. From the latter we know of translations within the core Alexandrian curriculum from Ibn al-Biṭrīq, Ibn Nāʻima, and Usṭāth (Prior Analytics,66 Sophistical Refutations, Physics, De caelo, Meteorologica, and Metaphysics),67 and outside of it the Liber animalium (= De gen. anim. and De part. anim.) and Parva naturalia.68 As is well known, al-Kindī’s interests were directed more towards the Neoplatonic theology and metaphysics of Plotinus and Proclus than to the Alexandrian curriculum based on the Organon.69 Even though for Ḥunayn’s circle there is some evidence 128

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

of translations beyond the strict regime of the Aristotelian tradition,70 and also to some spuria within the corpus itself outside the core autoprosōpa, which were closer to the physical and biological interests of al-Kindī,71 and although from al-Kindī’s circle we also have evidence of translations of Aristotelian commentators (to be discussed further later), the difference in the profile of translation activities is evident and entirely consistent with the assumption that while Ḥunayn and his associates did not adhere so strictly to the Alexandrian Aristotelian curriculum as later Mattā’s school appears to have done, they – or their Syriac patrons – belong to a tradition of Graeco-Syriac scholars and readers of Aristotle reaching back through Timothy to those of the Umayyad and late antique eras. Through the work of Ḥunayn and his associates this tradition developed a second arm in Arabic, which was strengthened, and indeed rapidly became dominant, by means of the Syro-Arabic translations and Arabic commentaries of Mattā and his successors.

The translation of the commentators on Aristotle It is more difficult to obtain a clear picture of the translation of the Greek commentators on Aristotle, as the evidence is at times unclear and only rarely are the translators identified. Assembling what is mentioned in the Fihrist, P, and L, around fifty commentaries on treatises of Aristotle are said to have been known in Arabic or Syriac in tenth century Baghdadi circles.72 Not all of them may truly have existed,73 but from this assemblage we may hope to be able to identify some significant features. The translation of around eight of them is in whole or part attributed to the Ḥunayn circle: Basil (Porphyry on the Physics),74 Isḥāq and al-Dimashqī (Alexander and Ammonius on Topics),75 Isḥāq [and Ḥunayn?] (Alexander on Physics,76 Olympiodorus on Meteorologica),77 Isḥāq (Themistius on De anima78 and Metaphysics Lambda79 and Porphyry on Ethics).80 Four works (Themistius on Physics, Philoponus on De gen. et corr., and Olympiodorus and Simplicius on De anima) are said to be extant in Syriac, although no translator is named,81 while around a further seven (Alexander on De caelo, De gen. et corr., Meteorologica, and Metaphysics Lambda, Themistius on Posterior Analytics (?) and De caelo, and Olympiodorus on De gen. et corr.) are said to have been translated (into Arabic) by Mattā or Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī.82 Since Mattā’s and Yaḥyā’s translations were all from Syriac,83 around eleven commentaries at least may have been extant in Syriac. In theory these Syriac versions need not all have been made in the circle of Ḥunayn, but if nevertheless we consider it probable that they were, we may conclude that there is a high probability that at least nineteen of the commentaries known in Syriac or Arabic were translated into one or the other of these languages by this group. That this imprecise and somewhat uncertain figure might nevertheless be of significance becomes plausible when we compare it with the evidence we can assemble of the contribution to these translations from the other contemporary group of translators, that around al-Kindī. From it we can currently adduce only five works, from the hands of Yaḥyā ibn al-Biṭrīq, Usṭāth, Ibn Nāʻima, and Qusṭā: Alexander on 129

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

Physics, De gen. et corr., and Meteorologica, Philoponus on Physics, and Olympiodorus on De gen. et corr.84 Since that still leaves unknown the identity of the translators of many of the (fifty) commentaries supposedly existing in Baghdad, a certain caution is evidently appropriate in drawing any conclusions. Within the limits of the available evidence, however, it seems reasonable to conclude that Ḥunayn’s group – or rather, the readership responsible for the demand which gave rise to its translations – had a greater interest in the Aristotelian tradition than that associated with al-Kindī. The relative numbers here are at least consistent with those of the translations of the texts of Aristotle himself, as is also the comparative range of interest of the two groups: Ḥunayn’s across the whole range, al-Kindī’s here restricted to the physical, with the logical noticeably absent. This adds further, albeit cautious, confirmation to the view that Ḥunayn’s group and its readers stood close to a tradition of Aristotelian philosophy derived from the Alexandrian School which in Baghdad we can detect running from Timothy through to Mattā, while al-Kindī belonged to a different tradition.85 This does not mean that al-Kindī was totally ignorant of Alexandrian Aristotelianism or of the Organon.86 His treatise on The Quantity of the Books of Aristotle proves otherwise. But that same treatise also shows he had little or no appreciation of the commanding role of the Posterior Analytics in the Alexandrian scheme, and is consistent with our evidence that he did not commission a translation of it.87 By contrast, the role of that treatise in the structure of the Alexandrian Organon was well understood in the Syro-Arabic tradition, all the way through from Sergius of Reshaina to al-Fārābī.88

Conclusion Ḥunayn and his associates made both Syriac and Arabic translations, and clearly therefore were part, indeed a highly significant part, of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. That their activity is to be entirely understood within this framework is, however, not so evident, for their Syriac translations were preceded by three centuries of Syriac translational activity on Greek secular texts, principally those of Galen and Aristotle. The important study of Dimitri Gutas on the Graeco-Arabic translation movement advanced arguments that all translation activity in this period should be seen entirely within this context, and not as in any significant sense continuous with the earlier Graeco-Syriac translations.89 Gutas sees the demand of the wealthy upper class of Abbasid society for translations as the driving force of the translation movement. That upper class included, however, wealthy and influential Christian Syrians as well as Muslim Arabs and Persians, and the demand from these wealthy Syrians for Syriac translations was in essence no different from that which brought forth the earlier Syriac versions.90 The environment had changed, and had indeed become more favourable to the production of translations. But the demand of Abbasid era Syrians for Syriac versions, to be read in Syriac and not merely used as ‘semi-manufactured goods’ serving the final product of an Arabic translation, did not fundamentally differ from that of earlier generations of Syrians. The demand since the time of Sergius of Reshaina 130

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

for Syriac versions especially of Galen and Aristotle arose from those who found the Greek original too difficult, or who knew no Greek. The Syriac intellectual elite, however, was consistently largely bilingual in Syriac and Greek, until Greek finally disappeared and a bilingual Syriac and Arabic elite appeared in its place, manifest to us in the figures of Abū Bishr Mattā and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. The principal reason for the greater number of Syriac translations made in the Abbasid period was therefore the decline in the number of Syriac readers able or willing to read the texts in Greek.91 Naturally the two demands, Syriac and Arabic, strengthened each other, and the Syrian specialists in translation translated into both Syriac and Arabic, according to the requirements of their patrons and readers. But their services for their Syriac patrons were essentially a continuation of what had gone before, as before focused principally on Galen and Aristotle. The Syriac translations of Abbasid times should therefore be seen as organically linked not only to the contemporary Arabic translations, but also to the earlier Syriac tradition of translation of Greek works.92

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Why Did Ḥunayn, the Master Translator into Arabic, Make Translations into Syriac? On the Purpose of the Syriac Translations of Ḥunayn and His Circle’, in: Jens Scheiner and Damien Janos (eds.), The Place to Go: Contexts of Learning in Baghdād, 750–1000 C.E. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 26 (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2014) 363–88. © 2014 by The Darwin Press, Princeton NJ. 2 Pellat (1951) 147–8. 3 Ḥunayn, Risāla. References are to the numbers in Bergsträsser’s edition. Lamoreaux employs a different numbering, but reproduces that of Bergsträsser in the inner margin of his translation. 4 To avoid repetition, I note here that most of the numbers in what follows should be taken as ‘circa’. On account of some cases where Ḥunayn’s statements are ambiguous, any two individuals are likely to come to a slightly different count. Does one, for example, count among Ḥunayn’s translations a revision of Job’s (Ayyūb’s) version (Risāla no. 37), or the assistance he gave Yūḥannā ibn Bakhtīshū’ (no. 81)? Or where he states that the same applies to one treatise as to its predecessor in the list, does one assume that everything said about the earlier treatise, e.g. the patron of the translation, applies to both? The numbers given here are my own figures arrived at when working through the Risāla. Meyerhof (1926) 706 counted ninety-five Syriac and thirty-nine Arabic translations. Minor differences in the counting do not affect the substance of the argument. 5 Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh (eighteen), Salmawayh (thirteen), Bakhtīshū’ ibn Jibrīl (ten), Jibrīl ibn Bakhtīshū’ (six), Da’ūd al-Mutaṭabbib (five), and Shīrīshū’ (one). Cf. on these physicians Meyerhof (1926) 717–20; Ullmann (1970) 108–115; Degen (1981) 161–2; Lamoreaux (2016) 138–52. Gutas (1998) 118–19, 133 notes the importance for medical science of these doctors and the translations which they commissioned, but even though he also notes that their liturgical and scientific language was Syriac and that Ḥunayn made translations into Syriac (134, 139), it could nevertheless escape a reader, given his book’s title, that what these physicians commissioned were translations into Syriac, not Arabic. 6 His pupil ‘Īsā ibn Yaḥyā (two), ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā (one), and ‘Alī al-Fayyūmī (one). On the last, cf. Meyerhof (1926) 720; Lamoreaux (2016) 140.

131

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

7 Nos. 36 (from the Arabic of Stephanus), 38 and 119 (both from the Arabic of Ḥunayn), and nos. 2 and 77 respectively. 8 Nos. 70 and 73. 9 In addition three others, Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdulmalik (no. 38, by Ḥunayn), ‘Abdallāh b. Isḥāq (no. 113, by Isḥāq), and Abū Mūsā al-Kātib (no. 82, by ‘Īsā b. Yaḥyā), are each credited with patronising one translation. On all these patrons, see Meyerhof (1926) 714–16; Lamoreaux (2016) 138–52. 10 Cf. Lamoreaux (2016) 144–5. 11 Meyerhof (1926) 703–5; Degen (1981) 162–3; Lamoreaux (2016) 142–51. 12 Nos. 7 (by Ḥunayn), 36, 38, 119 (these three by Ḥubaysh). 13 Cf. Ullmann (1970) 116: ‘Es muss jedoch betont werden, dass der Weg über die syrische Zwischenübersetzung nicht so häaufig begangen wurde, wie dies oft behauptet wird. Ein grosser Teil der arabischen Übersetzungen geht unmittelbar von den griechischen Originalen aus’. Strohmaier (1994) 2006, 2009–10 reckons the ratio (of those mentioned in the Risāla) of those made directly from the Greek to those made from the Syriac to be 50/50, on the grounds that Ḥubaysh and ‘Isā ibnYahya did not have a good command of Greek and translated from Syriac, a deduction from the Syriac to Arabic translations mentioned in Risāla (nos. 16, 20, 79, and 81) and the Arabic to Syriac in Risāla (nos. 36, 38, and 119). Against the view (derived from Risāla no. 3) that Ḥunayn translated his own Syriac into Arabic, cf. ibid. 2009 n. 111. 14 Nos. 7, 37 (an improvement of Ayyūb), 42, 64, 71 (partial), 72, 125. 15 Salama-Carr (1990) 42, 58–9, 78 recognises correctly that the Syriac translations were destined for Syriac doctors, the Arabic for notable Muslim persons, and implies (42) that the Arabic translation was a two-phase process in which the first, Greek to Syriac, could be to facilitate the task of translators who did not have sufficient command of Greek to work directly from it. This is correct, so long as one understands that easing the translation into Arabic was rarely if at all the original purpose of the Syriac translations, which were, as she says, ‘souvent destinées à de grands personnages [i.e. Syriac doctors] qui demandaient que certaines oeuvres soient traduites pour eux’. On the later members of Ḥunayn’s school who, subsequent to the Risāla (possibly after Ḥunayn’s death), did make Syriac-to-Arabic translations of Galen, cf. Meyerhof (1926) 710. 16 In one case, no. 122, the translation is said to have been a joint effort of the two of them. 17 For these reasons, and also on account of the weight of evidence that the Syriac translations were made for reading and not for the purpose of serving as a Vorlage for an Arabic version, the suggestion of Gutas (1998) 139 that Ḥunayn’s translations for Isḥāq are more plausibly to be understood as intended for further translation into Arabic than for instruction is improbable. Isḥāq was a physician and interested in the history of medicine; cf. Ullmann (1970) 119 and 228–9. 18 Strohmaier (1991) 165, 168, with reference to Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa I, 185–6. The story of Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh’s displeasure at Ḥunayn for asking too many questions is repeated in Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle ed. Bedjan 162.10ff., tr. Budge I, 147–8. 19 Cf. Haddad (2000) 158 (sect. XCVII). I owe this reference to Wood (2013) 88. The tradition that the medical expertise of those coming from Gundishapur had been nurtured in a long-standing ‘medical academy’ in the city has been dismissed as fantasy in several recent studies, but noteworthy arguments against dismissing it have been presented in Reinink (2003). 20 Fihrist 289.15–18. How Ibn al-Nadīm knew about Ḥunayn’s Syriac translations is significant: he did not know the translations themselves, but knew of them from the (Arabic) Risāla. If therefore texts in Syriac are not mentioned by Arabic bibliographers, it cannot be assumed without further ado that they did not exist. With the Fihrist we are of course dealing with a text more than a century later than the Risāla. Ibn al-Nadīm

132

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

21 22 23

24

25

26

27 28 29 30 31

32

33

knew more about Syriac works on philosophy than on medicine, probably on account of his contacts with Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Yaḥyā was not a doctor and presumably devoted less effort to medical writings than to philosophical. Cf. Brock (1991) 153–8. Brock (1991) 153–8. On these see Ullmann (1970) 108–19 and also 194, 199, 205, 265, 299, 314, 326, 327. Reading through the medical section of the Fihrist (294–303, esp. 294–8), one would assume that Ḥunayn and his patrons wrote medical works only in Arabic, but it was of course generally only works in Arabic that were directly known to Ibn al-Nadīm (cf. preceding n. 20). Occasionally, however, we get a glimpse of what may have happened quite often. In the entry on Yaḥyā ibn Sarāfyūn we read that ‘everything he wrote was in Syriac . . . His two books on medicine were translated into Arabic’, and there follow the Arabic titles (Fihrist 296.7–9). Cf. also Fihrist 303.16–18: ‘Theodorus was a Christian . . . translated into Arabic his book is (entitled) . . .’. Sergius of Reshaina, Shlēmon, Shem’on d-Ṭaybūtā, the medical handbook Kunnāsh al-Khūz from Gundishapur, Job of Edessa, Yōḥannan bar Serapion, Jurjīs ibn Jibrīl ibn Bakhtīshū’, Bakhtīshū’ ibn Jurjīs. Cf. Ullmann (1970) 100–3, 108–9. The only exceptional survivals in Syriac are in the Syriac Book of Medicines. Cf. thereto Ullmann (1970) 100; Degen (1981) 140, 143–4, 146–52. Ḥunayn seems to have considered that Arabic lacked an adequate nomenclature in comparison with Syriac, Greek, and Persian, according to his fragmentarily preserved Kitāb al-nuqaṭ (ed. Cheiko 373.16–24) referred to by Strohmaier (1971) 578. The point made here about work in medicine also applies, though probably to a lesser degree, to work in mathematics; cf. Takahashi (2011), Hugonnard-Roche (2014). Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle ed. Bedjan 163.1–2, tr. Budge I, 148. This compares with a list of about sixty-one treatises (forty-seven medical, eight scientific, and six on philosophy, science, and history) compiled by Gabriele (1924) 282–92 from the Arabic chroniclers (Ibn al-Nadīm, Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa, and Ibn al-Qifṭī). For the scientific work in Syriac of Thābit ibn Qurra, cf. Takahashi (2011) 481–2. Cf. Brock (2004) 10–11. As confirmation that there were such early Abbasid medical works written in Syriac, Brock points to survivals in Arabic-Latin and Armenian renderings of two such works. Strohmaier (1991) 169; Ullmann (1970) 116. Cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, 144–6. MSS. Bibliothèque nationale 2346 and Leiden Warner 583. These are the eight treatises of the Organon, four physical treatises (Physics, De caelo, De gen. et corr., Meteorologica), and Metaphysics, together with the De anima, which had an intermediate status, and an Ethics, part of the Alexandrian ‘practical philosophy’. On the Alexandrian curriculum, cf. Hadot (1989) 80–91, and on the school of Mattā, see Chapter 2 in this volume, 33–5. The count is based on the assumption that where Ibn al-Nadīm mentions a translation, it refers to a translation into Arabic unless Syriac is specified. In what follows I give the basic reference to the Fihrist. Further information about these translations is given in Peters (1968), Goulet(1994) 502–34, (2003) 191–542, D’Ancona (2005) 220–33, and D’Ancona (online). I give a specific reference to these works only where additional information is necessary for the purposes of the present chapter to complement or correct what appears in the Fihrist. Fihrist 248.20. Cf. Peters (1968) 7–8; Goulet (1994) 508; D’Ancona (2005) 221. That Ḥunayn translated this treatise into Arabic (as the Fihrist states) is certainly incorrect, although the notice is listed without comment in Gutas (2012) 490. The version in P comes from Isḥāq, and in it a Syriac translation by Ḥunayn is noted in the margin; cf. King (2010) 23–7; Endress (2012) 294.

133

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

34 Fihrist 249.1. 35 Fihrist 249.6–7, 11–12. 36 Fihrist 250.10–20. It is not impossible that he translated the whole treatise, if there was a Syriac version anterior to Isḥāq’s complete Arabic version, as Abū al-Ḥusayn, one of the editors of L, seems to imply. Cf. Peters (1968) 31–2. 37 Fihrist 251.3–4. 38 Fihrist 251.11–12. 39 Fihrist 251.29. 40 On Prior Analytics see preceding, revision of Taḏārī’s translation. On De caelo see Fihrist 250.28–251.1 and Goulet (2003) 284–5. 41 Fihrist 249.15–17. 42 Fihrist 249.1; 250.1–2, 10–20; 251.3–4, 11–12, 25–6; 252.2. On Categories see preceding, on Sophistical Refutations Fihrist 253.3–4 with the comments in Peters (1968) 23–6 and Goulet (1994) 526–8, and on Physics Peters (1968) 30–2 and Goulet (2003) 269–70. 43 According to P Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abdallāh’s version of Topics VIII is derived from Isḥāq’s Syriac. Cf. Goulet (1994) 524. 44 As in the case of Isḥāq’s Arabic version of De gen. et corr., said to be derived from Ḥunayn’s Syriac. Cf. Goulet (2003) 304. His versions of the Categories and De interpretatione are frequently said to be made, or ‘probably’ made, from his father’s Syriac, but there is no evidence for this. In fact, in the one place where the two can be compared (with the proviso that Ḥunayn’s Syriac has been translated into Arabic when cited in the margin of P) they turn out rather differently; cf. King (2010) 24–5. However, translating directly from the Greek does not preclude consulting an existing Syriac version, and Isḥāq may well have been guided by his father’s Syriac where such was available (although seemingly not following him in the passage just mentioned). That of course does not mean that providing guidance for translators into Arabic was the purpose of Ḥunayn’s Syriac versions. 45 Fihrist 249.12; 250.4. 46 Fihrist 249.15–16, 26; 250.11. 47 Nothing definite can be said about the mysterious version of Marāyā mentioned in two notes in P, either its language or any connection it may have to the anonymous Arabic version used by Averroes. Cf. Goulet (1994) 521–3. 48 Timothy epp. 19, 43, 48. Cf. Brock (1999) 235–6, 238–9. Tarán and Gutas (2012) 87 argue that Timothy’s interest in secular texts is reflective of ‘the corresponding interest of . . . Muslim elites’. While it is true that Timothy lived at a time when Muslim interest in certain Greek secular texts was emerging, there is no evidence that this was the cause of Timothy’s interest in them. Syrians had been interested in secular texts since the time of Sergius of Reshaina, and Timothy was particularly interested in bringing to Baghdad, the new patriarchal seat and Abbasid capital, texts or translations of secular Greek works previously available only in other places, including those which may have been known up to that time mainly among West Syrians; cf. Berti (2009) 316–32. He was equally interested in ecclesiastical texts, something which was hardly occasioned by any interest of the Muslim elites; cf. Berti (2009) 332–57; Heimgartner (2015) 180–1 and the list of patristic authors sought by Timothy at 180 n. 49. Cf. also Watt (2015) 16–23. Conversely, there is no evidence of any particular Muslim interest in Aristotelian logic at that time beyond al-Mahdī’s commission to Timothy for a version of the Topics (recorded in ep. 43) and the logic compendium of Ibn al-Muqaffa‛, covering only the contents of the ‘truncated Organon’. At a slightly later time, al-Kindī, as is well known, had only a very limited interest in, or knowledge of, the Organon. (The translation of the Sophistical Refutations before 785 mentioned in the table in Gutas (1998) 182 is the Syriac version by Theophilus of Edessa, not an Arabic version.)

134

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

49 In Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʻa II, 135.16–19. Al-Fārābī’s story of the migration of the School of Alexandria to Baghdad in this text is, as is now well understood, quite imaginary (cf. Chapter 1 in this volume), but with the appearance of these four named individuals concrete reality suddenly intrudes on a narrative which had previously been set in a fantasy world inhabited by shadowy figures without names; cf. Zimmermann (1981) cv-cviii, and on al-Fārābī’s story of the ‘truncated Organon’, Watt (2008–9) 771–8. Al-Marwazī is cited not only in the Fihrist (249.13–14) but also in P among the commentators on the Posterior Analytics; cf. Peters (1968) 18; Endress (2012) 296. 50 Fihrist 262.23–5; 263.15–17, 22–4. 51 Fihrist 263.15–17. 52 Al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl 88.13–15, tr. Mahdi (2001) 43. 53 A striking illustration of the respect accorded to Galen and Aristotle by Syrians in Ḥunayn’s time is a saying of Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, Axiomes médicaux 116: ‘When Galen and Aristotle agree on something, that’s the way it is, but when they differ, it is very difficult for reason to find the right answer’. 54 Cf. preceding 124 on the mention of the earlier Syriac Galen translators in the Risāla. 55 According to Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 209 it was only near the end of the tenth century that the translations of Athanasius and Theophilus were employed, by Ibn Suwār, to control whatever Arabic version he had copied, and this can account for the absence of these ‘old’ translations from the Fihrist. This is consistent with the view that among Syriac readers the translations of Ḥunayn’s circle rapidly pushed these older translations to the margin. In the Posterior Analytics Ibn Suwār always refers to ‘the Syriac’ in the singular, on one occasion elaborating ‘the Syriac in Isḥāq’s translation’; cf. Walzer (1962) 104. The fact that Mattā’s Arabic version was derived from Isḥāq’s Syriac may have been the reason for Ibn Suwār’s focus on the latter in this treatise to the exclusion of Athanasius’ version (if indeed, as seems likely, ‘the Syriac’ is always the Syriac of Isḥāq). 56 See Chapter 8 in this volume, 171–5, and Watt (2017) 181–7. If a translation of the Physics (into Arabic? Or Syriac?) by an (otherwise unknown) Sallām al-Abrash was indeed made in the reign of Hārūn al-Rashīd, i.e. before 809, as Fihrist 244.5–7 states, and subsequently disappeared, a pre-Ḥunayn Syriac version could have disappeared. It may be noted that the list of translators ‘from (other) languages into the Arabic tongue’ in the Fihrist (244.1–24) includes some who, to the best of our knowledge, translated only into Syriac (Theophilus of Edessa and Job/Ayyūb of Edessa, lines 10 and 12). 57 The version of the Sophistical Refutations by Isḥāq sought by Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī could have been in Syriac or Arabic. Cf. Fihrist 253.3–4 and preceding n. 42. 58 Goulet (1994) 456, (2003) 208–10, 219. It is impossible to be sure whether Timothy knew the Poetics in Greek or Syriac, or both. Cf. the recent discussion of the problem by Tarán and Gutas (2012) 85–8. Gutas thinks Greek is more likely, while I would opt for Syriac, or both, mainly on account of Timothy’s limited facility in Greek. Ḥunayn’s apparent ignorance of Aristotle’s definitions of tragedy and comedy is not a decisive argument in favour of Greek, as Ḥunayn could have as easily read the Poetics in Greek as in Syriac, and Timothy clearly knew one or the other version, or both. Ibn al-Samḥ reported that not many students of the art of logic had studied the Rhetoric; cf. Lyons (1982) ii–iii. What applies to the Rhetoric no doubt also applies to the Poetics, and indeed both in the Greek and (Graeco-)Syriac spheres none of the last four books of the Organon was subjected to the same level of study as the first four until the time of Mattā; cf. Watt (2010) 39–40. That does not necessarily imply, however, that they were not part of a curriculum, only that that part of the curriculum did not attract as much attention as the first four treatises. 59 This treatise was known to Timothy, but whether in Greek or Syriac we cannot say. See Berti (2009) 319, 330–1.

135

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

60 Cf. preceding n. 36. 61 Goulet (2003) 325. 62 Fihrist 250.29–251.1. Traces of a Syriac version of the De caelo have also been detected in later Syriac literature, as also behind the Arabic version of Ibn al-Biṭrīq. See Goulet (2003) 283–5 and now Endress (2017) 213–20. 63 Fihrist 250.1–2 and preceding n. 57. 64 Goulet (2003) 325. 65 Fihrist 252.2–4. Cf. Peters (1968) 52. 66 All we know is one note from P, the translation of I.3. 25b17; cf. Walzer (1962) 85. We do not know therefore whether or not it went beyond I.7, the end of the ‘truncated Organon’. 67 Fihrist 249.26; 250.10–20, 23; 251.27–8. On Ibn al-Biṭrīq’s translation of the Meteorologica see preceding. Vagelpohl (2008) 207–8 locates the extant Arabic version of the Rhetoric ‘in close proximity to the Kindī-circle’. If this is correct, it still has to be said that, as with the Sophistical Refutations, which were translated by Ibn Nāʻima, al-Kindī shows very little knowledge of (or interest in) it in his treatise on The Quantity of the Books of Aristotle. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 775 n. 82. 68 Fihrist 251.19–24. Cf. Peters (1968) 45–8, Goulet (2003) 329–30, 375–6. 69 Adamson (2007a) 14–15, 22–9; Endress (2007) 324–44 and esp. 345–8 on the Aristotelian translations in this circle. 70 Most significantly Plato’s Timaeus, Republic, and Laws attributed to Ḥunayn, and Plato’s Sophist and Proclus’ On the Eternity of the World against the Christians attributed to Isḥāq. In the Aristotelian tradition I include here Theophrastus, Nicholas of Damascus, and the commentators (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry, Themistius, and Olympiodorus). Ḥunayn included his translation of Galen’s compendia of Plato among his Galen translations (Risāla nos. 122, 124). 71 Problemata physica, De lapidibus, De plantis, De virtutibus et vitiis. Cf. Goulet (2003) 593–5, 652–4, 499–501, 513. 72 The point made earlier (n. 4) concerning the approximate nature of the cited numbers applies with special force here. The meaning of the Fihrist is not always clear. In particular it is sometimes difficult to decide whether a reference is to a translation of Aristotle or to that of a commentator. The fifty cited earlier are made up from eleven by Alexander, eleven by Themistius, six by Philoponus, four by Porphyry, three by each of Olympiodorus and the mysterious Alinus, two by each of Theophrastus, Iamblichus, Ammonius, Simplicius, and Stephanus, and one each by Theon and Syrianus. 73 Cf. the reservations in Goulet (1994) 515. 74 Fihrist 250.21–2. 75 Fihrist 249.24–5. 76 Fihrist 250.12–14 [with 250.7–11?]. 77 Goulet (2003) 326. 78 Peters (1968) 42; Goulet (2003) 352–3. 79 Peters (1968) 52 (Fihrist 251.30 names the translator as Mattā, but the MS. of the Hebrew version names Isḥāq). 80 Fihrist 252.2. 81 Fihrist 250.22–3; 251.7, 13–15. 82 Fihrist 264.1–2; 251.4, 9–10, 28; 263.25–6; 250.30; 251.5–6. 83 The translation of Fihrist 250.22–3 offered by Arzhanov and Arnzen (2014) 430 (‘Von Abū Bišr Mattā [stammt] eine syrische Übersetzung von Themistius’ Erklärung zu dieser Schrift [the Physics] . . .’) implies that Mattā could translate from Greek, but the translation is uncertain, and given the overwhelming evidence elsewhere that he did not know Greek (or at least know it well enough to make a translation) and translated exclusively from Syriac to Arabic, a different rendering of the passage is more

136

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

84

85 86

87 88

89 90 91

likely. For example, Müller (1873) 18: ‘Und von Abū Bišr Mattā ist eine Erklärung der Erklärung des Themistios zu dieser Schrift [Physics] in syrischer Sprache . . .’; Dodge (1970) 603: ‘Abū Bišr Mattā wrote an explanation in Syriac of Themistius’ commentary on this book . . .’; Peters (1968) 30: ‘And there is a commentary [on the Physics] by Abū Bišr Mattā. A commentary of Themistius is extant in Syriac . . .’. Fihrist 250.10–20; 251.4–5; and for the version by al-Biṭrīq of Alexander on the Meteorologica, see Goulet (2003) 326. Philoponus on the Physics is the only one of these translations from the al-Kindī circle which was not also translated in that either of Ḥunayn or of Mattā. Among the commentators Mattā seems to have been principally interested in Themistius, Alexander, and Olympiodorus, the last two of which were clearly also of interest to Timothy. See Chapter 2 in this volume, 34. The two traditions, ‘Kindīan’ and ‘Baghdad Aristotelian’, continued their separate ways in the tenth century. Cf. Adamson (2007a) 12–14, (2007b) 351–70. Neither does it mean that Ḥunayn was totally unaware of the work of al-Kindī’s group. He mentions (Risāla no. 83) that he believes a Galen translation to have been made by Yaḥyā ibn al-Biṭrīq, although the wording leads one to wonder whether or not he actually knew it. He did, however (as noted earlier), revise Ibn al-Biṭrīq’s translation of the De caelo. Adamson (2007a) 14–15, 28–9, (2007b) 354–62. Ibn al-Muqaffa‛ also shows little appreciation of the fundamental conception underlying the Alexandrian reading of the Organon. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 773–5. For Sergius, cf. Chapter 4 in this volume, 75–6, 84–5. For al-Fārābī, see, for example, his striking parallel between an ‘ascent’ to the Posterior Analytics followed by a ‘descent’ to the Poetics and the ascent and descent of the guardians in Plato’s myth of the cave in his Didascalia in Rethoricam Aristotelis 213–14; cf. Vallat (2004) 187–90. No doubt the Ḥunayn circle did not see the difference between Galen’s De demonstratione and Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics in quite as sharp terms as did Mattā’s circle, but as noted by Zimmermann (1981) cviii and n.2, who draws attention to al-Fārābī’s attacks on Galen’s philosophy, al-Marwazī was a physician as well as a philosopher, and is hardly likely to have been dismissive of Galen, at least as a doctor if not as a philosopher. It may have been Abū Bishr Mattā, who was not a doctor, if not al-Fārābī himself, who first attacked Galen as a philosopher. That the Baghdad Aristotelians of Mattā’s school were not physicians and had little interest in Galen will be the reason why Ibn al-Nadīm, who probably obtained his knowledge of the Syriac philosophical works and translations from Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, knew almost nothing of Syriac medical works and translations beyond Ḥunayn’s Risāla. Ḥunayn’s own comment was that Galen’s aim in his De demonstratione was also the aim of Aristotle in his Fourth Book of the Logic (Risāla no. 115). The observation of Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 209–10 that the Topics and Sophistical Refutations received, to judge by the marginal notes of P, less attention from the philosophical aspect than their predecessors in the sequence of the Organon is consistent with the view that these treatises were ‘on the descent’. Gutas (1998) 20–2, 134–41. See also Gutas (2010) 11–17. Cf. the criticism of Gutas’ influential book by Stroumsa (2013). Cf. Strohmaier (1991) 167–8: ‘The need for translations occurs in general when society assumes an interest in foreign literature of any kind. This need, on the other hand, does not arise when the prospective readers are bilingual . . . (as) holds true for Syrian territory before the Arab invasion . . . it was only at the end of the eighth century under Arab rule and again in the East that a second wave of medical translations came into being. . . . The first cause of this new development lay in the fact that the old Syro-Greek bilingualism had further declined in favour of the now obligatory Syro-Arabic bilingualism. The second was the social standing of the Syrian physicians, their competition

137

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

among themselves and their wealth, so that they were able to pay for the irksome labour of translation’. 92 See further Chapter 7 in this volume.

References Adamson (2007a): P. Adamson, Al-Kindī (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Adamson (2007b): P. Adamson, ‘The Kindian Tradition: The Structure of Philosophy in Arabic Neoplatonism’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 351–70. Arzhanov and Arnzen (2014): Y. Arzhanov and R. Arnzen, ‘Die Glossen in Ms. Leyden Or. 583 und die syrische Rezeption der aristotelischen Physik’, in: E. Coda and C. Martini Bonadeo (eds.), De l’antiquité tardive au Moyen Âge. Études de logique aristotélicienne et de philosophie grecque, syriaque, arabe et latine offertes à Henri Hugonnard-Roche (Paris: Vrin) 415–63. Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle: P. Bedjan (ed.), Gregorii Barhabraei Chronicon syriacum (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1890); tr. E.A.W. Budge, The Chronography of Gregory Abū’l Faraj 1225– 1286 . . . commonly called Bar Hebraeus, I–II (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Berti (2009): V. Berti, Vita e studi di Timoteo I, patriarca cristiano di Baghdad (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes). Brock (1991): S.P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Background to Ḥunayn’s Translation Techniques’, Aram 3, 139–62. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9, 233–46. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Changing Fashions in Syriac Translation Technique’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 3–14. D’Ancona (2005): C. D’Ancona, ‘Le traducioni di opera greche e la formazione del corpus filosofico arabo’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale (Turin: Einaudi) 180–258. D’Ancona (online): C. D’Ancona, ‘Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy’, in: E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition). Degen (1981): R. Degen, ‘Galen im Syrischen: eine Übersicht über die syrische Überlieferung der Werke Galens’, in: V. Nutton (ed.), Galen: Problems and Prospects (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine) 131–66. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Endress (2007): G. Endress, ‘Building the Library of Arabic Philosophy: Platonism and Aristotelianism in the Sources of al-Kindī’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 319–50. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. Endress (2017): G. Endress, ‘Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Arabic Version and Commentary of Aristotle’s De Caelo’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 213–75. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in Rethoricam Aristotelis: J. Langhade and M. Grignaschi (eds.), Deux ouvrages inédits sur la réthorique (Beirut: Dār el-Machreq, 1971). al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl: J. Āl Yāsīn (ed.), Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿādah (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2).

138

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

Gabriele (1924): G. Gabriele, ‘Hunáyn Ibn Isháq’, Isis 6, 282–92. Goulet (1994): R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, I (Paris: CNRS Editions). Goulet (2003): R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, Supplément (Paris: CNRS Editions). Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Gutas (2010): D. Gutas, ‘Origins in Baghdad’, in: R. Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) I, 11–25. Gutas (2012): D. Gutas, ‘Die Verbreitung philosophischen Denkens’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 458–511. Haddad (2000): B. Haddad (ed.), Mukhtaṣar al-akhbār al-bay’iya/Abrégé de la chronique de l’Église (Baghdad: Sharikat al-Dīwān lil-Ṭibāʻah). Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Heimgartner (2015): M. Heimgartner, ‘Contexts of Christian Education in Baghdad: The Letters of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 173–85. Hugonnard-Roche (1991): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Contributions syriaques aux études arabes de logique à l’époque abbasside’, Aram 3, 193–210. Hugonnard-Roche (2014): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Mathématiques en syriaque’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 67–106. Ḥunayn, Kitāb al-nuqaṭ (fragment) (1922): ‘Plenary Sessions of the Metropolitan of Nisibis’ (in Arabic), in: L. Cheiko (ed.), Al-Mashriq, 20, 373. Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed. and tr.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; ed. and tr. J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, On his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a: A. Müller (ed.),ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’, I–II (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Wahbīyah, 1882). al-Kindī, The Quantity of the Books of Aristotle: R. Walzer and M. Guidi (ed. and tr.), Uno scritto introduttivo allo studio di Aristotele (Rome: G. Bardi, 1940). King (2010): D. King, The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (Leiden: Brill). Lamoreaux (2016): see under Ḥunayn, Risāla. Lyons (1982): M.C. Lyons, Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica: The Arabic Version (Cambridge: Pembroke Arabic Texts). Mahdi (2001): M. Mahdi (tr.), Alfarabi: Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Meyerhof (1926): M. Meyerhof, ‘New Light on Ḥunain Ibn Isḥāq and his Period’, Isis 8, 685–724. Müller (1873): A. Müller, Die griechischen Philosophen in der arabischen Überlieferung (Halle: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1873). Pellat (1951): C. Pellat, Le livre des avares de Ǧāḥiẓ (Paris: Maisonneuve). Peters (1968): F.E. Peters, Aristoteles Arabus (Leiden: Brill). Reinink (2003): G.J. Reinink, ‘Theology and Medicine in Jundishapur’, in: A.A. MacDonald et al. (eds.), Learned Antiquity. Scholarship and Society in the Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West (Leuven: Peeters) 163–74. Salama-Carr (1990): M. Salama-Carr, La traduction à l’époque abbasside (Paris: Didier Érudition, 1990).

139

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N A N D H I S C I R C L E

Strohmaier (1971): G. Strohmaier, ‘Ḥunayn b. Isḥāk al-’Ibādī’, in: B. Lewis et al. (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (Leiden: Brill) III, 578–81. Strohmaier (1991): G. Strohmaier, ‘Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq: An Arab Scholar Translating into Syriac’, Aram 3, 163–70. Strohmaier (1994): ‘Der syrische und der arabische Galen’, in: W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II. 37, 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) 1987–2017. Stroumsa (2013): S. Stroumsa, ‘Philosophy as Wisdom: On the Christians’ Role in the Translation of Philosophical Material into Arabic’, in: H. Ben-Shammai, S. Shaked, and S. Stroumsa (eds.), Exchange and Transmission across Cultural Boundaries: Philosophy, Mysticism and Science in the Mediterranean World (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities) 276–93. Takahashi (2011): H. Takahashi, ‘The Mathematical Sciences in Syriac: From Sergius of Resh-’Aina and Severus Sebokht to Barhebraeus and Patriarch Ni’matallah’, Annals of Science 68.4, 477–91. Tarán and Gutas (2012): L. Tarán and D. Gutas, Aristotle: Poetics (Leiden: Brill). Timothy, ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy, epp. 43, 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Ullmann (1970): M. Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill). Vagelpohl (2008): U. Vagelpohl, Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East (Leiden: Brill). Vallat (2004): P. Vallat, Farabi et l’École d’Alexandrie: des prémisses de la connaissance à la philosophie politique (Paris: Vrin). Walzer (1962): R. Walzer, Greek into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (Oxford: Cassirer). Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2010): J.W. Watt, ‘Commentary and Translation in Syriac Aristotelian Scholarship’, Journal of Late Antique Culture and Religion 4, 28–42. Watt (2015): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Aristotelian Tradition and the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Philosophers’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 7–43. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Wood (2013): P. Wood, The Chronicle of Seert (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, Axiomes médicaux: D. Jacquart and G. Troupeau (ed. and tr.), Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh, Le livre des axiomes médicaux (Geneva: Droz, 1980). Zimmermann (1981): F.W. Zimmermann, Al-Farabi’s Commentary and Short Treatise on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (London: Oxford University Press).

140

7 T H E S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q A N D THEIR PRECURSORS1

In the cosmopolitan and intellectually vigorous culture of ninth century Baghdad, a prestigious position was held by families of Syriac medical doctors, many of whom had come to the city from Gundishapur. Medicine was practised in Baghdad by Arab Muslim doctors as well as Syriac Christians, but the dominant influence of the latter is illustrated in a well-known anecdote of al-Ǧāḥiẓ, in which a Muslim physician complains that, despite the presence of many sick people, he has no patients. He attributes this to the fact that his name is Asad, not Ṣalībā, Yūḥannā, or Bīrā; that he wears a white cotton garment, not a black silk one; and that he speaks pure Arabic, not the language of the people of Gundishapur.2 The eminence of the Syriac physicians in Baghdad is a fact of cardinal importance in considering the translational activity of the most famous of all Syriac and Arabic translators of Greek works, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq. Ḥunayn is perhaps best known as the man who, more than any other, moulded Arabic into a form suitable for scientific discourse, but he made more translations from Greek into Syriac than into Arabic. Al-Ǧāḥiẓ’s anecdote provides a simple answer to the question of why that was so. The leading physicians in Baghdad were Syrians, and what they wanted were translations of Greek medical works into Syriac, not Arabic. A different answer, however, is sometimes given to this question: the Syriac translations were intermediate versions, merely serving the ultimate aim of an Arabic one. Although both answers can be found in the scholarly literature, the correct one is the former. In asserting this, I am not therefore proposing something radically new, but so far as I am aware, the clear evidence we have concerning the recipients of Ḥunayn’s medical translations has not yet been applied to the understanding of his translations in the area of philosophy.3 We may begin with the medical translations, for which the basic source is the Risāla (‘missive’) of Ḥunayn to ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā, in which Ḥunayn records one hundred and twenty-nine treatises of Galen.4 Around ninety-six of these he had himself translated into Syriac, and about thirty-five into Arabic.5 Of his Syriac translations he mentions six patrons known to have been practising physicians, accounting for fifty-three of them;6 a further seven were done for his son Isḥāq (also a physician), and a further four for three others.7 In addition to the eighteen translations commissioned from Ḥunayn, Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh commissioned 141

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

three from Ḥubaysh, and in addition to his thirteen from Ḥunayn, Bakhtīshū’ ibn Ǧibrīl commissioned two from Isḥāq.8 Among the thirty-five Arabic translations of Ḥunayn, thirty-seven of Ḥubaysh, eighteen of ‘Īsā ibn Yaḥyā, nine of Isḥāq, eight of Stephanus, and two of Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalt, we have mention of four significant patrons: Abū Ǧa’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā (forty-seven commissions), Aḥmad ibn Mūsā (seventeen), ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā (six), and Isḥāq ibn Sulaymān (four), as well as three others.9 None of these is known to have been a physician, with the exception of Isḥāq ibn Sulaymān.10 There is thus no overlap, with the single exception of ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā, between the Syriac and Arabic patrons, or, with the exception of the Jewish physician Isḥāq ibn Sulaymān, between their professions. It is also significant that on four occasions Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh commissioned a Syriac translation when an Arabic already existed.11 In a few cases Ḥunayn mentions that an Arabic version was made from a Syriac (e.g. no. 16), but mostly he gives no such indication. Manfed Ullmann is thus surely correct to state: ‘Es muss jedoch betont werden, dass der Weg über die syrische Zwischenübersetzung nicht so häufig begangen wurde, wie dies oft behauptet wird. Ein grosser Teil der arabischen Übersetzungen geht unmittelbar von den griechischen Originalen aus’.12 In even fewer cases a Syriac version was made from an Arabic,13 but no one seems to have thought that the Arabic versions served merely as intermediaries for the Syriac. The conclusion is thus clear: the Syriac versions were intended to be read in Syriac by Syrians, especially Syrian physicians. They belonged to a vibrant Syriac medical culture, which included original works as well as translations. Neither of them is now extant (with the exception of a few fragments), the reasons for which will be considered later. Unfortunately there is no corresponding risāla from Ḥunayn on the translations of Aristotle. For these we are dependent on sources more than a century later, namely the relevant section of the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, and the marginal notes of the Paris Organon (Bibliothèque nationale 2346, hereafter P) and the Leiden Physics (Leiden Warner 583, hereafter L),14 all probably ultimately dependent for their information on Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. None of them provides us with information on patrons of the translations. The core Aristotle curriculum of Ammonius’ school in Alexandria had thirteen to fifteen treatises. According to our sources Ḥunayn translated eight of them into Syriac,15 in whole or in part, and corrected Arabic translations of two.16 Isḥāq completed Ḥunayn’s Syriac versions of the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and made a Syriac version of the Topics, and possibly nine Arabic versions, in whole or in part, by himself or with an associate.17 The profile of Aristotle translations is therefore consistent with those of the Galenic. Ḥunayn translated mostly but not exclusively into Syriac, Isḥāq mostly but not exclusively into Arabic. With only an occasional exception, there is no evidence that the Arabic translations originating in Ḥunayn’s circle were made from the Syriac.18 The situation in the later school of Abū Bishr Mattā is quite different. The Baghdad Aristotelians did not know Greek, so the only option open to them was a translation from Syriac. The Fihrist mentions explicitly and frequently that an Arabic translation by Mattā or Yaḥyā was made from a Syriac, 142

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

but does not do so in the case of Arabic translations stemming from Ḥunayn’s group. The case of the Posterior Analytics is especially important, being the most significant treatise (according to the Alexandrian reading) of the Organon. Isḥāq’s complete Syriac version (following Ḥunayn’s partial version) was not rendered into Arabic until Mattā did so. Since Ḥunayn’s Syriac Galen translations were primarily designed for Syrian doctors, and not for further translation into Arabic, there are no grounds to suppose that his Syriac Aristotle translations were not designed for Syrians interested in philosophy. Confirmation of this can be found in the case of the Posterior Analytics just mentioned. Nevertheless the key question is clearly the following: was there a readership for philosophy in Syriac, comparable to that for medicine? A confident affirmative response can be given to this question, because both shortly before and shortly after the time of Ḥunayn such a readership is clearly identifiable. Earlier than Ḥunayn we know of Patriarch Timothy I, who studied both Greek and Arabic but considered Syriac his principal language and clearly preferred to have, if he could, a Syriac version over a Greek original. He puzzled over passages in the Posterior Analytics and Topics in Greek and in the Syriac translations of Athanasius of Balad, sought information on commentaries or scholia in either Syriac or Greek on the Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics, and was on the lookout for commentaries on the ‘Logic’ (Organon?) by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Sergius, Olympiodorus, and Stephanus.19 After Ḥunayn we know of the philosophical interests of the Baghdad Aristotelians, bilingual in Syriac and Arabic, and what the Fihrist has to say about one of Mattā’s teachers (also named by al-Fārābī), al-Marwazī, is significant: ‘everything that he wrote about logic and other things was in the Syriac tongue’.20 Although by the time we reach Mattā the growing significance of Arabic over Syriac is clear, even shortly before that Syriac remained in use as a language of science and philosophy. It can therefore hardly be doubted that the Syriac Aristotle translations of Ḥunayn and Isḥāq were intended to be read in Syriac. When this is recognised, three further points become clear. First is that Ḥunayn and his circle created a new Syriac version of the greater part of the Organon and made available to Syriac readers at least much of the Alexandrian Aristotle curriculum. For a few treatises it is not possible to be sure whether or not they provided a version, but in some of these cases (e.g. the Rhetoric and Poetics)21 older Syriac versions might have existed. As far as we know, they were the first to translate into Syriac anything from the physical treatises and the Metaphysics, but if some older Syriac versions of these existed, Ḥunayn and his circle produced fresh ones.22 Second, the profile of translations from Ḥunayn’s circle differs radically from that of the circle of al-Kindī. There were indeed translations of Aristotle from the latter, but they were concentrated on the physical and biological treatises and the Metaphysics, with only the Prior Analytics and the Sophistical Refutations represented from the Organon.23 Al-Kindī was especially interested in the theology of Plotinus and Proclus, which clearly differentiates him from the strict Aristotelianism of the Baghdad Aristotelians in the school of Mattā. Although the translation 143

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

activity of Ḥunayn’s group was wider than that of Mattā’s, it is clear nevertheless that it stood, together with its readers and patrons, in a tradition which was closer to Mattā, and to the older Syriac tradition, than to al-Kindī. The third point, on the translation of the Greek commentators on Aristotle, is closely related to this. The Fihrist is not so informative on the translators of these as on those of Aristotle’s own texts. According to our sources about fifty of these may have existed,24 but in the majority of cases a translator is not identified. We can, however, put together three sorts of evidence: those translations where a translator from Ḥunayn’s circle is named;25 those where a Syriac version is said to exist;26 and those where an Arabic translation is attributed to Mattā or Yaḥyā, and which therefore must have been derived from a Syriac one.27 On the plausible (but not certain) assumption that the Syriac versions were produced in Ḥunayn’s circle, this would amount to a tally of nineteen translations (Syriac or Arabic) for them. Against that, the number we can attribute to al-Kindī’s circle is five.28 The paucity of the evidence should evidently caution us against over-confident conclusions, but we have here an indication that the bulk of the translation work on the Greek commentators on Aristotle probably comes from the circle of Ḥunayn, not that of al-Kindī. That al-Marwazī wrote about Aristotelian philosophy in Syriac shows that subsequently, in the late ninth or early tenth century, it continued to be employed in this field. But as with medicine, so also with philosophy, in the following years Arabic became dominant, as we can see already from the fact that it was preferentially employed by Mattā and Yaḥyā. As Ḥunayn’s translations facilitated this process in medicine, so also did those of Isḥāq and Mattā in philosophy.

