 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, On the Eastern Front, Philosophy in Syriac and Armenian. Let's say you wanted to read every pre-modern translation and commentary on Aristotle. How many languages would you need to learn? Well, obviously Greek. There are dozens of late ancient commentaries on Aristotle, beginning in the 2nd century AD, if not earlier, with the work of Aspasius and Alexander of Aphrodisias. The Greek commentary tradition arguably peaked with the school of Alexandria in the 5th century, though as we'll be seeing later in this series, the Byzantines too contributed numerous Greek commentaries on his works. Then there's Latin. Alrighty, Boethius drew on the exegetical productions of Alexandria in his commentaries on Aristotle's logic, and of course there was the rich medieval tradition featuring such authors as Aquinas and Buridan, which carried on into the Renaissance. And you'll definitely need Arabic. There are extant commentaries on Aristotle from the 10th century Baghdad school, a mostly Christian group, who also included the famous Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi. The greatest of all medieval commentators on Aristotle was the Muslim Aferroes, who lived in 12th century Spain. He did write in Arabic, but a number of his commentaries are preserved only in Latin or Hebrew, plus there are Hebrew super-commentaries on his explanations of Aristotle, so you'll certainly need a sound grasp of Hebrew as well. But surely that would do it, right? Well, no actually. You need to learn at least two more languages, Syriac and Armenian. In late antiquity, in the early medieval period, there were translations of Aristotle into these languages, focusing especially on logic, and introductions and commentaries to this material were also produced in Syriac and Armenian. And that's just Aristotle. Things get more daunting still if we want to broaden our remit to the reception of Greek philosophy as a whole. Then, we must include Georgian, the language used by the 12th century Neoplatonist John Petrizzi to write a commentary on Proclus. By the way, he also translated works by Aristotle into Georgian, though these versions are lost. We can add at least one more, the Ethiopian language Ge'ez. You can hear all about the translations of originally Greek works into Ge'ez in this series on Africana philosophy, but just to make the point with one striking example that we discuss in more detail there, let's consider the story of a philosopher named Secundus. It tells of how he unintentionally brings about the suicide of his mother, takes a vow of silence out of remorse, and is then challenged to share his wisdom by a powerful king. After refusing to speak despite the kings threatening him with death, Secundus agrees to write down a series of aphoristic remarks encapsulating his philosophical insights. Now this text was originally Greek and was translated into Latin and Arabic, but also into Ge'ez, Armenian, and Syriac. Secundus is all but forgotten today, but was an inspiration to an ascetically minded and monastic readership across eastern Christendom. Hence we find the 7th century spiritual author Isaac of Nineveh praising the discipline of the philosophers with the remark that one of them had so mastered the will of the body that he did not deviate from his vow of silence even under threat of the sword. What we learn from such cases is that the textual transmission of Greek philosophy was not just, as many people suppose, a simple handover of Aristotelianism and Platonism into Latin. Nor was it only, as you might have supposed on the basis of this podcast series so far, a matter of Greek ideas being transmitted to both the Islamic world and Latin Christendom. In fact, it was a nearly global phenomenon in which Greek literature, including philosophy, was rendered into local languages on the east coast of Africa and around the Black Sea, in Spain, Syria, and Iraq, with the Arabic translations produced in those realms working their influence as far as Central Asia and eventually in India and China too. Obviously that whole story is not on our agenda just at the moment. Rather, I want to look at one underappreciated corner of the reception of Greek thought, the Eastern Christian communities that used Syriac and Armenian as their languages of scholarship. In addition to the obvious interest of discovering the breadth and depth of Hellenic philosophy's penetration into these cultures, our topic boasts some of my favorite scholarly names. Actually, medieval translators in general have more than their share of fabulous names. One memorable sobriquet belonged to the translator of Aristotle and of Aries into Latin, Herman the German. The Syriac tradition meets that challenge with Paul the Persian and raises the stakes with Philoxenus of Mabouge, who sounds like he should be pursuing Frodo and Samwise across Mordor. Literally unbeatable though is the Greek and Armenian translator and commentator David the Invincible. These splendidly titled scholars were only a few of the men who labored to bring Aristotle and other works of Greek science into the languages of Eastern Christianity alongside theological literature, beginning of course with the Bible. While some of them did study in Constantinople, they directed their energies towards fellow