The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque by Griffith Sidney H.;

Author:Griffith, Sidney H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press

Syrian Christian Philosophers

In earlier Christian history, and coming to fruition in the fourth century, Greek-speaking Christian intellectuals had already done their best to coopt Late Antique, Hellenic philosophy into what they sometimes called “Christian Philosophy” or the “Philosophy of Christ,”6 a process that in effect created a new, hybrid intellectual discipline that some commentators have now dubbed simply “Christianism.”7 And it may well have been, at least in part, in reaction to this Christian co-optation of philosophy that in Athens and Alexandria in the fifth and sixth centuries Neoplatonist and other philosophers were determined to keep Christianity out of their discipline, at the same time that some of them resolutely defended traditional, Hellenistic/Egyptian religion, in ways obviously dictated by their reaction to the challenge of the then growing Christian religious establishment.8

The Neoplatonist school in Athens seems eventually to have fallen victim to the edict of the emperor Justinian I in the year 529 that prohibited non-Christians to teach philosophy or law.9 But in Alexandria, some accommodation with the local Christian patriarch for the participation of Christians in the academy is said to have given the largely Neoplatonist institution a new lease on life that preserved it until at least the early Islamic period.10 But here the Christian students of philosophy, in contrast to the ways of the Christian intellectuals of earlier generations, seem to have taken a different approach to their discipline; they did not so much co-opt traditional philosophy and its exercises into a new paideia, after the manner of Origen, Evagrius of Pontus, the Cappadocian Fathers, and other prominent Christianists of an earlier era. Rather, respecting the integrity of the philosophical enterprise in its own right, their purpose was to use their expertise in its traditional disciplines, and particularly in Aristotelian logic, reasonably to defend the credibility of the truth claims of divine revelation, and even to refine the expression of the religious claims themselves. Of course, this respect for the integrity of philosophy did not prevent Christian philosophers from taking issue, on philosophical grounds, with positions espoused by Aristotle and other non-Christians that they deemed to be in contradiction with positions they held on religious grounds. For example, and most notably, they defended the biblical doctrine of creation as opposed to the Aristotelian hypothesis of the eternity of the world.11

As it happened, there was an impressive number of Syrians with ties to Edessa and the Monophysite/Jacobite, or Syrian Orthodox, church who took up the practice of philosophy in Alexandria and elsewhere from the sixth century onward. They and their so-called Nestorian, or Church of the East, colleagues in Edessa, Nisibis, and the surrounding Syriac-speaking milieu in the eighth and ninth centuries made up the community of scholars in whose footsteps Arabic-speaking Christians such as unayn ibn Isq (808-873) and Yay ibn ‘Adï (893-974) and their students would follow in the ninth and tenth centuries.12

The story begins back in the days of John Philoponos (ca. 490-ca. 570), a Jacobite Christian student of the Neoplatonist Ammonius, son of Hermeias, in Alexandria.

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