The transmission of the translations It is therefore not altogether surprising that none of the Syriac Aristotelian translations made in this period has come down to us in manuscripts, and they are known of only through Arabic sources. One reason for the loss of the Syriac translations is therefore the subsequent ascendancy of Arabic as the premier language of science and philosophy. Since some at least of these Syriac translations appear to have been known to Bar Hebraeus, we can in broad terms assign their loss to a period from the thirteenth century onwards, although the manuscripts known to Bar Hebraeus may have already been quite old in his day.29 The loss of these Syriac medical and philosophical translations and independent works from the early Abbasid period needs, however, also to be viewed within a wider context of the transmission of Syriac manuscripts as a whole. Here the relevant consideration is that very few Syriac manuscripts earlier than the tenth or eleventh century in any subject seem to have survived outside of Egypt. A Syriac manuscript older than the twelfth century stood few chances of survival to our own day if it was not among those taken to Dayr al-Suryan or St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai.30 Unfortunately, none of the translations of Ḥunayn’s group was taken there. 144

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

That does not by itself fully account for the loss of all these translations, for of course later manuscripts do survive, and some of them were copied from earlier exemplars. However, in addition to the pre-eminence of Arabic and the ravages of time and circumstance, a further factor may have been working against the copying of the translations. Across a wide range of Syriac theological literature, but especially across translations from Greek, copyists after the ninth century were loath to transcribe complete texts, mostly choosing instead to make excerpts for anthologies.31 In these circumstances, we might have hoped for the survival of a few medical and philosophical extracts, but since the theological extracts were mostly made for liturgical purposes or for monastic anthologies, it is understandable that the same effort might not have been put into the anthologising of secular works, which were therefore less likely to have been copied at all. At least from the thirteenth century, there seems to have been little demand even for such anthologies from those who desired some knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy or Galenic medicine. Instead, what was evidently in demand were the various philosophical and medical compendia of Bar Hebraeus (and some others, notably Bar Shakko and Bar Zo‘bi). A survey of all surviving Syriac philosophical and medical manuscripts cannot be attempted here, but a more limited review covering only the main libraries in the United Kingdom may still give a good indication of the state of affairs. The United Kingdom is an appropriate choice, for its collections include in the British Library not only the bulk of the manuscripts from Dayr al-Suryan, but also several others from elsewhere now present not only in London, but also in Birmingham, Manchester, Cambridge, and Oxford, providing a potentially different perspective. The latest manuscript in the British Library to deal with Aristotle is from the eleventh century (Add. 14,738, two folios containing fragments of a commentary), while its later philosophical manuscripts (from the thirteenth century onwards) deal only with Bar Shakko and Bar Hebraeus.32 Two manuscripts in Birmingham contain texts of Aristotle, Syr. 44, from the sixteenth century, and Syr. 606, copied from a nineteenth century exemplar; and two others, Syr. 559 and 589, attribute works to Galen, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Job of Edessa, Ḥunayn, and Ḥubaysh.33 For the rest, the philosophers appearing in Birmingham manuscripts are again those of the ‘Syriac Renaissance’, and Bar Hebraeus is the only philosopher represented in the Manchester collection.34 At Cambridge, where the earliest philosophical manuscript is of the sixteenth century, Aristotle appears in two late manuscripts (Add. 3284 and Add. 2812, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and Nicolaus of Damascus on Aristotle’s Physics together with Euclid Book I appear in an earlier one (Gg. 2.14, fifteenth/sixteenth century).35 The other Cambridge philosophical manuscripts are again devoted mainly to Bar Hebraeus. The philosophical manuscripts at Oxford, from the fourteenth century to the sixteenth, are entirely devoted to Bar Hebraeus, Bar Shakko, and the Cause of All Causes.36 None of the Aristotle translations in these collections comes from the Abbasid period. Since the number even of Arabic manuscripts of translations of Aristotle that have survived to our day is small, the loss of all the corresponding Abbasid Syriac 145

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

manuscripts is hardly very surprising. There is, however, a striking contrast between the two when we turn from Aristotle to Galen. While little of Galen has survived in Syriac,37 much is still extant in Arabic. The reason for this is doubtless to be found in a determination among some Arabic physicians, notably Ibn Riḍwān, to maintain the original texts against the compendia, which they held responsible for a decline in medical practice. Production of compendia had begun as early as the translations themselves and continued unabated, but this ‘counter-revolution’, limited as it was, is nevertheless likely to have saved for us much of the Arabic Galen.38 No such counter-revolution is known in philosophy, and indeed something more like the opposite occurred: a ‘revolution’ in the history of Arabic philosophy in which the text of Aristotle was replaced by the Aristotelian but highly individual expositions (‘compendia’) of Avicenna.39 The result was that Aristotle himself was scarcely read (or copied) any more in Eastern Islam, but was mediated through the (frequently copied) texts of Avicenna.40 Analogously in Syriac Aristotle himself was rarely read or copied, but mediated through the expositions of Bar Hebraeus, who, as is well known, drew copiously on the work of Avicenna.41 It is not only the Syriac manuscripts of translations made in Ḥunayn’s time which are lost to us, but also the Greek manuscripts from which he translated. The Greek manuscripts of Galen and Aristotle which have come down to us are overwhelmingly from later than Ḥunayn’s period, and do not come from that part of the world.42 Even if, as has often been postulated, Ḥunayn gathered some manuscripts from Byzantine soil during his years away from Baghdad, in his time there were evidently many Greek manuscripts in the Middle East,43 as is clear also for the pre-Abbasid period from the translations and commentaries of the Qenneshre scholars, and also before Ḥunayn (born 808) produced his first Syriac translations (c. 825) from the Syriac translations of Ayyūb and Theophilus of Edessa (died 785) and the testimony of Timothy (died 823). When Ḥunayn started working on translations, both Greek texts of Galen and Aristotle and Syriac translations of at least some of these texts were in circulation. In improving (as he saw it) the existing translations and adding to their number, he was therefore continuing a process that had been going on, even if somewhat intermittently, for around three hundred years. During this time the presence of Syriac translations had not rendered the Greek texts even of the translated works ‘obsolete’ among Syrians. Those who could read the Greek could continue to make use of it if they so chose, while the translations were useful both to those who did not know Greek and to those who did but found a Syriac text easier or more convenient. Among the members of this last group we can include Timothy, who had access to the Greek and a desire to consult it where necessary, but a limited ability to use it and an evident preference for a Syriac version. We can assume some knowledge of Greek for many Syriac physicians at least until shortly before Ḥunayn’s time, not least among those of Gundishapur, where the inhabitants, many descended from prisoners of war from Roman imperial lands in the time of Shapur I, had long retained not only special 146

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

privileges within the East Syrian church but also a ‘Western’ (i.e. Greek) cultural and linguistic orientation, and where the liturgy was held in Greek and Syriac.44 Familiarity with Greek was, however, clearly in decline during the ninth century, as Mattā’s and Yaḥyā’s ignorance of it in the tenth century shows. The basic reason therefore for the extensive translation work of Ḥunayn into Syriac was the decline in Graeco-Syriac bilingualism among the Syrian medical and philosophical readership, doubtless both in the number of those who knew Greek and in the facility in its use possessed by many of those who still had some knowledge of it – excluding of course Ḥunayn and other expert translators. Syrians were not, however, the only people interested in ancient Greek philosophy and science. Their interest was shared by a growing number of Arabs. Translations into Arabic were also appearing, as well as translations into Syriac, from the hands of Ḥunayn and others. It has therefore been proposed that the translation activity of this period should not be seen as in any significant way continuous with that of earlier periods, but as a fundamentally new phenomenon made possible only by the social and economic circumstances and cosmopolitan culture of Abbasid Baghdad.45 One can hardly doubt that the Graeco-Syriac and Graeco-Arabic translation activities in this period stimulated and reinforced each other, and that the wealth possessed by patrons of Syriac translations, such as the court physicians who hailed from Gundishapur, provided a more economically advantageous context for the labour of translation than had previously existed in the Syriac realm. The Graeco-Syriac translations of this period can certainly therefore be differentiated to some extent from those that went before, but this differentiation does not necessarily imply that the Graeco-Syriac translation movement of the period should be seen as completely contained within the Graeco-Arabic and totally detached from the activity of earlier Syriac translators.46 Whether or not there was a fundamental discontinuity between the two periods is therefore the question to which I now turn.47

Pre-Abbasid and Abbasid era translations The alleged centrality of the ‘truncated Organon’ (ending at Prior Analytics I.7) in pre-Abbasid Syriac Aristotelian scholarship is the principal argument against the continuity of the two periods. The fact that a six-volume Syriac Organon did exist before the Abbasids came to power is now widely recognised, but its significance is sometimes unduly minimised. It has been argued that the last four books of the eight-volume Organon did not form part of the logical curriculum in schools in the earlier periods, and that translations of anything beyond the truncated Organon were not made for purposes of formal teaching.48 This may true for the Rhetoric and Poetics, but is more dubious in the case of the Topics and Sophistical Refutations.49 There is no direct evidence that either the truncated or full Organon was an integral part of a formal school curriculum in Syriac at any location, but at the one place for which we have strong indirect evidence, namely the monastery of Qenneshre, that evidence points to the study not of the truncated 147

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

but of the six-volume version.50 Athanasius of Balad’s (died 686) translations of the Topics and Sophistical Refutations, as of the Prior and Posterior Analytics, are no more likely to have been made only for his own personal satisfaction than are the translations of the Categories, De interpretatione, and Prior Analytics I.1–7 (i.e. the truncated Organon), or the translations by George of the Arabs (died 724, Categories to the end of Prior Analytics) or by Theophilus of Edessa (died 785, Prior Analytics and Sophistical Refutations).51 The postulate of a distinction between translations related to private and those to formal public study cannot be derived from the Syriac evidence, but is an interpretation wedded to al-Fārābī’s ‘Appearance of Philosophy in Islam’,52 according to which at some undefined point in time public teaching of logic – not among Syrians, but in Alexandria, said to be the sole place where philosophy was taught – is supposed to have been restricted to the material up to the end of the assertoric syllogisms by bishops fearful of its effect on Christian belief, until the coming, much later, of Islam and the imagined transfer of the teaching of philosophy to Antioch. (That al-Fārābī means that the rest of the Organon was not concealed, but merely restricted to the private sphere, depends on the interpretation of mastūr53 here as ‘private’, rather than ‘concealed’, although concealment, one imagines, is what bishops would have wished for teaching they considered dangerous to Christianity.) Al-Fārābī’s story, however, is not based on genuine knowledge of the distant past, is in many aspects clearly quite fictional, and is probably addressed to the situation of his own day. Imposing his template on the Syriac material involves making both distinctions among the attested translations for which there is no evidence, and implausible assumptions about many of them. The translations of Athanasius, Jacob, and George can plausibly be associated with teaching at the (real) monastic school of Qenneshre; by contrast, we have no evidence pointing to the adoption into a formal curriculum by any Syriac school anywhere of the commentaries of Probus and the translations probably made by him, the star witnesses for a Syriac ‘truncated Organon’.54 If (as is possible) there were a number of Syriac schools teaching the philosophy of Aristotle, that they all taught to the same formal curriculum, and all worked with an identical set of Aristotle texts and commentaries, is merely supposition. Al-Fārābī’s story envisions only one school: that of Alexandria, with its imaginary subsequent peregrination and afterlife. Nowhere is there any hint in Syriac (or Greek or Latin) tradition that Prior Analytics I.7 marked a boundary between communal and individual reading, comparable to what Ḥunayn says55 about the ‘Alexandrian canon’ of Galen, which is quite different from the ‘truncated Organon’. There are credible indications of a difference between writing for classroom and writing for private study in late antique philosophical education, but they have nothing to do with a partition in a curriculum.56 Comparison of the Arabic histories of medicine and philosophy is instructive in discerning the literary associations of al-Fārābī’s story, but the idea that within a politically inspired narrative there is a nugget of historical veracity concerning a Syriac formal curriculum of logic from the distant past devoted only to the truncated Organon57 is not consistent with a reading of the totality of the 148

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

relevant Syriac and Syro-Arabic evidence not pre-judged from the standpoint of that idea. Al-Fārābī maintained that what one could learn at a later time – namely that of the supposed first appearance of philosophy at Baghdad with four teachers, but before he himself read further with one of them, Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān – was also only to the end of the assertoric figures, but this is credible only on the assumption (as has indeed been proposed)58 that it was meant to apply only to teaching given by Muslims (in Arabic),59 and not to that given by Christians (in Syriac). The assertion, if indeed it is only about teaching given by Muslims, even though it was earlier asserted that with the coming of Islam the restriction to the truncated Organon came to an end, is however consistent with what we know from Ibn al-Muqaffa‛ and al-Kindī. This gives us, I have suggested, the key to understanding the fictional story about earlier times: it was al-Fārābī’s way, utilising the existing topos concerning the restriction of philosophical freedom of thought in the Christian Roman Empire, of commending the study of the full Organon to Muslims, who were still studying only the truncated version. It demonstrated to them that ‘Islam’ allowed the study of the full Organon, and that it was not the preserve of Christians. Indeed, according to the story, it was only ‘Islam’ that had delivered it from its truncation by Christians – not the praiseworthy contemporary Christians who were benefiting from living under enlightened Muslim rule and with whom he had read it, but churchmen of the past associated with the unenlightened anti-philosophical Roman power.60 Discussion around the Syrians and the truncated Organon sometimes proceeds without due consideration of the date and number of the surviving manuscripts. Any assessment of the comparative attention given to the two versions between the sixth and twelfth centuries needs, however, to take due notice of the preponderance among the extant manuscripts of those later than the twelfth century.61 Only three containing part of the text of the Organon are earlier. The oldest, BL Add. 14,658 (seventh century), is irrelevant in this connection, for it has aims quite different from a presentation of Aristotle’s logical corpus (and within it is confined to the Categories).62 BL Add. 14659 (eighth/ninth century) is no witness to the truncated Organon, for it runs from the start of the Categories to the end of the Prior Analytics, in the translation, with introduction and commentary, of George of the Arabs.63 The third, Vatican Syriac 158 (ninth/tenth century), is one, with a text running from the Categories to Prior Analytics I.7. (This is the one pre-thirteenth century manuscript containing the anonymous translations which may with some reason be attributed to Probus.) The ‘score’ on the basis of the early manuscripts is therefore ‘one all’. All others containing Aristotle translations reflect the truncated Organon in one way or another, but being from the thirteenth century or (usually much) later, that is, from a period when lengthy translations of Greek texts were rarely copied in their entirety and interest in Aristotle was largely overtaken by interest in Bar Hebraeus, they are poor witnesses to the pre-Abbasid period. They may indeed, with Vat. Syr.158, reflect a pre-Abbasid ‘corpus syriaque de logique’, but they do not tell us anything about the comparative attention devoted to it in comparison with the study of the full Organon.64 As for pre-Abbasid authors, 149

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

while Probus’ extant works and those of Paul the Persian65 are designed for readers going no further than Prior Analytics I.7, Sergius, Severus Sebokht, Athanasius, and George all assumed that their readers would proceed further.66 A misperception of the motive for study of Aristotle among pre-Abbasid Syrians has contributed at times to the belief in a fundamental discontinuity between the two periods. It has frequently been assumed that in the earlier one the principal reason for such study was the provision of a weapon in theological disputation.67 Expertise in logic could naturally have been applied in many contexts, including Christological controversies, but there is little or no indication that it was prominent in these, nor any indication of such a motive within the Aristotelian texts themselves.68 The primary motive for their study of logic was not inter-confessional debate, but their conviction, derived from their Alexandrian masters, that, as Sergius put it, Aristotle had fashioned ‘the perfect and admirable form of the science of all that is’, and that without logic neither ‘medicine, philosophy, or the divine Scriptures’ could be properly understood. The pre-Abbasid Syriac Aristotelians saw Aristotelian logic (the full Organon) as the first stage in the curriculum of Aristotelian philosophy which culminated in the Metaphysics. They were adherents of a Christianised Neoplatonism, which beyond Aristotle reached its goal not with Plato, but with Pseudo-Dionysius.69 A final consideration supporting the radical distinction of the two periods is the greater number and allegedly superior quality of the translations made in the later one.70 It is worth pointing out again that pre-Abbasid Syriac translations may have been more numerous than those known to us through our limited range of evidence, but even so there can be little doubt that the Abbasid era translations did indeed exceed in number those made in previous eras. However, it is important to be clear about the reasons for this and its implications. It does not necessarily mean that the untranslated treatises were unknown to Syrians able to read Greek, of whom there were a significant number. Translations were presumably in the first instance made for the monolinguals, but could also have been useful for bilinguals who preferred a Syriac version, or found it advantageous to have both. Precisely because there were readers of Greek in the Syriac-speaking area, there were Greek manuscripts in that area up until early Abbasid times. No doubt if both greater economic resources had been available to Syrians in pre-Abbasid periods and more translations had been felt to be necessary, more would have been made, but where the Greek was available, translations were not necessary for those who could read it. During the Abbasid period the number of Syrians with an easy command of Greek declined, and resources to compensate for the labour of translation were greater.71 The notion of the allegedly poor quality of (mostly lost) pre-Abbasid translations depends primarily on acceptance of Ḥunayn’s criticisms of the medical translations of Sergius72 and others (Ayyūb, Theophilus), and Ibn Suwār’s criticism of Athanasius of Balad. Sergius could hardly have gained much profit from his studies in Alexandria if he had not been proficient in Greek, and to judge from his translations of the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo and the Pseudo-Dionysian 150

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

corpus, and his Syriac adaptation of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe, he was in reality a very competent translator, perfectly able to render a Greek text accurately, but also willing to modify it when he so wished.73 Changes in Syriac itself over the three and a half centuries separating Sergius from Ḥunayn, and changing conceptions of an ideal translation, may account for some of the criticisms.74 Recent research, however, employing the actual survival of Sergius’ Galen translations, has put Ḥunayn’s criticisms in context and shown that the pre-Abbasid medical translations were by no means of poor quality and in fact ‘proved to be immensely useful for the later Syriac and Arabic translations produced in the Abbasid period’.75 Possibly Ayyūb and Theophilus were still attached to the text-oriented style of translation and for this reason attracted Ḥunayn’s criticism.76 Ibn Suwār’s criticism of Athanasius’ translation of Aristotle probably stems from the fact that the latter’s mirror-style, text-oriented translations were hard to understand for Ibn Suwār (and the other Baghdad Aristotelians of Mattā’s school), who knew no Greek and therefore preferred the reader-oriented translations of the Ḥunayn school. It should also be noted that the criticism is particularly directed to the Sophistical Refutations,77 a work which on account of its ambiguities is particularly difficult to translate and which also gave Boethius much difficulty.78 In the Prior Analytics and Topics Ibn Suwār seems to consider Athanasius’ translations to be useful from the textual or exegetical standpoint (eighteen citations, as against twenty-two from Isḥāq, without counting any of the anonymous Syriac versions, the authorship of which cannot be determined).79 Ibn Suwār’s criticism of Athanasius’ translation of the Sophistical Refutations should not therefore be generalised into one by all the Baghdad Aristotelians of all the pre-ninth century translations,80 nor should it be assumed that his criticism is justified, particularly since he knew no Greek. Whatever Ibn Suwār thought, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and to some extent Ibn Zur‘a used Athanasius’ version for their own translations of the Sophistical Refutations.81 The Baghdad Aristotelians certainly preferred the versions of Ḥunayn’s school to the earlier ones, but they still turned to these earlier ones for help.82 Far from being at a low ebb, the study of Greek flourished in some Syriac monasteries, notably Qenneshre, during the Umayyad caliphate, while the demand which kept a cadre of Greek specialists in business in the Abbasid period, when the number of Syriac speakers familiar with Greek was clearly in decline, was not only for Graeco-Arabic translations, but also for Graeco-Syriac.

Conclusion Ḥunayn and his associates translated into both Syriac and Arabic because there was a demand for both. With the ongoing Arabisation of the region, Arabic became the dominant language of science and philosophy, and from the thirteenth century the attention of Syriac scribes was directed to the compendia of Bar Hebraeus at the expense of the translations of Aristotle and the Greek commentators and of the earlier Syriac expositors. The dominance of Arabic is thus one (but not the only) 151

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

reason why the Syriac translations of Ḥunayn and his associates (and indeed of many of their predecessors, such as Sergius’ translations of Galen and Athanasius’ of Aristotle) are no longer accessible to us, and it is for the most part only through the copyists of Arabic texts, principally the Risāla of Ḥunayn, the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm, and the Paris Organon, that we know of their existence. However, when proper account is taken of these lost Syriac translations and their patrons and readers, it becomes clear that Syriac was not principally seen as a useful staging post on the way to an Arabic version, but the medium through which a significant body of people engaged with Greek thought before and during the early Abbasid period.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Translations of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq and Their Precursors’, in: Martin Tamcke und Sven Grebenstein (Hg.), Geschichte, Theologie und Kultur des syrischen Christentums. Beiträge zum 7. Deutschen SyrologieSymposium in Göttingen, Dezember 2011. Göttinger Orientforschungen I. Reihe: Syriaca Band 46 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014) 423–45. © Otto Harrassowitz Gmbh & Co KG, Wiesbaden 2014, and republished by permission. 2 Cf. Pellat (1951) 147–8. 3 The following paragraphs provide an overview of Ḥunayn’s translations of Galen and of Aristotle and his commentators, intended to set the scene for the subsequent discussion of their place within the overall history of Syriac medical and philosophical translations. For a more detailed analysis of the evidence specifically for Ḥunayn’s translations, see Chapter 6 in this volume. 4 Ḥunayn, Risāla. References are to the numbers in Bergsträsser’s edition. Lamoreaux employs a different numbering, but reproduces that of Bergsträsser in the inner margin of his translation. 5 To avoid repetition, I note here that most of the numbers in what follows should be taken as ‘circa’. On account of some cases where Ḥunayn’s statements are ambiguous, any two individuals are likely to come to a slightly different count. Meyerhof (1926) 706 counted ninety-five Syriac and thirty-nine Arabic translations. Minor differences in the counting do not affect the substance of the argument. 6 Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh (eighteen), Salmawayh (thirteen), Bakhtīšū’ ibn Ǧibrīl (ten), Ǧibrīl ibn Bakhtīšū’ (six), Da’ūd al-Mutaṭabbib (five), and Šhīrīšū’ (one). Cf. on these physicians Meyerhof (1926) 717–20; Ullmann (1970) 108–15; Degen (1981) 161–2; Lamoreaux (2016) 138–52. 7 His pupil ‘Īsā ibn Yaḥyā (one), ‘Alī ibn Yaḥyā (one), and ‘Alī al-Fayyūmī (one). On the last, cf. Meyerhof (1926) 720; Lamoreaux (2016) 140. 8 Nos. 36 (from the Arabic of Stephanus), 38 and 119 (both from the Arabic of Ḥunayn), and nos. 2 and 77 respectively. 9 Muḥammad ibn ‘Abdulmalik (no. 38, by Ḥunayn), ‘Abdallāh ibn Isḥāq (no. 113, by Isḥāq), and Abū Mūsā al-Kātib (no. 82, by ‘Īsā ibn Yaḥyā), each credited with patronising one translation. On all these patrons, see Meyerhof (1926) 714–16; Lamoreaux (2016) 138–52. 10 Cf. Lamoreaux (2016) 144–5. 11 Nos. 7 (by Ḥunayn), 36, 38, 119 (these three by Ḥubaysh). 12 Ullmann (1970) 116. Strohmaier (1994) 2006, 2009–10 reckons the ratio (of those mentioned in the Risāla) of those made directly from the Greek to those made from the Syriac to be 50/50, on the grounds that Ḥubaysh and ‘Isā ibnYahya did not have a good

152

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

13 14 15

16 17

18

19

20 21

command of Greek and translated from Syriac, a deduction from the Syriac to Arabic translations mentioned in Risāla (nos. 16, 20, 79, and 81) and the Arabic to Syriac in Risāla (nos. 36, 38, and 119). Against the view (derived from Risāla no. 3) that Ḥunayn translated his own Syriac into Arabic, cf. ibid. 2009 n. 111. The three versions by Ḥubaysh mentioned earlier (n. 8). Ḥunayn himself on several occasions (nos. 7, 37 [an improvement of Ayyūb], 42, 64, 71 [partial], 72, 125) made a Syriac version even after he or someone else had made one in Arabic. Cf. Peters (1968a); Goulet (1994) 502–34, (2003) 191–542; D’Ancona (2005) 220–33, and D’Ancona (online). Categories, De interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics in part, Physics Book Two, De gen. et corr., De anima, and Metaphysics Lambda. Cf. Fihrist 248–52. That Ḥunayn translated the Categories into Arabic (so the Fihrist) is certainly incorrect, although the notice is listed without comment in Gutas (2012) 490. P makes clear the Arabic is by Isḥāq, and notes a Syriac version by Ḥunayn; cf. Peters (1968a) 7–8; King (2010a) 23–7; Endress (2012) 294. It is not impossible that he translated the whole of the Physics, if there was a Syriac version anterior to Isḥāq’s complete Arabic version, as Abū al-Ḥusayn, one of the editors of L, seems to imply. Cf. Peters (1968a) 30–2. Prior Analytics and De caelo. Categories, De interpretatione, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, Physics, De gen. et corr., De anima, Metaphysics, Ethics. On the doubtful case of the Sophistical Refutations see the comments in Peters (1968a) 23–6 and Goulet (1994) 526–8. On Physics, see Peters (1968a) 30–2. The one seemingly clear exception is Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abdallāh’s version of Topics VIII, which according to P was derived from Isḥāq’s Syriac; cf. Goulet (1994) 524. In some other instances modern scholars have suggested a Syriac Vorlage for an Arabic version, e.g. Isḥāq’s Arabic version of De gen. et corr. from Ḥunayn’s Syriac; cf. Goulet (2003) 304. The commonly made suggestion that Isḥāq’s Arabic version of the Categories was derived (or ‘probably’ derived) from Ḥunayn’s Syriac has no clear evidence to support it. In fact, in the one place where the two can be compared (with the proviso that Ḥunayn’s Syriac has been translated into Arabic when cited in the margin of P) they turn out rather differently; cf. King (2010a) 24–5. However, translating directly from the Greek does not preclude consulting an existing Syriac version, and Isḥāq may well have been guided by his father’s Syriac where such was available (although seemingly not following him in the passage just mentioned). That of course does not mean that providing guidance for translators into Arabic was the purpose of Ḥunayn’s Syriac versions. Timothy epp. 19, 43, 48. Cf. Brock (1999) 235–6, 238–9. Timothy was as interested in Greek ecclesiastical texts as in philosophical. It is therefore hardly likely that it was only interest in Greek texts on the part of Muslim Arabs which motivated his desire for more information on the Aristotelian tradition; cf. Heimgartner (2015) 180–1 and the list of patristic authors sought in 180 n. 49. On Timothy’s knowledge of the Poetics and De gen. et corr., cf. following nn. 21 and 22. As is well known (from ep. 43), Timothy also made an Arabic translation (or supervised Abū Nūḥ’s translation) of the Topics from the Syriac (presumably of Athanasius of Balad) – not of course for his own benefit or interest, but for that of al-Mahdī. Fihrist 263.15–17. The Fihrist adds that ‘he was also a well-known physician in Baghdad’. It is possible that both of them were translated by Isḥāq (into Syriac or Arabic). Cf. Goulet (1994) 456, (2003) 208–10, 219. It could also be the case with the Poetics that Isḥāq revised an older Syriac version and that traces of both can be found in the Syriac fragment quoted (or paraphrased?) by Bar Shakko; cf. Tarán and Gutas (2012) 98–101. It is impossible to be sure whether Timothy knew the Poetics in Greek or

153

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

22

23

24

25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32

Syriac, or both; cf. the recent thorough presentation and analysis of the literary evidence by Gutas, ibid. 85–8. Gutas thinks Greek is more likely, while I would opt for Syriac, or both, mainly on account of Timothy’s limited facility in Greek. That Ḥunayn either did not know or (just as likely) did not use Aristotle’s definitions of tragedy and comedy is not a decisive argument against the existence of an old Syriac version, as he could have as easily read the Poetics in Greek as in Syriac, and Timothy clearly knew one or other version, or both. Ibn al-Samḥ reported that not many students of the art of logic had studied the Rhetoric; cf. Lyons (1982) ii–iii. What applies to the Rhetoric no doubt also applies to the Poetics, and indeed in both the Greek and (Graeco-)Syriac spheres none of the last four books of the Organon was subjected to the same level of study as the first four. That does not necessarily imply, however, that they were not part of a curriculum, but only that considerably less attention was paid to them than to the first four, and that commentaries on them were consequently fewer or known only to a smaller circle. The Arabic versions of the Meteorologica and De caelo by Ibn al-Biṭrīq were derived from Syriac; cf. Goulet (2003) 325 and 283–5 and now Endress (2017) 213–20. This Syriac version of De caelo was the base of Mattā’s Arabic version. No treatise in the core Alexandrian curriculum was thus entirely unrepresented in Syriac by the time of Mattā. For Timothy’s knowledge of De gen. et corr., cf. Berti (2009) 319, 330–1. From within the core Alexandrian curriculum the translations we know of from al-Kindī’s circle are from Ibn al-Biṭrīq, Ibn Nāʻima, and Usṭāth and comprise Prior Analytics, Sophistical Refutations, Physics, De caelo, Meteorologica, and Metaphysics. Outside of it we know of the Liber animalium (= De gen. anim. and De part. anim.) and Parva naturalia. The fifty are made up from eleven by Alexander, eleven by Themistius, six by Philoponus, four by Porphyry, three by each of Olympiodorus and the mysterious Alinus, two by each of Theophrastus, Iamblichus, Ammonius, Simplicius, and Stephanus, and one each by Theon and Syrianus. Doubts have been expressed as to whether all of them really existed. Eight works: Basil (Porphyry on the Physics), Isḥāq and al-Dimashqī (Alexander and Ammonius on Topics), Isḥāq [and Ḥunayn?] (Alexander on Physics, Olympiodorus on Meteorologica), Isḥāq (Themistius on De anima and Metaphysics Lambda and Porphyry on Ethics). Four works: Themistius on Physics, Philoponus on De gen. et corr., and Olympiodorus and Simplicius on De anima. Seven works: Alexander on De caelo, De gen. et corr., Meteorologica, and Metaphysics Lambda, Themistius on Posterior Analytics (?) and De caelo, and Olympiodorus on De gen. et corr. From the hands of Usṭāth, Ibn Nāʻima, and Qusṭā: Alexander on Physics, De gen. et corr., and Meteorologica, Philoponus on Physics, and Olympiodorus on De gen. et corr. Joose (2010) 140–1. Cf. Brock (2004) 18. See also Coakley (2011). The situation has not been materially altered by the new information concerning the manuscripts still at Dayr al-Suryan. Apart from the early biblical manuscripts, most are either from the sixth to ninth centuries (these are predominantly of patristic writings from late antiquity) or from the thirteenth century or later (which are almost exclusively liturgical); cf. Brock and van Rompay (2014) xxi. In the area of philosophy, there are some short pseudonymous, but no authentic, texts of Aristotle, letters of Severus already known from British Library manuscripts and some other short extracts, and fragments from Probus’ already known Introduction to the Organon: Brock and van Rompay (2014) 170–2, 359, 426–7. Brock (2004) 18–21. The point can be seen even by a cursory glance at the relevant British Library catalogues of Wright (1870–2) and Margoliouth (1899). The section on philosophical

154

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46

manuscripts in Wright III, 1154–65 contains eight manuscripts (some no longer than two folios) from Dayr al-Suryan from the seventh to eleventh centuries. The one later manuscript in the same section, of the thirteenth century, purchased from the metropolitan of Malabar in 1856, is a manuscript of Bar Shakko (ibid.) 1165–7. The philosophical manuscripts from the fourteenth century onwards in the later catalogue of Margoliouth are devoted exclusively to Bar Hebraeus. Cf. Mingana (1933) 112–17, 1034–9, 1125–7, 1163–6. Syr. 606 also contains Porphyry’s Eisagoge. Coakley (1993) 171, 181–2. Wright-Cook (1901) II, 1008–23, 635–43, 885–8. Payne Smith (1864) 368–98, 563–8, 576–93, 637–44. See Kessel (2016). On the evidence for original Syriac writings on medicine, cf. Chapter 6 in this volume, 125. Cf. Strohmaier (1981) 188. Avicenna himself referred to the Shifa̕ as a compendium (jumla). Cf. Gutas (1988) 51, 103. Cf. Peters (1968b) 192–200; Gutas (1993) 56–9. Bar Hebraeus accepted the view (probably taken from al-Qifṭī) that al-Fārābī and Avicenna understood Aristotle’s intentions better than those who translated him. Cf. Chapter 13 in this volume, 251. Greek manuscripts of Galen are mostly from the fifteenth century; cf. Ullmann (1970) 37–8. With a couple of possible exceptions (see following note), all extant manuscripts of Aristotle are probably from Constantinople, and a mere handful are from as early as the ninth or ninth/tenth century (only one of them in majuscule). Cf. Wartelle (1963) 36, 94, 120–1, 164 (nos. 545, 1279, 1624, 1629, 2196); Harlfinger (1980) 449–53. Cf. Strohmaier (1991) 165–7. A ‘fossil’ from the time when Greek was read in the Near East is a British Library Syriac palimpsest (Add. 17210 and 17211, ninth century, from Dayr al-Suryan, Syriac overwriting of Severus of Antioch against John the Grammarian, copied in Qartmin) with Greek underwriting of Homer (fifth century), Euclid (seventh/eighth century), and the Gospel of Luke (sixth century); cf. Wright (1870–2) II, 548–50. Another may be a palimpsest fragment with Aristotle’s De interpretatione 17a35–18a16 from the Umayyad mosque in Damascus; cf. Harlfinger (1980) 452 and n. 34 (p. 476). Another old Aristotle manuscript of non-Constantinopolitan origin may be Moscow 394 (ibid.). Cf. also following n. 71. Cf. Haddad (2000) 158 (sect. XCVII). I owe this reference to Wood (2013) 88. The tradition that the medical expertise of those coming from Gundishapur had been nurtured in a long-standing ‘medical academy’ in the city has been dismissed as fantasy in several recent studies, but noteworthy arguments against dismissing it have been presented in Reinink (2003). Gutas (1998) esp. 20, 135 on the discontinuity. Cf. the criticism of this influential book by Stroumsa (2013). The ‘Graeco-Arabic’ and ‘Graeco-Syriac’ translation movements in the Abbasid period can be too easily conflated in the contemporary discussion. As long as the Syriac translations are seen as merely intermediate steps to the Arabic, the Abbasid translation movement naturally appears detached from the earlier Syriac translations. But when due account is taken of the fact that Syrian patrons desired to have translations into Syriac, it becomes necessary to distinguish the two sets of readers and the two related but distinguishable enterprises which they patronised, translations into Syriac and translations into Arabic. Against the radical detachment of the pre-Abbasid and Abbasid periods, D’Ancona (2005) 190–1 recognises both the importance of the earlier Syriac translations in the creation of the environment in which the Graeco-Arabic translation movement was born, and the continuing activity of Graeco-Syriac translation in the Abbasid period, interwoven with the Graeco-Arabic and Syro-Arabic.

155

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

47 The following discussion is limited to the logic, the only section of the Aristotelian curriculum for which we have clear evidence of pre-Abbasid Syriac translations. Prior to the Abbasid era the physical treatises were probably deliberately neglected on account of Aristotle’s eternalist cosmology. The Metaphysics is very likely to have been known, but possibly never translated. Cf. Chapter 5 and Chapter 8 in this volume, and Watt (2017) 181–92. 48 Tarán and Gutas (2012) 87–8 n. 18, Gutas (2010) 13–15. 49 Cf. preceding n. 21. On the usual listing and order in the Alexandrian commentators of the books following the Posterior Analytics, with their minor variations, cf. Hadot (1989) 81–4. 50 Cf. chapters 1–3 in this volume. 51 Cf. Watt (2008–9) 757–8. The translation of the Sophistical Refutations before 785 mentioned in the table in Gutas (1998) 182 is the Syriac version by Theophilus of Edessa, not an Arabic version. Assigning pre-Abbasid translations of the truncated Organon to formal education but anything beyond Prior Analytics I.7 to the private sphere leaves us in a quandary as to how to evaluate those of Athanasius and George (and later Theophilus), all of which crossed this alleged divide. To the best of our knowledge no full Arabic translation of a treatise of Aristotle existed before the Syriac translations of Prior Analytics and Sophistical Refutations by Theophilus of Edessa, and even if a demand for translations by Muslim ruling elites did indeed extend at the time of Timothy beyond al-Mahdī’s commission for the Topics to other treatises of the Organon, a demand for Arabic translations for Muslim elites does not bring forth Syriac translations for Syriac readers. The likely main cause of the increase of Syriac demand for translations in the ninth century was the decline in the use of Greek; see the following at 150 and n. 71. Timothy was as anxious to search out Greek ecclesiastical texts as secular ones, and that was surely not on account of the interest of Muslim ruling elites; cf. preceding n. 19. On the specific case of the Poetics, it is hardly credible to attribute his interest in it to a general demand for translations by Muslim ruling elites when there is no evidence of an Arabic translation of it until at least many decades (possibly by Isḥāq) or more than a century (certainly by Mattā) later. 52 Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a II, 134–5. 53 Ibid. 135.13. 54 On Probus, cf. Brock (2011); Hugonnard-Roche (2012), (2018). 55 Risāla no. 20. 56 Cf. Watts (2011). 57 Gutas (1999) 183 and n. 80. 58 Ibid. 166–7, 184. 59 Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a II, 135.19–24. 60 Cf. Watt (2008–9) 773–8. Another clear instance of the topos concerning the restriction of philosophical activity by Roman Christendom is the story in Fihrist 241–2, the alleged prohibition of philosophy except during the reign of Julian, who was supported by Themistius. Cf. Chapter 10 in this volume. 61 Cf. preceding 144–6. 62 There are studies of this manuscript by Hugonnard-Roche (2004a) and King (2011). 63 Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, especially 102. 64 Hugonnard-Roche (2004b) 91–7. Hugonnard-Roche (2013) 243 attributes the two versions to different literary genres, the school manual and the exegetical commentary, and emphasises that a preponderance (of manuscripts) of the former (the truncated Organon) says nothing about the activities of the scholars in the latter (the full version). 65 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2011). 66 Cf. e.g. Chapter 5 in this volume, 109–13.

156

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

67 Gutas (2010) 15. This misperception makes it difficult for Tarán and Gutas (2012) 87 to imagine an occasion prior to the Abbasids when the Poetics would have been translated into Syriac. When this misperception is corrected, the difficulty disappears. 68 King (2013), (2015). 69 See Chapters 2–5 in this volume, Watt (2017). A hint that in Greek circles too readers of Pseudo-Dionysius might have also studied Aristotelian logic might lie in the palimpsest Par. gr. 1330. The thirteenth/fourteenth century scribe reused folios of a fifth/sixth century manuscript of an unknown (or unidentified) commentary on the Prior Analytics, and an eighth/ninth century manuscript of Pseudo-Dionysius. The fact that he used them both may indicate that he found them together. Cf. Faraggiana di Sarzana (2009) 222–5, who considers that the manuscript probably came not from Constantinople, but from the Greek East (Syria, Palestine, or Egypt). 70 Gutas (1998) 21–2, 135–41, (2010) 15. 71 Cf. Strohmaier (1991) 167–8: ‘The need for translations occurs in general when society assumes an interest in foreign literature of any kind. This need, on the other hand, does not arise when the prospective readers are bilingual . . . (as) holds true for Syrian territory before the Arab invasion. . . . [I]t was only at the end of the eighth century under Arab rule and again in the East that a second wave of medical translations came into being. . . . The first cause of this new development lay in the fact that the old SyroGreek bilingualism had further declined in favour of the now obligatory Syro-Arabic bilingualism. The second was the social standing of the Syrian physicians, their competition among themselves and their wealth, so that they were able to pay for the irksome labour of translation’. Brock (2007) 300–1 notes that it was mainly during the ninth to eleventh centuries that many manuscripts were ‘recycled’ in Syriac monasteries, and, as BL Add. 17210/17211 shows, the undertext of these palimpsests could be Greek – further evidence that it was particularly from the ninth century onwards that Greek fell out of (learnt) use in the Syriac-speaking area. Cf. preceding n. 43. 72 The uncritical acceptance of Ḥunayn’s judgement of the earlier Galen translations is a weakness in Meyerhof’s otherwise useful article on the Risāla, although this assessment has been frequently repeated; cf. Meyerhof (1926) 711, 724. 73 King (2010b); McCollum (2011); Fiori (2011). The readers of Ḥunayn’s medical translations were no doubt less familiar with Greek than Sergius’ readers, and for that reason could easily praise Ḥunayn’s translations over Sergius’, a situation which suited Ḥunayn very well and which he could easily exploit. 74 Brock (1991) 145–53. 75 Bhayro (2017) 132–43 (citation 143). 76 Brock (1991) 141–2. 77 Walzer (1962) 81–3. 78 Cf. Ebbesen (2011) 128–33, who remarks (128): ‘Translating Aristotle is always difficult, but translating the Sophistical Refutations is a terrible task, because many of its examples of ambiguous expressions only work in Greek’. If all the translators of Ḥunayn’s circle gave the Sophistical Refutations a wide berth, perhaps that was the reason. The three extant Arabic versions from the hands of Yaḥā ibn ‘Adī, Ibn Zur‘a, and Ibn Nāʻima are, according to one evaluation, respectively excessively literal (and thus difficult to understand), less literal and therefore more comprehensible, and well removed from the original with numerous misunderstandings; cf. Goulet (1994) 527–8. All of this puts Ibn Suwār’s criticism of Athanasius’ version of the Sophistical Refutations in context! 79 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 195 and n. 5, who observes that ‘the evidence suggests that the translations of Athanasius and Theophilus have had, on the whole, a comparable importance to those of Ḥunayn and Isḥāq in the formation of the notes of the Parisinus’.

157

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

80 Gutas (2010) 15. 81 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 197–9. 82 According to Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 209 it was only near the end of the tenth century that the translations of Athanasius and Theophilus were employed, by Ibn Suwār, to control whatever Arabic version he had copied. This is consistent with the view that among Syriac readers the translations of Ḥunayn’s circle rapidly pushed these older translations to the margin.

References Berti (2009): V. Berti, Vita e studi di Timoteo I, patriarca cristiano di Baghdad (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes). Bhayro (2017): S. Bhayro, ‘Galen in Syriac: Rethinking Old Assumptions’, Aramaic Studies 15, 132–54. Brock (1991): S.P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Background to Ḥunayn’s Translation Techniques’, Aram 3, 139–62. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9, 233–46. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Without Mushē of Nisibis, Where Would We Be?’, in: R. Ebied and H. Teule (eds.), Symposium Syriacum VIII (Leuven: Peeters) 15–24. Brock (2007): S.P. Brock, ‘A Syriac Intermediary for the Arabic Theology of Aristotle? In Search of a Chimera’, in: C.D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 293–306. Brock (2011): S.P. Brock, ‘The Commentator Probus: Problems of Date and Identity’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 195–206. Brock and van Rompay (2014): S.P. Brock and L. Van Rompay, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts and Fragments in the Library of Deir al-Surian, Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt) (Leuven: Peeters). Coakley (1993): J.F. Coakley, ‘A Catalogue of the Syriac MSS in the John Rylands Library’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 75, 105–207. Coakley (2011): J.F. Coakley, ‘Manuscripts’, in: S.P. Brock et al., Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 262–4. D’Ancona (2005): C. D’Ancona, ‘Le traducioni di opera greche e la formazione del corpus filosofico arabo’, in: idem (ed.), Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale (Turin: Einaudi) 180–258. D’Ancona (online): C. D’Ancona, ‘Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy’, in: E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition). Degen (1981): R. Degen, ‘Galen im Syrischen: eine Übersicht über die syrische Überlieferung der Werke Galens‘, in: V. Nutton (ed.), Galen: Problems and Prospects (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine) 131–66. Ebbesen (2011): S. Ebbesen, ‘Boethius as a Translator and Aristotelian Commentator’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 121–33. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362.

158

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

Endress (2017): G. Endress, ‘Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Arabic Version and Commentary of Aristotle’s De Caelo’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 213–75. Faraggiana di Sarzana (2009): C. Faraggiana di Sarzana, ‘Il Nomocanon Par. gr. 1330 “Horride rescriptus” su pergamene in maiuscola continenti un antico commentario ad Aristotele, il Corpus Dionysiacum e testi patristici’, Nea Rhome 6, 191–225. Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2011): E. Fiori, ‘Sergius of Reshaina and Pseudo-Dionysius: A Dialectical Fidelity’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 179–94. Goulet (1994): R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, I (Paris: CNRS Editions). Goulet (2003): R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, Supplément (Paris: CNRS Editions). Gutas (1988): D. Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden: Brill). Gutas (1993): D. Gutas, ‘Aspects of Literary Form and Genre in Arabic Logical Works’, in: C. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts (London: Warburg Institute) 29–76. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Gutas (1999): D. Gutas, ‘The “Alexandria to Baghdad” Complex of Narratives: A Contribution to the Study of Philosophical and Medical Historiography among the Arabs’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 10, 155–93. Gutas (2010): D. Gutas, ‘Origins in Baghdad’, in: R. Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) I, 11–25. Gutas (2012): D. Gutas, ‘Die Verbreitung philosophischen Denkens’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 458–511. Haddad (2000): B. Haddad (ed.), Mukhtaṣar al-akhbār al-bay’iya/Abrégé de la chronique de l’Église (Baghdad: Sharikat al-Dīwān lil-Ṭibāʻah). Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Harlfinger (1980): D. Harlfinger, ‘Einige Grundzüge der Aristoteles Überlieferung’, in: idem (ed.), Griechische Kodikologie und Textüberlieferung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft) 447–83. Heimgartner (2015): M. Heimgartner, ‘Contexts of Christian Education in Baghdad: The Letters of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 173–85. Hugonnard-Roche (1991): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Contributions syriaques aux études arabes de logique à l’époque abbasside’, Aram 3, 193–210. Hugonnard-Roche (2004a): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Ethique et politique au premier âge de la tradition syriaque’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 99–119. Hugonnard-Roche (2004b): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Hugonnard-Roche (2011): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Du commentaire à la reconstruction: Paul le Perse interprète d’Aristote’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 207–24. Hugonnard-Roche (2012): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Probus (Proba)’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques Vb (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 1539–42.

159

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

Hugonnard-Roche (2013): H. Hugonnard-Roche, Review of U. Vagelpohl, ‘The Prior Analytics in the Syriac and Arabic Tradition’, Vivarium 48 (2010), 134–58; Studia graeco-arabica 3, 242–4. Hugonnard-Roche (2018): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Probus’, in: C. Riedweg, C. Horn, and D. Wyrwa (eds.), Die Philosophie der Kaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Teilband 3 (Basel: Schwabe) §196. Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed. and tr.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; ed. and tr. J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, On his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a: A. Müller (ed.),ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’, I–II (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Wahbīyah, 1882). Joose (2010): N.P. Joosse, ‘Expounding on a Theme. Structure and Sources of Bar Hebraeus’ “Practical Philosophy”, in the Cream of Wisdom’, in: H. Teule et al. (eds.), The Syriac Renaissance (Leuven: Peeters) 135–50. Kessel (2016): G. Kessel, ‘Inventory of Galen’s Extant Works in Syriac’, in: J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, on his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016) 168–92. King (2010a): D. King, The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (Leiden: Brill). King (2010b): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91. King (2011): D. King, ‘Origenism in Sixth Century Syria: The Case of a Syriac Manuscript of Pagan Philosophy’, in: A. Fürst (ed.), Origenes und sein Erbe in Orient und Okzident (Münster: Aschendorff) 179–212. King (2013): D. King, ‘Why Were the Syrians Interested in Greek Philosophy?’, in: P. Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 61–82. King (2015): D. King, ‘Logic in the Service of Ancient Eastern Christianity: An Exploration of Motives’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 97, 1–33. Lamoreaux (2016): see under Ḥunayn, Risāla. Lyons (1982): M.C. Lyons (ed.), Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica: The Arabic Version (Cambridge: Pembroke Arabic Texts). Margoliouth (1899): G. Margoliouth, Descriptive List of Syriac and Karshuni MSS in the British Museum Acquired since 1873 (London: British Museum). McCollum (2011): A. McCollum, ‘Sergius of Reshaina as Translator: the Case of the De mundo’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 165–78. Meyerhof (1926): M. Meyerhof, ‘New Light on Ḥunain Ibn Isḥāq and his Period’, Isis 8, 685–724. Mingana (1933): A. Mingana, Catalogue of the Mingana Collection of Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Payne Smith (1864): R. Payne Smith, Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae pars sexta, codices syriacos, carshunicos, mendaeos complectens (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pellat (1951): C. Pellat, Le livre des avares de Ǧāḥiẓ (Paris: Maisonneuve). Peters (1968a): F.E. Peters, Aristoteles Arabus (Leiden: Brill).

160

S Y R I A C T R A N S L AT I O N S O F Ḥ U N AY N I B N I S Ḥ Ā Q

Peters (1968b): F.E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs (New York: New York University Press). Reinink (2003): G.J. Reinink, ‘Theology and Medicine in Jundishapur’, in: A.A. MacDonald et al. (eds.), Learned Antiquity: Scholarship and Society in the Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West (Leuven: Peeters) 163–74. Strohmaier (1981): G. Strohmaier, ‘Galen in Arabic: Prospects and Projects’, in: V. Nutton (ed.), Galen: Problems and Prospects (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine) 187–96. Strohmaier (1991): G. Strohmaier, ‘Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq: An Arab Scholar Translating into Syriac’, Aram 3, 163–70. Strohmaier (1994): ‘Der syrische und der arabische Galen’, in: W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II. 37, 2 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) 1987–2017. Stroumsa (2013): S. Stroumsa, ‘Philosophy as Wisdom: On the Christians’ Role in the Translation of Philosophical Material into Arabic’, in: H. Ben-Shammai, Sh.Shaked, S. Stroumsa (eds.), Exchange and Transmission across Cultural Boundaries: Philosophy, Mysticism and Science in the Mediterranean World (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities) 276–93. Tarán and Gutas (2012): L. Tarán and D. Gutas, Aristotle: Poetics (Leiden: Brill). Timothy, ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy, epp. 43, 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Ullmann (1970): M. Ullmann, Die Medizin im Islam (Leiden: Brill). Walzer (1962): R. Walzer, Greek Into Arabic (Oxford: Cassirer). Wartelle (1963): A. Wartelle, Inventaire des manuscripts grecs d’Aristote et de ses commentateurs (Paris: Les Belles Lettres). Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Watts (2011): E.J. Watts, ‘Translating the Personal Aspect of Late Platonism in the Commentary Tradition’, in: J. Lössl and J.W. Watt (eds.), Interpreting the Bible and Aristotle in Late Antiquity (Farnham: Ashgate) 137–50. Wood (2013): P. Wood, The Chronicle of Seert (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wright (1870–2): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, I–III (London: British Museum). Wright-Cook (1901): W. Wright and S.A. Cook, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, I–II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

161

8 GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES1

Greek cultural influence had been felt in Syria and Mesopotamia long before the rise of Syriac literature, and even in some of its earliest products some such influence could be at work. It was, however, especially in the period from the fifth or sixth century CE through to the ninth or tenth that the Greek impact was most significant, not only through the large number of translations made in that time, but also through the teaching and writing of Syrians who knew Greek and appropriated ideas from their reading of Greek texts. In that period the municipal school system of the Roman Empire which had sustained that culture was no longer in effect, but the monastic schools of the churches served to some degree as a replacement in the Syriac-speaking area, and some of them, among which the Syrian Orthodox monastic school of Qenneshre was especially prominent, preserved to some extent the form of the classical Greek educational curriculum, including the teaching of the Greek language. Grammar and elementary rhetoric constituted the basis of that system, with advanced rhetoric, philosophy, law, and medicine as higher education specialities available at selected major centres. By the turn of the sixth century, philosophy was limited to Athens and Alexandria, and the former was closed, or at least severely disrupted, by Justinian in 529. Rhetoric and philosophy are therefore the two subjects within higher education in the Greek pattern which may be thought likely to have had some influence on Syrians who had had some contact with that system and were involved in controversial matters. The only known Syriac text on rhetorical theory is that by Antony of Tagrit and belongs to the ninth century, thus close to the end of the period in which we are interested. Given the singularity and late date (within that period) of the work, the question thus arises as to whether there was any instruction in rhetoric at an earlier time and, if so, how widespread it was. While tracing a pre-history in Syriac of the material in Antony’s work is necessarily speculative, there are grounds to think that it embodies some earlier tradition.2 A reference to expertise in rhetoric possessed by the father of John Bar Aphtonia, the founder of Qenneshre, in an account of John’s life3 and, as shortly to be mentioned, the rhetorical character of the account itself also give one reason to think that there was indeed some instruction in classical rhetoric in those Syriac locations open to Greek cultural influence. 163

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Rhetorical theory, on the basis of a division established by Aristotle, classified speeches as forensic (judgement of the past), deliberative (advice for the future), or epideictic (praise or blame of a present or past figure).4 With the political changes in imperial times, it was the last of these which had by far the greatest practical usage in late antiquity, and it is therefore not surprising that Antony’s treatise embodies a significant amount of Greek epideictic theory, but virtually none of the elaborate but seemingly little used techniques of the other two species.5 While judicial and deliberative rhetoric are more naturally associated with disputation than epideictic, epideictic can also be significant in a controversy if the person to be praised or blamed clearly belongs to one party to a dispute. Since ‘the relation between [rhetorical] teaching and practice is less close than is sometime thought’, sensitivities to the concrete situation being of greater importance than the rigid application of rules and formulae,6 identifying the impact of rhetorical instruction on a speech or literary piece is not always straightforward or uncontested, but cases have been adduced in which such an impact has been proposed.

The impact of Greek rhetoric on Syriac texts concerning controversies Epideictic rhetoric Syriac speeches (mēmrē) for which an influence from Greek epideictic has been argued have as their subjects three controversial figures actively involved in the Christological disputes around the turn of the sixth century. John Bar Aphtonia (died 537) is known as the leader of those who left the monastery of St. Thomas at Seleucia Pieria during the persecution of non-Chalcedonian monasteries and founded the famous monastery of Qenneshre. As mentioned earlier, his father is said to have taught rhetoric in Edessa, according to the panegyric written about him by a monk of Qenneshre, and he himself appears to have written only in Greek. The structure and themes of the panegyric accord closely with the prescriptions for a Greek epideictic speech, and in praising the virtues and actions of John, the author was effectively sending out a message of encouragement to the members of the monastery (and perhaps others) to hold fast to their miaphysite convictions against the Chalcedonians.7 At a much later date (thirteenth century), the vigorous miaphysite theologian and controversialist Philoxenus of Mabbug (died 523) was celebrated in a Syriac panegyric by Eli of Qartamin.8 Although this panegyric was composed at a time when the living influence of the Greek-speaking world upon the Syriac was long past, the panegyric still conforms closely to the prescriptions of epideictic theory. The treatise by Antony of Tagrit and the models provided by the homilies (in Syriac translation) of Gregory of Nazianzus are means by which these ancient rhetorical practices could have survived so long in Syriac.9 The pattern of Greek epideictic theory is also clearly visible in the panegyric of Severus of Antioch (died 538) composed by George of the Arabs (died 724). George was a capable reader of Greek (and a translator and commentator on Aristotle) who could 164

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

well have had access to Greek handbooks of rhetoric even if none existed in Syriac in his day. In George’s Memra on Severus of Antioch we observe the standard topoi of a Greek epideictic speech: proemium, parentage, native city, education, life choice, actions, consolation (for a deceased person), comparisons, and epilogue.10 While in rhetorical form a speech of praise with Severus as its subject, it is clearly a proclamation of miaphysite faith. To his ‘brothers (called upon to) help with (their) prayers’, he proclaims that ‘the great weaponry by which all heresies are conquered you give in the name of Severus when you do battle’.11 Forensic rhetoric On the other side of the Christological controversies, the mēmrā of Narsai On the Three Nestorian Doctors12 has been analysed as a speech conforming to the pattern of classical forensic rhetoric, with proemium, narratio, propositio, probatio, refutatio, and peroratio.13 After an introduction setting the criticisms of his ‘defendants’ (Theodore, Diodore, and Nestorius) in the general context of the persecution of righteous men by Satan, the narration is an explanation of the origins of the Christological conflict. Narsai’s proposition is that his ‘defendants’ are oppressed just men, their persecutors heretics, while the proof is that each of them fought against heretics: Diodore against Arians and Eunomians; Theodore against the same heretics as well as Doumarites, disciples of Paul of Samosata, and also pagan idolaters; and Nestorius, whom he associates as closely as possible with the other two, against some unnamed heresies in Byzantium. The refutation consists in showing that Cyril of Alexandria’s objections to them were motivated by jealousy, and as they were condemned in their absence, their condemnation is invalid. The peroratio recapitulates his arguments and offers words of praise to Theodore, identifying himself as a pupil in the school of Theodore. Rhetorical touches are evident throughout the piece, including judicious use of ethopoiia. Deliberative rhetoric The claim that an example of the third species of rhetoric, the deliberative, can be found in Syriac has been made with respect to the earlier Liber Graduum.14 This work largely devoted to the ascetic life clearly does not fall within the category of ‘controversies’ as easily as those dealing with the Christological disputes, but if the division central to it between two levels of Christians, the ‘upright’ and the ‘perfect’, and two levels of commandments, the ‘lesser’ and the ‘greater’, can be categorised as controversial, a brief reference to it may be in order here. The treatise as a whole can be considered an exhortation to aim for perfection, and not to choose the easier path of ‘uprightness’, while the frequent mention of a ‘city’, whether the visible city or the city of the saints,15 could well be an indication that the author sees a parallel between his exhortation and the traditional role of deliberative rhetoric in the civic assembly. 165

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Particularly significant is the nineteenth discourse, ‘On the Distinction ( puršānā) of the Way of Perfection’. An analysis based on deliberative rhetoric envisages a proemium16 outlining the direct way to ‘the city of our Lord Jesus’ and the sideways for children and the weak, followed by a narratio17 explaining the greater and lesser commandments on each of the two ways, with only the direct way leading to the goal of perfection. The main section, probatio or argumentatio,18 provides concrete examples of the commandments and behaviour for each of the two ways, while the peroratio19 recapitulates the argument and returns to the point that the heavenly city can be reached only by the perfect.20

Philosophy and Syriac controversies In contrast to the situation with rhetoric, where the treatise of Antony of Tagrit is the only known Syriac work on the subject, there is no doubt that from the time of Sergius of Reshaina (died536) logic, particularly Aristotelian logic, was a field of study in Syriac. Several Syriac texts on the subject are still extant, as are translations of some of Aristotle’s logical treatises, and more were undoubtedly translated in pre-Abbasid times than those which have survived.21 The question which concerns us here is what purpose these Syrians had in mind when studying the subject, and what applications they envisaged for it. It has been widely assumed that logic was of interest to them primarily as a tool of Christological controversy, as a weapon therefore to be used by West and East Syrians against one another, and Chalcedonians, in their arguments over the single or dual nature of Christ. It has been pointed out, however, that none of the extant Syriac works on the subject gives any indication that it is being studied for this reason, or indeed makes any link between it and the Christological controversies raging at the time.22 Before the significance of Greek philosophy for Syriac controversies can be assessed, it therefore seems pertinent to ask, why did they study philosophy?