intellectuals in Syria and Armenia. These scholars were usually clerics or monks who did not accept the Chalcedonian form of Christianity that became Orthodox at Constantinople. The difference of agreement had to do with the nature, or natures, of Christ. According to the Chalcedonians, he had two natures, divine and human, united in a single They used the technical Greek word hypostasis to express this unity. Many Syrian Christians, by contrast, were either Nestorians or Monophysites. The followers of Nestorius emphasized the two natures and rejected the idea of a hypostatic union, while the Monophysites, also called Jacobites after the 6th century bishop of Edessa who was rather boringly just named Jacob, accepted a single nature that fused humanity and divinity. The Armenian Church was and still is Monophysite. Indeed, it's worth emphasizing that these late ancient rifts within Christianity are not yet healed. The most surprising example is that by the 4th century there was an outpost of the Syriac Church in India and it too survives down to the present day. It was within a Christian context that Syriac and Armenian emerged as written languages. Syriac was the dialect of Aramaic spoken around Edessa and hence a Semitic language like Arabic and Hebrew, not an Indo-European one like Greek. Already in late antiquity, it distinguished itself from other forms of Aramaic and came to be a literary language used by Jews to translate the Old Testament and then by Christians to translate a wide range of religious material starting in the 5th century. The texts rendered into Syriac included Greek church fathers like the Cappadocians and the Pseudo-Dionysios who, as we know, drew extensively on pagan philosophical ideas. At first the translations tended to be rather loose, but in the 7th and 8th centuries the scholars developed a highly literal, even overly exact style which they used to render Aristotle and other philosophical works into this language of Eastern Christian culture. And this just during the period labeled as the Dark Age of Christian literature in Greek. If we're looking for the first philosopher to use Syriac, we might settle on Baadaisan, who died in the easily remembered year 222 AD. His Book of the Laws of Countries was influenced by Platonism, and he debated the topic of fate with a rival Christian sect. Like the Jewish philosopher, Fallo of Alexandria, who had lived a couple of centuries earlier, Baadaisan saw resonances between Plato's dialogue on cosmology, the Timaeus, and the biblical creation story. When we reflect that important pagan Neoplatonists of late antiquity also came from Syria, we realize that the roots of Hellenism and philosophy were planted deeply in this eastern soil. And here I'm thinking of Iamblichus and also Porphyry, author of an introduction to Aristotle's logic that would become standard reading in Syriac and Armenian as well as Arabic and Latin. Another example would come several centuries later with Sergius of Roshaina. He too was interested in cosmology and worked on logic as well, for instance by commenting on Aristotle's categories. Sergius evidently studied with the school of Ammonius in Alexandria and reproduced the ideas of these Neoplatonizing Aristotelians in his own commentaries. Thus, his undertaking can be compared to that of Boethius in the West, especially since, like Boethius, he had the unfulfilled ambition to cover the entirety of Aristotle's logic with his translating and commenting activity. But the most significant group of Aristotelians who worked in Syriac was that gathered around the monastery at Knesre. In the 7th century, the logician and mathematician Sèvres Sebogte taught several other men who would form something of a small-scale translation movement. These included Athanasius of Balad, Jacob of Edessa, and, here comes another enjoyable name, George of the Arabs, who wrote translations with his own introductions and commentaries to three works from Aristotle's logical corpus. So this group was a forerunner of the translation circles that would emerge in the 9th century with the support of the Abbasid Caliphs, the ones led by the philosopher al-Kindi and the medical expert Hunayn ibn Ishaq. We discussed their output at the beginning of our series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world, and made brief mention there of the fact that Hunayn ibn Ishaq's circle often translated from Greek into Syriac and then from Syriac into Arabic. The apparently unnecessary middle step of rendering the target text into Syriac in fact made perfect sense, given that there was a long-standing tradition of using Syriac to translate Greek science. Once the material had been brought into this Semitic language, getting it into another realm, namely Arabic, was perhaps seen as relatively straightforward. All of which is not to say that every Syriac author was an enthusiastic Hellenist. The 4th century poet Ephraim of Edessa despised pagan philosophy, remarking, Happy is the man who has not tasted of the venom of the Greeks. Broadly speaking, though, Greek was the language of educated culture and was valued as such. An amusing story from the turn of the 6th century tells of a mother pleased by her son's pale complexion, which she assumes is due to his long study of the liberal arts that formed the Hellenic educational