Non-polemical aims in the study of philosophy In the earliest Syriac commentary on Aristotle, Sergius’ commentary on the Categories, the writer states that in the theoretical part of philosophy ‘logic is what enables us never to embrace falsehood as truth or to suppose about truth that it is falsehood’. Similarly in the practical part, it is the instrument by which we may separate good from evil.23 Sergius therefore conceived logic, like his (pagan) masters at the School of Alexandria, to be a general instrument (organon), not one for a particular purpose. However, like his masters he imagined Aristotle creating this instrument especially for the purpose of discerning truth in practical and theoretical philosophy, the latter of which comprised physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. There was no specific Christological dimension to his interest in logic. He certainly believed, as he stated at the end of this commentary, that without logic not only medicine and philosophy but also the Scriptures could not be properly understood,24 but this was not connected to the Christological disputes 166

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

of his day, in which he does not appear to have been greatly interested, but to the ascent to knowledge of the divine, a Christian version of the pagan Neoplatonic ascent to the One.25 Neither in Sergius, nor in the other two notable Syriac writers of the sixth century on logic, Proba and Paul the Persian, is there any clear link between their interest in logic and the Christological controversies.26 The situation is the same when we look at the principal Syriac Aristotelians of the seventh century, those connected at some point in their careers to the monastery of Qenneshre. In his treatise on the syllogisms of the Prior Analytics (to I.7), Severus Sebokht ended with the statement that the student should know that this book (the Analytics) does not exist for itself. Preceded by the Categories and De interpretatione, it is intended to lead up to the Apodeictics (Posterior Analytics), the fulfilment of logic. But logic also does not exist for itself, but is the instrument of the whole of philosophy, which itself ‘according to a fine Platonic word or definition, is assimilation to God according to what is possible for man’.27 The same conception of philosophy is found in the prolegomena to the Categories in the commentaries of George, bishop of the Arabs. Answering one of the standard introductory questions (question number four), ‘What is the end of the Aristotelian philosophy?’, he replied that it is ‘to know the one principal, cause, and creator of all’.28 George was here following the Greek commentary tradition, Philoponus in particular,29 but it is incredible to suppose that if he thought the end of philosophy was to gain clarity in Christological disputation, he would have given the answer he did. On the contrary, it is clear that the principal Syriac writers on Aristotelian philosophy from Sergius to George (died 724) shared the same conception of logic and philosophy – albeit of course Christianised – as the Greek philosophers of late antiquity, pagan and Christian.30

The polemical application of philosophy While defence of a contested theological or Christological position was therefore not the motivation for the serious study of philosophy among pre-Abbasid Syrians, that does not necessarily imply that the logical techniques so acquired could never be secondarily employed in such a way. There is, however, little evidence that they were so deployed by the major philosophical writers. The most important text which explicitly touches on the relationship of philosophy and theology is probably Jacob of Edessa’s Encheiridion.31 This considers the definition and meaning of six terms: nature, substance, hypostasis, essence, person, and species. While his discussion of ‘nature’, the definitions of which also require the elucidation of ‘substance’, is important in revealing his knowledge of the Metaphysics of Aristotle,32 that on ‘substance’ (and ‘species’) is significant for the attention he draws to the different usages of the logicians and the Church Fathers.33 While the former use it to refer to a primary (individual) substance, thus equivalent to ‘hypostasis’, for the latter it signifies a generic universal substance.34 It might be thought therefore that the purpose of the treatise was to prove the miaphysite doctrine of a single nature, on the grounds that two natures or substances must imply 167

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

two hypostases, but Jacob never explicitly identified this as his aim. A more cautious interpretation would be that he believed some errors and disagreements had arisen in the church as a result of different understandings of Greek philosophical terms, the implication being that the difference between the correct usages of the terms in philosophy and (Christian) theology needed to be recognised.35 When we turn to the extant presentations of controversial issues involving Syrians of the rival confessions, whether presented in narratives or as problems raised in correspondence, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Aristotelian logic scarcely played any role in them. One might have expected it to do so when an Aristotelian scholar such as George of the Arabs was a participant, but to judge by the problems directed to him in the three letters of his extant correspondence devoted to Christology, the problems themselves were so lacking in logical subtlety that Aristotelian logic could hardly have been expected to figure in his responses, which generally consisted of showing that by the substitution of different terms the problem could be directed back against the objector.36 From time to time, however, in the course of this correspondence, George used his knowledge of Aristotle to make an appropriate point.37 The most celebrated public disputant on Christological controversy among the miaphysites was Simeon of Beth Arsham, but from the account of his public disputation one cannot conclude that he had received any significant training in Aristotelian logic.38 In these disputes the real thrust of the debate was not the compatibility of the protagonist’s position with philosophical logic or the construction of a valid syllogistic argument, but rather the statements of the Scriptures and the Church Fathers.39 The situation among the East Syrians seems to be analogous. For example, in one of the most significant disputations before the Shah, that reportedly instigated by Gabriel of Sinjar between the martyr George and the miaphysites, the outcome turned, or so at least it is presented in Babai’s Life of George, on the consistency of the disputant’s position with a Confession of Faith drawn up by the bishops.40 In the East Syrian sphere, however, another disputation presented in a martyr’s legend, that of Mar Qardagh to be mentioned further later, did involve a philosophical issue and a question between pagans and Christians on cosmology, though not debated in any way involving Aristotelian logic.41 It was in the realm of controversy between Christians and others, rather than inner-Christian polemic, that in the Abbasid era resort to philosophy became more significant. The consistency of a doctrinal position with statements of the Church Fathers or Confessions of Faith was naturally ineffective in debate with Muslims, but the growing interest in philosophy among the latter provided a common basis for argument between members of the two communities. Whether or not the emergence of Muslim kalām (dialectical theology) owed something to earlier Greek or Syriac disputations, it contributed to the increasing usage of philosophy by Christians in debate with Muslims. Theodore Bar Kōnī’s Scholion42 represents something of a transition between the earlier form of controversy and the more systematic and rationally grounded form that increasingly prevailed in the course of the early Abbasid period. On the face of it the work appears to be 168

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

a commentary on the Old and New Testaments cast in the traditional form of questions and answers, but the tenth chapter (out of eleven) is an apology for Christianity against Islam. The discussion throughout the work of philosophical and cosmological questions, and the recourse to ‘outside’ authorities like Aristotle, the Platonists, and the physicians – even though, as may be expected from an East Syrian biblical exegete, their views are often rejected in favour of those of Theodore of Mopsuestia – may be part of the effort to meet Muslim challenges to East Syrian Christianity.43 The disputation between Patriarch Timothy I and the caliph al-Mahdī,44 with which the latter’s commission to Timothy for an Arabic translation of Aristotle’s Topics45 is often and not unreasonably thought to be connected, appears to mark a further stage in the growing importance of philosophy for religious dialogue and controversy. The event is recorded in a ‘protocol of memory’ (‘Gedächtnisprotokoll’) by Timothy, and has been dismissed by some as a literary fiction, but its reality seems more probable than otherwise, even if Timothy’s account cannot be naively assumed to be a fully accurate and unbiased record of the proceedings. At around the same time the patriarch also had a discussion at the caliphal court with a Muslim who claimed, according to Timothy, to be a devotee of Aristotelian philosophy.46 From the text of Timothy’s letter, however, it appears that in reality his protagonist was a mutakallim, a practitioner of Muslim kalām, and that it was Timothy himself who could claim to be the real Aristotelian.47 The disputation of the patriarch and the caliph as laid out in Timothy’s ‘protocol’ is structured in a rational manner,48 but if al-Mahdī had the Topics translated expressly for this event, one is hard put to find any such influence on the course of the debate as reported here. The recent editor of the disputation has identified only a small number of possible echoes of Aristotle: three of the Categories, two of the Metaphysics, and one of the Politics.49 The form of Timothy’s text was probably not inspired by a philosophical model, but by Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho.50 Al-Mahdī’s commission nevertheless represents an important step in the growing importance of philosophy in such controversies. As yet little of Aristotle was known in Arabic, and the weight of philosophical ‘armour’ was still heavily on the Syriac Christian side. In asking for an Arabic version of the Topics, the caliph was evidently not proposing to embark on a study of the full Organon; had that been his intention, he would have needed to read the Categories to the Posterior Analytics before looking at the Topics. The reason he asked for this particular treatise was therefore presumably that he had been informed it was a valuable tool in controversy. In Timothy’s time even the Christians in Baghdad were still marshalling there the legacy of the earlier Syriac Aristotelians, as the patriarch’s efforts to have the resources of the monasteries in the region of Mosul available in Baghdad indicate. His letters give the impression that in terms of these resources the East Syrian church had just arrived at its new headquarters, but if these still resembled ‘a few small offices somewhere in a multi-storey building of one of the newly founded administration centres of the twentieth century’,51 Timothy’s 169

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

efforts to build up these resources will doubtless have contributed to the vigorous interest of Syrians there in philosophy in the following years. While Timothy’s ‘protocol’ of his disputation with al-Mahdī is in Syriac, the debate itself will have been in Arabic, and over the course of time Arabic became ever more important for Christians in controversy. It was in Arabic therefore that the most prolific philosophical writer on controversial theological matters, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, composed his treatises, although his background was Syriac.52 Yaḥyā, a miaphysite Christian, wrote widely on both philosophy and Christian theology.53 The manuscript tradition of his works includes two large polemical treatises, one with a Muslim (al-Warrāq), the other with a Muslim and East Syrian (al-Miṣrī and al-Qāsim, behind the latter of which there was a group of anonymous but real East Syrian theologians who had taken issue with Yaḥyā). These are, however, compilations of smaller pieces, from which can be discerned sixteen works on the incarnation.54 His defence of the miaphysite doctrine of the incarnation only rarely draws on biblical or patristic citations, but depends primarily on appeals to reason and sense experience. What had been slowly germinating in Syriac finally therefore came to fruition in Arabic: philosophical expertise in defence of a particular theological doctrine.55 John Philoponus If Yaḥyā was therefore the first in a Semitic language to deploy philosophy extensively in the defence of Christian doctrine, it is nevertheless Syriac literature, and apart from a few fragments only Syriac literature, which has preserved, wholly or partially, the miaphysite writings of the only major theological writer of late antiquity steeped in and thoroughly conversant with Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy. The earliest of John Philoponus’ interventions in the Christological controversies is probably his Diaitētēs, extant in Greek only in fragments, but complete in Syriac.56 The Syriac version was certainly made before c. 700 CE, possibly many decades previously, possibly even during the sixth century when it could undoubtedly have provided a powerful weapon – at a higher level than that of the public disputations – in the armoury of miaphysites during the Christological controversies of that period.57 The determinative philosophical background here is not primarily that of Aristotelian logic, but rather Aristotelian physics. Since miaphysite Christology was founded on the belief that the incarnate Christ was a single nature which retained the properties of both humanity and divinity without them being numerically definable as two distinct parts of a whole, the issue could in principle be ‘abstracted’ from the concrete Christological controversy into a recognised philosophical topic, that of the parts and the whole (‘mereology’). This is what Philoponus did, and both his philosophical Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts and the Diaitētēs are preserved, and by the look of it preserved together, in the Syriac manuscript tradition.58 A reader who read only the former outside the context of the Christological controversies would not necessarily have jumped to the conclusion that the writer also thought of himself as a theologian, 170

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

but on the contrary could have recognised here a philosophical treatise, indebted particularly to Aristotle’s Physics and De gen. et corr., allowing the preservation of the qualities of the initial ‘ingredients’ of a true unitary combination through the existence in it of those initial ingredients ‘in potentiality’. In the Diaitētēs therefore, in which the philosophical doctrines of whole and parts, actuality and potentiality, are applied to the Christological controversy, the Chalcedonian formula of ‘in two natures’ is generally rejected in favour of the miaphysite ‘out of two natures’.59 Philoponus also wrote a more explicit attack on Chalcedon, Four Tmēmata against Chalcedon, which survives only through a summary in Michael the Syrian, in which he launches a philosophical critique of the Chalcedonian ‘one hypostasis, two natures’.60 Michael (or his source) found the argument hard to follow and ended by requesting any reader skilled in logic to pray for the poor excerptor who had done his best.61 A number of other interventions of Philoponus in the Christological controversies are again preserved fragmentarily only in Syriac.62 The same applies to his treatise On the Trinity, in which his philosophical conviction that universals are only mental concepts led him to argue against the concept of a generic godhead distinguishable from the hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit.63 While not himself the originator of Tritheism, the apparent similarity between this treatise (together with some other works) and Tritheism led to his denunciation at the council of Constantinople of 680–81,64 but did not affect the transmission of his works in Syriac to the same degree as it did in Greek. On the Greek side, however, his condemnation illustrates how little was the force of philosophical logic when up against a well-established doctrine of the church.65

On the eternity of the world Aristotelian physics was also an interest of Philoponus’ (probably elder) contemporary in Alexandria, Sergius of Reshaina. Among his works is a treatise entitled On the Causes of the Universe According to the View of Aristotle the Philosopher, That It Is a Sphere.66 In reality it is not an independent work but a carefully adapted Syriac version of a treatise by Alexander of Aphrodisias, which is not extant in Greek but has survived in an Arabic version.67 At first sight this may not seem to be a work with any bearing on Syriac controversies, but in fact it touches on the most contentious controversy between pagans and Christians in the philosophical environment of Alexandria, with its echoes in the intellectual environment elsewhere. That was the issue of the eternity of the world and the nature of the heavens, in which a literal reading of the Bible was at odds with virtually the entire philosophical and scientific consensus of the time. It is no accident that in Zacharias’ Ammonius the philosophy master of that name is said to have challenged the Christian students in the course of a lecture on Aristotle’s Physics on their refusal to consider the universe to be coeternal with the Good.68 While Aristotle’s logic was not considered a threat to their faith by philosophically inclined Christians, the cosmological views embedded in his Physics and De caelo were a different matter. 171

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Sergius’ modification of Alexander’s original text reflects the controversies over cosmology between Christians and pagans in Alexandria around the turn of the sixth century. Against the universally held belief among pagan philosophers concerning the divinity and ungenerated nature of the heavenly bodies, Sergius’ version consistently refuses to use the attributes ‘divine’ or ‘ungenerated’ in relation to them, utilising terms such as ‘revolving’, ‘pure’, or ‘superior’. He Christianises the Peripatetic First Cause by equating it with the ‘Creator of All’. And while anxious not to dispute the validity of the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the circular motion engendered by the First Mover, he refrains from affirming that the movements of the actual heavenly bodies are coeternal with the Creator.69 Not only, however, does Sergius’ treatise in effect touch on a controversy between pagan philosophy and Christian belief, it also reflected a controversy within Christianity itself between those willing to take into their cosmology as much of the pagan philosophical legacy as they could, and those who rejected it in principle and endeavoured to construct a cosmology based on a literal interpretation of a multitude of passages in the Bible. This ‘Antiochene’ exegesis, inspired especially by Theodore of Mopsuestia, led to the cosmological model of a flat earth and a vaulted heaven and was highly influential among Christian writers both at that and subsequent times.70 In affirming the spherical nature of the universe and the revolving heavenly bodies, but in modifying some of Alexander’s statements, Sergius’ treatise effectively engaged in controversy on two fronts, the pagan philosophical and the biblicist Christian. Sergius’ mode of controversy on these issues can be characterised as mild in comparison with that of Philoponus, although Philoponus did not reach his most pronounced views straightaway. His rejection of important elements of Aristotelian science emerges already in his early Commentary on the Physics, but epochal in natural philosophy as was his replacement of Aristotle’s idea of projectile motion via a medium by his theory of impressed force, when confined to terrestrial motion it did not involve the radical reconstruction of cosmological thought evident in his later views. The major division between the ‘early’ and ‘later’ Philoponus is usually put at 529 CE, the date of the appearance of his De aeternitate mundi contra Proclum. The views of the early Philoponus on cosmological issues appear to be closely aligned to those we find in Sergius. These reflect those held in the school of Ammonius, that Plato and Aristotle were in fundamental accord, and that the paradeigmata of Plato’s Timaeus were ideas (logoi) within (not external to) the Intellect, itself both an efficient and final cause of the universe.71 These ideas, particularly as expressed in Ammonius’ Commentary on the Isagoge, lie behind Sergius’ discussion of Peripatetic and Academic views on genera and species in his commentary on the Categories.72 Inasmuch as the views of Sergius and the early Philoponus are distinguished from those of the pagan masters on account of their Christianity, they are limited to collapsing the distinction between the One and the Intellect (or better perhaps, collapsing it more decisively than did Ammonius and Asclepius)73 and making more explicit that he is the Creator.74 The later Philoponus, in his writings beginning with the Contra Proclum, is significantly different. He mounts a sustained criticism of the idea of the eternity 172

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

of the world in the Contra Proclum and the subsequent Contra Aristotelem, and in his lengthy philosophical commentary on the biblical Hexaemeron, conventionally designated the De opificio mundi,75 he presented the thesis that the temporal creation of the world as described by ‘Moses’ was consistent with the Ptolemaic model of the universe, even though it was not Moses’ intention to teach natural philosophy, but to lead men to the knowledge of God. In the same work he also argues against what he considers the absurd biblicist flat-earth cosmology (probably with the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes particularly in mind), and considers that Moses’ account of creation inspired that of Plato, which, contrary to the prevailing philosophical exegesis of the Timaeus, has to be interpreted not as teaching a beginningless creation, but as one beginning in time. Aristotle, he claims, was the one who introduced the new and erroneous theory of the eternity of the world.76 Philoponus’ literary output is usually divided between philosophical and theological treatises, and it is commonly assumed that while the latter (as evidenced by Syriac manuscripts) were known among the Syrians from an early date, the former did not have any influence until their translation into Arabic in the ninth century.77 The close association (indicated earlier) between the Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts and the Diaitētēs, however, renders both these assumptions doubtful. Not only are the arguments of these two treatises closely connected, they are both extant (indeed only fully extant) in Syriac. Any modern division of the treatises into the philosophical and theological should therefore not be considered as limiting connections between them that could have been made in late antiquity or in the Syriac sphere.78 A seventh century Syriac manuscript, BL Add. 17,214, consisting of extracts from patristic theologians, contains two brief citations, one after the other, from the Contra Aristotelem and the De opificio mundi.79 Although they are followed by a third brief extract from a different work, Against Andrew the Arian, the collocation of passages from the two philosophical-cosmological treatises is likely to be significant.80 From these brief citations it is impossible to know how much was translated, but they nevertheless indicate that the two works were known in Graeco-Syriac circles of the period, and may also have been considered to be closely connected. The authors cited in the manuscript are mostly Greek, but the fact that Ephraim and Philoxenus of Mabbug are among them shows that the catena itself, at least in its final form, is of Syriac provenance, and particularly (from the inclusion of Philoxenus) of miaphysite Syriac provenance. As The Whole and the Parts and the Diaitētēs apparently formed a pair in the miaphysite (Graeco-)Syriac tradition, so a similar pairing could have been envisaged in the case of the Contra Aristotelem and the De opificio mundi, the former providing a philosophical rationale for rejecting the authority of Aristotle’s physical treatises, the latter providing information on the physical world derived from natural philosophy, but based on the principle of creation in time and integrated into the biblical account of creation.81 The fact that much of the Contra Aristotelem was known to Arabic authors makes it quite likely that it was similarly well known to philosophically minded Syrians, if not 173

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

extensively in Syriac, at any rate in Greek and available to Syrians familiar with the language.82 By contrast, in Abbasid Baghdad neither Muslim Arabic philosophers nor Christians who wished to engage with them would have had much interest in the De opificio mundi, based as it was on the biblical Genesis. The Contra Aristotelem is extant only in fragments, mostly in Greek (from Simplicius’ commentaries on the Physics and the De caelo) but with four in Arabic and the single Syriac fragment mentioned earlier. According to the current best estimate,83 these amount to about 30 percent of the original. That the work was known in the Syriac sphere, even though only one Syriac fragment (from Book VIII) is extant and it deals with eschatology rather than creation, shows that the controversy over the eternity of the world was an issue there also, as one would expect to be the case among philosophically inclined Syrians conversant with the Alexandrian tradition.84 For those who admired Aristotle, it could hardly be otherwise. Adherence to Christianity did not necessarily imply abandonment of the eternalist doctrine,85 and we have seen that Sergius avoided taking outright issue with it. One can imagine that among Syriac Aristotelians the question was debated during the sixth century, but by early in that following, the result was clear: the literal interpretation of the biblical Genesis as the beginning of creation was secure even among Syriac philosophers, for the arguments of Philoponus in the Contra Aristotelem and the De opificio mundi had vindicated it.

Creation in the Bible and according to the philosophers This reconstruction offers a solution to a well-known problem in the history of pre-Abbasid Syriac Aristotelianism. At the beginning of this tradition, Sergius indicated his intention to comment on the entire Aristotelian school corpus from the logic to the metaphysics,86 but when we next meet Syrians with a comparably wide vision of the curriculum, namely the scholars of Qenneshre from Severus Sebokht to George of the Arabs, only the logic and the metaphysics apparently remain.87 It is easy to understand why Christians might have preferred to study ethics from biblical and patristic writings, and at Qenneshre mathematics (predominantly astronomy) was studied, as at Alexandria, not from Aristotle, from whom no mathematical texts were known, but from recognised authorities in the subject such as Ptolemy and Theon.88 What is most striking, however, about the Aristotelian studies of the Qenneshre scholars is the contrast between their enthusiasm for the Organon and their apparent complete lack of interest in the physical treatises. Aristotle the logician was placed on a pedestal, but Aristotle the natural philosopher seemingly completely ignored. One can imagine that in the intervening years between Sergius and Severus Sebokht there was a lively controversy over which parts of the Aristotelian school corpus were fit to be the subject of continuing study. It is not that Hellenophilic Syrians were uninterested in natural philosophy; the Hexaemeron of Jacob of Edessa proves otherwise, and George of the Arabs clearly states the traditional view that the curriculum proceeds from logic to metaphysics by way of physics and mathematics.89 But whether or not 174

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Jacob’s Hexaemeron was directly influenced at points by Philoponus’ De opificio mundi, together with the Contra Aristotelem, it had established that natural philosophy could be set forth by an Aristotelian logician within the framework of Genesis, and that Aristotle’s own physics was vitiated by his erroneous theory of the eternity of the world and the divinity and fifth element of the heavens. In the view of the Philoponus of the De opificio mundi, the motion of the heavenly bodies was caused by God’s impetus (impressed force) and did not imply that they were rational beings with a soul. The idea that these bodies are rational and ensouled was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 CE, where they are associated with Origenism, but the most striking case of this controversy in Syriac comes from the East Syrian sphere. In the anonymous late sixth or seventh century Legend of Mar Qardagh, there is a narrative of a disputation between Qardagh, still at that point a Sasanian marzbān unconverted to Christianity, and a Christian monk ‘Abdīšō’, in the course of which there arises the issue of the eternity of the heavenly bodies.90 Worship of the celestial luminaries on the ground of their eternity is the point of dispute between the monk and the marzbān. The latter’s reasons for believing them to be eternal and ungenerated are entirely consistent with those advanced in late antique philosophy: ‘From their constant course, and because of the immutability of their nature, and from the fact that they endure by the strength of their nature and are not changed like other things, and are set on high above’. The monk replies that ensouled beings in the perceptible world who move according to their own volition grow weary, while everything that does not live is set in motion by something else. As ‘a stone or an arrow or a cart’ is set in motion by us, the celestial bodies, which do not grow weary, are moved by God.91 The legends of the martyrs are a surprising place to find allusions and echoes of the philosophers’ dispute over the eternity of the world, but the arguments of the two protagonists in this legend are a fair reflection of the controversy between late antique consensus philosophy and Philoponus, formulated, to be sure, not in the precise language of the Alexandrians but in what has been termed a ‘philosophical koine’.92 Even more surprising is that ‘Abdīšō’’s example of ‘a stone or an arrow or a cart’ for terrestrial projectile motion is reminiscent of Philoponus’ reference to an arrow and a stone in his exposition of his anti-Aristotelian theory of projectile motion in his Commentary on the Physics.93 There is no evidence of a Syriac translation of this commentary, but there is no reason to deny that, as with his commentary on the Categories, even if it was never translated into Syriac, it could have been known among those Syrians with an interest in such matters and the requisite linguistic attainment.94 The Hexaemeron of Jacob of Edessa is the major extant work on natural philosophy from the West Syrians. While it undoubtedly makes much use of Greek sources, these are generally, with the exception of Ptolemy and possibly the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo, difficult to pinpoint exactly.95 Eternalist ideas may still have been current in the environment of Jacob’s envisaged readership, for he puts some emphasis on asserting that the perceptible creation consists of 175

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

four elements, and that it came into being through the will of the Creator in the beginning only ‘from the moment it was right to create’, after he had previously ‘held back and restrained the sea of his goodness’.96 In a section which appears to be directed principally against astrology, but which may also take in an attack on consensus late antique philosophical ideas concerning the divinity of the heavenly bodies, he asserts that ‘they are not gods, nor living, rational, self-mastered or free-willed, nor do they possess the logos (meltā) of life, or govern the (sublunar)97 universe, as erring men among the Greeks and Chaldeans think about them, and call them gods, rulers of this world and of the things in it’.98 Jacob adapts the Ptolemaic system by placing the sun at the outermost layer, a symbol of God, making the movements of the planets dependent upon its movement and events on earth subservient to God.99 In relation to astrology we can again see a gradual shift between the Christianised late antique philosophy of Sergius and that of the Qenneshre Aristotelians. Sergius’ Memra on the Spiritual Life, his rendering of Alexander’s On the Principles of the Universe, and his translation of Galen’s On Critical Days all presuppose a ‘moderate’ astrology in which the heavenly bodies have an impact on sublunary events and astronomical knowledge can be put to use in science and medicine.100 Between Sergius and Jacob Syriac philosophical thinking moved more sharply against astrology, for which the primary cause was probably the rejection of the late antique view of the heavens by Philoponus. If among the pre-Abbasid Syrians connected with Qenneshre the physical treatises of Aristotle were not subject to detailed study on account of their eternalist teaching, but the Metaphysics held in esteem as the telos of the Aristotelian curriculum, the eternalist assertions in the latter101 must have been either rejected or interpreted in such a way as to avoid a conflict with Christian theology. How such an interpretation might have been fashioned has to be a matter of speculation on our part, as there is no direct evidence available to us. Possibly they knew of Philoponus’ own efforts to conceive of various modes of eternity,102 and these enabled them to consider divine eternity (as subject matter of the Metaphysics) differently from an infinite extension of time in the material world (the subject matter of the physical treatises). Even a biblical assertion about ‘the eternity of the world’ (Ecclesiastes 1,4 eis ton aiōna) could be set aside, by Philoponus, on the grounds that the book in question belonged more to ethics than to physics.103 The controversy over the eternity of the world continued into the Abbasid period, among both Muslim and Christian authors. The most important of the latter now wrote in Arabic, but they were bilingual, and their intellectual and religious background was Syriac.104 Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī was confronted in his anti-Nestorian controversy with the Muslim al-Miṣrī by the claim that if he followed Aristotle in everything, he must also accept his theory of the eternity of the world. Yaḥyā, however, declared that Aristotle was not his guide in matters to do with Christianity105 and claimed that authentic proofs had indicated that there had been a time when the world had not been created before the Creator made it.106 Thus although he was active in translating and commenting on the entire school corpus of Aristotle,107 he rejected the eternalist ideas present in it.108 176

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

While some Muslim authors, such as Yaḥyā’s protagonist, accepted that Aristotle taught the eternity of the world, the opinion of the author of the Harmony of Plato and Aristotle is not so clear.109 Al-Kindī’s On First Philosophy, while modelled on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, rejected the idea of an eternal world without ever explicitly arguing against Aristotle himself.110 Thus Syrians who engaged with Greek philosophy and had, from the time of the School of Alexandria, confronted this controversy passed it on to their Arabic successors.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Pensée grecque, controverses syriaques’, in: Flavia Ruani (éd.), Les controverses religieuses en syriaque. Études syriaques 13 (Paris: Geuthner, 2016) 349–80. ©2016, S.N. Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner S.A., Paris, translated and republished by permission of L’Association française ‘Société d’études syriaques’, Paris. 2 Watt (1994) 248–56. 3 History of John Bar Aphtonia 114 (text.), 123 (tr.). Cf. Chapter 11 in this volume, 217–18. 4 Aristotle, Rhetoric I 3. 5 Cf. preceding n. 2. 6 Russell and Wilson (1981) xix. 7 Cf. Watt (1999). 8 Eli of Qartamin, Memra on Philoxenus. 9 Cf. Watt (1989). 10 George, Memra on Severus of Antioch. On the epideictic topoi of the speech, see the introduction to the version (McVey [1993]) viii–xi. 11 Ibid., ed. McVey 2–3, tr. McVey 2. 12 Narsai, On the Three Nestorian Doctors. 13 McVey (1983). 14 Suggested dates for the work range from the middle of the fourth century to c. 430. For the rhetorical analysis, see Böhlig (1987). 15 Cf. e.g. §1, ed. Kmosko cols. 445–50. 16 §§1–2, ed. Kmosko cols. 445–52. 17 §§3–8, ed. Kmosko cols. 451–68. 18 §§9–38, ed. Kmosko cols. 467–522, or §§9–33 with §§34–38 as a digressio. 19 §§39–40, ed. Kmosko cols. 521–6. 20 Böhlig (1987) 300–2. 21 Brock (1993). 22 King (2013) 61–8, (2015b) 6–14. 23 See Chapter 4 in this volume, 74–5. 24 British Library Add. MS. 14,658, fol. 60v-61r. The commentary is still unedited. To the wording described earlier, Sergius added the qualification ‘unless by his exalted manner of life someone receives divine power so that he has no need of human instruction’. Cf. Watt (2017) 189. 25 Chapter 4 in this volume, 81–2. Cf. Fiori (2014). 26 Cf. King (2013) 62–4, (2015b) 14–17. 27 Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, 111; Hugonnard-Roche (2016) 233. 28 Chapter 5 in this volume, 104–5. 29 Ibid. 106–8. 30 King (2015b) 6–10, 26–9. 31 Jacob of Edessa, Encheiridion.

177

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

32 Furlani (1921). 33 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2008) 219–22. 34 On substance: Encheiridion 228.21–233.21 (text), 242–5 (transl.); on species: 238. 22–239.14 (text), 249 (transl.). 35 Cf. King (2015b) 15. 36 Tannous (2008) 679–84. 37 King (2013) 73–4. See George, bishop of the Arabs, Letters, tr. Ryssel 105–6. George alluded to Aristotle’s division of discrete and continuous quantities (Categories VI 4b20–33) and maintained the illogicality of the dyophysite position which attempted to assert that duality, being a number, did not imply separation. 38 Tannous (2008) 684–6 (with a note on the parallel phenomenon in Greek). While these disputations (Greek or Syriac) may include compilations of syllogisms, they exhibit no intimate knowledge of Aristotelian logic. 39 King (2013) 68–78. 40 Reinink (1999). 41 Tannous (2013) shows how miaphysite leaders were concerned to establish or consolidate borders against rival Christian confessions, and documents the translations made from Greek in leading miaphysite circles, but I am not persuaded by his argument that the former motivated the latter. The miaphysite scholars of Qenneshre, like their Alexandrian predecessors (including Sergius of Reshaina) and Arabic successors, considered logic to be an instrument of philosophy, not sectarian theology, and as King (2013) shows, sectarian disputations generally had little to do with Aristotelian logic. Of course since logic was an instrument to separate truth from falsehood, it could be secondarily applied to many issues other than those in theoretical philosophy (physics, mathematics, metaphysics), and from time to time was so applied by those with the requisite knowledge, but other factors were more significant in most sectarian disputations, and sectarian theology was never identified by the Qenneshre scholars as the reason for studying logic. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2015) 55–6: ‘The study of logic formed part of a philosophical curriculum . . . considered to be part of the education of a learned person’, and ‘there was no precise delimitation on the utility of the syllogism’. 42 Butts (2011) with bibliography. 43 Griffith (1981), (1982). 44 Timothy, ep. 59. Unlike the previous editions of later Syriac and Arabic recensions, Heimgartner’s edition (2011) uses the oldest and fullest manuscript, Baghdad Chaldean Monastery 509. 45 See Timothy, ep. 43, ed. Heimgartner 65–6, tr. Heimgartner 47–9. 46 Timothy, ep. 40. 47 Griffith (2007) 105–15. 48 Heimgartner in Timothy, ep. 59 (version), introduction xxxvii-xxxviii. 49 Timothy, ep. 59 (version) 122, index s.v. Aristotle. 50 Heimgartner in Timothy, ep. 59 (version), introduction xxxiv-xxxvi; Heimgartner (2007) 46–8. 51 Heimgartner (2015) 185. Ibid. 180–1 on the accumulation of these resources in Baghdad, both patristic and philosophical. 52 Platti (1983) 21. 53 See the inventory of his works in Endress (1977). 54 Platti (1983) 54–75, with the questions of the opponents 91–9. 55 Platti (1983) 76–90. 56 Philoponus, Opuscula, ed., tr. Šanda 1–48, 35–88. Cf. Scholten (1995) 433 (nos. 25–7). 57 King (2015a) 178–81.

178

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

58 The Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts: Opuscula 81–94, 126–39; tr. King (2015a) 193–221. Cf. Scholten (1995) 433 (no. 29). 59 King (2015a) 169–78. Cf. Chadwick (2010) 87–9. 60 Michael the Syrian, Chronicle VIII 13, ed. Chabot IV, 218b-238c, tr. Chabot II, 92–121. 61 ‘To a brother who is expert in logical science and articulate in the approved arts, I mournfully appeal that when he reads (this), he prays for me for the sake of the crucified Jesus Christ’. Cf. Chadwick (2010) 90–1. 62 Chadwick (2010) 90–1; Scholten (1995) 433–4. 63 Cf. Sorabji (2015) 94–5, 135–8; Chapter 4 in this volume, 88 n. 110. 64 Chadwick (2010) 94–6. Cf. Scholten (1995) 434. 65 Cf. King (2015a) 178. 66 Sergius, On the Causes of the Universe. 67 Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Cosmos. 68 Zacharias, Ammonius, ed., tr. Colonna 98, 150–1. 69 King (2010) 167–70. 70 Scholten (1995) 47–51. 71 Cf. Verrycken (2010) 738–42. 72 Cf. Chapter 4 in this volume, 88–91. 73 Cf. Verrycken (1990) 208–15. 74 Cf. Hadot (1989) 103. 75 Philoponus, De opificio mundi. The Greek title is Exegetica of the Cosmogony of Moses. The title of the Syriac excerpt in BL Add. 17214 (see below) is The Book of Six Days. 76 Scholten (1995) 41–56, 200–2, 363–79, etc. 77 That Philoponus’ writings enjoyed subsequent ‘notoriety rather than authority’ because he had embraced the Tritheist faction and attacked the Alexandrian philosophical tradition (Zimmermann [2010] 167) needs to be qualified by the observation that among Syriac miaphysite theologians of the seventh to eighth centuries his reputation was surpassed only by that of Cyril and Severus, which caused his alleged Tritheism to be virtually ignored; cf. Baumstark (1922) 162, 259–60. 78 Scholten (1995) 431–3 places the De opificio mundi together with Contra Proclum and Contra Aristotelem under ‘Schriften zur Kosmologie und Ewigkeit der Welt’, the treatise On the Whole and the Parts together with the Diaitētēs under ‘Monophysitische Schriften’. 79 On the manuscript, cf. Wright (1870–2) II, 915–17. Cf. also Baumstark (1922) 162–3. 80 The title in the Syriac fragment is Against (luqbal) Aristotle, in Arabic according to Fihrist 254.26 The Book of the Refutation (al-radd) against (‘alā) Aristotle. BL Add. 17,214, fol. 72vb36–73ra19 (Contra Aristotelem) is translated in Wildberg (1987) 148, fragment 134; fol. 73ra19–29 is an accurate rendition of De opificio mundi I.16, ed. Reichardt 40.8–12, Scholten 146.20–3. The first fragment is headed ‘from chapter two of book (mēmrā) eight of Against Aristotle’, the second (correctly) ‘from chapter sixteen of book one of the Book (ktābā) of Six Days’. The author is designated John the Grammarian. The third extract is connected to the other two by the theme of the finite term of the world and its ‘deliverance from bondage to corruption’ (Ep. Rom. 8,21); cf. Van Roey (1979) 241–2. 81 Philoponus alludes to his anti-eternalist treatises at the outset of the De opificio mundi (ed. Reichardt 1–2, ed., tr. Scholten I, 72–5) and subsequently; cf. Scholten (1995) 72–6 (nos. 1, 6–10, 16–17). There is no trace in Syriac of the Contra Proclum, or of the other anti-eternalist works which have left an imprint in Arabic, listed in Scholten (1995) 431–3. It can be assumed, however, that the main arguments in the Contra Proclum against the eternity of the world were also presented in the Contra Aristotelem,

179

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

82

83 84

85 86 87 88

89 90 91

92 93 94 95

which, while evidently a lengthy treatise, is even in Greek extant (principally through Simplicius) only in fragments. Cf. Davidson (1969) on Arabic authors’ knowledge of the Contra Aristotelem. The four known Arabic fragments are in Wildberg (1987) 43–4, 77, 88, 89–90 (nos. 3, 62, 76, and 79), the solitary Greek fragment (aside from the arguments of Simplicius against it) in Wildberg (1987) 42 (no. 2). Wildberg (1987) 31. The work as a whole might have contained more theology than is evident in the fragments in Simplicius. This is the view of Wildberg (1987) 26–7, (2010) 239–42, where he notes that ‘the whole treatise may well have been truncated by philosophers who were not interested in Philoponus’ theological views’, while ‘Syrian Christians, on the other hand, were greatly interested in the monophysite theologian’. Theologians who were also philosophers were of course also interested in whether or not Aristotle was right in his views about the eternity or finitude of the cosmos both a parte ante and a parte post, and therefore had every reason to study both Books I–VI (on creation) and VII onwards (apparently on eschatology). It is the theological-eschatological aspect, however, which interested the compiler of the Syriac manuscript, in respect of the fragments both of Contra Aristotelem and De opificio mundi (where at I.16 Philoponus cites Romans 8,21), and of Against Andrew the Arian; cf. preceding n. 80. Cf. Sorabji (2010) 208–9. See Chapter 4 in this volume, 76. Cf. also on this issue Watt (2017) 181–92. Hugonnard-Roche (2014) 67–74; Villey (2014), (2015). In relation to the overall issue of the philosophical culture of the pre-Abbasid Hellenophile Syrians, it is worth highlighting two points from the important article of Villey (2015). One (116) relates to the fact that all the important sources were in Greek (for which we know of no Syriac versions) and that Syriac explanations of Greek technical terms in Severus Sebokht’s Treatise on the Astrolabe were designed as a pedagogical aid for Syrians who, after reading Syriac commentaries, wished to read the Greek texts themselves, and she compares this with Sergius’ procedure in his works. The second point (110) is that the references to the logic and pedagogy of Aristotle in Severus’ proemium show that he inherited the editorial and commentarial traditions applied to scientific texts in late antiquity. Astronomy falls within a curriculum of Aristotelian philosophy, of which logic is the foundation. Cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, 104–5. See on Jacob’s Hexaemeron following. Legend of Mar Qardagh 22–31 (Syiac. and Latin) for the disputation section of the martyr act. English translation of that section in Walker (2006) 27–32. Legend of Mar Qardagh 25–6, tr. Walker (2006) 29–30. Noticeable here is the fact that in an East Syrian environment ‘Abdīšō’ declares that the celestial bodies are moved by God. Theodore had argued they were moved by angels, a view which Philoponus found absurd and against which he placed his theory of divine impetus: De opificio mundi I 12, ed. Reichardt 28–9, ed. Scholten 124. Cf. Scholten (1995) 200–1; Walker (2004) 527. Walker (2006) 164–205, (2004). Philoponus, in Phys. 639.3–642.25. The Legend of Mar Qardagh’s kēpā w-gērā (ed. Abbeloos 26.4–5) is strikingly reminiscent of Philoponus’ lithos and belos. Cf. Walker (2006) 30 n. 50, (2004) 529 n. 74. It was certainly known and influential among Arabic writers of the Abbasid period, including those of Syriac Christian background. Cf. Janos (2016) 164–9. For Syrians’ knowledge of Philoponus’ commentary on the Categories, cf. Chapter 5 in this volume, 106–7. Wilks (2008); Daiber (2012) 45. For the argument that Jacob employed Philoponus’ De opificio mundi, cf. Wilks (2008) 226–8. That some aspects of Jacob’s cosmology

180

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106 107

108

109

concur with those of Aristotle (ibid.) 225 does not of course necessarily imply that they were directly derived from Aristotle. Jacob of Edessa, Hexaemeron 2, ed. Chabot 44b-45a, tr. Vaschalde 36. Literally: this. Hexaemeron 4, ed. Chabot 163a-b, tr. Vaschalde 138. Wilks (2008) 228–38. King (2011) 192–204. Metaphysics XII.6 1071b3–11; 8 1074a36–38. Verrycken (2010) 746–50. De opificio mundi III 10, ed. Reichardt 135.1–24, ed. Scholten II, 322.8–324.5. In the Alexandrian tradition the distinction between the disciplines of physics and metaphysics allowed differences to emerge which ostensibly could seem illogical; cf. Verrycken (1990) 221–3. That the physical treatises and the Metaphysics of Aristotle belonged to different sections of the curriculum can still be glimpsed in the profile of Byzantine manuscripts. Cf. Ronconi (2012). Platti (1983) 21. Contra al-Miṣrī I, ed. Platti 106.12–15, tr. Platti 91. Contra al-Miṣrī II, ed. Platti 203.18–19, tr. Platti 178–9. Muslim authors had no interest of course in Philoponus’ De opificio mundi, based as it was on Genesis. While the controversy over the eternity of the world continued in the Abbasid period, the apparently complete rejection of Aristotle the physicist characteristic of the pre-Abbasid Syrians (apart from Sergius) therefore no longer applied, for Christians wishing to engage with Muslims no less than for Muslims themselves. Even the Baghdad Aristotelians could on many points of physics side with Aristotle against Philoponus; Zimmermann (2010) 164–8 considers, with particular reference to Philoponus’ impetus theory, that ‘for the Aristotelians of Baghdad Philoponus was there to be read but not agreed with’ (166). Platti (1983) 106–7. Cf. Behler (1965) 125–8. The juxtaposition of Behler’s discussion of Yaḥyā and Philoponus (128–37), and his adducing of a text of Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed I. 71, linking the two of them as Christian authors writing ‘against the philosophers’ (127–8) raises the interesting question of ‘what happened in between?’ It is of course any Syriac evidence which is of particular importance in relation to that question, on which more generally see Chapter 3 in this volume. Both the author and the interpretation are subject to differing views. While, for example, Rashed (2009) considers its creationist statements incompatible with authorship by al-Fārābī but akin to the doctrine of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, and Janos (2012) 235–47 thinks of it as an early creationist work of al-Fārābī, Martini Bonadeo (2008) 203–6 thinks that the allusions of ‘Aristotle’ in the pseudo-Aristotelian Theology of Aristotle to the words of ‘Plato’ affirming that the One created everything in an atemporal act enabled the author (al-Fārābī), who considered the Theology the direct continuation of the Metaphysics, to resolve what he saw as only an apparent contradiction between the temporal and eternalist views of creation in the works of Plato and Aristotle respectively. For the relevant passage, see ed., tr. Najjar and Mallet 127–37, 126–36, ed., tr. Martini Bonadeo 63–7. However, the significance of the Theology of Aristotle in Arabic invites the consideration that the corpus of Pseudo-Dionysius may earlier have had a comparable importance in Syriac. Syrians did not of course think that Aristotle was its author, but may have considered that it was appropriate to view it as a continuation of the Metaphysics in the manner of a Plato christianus; cf. Bettiolo (2005) 97–9, and Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume. Pseudo-Dionysius taught that the Scriptures’ use of ‘eternal’ had to be interpreted differently when applied to created objects than when applied to God, and that the creation was not coeternal with the Creator. Cf. De divinis nominibus X.2–3 (937B-940A, Corpus Dionysiacum I,

181

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

215–7, or in Sergius’ Syriac version, ed. Fiori 91–3). The strict separation of the component parts of the curriculum in the Alexandrian scheme (cf. preceding n. 103) could mean that Aristotle’s eternalist view of the world could be ‘quarantined’ to the physical treatises, even though these could be worth discussing in a Muslim or multi-religious environment. 110 On First Philosophy, ed. Abū Rīdah 116–22, tr. Ivry 69–75. Cf. Endress and Adamson (2012) 129–30.

References Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Cosmos: C.F. Genequand (ed. and tr.), Alexander of Aphrodisias, on the Cosmos (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Idem, Alexandre d’Aphrodise, Les principes du tout selon la doctrine d’Aristote. Introduction, texte arabe, traduction et commentaire (Paris: Vrin, 2017). Baumstark (1922): A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: Marcus und Webers). Behler (1965): Ernst Behler, Die Ewigkeit der Welt; problemgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu den Kontroversen um Weltanfang und Weltunendlichkeit im Mittelalter. 1: Die Problemstellung in der arabischen und jüdischen Philosophie des Mittelalters (Munich: Schöningh). Bettiolo (2005): P. Bettiolo, ‘Scuole e ambiente intellettuali nelle chiese di Siria’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), Storia della filosofia nell’ Islam medievale (Turin: Einaudi) 48–100. Böhlig (1987): Alexander Böhlig, ‘Zur Rhetorik im Liber Graduum’, in: H.J.W. Drijvers et al. (eds.), IV Symposium Syriacum 1984 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987) 297–305. Brock (1993): S.P. Brock, ‘The Syriac Commentary Tradition’, in: C. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and Medieval Latin Traditions (London: Warburg Institute) 3–18. Butts (2011): A.M. Butts, ‘Theodoros bar Koni’, in: S.P. Brock et al. (eds.), Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 405–6. Chadwick (2010): H. Chadwick, ‘Philoponus the Christian Theologian’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London: Institute of Classical Studies) 83–96. Daiber (2012): H. Daiber, ‘Die syrische Tradition in frühislamischer Zeit’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 40–54. Davidson (1969): H.A. Davidson, ‘John Philoponus as a Source of Medieval Islamic and Jewish Proofs of Creation’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 89, 357–91. Eli of Qartamin, Memra on Philoxenus: A. de Halleux (ed. and tr.), Élī de Qartamīn, Mēmrā sur S. Mār Philoxène de Mabbog (Louvain: Peeters, 1963). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 233 (text), 234 (version). Endress (1977): G. Endress, The Works of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī: An Analytical Inventory (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert). Endress and Adamson (2012): G. Endress and P. Adamson, ‘Abū Yūsuf al-Kindī’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 92–147. al-Fārābī, Harmony of Plato and Aristotle: F.M. Najjar and D. Mallet (ed. and tr.), L’harmonie entre les opinions de Platon et d’Aristote (Damascus: Institut Français d’études

182

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

arabes de Damas, 1999); ed. and tr. C. Martini Bonadeo, L’armonia delle opinioni dei due sapienti, il divino Platone e Aristotele (Pisa: PLUS, 2008). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fiori (2014): E. Fiori, ‘Un intellectuel alexandrin en Mésopotamie’, in: E. Coda and C. Martini Bonadeo (eds.), De l’antiquité tardive au Moyen Âge. Études de logique aristotélicienne et de philosophie grecque, syriaque, arabe et latine offertes à Henri Hugonnard-Roche (Paris: Vrin) 59–90. Furlani (1921): G. Furlani, ‘Di alcuni passi della Metafisica di Aristotele presso Giacomo d’Edessa’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 5, 268–73. George, bishop of the Arabs, Letters: V. Ryssel (tr.), Georgs des Araberbischofs Gedichte und Briefe (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1894). George, bishop of the Arabs, Memra on Severus of Antioch: K.E. McVey (ed. and tr.), George, Bishop of the Arabs: A Homily on Blessed Mar Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (Lovanii: Peeters, 1993). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 530 (text), 531 (version). Griffith (1981): S.H. Griffith, ‘Chapter Ten of the Scholion: Theodore bar Kōnī’s Apology for Christianity’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 47, 158–88. Griffith (1982): S.H. Griffith, ‘Theodore bar Kōnī’s Scholion: A Nestorian Summa contra Gentiles from the First Abbasid Century’, in: N.G. Garsoian, T.F. Mathews, and R.W. Thomson (eds.), East of Byzantium. Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies) 53–72. Griffith (2007): S.H. Griffith, ‘The Syriac Letters of Patriarch Timothy I and the Birth of Christian kalām in the Mu’tazilite Milieu of Baghdad and Baṣrah in Early Islamic Times’, in: W.J. van Bekkum, J.W. Drijvers, and A.C. Klugkist (eds.), Syriac Polemics: Studies in Honour of Gerrit Jan Reinink (Leuven: Peeters) 103–32. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Heimgartner (2007): M. Heimgartner, ‘Die Disputatio des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos (780–823) mit dem Kalifen al-Mahdī’, in: M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages (Beirut and Würzburg: Ergon) 41–56. Heimgartner (2015): M. Heimgartner, ‘Contexts of Christian Education in Baghdad: the Letters of the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt: Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 173–85. History of John Bar Aphtonia: F. Nau (ed. and tr.), ‘Histoire de Jean bar Aphtonia’, Revue de l’orient chrétien 7 (1902), 97–135. Hugonnard-Roche (2008): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Jacob of Edessa and the Reception of Aristotle’, in: B.ter Haar Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of his Day (Leiden: Brill) 205–22. Hugonnard-Roche (2014): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Mathématiques en syriaque’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 67–106. Hugonnard-Roche (2015): Henri Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Questions de logique au VIIe siècle. Les épitres syriaques de Sévère Sebokht et leurs sources grecques’, Studia graeco-arabica 5, 53–104. Hugonnard-Roche (2016): Henri Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Sévère Sebokht’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 230–35. Jacob of Edessa, Encheiridion: G. Furlani, ‘L’Encheiridion di Giacomo d’Edessa nel testo siriaco’, Rendiconti della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 6.4 (1928), 222–49.

183

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Jacob of Edessa, Hexaemeron: J.-B. Chabot (ed.), Iacobi Edesseni Hexaemeron (Louvain: Peeters, 1928); tr. A.A. Vaschalde, Iacobi Edesseni Hexaemeron (Louvain: Peeters, 1932). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 92 (text), 97 (version). Janos (2012): D. Janos, Method, Structure, and Development in al-Fārābī’s Cosmology (Leiden: Brill). Janos (2016): Damien Janos, ‘“Active Nature” and Other Striking Features of Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus’s Cosmology as Reconstructed from his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 135–77. al-Kindī, On First Philosophy: M.’A.H. Abū Rīdah (ed.), Rasā’il al-Kindī al-falsafīyah (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī) I, 97–162; tr. A. Ivry, Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974). King (2010): D. King, ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On the Principles of the Universe in a Syriac Adaptation’, Le Muséon 123, 159–91. King (2011): D. King, ‘Origenism in Sixth Century Syria: The Case of a Syriac Manuscript of Pagan Philosophy’, in: A. Fürst (ed.), Origenes und sein Erbe in Orient und Okzident (Münster: Aschendorff) 179–212. King (2013): D. King, ‘Why Were the Syrians Interested in Greek Philosophy?’, in: P. Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 61–82. King (2015a): D. King, ‘A Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus: On Aristotle Categories 1–5, and a Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts (London: Bloomsbury) 167–221. King (2015b): D. King, ‘Logic in the Service of Ancient Eastern Christianity: An Exploration of Motives’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 97, 1–33. Legend of Mar Qardagh: J.B. Abbeloos (ed. and tr.), Acta Mar Ḳardaghi Assyriae præfecti . . . Syriace . . . cum versione Latine (Brussels: Société Belge de Librairie, 1890). Liber Graduum: M. Kmosko (ed. and tr.), Liber graduum (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926). Patrologia syriaca 3. McVey (1983): K.E. McVey, ‘The Mēmrā of Narsai on the Three Nestorian Doctors as an Example of Forensic Rhetoric’, in: R. Lavenant (ed.), Symposium Syriacum 1980 (Rome: Pontificium Istitutum Orientalium Studiorum) 87–96. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle: J.-B. Chabot (ed. and tr.), Chronique de Michel le Syrien, patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche (1166–1199), I–IV (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899–1924). Narsai, On the Three Nestorian Doctors: F. Martin (ed. and tr.), ‘Homélie de Narses sur les trois docteurs nestoriens’, Journal asiatique 9.14–15 (1899–1900), 446–93 (text), 469–525 (version). Philoponus, Contra Aristotelem: see Wildberg (1987). Philoponus, De opificio mundi: G. Reichardt, Joannis Philoponi De opificio mundi libri VII (Leipzig: Teubner, 1897); C. Scholten, Johannes Philoponos. De opificio mundi, I–III (Freiburg: Herder, 1997). Philoponus, In Phys.: H. Vitelli, Ioannis Philoponi in Aristotelis Physicorum libros (Berlin: Reimer, 1887–8). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XVI–XVII. Philoponus, Opuscula: A. Šanda, Opuscula monophysitica Ioannis Philoponi (Beirut: Typographia Catholica PP. Soc. Jesu, 1930). Platti (1983): E. Platti, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī. Théologien chrétien et philosophe arabe (Leuven: Departement Oriëntalistiek).

184

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Pseudo-Dionysius (Syriac): E. Fiori (ed. and tr.), Dionigi Areopagita: Nomi divini, teologia mistica, epistole. La versione siriaca di Sergio di Rēšʻaynā (Lovanii: Peeters, 2014). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 656 (text), 657 (version). Pseudo-Dionysius: B.R. Suchla, G. Heil, and A.M. Ritter (eds.), Corpus Dionysiacum I-II (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990–1). Patristische Texte und Studien, 33, 36. Rashed (2009): M. Rashed, ‘On the Authorship of the Treatise On the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages attributed to al-Fārābī’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 19, 43–82. Reinink (1999): G.J. Reinink, ‘Babai the Great’s Life of George and the Propagation of Doctrine in the Late Sasanian Empire’, in: J.W. Drijvers and J.W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority: Religious Power in Early Christianity, Byzantium and the Christian Orient (Leiden: Brill) 171–93. Ronconi (2012): F. Ronconi, ‘Le corpus aristotélicien du Paris gr. 1853 et les cercles érudits à byzance. Un cas controversé’, Studia graeco-arabica 2, 201–25. Russell and Wilson (1981): D.A. Russell and N.G. Wilson, Menander Rhetor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981). Scholten (1995): C. Scholten, Antike Naturphilosophie und christliche Kosmologie in der Schrift “De opificio mundi” des Johannes Philoponos (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter). Sergius, On the Causes of the Universe: E. Fiori (ed. and tr.), ‘L’épitomé syriaque du Traité sur les causes du tout d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise attribué à Serge de Rēš’aynā, Le Muséon 123 (2010) 127–58. Sorabji (2010): R. Sorabji, ‘Infinity and the Creation’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London: Institute of Classical Studies) 207–20. Sorabji (2015): R. Sorabji (ed.), with R. Sirkel, M. Tweedale, J. Harris, and D. King (trs.), Philoponus: On Aristotle Categories 1–5, and a Treatise concerning the Whole and the Parts (London: Bloomsbury) 3–34. Tannous (2008): J. Tannous, ‘Between Christology and Kalām? The Life and Letters of George, Bishop of the Arab Tribes’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 671–716. Tannous (2013): J. Tannous, ‘You Are What You Read. Qenneshre and the Miaphysite Church in the Seventh Century’, in: P. Wood (ed.), History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 83–102. Timothy, ep. 40: H.P.J. Cheikho, Dialectique du langage sur Dieu: lettre de Timothee I (728–823) à Serge. Étude, traduction et édition (Rome: Giovanni Canestri, 1983). Timothy, ep. 43: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Timothy, ep. 59: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Timotheos I, Ostsyrischer Patriarch: Disputation mit dem Kalifen al-Mahdī (Lovanii: Peeters, 2011). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 631 (text), 632 (version). Van Roey (1979): A. Van Roey, ‘Fragments anti-ariens de Jean Philopon’, Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 10, 237–50. Verrycken (1990): K. Verrycken, ‘The Metaphysics of Ammonius Son of Hermeias’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth) 199–231. Verrycken (2010): K. Verrycken, ‘John Philoponus’, in: L.P. Gerson (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) II, 733–55.

185

GREEK THOUGHT AND SYRIAC CONTROVERSIES

Villey (2014): É. Villey, ‘Qennešre et l’astronomie aux VIe et VIIe siècles’, in: É. Villey (ed.), Les sciences en syriaque (Paris: Geuthner) 149–90. Villey (2015): É. Villey, ‘Ammonius d’Alexandrie et le Traité sur l’astrolobe de Sévère Sebokht’, Studia graeco-arabica 5, 105–28. Walker (2004): J.T. Walker, ‘Against the Eternity of the Stars: Disputation and Christian Philosophy in Late Sasanian Mesopotamia’, in: La Persia e Bisanzio (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei) 509–37. Walker (2006): J.T. Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh (Berkeley: University of California Press). Watt (1989): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Panegyric in Theory and Practice’, Le Muséon 102, 271–98. Watt (1994): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Rhetorical Theory and the Syriac Version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric’, in: W.W. Fortenbaugh and D.C. Mirhady (eds.), Peripatetic Rhetoric after Aristotle (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers) 243–60. Watt (1999): J.W. Watt, ‘A Portrait of John Bar Aphtonia, Founder of the Monastery of Qenneshre’, in: J.W. Drijvers and J.W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority (Leiden: Brill) 155–68. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Wildberg (1987): C. Wildberg (tr.), Philoponus: Against Aristotle, on the Eternity of the World (London: Duckworth). Wildberg (2010): C. Wildberg, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Philoponus’ Contra Aristotelem’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London: Institute of Classical Studies) 239–50. Wilks (2008): M. Wilks, ‘Jacob of Edessa’s Use of Greek Philosophy in his Hexaemeron’, in: B. ter Haar Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa and the Syriac Culture of his Day (Leiden: Brill) 223–38. Wright (1870–2): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, I–III (London: British Museum). Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, Contra al-Miṣrī: E. Platti (ed. and tr.), La grande polémique antinestorienne de Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī, I–II (Lovanii: Peeters, 1981–2). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 427 and 437 (text), 428 and 438 (version). Zacharias, Ammonius: M.M. Colonna (ed. and tr.), Ammonio (Naples: Tipolitografia La Buona Stampa, 1973). Zimmermann (2010): F. Zimmermann, ‘Philoponus’ Impetus Theory in the Arabic Tradition’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (London: Institute of Classical Studies) 161–9.

186

9 JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS – AND THEMISTIUS’ RESPONSE?1

In seeking to understand Julian as both emperor and author, his Letter to Themistius2 is of particular interest, precisely since its principal concern is the relationship between political activity and philosophy. Clearly a response to a previous letter to him from Themistius, now lost, that earlier letter apparently acknowledged Julian’s new position and expressed Themistius’ hopes for his success in it. Opinions are divided as to whether the occasion was Julian’s appointment as Caesar or sole emperor,3 but what is not in doubt is that Julian’s letter touches on a fundamental issue in late antique philosophy and represents a sharp response to Themistius’ exhortations in that preceding letter. It is not merely, as he says at the outset, that he fears falling short of the high hopes Themistius has expressed to him on his accession to power, but that the very nature of the exhortation has discouraged rather than encouraged him to live the active political life commended by Themistius. Later on he emphasises the point of his nervousness, expresses his desire to make clear the assertions in Themistius’ letter which puzzle him, and proclaims his wish to be more precisely informed by Themistius about these questions. This has sometimes been interpreted as an attempt on Julian’s part to reach a working compromise with Themistius over the issues which divided them, a compromise based on their common allegiance to a Hellenism founded on the thought of Plato and Aristotle.4 Given the rather confident manner in which Julian expresses some views which are clearly at odds with Themistius’ conception of kingship, it has also been interpreted as a sharp rebuttal, which effectively ended their relations and left Themistius with no grounds to continue the debate.5 If in fact he did respond, such a radical reading of the letter might seem rather questionable; at any rate it would not have been the way Themistius himself read it. Whether such a response was ever made is disputed, but on the basis of an extant Arabic text it cannot be ruled out, and has been advocated by a number of scholars.6 Given these diametrically opposed readings, it may be of value to consider the letter a challenge to Themistius,7 a sharp challenge but not a terminal rebuttal, in which Julian calls on him to justify his expectations for Julian’s rule on the basis of what they might be able to agree, rather than on the basis of Themistius’ theocratic conceptions of kingship

187

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

which Julian finds himself unable to share.8 The central point of agreement would be that the writings of Plato and Aristotle furnish the basis for discussion,9 but what Julian contests is that these sages recommended philosophers to enter the public sphere, and that, in the public sphere as it now is, events are or can be governed by semi-divine philosopher kings. Contemporary interpretations of the letter diverge over whether indeed Julian intended to close off the argument and in requesting assistance from the philosophers by all means in their power10 was merely acting with courtesy,11 or whether he was open to a response from Themistius, and may indeed have received one. Julian’s preference for the contemplative life of a philosopher over the active one of a ruler is a dominant thread running through the whole letter. Shivering at the thought of comparison with Alexander or Marcus Aurelius, his pleasurable recollection of the Attic way of living and his love of this life of leisure is shattered by Themistius’ exhortation to put away all thought of leisure12 and exchange the philosophy of the portico for the open air.13 This fearsome requirement from a friend is comparable to a navigator struggling to make his way safely through the Bosphorus now being required to set out on the Aegean and Ionian seas and the ocean,14 or a man accustomed to taking moderate exercise in his gymnasium at home now being catapulted into a competition in the Olympic stadium.15 This of course was the idée fixe of Themistius, the obligation of philosophers to come out of their secluded study rooms and bring their influence to bear on the life of the state. For Themistius the true philosopher was the one who put his theoretical knowledge at the service of the state, and the supreme philosopher was the philosopher king. But Julian has a different understanding of the role of the philosopher and the way he can benefit humanity. For him, Socrates ranks above Alexander in the benefit he brought to humanity, but Socrates was no ruler, and neither was Aristotle, who brought inestimable benefit to mankind especially by his ‘theological treatise’ (presumably Metaphysics Lambda). Military success is due to courage and fortune, but the greater glory of knowledge of God can be obtained (on the principle of like knowing like) only by him who becomes divine.16 Neither were the other philosophers to whom Themistius refers in support of his ideas statesmen – Areius, Nicolaus, Thrasyllus, and Musonius – while Themistius himself was no general or public orator. But as a teacher of philosophy he was, according to Julian, more effective in making men act virtuously than the statesmen who urge them to do so by commands.17 Themistius was therefore mistaken, so Julian contends, in railing against Epicurus, whose advice, praising leisure and discussions during walks, was to live in obscurity. No doubt Epicurus pressed the case too far, but it is nevertheless questionable whether someone lacking the appropriate natural aptitude should be forced into taking part in public life, as both Socrates and Glaucon realised. Furthermore, success in public life is determined not by virtue or wisdom, but by Fortune.18 Therefore, as Plato in the Laws made clear, no ordinary man can provide perfect rule, but only one whose conduct is divine, as in the days of Chronos the God, who, being philanthropic, set over men the higher race of daemons. Since so much is expected 188

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

of a king, are not the advice of Epicurus, the gardens of Athens, and the little house of Socrates preferable to the splendour now around him as a gift of Fortune?19 In turning the theocratic passages of Plato against Themistius’ beloved concept of the philosopher king, Julian seems to be throwing down a gauntlet, having already declared that by nature there is nothing special about himself, who has merely fallen in love with philosophy.20 But the challenge to Themistius, the great Aristotle interpreter of his day, becomes even bolder when Julian cites Aristotle against him, asserting that far from ‘bringing owls to the Athenians’ he is merely showing the Aristotelian master that he does not entirely neglect Aristotle.21 Themistius in his letter had cited Aristotle for his case, referring to his definition of happiness as acting well.22 But if every living thing desires happiness, in the opinion of Julian only according to the Stoic definition of happiness could statesmen such as Cato or Dio of Sicily be considered to have been fortunate and happy.23 And when, in the Politics, Aristotle speaks of ‘correctly using the word “act” of the architects of public actions by virtue of their intelligence’, he is speaking of lawgivers and political philosophers. They give counsel and instruction to those who do the work, but do not do it themselves. It is not Aristotle but Themistius who says that they are kings.24 The other thread running through the letter is Julian’s rejection of the Hellenistic notion so enthusiastically espoused by Themistius (and many of his Christian contemporaries) that the king, being divinely appointed, not only was a perfect philosopher, but also participated in the divine virtues, especially the divine love of mankind, philanthrōpia, and far from being under law was himself the animate law (nomos empsychos).25 Themistius’ voice can be clearly heard in the statement reported by Julian that he has been put, according to Themistius, in the place occupied of old by Heracles and Dionysus, who were at once both philosophers and kings.26 Julian, however, was aware that by nature there was nothing special about himself, who had merely fallen in love with philosophy and, much as he loved it, had never attained to it.27 Plato had shown that a ruler, although human by nature, had in his conduct to be divine and totally expel from his soul what is mortal and brutish, except what is necessary for the survival of his body.28 In line with this, Aristotle criticised hereditary monarchy, as it required of a good king a virtue greater than that belonging to human nature, obliging him to reject his children as successors if they are no better than anyone else. One who rules as guardian of the laws is not called a king by Aristotle, and absolute monarchy, governance by the king’s own will, is thought by some to be contrary to nature. The rule of reason is therefore that of God and the laws, not that of man, whose nature includes an element of the wild animal. Appetite (epithumia) is such, and anger (thumos), which perverts even the best men, but law is reason exempt from desire (orexis), and political affairs should be entrusted to it alone.29 These views of Aristotle are in perfect harmony with those of Plato, who likewise asserted the need for the moral superiority of the governor to the governed – a thing not easy to find among men – and the need for the lawgiver to purify his mind and soul before framing the laws.30 189

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

While the dispute seems to be primarily about the nature of imperial power,31 philosophical disagreements within Neoplatonism, as also diverse views about religion, could also be at play below the surface here.32 No doubt Julian was claiming to have had a better interpretation of Aristotle than did Themistius,33 and his rejection of Themistius’ philosopher king is consistent with his vision of the ruler’s task as the implementation of a second- or third-best constitution as presented in the Laws, rather than the ideal one of the Republic. In these inferior constitutions, philosophers should serve as counsellors, rather than act as rulers themselves.34 Themistius could therefore have continued the ‘conversation’ only by dropping his doctrine of the philosopher king and steering clear as far as possible of these disagreements. Julian had disputed the lessons Themistius drew from Plato and also quoted Aristotle against him. Nevertheless he had also maintained that he ‘wanted to make clear in your letter the points of difficulty’ for him, and ‘desired to learn more clearly about them’.35 It is reasonable to suspect that following this broadside against him, Themistius did not think it useful to make a frontal counter attack against Julian and present once again a full account of his views. To judge by all his later, post-Julianic orations, he did not change his mind at all. In an oration defending his acceptance of the prefecture of Constantinople, for example, he effectively gave an answer to Julian’s ‘presumptuous’ effort to trip him up with Aristotle on the matter of human happiness. This, said Themistius, involves the virtuous action of the soul in the prevailing circumstances; we philosophise not to know, but as far as possible to achieve.36 And the grand themes of Themistius – the public duty of philosophy, the philanthropic philosopher king, the king as the animate law – all appear again in the orations after Julian’s death, just as they did during the reign of his predecessor. But if Themistius did not want to let on to Julian what he really thought of his views, that does not necessarily mean that he did not want to respond to a challenge thrown down to him. Making no response at all might have implied an admission of defeat, and whatever their differences, they both shared a love of philosophy and Hellenism. There is no response of Themistius preserved in Greek, but two Arabic manuscripts are extant containing a ‘Letter (risāla) of Themistius the philosopher to the emperor Julian, on government and the administration of the empire’, or (in the other manuscript) a ‘Letter of Themistius, minister of the emperor Julian, on government, translated by Ibn Zur‘a from the Syriac’.37 The text is very similar in the two manuscripts, and the first of those mentioned here records in the subscription that it was translated by Abū ‘Uthmān Sa‘īd Ibn Ya‘qūb al-Dimashqī, without specifying the language of the text from which it was derived.38 Al-Dimashqī belongs to the early tenth century, Ibn Zur‘a to the later part of it. Given the similarity of the two texts it is likely that al-Dimashqī made some use of the Syriac version, either as his source or as a control, and Ibn Zur‘a subsequently revised his Arabic using the same, but now lost, Syriac (of unidentified authorship).39 Since the pioneering study of Jeanne Croissant,40 a case has existed for seeing in this text the response of Themistius to Julian’s letter, or an epitome or modified version of it, possibly shorn of the epistolary form and classical and literary allusions 190

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

which one might have expected from Themistius. Although Croissant’s defence of its authenticity has been accepted by some scholars, the identity of both author and addressee has been challenged. Dagron supposed it reasonable to believe that Syriac and Arabic traditions, knowing Themistius above all for his commentaries on Aristotle and aware that he was a contemporary of Julian, associated the two with this text.41 Such a hypothesis cannot be disproved, but is rather improbable. This is no paraphrase of Aristotle, and although Themistius was indeed quite well known in the Near East, his reputation was hardly so great that his name is likely to have been casually associated with a work such as this. There is in fact a clear example of the reverse process, the dissociation of his name from a work undeniably his. An Arabic paraphrase of a passage from his oration On Friendship (Or. 22), but clearly derived from the extant Syriac version rather than the Greek, appears in the chapter on friendship in Miskawayh’s treatise on ethics, Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, but in Miskawayh it is attributed not to Themistius, but to Socrates.42 Shahid believed the risāla was written by Themistius, but during the reign of Theodosius.43 His grounds, however, are rather weak, and it is only if addressed to Julian, whose ‘reactionary ideas of kingship’44 were in contrast to those of all other emperors of Themistius’ time and to those of Themistius himself, that the risāla, if addressed to an emperor, can be credibly attributed to Themistius. Daly’s objections presupposed that Themistius would have given a full account of his own views, rather than, as Brauch suggested, signalling in a response ‘his willingness to reach an accommodation with the emperor’.45 Along the lines of Brauch, the risāla might well be interpreted as Themistius’ response to Julian’s letter, endeavouring to stake out a position he has reason to believe Julian will accept and thus providing some of the assistance which Julian had requested ‘from you philosophers by all means in your power’.46 Unlike Themistius’ previous letter, however, this one, to judge from the Arabic, while intended to encourage Julian in his public life, is not in the form of a letter, but in that of a short treatise of political philosophy.47 More recently Swain established the antiquity and integrity of the text by demonstrating it was used by Nemesius, and concludes that ‘Themistian authorship cannot seriously be doubted once one is aware of Nemesius’ reading of the Letter at the end of the fourth century’.48 Conterno considers it may be treated as coming from ‘a revived Themistius’, while leaving the identity of ‘the one revived’ undetermined.49 In his letter Julian had effectively closed off Themistius’ natural lines of response. There was no point turning to Plato’s injunction that philosophers should become kings50 when Julian had already averred that as regards philosophy he had only fallen in love with it, and the fates had rendered that love ineffectual by removing him from the contemplative life proper to it.51 Extolling the divine character of kingship would have been equally futile when Julian had already asserted that by nature there was nothing remarkable about himself and doubted, following the example of Socrates and Glaucon, the rightness of forcing into the life of statesmanship any who were reluctant and conscious of their deficiencies.52 A respondent would have had to find in Julian’s letter some common ground from 191

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

which to proceed in order to be effective. Where that could be found was in the Platonic and Aristotelian psychology or anthropology cited by Julian with its linkage to government.53 Since Julian did not wish ‘to bring owls to the Athenians’, a respondent could put him right on the proper interpretation of this point – without of course explicitly saying so. Julian had noted Aristotle’s view that the rule of reason is that of God and the laws, not man, for appetite and anger pervert even the best men, and law is reason exempt from desire. But according to Themistius, if he is indeed the author of the risāla, that does not in practice exclude the rule of an individual man in whom the rational faculty is in full control and who therefore ‘becomes divine’. Most significantly, Julian had referred to the myth of Chronos in Plato’s Laws, at first accepting the allegorical interpretation as referring to a mortal, human by nature but divine by conduct, but later using the myth while abandoning or forgetting the interpretation and arguing that ruling is ‘beyond a man’ and requires ‘a more divine nature’.54 ‘Themistius’ could have seen the inconsistency and exploited the opening. The ‘natural’ divinity of rulers was ancient myth, not truth; it merely resembled (259a empherōs) it. As Julian had at first in effect indicated, it was Plato himself who used the myth to assert that a human ruler could be divine in his conduct and totally expel from his soul what is mortal and brutish, except what is necessary for the survival of his body. But that is indeed the core of the risāla’s argument. The risāla thus falls into two parts: an exposition of human psychology and society, followed by an account of the virtues of the most excellent king.55 In the background of course is the close parallel in Plato’s thought between the state (composed of elite philosopher-rulers and the governed multitude) and the soul (composed of governing reason and the governed ‘multitude’ of irrational passions and desires).56 It begins with the announcement that God created man the most perfect of animals and placed in him three faculties: that of speech, reason, or discernment; the animal faculty; and the nutritional, appetitive, or vegetative faculty. The first is unique to man, the second shared with animals, and the third shared also with plants. This is in conformity with the psychology of the authentic orations of Themistius, where the human soul is partitioned into logos, thumos (life, passion, anger), and epithumia (appetition). The rational faculty or logos enables man to be virtuous and pious and excel all other animals on earth. If he is not governed by the rational faculty and he abandons himself to bodily appetites and pleasures, his life is that of the animals, but if the rational faculty does rule and he abandons bodily pleasures, he becomes divine (muta’allih, theios) and lives a life proper to man and pleasing to God.57 Since man is composed of soul and body, God gave him appetites to fulfil the necessities of nourishment and reproduction, but the rational is designed to be the governing faculty in man, and the man in a praiseworthy condition is the man who by the rule of reason in his soul is not driven by pleasures and is angered only when anger (ghaḍab, thumos) is desirable or necessary.58 The doctrine here is that of metriopatheia, moderation of the emotions, to which Themistius devoted an oration in which he claimed that all philosophers ‘ascribe to [the doctrine] 192

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

in practice, even though it is only the adherents of the Lyceum who assent to it in theory’.59 What the risāla, unlike the orations, does not mention is that such a man is a philosopher. Since man is composed of soul and body, he has various material and intellectual needs,60 and since a single man cannot provide all of them by himself, men congregate in societies and build cities, for God created man disposed to community life and established for him laws and judges.61 Thus man is exposed to evil from himself, from his fellow citizens, or from another city.62 Against the evil which comes from himself, that is from the rule of the appetitive faculty associated with his body, man has the defence of his rational soul;63 against the evil from his fellow citizens the defence of the laws; and against that from another city the defence works of his own city and the resort to war.64 This reveals the source of excellence in rulers, why men are necessarily led to govern, and why it is the best of them who must rule: he who orders or defends something must demonstrate that he can do it in his own soul before he can perform it on others.65 Because a plurality of heads corrupts government and produces division, it is necessary for a single man to rule, whether over a city, great cities, a country, great countries, or most of the world.66 Only he who can govern his family and himself can govern the citizenry. He must be the best of the people (afḍal ahl) and a benevolent father (wālid shafīq) to them, combining all the virtues in himself, something which not every man is able to do.67 The following account, made ‘in obedience to the command of the king’, of the virtues necessary for the ruler if the people are to live in concord picks up on the ‘internal’ (psychological) and ‘external’ (administrative) features of this philosophical justification of kingship.68 The ‘internal’ include temperance, justice, generosity, and indifference to luxury69 as well as insight into the judicious employment of men.70 The ‘external’ include correct administration and selection of the army, preservation of frontiers, and care of the built environment.71 Importantly, as they certainly would be for Themistius, they also include his support of the theoretical, manual, and mixed arts. For the first of these he mentions philosophy, rhetoric, grammar, and eloquence, and for the third medicine and music.72 The ruler must leave to his successor a realm more prosperous than that he received,73 but his son is not designated as his successor. The author thus eschewed all explicit mention of the philosopher king and the divine origin of kingship. In the risāla the virtues of the king do not include philanthrōpia, the divine virtue par excellence, and the king is not above the law or portrayed as the animate law. The absence of these characteristic themes of Themistius, interpreted by defenders of the risāla’s authenticity as an accommodation to Julian’s ideas, gives weight to the sceptics’ counter argument that such an interpretation is almost entirely negative.74 But the attribution to Themistius in the Arabic manuscripts should not be lightly dismissed, and the risāla can be read as an astute response to Julian by Themistius, in contrast to his earlier Letter a more subtle exhortation to fulfil his kingly role in the form of a short philosophical treatise. By basing the treatise on the Platonic and Aristotelian psychology 193

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

quoted by Julian, the author can be conceived as endeavouring to convince him of the necessity of kingship, and persuading him that rule by the man who ‘becomes divinised’ through rational governance of the passions is indeed the proper interpretation of both philosophers’ writings. The superiority of the king over his subjects is not presented therefore as due to his divine origin, but to his moral excellence in virtue of the rule of reason in his soul. No doubt Themistius, if he was the author, would have wanted to clarify that he in whom reason reigns supreme is a philosopher, and that a philosopher thus not only can but also should exchange the philosophy of the portico for the open air and assume the responsibility of a ruler. Having already set forth that doctrine, however, in his previous letter and seen it rebuffed, there was little point in presenting it again. But he could still make the philosophical argument to Julian that only the best of men is fit to rule, and the best of men is him in whom reason reigns supreme. It may be that he hoped thereby – largely unsuccessfully, it would seem – to be retained as a philosophical adviser to Julian.75 After Julian’s death Themistius’ real views were given full expression again in the orations delivered during the reigns of subsequent emperors. Nearly two hundred years later, however, quite against the grain of prevailing contemporary thought, a more sober royal ideology reminiscent of this risāla found expression in a place which certainly Julian would not have found congenial, namely the commentary on the creation story of Genesis by John Philoponus, De opificio mundi.76 Against the view he attributed to Theodore of Mopsuestia, that those who bear the image of God are judges and kings and on this account may even be called gods, Philoponus maintained that the ‘image of God’ is present in all men and that mankind was given kingship over the animal realm, but human government exists only by convention and the will of men. Most men are not kings, and kingship is not a natural form of government, and frequently, indeed, is neither right nor rational.77 As an Alexandrian philosopher of the school of Ammonius, Philoponus was very familiar with the Aristotelian commentaries of Themistius, and made extensive use of them.78 He would not have been in sympathy with the Themistius of the orations, but he might have had more time for the Themistius (or pseudo-Themistius) of this little treatise of ‘political philosophy’.79 In claiming that kingship is frequently neither right nor rational, Philoponus’ criticism goes well beyond the risāla, which maintained that monarchy was necessary to avoid dissension, and kingship and logos were inextricably linked. But what is clear in the risāla is something also Philoponus could believe, namely that the righteous emperor is not exalted above other men by nature, but by his reason and virtue.80 It is of course no more than a speculation that Philoponus might have read the risāla as well as the Aristotelian paraphrases. But it would be a nice irony if a letter of a tolerant pagan philosopher,81 responding to an emperor who expressed his love for ‘portico philosophy’ but attempted to diminish Christianity as a cultural force, had an impact on the Christian ‘portico philosopher’ who mounted the most serious attack on key aspects of pagan philosophy in the last great ‘portico’ of philosophy in antiquity. 194

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Julian’s Letter to Themistius – and Themistius’ Response’, in: Nicholas Baker-Brian and Shaun Tougher (eds.), Emperor and Author: The Writings of Julian the Apostate (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2012) 91–103. © 2012 The Classical Press of Wales and republished by permission. 2 Ep. Ad. Them. Text editions with translation and commentary or study in Fontaine, Prato and Marcone (1987); Swain (2013). 3 For the former, cf. e.g. Bradbury (1987); Bouffartigue (2006) 120–7; Swain 53–7. For the latter, cf. e.g. Criscuolo (1983) 91. A compromise position in Barnes and Vanderspoel (1981) 187–9, cautiously commended by Brauch (1993) 83–5 and n. 18. 4 Brauch (1993) 85–8. 5 Bouffartigue (2006) 127–8, 136–7. 6 In addition to Brauch (1993) 88–97; see Croissant (1930); Dvornik (1955), (1966) II, 666–9. 7 A ‘challenge’ is how Bradbury (1987) 242 characterises Julian’s stance. 8 Whether or not this was a challenge to a teacher from a former student is disputed; against is Bouffartigue (1992) 22, in favour Smith (1995) 27–9, who nevertheless ‘suspect(s) that Themistius’ importance as an intellectual influence on Julian was marginal from an early stage’. 9 On the importance of Plato and Aristotle to Julian, cf. Bouffartigue (1992) 170–214, especially for the subject of this letter 192 (on the citing of Plato’s Laws) and 198–200 (on the citing of Aristotle’s Politics). 10 Ep. ad. Them. 266d. 11 Bouffartigue (2006) 137. 12 Ep. ad. Them. 253b-254a. 13 Ep. ad. Them. 262d. 14 Ep. ad. Them. 254c-255b. 15 Ep. ad. Them. 263a. 16 Ep. ad. Them. 264b-265b. 17 Ep. ad. Them. 265b-266c. This assertion of Julian would have been all the more pointed if, following his reference to Aristotle’s ‘theological treatise’, Julian had intended an allusion to the fact that Themistius wrote a paraphrase of Metaphysics Lambda (preserved fully only in Hebrew and partially in Arabic); cf. Brague (1999). 18 Ep. ad. Them. 255b-256a. 19 Ep. ad. Them. 257d-259b. Cf. Bouffartigue (1992) 192. 20 Ep. ad. Them. 254b. 21 Ep. ad. Them. 260c-261d. 22 Ep. ad. Them. 263c, citing Aristotle, Politics VII 3. 1325b. Elsewhere in Aristotle, happiness is to be found only in the contemplative life: Nicomachean Ethics X 7, 7–8, as also in the complete text of Politics 1325b. Cf. Bouffartigue (1992) 198–202, who draws the conclusion that at the time of writing Julian did not have available the text of (this chapter of) the Politics, but only what stood in Themistius’ letter to him. 23 Ep. ad. Them. 256a-c. 24 Ep. ad. Them. 263c-264a. 25 Cf. in general Leppin and Portmann (1998) 23–6; Renucci (2000) 420–34. According to Tantillo (1997) 398–404 (who adopts the ‘compromise’ position on dating, see preceding n. 3), Themistius’ concept of the animate law existed only in nuce at the time of his letter to Julian. 26 Ep. ad. Them. 253c-254a. 27 Ep. ad. Them. 254b, 266c-d. Cf. Bouffartigue (1992) 494–5. 28 Ep. ad. Them. 258d-259b.

195

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

29 Ep. ad. Them. 260c-261d. Cf. Aristotle, Politics III 15. 1286b22–7; III 16. 1287a8–13 and 28–32. 30 Ep. ad. Them. 261d-262d. 31 Kaldellis (2011) 129–32. 32 Elm (2012) 80–7 considers that Julian’s intended audience would have realised that his criticisms of Themistius were directed against Constantius, but that ultimately (105–6) the difference between the two of them resided in the different conceptions of the level of engagement appropriate to the philosopher: either public office (Themistius) or advisor to those holding public office, the latter view being that of Maximus. Cf. also Chiaradonna (2015). 33 Cf. Elm (2012) 106–7, who characterises Julian’s support of Maximus against Themistius on a point of Aristotelian logic as predictable. 34 Cf. O’Meara (2003) 91–4, 120–3. 35 Ep. ad. Them. 263b-c. This gave Themistius the justification for a response, even if Julian’s words were intended sarcastically or as a piece of Socratic irony; cf. Kaldellis (2011) 131 n. 23. 36 Themistius, Or. 34, 448.22–6, ed., tr. Schneider (1966) 62–3 with commentary 106. 37 Themistius, Risāla: Editions by Sālim (1970); Shahid (1974) 75–119, and Swain (2013) 132–59. There are facing translations, Latin and English, in Shahid and Swain, and an Italian translation in Conterno (2014) 95–118. Swain (2013) 22–52 and Conterno (2014) 97–106 have extensive introductory and interpretive studies. Briefer overview in Schamp, Todd, and Watt (2016) 862–4. 38 Titles and subscriptions ed. Shahid 82, 118, ed. Swain 134, 158. 39 If Ibn Zur‘a saw so little difference between the Syriac and al-Dimashqī’s versions that he made little change to the latter, it suggests the possibility that al-Dimashqī too used the Syriac in one way or another. If it was his source text, that will be because he could not find a (good) copy of the Greek. For a recent discovery of another Arabic translation by Ibn Zur‘a from a hitherto lost and unknown Syriac version (of Aristotle’s De caelo), cf. Endress (2017) 214–20, 226–9. 40 Croissant (1930). 41 Dagron (1968) 222–4. 42 Cf. Rosenthal (1940) 402–5. 43 Shahid (1974) 76–81. 44 The phrase is that of Dvornik (1955), (1966). 45 Daly (1980) 9; Brauch (1993) 92. 46 Ep. ad. Them. 266d. 47 Vanderspoel (1995) 115, 127–34, 244–9 held that the emperor envisioned in the risāla was indeed Julian, and that its Greek original was the panegyric of Themistius in honour of Julian admired by Libanius (Epp. 818 and 1430), or an epitome of that panegyric. There is a quasi-panegyrical section in the risāla, Shahid 96–104, Swain 146–50, but the work as a whole is more like a treatise than a panegyric. 48 Swain (2013) 23, 46–50. Swain’s discovery does evidently raise the likelihood of Themistian authorship, but does not make it certain. A Syriac version of Nemesius, known only through Moses Bar Kepha and John of Dara, was probably made in the seventh or eighth century, and given the relationship of the two texts, it might be suggested that the Syriac version of the risāla comes from the same period, though of course this is only a possibility, and Nemesius’ treatise is only about anthropology, not monarchy. Conterno (2014) 35–7 suggests Ḥunayn (ninth century) as the translator of the risāla (but cf. Chapter 10 in this volume, n. 62). On the date of the Syriac Nemesius, cf. Zonta (1991) 247. Whether in Syriac or Greek, Nemesius was known to Patriarch Timothy I (died 823); cf. Timothy, ep. 43, ed. Heimgartner 68, tr. Heimgartner 51.

196

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80

81

Conterno (2014) 106. Plato, Republic 5, 473c-d. Ep. ad. Them. 254b. Ep. ad. Them. 255c – 255d. Ep. ad. Them. 260c – 262d. Ep. ad. Them. 259a-b; 260c-d. Cf. Plato, Laws 4, 713a-714b, and Bouffartigue (2006) 130. Cf. Watt (2004) 135–8. Plato, Republic 4, 435a-436a; Laws 3, 689a-c. Risāla, Shahid 82–4, Swain 134–6. Risāla, Shahid 92–6, Swain 144–6. Themistius, Or. 32, especially 358a, 359b-360c; cf. Or. 34, 445.10–446.8. Cf. Croissant (1930) 9, 11–12. Risāla, Shahid 88–90, Swain 138–40. Risāla, Shahid 90, Swain 140–2. Risāla, Shahid 90–2, Swain 142. Risāla, Shahid 94–6, Swain 144–6. Risāla, Shahid 96, Swain 146. Risāla, Shahid 96–8, Swain 146. Risāla, Shahid 98, Swain 146. Risāla, Shahid 100, Swain 148. Risāla, Shahid 104–6, Swain 150. Risāla, Shahid 106–8, Swain 150–2. Cf. Plato, Republic 6, 485a-487a. Risāla, Shahid 108–110, Swain 152–4. Risāla, Shahid 110–18, Swain 154–8. Risāla, Shahid 114–16, Swain 156. Risāla, Shahid 118, Swain 158. Cf. Dagron (1968) 223: ‘hypothèse ingénieuse . . . mais une interprétation presque entièrement negative . . . est très insuffisante pour prouver que Julien fut bien le destinataire de l’œuvre’. Cf. on the other hand Swain (2013) 35–41. Cf. Elm (2012) 106–7. We owe this observation to Dvornik (1966) 711–12. Philoponus, De opificio mundi 6, 16, esp. 263.17–28 Reichardt, 558/9 Scholten. The anonymous dialogue On Political Science from the reign of Justinian also runs against the grain of most thought of the time in subjecting the monarch to various limitations, not least law. Cf. Dvornik (1966) 707–11; O’Meara (2003) 178–82; Angelov (2004) 508–11. He may have silently drawn on Themistius many times, for example, in commenting on the Physics; cf. Vitelli (1888) 992 s.v. Themistius; Sorabji (1990) 17. Julian is remembered appreciatively by Ammonius; cf. Smith (1995) 218 and n. 7. But the Christian Philoponus would hardly have had any sympathy for any views expressed by Julian. Even if the risāla was not by Themistius, it might of course have been attributed to him in the Greek tradition prior to the time of Philoponus. The risāla recognises three categories of men: those, the best, who do the good by themselves; those who do it under pressure from another; and those who refuse to do it and must be restrained by punishment. Men may be happy under the rule of a man whose nature is accepting of all the virtues necessary for governance (Risāla, Shahid 100–2, Swain 148–50). There is nothing in the risāla to suggest that all men of the first category could not meet that criterion. Themistius’ memory remained in good repute among generations of later Christians (but not pagans). Cf. Leppin and Portmann (1998) 26.

197

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

References Angelov (2004): D.G. Angelov, ‘Plato, Aristotle and “Byzantine Political Philosophy”’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 499–523. Barnes and Vanderspoel (1981): T.D. Barnes and J. Vanderspoel, ‘Julian and Themistius’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 22, 187–9. Bouffartigue (1992): J. Bouffartigue, L’empereur Julien et la culture de son temps (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes). Bouffartigue (2006): ‘La lettre de Julien à Thémistios: histoire d’une fausse manœuvre et d’un désaccord essentiel’, in: A. Gonzalez Galvez and P.-L. Malosse (eds.), Mélanges A. F. Norman (Lyon: Topoi orient-occident and Paris: De Boccard Édition-Diffusion) 113–38. Bradbury (1987): S. Bradbury, ‘The Date of Julian’s Letter to Themistius’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 28, 235–51. Brague (1999): R. Brague, Thémistius: Paraphrase de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, livre lambda (Paris: Vrin). Brauch (1993): T. Brauch, ‘Themistius and the Emperor Julian’, Byzantion 63, 79–115. Chiaradonna (2015): R. Chiaradonna, ‘La Lettera a Temistio di Giuliano Imperatore e il dibattito filosofico nel IV secolo’, in: A. Marcone (ed.), L’imperatore Giuliano. Realtà storica e rappresentazione (Florence: Le Monnier) 149–71. Conterno (2014): M. Conterno, Temistio orientale. Orazioni temistiane nella tradizione siriaca e araba (Brescia: Paideia). Criscuolo (1983): U. Criscuolo, ‘Sull epistola di Giuliano imperatore al filosofo Temistio’, Koinonia 7, 89–111. Croissant (1930): J. Croissant, ‘Un nouveau discours de Thémistius’, Serta Leodiensia, Bibliothèque de la faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’université de Liège 44, 7–30. Dagron (1968): G. Dagron, ‘L’empire romain d’Orient au IVème siècle et les traditions politiques de l’hellénisme. Le témoignage de Thémistios’, Travaux et mémoires 3, 1–242. Daly (1980): L.J. Daly, ‘“In a Borderland”: Themistius’ Ambivalence toward Julian’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 73, 1–11. Dvornik (1955): F. Dvornik, ‘The Emperor Julian’s “Reactionary” Ideas on Kingship’, in: K. Weitzmann (ed.), Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 71–81. Dvornik (1966): F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background, I–II (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies). Elm (2012): S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church (Berkeley: University of California Press). Endress (2017): G. Endress, ‘Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Arabic Version and Commentary of Aristotle’s De Caelo’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 213–75. Fontaine, Prato, and Marcone (1987): J. Fontaine, C. Prato, and A. Marcone, Giuliano Imperatore. Alla madre degli dei e altri discorsi (Milan: Mondadori). Julian, Letter to Themistius: see Fontaine, Prato, and Marcone (1987), Swain (2013). Kaldellis (2011): A. Kaldellis, ‘Aristotle’s Politics in Byzantium’, in: V. Syros (ed.), Well Begun Is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) 121–43.

198

JULIAN’S LETTER TO THEMISTIUS AND RESPONSE?

Leppin and Portmann (1998): H. Leppin and W. Portmann, Themistios. Staatsreden (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). O’Meara (2003): D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Philoponus, De opificio mundi: G. Reichardt, Joannis Philoponi De opificio mundi libri VII (Leipzig: Teubner, 1897). C. Scholten, Johannes Philoponos. De opificio mundi, I–III (Freiburg: Herder, 1997). Renucci (2000): P. Renucci, Les idées politiques et le gouvernement de l’empereur Julien (Brussels: Latomus). Rosenthal (1940): F. Rosenthal, ‘On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World’, Islamic Culture 14, 387–422. Sālim (1970): M.S. Sālim, Risālat Thāmistiyūs ilā Yūliyān al-mālik fī al-siyāsa wa-tadbīr al-mamlaka (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub). Schamp, Todd, and Watt (2016): J. Schamp, R.B. Todd, and J.W. Watt, ‘Thémistios’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 850–900. Schneider (1966): H. Schneider, Die 34. Rede des Themistios. Einleitung, Übersetzung und Kommentar (Winterthur: Verlag P.G. Keller). Shahid (1974): I. Shahid, ‘Epistula de re publica gerenda’, in: H. Schenkl, G. Downey, and A.F. Norman (eds.), Themistii Orationes quae supersunt (Leipzig: Teubner) III, 73–119. Smith (1995): R. Smith, Julian’s Gods: Religion and Philosophy in the Thought and Action of Julian the Apostate (London: Routledge). Sorabji (1990): R. Sorabji, ‘The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth) 1–30. Swain (2013): S. Swain, Themistius, Julian and Greek Political Theory under Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Tantillo (1997): I. Tantillo, La prima orazione di Giuliano a Costanzo. Introduzione, traduzione e commento (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider). Themistius, Orations: H. Schenkl, G. Downey, and A.F. Norman (eds.), Themistii Orationes quae supersunt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1965–74) I–III. Themistius, Risāla: see Sālim (1970), Shahid (1974), Swain (2013), Conterno (2014). Timothy ep. 43: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Vanderspoel (1995): J. Vanderspoel, Themistius and the Imperial Court (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Vitelli (1888): H. Vitelli, Ioannis Philoponi in Aristotelis Physicorum libros quinque posteriores commentaria (Berlin: Reimer, 1888). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XVII. Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 121–49. Zonta (1991): M. Zonta, ‘Nemesiana Syriaca’, Journal of Semitic Studies 36, 223–58.

199

10 THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN Their association in Syriac and Arabic tradition1

In the great tenth century catalogue of the books in Baghdad known to its Arabic author, Ibn al-Nadīm, there are several accounts describing how the Arabs became acquainted with Greek philosophy. In one of these it is reported that philosophy was manifested among the Greeks and Romans before the advent of Christianity, but when the Romans became Christians it was forbidden to them. Part of the philosophical literature (according to this account) was burnt and part preserved in libraries, but philosophical discussion of anything contrary to Christianity was not allowed. Later, however, the Romans lapsed from Christianity and turned again to the teachings of the philosophers, the reason being that the Roman emperor was Julian, ‘he whose minister was Themistius, the interpreter of the books of Aristotle’. After Julian’s death in Persia, Constantine was made emperor (by the Persian emperor Shapur) and the Roman Empire became Christian once again. Philosophical works were again prohibited and merely stored in libraries ‘until the present day’. The account ends by claiming that in olden times some works on logic and medicine had been translated into Persian, and these were further translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘.2 Students of fourth century late antiquity may be forgiven for raising a few eyebrows on reading this account, while detecting some genuine historical nuggets within it. Arabic scholarship on the efflorescence of classical learning in the Abbasid caliphate has identified a ‘political narrative’ serving the Hellenophile caliphs, probably originating in the time of al-Ma’mūn and directed at internal opponents of the Greek sciences, which attributed the decline of the Romans (Byzantines) to their acceptance of Christianity and rejection of the ancient Greek heritage of wisdom. This narrative, whose connection with historical reality is clearly quite tenuous,3 can be seen in a number of Arabic accounts.4 The time frame of these alleged events, and the personalities involved, is in most accounts unspecified, but the one presented here identifies two great fourth century orators, Julian and Themistius, as the key figures championing philosophy against its implied incompatible alternative, Christianity. How much the Arabic and Syriac tradition about these figures can tell us about their genuine activity in their own days is debated, but it can certainly shed light on their impact upon subsequent generations in the Near East. 201

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

This presentation of Themistius as a close associate of Julian and, by implication, his association in the restoration of the ‘teachings of the philosophers’ in opposition to Christianity represents, however, only one side of the later Oriental tradition about him. The absence of any mention of him in the pagan historians Eunapius and Zosimus is well known, and although the reason for it is hardly certain, antagonism towards him on account of his association with several Christian emperors is likely to have been a significant factor.5 By contrast, he makes an appearance in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, who records with favour his plea for tolerance.6 Neither Christians nor Muslims could (according to our current evidence) read any of Julian’s works in Syriac or Arabic, but they could read some of Themistius’, and not just his Aristotelian paraphrases. From many sources Christian Syrians, even if they could not read Greek, could be in no doubt about Julian’s opposition to Christianity, but they did not implicate Themistius in it. On the contrary, there is evidence that by some of them he was rather admired. The one extensive text of indubitable authenticity connecting Julian and Themistius in their own lifetimes is Julian’s Letter to Themistius.7 This is a response by Julian to a preceding letter from Themistius – like all Themistius’ correspondence (bar possibly the Arabic letter discussed later) now no longer extant – on Julian’s accession to a position of political power, whether that of Caesar in 355 or sole Augustus in 361. Some information about that lost letter, and certainly its central thrust, can be garnered from Julian’s reply. The central thrust was clearly an exhortation to Julian to ‘put away all thought of leisure’ (254a) and ‘exchange the philosophy of the portico for the open air’ (262d). This is entirely consistent with what is known of Themistius from his numerous extant orations. He was the leading exponent in the fourth century of the doctrine of the philosopher king, and the foremost critic of those philosophers who considered that philosophy should be kept separate from the public realm. For the same reason he considered oratory a noble activity and necessary to the true vocation of a philosopher; only through oratory could the philosopher lead the masses to virtue. What is more, according to Themistius this was the teaching of both Plato and Aristotle. Thus in an oration defending his right as a philosopher to speak in public, he argues that ‘in the judgement of the divine Plato . . . the terms “statesman”, “popular speaker”, and “sophist” are not synonymous (and) if the person who appears before the masses and publicly addresses them at length does so out of concern for the welfare of his audience, Plato considers him a statesman’.8 Similarly Aristotle recognised that ‘the same writings are not beneficial both to the general public and to philosophers’ and produced some ‘that are of general utility and designed for a broad audience (and) are truly full of light and radiance’.9 So Themistius claims to be doing nothing new when he ‘takes philosophy – cooped up in her house, ill-humoured, and avoiding gathering places, as the poets say Justice does – and persuades her to come out into the open and not to deprive the multitude grudgingly of her beauty’.10 Julian, however, had a conception of philosophy ‘cooped up in her house’ − certainly not ‘ill-humoured’, but on the contrary an Attic way of living, the 202

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

recollection of which gave him much pleasure. While Themistius had (in his letter) railed against Epicurus for advising one to live in obscurity, Julian commended him and maintained that Socrates and Glaucon cautioned against forcing into public life anyone who lacked the appropriate natural aptitude. In Julian’s estimation Socrates ranked above Alexander, and success in public life is determined not by virtue or wisdom, but by Fortune. Themistius himself, according to Julian, is no general or public orator (!), but as a teacher of philosophy he is more effective in making men act virtuously than the statesmen who urge them to do so by commands. Nevertheless, while professing to be no expert in philosophy, Julian claims that Themistius misinterpreted Aristotle when he argued that Aristotle’s architects of public actions in his Politics were kings; according to Julian they were lawgivers and political philosophers.11 Greek manuscript tradition gives us no clue whether or not Themistius replied to this. Julian’s Letter has been interpreted either as closing off further discussion12 or as inviting some compromise.13 Similarly, there is continuing difference of opinion as to whether or not Themistius held any public office under Julian. There is, however, in Arabic a risāla (possibly ‘letter’, but see the following) which might be just such a response. It is extant in two manuscripts, in one of which it is entitled ‘Risāla of Themistius the philosopher to the emperor Julian, On government and the administration (tadbīr) of the empire’, in the other ‘Risāla of Themistius, minister of Ilian, that is of the emperor Julian, On government (fī al-siyāsa), translated by Ibn Zur’a from Syriac’.14 Thus both manuscripts connect the two figures, but differently: one designates Julian as the addressee, the other Themistius as his minister. A Syriac version clearly existed prior to the Arabic of Ibn Zur‘a. The two Arabic texts are so similar it is hard to avoid the conclusion that one is a revision of the other. The translator of the former is named in the subscription as al-Dimashqī, but the language from which he translated is not specified.15 The likelihood is that the latter is a revision of the former using the lost Syriac as an aid, and the former made from either the Greek or the Syriac, if from the Greek possibly also using the Syriac as a control. Al-Dimashqī belonged to the circle of translators around Ḥunayn in the ninth to early tenth century, Ibn Zur‘a to the Baghdad Syro-Arabic school of Aristotelian philosophers in the late tenth.16 Both the Themistian authorship and the Julianic connection of the risāla have been questioned. Neither Julian nor anyone else is mentioned by name in the body of the text, but only in the superscription and subscription. In favour of authenticity, however, two considerations can be advanced. One is that the risāla is capable of interpretation as a remarkably astute response to Julian’s Letter. Julian had referred to the myth of Chronos in Plato’s Laws, at first accepting the allegorical interpretation as referring to a mortal, human by nature but divine by conduct, but later using the myth while abandoning or forgetting the interpretation and arguing that ruling is ‘beyond a man’ and requires ‘a more divine nature’.17 The latter interpretation justifies his ‘abdication’ of political responsibility, but as he had earlier indicated, Plato had used the myth to assert that a human ruler could be divine in his conduct and totally expel from his soul what is mortal and brutish, 203

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

except what is necessary for the survival of his body. But that is consistent with the risāla’s argument, which falls into two parts: an exposition of human psychology and society, followed by an account of the virtues of the most excellent king. In the background of course is the close parallel in Plato’s thought between the state (composed of elite philosopher-rulers and the governed multitude) and the soul (composed of governing reason and the governed ‘multitude’ of irrational passions and desires),18 and the link between psychology and government had already been cited by Julian. The argument of the risāla is thus that an individual man in whom the rational faculty is in full control (and could therefore potentially be a philosopher, although this is not made explicit) becomes divinised (kāna muta’allahan)19 and therefore fit to rule. The second consideration in favour of authenticity is the title. It is difficult to see why an anonymous text should have been ascribed to Themistius, whether in the Greek, Syriac, or Arabic tradition. Some of his orations were indeed known in Syriac tradition,20 but he was hardly so prominent that it would have been natural to ascribe an anonymous text to him. In Arabic, in fact, we have an example of just the opposite, namely the ascription of a piece genuinely by him (a paraphrase of a passage from Oration 22, On Friendship) to Socrates.21 In Arabic, and no doubt also in Syriac, he was known as a commentator on Aristotle, but so were many others, and the risāla is no Aristotelian commentary. Neither was there any particular reason to add the name of Julian to a text which originally made no mention of him. It is in fact hard to see why in the Christian Syriac tradition a text, which (because it was translated and transmitted) was evidently considered of value, should be connected for no reason to the notorious opponent of Christianity.22 Two arguments against authenticity, however, have considerable weight, one to do with content, the other with form. Absent from the risāla are some of the key doctrines of Themistius known from the orations, in particular the theocratic conception of kingship encapsulated in the idea of the king as the animate law (nomos empsychos), and the assertion of the doctrine of the philosopher king. To this the counter argument was made some time ago that the absence of these concepts is explicable precisely because this work is a response to Julian.23 Themistius would have grasped that he could never convert Julian to his theocratic conception of kingship or his idea of the philosopher king,24 and so chose to respond on different terrain in which he had some hope of success, namely Platonic-Aristotelian psychology and the rule of the man in whom the rational faculty is in full control. Possibly more problematic is the issue of form. The risāla does not have the formal structure or style of an epistle, but looks more like a short treatise. While one may assume that the original letter of Themistius was in proper epistolary form in the advisory-exhortatory style,25 and clearly, as Pseudo-Libanius advised, used fables (Heracles, Dionysius) and venerable figures of old (Solon, Pittacus, Lycurgus) as well as philosophers’ doctrines, but not in a dialectical manner,26 the risāla is devoid of epistolary form or grace. If it is indeed a response to Julian’s letter, we must probably assume therefore that Themistius chose to give this response in

204

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

the form not of a letter, but of a short treatise.27 The present text might be thought to be an epitome or redacted version of a longer letter, but recent research has made this unlikely.28 A different form, by contrast, seems entirely understandable. Themistius wrote the original letter for an exhortatory purpose, presumably not supposing (or at least hoping) that it would elicit such a negative response. Stung, or at least challenged, by Julian’s reply, and wishing to make clear his ability to defend his position as a philosopher, his reaction could well have been not to pen a further letter, but rather to dedicate a short philosophical treatise to him. The Arabic term covers both meanings.29 Given the indifference to or suspicion of Themistius, as noted earlier, in the pagan Greek historians, it is unlikely that he would have been linked with Julian by pagans without good reason. Similarly, given the rather favourable attitude to Themistius in Christian tradition and the hostile attitude to Julian, the creation of a secondary link there would also seem unlikely. On these grounds, it is by no means impossible that the superscriptions in the Arabic manuscripts preserve authentic information from the original provenance of the text. It is of course possible that because – whether rightly or wrongly – it was believed that Themistius was prefect of Constantinople under Julian,30 the risāla was secondarily taken to be addressed to him. Alternatively, if its superscription is authentic or at least early, it may have encouraged the idea that Themistius held office under Julian. Whatever the case, it was considered by Syro-Arabic Christians and Arabic Muslims in Baghdad to be an authentic work of Themistius connected to Julian. By the tenth century, with the decline of knowledge of Greek in the Near East, it seems unlikely that Julian’s Letter to Themistius was known to many, or indeed any, in that area, unless it had been translated. In the Near East of that time therefore it is unlikely to have provided the context for the interpretation of the risāla. The Fihrist, however (which knows nothing of any writing of Julian), in its section on the works of Themistius knows not one but two addressed to Julian: a kitāb (‘treatise’? ‘letter’?) to Julian on administration (tadbīr), and a risāla to Julian the emperor (malik). It also states that Themistius was a minister (kātib, ‘secretary’) of Julian, ‘the renegade from Christianity to the teaching of the philosophers’.31 The extant Arabic treatise is no doubt one of these, but which of them is hardly certain. If the coincidence with the term ‘risāla’ in the title of the extant treatise leads one to favour the latter, that with ‘tadbīr’ could contrariwise be held to point to the former. Whatever the answer may be, the intriguing point is that the Fihrist mentions two works. If we reject the supposition that these are simply different editions of the same one, which Ibn al-Nadīm has mistakenly taken to be two separate writings, we are bound to wonder what the other might have been. It might be tempting to suppose that it was an Arabic translation of the original letter of Themistius to Julian,32 but that of course remains only an (unlikely) speculation. The notice of Bar Hebraeus (died 1286) on these writings is somewhat longer: ‘Julian had a minister (kātib, ‘secretary’) named Themistius, an esteemed philosopher in his time, who interpreted many of the books of Aristotle and wrote

205

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

a kitāb to Julian on administration and the government of empires (fī al-tadbīr wa-siyāsat al-mamālik) and also a risāla to him which includes refraining from the persecution of the Christians’.33 On the ground that the extant risāla says nothing about stopping the persecution of Christians, it has been argued that it should be identified not with the risāla of Ibn al-Nadīm and Bar Hebraeus, but with the kitāb.34 If Bar Hebraeus’ statement about the risāla is accepted, it could hardly be argued that it is the lost original letter of Themistius to Julian; whatever else that contained in addition to what we can deduce from Julian’s reply, it is not credible that (at the time of its composition) it contained a plea to stop persecuting Christians. However, Bar Hebraeus’ notice must be regarded as extremely suspect. Or rather, there is a strong suspicion that he has added a comment here which is based on something he recorded elsewhere of considerable importance to his evaluation, and indeed to the evaluation by the Christian tradition generally, of Themistius vis-à-vis Julian. In his Ecclesiastical Chronicle Bar Hebraeus reported that Themistius, defending non-Arian Christians, ‘defused the anger of the emperor (Valens) by the oration he produced’, maintaining that the divisions among Christians are no more remarkable than ‘the three hundred cults among pagans’, and that God wishes to be worshipped in various ways. His (possibly direct but certainly ultimate) source was the same report in the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates, of which there was a Syriac version.35 The tolerance, indeed advocacy, of religious diversity was seen by Bar Hebraeus as characteristic of Themistius, and it is understandable if therefore, believing Themistius to have written works for Julian, the least tolerant of emperors towards Christians, he consciously or unconsciously added the point that he dissuaded him from their persecution. Themistius’ reputation for tolerance and diversity of worship was probably of great importance to the esteem in which he was held among some Christians, not least among those who as ‘outsiders’ stood to benefit from the tolerance or philanthrōpia of an emperor or caliph. That was the case with Christians living under Muslim rule, and Syrian Orthodox (‘monophysite’, ‘miaphysite’) Christians in the Byzantine Empire. There are therefore grounds to believe that at least one reason for the transmission of information about the pagan Themistius among the Syrians, despite evidence from the risāla of a connection to Julian, was his tolerance of Christianity. Of course the Syrians transmitted the writings of several pagan thinkers, notably Aristotle and Galen, but only Themistius had, according to this text, been associated with an outspoken opponent of Christianity.36 Syriac Christian transmitters or translators of his works may be assumed to have read anything in his work they thought related to Julian in the light of a basic disagreement between the two of them in relation to Christianity, even if that was only made explicit by Bar Hebraeus. That hermeneutical standpoint would certainly be confirmed if they knew, as many probably did, that Gregory of Nazianzus, the most admired theologian and orator among all the Greek Fathers, not only mounted powerful attacks on Julian in two great orations, but by contrast in two letters to Themistius addressed him in a most friendly manner.37 206

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

Only two of Themistius’ orations are currently extant in Syriac, and neither of them deals with the themes of religious toleration or the philanthrōpia of the philosopher king. On the face of it therefore this suggestion that Themistius was well known to the Syrians and that this theme was important to them may be thought to lack credibility. Discussion around ‘the Syriac tradition’ is, however, frequently misled by a failure to note that many Syriac speakers were bilingual, or at least able to read Greek. Within the ‘Syriac tradition’, encompassing the totality of Syriac speakers, there was a significant sub-group of such bilinguals, who maintained a tradition which may be termed ‘Graeco-Syriac’. Many Greek works were translated into Syriac by these bilinguals for the benefit of their less linguistically endowed compatriots, but many were also read in the original without ever, to the best of our knowledge, being translated. This situation prevailed from the fourth to at least the eighth century, at the end of which the East Syrian Patriarch Timothy I in Baghdad declared that while his own language was Syriac, he had studied Greek and Arabic, and compared the Syriac translation of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics by Athanasius of Balad (no longer extant) with the Greek.38 The contrast is particularly evident in philosophy between what Graeco-Syrians knew of Greek writings and what was translated (or what translations have survived), but the same is true in other fields such as medicine and mathematics.39 The major orations of Themistius on the theme of religious tolerance could have been known therefore among Hellenophile Graeco-Syrians. Bar Hebraeus’ comment about Themistius’ plea for tolerance comes (directly or indirectly) from Socrates’ account of his (lost) oration to Valens, but it fits perfectly with the text of an (extant) oration delivered before Jovian: You alone have clearly understood that the king cannot exercise force on his subjects in all matters, and that there are areas which are immune to pressure and resistant to menace and compulsion, namely piety in general and religion in particular. . . . You prescribe that the form of cultic worship belongs (not to you, but) to all men, imitating in this respect the Divinity, who has made a disposition to piety a common trait of all men, but has left the mode of adoration to the decision of the individual. . . . ‘Each sacrificed to a different god’ (Iliad II 400) is older than Homer. Perhaps God does not wish such agreement on this to arise among men. . . . You can believe that the Creator of all rejoices at this diversity. He wills that the Syrians lead a different life from the Greeks and Egyptians, and that not even among the Syrians is everything unified, but he has divided them into small groups.40 On account of their relatively free translation style, the two orations which are extant in Syriac are indicative of an early respect for Themistius among GraecoSyrians, for this free style was characteristic of the fifth or sixth century, rather than later, when the ‘mirror’ style of translation became dominant. One is a translation of Oration 22, On Friendship, and while dedicated to a subject which is 207

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

more personal than political, it does include mention of the all-important Leitmotiv of Themistius – the very one, indeed, at the heart of his original letter to Julian – namely the duty of philosophy to engage the general public (which of course leads on to the necessity of combining philosophy with rhetoric). A translation of the Syriac version of this passage will serve as an example of the general character of the version.41

Syriac

Greek

Orations (mellē) by which men may become virtuous are not often delivered in your presence, and this is not the fault of yours, but of those who are philosophers in name only and think it sufficient that someone present his wisdom in secret before his disciples, and not before the gaze of the whole city.

Of orations (logoi) by which men may live better, you seem to me not to have plenty, not by fault of yours, but of the so-called philosophers, those who have assumed it sufficient to whisper to the young in a solitary corner. They thought, as Callicles put it in his criticism, that they could avoid the centre of the city and those gathering places wherein the poet says that men gain distinction. Leaving them to stay where they want to stay; it will be our duty to bring speech (logoi) out into the light and to accustom it to tolerate the crowd and to put up with noise and with the clamour of the seated assembly. Indeed, if it is capable of acting beneficially individually, it will also be able to do so on many at once. For it is not, one might say, like provisions that are enough for one or two diners but cannot satisfy more than that number; rather it is more like the rays of the great god, which shine down on thousands of eyes no less than on any two.

But leaving them to teach how they wish, we will send our doctrine (malpānūtā) out into the light and accustom it to endure the assembly and its commotions, and the clamour of the populace seated to hear it. Indeed, if it can be of value to everyone individually, it can also bring benefits to all its listeners. For doctrine is not like nourishment of the body which, when sufficient for one or two cannot be adequate for many, but is like light itself, which, just as easily as it gives light to two eyes, similarly does so also to eyes without number.

Those I have termed ‘Graeco-Syrians’, or some of them, may of course have preferred to read Themistius in Greek rather than in translation. Nevertheless, any substantive modifications of the translator may well be thought to reflect the kind of ‘reservations’ that could be held among bilingual Syrians about some of Themistius’ statements, whether such reservations implied some criticism (of paganism), or merely a belief that the readers would not understand the allusion. In the preceding passage, one notes that the translator dropped the allusions to ‘a corner’ and Callicles and ‘the poet’s’ (Homer’s) words about the ‘gathering places wherein . . . men gain distinction’,42 and substituted ‘light itself’ for ‘the rays of the great god’, i.e. the sun. It is also noteworthy that the version ends at the conclusion of Themistius’ remarks about Aesop’s wily fox (279b), omitting the subsequent material about Scylla and the allegory, ‘as Prodicus tells the 208

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

story . . . (about) Heracles’, of Virtue and Vice. These observations remind us that we should not dismiss the authenticity of the risāla simply on the ground of the absence of classical allusions. As mentioned earlier,43 part of this oration was known in an Arabic paraphrase, derived from the Syriac version, but attributed not to Themistius but to Socrates.44 The second oration of Themistius extant in Syriac, and in the same unique manuscript, Add. 17,209 of the British Library (probably of the ninth century), is entitled ‘On aretē (virtue), which is excellence (myatrūtā) of soul’. Although it is not extant in Greek, there is no reason to doubt its authenticity.45 It opens by calling on those who consider there is something more excellent than aretē to purify their hearts of this stain and follow his words. Earlier he had shown them the way of Plato and Aristotle, but that was a hard way; now he will show them another way, simpler but ‘full of goods and abundance’.46 He identifies three groups of listeners: one glorifies pleasures, another maintains that the life of man is intermediate between the animals and the spiritual beings and therefore requires many things, while the third claims that human good is exclusively found in what man has in himself, and not from what he gains from outside of himself. The first takes Epicurus as its guide, the second could be persuaded by Aristotle that virtue is the highest good, above the goods of the body and external possessions, or by Plato, who also recognised the fact of other goods but designated virtue the highest.47 Many of the philosophers do wish to place human excellence outside of a man, but while one may ask whether it is to be sought in the soul, the body, or both, the answer is that human excellence resides not in hands, feet, or eyes, but in wisdom, reason, and subtlety.48 ‘The nature of man complies with rationality and with excellent and goodly reason . . . (not) the things of the world’.49 Therefore, contends Themistius, ‘Socrates’ words were not misleading when, asked by someone if in his estimation the great king of the Persians was happy (ṭubbānā, makaraios), he answered, “I do not consider him to be happy, for I am not persuaded that he cares about wisdom”’.50 And when reminded of the Persian king’s wealth and power, ‘(Socrates said,) “I know and hear all these things, but I do not deduce from them that he is good, nor (that they constitute) human excellence”. By what then is it constituted, Socrates? “By knowledge, true insight and truth, inasmuch as someone knows over what he has power and over what he has no power, and what it is right for him to endeavour to bring about and what it is right for him to work so that it does not come about”. . . . But because the Athenians could not tolerate Socrates saying these things, like children who find an opportunity and occasion to harm their teacher they removed him from their presence by poison’.51 The remainder of the oration is largely devoted to countering any misperception that Themistius maintains that ‘virtue is sufficient for life’; rather his argument is that ‘it is sufficient for the good life’.52 Similarly to everyone who is serious about leadership, he argues, the philosopher teaches that it is not appropriate for anyone to become a leader, but (only) for him who exercises leadership with wisdom.53 Striking evidence of Themistius’ subsequent acceptance in Christian circles is provided by a Syriac monastic anthology in a manuscript, Sinai syr. 14, 209

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

probably of the tenth century. In addition to excerpts from Christian writers, the compilation includes several short pieces from pagan writers. The pagan pieces are from Aristotle (the pseudonymous On Virtues and Vices), sayings attributed to Plato, Dandamis, Stomathalassa, ‘Pythagorean philosophers’, ‘a philosopher’, ‘the sages’, and ‘Themistius the philosopher’.54 The five extracts from Themistius55 are from this oration on aretē, and consist of the two passages mentioning Socrates cited earlier, together with a story about the Ephesians under siege, a remark of Plato about the nature of dogs,56 and a story about Lysimachus.57 Between Themistius and Julian in their lifetimes there was clearly an element of distrust, or at least reserve,58 but in subsequent Christian tradition this became an unbridgeable incompatibility. While Themistius was received into the select group of pagan thinkers held in high esteem among some Christians, Julian, already subjected in the fourth century to the withering invectives of Gregory of Nazianzus and Ephrem Syrus, was subsequently pilloried in texts such as the Julian Romance.59 The connection between the two of them in the superscription of the Arabic risāla, which we have no reason to doubt was also present in the (Greek and Syriac) exemplars,60 is therefore likely to be no secondary addition, but rather to be firmly anchored in the tradition from the outset.61 Christians must have read this work as a piece of valuable teaching given by a philosopher of whom they approved to an emperor of whom they did not.62 However, in the ideological narrative from the Abbasid era identifying Christianity with a rejection of philosophy, Julian’s apostasy from Christianity to ‘the teaching(s) of the philosophers’63 would be cause not for vituperation, but for praise.64 When therefore the risāla was read by Muslims familiar with the anti-Byzantine narrative, the connection between Themistius and Julian would appear in a quite different light. In Baghdad it would be only among Christian Syrians that Themistius’ tolerance of Christianity was known. For Muslim Arabs receptive to the anti-Byzantine narrative, on the other hand, the risāla of Themistius to Julian showed that the former was the guiding light in the latter’s praiseworthy espousal, against Christianity, of ‘the teachings of the philosophers’.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Themistius and Julian: Their Association in Syriac and Arabic Tradition’, in: Alberto J. Quiroga Puertas (ed.), The Purpose of Rhetoric in Late Antiquity. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 72 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013) 161–76. © 2013 by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, and republished by permission. 2 Fihrist 241.16−242.6, tr. Dodge (1970) 579−81; cf. Rosenthal (1975) 45−7. 3 This will doubtless be clear to readers in relation to its statements about late antique history. It may be useful to note, however, that it also applies to the assertion in the account about pre-Arabic translations of Greek works of logic and medicine into Persian. The work of Ibn al-Muqaffa‛ on logic was not translated from an ancient Persian version, but was influenced by Graeco-Syriac logical works from the sixth century or later. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 203−4.

210

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

4 Gutas (1998) 83−95. Cf. his pithy summary, 85: ‘the Byzantines turned their back on ancient science because of Christianity, while the Muslims welcomed it because of Islam. Anti-Byzantinism thus becomes philhellenism’. 5 Cf. Leppin and Portmann (1998) 26. 6 See further discussion later. 7 Text, translation, and commentary in Fontaine, Prato, and Marcone (1987) 1−39, 255−68, and Swain (2013) 160–79, 53–91. On this and the following section, see the more detailed account in Chapter 9 in this volume. 8 Themistius, Or. 26, 314d−315a, tr. Penella (2000) 143−4. 9 Themistius, Or. 26, 319b-c, tr. Penella (2000) 149−50. 10 Themistius, Or. 26, 320b; tr. Penella (2000) 151. 11 Julian, Ep. ad Them. 253b, 255b-c, 256c-257d, 266a-c, 254b, 263c-264a. 12 Bouffartigue (2006). 13 Brauch (1993). 14 Themistius, Risāla, ed. Shahid (1974) 82, ed. Swain (2013) 134. There are facing translations, Latin and English, in Shahid and Swain respectively, and an Italian translation in Conterno (2014). 15 Themistius, Risāla, ed. Shahid 118, ed. Swain 158. 16 Watt (2004) 128−9. 17 Ep. ad Them. 259a-b, 260c-d with reference to Plato, Laws 4, 713a-714b. Cf. Bouffartigue (2006) 130. 18 Plato, Republic 4, 435a-436a; Laws 3, 689a-c. 19 Risāla, ed. Shahid 84, ed. Swain 136. 20 See further discussion later. 21 See further discussion at nn. 43−44. 22 Dagron (1968) 222−4 argued that it is reasonable to suppose that Syriac and Arabic traditions, knowing Themistius above all as a commentator on Aristotle and a contemporary of Julian, systematically associated the two names in works of the philosopher addressed to an emperor. Such a supposition does not strike me as likely. Dagron (1968) 224 n. 35 notes that ‘Julian was the emperor best known to the Arabic and especially the Syriac sources’, but especially in the Syriac sources he was well known because he was so greatly hated. 23 Croissant (1930), followed by Dvornik (1955), (1966) 666−9. 24 Since Julian had himself claimed he was no philosopher, but had only fallen in love with philosophy (Ep. ad Them. 254b), there was no point in Themistius renewing in an explicit fashion his exhortation to him to pursue his vocation as a philosopher king. The argument needed to be rephrased (and for tactical purposes de-personalised), even if ‘divinisation’ was still included in it. Even if Julian’s claim was merely sarcastic or ironic, it would still have had to be taken at face value by Themistius. 25 For these styles, see Pseudo-Demetrius and Pseudo-Libanius: Weichert (1910), 7 [11] and 18 [32]; Greek texts with English translation in Malherbe (1988) 36−7, 70−1. 26 Ep. ad Them. 253c-254a. For Pseudo-Libanius, see Weichert (1910) 19−21; ed., tr. Malherbe (1988) 72−3. 27 Cf. Croissant (1930) 9. Vanderspoel (1995) 126−34 considers that the risāla, while an authentic work of Themistius, is not a response to Julian’s Letter to Themistius, but nevertheless expounds a conception of kingship (133) ‘more in terms of the emperor’s philosophy than of his own’. Vanderspoel instead equates the risāla with the panegyric of Julian by Themistius mentioned by Libanius (Epp. 818 and 1430), or an epitome of it. There is a quasi-panegyrical section in the risāla, Shahid 96–104, Swain 146–50, but the work as a whole is more like a treatise than a panegyric. That the ‘beautifully-yoked three-horse chariot of daimones and the necessities by which they are bound’ cited by Libanius from the panegyric refer to the three faculties of the soul in the risāla is by no means certain; Croissant (1930) 28 n. 1 and Dagron (1968) 224−5 are sceptical of such an identification.

211

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Cf. Swain (2013) 46–50, the employment of the anthropological portion by Nemesius. Cf. Bouyges (1924) 17. Suda, s.v. Θεμίστιος, cited in the Testimonia in Themistii Orationes III, 135. Fihrist 253.24−7, tr. Dodge (1970) 610−11. This is the suggestion of Vanderspoel (1995) 243. Bar Hebraeus, Ta’rīkh, ed. Ṣāliḥānī 139.12−15, ed. Mansur 74.17−19. Bouyges (1924) 304−5. Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle, ed. Abbeloos and Lamy I, 107.13−109.2; Socrates, H. E. IV, 32 (cited in Themistii Orationes III, 134). On the Syriac version of Socrates and its users, cf. Hansen (1995) xxxi–xxxiii. Conterno (2014) 21 n. 3, 102 n. 4 notes that the direct source could have been Michael the Syrian. On account of his imperial actions against Christians in the educational realm, Julian was clearly in a different category from other non-Christians, and none of his writings, to the best of our knowledge, was ever translated into Syriac. Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 4 and 5 (contra Julianum 1 and 2); Ep. 24 and 38 (ad Themistium). Cf. Ruether (1969) 162−6; Watt (2004) 127−30; Elm (2012) 219–28 and following n. 62. Timothy, ep. 19, ed. Braun 127, tr. Braun 85; ep. 48, ed. Heimgartner 89, tr. Heimgartner 74. Cf. Chapters 6–8 in this volume, and Watt (2017). Most Syriac translations of Galen’s medical treatises have not survived and are known only through Ḥunayn’s famous risāla (of which the earlier Syriac version has also not survived) and further translations from Ḥunayn’s Syriac into Arabic. Themistius, Or. 5, 67b−70a. German translation of the complete passage in Leppin and Portmann (1998) 107−10. ‘Syrians’ probably denotes Christians; cf. ibid. 110 n. 45. Or. 22, 265b−d. Syriac in Sachau (1870) 49. The translation of the Greek is taken from Penella (2000) 89, with light modification for the purpose of comparison with the Syriac. Plato, Gorgias 485d; Homer, Iliad IX 441. Generally on these kinds of changes in the Syriac versions of the orations, cf. Rigolio (2013). Cf. preceding n. 21. Cf. Rosenthal (1940) 402−5. The passage cited is the beginning of the oration (264b−265a). Rosenthal noted (similarly to our observation on the Syriac preceding) that the Syriac translator omitted many Greek names, while the Arabic translation ‘can be styled but a paraphrase’. He also noted it to be ‘a yet unsolved and unexplainable riddle, just where and how the most appropriate name of Socrates might have been introduced into this quotation in the Arabic version’. The frequent citation of alleged words of Socrates in the oration discussed immediately following might point in the direction of an answer. But however that is to be explained, in our context the more significant point is that in the Arabic the genuine name of Themistius was eliminated. Syriac in Sachau (1870) 17−47. Syriac with facing Latin version in Mach (1974) (reproduction page-by-page of the Syriac of Sachau). Annotated German translation with introduction in Gildemeister and Bücheler (1872), and Italian translation with introduction in Conterno (2014) 71–94. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 17−18, Mach 10−12. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 18−31, Mach 12−38. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 31−2, Mach 38−40. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 33, Mach 42. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 34, Mach 44. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 35, Mach 46. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 38, Mach 52. Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 47, Mach 70.

212

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

54 Brock (1999) 48−50. 55 The name is spelt twmsṭyws (‘Thaumastios’) in the two orations and the monastic anthology. In the risāla it is spelt t’msṭyws or d’msṭyws, in the Fihrist t’msṭyws, in Bar Hebraeus t’mysṭws in Syriac and t’msṭyws in Arabic. Despite these variations, it is clear that we are dealing with the same person. 56 Cf. Plato, Republic 2, 375e. 57 Themistius, Perì aretês, ed. Sachau 40−1, 44, 45−6; Mach 56−8, 64, 66−8. The stories are designed to demonstrate (1) that one can be of assistance through silence as through admonition, (2) that a philosopher should not befriend him who gives him something, or hate him who gives him nothing, but should look on as a friend him who has virtue in his life, and (3) that a philosopher can create peace among warring factions by his courage. 58 Cf. Leppin and Portmann (1998) 11−13 and the literature cited there. 59 Drijvers (2007) 19−20: ‘The narrative (of the Julian Romance) is an invective in the tradition of the Hymns against Julian by Ephrem Syrus and the Orations 4 and 5 by Gregory of Nazianzus and is therefore of prime importance for the Christian image of Julian’s reign’. 60 The ‘king’ is directly addressed at Themistius, Risāla, ed. Shahid 98, Swain 146 (‘. . . you, that is, O blessed king’). 61 For different reasons Vanderspoel (1995) 244−9 considers that ‘all in all, the Risālat is much more likely to have been addressed to Julian’ (than to Theodosius). 62 Conterno (2014) 13–42 argues that Syriac interest in the risāla, and its translation into Syriac, dates only from the time of Ḥunayn, and that previously Themistius had been of interest to Syrians only as a writer on personal ethics. Since the date of the Syriac version is unknown, while the translation of the two orations is generally thought to be of the fifth or sixth century, this reconstruction is possible. It seems to me unlikely, however, that Themistius was initially considered by Syrians solely from the viewpoint of personal ethics, and only subsequently as a political thinker, while in Greek he was always seen in both these ways. Whatever the date of the Syriac risāla, the symbiosis of Greek and Syriac culture (at least of its Hellenophile component) would have ensured that Graeco-Syrians who came into contact with the orations (and some did, as the versions of the two ‘private orations’ show) could hardly have missed the political aspect of Themistius’ activity. Even if early Syriac translations were confined to some of the ‘private orations’, the ‘political orations’ and the risāla could still have been of interest to pre-Abbasid Hellenophile Syrians, such as those interested in Aristotle or in the political-theological orations of Gregory of Nazianzus. This is all the more likely if, as suggested by Elm (2012) 219–28, Themistius had been Gregory’s model for the publicly engaged philosophical life. Cf. Watt (2015); Schamp, Todd, and Watt (2016) 897–900; and preceding n. 37. 63 madāhib/madhab al-falāsifa (Fihrist 241.22 and 253.25). Cf. preceding nn. 2 and 31. 64 The vituperative anti-Julian Christian literature was presumably not known to Muslims, or at least not influential among them.

References Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle: J.B. Abbeloos and T.J. Lamy (ed. and tr.), Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon ecclesiasticum (Lovanii: Peeters, 1872–7). Bar Hebraeus, Ta’rīkh: A. Ṣāliḥānī (ed.), Ta’rīkh mukhtaṣar al-duwal (Beirut: Catholic Press of the Jesuit Fathers, 1890); ed. K. Mansur, Ta’rīkh mukhtaṣar al-duwal (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-‘Imlīya, 1997).

213

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

Bouffartigue (2006): ‘La lettre de Julien à Thémistios: histoire d’une fausse manœuvre et d’un désaccord essentiel’, in: A. Gonzalez Galvez and P.-L. Malosse (eds.), Mélanges A. F. Norman (Lyon: Topoi orient-occident and Paris: De Boccard Édition-Diffusion) 113–38. Bouyges (1924): M. Bouyges, ‘Notes sur des traductions arabes III. Épître de Thémistius á Julien sur la politique’, Archives de Philosophie 2, 15–23, 363–71. Brauch (1993): T. Brauch, ‘Themistius and the Emperor Julian’, Byzantion 63, 79–115. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Stomathalassa, Dandamis and Secundus in a Syriac Monastic Anthology’, in: G.J. Reinik and A.C. Klugkist (eds.), After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour of Professor Han J.W. Drijvers (Leuven: Peeters) 35−50. Conterno (2014): M. Conterno, Temistio orientale. Orazioni temistiane nella tradizione siriaca e araba (Brescia: Paideia). Croissant (1930): J. Croissant, ‘Un nouveau discours de Thémistius’, Serta Leodiensia, Bibliothèque de la faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’université de Liège 44, 7–30. Dagron (1968): G. Dagron, ‘L’empire romain d’Orient au IVème siècle et les traditions politiques de l’hellénisme. Le témoignage de Thémistios’, Travaux et mémoires 3, 1–242. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Drijvers (2007): J.W. Drijvers, ‘Julian the Apostate and the City of Rome: Pagan-Christian Polemics in the Syriac Julian Romance, in: W.J. van Bekkum, J.W. Drijvers, and A.C. Klugkist (eds.), Syriac Polemics: Studies in Honour of Gerrit Jan Reinink (Leuven: Peeters) 1−20. Dvornik (1955): F. Dvornik, ‘The Emperor Julian’s “Reactionary” Ideas on Kingship’, in: K. Weitzmann (ed.), Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 71–81. Dvornik (1966): F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background, I–II (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies). Elm (2012): S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church (Berkeley: University of California Press). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Fontaine, Prato, and Marcone (1987): J. Fontaine, C. Prato, and A. Marcone, Giuliano Imperatore. Alla madre degli dei e altri discorsi (Milan: Mondadori). Gildemeister and Bücheler (1872): J. Gildemeister and F. Bücheler, ‘Themistios Perì aretês’, Rheinisches Museum 27, 438−62. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Hansen (1995): G.C. Hansen, Sokrates. Kirchengeschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag). Hugonnard-Roche (1991): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘L’intermédiaire syriaque dans la transmission de la philosophie grecque à l’arabe: le cas de l’Organon d’Aristote’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 1, 187–209. Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed. and tr.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; ed. and tr. J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, on his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Julian, Letter to Themistius: see Fontaine, Prato, and Marcone (1987), Swain (2013).

214

THEMISTIUS AND JULIAN

Leppin and Portmann (1998): H. Leppin and W. Portmann, Themistios. Staatsreden (Stuttgart: Hiersemann). Mach (1974): R. Mach, ‘Themistii philosophi Oratio de virtute, quae est praestantia animi’, in: Schenkl, Downey, and Norman, III, 7−71. Malherbe (1988): A.J. Malherbe, Ancient Epistolary Theorists (Atlanta: Scholars Press). Penella (2000): R.J. Penella, The Private Orations of Themistius (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Rigolio (2013): A. Rigolio, ‘From “Sacrifice to the Gods” to the “Fear of God”: Omissions, Additions and Changes in the Syriac Translations of Plutarch, Lucian and Themistius’, in: M. Vinzent (ed.), Studia Patristica, 64 (Leuven: Peeters) 133–43. Rosenthal (1940): F. Rosenthal, ‘On the Knowledge of Plato’s Philosophy in the Islamic World’, Islamic Culture 14, 387−422. Rosenthal (1975): F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London: Routledge). Ruether (1969): R.R. Ruether, Gregory of Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Sachau (1870): E. Sachau, Inedita Syriaca (Vienna: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses in Halle). Sālim (1970): M.S. Sālim, Risālat Thāmistiyūs ilā Yūliyān al-mālik fī al-siyāsa wa-tadbīr al-mamlaka (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat Dār al-Kutub). Schamp, Todd, and Watt (2016): J. Schamp, R.B. Todd, and J.W. Watt, ‘Thémistios’, in: R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques VI (Paris: CNRS Éditions) 850–900. Schenkl, Downey, and Norman (1965−74): see Themistius, Orations. Shahid (1974): I. Shahid, ‘Epistula de re publica gerenda’, in: Schenkl, Downey, and Norman, III, 73–119. Swain (2013): S. Swain, Themistius, Julian and Greek Political Theory under Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Themistius, Orations: H. Schenkl, G. Downey, and A.F. Norman (eds.), Themistii Orationes quae supersunt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1965–74) I–III. Themistius, Perì aretês: see Sachau (1870), Gildemeister and Bücheler (1872), Mach (1974), Conterno (2014). Themistius, Risāla: see Sālim (1970), Shahid (1974), Swain (2013), Conterno (2014). Timothy ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy epp. 42–58: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Vanderspoel (1995): J. Vanderspoel, Themistius and the Imperial Court (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 121–49. Watt (2015): J.W. Watt, Review of Conterno (2014), Orientalia 84, 140–43. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Weichert (1910): V. Weichert, Demetrii et Libanii ΤΥΠΟΙ ΕΠΙΣΤΟΛΙΚΟΙ et ΕΠΙΣΤΟΛΙΜΑΙΟΙ ΧΑΡΑΚΤΗΡΕΣ (Leipzig: Teubner).

215

11 L I T E R A RY A N D P H I L O S O P H I C A L RHETORIC IN SYRIAC1

Syrians and Syriac literature played an important role in the transmission of Greek thought to the Near East. In late antiquity much native Syriac literature bore the imprint of Greek cultural influence, and a considerable quantity of Greek Christian and secular literature was translated into Syriac. In the Abbasid period Syrians, now conversant also with Arabic, were much in demand as translators from Greek or Syriac to Arabic, and their long familiarity with Greek logic and medicine stimulated and contributed to the Arabic engagement with these fields. Inasmuch as rhetoric is viewed as a branch of logic, it is therefore natural to expect that Syriac involvement would be of significance for the Arabic experience, but given the native Arabic literary tradition and the closeness of the Syriac to the Greek, a different picture is to be expected in the case of sophistic or literary rhetoric. Nevertheless, it is important to consider both sides, philosophical and literary, when looking at the Syriac material, both for its contribution to the later history of classical rhetoric and for its possible direct or indirect contribution to the Arabic. We may begin with the sophistic or literary strand, apparently the least likely to be of significance in the Near East, for according to general opinion the forms of Greek culture admired there were the philosophical and the scientific, and little or no interest was shown in the Greek literary heritage.2 While it is undoubtedly true that there is little evidence of an interest in the pagan Greek literary heritage, it does not necessarily follow that the rhetorical elements enshrined in some of that literature, which contributed to its aesthetic attraction or persuasive power, could not have been absorbed by bilingual Greek-Syriac speakers. Education in rhetoric was, after all, the staple of late Greek education, and well educated Syriac speakers in the major bilingual cities such as Edessa who also knew and admired Greek must surely be presumed to have received instruction in the basic principles of classical rhetoric. One such case is particularly relevant in the present context, because of its connection with the history of philosophy in the region. The father of the monk John Bar Aphtonia was a teacher of rhetoric in Edessa; a Syriac panegyrist of John said of his father that he ‘partook of the secular wisdom, as not without foresight it ends up with the art of rhetoric’.3 He died before John was born, and John was sent at the age of 15 to the monastery of St. Thomas at Seleucia (near Antioch), which 217

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

was known as a centre for the study of Greek. There he proceeded in due course to the study of ‘arts based on logos’, and John’s later literary output may have been entirely in Greek. He is described in Pseudo-Zacharias as learned, eloquent, an abbot, and an ex-advocate originating from Edessa,4 but it is the panegyric which is of particular interest here, because it conforms very closely to the rules of epideictic rhetoric for a basilikos or epitaphios logos.5 At its outset the panegyrist makes an explicit comparison between the praise of ‘soldiers who are deemed worthy of encomia’ and ‘the soldiers of Christ who have demonstrated spiritual might and vanquished the sect of the devil’. John Bar Aphtonia and this encomium, Christian in content but classical in form, are especially relevant to our topic because John’s great achievement was the foundation, by the transfer from Seleucia around 530 CE, of the monastery of Qenneshre on the banks of the Euphrates, among the monks of which was the panegyrist. He is anonymous, but others from that monastery are among the most significant names in the history of the transmission of Greek philosophy in the Near East in the pre-Abbasid period: Severus Sebokht, Athanasius of Balad, Jacob of Edessa, and George, bishop of the Arabs. It was the single most important centre of philosophical, and particularly Aristotelian, studies in the region during the seventh century.6 The Graeco-Syriac culture represented in this monastery was not therefore confined to the philosophical aspect, but included the rhetorical. John Bar Aphtonia’s panegyrist, however, was not the first to rework classical epideictic for Christian religious purposes, for he had been preceded by the great Greek Christian orators: Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Chrysostom.7 If Syriac-speaking Christians had little interest in pagan Greek literature, they most certainly had a very strong interest in Christian Greek rhetorical literature. Gregory was the most admired Greek theologian in the Syriac language sphere, and all his extant orations were translated into Syriac; among the translators was an alumnus of Qenneshre, Athanasius of Balad, who was also an energetic translator of Aristotle. It is hard to imagine that readers of Gregory could have missed his love of rhetoric, and, were they desirous of imitating his achievement, not continued to cultivate the study of it. The panegyric of John Bar Aphtonia is a particularly striking example of the use of the structure and topoi of Greek rhetoric in a Syriac speech or Life, but it is not an isolated case. Other examples in Syriac of familiarity with classical rhetoric include the employment of deliberative rhetoric in the fourth century Liber Graduum, judicial rhetoric in the fifth century oration of Narsai on the three Nestorian doctors, and epideictic rhetoric in the eighth century oration on Severus of Antioch by George, bishop of the Arabs.8 One notable pagan orator is present in the extant Graeco-Syriac translation literature, the fourth century philosopher and statesman Themistius,9 whose commentaries on Aristotle were known to, and greatly admired by, the Syro-Arabic Aristotelians of tenth century Baghdad.10 Turning from rhetorical practice to theory, however, we have no evidence of handbooks or technical treatises of rhetoric in Syriac from the pre-Islamic period. Thus if John Bar Aphtonia’s father taught rhetoric to students from a technical 218

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

treatise in Syriac, it has been lost. It is of course possible that he taught it (whether in Syriac or Greek) from one or more works of the Hermogenes corpus, which was becoming established around that time as the standard rhetorical cursus, but the situation concerning the translation of the rhetorical corpus is in marked contrast to that of the philosophical. The fifth and sixth centuries marked the beginning of the intensive Syriac work of translation and commentary on the Organon, but we have no evidence of a comparable interest in the rhetorical corpus of Hermogenes. For evidence of a technical treatise in Syriac which might be compared to Quintilian or Hermogenes we have to wait until the Islamic period, and even then only one is known to us, the treatise by Antony of Tagrit, an author belonging to the ninth century CE.11 Antony’s treatise is different in many ways from those known to us in Greek or Latin, but there is also a significant amount of common ground. It is very unlikely that Antony knew Greek or consulted Greek works; where he does cite Greek writings it is always in Syriac versions, and there is evidence in his work of misunderstandings of passages which are hardly conceivable had he known them in the original.12 It is therefore hard to see where his knowledge of Greek rhetorical theory could have come from unless some Syriac (or Arabic) handbook was available to him, or there had been a tradition of rhetoric teaching in Syriac. We have no knowledge of any other rhetoric manual in Syriac or Arabic, but Antony does inform us, in his discussion of rhetorical figures in the Fifth (and final) Book of his treatise, and specifically in his exegesis of the Homeric ‘battle of the gods’ (Iliad 20, 67–73), that he had a ‘teacher in these things’.13 It is a likely supposition therefore that some kind of grammatical-rhetorical education existed in Syriac prior to Antony, based to a greater or lesser extent on the Greek model, and it is significant that the explanation of the ‘battle of the gods’ attributed by Antony to his teacher is exactly that of the Greek scholia to Homer.14 Admittedly in the same Book Antony claims to be the first Syrian to have put rhetoric and poetics into an Art, but he claims that the Syrians until his time had been amiss in failing to produce not only Arts of rhetoric and poetics but also grammar, which in this last case is certainly not true. In the introduction to this Fifth Book he at first appears to assert that although the Syrians have at their disposal eloquent speeches in their language, he is the first Syrian to have organised the material into an Art, but subsequently it is clear that he is talking principally about the rules of Syriac metre.15 He makes no such assertions to originality in the First Book, which contains the main bulk of the rhetorical prescriptions. He praises the Greeks for having written Arts, but nowhere cites the Greek treatises which he deems worthy of praise or from which he could have drawn material. The main source of his material is thus likely to have been a tradition of rhetoric instruction in Syriac. The ninth century date mentioned earlier as his floruit was based on the testimony of Bar Hebraeus, but has been questioned on the grounds that the first Syriac writer to cite Antony is Jacob Bar Shakko in the thirteenth century.16 The objection is not compelling; Bar Shakko was also the first writer in Syriac to cite Aristotle’s Poetics, but we know that it existed in Syriac no later than the tenth 219

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

century, for Abū Bishr Mattā translated it from Syriac into Arabic.17 In the introduction to the Fifth Book Antony vigorously defends Syriac against those (no doubt Arabs) who call it ‘meagre, narrow, stunted and feeble and designate our literature poor and beggarly’.18 The reproach is more likely to have been made while Syriac and Syrians were still a force to be reckoned with at the centre of Arabic culture, and thus during the ninth or tenth centuries rather than later. It therefore seems preferable to assume that Bar Hebraeus was not off the mark and to locate Antony within the context of the Graeco-Arabic culture of the early Abbasids, rather than bringing him closer to the close of the Abbasid caliphate and the period of the ‘Syriac Renaissance’ (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). The issue has now been placed beyond reasonable doubt by the discovery at Dayr al-Suryan of an old manuscript (Syr. 32) of the Rhetoric and other works of Antony (forty-two folios of which are in the collection of the British Library), which the cataloguers of the recent discoveries there have assigned to the ninth century.19 While we know of no other manual of rhetoric in Syriac, we do know that Syriac and Arabic translations were made of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The Arabic survives in the unique Paris manuscript of the Organon,20 the Syriac, although known to Ibn al-Samḥ, is no longer extant but was the subject of a commentary by Bar Hebraeus.21 Although Bar Hebraeus often preferred to paraphrase Avicenna’s paraphrase of Aristotle rather than Aristotle himself, it is nevertheless clear that the Syriac Rhetoric which lay before Bar Hebraeus was on the whole quite far from the Greek but close to the Arabic text, while yet in many individual details (particularly in the use of loanwords) closer to the Greek. The Arabic must therefore have been made either from the Syriac or, very likely with the assistance of the Syriac, from a Greek manuscript very similar to that used by the Syriac translator.22 Assuming therefore, with the general consensus, that the Paris text represents the old (pre-Ḥunayn) translation,23 we may conclude that a Syriac translation existed of the Rhetoric early in the ninth century CE. Ibn al-Samḥ’s note in the colophons of the Paris Arabic manuscript, that ‘not many students of the art of logic have arrived at a study of this book or have investigated it satisfactorily’,24 appears to indicate that Syriac and Arabic logicians on the whole did not regard it as a significant part of the Organon. Ibn al-Samḥ was a member of the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians, but in that environment we do in fact come across indications of significant Syriac (or Syro-Arabic) interest in the Rhetoric and the Poetics. If ‘not many students of the art of logic’ studied the Rhetoric, one would imagine that even fewer concerned themselves with the Poetics, yet Abū Bishr Mattā, the effective founder of the school, was sufficiently interested in the Poetics to translate it into Arabic from Syriac. His pupil al-Fārābī was also very interested in both the Rhetoric and the Poetics, and from al-Fārābī’s reading of them we may get some clue as to how they were understood by his Syro-Arabic teachers. As is well known, it was the Syro-Arabic Christian Aristotelians of Baghdad who were responsible for the appearance in Arabic of the full Alexandrian Organon, which al-Fārābī read under their guidance.25

220

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

In this connection the key texts are his exposition of the Rhetoric and Poetics in his Philosophy of Aristotle and the related remarks in the associated Attainment of Happiness. In al-Fārābī’s thinking the Rhetoric and Poetics belong to ‘the logical faculty’, although their difference over against the other six in the Organon is clearly indicated. The first six ‘canvassed the certain science, gave an account of the way to it, and intercepted what stands in its way’, whereas the last two are an account of the art enabling one to instruct ‘whoever is not to use the science of logic or to be given the certain science’, that is, the multitude. The first of them, rhetoric, is designed to persuade the multitude regarding both theoretical things and practical things; the second, poetics, is to instruct the multitude by means of imaging and imitation about the theoretical things known to the philosopher through exact demonstration (apodeixis). When the theoretical things are perceived by the intellect and receive assent by demonstration they are philosophy, but when they are perceived by imaging and imitative similitudes and receive assent by persuasion, they are religion. The function of rhetoric in his thinking is therefore religious, as well as ethical and political. ‘Religion’ (milla) he understands as an imitation of philosophy, and rhetoric enables man to persuade the multitude regarding both theoretical things and ‘those practical things in which it is customary to confine oneself to using persuasive arguments based on particular examples drawn from men’s activities when conducting their public business’.26 The connection made by al-Fārābī between religion and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics is new, but I have suggested elsewhere that there is some evidence to support the view that it was inspired by Mattā, the Arabic translator of the Poetics.27 In the Christian tradition, both Greek and Syriac, rhetoric was employed in the service of religion by an educated elite when preaching to the multitude. In their commentaries on Gorgias and Phaedrus, the Neoplatonists of late antiquity recognised Plato’s philosophical rhetoric as the means by which the philosopher addresses the multitude and persuades it to do what is good and beneficial.28 However, there is no trace of these commentaries in Syriac or Arabic, and Aristotle’s Rhetoric hardly figured in their discussion. Themistius extolled the importance of rhetoric for the philosopher who turns to statesmanship, and there is evidence that at least some of his works were known to the Syrians.29 A brief allusion by Themistius to a personified Philosophy’s designation of dialectic as an antistrophos to rhetoric, in the context of a defence of philosophy’s right and duty to engage in public affairs, appears to indicate that he regarded Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a treatise of philosophical rhetoric designed for the philosopher-statesman.30 If rhetoric and philosophy were both taught in Syriac schools such as Qenneshre, elements of Neoplatonic rhetorical theory will probably have become embedded within a Graeco-Syriac tradition of ‘classical’ education there. In the environment of such schools, where the techniques of Greek rhetoric were well understood and put to Christian use, rhetoric could be seen not only as an instrument of the statesman, but also – and possibly more significantly for them – as an instrument of the religious leader. The Baghdad Aristotelians would have been

221

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

heirs of this tradition, and being devoted to Aristotle could quite naturally have seen this as a function of his Rhetoric. In this connection, it is appropriate to return to the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit, the one original Syriac treatise on rhetoric which has come down to us. If the Syriac version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric was produced before or around 800 CE, and Antony was active around the same time or later, then it is of course possible that he could have known Aristotle’s treatise. However, it is quite clear that Antony’s work is not dependent upon Aristotle; his few statements on the theoretical basis of rhetoric are, rather, clearly related to some in the late antique prolegomena to the Aphthonius-Hermogenes corpus. The most striking case is his tripartite division of rhetoric. That the species of rhetoric were three, judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, was of course a commonplace of Greek rhetorical theory, but if rhetorical theory had been known in Syriac only through Aristotle, one would have expected the basis of the tripartition to be the Aristotelian. In Antony, however, the division is associated not with listener, time, or end,31 but with the three Platonic divisions of the soul, appetitive, rational, and passionate, as in the late antique prolegomena to rhetoric.32 It is the clearest example of a link between Antony and Neoplatonic rhetorical doctrine. Despite that, while the bulk of the technical theory of late antiquity is devoted to judicial and deliberative rhetoric, Antony has comparatively little to say on these, but by contrast has much to say on epideictic. Here we find clear points of contact with the Greek tradition and the prescriptions of Menander Rhetor, but there are some differences, and one of them is particularly striking. While following the main outlines for praise as known in Greek, Antony nevertheless has three of the usual four ‘virtues of the soul’ (justice, temperance, and courage, omitting wisdom) under a heading entitled ‘the participation of soul and body’, while ‘the virtues of the soul’ consist of philosophy (‘sciences’), philanthropy, and public and private actions.33 The best explanation for this departure from the standard Greek scheme appears to lie ultimately (whatever the more immediate source may be) in Plato’s assertion in the Republic (611b-e) that ‘to know what the soul is in truth we must behold it not maimed by the participation of the body . . . but we must look elsewhere . . . to its philosophy’. When it comes to ‘public actions’, Antony speaks of a ruler who is just in his judgements, gentle in his decrees, blameless in governing . . . unostentatious in power . . . (unlike) the sort of ruler under which many suffer, but wise, learned, discerning and understanding, for he encourages, leads, persuades and turns his subjects towards the Good.34 He thus provides a model basilikos logos, a laudation of a king, but a king who also possesses philosophy and in his private actions dies to the passions, becomes like God and appears, as much as it is allowed and permitted to creatures wisdom-loving and wise . . . has understanding of the judgements of God . . . and admonishing the 222

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

impious expounds the incomprehensibility, ineffability and hiddenness of insights concerning the eternity of God.35 We have here therefore a portrait of a philosopher whose soul has ascended to the light of knowledge, but who is also involved in public life as a ruler persuading and turning his subjects to the Good, with philanthropy providing the link between the two. It is clear therefore that Antony’s encomium reflects the ideology of the Platonic philosopher king in its Themistian or Neoplatonic version,36 and that his basilikos logos is a laudation not of a ‘normal’ king as in Menander Rhetor and other Greek rhetors, but of a philosopher king. The importance of the philosopher king in the thought of al-Fārābī is well known, as is also among the virtues of the ruler al-Fārābī added to those mentioned in the Republic that of eloquence,37 no doubt, as he said in his Philosophy of Plato, because ‘one ought to devise a plan for moving (the multitude) away from their ways of life and opinions to truth and to the virtuous ways of life, or closer to them’.38 As already noted, the role of rhetoric as an instrument for the philosopher and statesman to move the multitude towards the Good is evident in the work of Themistius and in the late antique Neoplatonic commentaries on Gorgias and Phaedrus. When Antony says that the subject of his encomium ‘encourages, leads, persuades and turns his subjects towards the Good’, he no doubt intends that this persuasion is to be accomplished by means of the philosopher king’s mastery of rhetoric. While it is thus not possible to say how much of the complicated rhetorical cursus of late antiquity was known in Syriac, there is evidence to suggest that a tradition of rhetoric teaching did exist in that language, at least until the time of Antony, and that the Platonic concept of a true rhetoric at the disposal of a philosopher king or religious leader was known among the Syrians. In the Baghdad school of Abū Bishr Mattā, with its focus on Aristotelian philosophy and the Organon, philosophical rhetoric stemming from late antique Plato interpretation could have offered a key to discovering a hitherto unrecognised role for Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, subsequently to be developed in the thought of al-Fārābī. In the following centuries we have no further evidence concerning rhetorical instruction in Syriac, or indeed about other forms of secular culture, until the so-called ‘Syriac Renaissance’ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but from the thirteenth century we have a large Syriac secular encyclopaedia (the Book of Dialogues) by Jacob Bar Shakko, and subsequently the extensive literary output of Bar Hebraeus. Book One of Jacob’s encyclopaedia is devoted to grammar, rhetoric, and poetics, Book Two to logic and philosophy, the last divided into the mathematical quadrivium, physics, metaphysics, and practical philosophy. Jacob studied both with the Christian philosopher John Bar Zo‘bi and with the Muslim mathematician Kamāl al-Dīn Mūsā Ibn Yūnus, and the mathematical section of his work in particular betrays the influence of his Arabic master. Book One and the section on logic, however, are drawn from Syriac sources. Jacob’s treatment of grammar is based on the Syriac version of Dionysius Thrax, while his discussion of rhetoric and poetics is largely an epitome of Books One and Five of Antony’s 223

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

treatise39 (although Jacob’s section on poetics also includes the celebrated Fragmentum Syriacum of Aristotle’s Poetics).40 As far as the content of rhetorical instruction in Syriac is concerned therefore, Jacob’s encyclopaedia offers us virtually nothing new, but significantly it places rhetoric in a systematic framework of the sciences, which in principle could be dependent either on older Graeco-Syriac tradition or on the more recent Arabic encyclopaedias. It is immediately apparent that the seven ‘liberal arts’ are all represented here, grammar and rhetoric in Book One, dialectic and the quadrivium in Book Two. The classification of dialectic and mathematics under the logical or philosophical sciences is familiar to us from the Arabic classifications, although in Arabic we can also find mathematics under the propaedeutic,41 but it should be noted that pre-philosophical education in late antiquity in practice usually consisted of ‘grammar and rhetoric’ (including the reading of the poets), rather than all seven arts, and there too dialectic and mathematics were usually consigned to higher education and the philosophers.42 The Ṣiwān al-ḥikma therefore reflects late antique practice when it describes Aristotle’s ‘encyclical’ studies (enkyklios paideia) from ages 8 to 17 as ‘linguistic knowledge’ in a school of ‘poets, rhetors, and grammarians’.43 This report, however, is undoubtedly of late Greek, Alexandrian origin,44 and appears to be the only example in Arabic of a classificatory scheme to mention rhetoric alongside grammar and poetics among the propaedeutic sciences. Elsewhere in Arabic it either appears under the logical (doubtless under Aristotelian influence) or is not mentioned at all: the Letters of the Sincere Brethren mention it together with poetics under the logical,45 while even Ḥunayn’s picture of a Greek literary education mentions grammar and poetry but not rhetoric.46 The threefold ‘grammar, rhetoric, and poetics’ is clearly of Greek origin and found scarcely an echo in Arabic, but it is clearly presupposed by Antony in his discussion of experience and art: I speak about sciences and skills which in one way or another have been found by many languages and writers, but not with art and right arrangement. . . . With the Greeks the three arts of grammar, rhetoric, and poetics exist in a collected and crafted form, but with Syrians, Persians, and others scattered and confused. For example, a Syrian may use . . . nouns, verbs, pronouns . . . but not through discrimination or art. . . . An Arab may praise, blame, or incite to battle, yet may never have learned the fair art of Demosthenes or the details of the study of rhetoric. . . . And Persians, Syrians, Armenians and other nations compose poems, psalms, and laments, yet have not been disciples of Homer.47 As mentioned earlier, Antony’s claim to originality as the first to compose an Art of rhetoric and poetics in Syriac has to be treated with some reserve; what he writes about the (Greek) art of rhetoric could not have been inferred from knowledge of orations. But there is no reason to doubt that the three subjects of ‘grammar, rhetoric and poetics’ were part of his experience. While he may not have been the first to write a rhetoric or poetics handbook in Syriac, he clearly put 224

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

any competitors in the shade, for Bar Shakko takes almost all his information on these subjects from Antony. The scheme of these three subjects in the Neoplatonic source of the Ṣiwān al-ḥikma, Antony, and Bar Shakko undercuts the hypothesis (advanced by Baumstark) that Bar Shakko’s systematisation is derived from his Arabic masters48 and gives us grounds to suppose that some form of rhetorical instruction was given in Syriac in the context of pre-philosophical, literary education from early times through to Bar Shakko. The work of the greatest figure of the Syriac Renaissance, Bar Hebraeus, stands much more decisively under the impact of Muslim philosophy, particularly the writings of Avicenna, than does that of Bar Shakko, but even with Bar Hebraeus the influence of the earlier Syriac tradition is still discernible. In his Nomocanon he prescribes the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (i.e. ecclesiastical and secular) studies which he wishes to see taught in the Syriac schools. The ‘outside’ requirements comprise the Aristotelian Organon plus some mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, but all these are preceded by ‘the book of Antony of Tagrit’, which, together with the Organon and the mathematical quadrivium, provide ‘elegance (shuprā) for the tongue and discipline for the mind’.49 Bar Hebraeus therefore was apparently concerned to sustain both literary and philosophical rhetoric. In Antony’s book he presumably saw the means to support the former, while in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as part of the Organon, his prime concern would be with the latter. In the protheoria of his commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, an introduction only loosely connected to the text of Aristotle but closely aligned with the commentary of Avicenna, Bar Hebraeus discusses the respective uses of demonstration, dialectic, rhetoric, sophistic, and poetic, leading to the conclusion that ‘the utility of rhetoric, more than demonstration or dialectic, is general and abundant’. While the wise have profit in demonstration and (to a lesser extent) dialectic, these are too hard for the populace. Only persuasive address can bring the populace to give its assent to that to which it ought to give assent, and that is the function of rhetoric.50 While Bar Hebraeus is here directly following Avicenna, the basic ideas go back to the Neoplatonic commentators on the Organon, and could have also been known to Bar Hebraeus from Syriac writers such as Paul the Persian and Antony.51 The accompanying tripartition of humanity (in Avicenna and Bar Hebraeus) into the wise, the ‘middle ones who refuse to be in the lowest rank of the populace but are not able to rise to the height of the grade of the knowledgeable’, and the populace is also known from Antony and al-Fārābī.52 Antony’s Rhetoric, with its elaborate model speeches and lengthy discussions of elegant words, phrases, figures, and metres, was no doubt for Bar Hebraeus the prime authority for a Syriac literary rhetoric, but of course a running commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric obliged him to comment on stylistic matters when he came to Rhetoric III 2–12. Mostly he followed Aristotle or Avicenna, adapting them to the requirements of the Syriac language, for example, in remarks concerning accents, syntax, assonance, and balance. Significantly, however, in his paraphrase of Rhetoric III 3 on ‘frigidities’, he added to the inappropriate ‘glosses’ of Aristotle (1406a7–9) some expressions drawn from the model vituperation in Antony’s 225

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

Rhetoric and commented that ‘when such words, (although) laid down originally for things by masters of style are foul of form . . . or very long . . . or “slanted” (Aristotle’s “untimely”) . . . or crowded . . . they are not pleasing in rhetorical speech, and even though those which are well known may be, those which are used by poets are not, because they make the style foreign and therefore do not lead the populace to conviction (haymānūtā, pistis)’.53 At the same point Avicenna differentiates between ‘dissolved poetry (dhaub al-shi‘r) which may be found pleasant in balāgha where it is balāgha, which seeks to arouse admiration (ta ‘jīb), but not where it is khiṭāba, which seeks to produce conviction (taṣdīq) in the populace’.54 Bar Hebraeus therefore had no terminology in Syriac to distinguish between balāgha and khiṭāba, but he understood what was meant by the different Arabic terms. For him Antony’s work was primarily a treatise of Syriac balāgha, which along with grammar served as the propaedeia to philosophy, while Aristotle’s treatise among the logical works of the Organon was universally, for all languages, the supreme work of khiṭāba.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Literary and Philosophical Rhetoric in Syriac’, in: Frédérique Woerther (ed.), Literary and Philosophical Rhetoric in the Greek, Roman, Syriac, and Arabic Worlds. Europaea Memoria: Studien und Texte zur Geschichte der europäischen Ideen, Reihe I: Studien, Band 66 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2009) 141–54. © by Georg Olms Verlag AG, Hildesheim 2009, and republished by permission. 2 Cf. Rosenthal (1975) 10: ‘They no longer cared for rhetoric, since it served direct political ends and had had a proper place only in independent pagan or Christian states. Nothing of Greek poetry, tragedy, comedy or the historical literature was translated into Arabic. All this had been included in the school curriculum as part of rhetorical training’. 3 History of John Bar Aphtonia, ed./tr. Nau 114/123. 4 Pseudo-Zacharias, Hist. eccl., ed./tr. Brooks 79–80/54–5. 5 Cf. Watt (1999). 6 Cf. Chapters 1–3 in this volume. 7 Cf. Kennedy (1983) 215–54. 8 Cf. Böhlig (1987); McVey (1983), and George, Memra on Severus of Antioch, the introduction to the version (McVey [1993]) viii–xi. 9 Cf. Chapter 10 in this volume. Conterno (2014) 20–43 sees the two extant Syriac translations of Themistius’ orations as evidence of their interest in him as a teacher of popular ethics, not as an orator. However, the two are not mutually exclusive, as ethical instruction in late antiquity took place within the context of the teaching of rhetoric. Cf. Watt (2015b), (2018). 10 Cf. Zimmermann (1981) ci–civ. 11 Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V. 12 Cf. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, version xvii-xx, and for an example of a misunderstanding, text 67/version 55–6. 13 Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, text 78–9/version 66–7. 14 Cf. Watt (1994b) 254–5. 15 Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, text 6–10/version 5–8. On the topos of ‘bringing something new’ in Syriac prefaces, to be understood in the framework of the Christian adaptation of the classical captatio benevolentiae, cf. Riad (1988) 208–11, 218.

226

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Cf. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, version v–x. Fihrist 250.4–5. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, text 2/version 2. Brock and Van Rompay (2014) 244–7. This concurs with the judgement of Wright (1870–2) II 613–17 on the date of the leaves in the British Library. The same manuscript at Dayr al-Suryan also indicates that Antony probably wrote two treatises in the area of rhetoric, the larger of which (entitled ‘On the science of rhetoric’) was in four books, rather than one treatise in five as was previously thought on the basis of later manuscripts. Nevertheless, for convenience I give the conventional reference to the smaller treatise (entitled in both the early and the later manuscripts ‘On the ornamentation and decoration of words’) as Rhetoric V. Ed. Lyons (1982). Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric. Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric, introduction 21–9. Cf. Lyons (1982) I, xxvii–xxxi. Lyons (1982) I, ii–iii. Cf. Zimmermann (1981) cv–cxii. Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs 84–5; Taḥṣīl 40–1; tr. Mahdi (1969) 92–3 (The Philosophy of Aristotle) and 44–5 (The Attainment of Happiness). Cf. Watt (2007), (2015a) 28–36. Cf. Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum ed. Couvreur 221, tr. Bernard (1997) 376; Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria, ed. Westerink 14–15, tr. Jackson, Lycos, and Tarrant (1998) 69. Cf. Chapter 10, 207–10 and Watt (2004) 127–30, 133–8, 141–4. Cf. Watt (1995) 33–7 (on Themistius, Or 26, 328c-329a). Cf. the opening words of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1354a1): ‘Rhetoric is an antistrophos to dialectic’. As in Aristotle, Rhetoric I 3 (1358a36–1359a6). Cf. Watt (1993a) 586–8. Antony’s division of rhetoric is found in Book One, chapter three. Book One is not yet edited, but a facsimile reproduction of one manuscript (Harvard Syriac 25) and translation of the first fifteen chapters are provided in the doctoral dissertation of P. E. Eskenasy (1991), Antony of Tagrit’s Rhetoric Book One. Chapter three is on foll. 7v-8v, the translation 95–8. Antony, Rhetoric Book One, 4 (Ms. Harvard foll. 8v-10v, tr. Eskenasy 99–106). Cf. Watt (1994a) 247–8. Antony, Rhetoric Book One, 8 (Ms. Harvard foll. 14r-14v, tr. Eskenasy 133–4). Cf. Watt (1994a) 249. Antony, Rhetoric Book One, 8 (Ms. Harvard, foll. 14v-15r, tr. Eskenasy 134–5). Cf. Watt (1994a) 250. Cf. O’Meara (2003) 73–81. Cf. Walzer (1985) 244–9, 436–8, 444–6. al-Fārābī, Philosophy of Plato, ed. Rosenthal and Walzer 22 (Arabic)/16 (Latin); tr. Mahdi (1969) 67. Cf. Watt (1993b) 52–5. On his logic, cf. Baumstark (1900) 181–210; Hein (1985) 38–9. Margoliouth (1887) 77–9 (Arabic sequence); cf. Heinrichs (1969) 115–18. For example, in Ḥunayn; cf. the passage from the Nawādir al-falāsifa translated by Rosenthal (1975) 73. See in general Hein (1985) 8–9, 170–9. Cf. e.g. Marrou (1956) 176–85. Muntakhab Ṣiwān al-ḥikma, ed. Dunlop 39–40, tr. Kraemer 153–4. Cf. Gutas (1986) 20–2. Although they also mention poetry and prosody under the propaedeutic. See the translation of the relevant passage in Rosenthal (1975) 56–7, and the comment of Hein (1985) 179–80.

227

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Cf. preceding n. 41. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, text 6–7/version 5–6. Baumstark (1900) 182–3. Bar Hebraeus, Nomocanon, ed. Bedjan 106. Cf. Watt (1993b) 64–5; Weltecke (2015) 299–301. Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric, ed. and tr. Watt 52–5. Cf. Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric (commentary) 292. Antony, Rhetoric Book One, 2 (Ms. Harvard fol. 7v, tr. Eskenasy 93–4), cf. Watt (1993a) 586; Walzer (1985) 437–8. Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric, ed. and tr. Watt 248–9. Avicenna, Rhetoric, ed. Salem 211.

References Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), The Fifth Book of the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit (Lovanii: Peeters, 1986). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 480 (text), 481 (version). Antony of Tagrit’s Rhetoric Book One: P.E. Eskenasy, Antony of Tagrit’s Rhetoric Book One (Dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991). Avicenna, Rhetoric: M.S. Salem (ed.), Ibn Sīnā, al-Shifā’, La Logique VIII- Rhétorique (Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale, 1953). Bar Hebraeus, Nomocanon: P. Bedjan (ed.), Nomocanon Gregorii Barhebraei (Paris and Leipzig: Harrassowitz, 1898). Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac. Barhebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Baumstark (1900): A. Baumstark, Aristoteles bei den Syrern vom 5. bis 8. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Teubner). Böhlig (1987): A. Böhlig, ‘Zur Rhetorik im Liber Graduum’, in: H.J.W. Drijvers et al. (eds.), IV Symposium Syriacum 1984 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1987) 297–305. Brock and van Rompay (2014): S.P. Brock and L. Van Rompay, Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts and Fragments in the Library of Deir al-Surian, Wadi al-Natrun (Egypt) (Leuven: Peeters). Conterno (2014): M. Conterno, Temistio orientale. Orazioni temistiane nella tradizione siriaca e araba (Brescia: Paideia). al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs: M. Mahdi (ed.), Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs (Beirut: Dār Majallat Shiʿr, 1961). al-Fārābī, Philosophy of Plato: F. Rosenthal and R. Walzer (ed. and tr.), Alfarabius De Platonis Philosophia (London: Warburg Institute, 1943). al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl: J. Āl Yāsīn (ed.), Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿādah (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). George, Memra on Severus of Antioch: K.E. McVey (ed. and tr.), George, Bishop of the Arabs: A Homily on Blessed Mar Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (Lovanii: Peeters, 1993). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 530 (text), 531 (version). Gutas (1986): D. Gutas, ‘The Spurious and the Authentic in the Arabic Lives of Aristotle’, in: J. Kraye, W.F. Ryan, and C.B. Schmitt (eds.), Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages (London: Warburg Institute) 15–36. Hein (1985): C. Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie (Frankfurt: Lang).

228

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

Heinrichs (1969): W. Heinrichs, Arabische Dichtung und griechische Poetik: Ḥāzim al-Qartāğannīs Grundlegung der Poetik mit Hilfe aristotelischer Begriffe (Wiesbaden: Steiner). Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum: P. Couvreur (ed.), Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum scholia (Paris: Bouillon, 1901); tr. H. Bernard, Kommentar zu Platons “Phaidros” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). History of John Bar Aphtonia: F. Nau (ed. and tr.), ‘Histoire de Jean bar Aphtonia’, Revue de l’orient chrétien 7 (1902), 97–135. Kennedy (1983): G.A. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Lyons (1982): M.C. Lyons (ed.), Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica: The Arabic Version, I–II (Cambridge: Pembroke Arabic Texts). Mahdi (1969): M. Mahdi (tr.), Alfarabi: Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Margoliouth (1887): D.S. Margoliouth, Analecta Orientalia ad Poeticam Aristoteleam (London: Oxford University Press). Marrou (1956): H.-I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (London: Sheed and Ward). McVey (1983): K.E. McVey, ‘The Mēmrā of Narsai on the Three Nestorian Doctors as an Example of Forensic Rhetoric’, in: R. Lavenant (ed.), Symposium Syriacum, 1980 (Rome: Pontificium Istitutum Orientalium Studiorum) 87–96. Muntakhab Ṣiwān al-ḥikma: D.M. Dunlop (ed.), The Muntakhab Ṣiwān al-ḥikma (The Hague: Mouton, 1979); tr. J.L. Kraemer, ‘Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: A Preliminary Study’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984), 135–64. O’Meara (2003): D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria: L.G. Westerink, (ed.), Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970); tr. R. Jackson, K. Lycos, and H. Tarrant, Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Pseudo-Zacharias, Hist. eccl.: E.W. Brooks (ed. and tr.), Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1919–24). Corpus scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 84 (text), 88 (version). Riad (1988): E. Riad, Studies in the Syriac Preface (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell). Rosenthal (1975): F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London: Routledge). Walzer (1985): R. Walzer (ed. and tr.), Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Watt (1993a): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Reception of Platonic and Aristotelian Rhetoric’, Aram 5, 579–601. Watt (1993b): J.W. Watt, ‘Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Enkyklios Paideia in Syriac’, Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 143, 45–71. Watt (1994a): J.W. Watt, ‘The Philosopher-King in the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit’, in: R. Lavenant (ed.), VI Symposium Syriacum (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale) 245–58. Watt (1994b): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Rhetorical Theory and the Syriac Version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric’, in: W.W. Fortenbaugh and D.C. Mirhady (eds.), Peripatetic Rhetoric after Aristotle (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers) 243–60. Watt (1995): J.W. Watt, ‘From Themistius to al-Farabi: Platonic Political Philosophy and Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East’, Rhetorica 13, 17–41. Watt (1999): J.W. Watt, ‘A Portrait of John Bar Aphtonia, Founder of the Monastery of Qenneshre’, in: J.W. Drijvers and J.W. Watt (eds.), Portraits of Spiritual Authority (Leiden: Brill) 155–68.

229

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL RHETORIC IN SYRIAC

Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 121–49. Watt (2007): J.W. Watt, ‘Christianity in the Renaissance of Islam: Abū Bishr Mattā, al-Fārābī, and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī’, in: M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages (Beirut and Würzburg: Ergon) 99–112. Watt (2015a): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Aristotelian Tradition and the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Philosophers’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 7–43. Watt (2015b): Review of Conterno (2014), Orientalia 84, 140–43. Watt (2018): J.W. Watt, ‘Rhetorical Education and Florilegia in Syriac’, in: M. Farina (ed.), Les auteurs syriaques et leur langue (Paris: Geuthner) 95–110. Weltecke (2015): D. Weltecke, ‘Bemerkungen zum Kapitel über die Schule in Bar ‘Ebroyos Huddoye (dem Nomokanon)’, in: S.H. Griffith and S. Grebenstein (eds.), Christsein in der islamischen Welt. Festschrift für Martin Tamcke zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) 299–311. Wright (1870–2): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838, I–III (London: British Museum). Zimmermann (1981): F.W. Zimmermann, Al-Farabi’s Commentary and Short Treatise on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (London: Oxford University Press).

230

12 GREEK PHILOSOPHY AND SYRIAC C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q 1

The early Abbasid period in Iraq, from the second half of the eighth century to around the end of the tenth, is widely recognised as one of the pivotal moments in the history of ideas. During those years almost the entire available corpus of preand non-Christian Greek works was translated into Arabic, and a body of Arabic scholarship created in philosophy, medicine, and science which profoundly influenced not only the intellectual history of the Middle East, but also, in the longer term and through further translations into Hebrew and Latin, that of Europe as well. The number of Greek works translated, and the range of questions treated in the Arabic writings of the early and later Abbasid period, far exceeded anything that had gone before in the areas where Greek was not the predominant spoken language, but it was nevertheless not the first time that scholars in the Middle East had concerned themselves with the understanding and appropriation of the classical Greek patrimony. For more than two centuries before the Abbasids came to power, a number of translations of Aristotle and Galen into Syriac had been made by philo-Hellenic Syrians, and both Aristotelian logic and Galenic medicine were well entrenched as subjects of study within the Christian Syriac community. It is not surprising therefore that the Syriac Christians of Iraq played an important part in the ‘classical renaissance’ which occurred in the Arabic literature of the Abbasid era. That they were important is generally recognised, for many of those who made the translations into Arabic were Syriac Christians, and some of the Arabic translations were made from or with the aid of Syriac translations of the Greek texts. However, it remains a matter of some scholarly controversy as to just how important Syriac Christians were in the efflorescence of scholarship on the classical tradition in Abbasid Iraq. The issue appears in sharp relief in a famous text (The Appearance of Philosophy) from the greatest philosopher of the period, the Muslim al-Fārābī, which actually asserts at one point that Christians held back the advance of philosophy. The text is transmitted by Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a, and is an account of how philosophy reached Baghdad from Alexandria. The story it tells is that philosophy, originally taught only in Alexandria, was also taught in Rome until the coming of Christianity. It then ceased in Rome, and was subsequently severely curtailed in Alexandria because the Christian bishops, considering which parts of it should be kept and which suppressed or concealed, decided 231

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

that the logic curriculum beyond the assertoric figures was harmful to Christianity. The teaching of philosophy was transferred to Antioch, where eventually only a single teacher survived. He had two disciples, one from Ḥarrān and one from Merv, and they each had two disciples, all four of whom came to Baghdad. Abū Bishr Mattā, the founder of the Aristotelian school there, was a pupil of one of them (al-Marwazī), al-Fārābī a pupil of another (Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān). Al-Fārābī reports that under Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān he studied to the end of the Analytica Posteriora, i.e. beyond the assertoric figures.2 The account is for the most part fictional, but both its fictional and non-fictional elements are significant for our theme. Non-fictional, we may assume, are the names of the four scholars who ‘came to Baghdad’, all of whom were Christian, as are also the remarks concerning the teaching of Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān. The account thus indirectly points to the enormous importance of Christians in this school of philosophy, the dominant one in Baghdad. Quite fictional, by contrast, is the assertion that bishops forbade the teaching of logic beyond the assertoric figures, i.e. beyond the first half of Aristotle’s Analytica Priora. Although only the earlier parts of the Organon may have been studied at some places in the East during the late antique and Umayyad periods, that was clearly not true at the Syriac Orthodox monastery of Qenneshre.3 While in the information it provides towards its end about the beginnings of the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians the account confirms the importance of Syriac Christians in the development of Aristotelian and logical studies in Islam, the fictional character of its assertions about the role of bishops suggests that the relation of Christianity and philosophy was a subject that had to be treated with care by the Muslim al-Fārābī.4 Not only in the development of philosophical teaching and writing is the balance between the Syriac or Syro-Arabic Christians and the Muslim Arabs a subtle one, but even in the assessment of the driving force behind the translation movement differing evaluations are possible. There can be no doubt that the Syriac translations made from Greek in late antiquity and during the Umayyad caliphate (that is, from the fifth or sixth to the early eighth century) were made in order that Syriac speakers might read them in Syriac. Those made in Abbasid times were frequently subject to further translation into Arabic and are therefore often thought to have served only as ‘intermediaries’; that is to say, it is assumed that they came into existence only because Arabic Muslim patrons desired to read a Greek work in Arabic and turned to Syrians to produce such a version, which the Syrians made by first translating the work from Greek to Syriac and then, either from or with the aid of the Syriac version, producing the Arabic. It is clear, however, that the medical versions of Galen made by the greatest of all the translators, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, and probably also his philosophical translations of Aristotle, were made for Syriac readers.5 The tendency to think of these translations merely as ‘intermediaries’ probably owes much to the fact that they are no longer extant, and we attribute this precisely to the fact that because they were merely intermediaries, they no longer had any function after the Arabic had appeared. However, their disappearance was not immediate; they were still known to and used by 232

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Syriac scholars who could read Arabic with ease, such as Bar Hebraeus in the thirteenth century. Nevertheless from about the time of Abū Bishr Mattā (died 940) Arabic replaced Syriac as the language of science even among Syriac Christians.6 The fact that the translations are no longer extant therefore tells us nothing about the motives of those who produced them. These issues are well illustrated in some letters of the East Syrian Catholicos Timothy I (died 823) from the last decades of the eighth century. Timothy had been requested by the caliph al-Mahdī to make a translation of Aristotle’s Topics into Arabic, and the work had been done, partially by Timothy himself but much more fully by Abū Nūḥ, later to become secretary to the governor of Mosul. Both Timothy and Abū Nūḥ had been pupils at the School of Mar Abraham at Bashosh, north-east of Mosul. Now we know that Timothy and Abū Nūḥ had no need to make an ‘intermediate’ Syriac translation from Greek, for a Syriac version already existed and was known to them, although now it is no longer extant. It was made by Athanasius of Balad (died 686), and its existence is attested in the marginalia of the great Arabic manuscript of the Organon, Paris BN 2346. In these letters Timothy also mentions Athanasius’ translation of the Posterior Analytics, a work the study of which, we may recall, was said by al-Fārābī to have been forbidden by the bishops. Timothy not only knew the Topics in Syriac translation, he also asked Pethion, his correspondent (and former teacher at the School of Mar Abraham), to inquire, particularly at the monastery of Mār Mattai, ‘whether there is some commentary or scholia by anyone, whether in Syriac or not, to this book, (that is) the Topics, or to the Refutations of the Sophists, or to the Rhetoric, or to the Poetics’.7 Timothy does not tell us why al-Mahdī wanted an Arabic translation of the Topics, so we are left to speculate on the reason. Timothy and al-Mahdī engaged in a (friendly) theological debate on Islam and Christianity, and since dialectic is the subject of the Topics, it seems probable that al-Mahdī’s wish to have it at his disposal stemmed from his interest in such debates. The question then arises as to how he might have learnt that Aristotle’s Topics was a useful book on debating. The most likely answer is surely that he would have discovered this from Syriac Christians. It is only they to whom the work would have been long familiar, in the translation of Athanasius. The counter argument has been made that al-Mahdī ‘was certainly not interested in the book because of its place, rather insignificant, in the Graeco-Syriac logical curriculum of late antiquity’.8 But Syriac knowledge of the Topics and interest in the entire Organon (at least up to the Sophgistical Refutations) is evident for the time long before Timothy.9 There was therefore enough interest in the book on the part of Christians in the eighth century for it to be quite probable that it was precisely because the book was known to them that al-Mahdī wished to be able to read it in Arabic. If it was al-Mahdī’s advisors who referred him to it, these advisors could have been East Syrians, of whom there were many at the caliph’s court among the secretaries and physicians; and if he preferred Timothy’s translation from Syriac to the attempts then being made to translate it from Greek (mentioned in Timothy’s letter), that may point to the influence of Syriac Christians in the matter.10 233

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

The only significant indication of Arabic engagement with Aristotelian logic before the time of al-Mahdī is the logic compendium of Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, encompassing the Eisagoge, Categories, De interpretatione, and Prior Analytics – thus like the sixth century Syriac evidence confined to the first part of the Organon. Not only its range, but also its method shows it to have been written under the influence of Syriac logical studies, and it was not based on a Persian original or a Persian translation of Aristotle.11 It is striking, and surely significant, that the two areas in which, according to all our evidence, Syriac Christians played a dominant role in the Abbasid classical renaissance were Aristotleian logic and medicine, two subjects closely connected in late antique scholarship and the two secular themes most actively cultivated in Graeco-Syriac scholarship prior to the Abbasids. Syriac Christians did not create the Abbasid Renaissance by themselves, and the contribution from the Persian side was also of great importance, but the scholarly expertise of the Syrians and the prestige of their physicians and philosophers were a vital ingredient in the movement, and their input was not confined to translation at the request of others. As Graeco-Syriac medicine and the Galen translations which supported it swept all competitors before it in that field,12 so also in logic the Zoroastrian encounter with Greek thought bequeathed nothing to Abbasid society which could compete with the Syriac range of expertise in the subject. Despite his negative remarks about ‘the bishops’ in his Appearance of Philosophy, this was implicitly recognised by al-Fārābī. Thus despite his assertion that the full logical curriculum remained concealed under Christianity until the coming of Islam, he named not a single Muslim predecessor, such as Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ or al-Kindī, but only Christian teachers, the founders of the School of the Baghdad Aristotelians. The fictional account of the history of philosophy prior to the mention of the philosophers who came to Baghdad could be a product of the anti-Byzantine philo-Hellenic ideology propagated in the reign of al-Ma’mūn, a version of the propaganda proclaiming the superior enlightenment of the Abbasids over the Byzantines.13 Antioch and Ḥarrān might well have found a mention in this perspective because they were associated with groups, Nestorians and pagans, which had been ‘outcast’ by the Byzantine emperors.14 But it may also represent an attempt by al-Fārābī to protect himself and the study of Aristotelian philosophy from too close an identification with Christianity. It was the head of the school, the East Syrian Abū Bishr Mattā, who publicly argued the case for logic against grammar.15 While the school was inter-confessional, it was predominantly Christian and therefore exposed to any traditionalist Muslim reaction against philosophy. Al-Fārābī may therefore have had to chart a careful course,16 but it is clear in his programmatic work The Attainment of Happiness what he conceives the real history of logic to have been: It is said that this science [of demonstrative logic] existed anciently among the Chaldeans, who are the people of Iraq, subsequently reaching the people of Egypt, from there transmitted to the Greeks, where it remained until it was transmitted to the Syrians and then to the Arabs. 234

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Everything comprised by this science was expounded in the Greek language, later in Syriac, and finally in Arabic.17 As in The Appearance of Philosophy, his presentation of the history of philosophy long before his own time (‘anciently among the Chaldeans’) is imaginative. His statement, however, that philosophy was expounded in Greek, then Syriac, and then Arabic is based on the knowledge and activities of his contemporaries and no doubt primarily has in view the Syriac and Syro-Arabic study and translation of Aristotle’s Organon with which he himself was acquainted as a pupil in the school of the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Aristotelians. Not only before but also after al-Fārābī the school seems to have been predominantly Christian. Its most tangible product today is the great Paris manuscript of the Arabic Organon, in its marginalia a witness to the efforts of its members (ignorant of Greek) to reach a true reading or understanding of Aristotle through recourse to the multitude of Syriac and Arabic versions.18 Al-Fārābī’s own writings seem to have had little impact on Muslim philosophers of his own day, but they did influence Christian members of the school, notably his pupil and later head of the school the West Syrian Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, who came to Baghdad from Tagrit. The central role of Aristotle in the teaching of this school and its influence on al-Fārābī were eventually, however, to have a profound effect on Islamic philosophy, when Ibn Sīnā took up and developed the thought of the ‘First’ and ‘Second Teachers’ (i.e. Aristotle and al-Fārābī). Aristotelian logic is not the only sphere in which we can discern an affinity between al-Fārābī and the Christian philosophers of Baghdad. Another such sphere is political thought, and in particular what we may term, with some reservation, Platonic political philosophy.19 The reservation arises first of all from the fact that it is by no means certain that a complete text of the Republic or the Laws ever existed in Syriac or Arabic, and it appears that al-Fārābī did not know the full text of the Laws.20 However, the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm asserts that Ḥunayn explained (fassara) the Republic and translated (naqala) the Laws, as did also Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī.21 It may be that epitomes rather than complete texts are what is referred to here. In al-Fārābī’s political thought the central concepts which we may designate ‘Platonic’ are the analogies between the harmonious functioning of the different parts of the ideal state and those of the human soul, the need in the ideal state for a single ruler who possesses the classical cardinal virtues, and the combination of kingship and philosophy in the person of a philosopher king. The ‘Platonism’ with which we are concerned here is therefore the widespread Platonism of imperial times, rather than a close exegesis of Plato’s political texts. Al-Fārābī gave his fullest exposition of these concepts in his work entitled Principles of the Views of the Citizens of the Perfect State. The clearest evidence that this work was of interest to Christians is that the earliest extant manuscript of it comes from the hand of the West Syrian theologian Abū Naṣr Yaḥyā ibn Jarīr of Tagrit, a pupil of Ibn Zur‘a (himself a pupil of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī). Yaḥyā ibn Jarīr not only copied the text, he also made marginal annotations referring to Gregory (presumably Gregory of Nazianzus).22 235

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

The only original Syriac work known to date containing some of the concepts of the late antique political Platonism found in al-Fārābī is the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit. On the testimony of Bar Hebraeus he is usually assumed to have flourished in the ninth century, a dating seemingly confirmed by a recent finding of a manuscript of his work at Dayr al-Suryan.23 He was a rhetor, not a political philosopher, but anyone familiar with Aristotle’s Rhetoric is unlikely to miss the point that ‘rhetoric is a kind of offshoot of dialectic and of the study of ethics, which may justly be called politics. Thus rhetoric dresses itself up in the schema of politics’.24 In the late antique commentaries of both the philosophers on Aristotle and the rhetors on Hermogenes, rhetoric appears largely to have lost its connection to politics, while preserving that to dialectic, but as long as rhetoric was perceived as public address to the multitude, there was always the possibility that the connection could be restored. This certainly happened with al-Fārābī, who wrote: (After Aristotle) canvassed the certain science, gave an account of the way to it, and intercepted what stands in its way . . . he gave also an account of the art and faculty by which to instruct all others in these very same beings [i.e. in the Rhetoric and Poetics]. Therefore he gave an account [in the Rhetoric] that enables man to persuade the multitude regarding all theoretical things, and those practical things in which it is customary to confine oneself to using persuasive arguments based on particular examples drawn from men’s activities when conducting their public business – that is, the activities through which they labour together toward the end for the sake of which man is made.25 According to Antony, although rhetoric is ‘a faculty of persuasive speech on any matter . . . theoretical or practical, having the power to prevail over the multitude’, some maintain that it ‘is concerned (primarily) with matters of civic life, for they say that the subjects treated by its pioneers were the customs relating to the individual and the community, but that subsequently its other forms were created when it was discovered that it was also useful for inciting to battle and exhorting to good works [i.e. deliberative rhetoric], praising [epideictic rhetoric], and causing justice to prevail in lawsuits [judicial rhetoric]’.26 As yet no direct evidence has been found in Antony’s Rhetoric of a knowledge of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but we have seen that Timothy was interested in it and knew it belonged to the collection we designate the (longer) Organon. A Syriac translation of the Rhetoric was made before Ḥunayn; it is no longer extant but was used by Bar Hebraeus.27 Bar Hebraeus himself greatly admired Antony’s treatise and recommended it as propaedeia to the study of Aristotle.28 The connection with Platonic political philosophy is found in Antony’s treatment of epideictic rhetoric, much of it familiar from Greek rhetorical theory. In one chapter of his work he has a set of theoretical prescriptions; in another he offers a model encomium. However, he does not deal with all the various types of epideictic speech that are discussed in the treatise on epideictic by Menander 236

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Rhetor. His prescriptions in fact fit only one of them, the royal oration (basilikos logos). This is evident not because Antony explicitly says so, but because their content is appropriate to no one other than a ruler. His division of the sources of praise appears at first sight to conform to the general pattern of the Greek rhetors, but there are some striking differences. Surprisingly, they can best be explained by assuming that the traditional rhetorical outline has been brought into conformity with the statements about the guardians in the text of Plato’s Republic. Thus instead of the usual threefold division of goods of soul, body, and externals, we find in Antony a fourfold partition comprising a new division of ‘the participation of both soul and body’. Three of the traditional cardinal virtues, temperance, justice, and courage, appear under this new heading of ‘soul and body’, but the fourth, wisdom, does not appear there. In this we may be reminded of Plato’s division of the soul into rational and irrational parts, and the frequent discussion in Hellenistic and later writers concerning the distribution of the virtues among the parts of the soul, with wisdom (phronēsis or sophia) assigned to the rational. Antony’s terminology, however, is closer to Plato himself, when the latter states that ‘to know what the soul is in truth, we must behold it not maimed by the participation of the body . . . but we must look elsewhere . . . to its philosophy (philosophia)’.29 And when we look at the sources of praise for the soul in Antony, ‘philosophy’ is more or less what we find – or rather, in our terms, philosophy combined with philanthrōpia and public and private activity. Philanthrōpia, although it could in principle be possessed by any man, was predominantly a divine30 and royal virtue, and when it comes to ‘public activity’ it is clear that Antony is really talking about a ruler, for the subject of his model encomium is ‘a ruler, because he governs the multitude with care’. The third branch of praise for the soul is ‘sciences’, and these are divided in the same way as in the schemes for the division of the sciences elaborated in the prolegomena to philosophy of the Alexandrian commentators on Aristotle.31 The subject of Antony’s encomium therefore is the Platonic philosopher king. Antony, to be sure, does not say so; nor does he say that the schema of the sciences which he attributes to his philosopher-ruler is Aristotelian. But there can be no doubt about either case. And when we examine in the model encomium the private and more particularly the public actions for which this imaginary subject is praised, the closeness to Plato’s guardians and the text of the Republic becomes increasingly evident. This Syriac rhetor in Abbasid Iraq presents a scheme of praise and model encomium which is closer to the text of the Republic and to the philosopher king as envisaged in the imperial age than anything found in Greek rhetorical manuals. In Muslim Arabic writings we have accounts of the virtues of the Platonic ruler from al-Fārābī and the Epistles of the Sincere Brethren32 which may be compared with that of Antony. From this it is clear that the Christian Syriac and Muslim Arabic versions of the virtues of the ruler are very similar and are both inspired by the Platonic passages, but they are not mere copies of one another. It is not absolutely impossible that Antony’s Syriac presentation of the ideal ruler is derived from Muslim thinkers and does not represent an 237

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

intermediate stage in the history of the idea between Greek and Arabic. Nothing, however, in Antony’s version points directly to an Arabic or Muslim source, and his treatise as a whole is inspired by the Graeco-Syriac tradition.33 It seems likely therefore that the concept first became known in Christian circles, from where it passed to Islamic thinkers.34 One particular virtue worthy of mention here is that of eloquence, which does not appear in the relevant passages of the Republic. In al-Fārābī and the Epistles of the Sincere Brethren, the ruler has to be well spoken and eloquent, while in Antony ‘he encourages, leads, persuades, and turns his subjects towards the Good’. Perhaps Antony’s formulation reveals the ground for the introduction of eloquence into the virtues of the ruler: the statesman’s need to master the ‘true rhetoric’ which will ‘persuade . . . the citizens to that on account of which they would become better’,35 and the legislator’s need to ‘add to his statutes (words) of encouragement and persuasion’.36 The formal prescriptions make even clearer the fundamental structure of the imperial doctrine of the philosopher king. The ruler has all the ‘normal’ human virtues of external goods, bodily goods, and those of ‘soul and body’, but his soul is characterised by possession of the sciences, personal virtues, statecraft, and philanthrōpia. Political philosophy, and in particular the ideal of the philosopher king, plays a greater role in the writings of the Neoplatonists of late antiquity than has until recently been generally assumed. Both Christians and Muslims could therefore have picked up these concepts from Neoplatonist literature available to them in Abbasid Baghdad. In the case of the Christians, however, there is another source close to hand, namely the oratory of the fourth century Greek Fathers, and Gregory of Nazianzus in particular. Gregory was the single most influential author of Eastern Christianity. Not only did the orations of ‘the Theologian’ become the pre-eminent model of Christian eloquence, they were also enormously influential and read by virtually every later thinker in Eastern Christianity who touched on the subject of theology, including those of them who were also interested in Greek philosophy. His orations were translated into Syriac probably in the sixth century, and a new translation was made by Paul of Edessa and completed in 624.37 Athanasius of Balad, who wrote on Aristotelian logic and made many translations of Aristotelian logical works, revised Paul of Edessa’s translation, and the abiding interest of philosophically minded Syrians in Gregory’s works is illustrated by Timothy’s request to Pethion in the letter noted earlier to look not only for scholia on the Organon, but also for the second volume of Athanasius’ revised translation. (Timothy mentions that he already has volume one.)38 Antony of Tagrit called him ‘the prince of rhetors and chief of sophists’ and quoted him frequently. As already noted, Abū Naṣr Yaḥyā ibn Jarīr of Tagrit cited him in his marginal annotations on al-Fārābī’s Perfect State. Gregory did not set forth a systematic political philosophy, but he had a great deal to say about the role of the emperor, and in this way embedded the Platonic philosopher king and the Hellenistic concept of kingship in Eastern Christian thought. A similar apotheosis of the emperor, against a background of Platonic and Christian ideas, can be found in Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom, all of whom were widely read and translated into Syriac, at least in part. The ‘political Platonism’ 238

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

of these Christian orators would thus have been well known among Syriac Christian thinkers, and might have been transmitted to al-Fārābī in the predominantly Christian school of the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Aristotelians. Another fourth century orator, pagan but widely respected by Gregory, was also known to Syriac Christians. The political orator and Aristotelian commentator Themistius, a proponent of religious toleration, was asked by Gregory to confirm as a philosopher ‘the saying of your trusted Plato, that the cities will not cease to see evil as long as power is not united to philosophy’.39 The political ideas expressed in many of Themistius’ orations represent a Platonism quite similar to that of the fourth century Christian authors on the one hand and al-Fārābī on the other. Pagan and Christian orators shared the one set of concepts: monotheism and monarchy belong together, and philosophy and philanthrōpia should direct the king. They offered the same justification for monarchic government: imperial rule reflects a theological monarchism, and as with a plurality of gods, a plurality of rulers produces schism and discord. The old Greek love of concord and peace, and horror of their opposites, strife and division, are fully manifest in Themistius, as is the old analogy between the cosmos, the state, and the human soul and body. The same correspondence between these various levels is found in Gregory of Nazianzus and would not have appeared strange to Syriac-speaking Christians. Another Leitmotiv of Themistius linking him to both fourth century Christian orators and Christians in Abbasid Iraq is his emphasis on the emperor’s philanthrōpia.40 We have noted the occurrence of this theme in Antony’s encomium of the ruler, and it is clear that the concept of the monarch as the true philosopher filled with philanthrōpia remained alive among the Christian elite of Baghdad.41 Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī wrote no extant works on political philosophy, but in his Ethics he emphasised philanthrōpia and its connection to the rule of the rational over the irrational soul: ‘and so it is meet for the lover of perfection to love all men, having pity and mercy for them, especially the king and head, for the king is not a king so long as he does not love and pity his subjects’.42 Gregory’s orations were without doubt influential in Graeco-Syriac circles in the Christian East, but the hypothesis that much attention was also given there to Themistius is more speculative. Only two of Themistius’ orations are extant in Syriac, for one of which there is no evidence in Greek.43 It is possible, however, that many more might have been translated or at least known among literary Graeco-Syriac circles. The suggestion that among some Syrians there was an interest in Themistius’ political thought is not, however, based entirely on extrapolating the evidence of the translation of these two orations, but also on the attested fact that a Syriac translation existed, although neither it nor the original Greek is now extant, of a risāla (‘letter’ or ‘treatise’) of Themistius on government.44 This letter survives in two Arabic manuscripts, in one of which it is said to have been translated by al-Dimashqī (died after 914), in the other by Ibn Zur‘a (943–1008) from Syriac. Arguing from silence, it can be proposed that al-Dimashqī’s translation was made directly from the Greek, but the similarity of the two translations suggests that he might have used the Syriac, as a control if not as his base. Ibn Zur‘a almost certainly 239

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

did not know Greek, and there is no reason to doubt the superscription of the manuscript which states that he translated it from Syriac – which we might interpret to the effect that he revised al-Dimashqī’s version on the basis of the Syriac. The document is important because it provides concrete evidence for an interest in Themistius’ political thought in Syriac or Syro-Arabic Christian circles and especially, with the mention of Ibn Zur‘a, in the circle of the Baghdad Aristotelians,45 among whom, in the generation before Ibn Zur‘a, al-Fārābī pursued his studies. The basic Platonic inspiration of the concepts expounded in Themistius’ risāla is clear, drawing in particular on the analogy in the Republic and the Laws between the philosopher-rulers and ruled multitude of the state on the one hand and the ruling reason and irrational passions and desires of the soul on the other.46 Many other similar points in the risāla stemming from Plato, or from a fusion of Platonic and Aristotelian elements, can also be found in the orations.47 There are also some differences between the risāla and the orations, which have led some to question its authenticity; for us, the essential point is that it was attributed to Themistius in the Syro-Arabic circles with which we are concerned, whether or not it originally came from his pen.48 It may still be thought surprising that the political writings of the pagan Themistius were admired by Iraqi Christian philosophers. There is, however, a certain striking similarity in their respective situations: Themistius was a monotheistic pagan philosopher living (for the most part) under Christian emperors; the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Aristotelians were Christian philosophers under a Muslim caliph. What they presumably both valued was being under a ruler like a Platonic philosopher king who manifested philanthrōpia and tolerance towards those of a different religion.49 For Themistius various religions were different cultural expressions of a universal human veneration for a single God common to all mankind. Therefore he could declaim to Jovian: You are the first not to have misperceived that the king cannot exercise force on his subjects in all matters, and that there are things which by their nature . . . are above menace and compulsion, namely the domain of virtue in general and religious piety in particular. . . . You prescribe that the domain of the cult concerns each individual, imitating in this respect God himself who has made a disposition to piety a common trait of human nature, but has left the mode of adoration to each. . . . ‘Each sacrificed to a different god’ (Iliad II, 400) is a truth older than Homer. Thus it has never been displeasing to God that this concert of different voices has appeared among men. . . . Consider that the master of the universe also rejoices at this diversity. . . . It is his will that the Syrians (i.e. Christians) choose one politeia, the Greeks another, the Egyptians another, and his will also that the Syrians differ among themselves and are divided into small groups.50 This would surely have been congenial to a Christian minority (which was indeed divided into small groups) under a benign Muslim ‘king’. 240

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Al-Fārābī may have derived his view that philosophy could accommodate diverse religions from the Baghdad Aristotelians, or at least may have confirmed it from them. He worked out his theory of religion as an imaginative representation of philosophical truth in connection with his interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics, which of course he read in Arabic. The Arabic translation, made from Syriac, was the work of the head of the Baghdad School, Abū Bishr Mattā. We do not know how Mattā interpreted the work, but it seems very unlikely that an active philosophical thinker such as him would have undertaken the translation without thinking about its meaning, and we may well wonder if al-Fārābī’s interpretation was in fact derived from that of Mattā. The similarity of his theory of religion to that of Greek Neoplatonism is clear, and there is no doubt that Christian and Muslim philosophers in Baghdad were well acquainted with much of the teaching of the Alexandrian School of late antiquity.51 Only in al-Fārābī, however, is this interpretation of religion and philosophy linked to that of Aristotle’s Poetics, and I suggest the interpretation may have been inspired by Mattā.52 The reason the theory could have appealed to them is the same as that which would have attracted them to the works of Themistius: in both Themistius and al-Fārābī, philosophy was the key to human perfection, and different religions partial and imperfect representations of philosophical truths. Not everyone, however, in Iraq or elsewhere, shared this universalistic outlook. In the second half of the ninth century traditionalist Muslim reaction against rationalism grew strong and generated some opposition to the religiously sensitive discipline of philosophy in particular. A cleavage thus appeared in the Muslim community between the adherents of the specifically Islamic disciplines and the circles which admired the foreign sciences.53 The rise of the traditionalists thus pitched Christian and Muslim philosophers into the same camp on the side of the foreign against the Islamic sciences. Each stood to gain from the tacit support of the other, for philosophy was threatened by the traditionalists’ implicit claim of its irrelevance within the ‘house of Islam’. Armed with the complete Organon, the Christian members of the Baghdad School could fight alongside sympathetic Muslims on behalf of philosophy against both Arabic grammar and Muslim kalām. Wishing to defend their role as philosophers within a Muslim society in a way which neither antagonised those Muslims who were favourably disposed towards them nor undercut the legitimacy of their own Christian confessions, they would have furthered their aims by the exposition of religion as a necessary complement of philosophy and an imitation of it through the similitudes best known to a particular nation. It would both have bound them together with Muslim philosophers in the defence of reason against the jurists of traditionalist Islam54 and also allowed them, when they so wished, to argue for Christianity (or its West Syrian or East Syrian varieties) as a closer imitation of ultimate truths than religions professed by rival confessions.55 If the Christian philosophers of Baghdad did indeed make common cause there with their Islamic counterparts in the defence of philosophy against Muslim traditionalists, their successes were notable but not permanent. The golden age ended 241

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

for both in Baghdad around the end of the tenth century. In Islam philosophy flourished elsewhere, in the East especially under the impact of Ibn Sīnā. Evidence of interest in the subject among Syrians, however, is not clearly forthcoming until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period of the ‘Syriac Renaissance’. This was not focused on a single centre, and neither was it confined to Iraq. Nevertheless, the monastery of Mār Mattai, near Mosul, figures prominently both in this and in the previous period, associated as it was during the ‘Syriac Renaissance’ with Jacob Bar Shakko and Bar Hebraeus. According to a common view, any philosophy books in its library had lain there gathering dust for a century or two untouched by readers, while philosophical studies lay dormant among Syrians, to be awakened only by the vivifying touch of Arabic scholarship. Such a scenario is possible, but does seem on the face of it rather improbable. It is based primarily on the absence of any significant Syriac writer on philosophy between the era of the Baghdad Aristotelians and the Syriac Renaissance, and the lack of positive evidence of Syriac interest in secular subjects within the pages of Thomas of Marga’s Historia monastica and Bar Hebraeus’ Chronicon ecclesiasticum.56 These works, however, were not designed to be histories of secular scholarship. Bar Zo‘bi, Bar Shakko, and Bar Hebraeus all had Muslim Arabs among their teachers, but Bar Ṣalibi seemingly did not, yet he also wrote on Aristotle.57 It may thus be the case that some Syriac Christians continued to study philosophy during these intervening years, but no writer (apart from Bar Ṣalibi) emerged from among them who attracted sufficient attention to be noted by contemporaries or posterity. A possible explanation for this is not hard to find. If Syriac Christians continued to study philosophy in the manner of pre- and early-Abbasid times, their work would have seemed quite passé to those whose thought was dominated by the appearance of Ibn Sīnā (died 1037). In the East, in the years following his death, Arabic Aristotelianism moved on from the Graeco-Syriac model, and any Syriac writers on philosophy who remained exclusively attached to that older model would have had little impact in the new intellectual environment.58 In the writings of Bar Zo‘bi, Bar Shakko, and Bar Hebraeus, it may be that what we see is not a resurrection from the dead of Syriac interest in philosophy as such, but rather a new and revitalised phase in that interest, as Syrians gave up an exclusive attachment to the older ways of doing philosophy and, while continuing to make use of the Graeco-Syriac literary heritage, nevertheless plunged into the current of post-Avicennan Arabic Aristotelianism. In relation to the achievements of the Syriac Christians in the early part of the Abbasid period, there is therefore both continuity and change in the impressive and voluminous work of Bar Hebraeus at its end.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Greek Philosophy and Syriac Culture in Abbasid Iraq’, in: Erica C.D. Hunter (ed.), The Christian Heritage of Iraq: Collected Papers from the Christianity of Iraq I–V Seminar Days. Gorgias Eastern Christian Studies

242

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

13 (Piscataway: Gorgias, 2009) 10–37. © 2009 by Gorgias Press LLC and republished by permission. Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a II 134–5; similarly al-Mas‘ūdī, Tanbīh 121–2. Translations in Rosenthal (1975) 50–1 and Stern (1960) 39–41. Cf. Chapters 1–3 in this volume. Cf. Strohmaier (1987); Watt (2008–9). Cf. Chapter 6 in this volume. Cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, and Brock (2004) 10–11. See Timothy epp. 19, 43, 48; cf. Brock (1999). Gutas (1998) 62. Cf. Chapters 1–3 in this volume, and Watt (2015) and (2017). Gutas (1998) 62 notes the translation of Athanasius and concludes this implies ‘that (the Topics) was known also to those unable to read Greek (and) was therefore somehow brought to al-Mahdī’s attention’. The point is, however, that among those unable to read Greek, it was known only to those able to read Syriac. Timothy’s letter is discussed in greater detail in Watt (2004a) 17–19. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (1991) 203–4; Kraus (1933/4) 8–9. Cf. Dols (1989) 45–52. Cf. Gutas (1998) 83–95. Cf. Lameer (1996) 189–91; Watt (2004a) 20. Cf. Zimmermann (1981) cv–cxii, cxxii–cxxix. Cf. Watt (2008–9) 775–8. Al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda 38, tr. Mahdi (2001) 43. On this manuscript cf. Walzer (1953); Hugonnard-Roche (1992), (1993). On the following, cf. Watt (2004b). Cf. Gutas (1997). Fihrist 246, tr. Dodge (1970) 592–3. Cf. Walzer (1985) 22–5. Cf. Chapter 11 in this volume, 219–20. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1356a25–28. Al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs 84–5, tr. Mahdi (2001) 92. Cf. Watt (1993a) 585–6. Cf. Watt (2005) 19–29. Cf. Watt (1993b) 64–8. Republic 611b-e. Cf. Laws 713d-e: ‘The god Cronos, being philanthrōpos, appointed as kings and rulers over men the nobler race of daemons’. Cf. Watt (1993a) 588–93, (1994) 247–53. Book I of Antony’s Rhetoric, from which these citations are drawn, is translated in part together with a facsimile reproduction of one of its manuscripts in Eskenasy (1991). Cf. Walzer (1985) 246–49, 445–6; Baffioni (1991). For the comparable texts of Antony, see the passages quoted in translation in my 1993a and 1994 articles cited in the previous footnote. The same passages are in Eskenasy (1991) 99–106, 131–41. Of the twelve qualities of the ruler listed in the Arabic works, only ‘number three’, a good memory, makes no appearance among the qualities mentioned for praise in Antony’s encomiastic scheme and model. The barrage of Greek loanwords in the texts of Antony referred to in the two previous footnotes is suggestive but not decisive. His derivation of the three species of rhetoric from the Platonic tripartition of the soul (cf. Watt [1993a] 586–8) is clearly of late antique Greek origin and has, to the best of my knowledge, no parallel in Arabic texts. Antony himself believed that his Syriac treatise derived from Greek models, not Arabic; cf. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, 6–8, 65 (text), 5–7, 54 (version).

243

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

34 Cf. Kraemer (1984) 161, who notes the likely Hellenistic and Christian inspiration of the kingly philanthrōpia ideal manifested in both Christian and Muslim Arabic philosophers. 35 Plato, Gorgias 517a-b. Cf. Statesman 304a: rhetoric, when ‘it partakes of the kingly art, persuades to justice and thus helps to govern events in states’. 36 Laws 720a. Cf. on Antony Watt (1993a) 582–5, 591–3. 37 Cf. de Halleux (1983). The Syriac version contains the entire forty-four authentic orations of Gregory. 38 Timothy ep. 43; cf. Brock (1999) 237, 244. 39 Gregory of Nazianzus, ep. 24 (ed., tr. Gallay I, 32–3). Thirty-one of Gregory’s epistles, but not this one, are transmitted in the same Syriac manuscript (British Library Add. 17,209) as the two orations of Themistius to be mentioned later. It is quite likely, however, that this letter was also translated into Syriac, as the colophon of British Library manuscript Add. 18,821 notes that it originally contained 166 of Gregory’s letters and 219 of his poems; cf. Wright (1870–2) 775b. 40 Cf. Downey (1955). 41 Cf. Kraemer (1986) 17–19. 42 Cf. Kraemer (1986) 115. 43 Ed. Sachau (1870) 48–65 (Greek Or. 22) and 17–47 (not extant in Greek). 44 Ed. and tr. Swain (2013) 132–59. 45 On Ibn Zur‘a (943–1008), cf. Endress (2012) 325–33. 46 Plato, Rep. 435a ff., 443e, Laws 689a ff. 47 Cf. Croissant (1930) 11–18. 48 Cf. more fully Chapters 9–10 in this volume. On the view of Conterno (2014) that Themistius’ orations were not valued for their political content, but solely for their teaching on personal ethics, by Syriac Christians, cf. Chapter 10 n. 62. 49 Generally on the Christian interest in promoting philanthrōpia within an Islamic society and raising the universalism of philosophy above the particularism of religious affiliation, cf. Kraemer (1986) 76–7. 50 Themistius, Or. 5, 67b-70. 51 Cf. O’Meara (2002), (2003) 187–97. 52 Cf. Watt (2007), (2015) 28–35. 53 Cf. Endress (1990) 13–16. 54 Cf. ibid. 16–23. 55 Cf. al-Fārābī in Walzer (1985) 278–80: ‘Some of those who know them through similitudes which imitate them know them through similitudes which are near to them, and some through similitudes slightly more remote, and some through similitudes which are even more remote than these, and some through similitudes which are very remote indeed’. 56 Cf. Ruska (1897) 12–26. 57 That Bar Ṣalibi’s commentaries on Aristotle are of the older Graeco-Syriac type, and not in the mould of the contemporary Arabic Aristotelianism, can be only a provisional assertion as long as these commentaries remain unedited. To the extent, however, that a judgement can be made on the basis of the information given in Wright and Cook (1901) 1009–17 (MS. Gg.2.14), it seems to be valid. 58 Cf. Gutas (1993) 43–8.

References Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), The Fifth Book of the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit (Lovanii: Peeters, 1986). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 480 (text), 481 (version).

244

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Baffioni (1991): C. Baffioni, ‘The Platonic “Virtues of the Ruler” in Islamic Tradition’, Études Orientales 9/10, 111–18. Brock (1999): S.P. Brock, ‘Two Letters of the Patriarch Timothy from the Late Eighth Century on Translations from Greek’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 9, 233–46. Brock (2004): S.P. Brock, ‘Changing Fashions in Syriac Translation Technique’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 3–14. Conterno (2014): M. Conterno, Temistio orientale. Orazioni temistiane nella tradizione siriaca e araba (Brescia: Paideia). Croissant (1930): J. Croissant, ‘Un nouveau discours de Thémistius’, Serta Leodiensia, (Bibliothèque de la faculté de philosophie et lettres de l’université de Liège, 44, LiègeParis) 7–30. Dodge (1970): B. Dodge (tr.), The Fihrist of al-Nadīm (New York: Columbia University Press). Dols (1989): M. Dols, ‘Syriac Into Arabic: The Transmission of Greek Medicine’, Aram 1, 45–52. Downey (1955): G. Downey, ‘Philanthrōpia in Religion and Statecraft in the Fourth Century after Christ’, Historia 4, 199–208. Endress (1990): G. Endress, ‘The Defense of Reason: The Plea for Philosophy in the Religious Community’, Zeitschrift für Geschichte der arabisch-islamischen Wissenschaften 6, 1–49. Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. Eskenasy (1991): P. Eskenasy, Antony of Tagrit’s Rhetoric Book One: Introduction, Partial Translation, and Commentary (PhD. Dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University). al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs: M. Mahdi (ed.), Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs (Beirut: Dār Majallat Shiʿr, 1961). al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda: J. Āl Yāsīn (ed.), Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿādah (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistles: P. Gallay (ed. and tr.), Saint Grégoire de Nazianze, Lettres, I–II (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–7). Gutas (1993): D. Gutas, ‘Aspects of Literary Form and Genre in Arabic Logical Works’, in: C. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts (London: Warburg Institute) 29–76. Gutas (1997): D. Gutas, ‘Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Farabi’s Talkhis’, in: G. Endress and R. Kruk (eds.), The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism (Leiden: Research School CNWS) 101–19. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). de Halleux (1983): A de Halleux, ‘La version syriaque des discours de Grégoire de Nazianze’, in: J. Mossay (ed.), II Symposium Nazianzenum (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh) 75–111. Hugonnard-Roche (1991): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘L’intermédiaire syriaque dans la transmission de la philosophie grecque à l’arabe: le cas de l’Organon d’Aristote’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 1, 187–209. Hugonnard-Roche (1992): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Une ancienne édition arabe de l’Organon d’Aristote’, in: J. Hamesse (ed.), Les problèmes posés par l’édition critique des textes anciens et médiévaux (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain) 139–57.

245

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Hugonnard-Roche (1993): H. Hugonnard-Roche, ‘Remarques sur la tradition arabe de l’Organon d’après le manuscrit Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, ar. 2346’, in: C. Burnett (ed.): Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and Medieval Latin Traditions (London: Warburg Institute) 19–28. Ibn Abī Uṣaybi‘a: A. Müller (ed.),ʿUyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbā’, I–II (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿah al-Wahbīyah, 1882). Kraemer (1984): J. Kraemer, ‘Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam: A Preliminary Study’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, 135–64. Kraemer (1986): J. Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam (Leiden: Brill). Kraus (1933/4): P. Kraus, ‘Zu Ibn al-Muqaffa’, Rivista degli studi orientali 14, 1–14. Lameer (1996): J. Lameer, ‘From Alexandria to Baghdad: Reflections on the Genesis of a Problematical Tradition’, in: G. Endress and R. Kruk (eds.), The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism (Leiden: Brill) 181–92. Mahdi (2001): M. Mahdi (tr.), Alfarabi: Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). al-Mas‘ūdī, Tanbīh: M. de Goeje (ed.), Kitāb al-Tanbīh wa-l-išrāf (Leiden: Brill, 1894). O’Meara (2002): D.J. O’Meara, ‘Religion als Abbild der Philosophie. Zum neuplatonischen Hintergrund der Lehre al-Farabis’, in: T. Kobusch and M. Erler (eds.), Metaphysik und Religion. Zur Signatur des spätantiken Denkens (Munich and Leipzig: K.G. Saur) 343–53. O’Meara (2003): D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Rosenthal (1975): F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London: Routledge). Ruska (1897): J. Ruska, ‘Studien zu Severus bar Shakku’s “Buch der Dialoge”’, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 12, 8–41, 145–61. Sachau (1870): E. Sachau, Inedita Syriaca (Vienna: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses in Halle). Stern (1960): S.M. Stern, ‘Al- Mas‘ūdī and the Philosopher al-Fārābī’, in: S. Maqbul Ahmad and A. Rahman (eds.), Al- Mas‘ūdī Millenary Commemoration Volume (Aligarh: Indian Society for the History of Science and the Institute of Islamic Studies, Aligarh Muslim University) 39–41. Strohmaier (1987): G. Strohmaier, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: eine fiktive Schultradition’, in: J. Wiesner (ed.), Aristoteles, Werk und Wirkung: Paul Moraux gewidmet II (Berlin: De Gruyter) 380–9. Swain (2013): S. Swain, Themistius, Julian and Greek Political Theory under Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Themistius, Orations: H. Schenkl, G. Downey, and A.F. Norman (eds.), Themistii Orationes quae supersunt (Leipzig: Teubner, 1965–74) I–III. Timothy ep. 19: O. Braun (ed. and tr.), Timothei patriarchae I, epistulae I (Paris: e Typographeo Reipublicae, 1914–15). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 74 (text), 75 (version). Timothy epp. 43, 48: M. Heimgartner (ed. and tr.), Die Briefe 42–58 des ostsyrischen Patriarchen Timotheos I (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 644 (text), 645 (version). Walzer (1953): R. Walzer, ‘New Light on the Arabic Translations of Aristotle’, Oriens 5, 91–142. Walzer (1985): R. Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: A Revised Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

246

G R E E K P H I L O S O P H Y , S Y R I A C C U LT U R E I N A B B A S I D I R A Q

Watt (1993a): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Reception of Platonic and Aristotelian Rhetoric’, Aram 5, 579–601. Watt (1993b): J.W. Watt, ‘Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Enkyklios Paideia in Syriac’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 143, 45–71. Watt (1994): J.W. Watt, ‘The Philosopher-King in the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit’, in: R. Lavenant (ed.), VI Symposium Syriacum 1992 (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale) 245–58. Watt (2004a): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac Translators and Greek Philosophy in Early Abbasid Iraq’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4, 15–26. Watt (2004b): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, in: E. Gannagé, P. Crone, M. Aouad, D. Gutas, and E. Schütrumpf (eds.), Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph, 57: The Greek Strand in Islamic Political Thought (Beirut: Université Saint-Joseph) 121–49. Watt (2005): J.W. Watt, Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac (Leiden: Brill). Watt (2007): J.W. Watt, ‘Christianity in the Renaissance of Islam. Abū Bishr Mattā, al-Fārābī, and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī’, in: M. Tamcke (ed.), Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages (Beirut and Würzburg: Ergon) 99–112. Watt (2008–9): J.W. Watt, ‘Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon’, in: G.A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-rabo d-malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 751–77; reissued separately 2009. Watt (2015): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Aristotelian Tradition and the Syro-Arabic Baghdad Philosophers’, in: D. Janos (ed.), Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond (Leiden: Brill) 7–43. Watt (2017): J.W. Watt, ‘The Curriculum of Aristotelian Philosophy among the Syrians’, Studia graeco-arabica 7, 171–92. Wright (1870–2): W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired since the Year 1838 (London: Trustees of the British Museum). Wright and Cook (1901): W. Wright and S.A. Cook, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Zimmermann (1981): F.W. Zimmermann, Al-Farabi’s Commentary and Short Treatise on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione (London: Oxford University Press).

247

13 GRAECO-SYRIAC TRADITION AND ARABIC PHILOSOPHY IN BAR HEBRAEUS1

When ‘the Syriac Renaissance’ was coined as a term for the upsurge of literary activity in Syriac in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the main thought was no doubt to characterise a cultural revival in the broad sense. Lurking in the background, however, may also have been the more specific concept associated with the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and indeed the Abbasid Renaissance of the eighth to tenth, of a revival of classical Greek thought. Both these aspects, the rebirth of Syriac as a significant medium of culture, and the renewal of interest among Syriac writers in the legacy of Greek wisdom, do indeed call for attention in a study of the Syriac Renaissance. The interest of the Syrians in Greek wisdom in pre-Islamic times is most evident in their engagement with the works of Aristotle and Galen, and these authors continue to figure prominently in their activities at the time of the Abbasid Renaissance. When we turn to the Syriac Renaissance of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, we encounter in the Cream of Wisdom of Bar Hebraeus a work which has been called ‘the grandest exposition in the Syriac language of the entire Aristotelian system of philosophy’,2 but while the Syro-Arabic Aristotelians of Abbasid Baghdad were inspired by Greek works in Syriac translations, even though writing themselves in Arabic, Bar Hebraeus, while writing in Syriac, appears to have been mostly inspired by Muslim Arabic work on Aristotle. The reasons for the procedure of the Baghdad Aristotelians are clear enough – while the tradition of Aristotelian scholarship was predominantly Graeco-Syriac, Arabic was rapidly gaining ground as the language of power and prestige – but those for Bar Hebraeus’ procedure are not so evident. The text most commonly cited in efforts to explain it is his remark on the rise of Arabic philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians in the account of the Chronicon syriacum of the Arab conquest of the region: There arose among (the Arabs) philosophers, mathematicians, and physicians, who surpassed the ancients in subtlety of understanding. While they built on no foundation other than those of the Greeks, they constructed greater scientific edifices by means of a more elegant style and more studious researches, with the result that although they had received

249

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

the wisdom from us through translators, all of whom were Syrians, now we find it necessary to seek wisdom from them.3 The context is important.4 The fact that Bar Hebraeus locates it in the reign of Heraclius, at the close of the Greek and beginning of the Arab period, while he himself is living at the close of the Arab and beginning of the Mongol period, certainly invites the consideration that he saw his own times as a decisive period of cultural and religious change, which might enhance the importance of the Syrians and their language at the expense of Arabic. If in the period between the Arab and Mongol conquests the sciences had been built up by Arabs, yet that had been made possible only by Syrians, Syrians might well now be in a position to take over the building work, and this may have been the rationale behind the writing of the Cream of Wisdom. Bar Hebraeus’ remark, however, raises some further questions. What is striking about it is not so much his pride in the work of the Syrian translators – soundly based of course on their achievements in the Abbasid era of translation – but rather the fact that he passes over their scholarly and scientific activity in areas other than translation. The Syrians of early Abbasid Baghdad were, after all, not only the leading translators of Greek to Arabic, but also the leading physicians and philosophers. They dominated medical practice, and the school founded by the East Syrian Abū Bishr Mattā, that of ‘the Baghdad Aristotelians’, was the foremost centre of philosophy, even though in the longer term its most illustrious member turned out to be the Muslim al-Fārābī. It is true of course that the majority of them were East Syrians, but Bar Hebraeus’ ecumenical sympathies would have allowed him to take as much pride in their achievement as in those of the West Syrians, to whom he belonged. In fact, he appears either not to have known, or at any rate not to have paid much attention to, the work of the outstanding West Syrian member of the school, Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī.5 In some other passages in the Chronicon syriacum Bar Hebraeus is, to be sure, more complimentary, and specific, concerning the achievements of Syrian translators and physicians. Under the Roman emperors he mentions Sergius and others including Ḥunayn,6 and under the caliph al-Muhtadī he gives a much fuller account of the activity of Ḥunayn.7 In this work, however, he is more effusive about the two Muslim scholars whose writings – and in the latter case perhaps also whose personal acquaintance – were so important to his own literary efforts, namely Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and al-Ṭūsī.8 His opening comment on Avicenna is especially striking: ‘When he took Aristotle’s talent, he added to it not only five but more than fifty talents’ (cf. Matthew 25, 14–22). If Bar Hebraeus considered that the Greeks in general (and Aristotle in particular) had established the foundations of the edifice of wisdom, but the Arabs in general (and Avicenna in particular) had constructed a fine edifice upon them, there would have been no need to go back to the works of the Greeks (or Aristotle). People who inhabit a fine building do not generally spend much time looking at the foundations – unless they have reason to believe that they are not entirely secure. 250

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

However, as more books of the Cream are being edited and we are becoming more familiar with Bar Hebraeus’ method in it, it is becoming clear that Bar Hebraeus did in fact often revert to the foundations. It is true that the overall design of his Cream of Wisdom is close to and manifestly based upon the Shifā’ of Avicenna (or in the case of the books of practical philosophy, al-Ṭūsī). But he did not take over the works of his Muslim authorities just as they stood; rather, he frequently interwove them with the ‘foundations’ in Syriac translation. Often he reverted to the Greek author (Aristotle, or Nicholas of Damascus), either including material omitted by the Muslim commentator, or preferring to make a paraphrase of the ‘foundation’ rather than a paraphrase of the Muslim’s paraphrase.9 When he spoke of rabban (‘our master’), he was referring to Aristotle (or his epitomiser, Nicholas of Damascus), not Avicenna. In the Cream we encounter a skilful construction combining the Greek ‘foundations’ and the Muslim ‘superstructure’. But if the superstructure is so excellent, why did he sometimes go back to the foundations? Bar Hebraeus, who himself did not know Greek, of course nevertheless knew that the ‘original’ foundations were the Greek texts of the Greek authors, but that Muslims could refer to only Arabic versions of these. By contrast, he could normally refer to a Syriac and an Arabic version, and he knew that the latter was sometimes derived from the former. There is no doubt that in the Cream, when he paraphrased the ‘foundations’, it was the Syriac version he was working on, not the Arabic (or the Greek).10 In having access to the Syriac, he therefore had an advantage over his Muslim authorities, but he no doubt realised that it was a limited one, for as far as we can tell at present the Syriac and Arabic versions of philosophical works available to him did not greatly diverge. So how true did he believe the Syriac and Arabic versions to be to the original foundations, the Greek texts? In the account of Aristotle in the Chronicon syriacum11 there is no word about the translation of the corpus, but the corresponding passage in his Arabic Historia dynastiarum has a significant statement about its translation: Everyone who translated (Aristotle’s) work (his kalām) from Greek into another language distorted (it), engaged in speculation, and did not do it justice. The group at present (ḥālan) closest to understanding him is (that consisting of) al-Fārābī and Avicenna, for they took his learning upon themselves in accordance with the intended purpose and gained pleasure from it on finding its revealed source.12 The passage is taken from al-Qifṭī,13 but we may assume that it does in fact represent Bar Hebraeus’ own view. On this assumption therefore, Bar Hebraeus believed that what al-Fārābī and Avicenna achieved was a recovery – indeed, the best recovery to date – of the meaning and intention of Aristotle, which had been obscured by misunderstanding and speculation in translation. These mistakes and erroneous conjectures were committed by ‘all who translated his writings from Greek into another language’, and therefore affected both Syriac and Arabic versions. Bar Hebraeus no doubt held the Syriac in higher esteem,14 but it could 251

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

not be considered a perfect representation of Aristotle’s thought. Syrians thus had some advantage over Arabs in that their versions were one stage closer to the Greek, and Syrians had made the Syriac and Arabic translations of Aristotle. On the other hand, they had introduced errors and obscurities, and to the Arabic philosophers was due the credit for achieving the best approximation to date of Aristotle’s true intention. This is of course a somewhat different conception of the relation of Avicenna to Aristotle than that implied in the assertion that Avicenna ‘made more than fifty talents from Aristotle’s one’, but it is quite possible that Bar Hebraeus held both aspects to be true: that is, in some respects Avicenna came closest to recovering Aristotle’s original meaning, while in others he progressed further even than ‘our master’ himself along the path of knowledge. That leaves open the possibility that using both the insights of the Arabic philosophers and the best ‘foundations’ available to those without the Greek, namely Syriac rather than Arabic versions of Aristotle, both a closer approximation to Aristotle’s intention and a further multiplication of his ‘talents’ might still be achieved. The stimulation of such a philosophical enterprise among Syrians may have been the aim of the Cream of Wisdom. It could not of course have been through a philological comparison of Greek and Oriental texts of Aristotle that al-Qifṭī and Bar Hebraeus came to hold the view that all the translators had made errors and conjectures. Neither of them knew the Greek texts. Even if Bar Hebraeus knew something of the philological labours of the school of Ḥunayn and those of the Baghdad Aristotelians, it was not they who pointed to al-Fārābī and Avicenna as coming closest to understanding Aristotle.15 That idea, if not al-Qifṭī’s own, must have come from another Muslim source or teacher. Its roots no doubt lie in Avicenna’s freedom in relation to the text of Aristotle and his conviction that his own insights represented a new stage in the acquisition of knowledge beyond that reached by Aristotle himself, the ‘First Teacher’. That Avicenna came closest to grasping Aristotle’s meaning is an inference which could have been drawn by his readers from his conception of the practice of philosophy and his theory of intuition granting direct access to knowledge beyond that mediated through inherited conceptions and a historical tradition.16 In his autobiography they could also read that from al-Fārābī he understood the purpose of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.17 Bar Hebraeus was also well aware that Avicenna considered the Arabic text of Aristotle which lay before him as at times incomprehensible or inaccurate. For example, in the Rhetoric at 1365a26–27 he found the Arabic incomprehensible and simply said, ‘In the First Teaching examples are given here which I do not understand’. A little further on, at 1365a35–36, where the Greek reads, ‘The possible (is better) than the impossible, for one (is useful) in itself, the other not’, but the Arabic (and presumably the Syriac), ‘Health is better than weakness, for one (is useful) in itself, the other not’,18 Avicenna considered that ‘a mistake has been made in the copies, and in place of weakness there should have been absence of weakness, or what comes to the same thing, strength. Therefore it is necessary to go back to the Greek’.19 In the first of these passages Bar Hebraeus presumably 252

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

reproduced what stood in the Syriac version of the Rhetoric, prefacing it by saying, ‘At this point our master quoted paradigms incomprehensible to us or our teachers’.20 In the second, taking his cue no doubt from Avicenna that weakness was not what Aristotle intended, but unsure whether Avicenna’s conjecture absence of weakness was right on the mark, Bar Hebraeus paraphrased, ‘What is helpful for living and living well, like health and wealth, is better, for they drive away pain and increase pleasure’.21 Bar Hebraeus’ admiration for Avicenna, however, will hardly have arisen through his reading of him in vacuo, but rather within the context of the debate in Muslim circles concerning his legacy in the years between al-Rāzī (died 1209 CE) and al-Ṭūsī (died 1274 CE). Both these are mentioned in glowing terms in the Chronicon syriacum. Of the former it is said that by the great number of his books ‘the Arabs throughout the world have been enlightened, and they are to this day’, and Bar Hebraeus goes on to compare him to Origen, ‘through whose books the doctors of the church became rich and illustrious, yet turned round and called him a heretic. So it is also with the Arabs, who call this man an infidel and an adherent of Aristotelian doctrine’.22 The work of Avicenna which Bar Hebraeus translated into Syriac, the Ishārāt, was brought into prominence in the Muslim debate by al-Rāzī’s commentary on it, and although al-Rāzī claimed not to be an Aristotelian and was not uncritical of Avicenna, his appreciative readers (among whom we must obviously reckon Bar Hebraeus) recognised him (correctly) as both an Aristotelian and an Avicennan and defended him against the charge of heresy.23 His writings found a champion in Ibn Yūnus, whose pupils included three figures well known to Bar Hebraeus: al-Abharī, author of the philosophical encyclopaedia entitled Hidāyat al-ḥikma (‘Guidance of Wisdom’) and the philosophical treatise Zubdat al-asrār (‘Cream of Secrets’) translated into Syriac by Bar Hebraeus;24 Jacob Bar Shakko;25 and al-Ṭūsī. Bar Hebraeus knew that Ibn Yūnus (as well as Bar Zo‘bi) had been a teacher of Bar Shakko, and (from Michael’s Chronicle) that as a young man Ibn Yūnus had had conversations with Michael the Great.26 Of Bar Hebraeus’ own philosophical education we know only that he studied logic and medicine in Tripoli under an East Syrian by the name of Jacob, and that he worked at the Nūr al-Dīn hospital in Damascus. It is probably futile for us to speculate as to when or where his particular philosophical position was first formed, but it does seem likely that we can locate the intellectual context of his thought in the discussion stemming from al-Rāzī and Ibn Yūnus over the legacy of Avicenna, and, in a wider sense, the debate over Aristotlelian philosophy on the one side and al-Ghazālī on the other. In this, Bar Hebraeus’ views were evidently highly inclusive. In his philosophical works he drew from Avicenna, and in his spiritual ones from al-Ghazālī. Within philosophy, too, his desire was to harmonise Aristotle and Avicenna, and by portraying Avicenna (occasionally together with the ‘Second Teacher’, al-Fārābī) as the one who came closest to restoring Aristotle’s true meaning in those places where it had been lost through corruption in translation, he had a means of weaving the two into a tapestry of his own design. 253

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

If the discussion around Aristotle and Avicenna in the wake of al-Rāzī’s writings formed the literary and intellectual context in which Bar Hebraeus’ philosophical thinking was born, the question arises as to whether the same may apply to some degree concerning the renaissance of Aristotelian studies in general among the Syrians, and furthermore what that might contribute to our understanding of the emergence of the Syriac Renaissance as a whole. Ruska’s view of the matter is well known: Jacob Bar Shakko’s Book of Dialogues represents the first attempt to acquaint his fellow Syrians with the various branches of secular knowledge when, at a time when among West and to a certain extent also East Syrians this knowledge had virtually ceased to exist, it had become common property among Muslim thinkers.27 Ruska’s assessment was to a large extent based on the mathematical sciences, and he did temper it at points, noting not only, for example, that within the mathematical sphere Jacob could make use of older Graeco-Syriac tradition such as Sergius’ translation of the De mundo,28 but also that for the first, ‘literary’ section of the work, no Arabic sources existed.29 Baumstark further significantly modified the assessment in taking forward his observations on the prolegomena to philosophy30 and noting that Bar Shakko’s exposition of logic and the divisions of philosophy was entirely based on Graeco-Syriac, not Arabic sources.31 More recently Daiber has shown not only that Baumstark too may have underestimated the number of Graeco-Syriac collections of such texts in circulation in the Orient (by restricting the tradition to Philoponus and Stephen), but that ‘Ammonius was better known than has been assumed – and indeed from Greek texts which survived in Syriac’.32 In the meantime it has also become clear that the first part of the Dialogues is dependent for much of its material on the Syriac Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit,33 and also that Bar Shakko had no hesitation in adding in this context a substantial passage from the Syriac Aristotle.34 Baumstark’s assertion that ‘Bar Hebraeus is a translator from Arabic, Severus [Bar Shakko] a Syriac compiler familiar with Arabic sources’35 may therefore give an exaggerated impression of the difference between them. Of course grosso modo he was quite correct, and Bar Hebraeus undoubtedly stood far closer to the classics of Arabic philosophy than did Bar Shakko. But in Bar Hebraeus’ work also one can discern some ‘Syriac compilation’ together with the ‘Arabic translation’. In Bar Hebraeus it is not just that the exposition is at a much higher level, but also that the two aspects are subtly interwoven with each other, not left standing separately each in their own ‘block’, as is generally the case with Bar Shakko. In the ‘alles überragende Erscheinung des Barhebraeus’ we meet not only Arabic sources, as Ruska sometimes appeared to imply,36 but also the Greek ‘foundations’ in Syriac versions.37 Since Bar Shakko, too, made use of both within the one work, albeit in a very different way from Bar Hebraeus, he may be fairly characterised as in some respects the latter’s predecessor. The writers of the Syriac Renaissance thus certainly owed much of their instruction in the philosophical sciences to their Arabic guides and teachers. But they also made use of Syriac versions of the Greek works on which the Arabic philosophical tradition was based. According to Ruska (followed by Baumstark), these 254

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

versions had been gathering dust in one or more monastic libraries (such as that of Mār Mattai, where Bar Shakko became abbot) for centuries untouched by readers, while secular studies among the Syrians lay dormant, like a sleeping princess awakened only by a kiss from an Arab prince. Such a scenario is possible, but does seem on the face of it somewhat improbable. It is based primarily on the absence of any significant Syriac writer on philosophy between the era of the Baghdad Aristotelians and the Syriac Renaissance, and the lack of positive evidence of Syriac interest in secular subjects within the pages of Thomas of Marga’s Historia monastica and Bar Hebraeus’ Chronicon ecclesiasticum.38 These works, however, were not designed to be histories of secular scholarship. From Bar Hebraeus alone we would also have known little of the scholarship of the Syro-Arabic Aristotelians of tenth century Baghdad, and the Muslim Arabic biographers, from whom we know so much more about the Syro-Arabic philosophers, might have known little or nothing about any later Syriac philosophical activity. One wonders how the authors of the Syriac Renaissance could apparently lay their hands on Syriac philosophical manuscripts with ease, if philosophy had been effectively dead for so long in the Syriac community.39 Bar Zo‘bi, Bar Shakko, and Bar Hebraeus all had Muslim Arabs among their teachers, but Bar Ṣalibi seemingly did not, yet he also wrote on Aristotle.40 Even if there were no ecclesiastical institutions providing instruction in philosophy, individuals among the Syriac communities (such as Bar Ṣalibi) may still have interested themselves in it. If, however, they continued to study it in the traditional Syriac way solely on the basis of the Graeco-Syriac translation literature, they would not have experienced as did Muslims what has been called ‘the hurricane of Avicenna’s philosophy’.41 In the East, in the centuries following the death of Avicenna (died 1037 A.D.), Arabic Aristotelianism moved on from the Graeco-Syriac model, and any Syriac writers on philosophy who remained exclusively attached to that older model would have had little impact in the new intellectual environment.42 In the writings of Bar Zo‘bi, Bar Shakko, and Bar Hebraeus, it may be that what we see is not a resurrection from the dead of Syriac interest in philosophy as such, but rather a new and revitalised phase in that interest, as Syrians gave up an exclusive attachment to the older ways of doing philosophy and, while continuing to make use of the Graeco-Syriac literary heritage, nevertheless entered into the current of post-Avicennan Arabic Aristotelianism.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Graeco-Syriac Tradition and Arabic Philosophy in Bar Hebraeus’, in: Herman Teule, Carmen Fotescu Tauwinkl, with Bas ter Haar Romeny and Jan van Ginkel (eds.), The Syriac Renaissance. Eastern Christian Studies 9 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010) 123–33. © 2010 Uitgeverij Peeters, Leuven, and republished by permission. 2 Baumstark (1922) 316; cf. 285 and 295 for the use of the term ‘Renaissance’ to characterise this period of Syriac literature. 3 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum ed. Bedjan 98; tr. Budge I, 92.

255

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

4 Cf. Watt (2002) 77–9. 5 Cf. Teule (1999) 291. There are brief notices on Baghdad Aristotelians in Bar Hebraeus, Ta’rīkh ed. Ṣāliḥānī 295–6. 6 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum ed. Bedjan 57; tr. Budge I, 56–7. 7 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum ed. Bedjan 162–3; tr. Budge I, 147–8. Bar Hebraeus did of course also translate a work of Ḥunayn into Syriac, the Quaestiones Medicae. There is a very brief (and critical) remark in the Chronicon syriacum (ed. Bedjan 226–7; tr. Budge I, 203) concerning the (Syriac-to-Arabic) translation abilities of Ibn al-Ṭayyib. 8 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum ed. Bedjan 219–21, 529; tr. Budge 196–8, 451–2. 9 Cf. Drossaart Lulofs and Poortman (1989) 35–40; Takahashi (2004) 48–57; Watt (2005) 20–3. 10 Cf. Drossaart Lulofs and Poortman (1989) 40; Takahashi (2004) 51–3; Watt (2005) 22–9. 11 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum ed. Bedjan 34; tr. Budge I, 36–7. 12 Bar Hebraeus, Ta’rīkh ed. Ṣāliḥānī 93. 13 al-Qifṭī ed. Lippert 51: ‘Everyone who translated his kalām from Greek into Byzantine Greek (al-rūmiyya), Syriac, Persian, or Arabic distorted (it), engaged in speculation, and opined that his translation did it justice while not doing it justice. The group at present (ḥālan) closest to understanding his intentions in kalām is (that consisting of) Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī and Avicenna, for they investigated, recognised, and took his learning upon themselves in accordance with the intended purpose and gained pleasure from it on finding its revealed source’. 14 Cf. his remark about the weak Arabic translation of Ibn al-Ṭayyib (preceding n. 7). 15 It is not clear that Bar Hebraeus knew very much about the philological-exegetical efforts of the Syro-Arabic scholars whose labours on the text of Aristotle’s logical works are conserved in the marginalia of the Paris manuscript of the Arabic Organon. But perhaps as a Syrian Christian, Bar Hebraeus (unlike al-Qifṭī) knew that there was no translation of Aristotle from classical (al-yūnāniyya) into Byzantine Greek (al-rūmiyya). 16 Cf. Gutas (1988) 101, 219–25, 286–96. 17 Life of Ibn Sina ed. and tr. Gohlman 32–5; cf. Gutas (1988) 28, 238–9. 18 Lyons (1982) 39. 19 Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 81. Cf. Würsch (1991) 12, 213–16. 20 Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric ed. and tr. Watt 106–7. 21 Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric ed. and tr. Watt 106–7. 22 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum ed. Bedjan 425; tr. Budge 366. The reference to al-Ṭūsī is at Bedjan 529; tr. Budge 451–2. On al-Rāzī, cf. also Bar Hebraeus, Ta’rīkh ed. Ṣāliḥānī 418. 23 Cf. Peters (1968) 195. 24 His īsāghūjī (eisagōgē) was a brief summary of the Organon as systematised by Avicenna. Cf. Gutas (1993) 62. Bar Hebraeus referred to al-Abharī in Ta’rīkh ed. Ṣāliḥānī 445. Might al-Abharī’s ‘Cream of Secrets’ and ‘Guidance of Wisdom’ have inspired the title of Bar Hebraeus’ Cream of Wisdom? 25 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle ed. Abbeloos and Lamy II, 409–12. Cf. in general Ruska (1897) 26–31. 26 Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle ed. Abbeloos and Lamy II, 409; and on Michael and Ibn Yūnus, cf. Weltecke (2003) 108, 118–19. 27 Ruska (1897) 34 and passim. 28 Ruska (1897) 154–7. 29 Ruska (1897) 145–6. 30 Ruska (1897) 146–52. 31 Baumstark (1900) 181–210.

256

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

32 Daiber (1985) 80. 33 Cf. Bendrat (1968); Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, introduction to text xviii-xx and passim. Antony of Tagrit was also extensively used by Bar Hebraeus, especially in his Grammar; cf. Moberg (1907–13) I, 180 (index). Despite the views of Ruska (1897) 8, 20–1, 145–6 and Baumstark (1900) 182 that the framework of Book I of Bar Shakko’s Dialogues (grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and Syriac stylistics) is of Arabic inspiration, there are good grounds for supposing that on the contrary it is descended from the ancient propaedeia to philosophy, the Hellenistic-Roman ‘secondary education’ consisting of grammar and rhetoric. Cf. Watt (1993) 45–55. 34 This is the celebrated citation of Poetics 1449b24–1450a9 in Syriac; cf. Margoliouth (1887) Arabic pagination 77–9. In Bar Shakko’s Dialogues I 3, which is composed of questions 12 to 21, it forms question 20; questions 12–17 and 19 are taken from Antony of Tagrit. Cf. Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V, text xix, 66–84, version xv-xvii, 54–71. Bar Hebraeus cited the Syriac version of Aristotle’s Rhetoric 1382b23–24 in his Grammar; cf. Moberg (1907–13) I, 216 and Watt (2005) 28–9. 35 Baumstark (1900) 183. 36 Ruska (1897) 37. 37 Cf. Weltecke and Younansardaroud (2019) 710–11 on the balancing of ‘separation and interaction, tradition and innovation’ in the work of Bar Hebraeus and other writers of the Syriac Renaissance. 38 Ruska (1897) 12–26. 39 Joosse (2010) 140–1 makes the valid point that there is little or no evidence of manuscripts of Syriac writers on philosophy active between the Baghdad and Syriac Renaissances lying unread in monasteries in the interim. There can be little doubt, however, that Bar Hebraeus (and Bar Shakko) used manuscripts of Syriac versions of Greek authors (where such were available) which were at least as good as Arabic versions. See, for example, the case of the Rhetoric, analysed in Watt (2005) 21–9. Whether or not there were any Syriac writers on philosophy whose works monastic libraries thought worth keeping, there may have been readers of the Graeco-Syriac philosophical translation literature. 40 That Bar Ṣalibi’s commentaries on Aristotle (the Organon from the Eisagoge to Prior Analytics) are of the older Graeco-Syriac type, and not in the mould of Avicennan Aristotelianism (see the following), can only be a provisional assertion as long as these commentaries remain unedited. To the extent, however, that a judgement can be made on the basis of the information given in Wright and Cook (1901) 1009–17 (MS. Gg.2.14), it seems to be valid. At this time we do not know the version of Prior Analytics II he used and criticised for its barbarity and ignorance; cf. Brock (2011) 126. If it was that of Athanasius of Balad, the same applies to his criticism as to that of Ibn Suwar (cf. Chapter 7 in this volume, 150–1): not knowing the Greek text, and thus not understanding that the Syriac is a ‘mirror translation’, renders the criticism pointless. If it was that of Ḥunayn and Isḥāq (Fihrist 249.6–7), then one must say that his judgement of their work differs radically from that of most critics! 41 Gutas (1998) 155. 42 Cf. Gutas (1993) 43–8.

References Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), The Fifth Book of the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit (Lovanii: Peeters, 1986). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 480 (text), 481 (version). Avicenna, Rhetoric: M.S. Salem (ed.), Ibn Sīnā, al-Shifā’, La Logique VIII- Rhétorique (Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale, 1953).

257

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

Bar Hebraeus, Chronicle: J.B. Abbeloos and T.J. Lamy (ed. and tr.), Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon ecclesiasticum (Lovanii: Peeters, 1872–7). Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon syriacum: P. Bedjan (ed.), Gregorii Barhabraei Chronicon syriacum (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1890); tr. E.A.W. Budge, The Chronography of Gregory Abū’l Faraj 1225–1286 . . . Commonly Called Bar Hebraeus, I–II (London: Oxford University Press, 1932). Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac. Barhebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Bar Hebraeus, Ta’rīkh: A. Ṣāliḥānī (ed.), Ta’rīkh mukhtaṣar al-duwal (Beirut: Catholic Press of the Jesuit Fathers, 1890). Baumstark (1900): A. Baumstark, Aristoteles bei den Syrern vom 5. bis 8. Jahrhundert (Leipzig: Teubner). Baumstark (1922): A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn: Marcus und Webers). Bendrat (1968): J. Bendrat, ‘Der Dialog über die Rhetorik des Jakob Bar Shakko’, in: Göttinger Arbeitskreis für syrische Kirchengeschichte (ed.), Paul de Lagarde und die syrische Kirchengeschichte (Göttingen: Lagarde Haus, 1968) 19–26. Brock (2011): S.P. Brock, ‘Dionysios bar Ṣalibi’, in: S.P. Brock et al. (eds.), Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias) 126–7. Daiber (1985): H. Daiber, ‘Ein vergessener syrischer Text: Bar Zo‘bī über die Teile der Philosophie’, Oriens Christianus 69, 73–80. Drossaart Lulofs and Poortman (1989): H.J. Drossaart Lulofs and E.L.J. Poortman, Nicolaus Damascenus De plantis: Five Translations (Amsterdam: North-Holland). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Gutas (1988): D. Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill). Gutas (1993): D. Gutas, ‘Aspects of Literary Form and Genre in Arabic Logical Works’, in: C. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts (London: Warburg Institute) 29–76. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London: Routledge). Joosse (2010): N.P. Joosse, ‘Expounding on a Theme: Structure and Sources of Bar Hebraeus’ “Practical Philosophy”, in the Cream of Wisdom’, in: H. Teule and C.F. Taauwinkl (eds.), The Syriac Renaissance (Leuven: Peeters) 135–50. Life of Ibn Sina: W.E. Gohlman (ed. and tr.), The Life of Ibn Sina (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974). Lyons (1982): M.C. Lyons (ed.), Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica: The Arabic Version, I–II (Cambridge: Pembroke Arabic Texts). Margoliouth (1887): D.S. Margoliouth, Analecta Orientalia ad Poeticam Aristoteleam (London: Oxford University Press). Moberg (1907–13): C.A. Moberg, Buch der Strahlen. Die grössere Grammatik des Barhebräus (Leipzig: Harrassowitz). Peters (1968): F.E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian Tradition in Islam (New York: New York University Press). al-Qifṭī: J. Lippert (ed.), Ta’rīkh al-ḥukamā’ (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1903). Ruska (1897): J. Ruska, ‘Studien zu Severus bar Shakku’s “Buch der Dialoge”’, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 12, 8–41, 145–61.

258

GRAECO-SYRIAC, ARABIC INFLUENCE IN BAR HEBRAEUS

Takahashi (2004): H. Takahashi, Aristotelian Meteorology in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Books of Mineralogy and Meteorology (Leiden: Brill). Teule (1999): H.G.B. Teule, ‘La Critique du Prince. Quelques aspects d’une philosophie politique dans l’oeuvre de Barhebraeus’, in: G.J. Reinink and A.C. Klugkist (eds.), After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour of Prof. Han J. W. Drijvers (Leuven: Peeters) 287–94. Watt (1993): J.W. Watt, ‘Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Enkyklios Paideia in Syriac’, Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 143, 45–71. Watt (2002): J.W. Watt, ‘The Portrayal of Heraclius in Syriac Historical Sources’, in: G.J. Reinink and B.H. Stolte (eds.), The Reign of Heraclius (610–641): Crisis and Confrontation (Leuven: Peeters) 63–79. Watt (2005): J.W. Watt, Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill). Weltecke (2003): D. Weltecke, Die “Beschreibung der Zeiten” von Mōr Michael dem Grossen (Leuven: Peeters). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, 594. Weltecke and Younansardaroud (2019): D. Weltecke and H. Younansardaroud, ‘The Renaissance of Syriac Literature in the 12th-13th Centuries’, in: D. King (ed.), The Syriac World (London: Routledge) 698–717. Wright and Cook (1901): W. Wright and S.A. Cook, A Catalogue of the Syriac Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Würsch (1991): R. Würsch, Avicennas Bearbeitungen der aristotelischen Rhetorik: ein Beitrag zum Fortleben antiken Bildungsgutes in der islamischen Welt (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag).

259

14 ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE CHRISTIAN ORIENT AND IN A L - F Ā R Ā B Ī , AV I C E N N A , A N D AV E R R O E S 1 It is a remarkable fact that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a work to which Greek thinkers in the Roman period and Byzantine writers paid little attention, was greatly admired by some of the foremost Islamic philosophers writing in Arabic. In spite of the huge effort devoted by Greek philosophers to commentary on the treatises of Aristotle, all that is known to us on the Rhetoric consists of two short commentaries from the twelfth century. In Arabic, however, from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, extensive commentaries were composed by al-Fārābī (died 950), Avicenna (died 1037), and Averroes (died 1198), and they were not alone in their efforts dedicated to the understanding and application of the treatise. This is all the more striking in view of the entirely different conditions prevailing in the Muslim world from those that existed in the classical centuries. Aristotle’s treatise is primarily concerned with the requirements of citizens engaged in public life. He envisaged the needs of those deliberating in the assembly about the best course of action for the state (deliberative rhetoric), of those prosecuting or defending in the law courts (judicial rhetoric), and of those speaking in praise or blame of some person or entity on ceremonial or other occasions (epideictic rhetoric). His treatise is therefore a ‘theory of civic discourse’,2 and, being concerned with issues of public life, it can in a broad sense be characterised as political; in the treatise itself rhetoric is declared to be ‘an offshoot of dialectic and of ethical studies, which it is just to call politics’.3 It was not written for a political or intellectual elite, but for the general citizenry, nor was it written to enable that elite to bring about the best possible state on earth, but to deal with the problems confronting citizens in the state and circumstances known to him. For the medieval Muslim philosophers, however, the treatise belonged in the armoury of the wise who, conscious of the needs of the masses to live the good life despite their weak intellects and their deficient knowledge of the good, sought to bring them a measure of knowledge appropriate to their intellectual attainment and to persuade them to lead the good life to the extent possible for them. This transformation has been aptly characterised as ‘the Platonization of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric’.4 Such a characterisation, however, alerts us to the possibility that the roots of the 261

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

change may lie within pre-Islamic Greek political thought, and specifically within the Platonic philosophical currents of late antiquity, where the thought of Plato and Aristotle were assumed to be one. If al-Fārābī believed that philosophy came to Islam from Alexandria,5 it may be that it is in Alexandria, or in the culture of Greek late antiquity which found such notable expression there, that we should seek the roots of this Platonisation of Aristotelian rhetoric, despite the fact that (as far as we know) no commentaries on the Rhetoric were written at that time. Rhetorical education in the period of the Late Empire was hardly directed towards public address and active political life. In theory the subject was still viewed as a civic art, but with Demosthenes (died 322 BCE) and the Attic orators as models the discipline was caught in a time-warp and teachers took little or no account of the changes in political circumstances between ancient Athens and their own time. The curriculum was based on the corpus of writings by or attributed to Hermogenes and served, along with grammar, to provide skill in literary composition and to prepare some students for the study of philosophy.6 Aristotle’s Rhetoric was not part of the curriculum of the rhetors, but eventually found a settled place (despite the misgivings of some) among the logical works of the philosopher. This collection of treatises (the organika, in later Western terminology the Organon) consisted, according to the late Greek commentators, of an essential group of four culminating in demonstration (Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, with these three leading up to Posterior Analytics) together with four others (Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics) described in various ways such as ‘protecting demonstration’ or ‘being useful in other ways’, but all devoted to less rigorous forms of argumentation than demonstration (apodeixis). This ‘seclusion’ of general rhetorical theory within the schoolrooms of the rhetors, and of Aristotle’s Rhetoric within those of the philosophers, does not mean that public oratory served no political purpose in late antiquity, or that powerful statesmen or religious leaders had no use for it. Epideictic rhetoric, i.e. the rhetoric of praise and blame, could not only praise a ruler and set forth the ideals of wise rule, but also express the ideals of a ruler to his subjects, while deliberative rhetoric could be employed by rulers or elites to persuade the populace to adhere to their ideals. Philosophers who wished to engage in public affairs or proffer advice to statesmen, and statesmen or religious leaders who had received a philosophical education, all having also received a training in rhetoric in accord with the practice of late antiquity, were thus in a position to apply their rhetorical expertise in the communication of their ideals to the populace en masse. From the fourth century we know of three great epideictic orators who employed their talent in just such a fashion: the Emperor Julian (332–363), the philosopherstatesman Themistius (born 317), and the philosopher-bishop Synesius of Cyrene (c. 373–c. 414).7 All three were familiar with Plato and Aristotle, and to a greater or lesser degree shared the conviction already advanced by Porphyry that the two were in accord. Their brilliance as epideictic or deliberative orators did not of course arise simply from reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but having received a 262

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

philosophical education, they all presumably knew it. Themistius is known as both a statesman and philosophical orator, but also as a commentator on Aristotle. There is no evidence that he wrote a paraphrase on the Rhetoric, though he did write on many other Aristotelian treatises, but he did allude in a significant way to it in an oration specifically devoted to the role of philosophy in ‘the city’.8 The use of rhetoric by the philosophical elite to address and persuade the multitude, as we see it in practice in the fourth century philosophical orators, was given a theoretical underpinning in the following two centuries in the commentaries of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists on Plato’s Phaedrus and Gorgias. Skilled in rhetoric themselves as a result of their grammatical and rhetorical propaedeia, late antique Neoplatonists did not read the Gorgias as an outright condemnation of rhetoric; rather, they found in it a clear distinction between true and false, or philosophical and popular, rhetoric.9 The former served as the tool by which the theoretical philosopher, when turning his gaze away from the intelligible and towards the care of the city and thus acting as a political philosopher, persuades the people in terms they can understand to do what is right and thus induces them towards the good. Thus commenting on Socrates’ question as to what harvest a city will reap from the persuasion of an ignorant orator (Phaedrus 260c-d), Hermeias (c. 410–c. 450) comments: He says this, because he also wishes to deal with the middle rhetoric [the rhetoric, for example, of Themistocles and Pericles, which takes account of the emotions of the people when addressing them, but is directed not towards serving these emotions but achieving what is good for the city], having already spoken about the true and the popular rhetoric. In general the philosopher is a first (i.e. theoretical) philosopher . . . when the eye of his reason is directed upwards. But when he turns from that vision to the care of the city and orders it according to the vision of those things (above) he becomes a political philosopher. And when such a person addresses his words to the general populace, persuading the people to do what they should, then he is a true orator, for knowing the truth on the basis of that vision (above), he persuades them to do what is true and what for them is bearable.10 In a similar vein, Olympiodorus (c. 500-c. 570), commenting on Socrates’ wish to learn the dynamis of Gorgias’technē (Gorgias 447c), writes: Rhetoric is of two kinds, one kind true and scientific, the other false and empirical. That which is subordinate to the statesman is scientific, that which aims at pleasure is false. . . . Note that there are many kinds of constitution, for the soul has three parts. . . . When reason holds sway it leads to aristocracy. . . . The true rhetoric is that of aristocracy, over which the statesman presides, for in that case the orator serves the statesman by way of recommending whatever he commands.11 263

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

From these commentaries on Gorgias and Phaedrus we can detect among the Alexandrian Neoplatonists some key ideas which were later important in the thought of Islamic philosophers. First is the notion that the theoretical philosopher, whose goal is the vision of supra-mundane reality, might nevertheless also act as a political philosopher and endeavour to order this world in accordance with his vision of the greater reality. The motive for this shift is not explained here,12 and it is not said to be obligatory,13 but it is clearly assumed that some at least will take up the challenge, and it is likely that in the background here as elsewhere in the thought of the Neoplatonists is Plato’s image of the cave (Rep. 514a-521b). Second, the true or scientific rhetoric is here integrated with, or subordinated to, the activity of the political philosopher or statesman. Whether the philosopher is an adviser to the statesman or is himself a philosopher king (Rep. 473c-d, etc.), he employs true rhetoric to guide the non-philosophical multitudes to the good, insofar as that is possible for them, and to bring about conditions in this world mirroring those of the world above. In the Neoplatonic school curriculum Aristotle’s treatises were conceived as a propaedeia to those of Plato, and the two philosophers were thought to have one and the same aim. Thus both were understood to have taught the same ‘political virtue’, albeit at different levels, Aristotle in the ethical and political treatises, Plato especially in Gorgias, Republic, and Laws.14 As Hermogenes was the standard text on rhetoric in Greek late antiquity,15 it appears likely that these philosophers would have considered Hermogenes, ‘leavened’ with appropriate dialogues of Plato such as Gorgias, Statesman, and Phaedrus, as the source for the acquisition of true rhetoric. This supposition receives some support from the work of a Neoplatonist rhetor named Sopatros, who wrote on Hermogenes but also made use of the Gorgias and Statesman.16 Aristotle’s Rhetoric was seen in these circles only as teaching a non-demonstrative form of logic, and not envisaged as a work with a political application. While Greek Neoplatonism therefore laid the groundwork for the appreciation of the political role of rhetoric among Islamic philosophers, the incorporation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric into this Neoplatonic scheme cannot be understood from the Alexandrian situation alone.

The Syrian Orient The introduction of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought into the lands east of the main Greek-speaking area, specifically into Syriac-speaking Christianity, is especially associated with the physician Sergius of Reshaina (died 536). Although by no means the only Syriac speaker of his time to have an interest in Greek philosophy, he is the first known to us to have written on the Aristotelian corpus in Syriac. Among his several works there are extant two accounts of the Categories, and Sergius was also an industrious translator of Greek into Syriac, including many treatises of Galen and the corpus of the Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionyius.17 Sergius studied at Alexandria, presumably under Ammonius, and his writings on the Categories show him to have been well versed in Alexandrian Aristotelianism. 264

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Although he was profoundly influenced by the Neoplatonic interpretation of Aristotle current in Alexandria, there is no indication that he regarded the study of Aristotle as preliminary to that of Plato, as was the case with his Alexandrian masters. On the contrary, his view of the primacy of epistemology in philosophy with the Organon at its core, the mysteries of supra-mundane reality being reserved for Christian rather than Platonic theology, established Aristotle as the authority in Syriac philosophical tradition.18 This had significant consequences for the history of Greek philosophy in the Near East. A continuous tradition of Aristotle reading existed among Syriac speakers from the sixth to the tenth century, whether in the original Greek (for those able to read it) or in the various Syriac translations made from time to time by these scholars for their monolingual compatriots. PseudoDionysius was also continuously read and repeatedly translated by Syriac scholars during these years, but there is no sign of an interest in Plato, and no evidence for the translation of a complete dialogue. The Christian Syro-Arabic Baghdad Aristotelians, teachers of al-Fārābī in the tenth century when knowledge of Greek had largely disappeared in Iraq, were familiar with the Organon and other treatises of Aristotle in Syriac and Arabic translations, and also with Neoplatonic ideas, both through the translations of Pseudo-Dionysius19 and through the voie diffuse of live ideas circulating from Sergius’ time onwards among the Christians in Mesopotamia. Sergius’ larger work on the Categories includes, in the manner of the Greek commentaries, an overview of Aristotle’s writings as a whole. This is what he says about the school corpus and his intention to write on it:20 The book written by him about simple namings is called Categories, that which he wrote about their first combination On Interpretation, that about the linkage of discourse is named Prior Analytics, and that about the art of demonstrations itself is named Apodeictics. Together with this there is that called Topics, and that about the refutation of sophists which he named Sophistical Refutations. With these, therefore, this philosopher completed the whole art of logic, which is, as we have said, an instrument of philosophy and not a part of it. Some people say that the Art of Rhetoric which was composed by him is also part of the same (art) of logic. However, let us turn now to the subject itself and start to speak as (well as) we can about the aim of each one of these treatises, beginning the sequence with that on Categories, which is about simple namings, and similarly treating each of them one by one in the same way. Then we will go on to his other treatises, those on the parts of praxis, and on all natures, teachings, and the other ones which are called ‘divine’.21 Whether or not he in fact wrote on any treatise other than the Categories is not known, but his reference here to the Rhetoric as, in the opinion of ‘some people’, one of the logical treatises is the earliest evidence for the acceptance of this taxonomy of the Alexandrians by someone writing in a Semitic language. Sergius did 265

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

not enumerate those treatises ‘on the parts of praxis’, but the Alexandrian curriculum comprised Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Magna Moralia, Economics, and Politics.22 Shortly thereafter Paul the Persian wrote an introduction to Aristotle’s philosophy. Unlike Sergius he probably did not know Greek, but he was familiar with the same scheme and expressly mentioned Ethics (undefined), Economics, and Politics.23 Sergius was familiar not only with Aristotelian philosophy, but also with the literary conventions of Greek rhetoric.24 In this he was not alone; Greek sophistic and epideictic rhetoric were well known and copied by some Syriac writers. There is no evidence, however, that the standard Greek corpus of technical deliberative and forensic rhetoric, that of Hermogenes, was known to any Syriac writer, whether bilingual or monolingual, or that it was ever translated into Syriac. If it was in theory open to bilingual Syrians to read Hermogenes or Plato despite the absence of Syriac translations, in practice even the bilingual elite seems to have shown little interest in either, and by the time of the tenth century that bilingual Greek-Syriac elite had all but vanished (being ‘replaced’ by those bilingual in Syriac and Arabic).25 Running through the Syriac tradition between ‘Alexandria and Baghdad’ we can therefore observe an interest in Aristotle’s writings, a diffuse Platonic ideology of ‘assimilation to God’, and possibly a conception of a true or ‘aristocratic’ rhetoric as a tool of the philosopher as statesman or statesman’s adviser. While Aristotle’s treatises were well known in Syriac, however, the same does not apply to the sources employed by the Greek Neoplatonists for the statesman’s philosophical rhetoric, namely Hermogenes, Gorgias, and Phaedrus. It is of course possible that, unknown to us, some handbooks of popular or epideictic rhetoric existed in Syriac, but the only treatise which made any appearance in Syriac and could qualify as a philosophical rhetoric meeting the scientific requirements of the Platonists is that of Aristotle. For this reason I suggest that among Syriac Aristotelians in late antiquity or the early Islamic (pre-Abbasid) period, Aristotle’s Rhetoric acquired a function it never possessed among the Neoplatonic philosophers: it became the ‘textbook’ for the ‘aristocratic’ rhetoric of the philosopher kings or their advisers, who ‘persuade the people to do what they should’.26 It is also possible, however, that elsewhere in the Greek world, among some who were active in public life rather than merely philosopher-advisers, Aristotle’s Rhetoric had been conflated with Plato’s philosophical rhetoric. Themistius’ allusion to it in precisely such a context has already been mentioned.27 Some at least of Themistius’ orations were translated into Syriac and even further transmitted fragmentarily into Arabic. Most striking of all is the existence in Arabic of a letter or treatise (risāla) by or attributed to him on public administration which previously existed in a lost Syriac version.28 While there were differences in priorities between Themistius and most Neoplatonic philosophers,29 both shared a broad set of concepts which were to prove influential in succeeding periods: the supra-mundane world as the pattern for the best state on earth; the compatibility of theoretical and practical philosophy and the assumption of a role of one kind 266

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

or another for the philosopher in public life; and the important role of philosophical rhetoric in the hands of the statesman or his adviser for the betterment of the multitude. It is not necessary therefore in assessing the influence of later Greek thought on Syrians and Arabs to consider Themistius and the Alexandrian Neoplatonists as alternatives; influences from both could have played into the Near Eastern situation.30 Among Christians, another significant influence may have been the literary heritage of the major fourth century orator-theologians. Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Synesius of Cyrene, and before them Eusebius of Caesarea all shared a broadly similar political philosophy premised on the ideas that the eternal world, human society, and the individual human soul all follow the same pattern, and that monotheism and monarchy belong together, philosophy and philanthropy being the guiding principles of the wise and benevolent monarch. In this respect they differed little from Themistius,31 of whom Gregory of Nazianzus spoke very favourably.32 Christians in the Near East held these theologians in the highest esteem and rendered much of their oratory into Syriac. While not school philosophers or commentators on Plato or Aristotle, these theologians were certainly familiar with Plato, and Gregory in particular may have been inspired by the philosophical rhetoric of Plato’s Phaedrus.33 The late antique Greek thought which reached al-Fārābī through the Syro-Arabic Christian circles of Baghdad may therefore not have been exclusively ‘Neoplatonic’, if by such one means the pagan thinkers at the various schools in Rome, Athens, Asia Minor, Syria, and Alexandria between the time of Plotinus and the Arab conquest of Egypt. It could also have comprised Christian Neoplatonism and a political philosophy consistent with the thought of the Hellenistic and earlier Roman imperial periods, whether expressed within the framework of pagan monotheism (Themistius) or Christianity. What we therefore observe in the writings of al-Fārābī is hardly a ‘rejection of the main tenets of both the pagan and the Christian Neoplatonic traditions and his return to the pre-Neoplatonic philosophic tradition, namely, the tradition he found in the works of Plato and Aristotle themselves and in the works of earlier, pre-Neoplatonic, especially Middle Platonic, commentators’,34 but rather a judicious selection from the various aspects of late Greek thought known to him from his Syro-Arabic teachers and the Arabic versions of Greek philosophy available to him in Baghdad.35 It is not known when Aristotle’s Rhetoric was translated into Syriac. A Syriac version is not extant, but certainly did once exist. It was used by Ibn al-Samḥ (died 1027) in his edition of the Arabic Rhetoric,36 and formed the basis of Bar Hebraeus’ (died 1286) Syriac paraphrase in his Aristotelian encyclopaedia Cream of Wisdom.37 Comparison of the text of the extant Arabic Rhetoric with that of Bar Hebraeus leads to the conclusion that the Arabic was made either from the Syriac or, with the (probable) help of the Syriac, from a Greek text very close to that lying at the basis of the Syriac. Since the Arabic is an ‘old’ translation, that is, in the terminology of the age, a translation made prior to those of Ḥunayn and his school, the lost Syriac version must similarly be earlier than Ḥunayn. 267

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

In the late eighth century the East Syrian Catholicus Timothy I looked for ‘some commentary or scholia by anyone, whether in Syriac or not’, to ‘the Topics, or to the Sophistical Refutations, or to the Rhetoric, or to the Poetics’, and also asked a correspondent to ascertain whether in the library of the monastery of Mār Zina near Mosul he could find ‘the two treatises on poets,38 for I have one, or perhaps you will find among (the volumes there) the commentary of Olympiodorus on the books of the logic, or of Stephanus or of Sergius or of Alexander’. We cannot be sure whether Timothy had in mind the Greek or Syriac text of the Greek authors, for he had some knowledge of Greek, and either is therefore possible. From the time of Athanasius of Balad (died 686/7, whose translations were known to Timothy), the Organon as far as the Sophistical Refutations had been rendered into Syriac. Athanasius’ translations are not extant, and are known to us only through the marginal notes of the Paris manuscript of the Arabic Organon (for the Prior Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations) and the correspondence of Timothy (Posterior Analytics and Topics).39 It is possible that the Rhetoric and Poetics were translated into Syriac at the same time, but we have no evidence for it. We do know, however, that the Poetics was rendered into Arabic from a Syriac version by the head of the Baghdad Aristotelian School at the time of al-Fārābī, Abū Bishr Mattā, who died in 940.40 The situation in respect of Plato was quite different. It is unlikely that a complete Arabic or Syriac translation of any of Plato’s longer dialogues was ever made. What were available were epitomes of the Platonic corpus or of individual treatises, and (whether as part of these epitomes, or from doxographies, or quotations from other works) translations of particular passages from the longer dialogues.41 Ḥunayn’s translation of Galen’s epitome of the Republic may have been of special importance for the Arabic appropriation of Platonic political philosophy, particularly by Averroes.42 Some insight into the influence of various strands of late Greek thought on rhetoric and politics among Syrians in the ninth century may be obtained from the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit. This author probably flourished in the ninth century, an attribution originally based solely on the testimony of Bar Hebraeus. It is, however, not at all unlikely, given the fact that Antony, who himself probably did not know Greek, mentioned an acquaintance who did, and was also familiar with some, doubtless Arabs, who attacked Syriac as ‘meagre, narrow, stunted and feeble and designated (Syriac) literature poor and beggarly’.43 The ninth century fits both these circumstances; knowledge of Greek was by then becoming less common except among a bilingual or trilingual Syriac elite, and Syriac was still a force to be reckoned with (and therefore significant enough to be worth criticising) within the orbit of Arabic culture. The recent discovery of an old manuscript of Antony’s works at Dayr al-Suryan (Egypt) provides strong confirmation of this dating.44 Antony was a rhetor, not a philosopher; his work is much more characteristic of popular and epideictic rhetoric than the philosophical variety, and it is certainly not dependent as a whole on Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

268

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

There are, nevertheless, elements within Antony’s treatise which hint at the presence of a philosophical rhetoric of Neoplatonic inspiration, and perhaps even a faint echo of Aristotle. He defines rhetoric as a faculty of persuasive speech possessing proper continuity on any matter of its choice, theoretical or practical, with the power to prevail over the multitude and bring the masses to obedience and belief in what is said . . . (which) is concerned with matters of civic life (politeia), for it is said that the subjects treated by its pioneers were the customs relating to the individual and the community, but that subsequently its other forms were created when it was discovered that it was also useful for inciting to battle in wartime, for exhorting to good works, for praising, and for causing justice to prevail in lawsuits. . . . Those who employ eloquence possess multiform knowledge like apodeixis and dialectic . . . but rhetoric does not devote its energy to what philosophy has demonstrated and permanently manifested. Antony connects the three species of rhetoric (epideictic, judicial, and deliberative) with the Platonic tripartition of the soul (appetitive, rational, and passionate), a procedure known from the Neoplatonic rhetorical commentators on Hermogenes. In a model encomium of an (imaginary) subject, who is a philosopher, he lists his intellectual attainments in an order reminiscent of, albeit not identical to, that of the usual Neoplatonic ordering of Aristotle’s writings: dialectic, demonstration, rhetoric, poetics, mathematics, physics, and metaphysics. In rhetoric his subject is ‘victorious, eminent, and renowned by his winged and ornamented language (leššānā) . . . by which rhetoric is exalted above every other science’, and in poetics in his ‘metre and mensuration of language . . . in which poets take pride . . . he soars above the multitude’. Most significantly, this philosopher is also a ruler, for in addition to being praised for his scientific knowledge and his personal virtue, he is also praised for his philanthropy and his public actions ‘relating to his government and rule’. He is, in other words, not just a philosopher, but a philosopher king, who, in addition to possessing several of the virtues stipulated by Plato for this office (Rep. VI 485a-487a), also ‘encourages, leads, persuades, and turns his subjects towards the good’.45

Al-Fārābī The importance of rhetoric within the thought of al-Fārābī can be clearly seen in a work often considered his masterpiece, the Principles of the Views of the Citizens of the Excellent State.46 If characterised as a treatise of political philosophy, it must not be assumed that it dealt only with questions concerning the order of human society, as would be expected in a modern work falling within this category. The greater part of it is concerned with metaphysics and physics, and

269

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

the nature and ultimate destiny of the individual. Only in the final parts of the work does he deal with the characters of states, rulers, and citizens. According to al-Fārābī the structure of the excellent state resembles that of the universe, and also that of the individual human being; in this his general conception is thus entirely in accord with that of late Greek Platonist thought, both pagan and Christian.47 Within this framework special importance is attached to ‘the perfect man’, who is not only a theoretical philosopher, but also a lawgiver and statesman and the only suitable ruler of the excellent state. Al-Fārābī lists twelve qualifications required of the perfect ruler, mostly derived from the Republic, but (as is also the case with the subject of Antony’s encomium) he must also possess – not mentioned there by Plato, but developed in the Neoplatonic commentaries on Gorgias and Phaedrus – ‘a fine diction, his language enabling him to explain to perfection all that is in the recess of his mind’, and ‘an ability with language to rouse the imagination with well-chosen words and lead (the citizens) along the right path to happiness’.48 This perfect ruler is also described in some detail in al-Fārābī’s Attainment of Happiness where he declares that ‘this science (of demonstration, after existing among Chaldeans and Egyptians) was transmitted to the Greeks, where it remained until it was transmitted to the Syrians and then to the Arabs’,49 and that ‘the philosophy that answers to this description (of the true philosopher) was handed down to us by the Greeks from Plato and Aristotle only’.50 In this work it is argued that ‘the idea of the Philosopher, Supreme Ruler, Legislator, and Imam is but a single idea’,51 and the true philosopher, the one who both is innately equipped for the theoretical sciences and achieves the perfection so as to be able to introduce others to what he knows insofar as their capacity permits, must ‘fulfil the conditions prescribed by Plato in the Republic’.52 That Plato pointed to the value of rhetoric for the instruction and betterment of the multitude is asserted also in al-Fārābī’s Philosophy of Plato, where Plato is said to have ‘investigated the manner and the method by means of which the citizens of cities and nations ought to be instructed in this science and their character formed by those ways of life’, and to have concluded that ‘the philosopher, prince, and legislator ought to be able to use both methods: the Socratic method [scientific investigation] with the elect, and Thrasymachus’ method [rhetoric] with the youth and the multitude’.53 The content of that rhetorical instruction for the multitude is made clear in the Attainment of Happiness: When one acquires knowledge of the beings or receives instruction in them, if he perceives their ideas themselves with his intellect, and his assent to them is by means of certain demonstration, then the science that comprises these cognitions is philosophy. But if they are known by their image-evocation through similitudes that imitate them (i.e. poetics), and assent to what is imaged of them is caused by persuasive methods (i.e. rhetoric), then the ancients call what comprises these cognitions religion (milla).54 270

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Others within the excellent city, not merely the philosophers, may have some ability in this respect; this second group is described as ‘the masters of speeches (dhawū al-alsina) . . . and officers of religion (ḥamalat al-dīn) . . . who are rhetoricians (khuṭabā’), orators (bulaghā’), poets, musicians, secretaries’.55 Their rhetorical art may be supposed to be not scientific and aristocratic, but the timocratic rhetoric of Demosthenes, Pericles, and Themistocles,56 now also that of the clerical preacher, and confined to the language of their own nation. The true philosopher has to be educated from his youth, and before setting out to study philosophy should have ‘sound conviction about the opinions of the religion in which he is reared, hold fast to the virtuous acts in his religion . . . hold fast to the generally accepted virtues, and not forsake the generally accepted noble acts’.57 This ethical precondition can be understood from Plato’s own views in the Republic of a pre-scientific education which included music and myth58 and the Neoplatonists’ insistence on a propaedeutic moral education.59 In that environment, however, the development of the individual philosopher, with his preliminary moral and subsequently rhetorical education, was seen as parallel to that of the evolution of philosophy among mankind, the transition from pre-scientific to scientific thinking occurring with Plato and Aristotle. Thus Olympiodorus wrote that ‘the ancients (before Aristotle) knew how to use demonstration, but did not know the theory behind it. . . . One should not consider Plato inferior to Aristotle, but superior, because when using demonstration he did not need Aristotle’s demonstrative method, while Aristotle needed Plato’s demonstrations. Similarly Homer and Demosthenes needed neither Aristotle’s Poetics nor Hermogenes’ Art, but (Aristotle and Hermogenes) needed (Homer and Demosthenes) to establish from their writings the (poetical and rhetorical) methods’.60 The same pattern of historical development, albeit greatly expanded, is seen in al-Fārābī, especially in his Book of Letters (commentary on the Metaphysics). According to this account man first developed a linguistic capacity, after which there gradually emerged the syllogistic arts of rhetoric and poetry, and consequently the orators (bulaghā’) of a particular nation. These were the first wise men of a nation and became its leaders and the authorities for its language.61 Subsequently there emerged the arts of dialectic and sophistic, and al-Fārābī appears to consider the development up to this point to be applicable to any nation, even though he has clearly added dialectic and sophistic to rhetoric and poetics by reading in reverse the order of the last four books of the Organon.62 A singular event occurred, however, at the time of Aristotle when scientific philosophy, theoretical and practical, was discovered. Instruction in demonstrative syllogistic could now be given to those capable of understanding it, while to those unable to scale that height instruction through dialectic, rhetoric, or poetics could be given, the veracity of which had been confirmed by demonstration (apodeixis). Beside the ‘proto-philosophical’ rhetoric and poetics there now therefore appeared a philosophical form of these two arts, through which the philosopher could address and instruct the multitude. Such instruction appears finally as religion and legislation, as the philosopher leads the multitude to happiness by making the insights of 271

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

theoretical philosophy intelligible to it.63 A similar picture is drawn in al-Fārābī’s Kitāb al-Khaṭāba where Plato is said to have been the first to have become conscious of, and to differentiate, dialectic, sophistic, rhetoric, and poetics. However, they were differentiated by him only in practice, not in theory; the latter was achieved only by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics.64 The book which expounds the rhetoric which the philosopher in possession of demonstration may now employ to instruct the multitude is the Rhetoric of Aristotle. This is made especially clear in al-Fārābī’s work The Philosophy of Aristotle. In this little treatise he works his way through Aristotle’s writings on logic, physics, and metaphysics, the section on logic proceeding according to the order of the Organon: Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Sophistical Refutations,65 after which ‘he gave an account of the powers and the arts by which man comes to possess the faculty for instructing whoever is not to use the science of logic or to be given the certain science’.66 Al-Fārābī comments that Aristotle is of the opinion that he who knows with certainty the end and that by which one arrives at the end – that is, he who is equipped for truth by nature – ought to labour for a human end . . . but that whenever the others labour, their labour, too, ought to be directed toward what they know to the measure of their ability to know. . . . Therefore he gave an account of the art that enables man to persuade the multitude regarding (a) all theoretical things and (b) those practical things in which it is customary to confine oneself to using persuasive arguments based on particular examples drawn from men’s activities when conducting their public business. . . . Then afterwards he gave an account of the art that enables man to project images of the things that became evident in the certain demonstrations in the theoretical arts, to imitate them by means of their similitudes, and to project images of, and imitate, all the other particular things in which it is customary to employ images and imitation through speech.67 The Rhetoric and the Poetics are not identified here by name (unlike the preceding treatises of the Organon), and neither are the arts of rhetoric and poetry, nor is there an explicit mention of statesmanship or religion. With the technical terminology of ‘persuasion of the multitude’ and ‘image-projection and imitation’, however, they are undoubtedly implied.68 The use of the technical terminology in place of the more general ‘rhetoric’ and ‘poetics’ is no doubt to be attributed to al-Fārābī’s desire to emphasise that with Aristotle the ‘proto-philosophical’ rhetoric and poetry have now been transcended by the philosophical forms of the arts discovered and expounded by Aristotle.69 If the Greek Neoplatonists saw in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus a philosophical rhetoric directed at the multitude for their benefit,70 al-Fārābī saw it in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in the Arabic version of which he could read that ‘there is a class of men in our relations with whom 272

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

we should not employ true knowledge . . . (but for whom) we must produce persuasion and argument through the things common between us and the addressee (mukhāṭab)’.71 The major extant text of al-Fārābī dedicated to the Rhetoric is the Didascalia in Rethoricam Aristotelis, the beginning of a long commentary on the Rhetoric which is almost entirely lost in the Arabic, but of which the introduction and commentary on the first few lines of the text of Aristotle are preserved in the thirteenth century Latin translation by Hermannus Alemannus of this title. It is significant that in this work al-Fārābī expressly links the structure of the Organon to Plato’s allegory of the cave (Republic VII 514–521): Et proverbium Platonis, quod posuit in libro suo De civilibus de spelunca, qualiter egreditur homo ex ipsa, deinde redit ad ipsam, conveniens est valde ordini, quem posuit Aristoteles partibus artis logices.72 The ascent from the subterranean shadows to the light of the sun corresponds to Aristotle’s Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics, and finally Posterior Analytics, ‘quod enim est in Libro Demonstrationis est completissimum scientiarum et altissimi gradus’. The descent back down to the cave corresponds to the Topics (magis proportionatus est scientie demonstrative), then the Sophistical Refutations, the Rhetoric, and finally the Poetics, ‘et quod est in Libro Poetrie est imperfectissimum et infimum earum et maxime scientie perfecte’.73 Al-Fārābī does not mention here why Plato required the philosophers to return to the cave, namely ‘to take charge of the others and be their guardians’ (Republic 520a), but from other passages in his writings asserting that the true philosopher will ‘introduce others to what he knows insofar as their capacity permits’, and that after achieving the certain science Aristotle ‘gave an account . . . for instructing whoever is not to use the science of logic’,74 it can be assumed that it is for this reason that the philosopher must ‘descend’ through the second half of the Organon. The myth of the cave is conveniens or verisimile to the order of the books in Aristotle’s logical art because the respective knowledge of the wise and the multitude is comparable to the vision of the realities and their shadows.75 In fact, the usefulness of the Rhetoric is greater, and its necessity more pressing, than that of the other books in Aristotle’s logical art, because it is an instrument which is especially pertinent to civic government (instrumentum eximium pertinens ad regimina civitatum) and the promulgation of laws, and because the multitude (plures) are more accepting of the actions of this faculty than those of the others in logic. Scarcely anything can be grasped by them involving demonstration, dialectic (i.e. topics), or even sophistics, unless it is communicated by rhetoric (cum rethorica).76 Aristotle named his book The Book of Rhetoric,77 but throughout the Didascalia two terms appear, rethorica and oratoria. Without the Arabic text certainty concerning the originals is out of reach, but it is likely that behind ‘rethorica’ lies the Arabic khaṭāba, and behind ‘oratoria’ balāgha (the native term for Arabic 273

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

eloquence).78 Al-Fārābī takes care to distinguish them: rethorica is a species of the genus oratoria, requiring more parts within its discourse, but the most significant difference lies in the fact that it is an address to an assembly (collegium, collegio, congretatione), and therefore, since an assembly contains people of differing ability, it requires a range of procedures appropriate to the various levels if it is to produce conviction with them all.79 Rhetorica is therefore useful, necessary, and honourable, and the species of oratoria to which Aristotle gave his attention. Essentially political, it is, along with prudentia, one of the two main influences on activities in cities: Rethorica enim inter ceteras species sive partes oratorie est subsistitiva civitatum et est unum ex instrumentis ipsius. Principales enim potentiarum activarum in civitatibus sunt hee due: prudential et rethorica seu eloquentia80. . . . Propter hanc ergo causam facta est rethorica utilis et necessaria et honorabilis; et huius cause consideratione nominavit Aristotelis hunc librum suum nomine rethorice.81

Avicenna and Averroes The loss of all but the Latin Didascalia and a few other fragments of the complete work has deprived us of most of al-Fārābī’s ‘long commentary’ on the Rhetoric, but it was known to and used by Avicenna and Averroes in their extant ‘middle commentaries’ on Aristotle’s treatise. With them we enter a new phase of Islamic thought in which, unlike the period of al-Fārābī, philosophers no longer had access to Greek speakers or Syriac expositors in touch with the Greek tradition, but through al-Fārābī’s writings in particular that tradition continued to exert its influence on Muslim minds. With Avicenna and Averroes the Aristotelian tradition underwent development in differing ways. Avicenna considered himself a Peripatetic philosopher, and by the time he came to write his Shifā’ (‘Cure’), which includes his commentary on the Rhetoric, he had developed a fairly cold assessment of the work of Plato. At the same time he regarded himself as occupying a special position within the Peripatetic tradition and claimed to have inaugurated a new stage in the ongoing acquisition of knowledge.82 The general character of his political thought can therefore be characterised as less Platonic than that of al-Fārābī, while his approach to the Rhetoric (as to other treatises of Aristotle) was not principally to offer a close or detailed commentary on the text, but to present in his own terms what in his opinion was of value in the text which lay before him. His ‘theologising’ of the theoretical sciences, however, did not meet with approval by Averroes, who not only had a greater regard for what he knew of Plato and an apparently greater interest in political issues of the here and now, but also a more conservative attitude towards the text of Aristotle. Averroes’ closer relationship to the thought of al-Fārābī is highlighted in his assertion that there existed satisfactory and unsatisfactory commentaries on the Rhetoric, probably envisaging thereby al-Fārābī and Avicenna respectively.83 On the Christian side in 274

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

the East, a ‘long commentary’ (not extant) on the Rhetoric may have been written in Arabic by Ibn al-Ṭayyib (died 1043), and a ‘middle commentary’ in Syriac by Bar Hebraeus comprises one Book of his Aristotelian encyclopaedia, Cream of Wisdom. The latter owes much in structure and content to Avicenna’s Aristotelian encyclopaedia, the Shifā’. Despite these differences, the fundamental ‘political’ interpretation of the Rhetoric remains constant in Avicenna (and Bar Hebraeus) and Averroes. Humanity is divisible into the wise (i.e. the philosophers) and the masses (the common man). The wise achieve certainty through demonstration, but it is too difficult for the common man, who can achieve only a lower level of conviction through rhetoric. These two arts, demonstration and rhetoric, are therefore the most useful two of the five syllogistic arts taught in Aristotle’s logical treatises, but the former is useful only to the wise, while the latter is of benefit only to the masses. Although the division of mankind is fundamentally dichotomous, there is a third group which can gain some benefit from dialectic (although the primary purpose of that art is different). This third group is al-Fārābī’s sapientiores plurium,84 Avicenna’s ‘simple man when he raises himself a little above simplicity’ and ‘educated individuals who tend one way and another, not truly in the direction of the educated nor truly in the direction of the common people’,85 Averroes’ ‘(people who) assent by means of dialectical statements in the same way the one adhering to demonstration assents by means of demonstration, there being nothing greater in their natures’,86 and Bar Hebraeus’ ‘middle order of human beings who refuse to be in the lowest rank of the populace but are not able to rise to the height of the grade of the knowledgeable and who benefit by reputable (i.e. generally accepted) arguments (endoxa)’.87 This tripartition of humanity may reflect a view held earlier among Syrians and surfacing in the work of Antony of Tagrit, but if so Antony has modified or garbled it. He wrote that while demonstration proceeds by syllogisms, dialectic by question and answer, and rhetoric by continuous sequence, it was rhetoric which had an effect on the multitude consisting of ‘those who are in the middle with respect to the sciences and are not greatly inclined (to them)’, while ‘those who are especially exalted in philosophy do not delight in it’, and ‘labourers and peasants do not comprehend what is said, for they hear without understanding’.88 For the rhetor Antony therefore ‘the multitude’ appears to be the middle group of the ‘slightly educated’, rather than the lowest group of the ‘uncomprehending’. For the philosophers, however, it is dialectic which is aimed at the small middle group. All agree, however, on the usefulness of rhetoric. Avicenna affirmed that ‘rhetoric is the (art) which is able to persuade the multitude about everything about which it is appropriate for it to hold to be true, although it is not useful for what is more appropriate to wisdom (i.e. demonstration) or dialectic’,89 while Bar Hebraeus explicitly stated that ‘because two of the orders (of human beings), the highest and the middle, are small in number, but the world is full to the brim with the third, the utility of rhetoric, therefore, more than demonstration or dialectic, is general and abundant’.90 The three arts each produce a different level of conviction (creditio/credulitas, Arabic taṣdīq), designated in al-Fārābī’s Didascalia 275

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

as (first) an absolute certainty without contradiction and which cannot be other than it is, (second) a near certainty whose contradiction is nevertheless possible, and (third) persuasion to which the soul inclines but whose contradiction is quite possible.91 This threefold division is restated by Avicenna at the very beginning of his commentary, recalling certain conviction (taṣdīq yaqīn), that which is near to it, and persuasion based on opinion.92 It is of course the third of these which is produced by rhetoric. Al-Fārābī in his Philosophy of Aristotle explicitly defined the content of what is conveyed to the multitude by means of the Rhetoric as ‘(a) all theoretical things and (b) those practical things in which it is customary to confine oneself to using persuasive arguments based on particular examples drawn from men’s activities when conducting their public business’.93 While in this tradition it would be mistaken to consider ‘all theoretical things’ (such as the structure of the universe) as irrelevant to political science, it is clearly the ‘practical things . . . (concerning) public business’ which concern statesmanship and political thought in the narrower sense of the terms. Avicenna concluded the first section of his commentary with the statement that ‘rhetoric is a faculty which is of great use for the needs of communities (“cities”) and by means of which one directs the common people’.94 The passage from Aristotle, Rhet. 1355a24–28 (cited earlier), on the inability of some to grasp scientific arguments, was important to him as establishing the rationale for rhetoric in general, and although he did not use this particular terminology here, he did indicate that rhetoric can affect both belief and action. The content to be given to the multitude he had earlier declared to be ‘everything about which it is appropriate for it to hold to be true’,95 but in commenting on the passage of Aristotle cited earlier, he went on to argue that life in community is necessary for the preservation of mankind, that community wellbeing is possible only through true judgements over practical things, that such judgements must be impressed in the souls of the people, and that rhetoric is the most effective means to achieve this. Thus: When among men the one who is governed cannot be addressed by the authentic (method) of scientific explanation in regard to that which it is clear he should believe, or by discerning explanation in regard to that which it is clear he should do, then if we possess the rhetorical faculty it is possible for us to persuade the addressee of what will persuade him, of what he will hold an opinion, of what he will accept, of what will affect him, and of what will correspond to his ability and be appropriate to him, as we have shown for the art of dialectic.96 On the same passage of Aristotle, Averroes more explicitly picks up and points out the twofold content and utility of rhetoric, using the philosophical terminology of theoretical and practical, but apparently giving precedence to the latter: Rhetoric has two uses. One of them is to incite the citizens to excellent actions. People are in fact inclined towards the opposite of the just 276

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

excellencies . . . (by which) I mean those excellencies between one man and another, namely, between himself and his associate whatever the realm of the association, not those concerning a man’s relation with himself. As for the second use: it is not necessary with all sorts of men to use demonstration of the theoretical things which one wishes them to believe . . . (either) because they are under the opinion of generally believed opinions (mashhūrāt) different from the truth . . . or because their nature is not suited to accept demonstration, or because it is not possible to lay the evidence of demonstration for them before them in the time one wishes to obtain conviction. That is why we are sometimes constrained to induce conviction by premisses common between us and the addressee, namely the generally esteemed (maḥmūdāt).97 For both Avicenna and Averroes rhetoric as taught by Aristotle is therefore for the use of the philosopher in influencing for the better both the opinions and actions of the common citizen. In al-Fārābī’s excellent city the supreme ruler, a philosopher, employs this rhetoric to lead the citizens to happiness, but those parts of the city close in authority to the ruler perform those actions which are noblest and closest to him, just like the organs in the human body. Thus all the parts of the excellent city, according to their rank, imitate in their actions those of the supreme ruler.98 The rhetoric taught by Aristotle is therefore primarily designed for philosophers, but is imitated also by the second rank of ‘the masters of speeches . . . and officers of religion . . . who are rhetoricians (khuṭabā’), orators (bulaghā’), poets, musicians, secretaries, and those who act in the same way’.99 In Avicenna, the political office held by philosophers, the ‘we (who) possess the rhetorical faculty’ and may persuade ‘among men the one who is governed’,100 is not so clear, although he evidently holds philosophers to be among the governors rather than the governed. The enthusiasm of al-Fārābī towards the concept of the philosopher king and the identification of that figure with the imam is not seemingly endorsed by Avicenna, a result presumably, at least in part, of his colder attitude towards Plato. In the Rhetoric, however, he encounters the issue of various constitutions in commenting on 1360a20ff. and 1365b29ff. At the former he identifies six constitutions which can be grouped into four: monarchic (waḥdāniyya), oligarchic, democratic, and ‘Socratic’ (suqrāṭiyya), the last including both ‘aristocracy’ (siyāsat al-khayr, literally ‘government of the best’) and royalty (siyāsat al-mulk).101 At the latter he identifies ‘noble government’ (riyāsa sharīfa, again differentiated from democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy) as the rule which exists for legislation and defence of the law (sunna).102 At the former al-Fārābī’s Excellent State can be seen to have influenced him in his remarks on the ‘government of the best’ in which, whether there is one ruler or several acting as with one soul, everyone follows the ruler or rulers voluntarily, each performing their appropriate function, and harmony prevails under an excellent rule when the ruler possesses both a political and theoretical excellence.103 In his Divisions of the Rational Sciences Avicenna asserted that ‘(the part of practical philosophy) which is concerned with 277

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

kingship is included in the book of Plato and Aristotle about politics, and that which is connected with prophecy and the sharī‘a in two books, both about the laws’.104 Al-Fārābī had clearly identified the philosopher king with the prophet, who in his prophetic capacity acts as lawgiver, but while he repeatedly referred to the importance of rhetoric in the political administration of the state, in Avicenna it is apparently only in his two works specially devoted to rhetoric105 that he paid much attention to it, and the focus of his interest in political philosophy was the philosopher-prophet, not the philosopher-orator.106 In his commentary on 1365b29ff. Averroes mentions Aristotle’s four regimes of democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy (waḥdāniyya). Aristocracy (‘the regime of good authority’) is again divided into two kinds: it may be either a royal government, whereby both opinions and acts are in conformity with the theoretical sciences, or an aristocracy (‘the government of the best people’) in which the actions alone are excellent. This is said to be the government of the imāma, and on the authority of al-Fārābī to have existed among the ancient Persians. The Arabic text of Aristotle and the long commentary of al-Fārābī presumably underlie both Avicenna and Averroes at this point, but they have developed them in different ways, with the latter showing the closer dependence on al-Fārābī’s commentary.107 It is Averroes who makes explicit that it is in either of the two forms of ‘the regime of good authority’ that ‘the good state’108 of the inhabitants of the city and human happiness are achieved and that ‘those who give advice (yushīrūn)109 have excellencies and the capacity to bring about the acts which will improve the city’.110 The similarities between the constitutions described in the Arabic commentaries on these passages of the Rhetoric and those of Aristotle and Plato in the Nichomachean Ethics and the Republic are clear.111 In Averroes more than Avicenna, however, the wider Platonic and Neoplatonic context, in which the Arabic commentators’ interpretations of the Rhetoric are set, comes more clearly into view, not least because the Andalusian philosopher, unlike his Iranian predecessor, wrote a commentary on the Republic (preserved only in a Hebrew translation). Averroes would not have seen this as in any way directly opposed to his Aristotelianism, for he asserted that ‘the first part of this art (of politics) is in Aristotle’s book known as the Nicomachea, and the second in his book known as the Governance [Politics] and also in this book of Plato’s that we intend to explain, since Aristotle’s book on governance has not yet fallen into our hands’.112 That he did turn to ‘Plato’s book’ to write about politics does show, however, a greater concern than that exhibited by Avicenna to deal fully with the Greek legacy of political thought, including the harmony of Plato and Aristotle, and also the legacy of al-Fārābī. Avicenna did not devote a special section of the Shifā’ to practical philosophy, but dealt with it only briefly towards the end of the book on Metaphysics.113 Averroes’ philosopher king is not identical to al-Fārābī’s; in particular Averroes was not convinced, as was al-Fārābī, that the philosopher king should be a prophet,114 perhaps because he believed that prophecy had ended with the death of Muhammad and in the past and present the Muslim state had achieved a level of perfection it would never subsequently surpass.115 But in many other respects, 278

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

not touching the particular claims for Islam made by Averroes which were absent from al-Fārābī’s universalistic message of prophecy as an outcome of the highest human knowledge and religions as symbolic forms of philosophy differing from one nation to another,116 Averroes followed the lead of his predecessor in the evaluation of Plato, not least in the importance he ascribed to rhetoric. Thus in discussing how virtues can be established in the souls of citizens, Averroes distinguished the true method of teaching the theoretical sciences to the elect from the rhetorical and poetical methods employed with the multitude, as right conviction may be established in the souls of the masses by such methods and every man is entitled to acquire as much of human perfection as is possible for his nature.117 In this he was closely following al-Fārābī’s Attainment of Happiness.118 Similarly, according to Averroes moral, pre-philosophical education (Rep. 376e–378e) should include theoretical and practical matters, and also arguments of a dialectical, rhetorical, and poetical sort. The poetical are more appropriate for youths, and eventually a few will move on to the demonstrative.119 The argument recalls that of al-Fārābī in his Philosophy of Plato, distinguishing the methods of Socrates and Thrasymachus, the former to be used with the elect, the latter with the youth and the multitude.120 As in al-Fārābī’s Perfect State, the qualities of the philosopher and ruler include good oratory, ‘his language (lisān, Heb. lāshōn) leading him [to explain] all that is in his mind’, to which Averroes added that ‘when speculating’, he should also be able ‘to light quickly upon the middle term (of a syllogism)’.121 In this passage Averroes reduced al-Fārābī’s twelve qualities to ten, and later, basing himself on al-Fārābī’s model where the qualities are dispersed over a number of groups as described in the Aphorisms of the Statesman,122 he characterised the third group as possessing good persuasion and the fourth good image-evocation.123 In commenting on Plato’s allegory of the cave, however, Averroes did not, like al-Fārābī, compare the descent of the philosophers back down to the subterranean realm (Rep. 519c–521b) to the second part of the Organon, but simply following Plato (Rep. 539e) assigned leadership in the army to them after their completion of the study of philosophy.124 The Islamic context of Averroes’ thinking is more evident in the Decisive Treatise, where it is argued that the intention of the Law (sharī‘a, shar‘) is similar or identical to that of philosophy, and therefore like philosophy the Law uses demonstrative, dialectical, or rhetorical and poetical methods as appropriate to the level of the audience.125 Al-Ghazālī thus came in for criticism on the grounds that although interpretations should be established only by demonstrative methods, he employed poetical, rhetorical, and dialectical methods, thus ‘making those adept in wickedness more numerous, yet not without some increase among those adept in science’.126

Conclusion ‘Not for the only time in the history of philosophy . . . a perfectly crazy position (harmony) proved philosophically fruitful. To establish the harmony of Plato and 279

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Aristotle, philosophers had to think up new ideas, and the result was an amalgam different from either of the two original philosophies’.127 This observation of Richard Sorabji relates primarily to the domain of metaphysics and theology, and refers to developments within the Neoplatonic Greek commentators on Aristotle. It is, however, also applicable to the role played by Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the history of Syriac and Arabic political thought. The political philosophy of those late antique Greek thinkers was based on Neoplatonic metaphysics and the concept of the philosopher king. In this scheme the theoretical philosopher was permitted or obliged also to turn his attention to the care of the city, act as a political philosopher, and address the general populace using the true or philosophical rhetoric indicated by Plato in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Such a philosopher would have studied Aristotle on his way to Plato, but hardly to any of them128 did it occur to see in Aristotle’s Rhetoric the true rhetoric needed by the philosopher king. Aristotelian commentary first entered the Syriac sphere in the work of Sergius of Reshaina, together with a Christianised Neoplatonic metaphysics (in the translation by Sergius of the Pseudo-Dionsyian corpus). But it did not enter it as an apprenticeship for the study of Plato, despite the accompanying Neoplatonic metaphysics and its associated political philosophy in the pagan Neoplatonists. Although the political thought of the Arabic philosophers and their scarcely visible Syriac predecessors was Neoplatonic, it was thus the Rhetoric of Aristotle in Syriac or Arabic translation, not an integral text of Plato or Hermogenes, which was available to them to implement that philosophical rhetoric of the philosopher king tasked with leading the populace to believe and do the true and the good. From this harmonisation of Neoplatonic Plato interpretation and Aristotelian text, the Rhetoric of Aristotle gained its important role in the political thought of Arabic philosophers. Each developing the basic theme in his own special way, al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes were united in seeing in Aristotle’s Rhetoric the means by which the elite who had obtained the knowledge of the truth by certain demonstration, as taught in the first four treatises of the Organon, could make that knowledge available by persuasive methods to the general body of men. When, in their view, the philosophical elite are also the rulers and successfully employ the persuasive methods, the necessary conditions are in place for the realisation of the virtuous city.

Notes 1 Original publication: John W. Watt, ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Political Thought in the Christian Orient and in al-Fārābī, Avicenna, and Averroes’, in: Vasileios Syros (ed.), Well Begun Is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Volume 388 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011) 17–47. © 2011 Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University and Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 2 This is the apposite subtitle of Kennedy (1991). 3 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1356a25–27.

280

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

4 Butterworth (1998). 5 The celebrated theory of Meyerhof (1930) is no longer credible in its entirety. Cf. Gutas (1999) and, with a different assessment of the Syriac tradition, Chapters 1–3 in this volume. 6 Cf. Kennedy (1983) 3–4, 52–4. 7 Cf. Kennedy (1983) 23–45 for an overview of all three as public orators. 8 Themistius, Or. 26, 328c-329a. Cf. Watt (1995) 33–7. 9 Cf. Gorgias 502d-e, 504d-e, 516e-517a; Phaedrus 269d, 271a-272b, 277b-c; Statesman 304a-e. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094a27-b4. 10 Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum ed. Couvreur 221.9–18; tr. Bernard 376. 11 Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria ed. Westerink 14.4–10, 23–26; tr. Jackson, Lycos, and Tarrant 69. 12 In Plato it is the good of the state (Rep. 519c-521b). O’Meara (2003) 73–81 suggests that in late antique Neoplatonism the fecundity of the Good implies the sharing of the good with others. 13 The obligation of the philosopher to engage in political matters appears to be more characteristic of Themistius. In this respect, in subordinating knowledge to action, Themistius differs from ‘mainstream Neoplatonism’; cf. O’Meara (2003) 206–8. Nevertheless, philosophy’s involvement with political matters was shared by both, and both may have had an influence in the Syriac and Arabic spheres. Cf. the following. 14 On the Neoplatonic curriculum comprising the two, cf. O’Meara (2003) 62–8. For Themistius, cf. Themistius, Or. 34, 448, where he claims that the special characteristic of Plato’s thought was to mould as far as possible the human according to the divine politeia, this being the intention of the Republic, the Laws, Phaedrus, and Gorgias. 15 Cf. Olympiodorus, Prolegomena ed. Busse 18.7–10: ‘Homer and Demosthenes needed neither Aristotle’s Poetics nor Hermogenes’ Art, but (Aristotle and Hermogenes) needed (Homer and Demosthenes) to establish from their writings the (poetical and rhetorical) methods’. 16 Cf. O’Meara (2003) 209–11. 17 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 123–42. 18 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 143–86, esp. 185–6; and Chapters 2–3 in this volume. 19 Cf. Endress (2012) 318–29. 20 Cf. Chapter 4 in this volume, 76. 21 I.e. after logic the (three) parts of practical philosophy, and then physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. 22 O’Meara (2003) 66. 23 Gutas (1983) 235. Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 233–5. 24 Cf. Hugonnard-Roche (2004) 170–5. 25 In the ninth century there was a trilingual intellectual elite (Greek, Syriac, and Arabic), of which the great translator Ḥunayn is the most famous representative. 26 Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum ed. Couvreur 221.16; tr. Bernard 376. Cf. above 263. 27 Themistius, Or. 26, 328c-329a. Cf. preceding, 263 and n. 8. 28 Cf. Chapter 10 in this volume, 203–5. 29 O’Meara (2003) 206–8. 30 Watt (2004) 127–9, 133–8, 142–7, and Chapter 10 in this volume, 205–10. Conterno (2014) 13–42 argues that Syriac interest in the risāla, and its translation into Syriac, dates only from the time of Ḥunayn (ninth century), and that previously Themistius had been of interest to Syrians only as a writer on personal ethics, not public matters or rhetoric. Cf. Chapter 10 in this volume, 210 n. 62, and Watt (2015). 31 Cf. Dvornik (1966) 611–26, 666–9, 683–705. Elm (2012) 225–8 suggests that Themistius served as Gregory’s model for the publicly engaged philosophical life.

281

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

32 Gregory, epp. 24 and 38 (ed., tr. Gallay I, 32–3, 47–8). 33 Cf. Kennedy (1983) 219. 34 Mahdi (2001b) 2. The Neoplatonic metaphysical basis of al-Fārābī’s political philosophy, as against the contrary reading of his works by Mahdi and others, is stressed by Vallat (2004) 85–102 and Gutas (2002) 19–25. 35 Cf. O’Meara (2003) 185–97, who aptly characterises al-Fārābī’s metaphysical views as ‘an Aristotelianizing of the Neoplatonic scheme’ (195). A similar evaluation applies to rhetoric: in Syriac and Arabic, Aristotle’s Rhetoric ‘Aristotelises’ Neoplatonic philosophical rhetoric. 36 Lyons (1982) I, i–vi. Cf. Vagelpohl (2008) 39–51; Endress (2012) 342. 37 Watt (2005) 6–8, 20–9. Cf. Vagelpohl (2008) 59–61. 38 Undoubtedly the two Books of Aristotle’s Poetics. Cf. Berti (2007) 310–17. 39 Cf. Chapter 3 in this volume, 49–50. 40 Cf. Watt (2018) 118–20. 41 Cf. Gutas (1997) 101–19; Gutas (1998) 405–11; Vallat (2004) 43–73; Reisman (2004) 264–71. A different view is presented in Parens (1995), who argues that al-Fārābī had access to a complete text of the Laws. His reference to Fihrist 246 (Ḥunayn’s and Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī’s translation of the Laws) is relevant, but it cannot be assumed that these were of a complete text, rather than extracts or an epitome. 42 Cf. Ḥunayn, Risāla ed. Bergsträsser 50.18–19, tr. 41; ed. and tr. Lamoreaux 124–7. Cf. Rosenthal (1958) 9; Reisman (2004) 264–5. 43 Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V ed. Watt 2, tr. Watt 2. On the date of the work and the author’s ignorance of Greek, cf. the introduction to the volume of the translation v–x, xvii–xx. 44 Cf. Chapter 11 in this volume, 219–20. 45 Cf. Watt (1993). While Antony’s ordering of dialectic (i.e. the Topics) before demonstration (the Posterior Analytics) is not the usual order of books in the Organon, it does in fact appear on occasion, in Ammonius and Philoponus; cf. Hadot (1989) 83–4. 46 al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State. 47 Cf. the extensive commentary by Walzer in al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State (1985), and the succinct account of O’Meara (2003) 185–97. 48 al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State ed. and tr. Walzer 244–9, with commentary 445–6. On the relation of rhetoric and the ruler in al-Fārābī, cf. also Daiber (1986) esp. 6–7 (on rhetoric and pedagogy) and 5–6 (starting from the conviction of the harmony of Plato and Aristotle, al-Fārābī gave ‘to Plato’s political thought a new, Aristotle-orientated context’). 49 al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 88.10–13; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 43. 50 al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 97.10–11; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 49. 51 al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 93.18–19; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 47. 52 al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 94.19–95.1; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 48. 53 al-Fārābī, Philosophy of Plato ed. Rosenthal and Walzer 21.15–22.8; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 66–7. Cf. also ed. Rosenthal and Walzer 16.1–10; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 62. 54 al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 90.8–12; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 44. 55 al-Fārābī, Aphorisms of the Statesman ed. Najjar 65.9–12, ed. Dunlop 136.13–16; tr. Dunlop 50, tr. Butterworth 37. Cf. Walzer (1985) 436–8. 56 Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria ed. Westerink 14.22–15.18; tr. Jackson, Lycos, and Tarrant 69–70. Cf. preceding, 263 and n. 11. ‘Timocratic rhetoric’, according to Olympiodorus, which has ‘to do with honour-loving and saving the city in whatever manner’, while inferior to aristocratic rhetoric, is superior to those kinds of rhetoric based on desire, whether lawful or unlawful love of pleasure or love of money. 57 al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 95.10–14; tr. Mahdi (2001a) 48. 58 Republic 376e-379e, 521c-522b. Cf. Walzer (1985) 444–5. 59 Cf. O’Meara (2003) 61–6.

282

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97

Olympiodorus, Prolegomena ed. Busse 18.1–10. Cf. Gutas (1983) 257–9. al-Fārābī, Book of Letters ed. Mahdi 142.6–143.6. Cf. Heinrichs (1978) 273–9. al-Fārābī, Book of Letters ed. Mahdi 148.14–18. Cf. Heinrichs (1978) 279–82. al-Fārābī, Book of Letters ed. Mahdi 151.17–152.15. Cf. Heinrichs (1978) 282–4. See also Gutas (1983) 258–60, 267, and Daiber (1986) 10–18. al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-Khaṭāba ed. Langhade 55.6–17, tr. 54. Cf. Heinrichs (1978) 281. al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs ed. Mahdi 70–84, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 81–92. al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs ed. Mahdi 84.6–8, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 92. al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs ed. Mahdi 84.11–85.7, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 92–3. Cf. preceding, 270, and n. 54, and Vallat (2004) 166–70. Heinrichs (1978) 269–70, 272–3, 283. Cf. preceding, 263 and n. 10–11. Rhetoric 1355a24–28, Arabic version ed. Lyons (1982) I, 5.13–19, tr. 231. On the interpretation of this passage by Avicenna, Averroes, and Bar Hebraeus, see the following. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 213. A new edition with French translation is in preparation; cf. Woerther (2011), (2018). al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 213–14. Cf. Boggess (1970); Black (1990) 116–17; Vallat (2004) 187–90. Averroes’ commentary on the allegory of the cave is discussed later. al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Al-Yāsīn 95.16–18, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 48; al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs ed. Mahdi 84.6–8, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 92. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 213–14. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 150–1. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 150: ‘Inquid Alpharabius: propositum nostrum est explicare quod contextuit Aristoteles in libro suo, quem nominat librum rethorice’. Aouad (2008) 58–61. Aouad (2008) 43–8 (on the parts of the discourse), 48–52 (on the range of procedures). Rethorica seu eloquentia is probably a hendiadys for khaṭāba. Cf. Aouad (2008) 60. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 201–2. Cf. Gutas (1988) 286–96. Cf. Aouad (2002) I, 20–50. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 151. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 5.9–12; tr. Würsch (1991) 143. Averroes, Decisive Treatise, ed., tr. Butterworth 8. Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric ed. Watt 54.1–5. Watt (1993) 586. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 2.12–13; tr. Würsch (1991) 141. Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric ed. Watt 54.5–8. al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ed. Grignaschi 155. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 1.3–4; tr. Würsch (1991) 140. Cf. preceding, 272 n. 67. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 6.8; tr. Würsch (1991) 143. Preceding, 275 n. 89. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 22.3–23.7 (the citation 23.3–7); tr. Würsch (1991) 155. Cf. also the passages cited from other works of Avicenna in Würsch (1991) 180 n. 21. Contrast Bar Hebraeus’ comparative lack of interest in the political dimension in his paraphrase of the same passage (Rhet. 1355a20–29): Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric ed. Watt 62.4–12. The different situation of Christians in a Muslim society from that of the Islamic philosophers may account for this diversity of interpretation. Averroes,Middle Commentary ed., tr. Aouad II, 8–9. Cf. Aouad (2002) I, 63–5, III, 24–7.

283

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

119 120 121 122 123

al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State ed., tr. Walzer 234–9. Cf. preceding, 271 n. 55. Cf. preceding, 276 n. 96. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 62.1–63.10; cf. Würsch (1991) 192–3. Bar Hebraeus has ‘aristocratic’ (arisṭoqraṭāyā) where Avicenna has ‘Socratic’, and divides it into ‘government of pre-eminence’ (dubbār ṭarqūtā) and ‘royal government’ (dubbārā malkāyā): Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric ed. Watt 86.12–27. Treiger (2007) 395, referring to the confusion in the manuscripts of Avicenna, considers that ‘aristocratic’, not ‘Socratic’, is also the correct reading of Avicenna, and that both ‘government of the best’ and ‘royalty’ are designated ‘aristocratic’. ‘Royalty’ specifically refers to the government of the philosopher king, which may indicate that Avicenna’s view of Plato was not quite so ‘cold’ as suggested earlier. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 82.13–83.9; cf. Würsch (1991) 193. Avicenna, Rhetoric ed. Salem 62.11–63.5; cf. Würsch (1991) 193. Avicenna, On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences ed. ʿĀṣī 85.20–2; tr. Morris (1992) 169. Cf. Butterworth (2000) 38. That is, the commentary on the Rhetoric in the Shifā’, and the Ḥikma ‘Arūḍiyya. On the latter, cf. Würsch (1991) 180 n. 21, Butterworth (1984) 119–29. Morris (1992); Butterworth (2000). Averroes,Middle Commentary ed., tr. Aouad II, 68–70. Cf. Aouad (2002) I, 27–9, 78–82, and III, 132–5. See also Würsch (1991) 193–4. ṣalāḥ ḥāl, the Arabic rendering of eudaimonia in the Rhetoric; cf. Lyons (1982) II, 65. Forms of this root render the advising of deliberative oratory (bouleuomai, sumbouleuō, etc.) in the Arabic Rhetoric. Cf. Lyons (1982) II, 32, 133, 223. Averroes,Middle Commentary ed., tr. Aouad II, 69.8–12. Aouad (2002) III, 136–7; Würsch (1991) 191. Cf. especially Nicomachean Ethics 1160a31-b23. Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 22.3–5, tr. Rosenthal 112, tr. Lerner (1974) 4. Pines (1975) argued that Aristotle’s Politics was not entirely unknown in Arabic, but this view was rejected by Brague (1993). Therefore in writing about practical philosophy in the Cream of Wisdom, Bar Hebraeus turned to another Arabic philosopher, namely Ṭūsī. Cf. Joosse (2004). Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 61.17–19; tr. Rosenthal 177 (with commentary 271); tr. Lerner (1974) 72. Cf. Rosenthal (1958) 201–2. al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State ed., tr. Walzer 220–5, 240–7, 276–81 (with commentary 421–3, 440–2, 471–80). Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 25.14–30; tr. Rosenthal 117–18; tr. Lerner 10–11. al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda ed. Āl-Yāsīn 81–2, 90–1, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 37–8, 44–5; al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs ed. Mahdi 84.11–18, tr. Mahdi (2001a) 92. Al-Fārābī’s point (in the first of the foregoing references, picked up by Averroes at the end of the passage referred to immediately preceding) concerning the use of character and emotion is clearly indebted to Aristotle’s ethos and pathos (Rhetoric, Book 2). Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 29.9–26; tr. Rosenthal 123–4; tr. Lerner 17–18. Cf. preceding, 270 n. 53. Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 62.16–17; tr. Rosenthal 179 (with commentary 271); tr. Lerner 74. For al-Fārābī, cf. preceding, 270 n. 48. al-Fārābī, Aphorisms of the Statesman ed. Najjar 66.8–12, ed. Dunlop 137.11–15; tr. Dunlop 50–1, tr. Butterworth 37–8. Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 80.27–31; tr. Rosenthal 208 (with commentary, 283); tr. Lerner 106. Al-Fārābī puts persuasion and image-evocation together

284

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

124 125

126 127 128

for the third group, and the fourth has the capability for jihād, which in Averroes constitutes a fifth group. Averroes, On Plato’s Republic ed. Rosenthal 74.13–78.5; tr. Rosenthal 197–203 (with commentary 279–81); tr. Lerner 94–100. For al-Fārābī, cf. preceding, 273 n. 72–3. Averroes, Decisive Treatise ed., tr. Butterworth 3, 8, 18–19, 24. On the intention of the Law ‘to take care of the greater number without neglecting to alert the select [few]’ as expounded by Averroes, cf. preceding, 273 n. 76 (on al-Fārābī), 275 n. 89 (on Avicenna), and 275 n. 90 (on Bar Hebraeus). Averroes, Decisive Treatise ed., tr. Butterworth 21–2. Cf. also Butterworth (1972) 189–98, (1984) 129–34. Sorabji (1990) 5. Themistius appears to be the exception. See preceding, 263 n. 8.

References Antony of Tagrit, Rhetoric V: J.W. Watt (ed. and tr.), The Fifth Book of the Rhetoric of Antony of Tagrit (Lovanii: Peeters, 1986). Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 480 (text), 481 (version). Aouad (2002): M. Aouad, Averroès (Ibn Rušd). Commentaire moyen à la Rhétorique d’Aristote, I–III (Paris: Vrin). Aouad (2008): M. Aouad, ‘Balāgha. Rhétorique aristotélicienne (Rethorica) et faculté oratoire (oratoria/balāgha) selon les Didascalia in “Rethoricam (sic!)” Aristotelis ex glosa Alpharabii’, in: B. Gruendler (ed.), Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill) 40–61. Averroes, Decisive Treatise: C.E. Butterworth (ed. and tr.), The Book of the Decisive Treatise Determining the Connection between the Law and Wisdom; and Epistle Dedicatory (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2001). Averroes,Middle Commentary on the Rhetoric: see Aouad (2002). Averroes, On Plato’s Republic: E.I.J. Rosenthal (ed. and tr.), Averroes: Commentary on Plato’s Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956); tr. Lerner (1974). Avicenna, On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences: Ḥ. ʿĀṣī (ed.), Tis‘ rasā’il fī al-ḥikma wa-al-ṭabī’iyyāt (Beirut and Damascus: Dār Qābis, 1986). Avicenna, Rhetoric: M.S. Salem (ed.), Ibn Sīnā, Al-Shifā’. La Logique VIII – Rhétorique (Cairo: Imprimerie Nationale, 1954). Bar Hebraeus, Rhetoric: see Watt (2005). Berti (2007): V. Berti, ‘Libri e biblioteche cristiane nell’ Iraq dell’ VIII secolo. Una testimonianza dell’ epistolario del patriarca siro-orientale Timoteo I (727–823)’, in: C. D’Ancona (ed.), The Libraries of the Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill) 307–17. Black (1990): D.L. Black, Logic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden: Brill). Boggess (1970): W.F. Boggess, ‘Alfarabi and the Rhetoric: The Cave Revisited’, Phronesis 15, 86–90. Brague (1993): R. Brague, ‘Note sur la traduction arabe de la Politique d’Aristote, derechef, qu’elle n’existe pas’, in: P. Aubenque (ed.), Aristote Politique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France) 423–33. Butterworth (1972): C.E. Butterworth, ‘Rhetoric and Islamic Political Philosophy’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 3, 187–98. Butterworth (1984): C.E. Butterworth, ‘The Rhetorician and his Relationship to the Community: Three accounts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric’, in: M.E. Marmura (ed.), Islamic

285

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Theology and Philosophy: Studies in Honor of George F. Hourani (Albany: State University of New York Press) 111–36, 297–8. Butterworth (1998): C.E. Butterworth, ‘Averroes’ Platonization of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric’, in: G. Dahan and I. Rosier-Catach (eds.), La Rhétorique d’Aristote. Traditions et Commentaires de l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin) 227–40. Butterworth (2000): C.E. Butterworth, ‘The Political Teaching of Avicenna’, Topoi 19, 35–44. Conterno (2014): M. Conterno, Temistio orientale. Orazioni temistiane nella tradizione siriaca e araba (Brescia: Paideia). Daiber (1986): H. Daiber, The Ruler as Philosopher: A New Interpretation of al-Fārābī’s View (Amsterdam: North-Holland). Dvornik (1966): F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy: Origins and Background, I–II (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies). Elm (2012): S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church (Berkeley: University of California Press). Endress (2012): G. Endress and C. Ferrari, ‘Die Bagdader Aristoteliker’, in: U. Rudolph (ed.), Philosophie in der islamischen Welt. Band 1: 8.-10. Jahrhundert (Basel: Schwabe) 290–362. al-Fārābī, Aphorisms of the Statesman: F.M. Najjar (ed.), Al-Fārābī’s Fuṣūl muntaza’ah (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1971); ed. and tr. D.M. Dunlop, Al-Fārābī, Fuṣūl al-Madanī. Aphorisms of the Statesman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); tr. C.E. Butterworth, Alfarabi: The Political Writings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001) 1–67. al-Fārābī, Book of Letters: M. Mahdi (ed.), Alfarabi’s Book of Letters (Kitāb al-Ḥurūf). Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1970). al-Fārābī, Didascalia in rethoricam Aristotelis ex glosa Alpharabii: J. Langhade and M. Grignaschi (eds. and trs.), Deux ouvrages inédits sur la réthorique [sic] (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1971); New edition with French translation in preparation by M. Aouad and F. Woerther. al-Fārābī, Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs: M. Mahdi (ed.), Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs (Beirut: Dār Majallat Shiʿr, 1961). al-Fārābī, Kitāb al-Khaṭāba: J. Langhade and M. Grignaschi (eds. and trs.), Deux ouvrages inédits sur la réthorique [sic] (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1971). al-Fārābī, On the Perfect State: R. Walzer (ed. and tr.), Al-Farabi on the Perfect State (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). al-Fārābī, Philosophy of Plato: F. Rosenthal and R. Walzer (eds.), Alfarabius, De Platonis Philosophia (London: Warburg Institute, 1943); tr. Mahdi (2001a). al-Fārābī, Taḥṣīl al-sa‘āda: J. Āl Yāsīn (ed.), Kitāb taḥṣīl al-saʿādah (Beirut: Dār al-Andalus, 1981). Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm: G. Flügel (ed.), Kitāb al-Fihrist (Leipzig: Vogel, 1871–2). Gregory of Nazianzus, Epistles: P. Gallay (ed. and tr.), Saint Grégoire de Nazianze, Lettres, I–II (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–7). Gutas (1983): D. Gutas, ‘Paul the Persian on the Classification of the Parts of Aristotle’s Philosophy: A milestone between Alexandria and Baghdad’, Der Islam 60, 231–67. Gutas (1988): D. Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works (Leiden: Brill).

286

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Gutas (1997): D. Gutas, ‘Galen’s Synopsis of Plato’s Laws and Fārābī’s Talkhīṣ’, in: G. Endress and R. Kruk (eds.), The Ancient Tradition in Christian and Islamic Hellenism (Leiden: Research School CNWS, Leiden University) 101–19. Gutas (1998): D. Gutas, ‘Fārābī’s Knowledge of Plato’s Laws’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4, 405–11. Gutas (1999): D. Gutas, ‘The “Alexandria to Baghdad” Complex of Narratives: A Contribution to the Study of Philosophical and Medical Historiography among the Arabs’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 10, 155–93. Gutas (2002): D. Gutas, ‘The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29, 5–25. Hadot (1989): I. Hadot, Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories, fasc. 1 (Leiden: Brill). Heinrichs (1978): W. Heinrichs, ‘Die antike Verknüpfung von phantasia und Dichtung bei den Arabern’, Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft 128, 252–98. Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum: P. Couvreur (ed.), Hermiae Alexandrini In Platonis Phaedrum scholia (Paris: Bouillon, 1901); tr. H. Bernard, Kommentar zu Platons “Phaidros” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997). Hugonnard-Roche (2004): H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque (Paris: Vrin). Ḥunayn, Risāla: G. Bergsträsser (ed. and tr.), Ḥunain ibn Isḥāq. Über die syrischen und arabischen Galen-Übersetzungen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1925). Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 17, 2; ed. and tr. J.C. Lamoreaux, Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, on his Galen Translations (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Joosse (2004): N.P. Joosse, A Syriac Encyclopaedia of Aristotelian Philosophy: Barhebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Books of Ethics, Economy and Politics (Leiden: Brill). Kennedy (1983): G.A. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Kennedy (1991): G.A. Kennedy (tr.), Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lerner (1974): R. Lerner (tr.), Averroes on Plato’s Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Lyons (1982): M.C. Lyons (ed.), Aristotle’s Ars Rhetorica: The Arabic Version, I–II (Cambridge: Pembroke Arabic Texts). Mahdi (2001a): M. Mahdi (tr.), Alfarabi: Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Mahdi (2001b): M. Mahdi, Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Meyerhof (1930): M. Meyerhof, ‘Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des philosophischen und medizinischen Unterrichts bei den Arabern’, Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse 23, 389–429. Morris (1992): J.W. Morris, ‘The Philosopher-Prophet in Avicenna’s Political Philosophy’, in: C.E. Butterworth (ed.), The Political Aspects of Islamic Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Muhsin S. Mahdi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 152–98. O’Meara (2003): D.J. O’Meara, Platonopolis (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria: L.G. Westerink, (ed.), Olympiodori In Platonis Gorgiam commentaria (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970); tr. R. Jackson, K. Lycos, and H. Tarrant, Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

287

ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

Olympiodorus, Prolegomena: A. Busse (ed.), Prolegomena et In Aristotelis Categorias Commentarium (Berlin: Reimer, 1902). Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, XII, 1. Parens (1995): J. Parens, Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi’s Summary of Plato’s “Laws” (Albany: State University of New York Press). Pines (1975): S. Pines, ‘Aristotle’s Politics in Arabic Philosophy’, Israel Oriental Studies 5, 150–60. Reisman (2004): D.C. Reisman, ‘Plato’s Republic in Arabic: A Newly Discovered Passage’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 14, 263–300. Rosenthal (1956): E.I.J. Rosenthal (ed. and tr.), Averroes’ Commentary on Plato’s Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rosenthal (1958): E.I.J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Sorabji (1990): R. Sorabji, ‘The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle’, in: R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed (London: Duckworth) 1–30. Themistius, Orations: H. Schenkl, G. Downey, and A.F. Norman (eds.), Themistii Orationes, I–III (Leipzig: Teubner, 1965–70). Treiger (2007): A. Treiger, Review of Watt (2005) in: Journal of the American Oriental Society 127.3, 394–6. Vagelpohl (2008): U. Vagelpohl, Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East (Leiden: Brill). Vallat (2004): P. Vallat, Farabi et l’école d’Alexandrie: Des premisses de la connaissances à la philosophie politique (Paris: Vrin). Walzer (1985): R. Walzer (ed. and tr.), Al-Farabi On the Perfect State (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Watt (1993): J.W. Watt, ‘The Syriac Reception of Platonic and Aristotelian Rhetoric’, Aram 5, 579–601. Watt (1995): J.W. Watt, ‘From Themistius to al-Farabi: Platonic Political Philosophy and Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East’, Rhetorica 13, 17–41. Watt (2004): J.W. Watt, ‘Syriac and Syrians as Mediators of Greek Political Thought to Islam’, Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 57, 121–49. Watt (2005): J.W. Watt, Aristotelian Rhetoric in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum Sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric (Leiden: Brill). Watt (2015): J.W. Watt, Review of Conterno (2014), Orientalia 84, 140–43. Watt (2018): J.W. Watt, ‘The Commentary on the Rhetoric by Bar Hebraeus’, in: F. Woerther (ed.), Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, from Antiquity to the Present (Leiden: Brill) 116–31. Woerther (2011): F. Woerther, ‘La Rhétorique d’Aristote comme moyen de diffusion des idées politiques aristotéliciennes dans la philosophie politique arabe: les Didascalia in Rethoricam Aristotelis ex glosa Alpharabii’, in: V. Syros (ed.), Well Begun Is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) 49–71. Woerther (2018): F. Woerther, ‘Al-Fārābī commentateur d’Aristote dans les Didascalia in Rethoricam Aristotelis ex glosa Alpharabii’, in: F. Woerther (ed.), Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, from Antiquity to the Present (Leiden: Brill) 41–63. Würsch (1991): R. Würsch, Avicennas Bearbeitungen der aristotelischen Rhetorik (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag).

288

INDEX

Abū Bishr Mattā 13–16, 32–5, 59, 114, 126–31, 142–4, 220–1, 223, 232–4, 241, 268 Abū Nūḥ 13, 32, 153n19, 233 Academics see Plato and (all) the Academics al-Abharī 253 al-Dimashqī 126, 129, 154n25, 190, 203, 239–40 Alexander of Aphrodisias 13, 31, 33–4, 50, 52, 59, 79, 88, 127, 129–30, 143, 171; On the Principles of the Universe (On the Cosmos) 26, 32, 108, 151, 171–2, 176 al-Fārābī: Aphorisms of the Statesman 271, 277, 279, 282n55, 284n122; Appearance of Philosophy in Islam 9–10, 13–14, 47, 56–7, 59, 109–10, 127, 135n49, 148–9, 231–2, 234; Attainment of Happiness (Taḥṣīl al-sa’āda) 40n80, 61, 66n102, 127, 221, 234–5, 270–3, 279; Book of Letters 271–2; Didascalia in Rethoricam Aristotelis 40n78, 137n88, 273–6; Harmony of Plato and Aristotle 177; Kitāb al-Khaṭāba 272; On the Perfect State 96n96, 118n85, 227n37, 235, 243n32, 238, 244n55, 269–71, 284n98, 279; On What Should Precede the Study of (Aristotle’s) Philosophy 114; Philosophy of Aristotle (Falsafat Arisṭūṭālīs) 33–5, 221, 243n25, 272–3, 276, 284n118; Philosophy of Plato 223, 270, 279 al-Ǧāḥiẓ 123, 141 al-Ghazālī 253, 279 al-Kindī 14–15, 34–5, 61–2, 128–30, 143–4, 149, 177

al-Mahdī 13, 15, 32, 61, 118n79, 134n48, 153n19, 156n51, 169–70, 233–4 al-Manṣūr 15 al-Marwazī 13–14, 59, 118n82, 127, 137n88, 143–4, 232 al-Mas‘ūdī 10, 15, 18n3, 243n2 al-Miṣrī 170, 176 al-Qāsim 170 al-Qifṭī 251–2 al-Rāzī 253–4 al-Ṭūsī 250–1, 253 al-Warrāq 170 Ammonius 51–3, 81–91, 107–8, 129, 171–2, 254; in Cat. 63n26, 81–91, 93–7nn36–137, 116n44; in Isag. 64n43, 89, 97n134, 108, 172 Anastasius (pupil) 14, 38n38 Andronicus 95n72 Antony of Tagrit 40n84, 163–4, 219–20, 222–6, 236–9, 254, 268–9, 275 Aristotle: biological works 33–4; Book of Animals 33, 128; Categories 32–3, 48–9, 55, 83, 88, 91, 111, 126, 153n15, 153nn17–18, 169, 178n37; De anima 33–4, 126, 128–9, 153n15, 153n17; De caelo 33–4, 126, 128–30, 153n16, 154n22, 171, 174; De gen. et corr. 33–4, 126, 128–30, 153n15, 153nn17–19; De int. 87, 111, 126, 153n15, 153n17; Ethics 40n86, 126, 128–9, 153n17; Metaphysics 4, 29, 33–5, 36n23, 53, 57, 59–60, 66n91, 86–7, 91, 105, 108, 111, 113–14, 126–9, 143, 150, 153n15, 153n17, 156n47, 167, 169, 176–7, 188; Meteorologica 33–4, 92n24, 126, 128–30, 154n22; Nicomachean Ethics 92n10, 195n22, 278, 281n9; Organon 11–15,

289

INDEX

26, 30, 34–5, 51, 55–7, 59, 101, 111, 127–8, 130, 143, 147–50, 169, 220–1, 225–6, 232–6, 238, 256n24, 257n40, 265, 268, 271–3, 280; Parva naturalia 39n73, 128; Physics 29, 33, 36n23, 116n32, 116n45, 126, 128–30, 145, 153n15, 153n17, 171, 174; Poetics 13, 32–3, 49–50, 56, 85, 126–8, 153n19, 153–4n21, 156n51, 219–21, 223–4, 236, 241, 257n34, 268, 271–2; Politics 169, 195n9, 189, 203, 278; Posterior Analytics (Apodeictics) 32–3, 50, 58–9, 64n47, 85–6, 111, 126–30, 143, 153n15, 232–3; Prior Analytics 84–5, 111, 126, 128, 153nn15–16, 232, 257n40; Rhetoric 6–7, 32–3, 50, 56, 76, 85, 126–8, 153n17, 154n21, 143, 177n4, 220–3, 225–6, 243n24, 252–3, 257n34, 257n39, 261, 267–8, 272–3, 276–8; Sophistical Refutations 32–3, 50, 115–16n31, 126–8, 153n17, 143, 151, 156n51; Topics 13, 15, 32–3, 50, 58, 61, 106, 118n79, 126–7, 129, 151, 153nn18–19, 169, 233; see also Organon (of Aristotle), construction of; Pseudo-Aristotle; Rhetoric of Aristotle, Syriac and Arabic interpretation of Asclepius 89, 90, 107, 172 astrology 176 astronomy 57, 61, 95n85, 180n88 Athanasius of Balad 2, 12–14, 30–2, 50, 55–9, 85, 101, 110–12, 115–16n31, 127–8, 143, 148, 150–2, 218, 233, 238, 257n40, 268 Averroes 274–9; Decisive Treatise 279, 283n86; Middle Commentary on the Rhetoric 277–8; On Plato’s Republic 278–9 Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) 146, 220, 235, 242, 250–3, 255, 274–9; On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences 277–8; Rhetoric 225–6, 252–3, 276–8 Babai, Life of George 168 balāgha 6, 226, 273 Bar Hebraeus 144–6, 205–6, 219–20, 225–6, 236, 242, ch. 13 passim, 275; Chronicle 132n18, 132n26, 206, 255, 256nn25–6; Chronicon syriacum 249–51, 253; Grammar (Buch der Strahlen) 257nn33–4; Nomocanon 225; Rhetoric 220, 225–6, 253, 283n96,

284n101; Taʼrīkh 205–6, 255n5, 251, 256n22, 256n24 Bar Ṣalibi 242, 255 Bashosh 13, 32, 58, 233 Basil (translator) 129, 154n25 Book of Medicines 133n24 Categories, skopos of 77–8, 80, 87–8 Cause of All Causes 145 Chaldean Oracles 37n29, 93n44, 94n53, 116n33 Cosmas Indicopleustes 173 creator (of all) 78, 81–2, 89–91, 104, 107–8, 112, 114, 172, 175–6; see also Demiurge David (Elias) 40n74, 40n78, 93n50, 94n53, 106, 108 David bar Paulus 39n58 Dayr al-Suryan 49, 55–7, 101–2, 113, 117n50, 144–6, 220, 236, 268 Demiurge 78–9, 89–91, 108 Denḥā 18n15 Dionysius the Areopagite see Pseudo-Dionysius Dionysius Thrax 223 Elias see David (Elias) Eli of Qartamin 164 Ephraim Syrus 173, 210 Epistles of the Sincere Brethren 224, 237–8 eternity of the world 5, 57, 91, 108, 171–7 Euclid 31, 145–6 Evagrius Ponticus 27–9, 52, 58, 82, 91, 117n62; Gnosticus 36n22, 38n35; Kephalaia gnostica 36n24; Letter to Melanie 36n24; Practicus 36n24 Galen 2–3, 123–7, 136n70, 137n88, 141–2, 146, 148, 151–2, 176, 268 genera and species 52, 78–80, 88–9 George, bishop of the Arabs 12, 30, 32, 55, ch. 5 passim, 148–50, 164–5, 167–8, 174, 218 George of Scythopolis 31, 57 Gregory of Nazianzus 6, 12–13, 164, 206, 210, 218, 235, 238–9, 267 Gundishapur 10, 123, 125, 141, 146–7 Ḥarrān 9–10, 12–14, 19n38, 31, 47, 60–1, 232, 234 Hermiaes 8n9, 227n28, 281n26 Hermogenes (rhetor) 7, 219, 222, 236, 262, 264, 266, 269, 271, 280

290

INDEX

Homer 29, 155n43, 207–8, 219, 224, 240, 271, 281n15; Iliad 108, 207, 212n42, 219, 240 Ḥubaysh 124–6, 142, 145 Ḥunayn 2–5, 14–16, 58–9, 61, 114, 115–16n31, ch. 6 passim, 141–7, 150–2, 224, 232, 235, 255n7, 257n40, 268

language diversity 77–8 Leiden Physics 118n72, 126, 142 Libanius 196n47, 211n27 Liber Graduum 165, 218 logical square 88 logic an instrument of philosophy 74–5, 111, 166–7

Iamblichus 80, 88 Ibn al-Batrīq 61, 124, 128–9, 137n86, 154nn22–3 Ibn al-Muqaffa‛ 15, 61, 84, 95n79, 134n48, 137n87, 149, 201, 234 Ibn al-Samḥ 135n58, 154n21, 220, 267 Ibn al-Ṭayyib 255n7, 256n14, 275 Ibn Nāʻima 61, 128–9, 154n23, 154n28, 157n78 Ibn Riḍwān 146 Ibn Suwār 115–16n31, 135n55, 150–1, 257n40 Ibn Yūnus 223, 253 Ibn Zur‘a 32–5, 59–60, 86–7, 113, 151, 190, 203, 235, 239–40 Ibrāhīm al-Ṣalt 124, 126, 142 Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Abdallāh 126, 128, 153n18 infinities and science 80, 91 ʽĪsā ibn Yaḥyā 124, 131n6, 142 Isḥāq 58–9, 61, 124–9, 141–4, 257n40 Isra’īl 13–14, 127

Maimonides 181n108 Manṣūr the Sabian 124 Mar Mattai (monastery) 13, 32, 50, 58, 233, 242, 255 Mar Qardagh, legend of 168, 175 Mar Zina (monastery) 13, 32, 50, 58, 268 mathematics 57, 61, 105, 107, 111, 133n25, 174, 207, 223–5, 254 Maximus (philosopher) 196nn32–3 medicine 10–16, 28, 30, 53, 118n73, 118n76, 123–6, 141–2, 155n44, 176, 207, 232; see also Galen; patrons of Abbasid Galen translators Menander Rhetor 222–3, 236 Merv 14, 232 Michael the Syrian 18n29, 38n45, 171, 212n35, 253 mirror translations 12, 115–16n31, 151, 207, 257n40; see also quality of translations Miskawayh 191 misunderstanding in translation 251–3

Jacob Bar Shakko 49, 153–4n21, 145, 219, 223–5, 242, 253–5 Jacob of Edessa 12, 14, 18n29, 30–3, 55–7, 101, 110, 118n71, 167–8, 174–6; Encheiridion 101, 108, 167–8; Hexaemeron 57, 111–12, 174–6; translation of Categories 55–6, 101, 111, 127 Job (Ayyūb) of Edessa 124, 127, 133n24, 135n56, 145 John bar Aphtonia 12, 14, 30, 55, 101, 115–16n31, 163–4, 217–18 John Bar Zo‘bi 145, 223, 242, 253, 255 John of Scythopolis 31, 54, 57–8, 61, 89–90 Josef the priest 124 Julian (emperor) ch. 9–10 passim; Letter to Themistius 187–90, 191–2, 202–3, 211n24, 211n26 Julian Romance 210 Justin, Dialogue 169 khiṭāba 6, 226

Narsai 165, 218 natural philosophy 111, 171–6, 225 Nemesius 13, 191, 212n28 Nicholas of Damascus 136n70, 145, 251 obscurity 17, 29, 35, 76–7, 86–7, 105 Olympiodorus 13, 31, 33–4, 50–1, 59, 84, 108, 127, 129–30, 143; in Platonis Gorgiam 227n28, 263, 282n56; Prolegomena 36n14, 63n24, 93n48, 94n68, 271, 281n15 On Political Science 197n77 Organon (of Aristotle), construction of 75–6, 80–1, 84–5, 273 Origen 9, 16–17, 29, 253 Origenism 58, 91, 175 pagans and ‘true philosophy’ 112–13 paradeigmata (Platonic) 54, 89–90, 108, 172 Paris Organon 31, 39n62, 50, 55–6, 58, 101–2, 118n72, 126–8, 137n88, 142, 152, 220, 233, 235, 256n15, 268

291

INDEX

patrons of Abbasid Galen translators, Syriac and Arabic 4–5, 123–5, 141–2, 147 Paul of Edessa 12, 238 Paul the Persian 18nn27–8, 38n47, 150, 167, 225, 266 Peripatetics 52, 54, 79, 89, 96n110 Pethion 13, 32, 50, 233, 238 philanthrōpia 189–90, 193, 206, 223, 237–40, 267–9 philoponoi 10, 20n51 Philoponus 5, 51, 57, 81–91, 102–11, 129–30, 170–6, 194; Against Andrew the Arian 173; Contra Aristotelem 173–4; Contra Proclum 62, 172–3; De opificio mundi 8n8, 173–5, 194; Diaitētēs 170–1, 173; Four Tmēmata against Chalcedon 171; in Anal. priora 115n21; in Cat. 37n30, 63n24, 63n26, 81–91, 93–7nn36–137, 102–8; in Phys. 172, 175, 197n78; On the Trinity 171; Treatise concerning the Whole and the Parts 170–1, 173 philosopher king 6–7, 188–90, 193, 202, 204, 222–3, 235, 237–40, 264, 267, 269–70, 277–8, 280 philosophy, curriculum of 26–9, 31, 33–4, 50–3, 57, 75, 82–3, 109–12, 126, 142, 150, 167, 265–6 philosophy, end (telos) of 80–1, 104, 107, 110–13, 167, 176 philosophy, motive for the study of 57–8, 109–13, 150, 166–7 philosophy in Christological controversy 168, 170–1; in defence of Christianity against Islam 168–70 Philoxenus 164, 173 Phocas 13, 31–2, 57–8, 61 physics see natural philosophy Plotinus 58, 61, 91, 107, 128, 143, 267; Enneads 58, 61, 116n34 Plato: Gorgias 212n42, 221, 223, 244n35, 263–4, 266, 270–1, 280; Laws 136n70, 188, 190, 197n56, 203, 211n18, 235, 240, 243n30, 244n36, 264, 282n41; Phaedrus 221, 223, 263–4, 266–7, 270, 280; Republic 136n70, 190, 197n50, 197n56, 197n69, 211n18, 213n56, 222–3, 235, 237–8, 240, 264, 268–71, 278–9; Sophist 136n70; Statesman 244n35, 264, 281n9; Timaeus 96n113, 108, 136n70, 172–3 Plato and (all) the Academics 78–9, 89–91

political activity and philosophy 187–94, 202–4, 208, 213n62, 236–40, ch. 14 passim political constitutions 277–8 Porphyry 88, 94n63, 96n115, 102, 129, 262; Eisagoge 55–6, 102, 115–16n31, 116n33, 234; On Abstinence 96n97 predications 36n6, 83, 88, 92n14 Probus 18nn27–8, 37n32, 38n47, 148–50, 154n30 Proclus 4, 52–4, 58, 60, 62, 89–91, 109, 112; in Primum Euclidis 116n34; in Tim. 54, 62, 89–90; On the Eternity of the World against the Christians 136n70; Platonic Theology 63n33, 93n44, 96n120, 96n123 prolegomena (to philosophy) 4, 17, 51, ch. 4–5 passim, 254; (to rhetoric) 222, 224–5 Pseudo-Aristotle: De mundo 10, 26, 32, 150, 175, 254 Pseudo-Dionysius 10–13, 16–17, 25–35, 52–4, 57–8, 60–2, 82, 86–7, 89–91, 108–9, 111–13, 150–1, 181n109, 264–5, 280; De caelesti hierarchia 38n34, 38n37, 40n84, 60, 95n83, 95n88; De divinis nominibus 37n25, 38n37, 54, 97n123, 181n109; De myst. theol. 37n25 Pseudo-Libanius 204 Pseudo-Maǧrīṭī 39n70, 40n81 Pseudo-Zacharias 16–17, 95n80, 218 psychology, human, and society 189, 192–4, 203–4 Ptolemy, Ptolemaic system 19n29, 106, 173–6 Ptolemy al-Ġarīb 95n72 Qenneshre 11–15, 30–1, 55–8, 101, 110, 147–8, 151, 163–4, 167, 174, 217–18, 232 quality of translations 7, 115–16n31, 150 Qusṭā 66n89, 129, 154n28 Quwairā 13, 33, 59, 127 rhetoric 6–7, 163–6, ch. 11 passim, 236, 238, ch. 14 passim; see also Rhetoric of Aristotle, Syriac and Arabic interpretation of rhetoric, poetics, religion 221–3, 241, 270–2, 279

292

INDEX

Rhetoric of Aristotle, Syriac and Arabic interpretation of 220–3, 225–6, 236, ch. 14 passim ruler, virtues of 193–4, 269–71 Sabians 10, 60, 124 Sahdā 124 Sergius of Reshaina 3–4, 10–11, 15–17, 25–9, 31–2, 35, 48–54, 57–8, ch. 4 passim, 108–9, 124–5, 127, 130, 143, 150–1, 166, 171–2, 174, 176, 264–6, 280; Commentary on the Categories 13, 25–9, 50–3, ch. 4 passim, 108–9, 166, 265; Memra on the Categories 92n3, 94n65, 96nn106–7, 96n110, 96n119, 97n134; Memra on the Spiritual Life 16–17, 26–8, 52, 82, 89; On the Causes of the Universe 108, 171–2, 176; see also Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Principles of the Universe; PseudoAristotle, De mundo Severus of Antioch 12, 14, 155n43, 164–5, 218 Severus Sebokht 14, 30, 55, 57, 84–5, 95n85, 101, 110–11, 150, 167, 174, 218 Shamlī 124 Simeon of Beth Arsham 168 Simplicius 51, 60, 81–91, 108, 129; in Cat. 63n24, 81–91, 93–7nn36–137, 115n21, 174 singularity and multiplicity 79 Ṣiwān al-ḥikma 224–5 Stephanus (commentator) 13, 31, 34, 50, 84, 127, 143 Stephanus (translator) 124, 142 Stephen bar Sudhaili 58, 91 Sylvanus of Qardu 114 Synesius of Cyrene 262, 267 Syriac medical works known in Arabic 125 Syriac philosophical and medical manuscripts, loss of 2–3, 49–50, 101–2, 113, 125–6, 144–6, 149, 151–2 Taḏārī 126 Thābit ibn Qurra 61, 124, 133n26

Themistius 5–6, 33–5, 59–60, 128–9, 156n60, ch. 9–10 passim, 218, 221, 223, 239–41, 262–4, 266–7, 285n128; in Metaph. 40n85, 66n91, 118n71; orations extant in Syriac 191, 204, 207–10, 239, 266; religious toleration 206–7, 210, 240; Risāla 6, 190–4, 203–5, 210nn60–2, 239–40, 266–7 Theodore Bar Kōnī 168 Theodore bishop of Karkh Juddan 11, 25, 51, 74, 81, 94n62 Theodore of Mopsuestia 19n46, 165, 169, 172, 180n91, 194 theological (Christian) and philosophical terminology 167–8 Theology of Aristotle 4, 35, 61, 181n109 Theon (mathematician) 174 Theophilus of Edessa 14, 32, 56, 65n74, 59, 114, 124, 134n48, 135n56, 146, 148, 150–1 theoria and action 75–6 theoria and praxis 17, 74–5 things, concepts, words 77–8, 80, 87–8 Thomas of Edessa 124 Thomas of Ḥarqel 12 Thomas of Marga 242, 255 Timothy (patriarch) 13–15, 30–4, 49–50, 56–8, 61, 84–5, 111–12, 114, 127–30, 143, 146, 156n51, 169–70, 207, 233, 236, 238, 268 translation and commentary 83–4, 86 truncated Organon 11, 15, 51, 55–7, 84, 109–11, 134n48, 135n49, 136n66, 147–50, 231–2, 234 Usṭāth 128–9, 154n23, 154n28 Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī 32–5, 59–61, 113, 126, 129–31, 133n20, 135n57, 142–4, 151, 170, 176–7, 235, 239 Yaḥyā ibn Jarīr 235, 238 Yūḥannā ibn Ḥaylān 13, 127, 149, 232 Yūḥannā ibn Māsawayh 8n6, 124–5, 135n53, 141–2 Zacharias Scholasticus 10, 14, 20n51, 30, 171

293