curriculum. She is horrified to discover that actually he's been memorizing the Psalms and in Syriac. The more religiously minded tended to value Greek too, even for religious purposes. Thus, the aforementioned Philoxenus of Maboug, still loving that name, remarked on the difficulty of doing Christian theology in Syriac because, It is not accustomed to use the precise terms that are in currency with the Greeks. Much of what I've just said about the Syrian context was mirrored in Armenia. Here too we have a language that comes into literary use during late antiquity with the script for Armenian emerging at about 400 AD. The purpose of this was, in the first instance, Christian missionary work. A figure called Mashtok translated part of the Bible and dispatched students to convert the people while some members of his circle went abroad to learn Greek or Syriac. In a telling story from about 600, a man named Anania of Shirak tells of his struggles to find a teacher of mathematics in Armenia. He finally locates one in Trebizond, a well-traveled man who had been in Alexandria, Rome, Athens, and Constantinople. When Anania returns home, he grumbles about his countrymen, who lack all interest in such educational pursuits. But in fact, the Armenian translation movement was already underway by this point. For the sake of studying the liberal arts, there was an early Armenian translation of a grammar written by a man with yet another pleasing moniker, Dionysius Thrax. This was followed by Aristotle's logic, commentaries on his works by Amblicus, and the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius in addition to many religious and theological texts. As with Syriac, the translations were often overly literal, to the point of being essentially incomprehensible to the untutored reader. It has been commented that they are really just written in Greek with Armenian words. The most remarkable figure here, and not just for his comic book ready title, was David the Invincible, who was something like an Armenian version of Boethius and Sergius of Reshaina. Like Sergius, he actually studied in Alexandria, in David's case with Olympia Doris, one of the very last pagan teachers of antiquity. David's commentaries on Aristotle's logic are extant in both Greek and Armenian. We are told that he wrote them in Greek but then translated them himself for the benefit of his fellow Armenians. His interest went beyond Aristotle. He apparently translated Platonic dialogues into Armenian too, but since these are lost, it is his logical works that give him a claim to what fame he still has. One of today's leading scholars of Aristotelian logic, Jonathan Barnes, commented that David's exposition of Porphyry's introduction to logic is one of the two best commentaries written on that much-commented work. Barnes doesn't say what the other best commentary on Porphyry is, but given that he wrote one himself, I have a sneaking suspicion what he has in mind. David the Invincible does not advertise his Christianity while commenting on the pagan logical corpus, perhaps a sign of his training in a school where Christians were collaborating closely with the last pagans of antiquity, both sides striving to keep the peace for the sake of their joint intellectual endeavors. To what extent are David's commentaries and those of the Syriac scholars valuable contributions to the history of Aristotelianism? To be honest, you should not read them for their entertainment value, though David does at one point prove that irrational animals do not grasp universal concepts on the basis that a rooster remains calm when it sees the farmer slaughtering the other chickens, which proves that the rooster doesn't know it is a member of the same species. But what they otherwise lack in laughs, they make up in terms of philological importance. The Armenian and Syriac translations are very early, usually earlier than any manuscripts we have for the Greek version. This means we can use them to help reconstruct the original Greek text, since earlier texts lack errors that inevitably crept in during the process of copying out books by hand. We'll get back to this issue later when we look at Byzantine manuscripts and how scholars today use them. There are also a few ancient texts that are lost in Greek and preserved only in Syriac, for example a treatise on meteorology by Aristotle's student Theophrastus. Beyond that, there is the philosophical interest of the commentaries. As with commentaries in Greek, these are works of exegesis intended for use by students, so they are not full of advanced, innovative ideas. Yet they carry on traditions of thinking about logic that we know from late antiquity and that will be passed on to the Arabic and Latin spheres. Thus David argues in detail for the long-standing peripatetic view that logic is not really a part of philosophy, but only its instrument. This indeed is why Aristotle's logical works were called the Orgodon, meaning tool. It's a point on which Aristotelians like Alexander of Aphrodisias had insisted back in the 2nd century when it was a good way of marking their opposition to the Stoics who did think that logic is a part of philosophy on a par with ethics and physics. Or, to take another example, it seems that Paul the Persian's logical writings continue a trend away from formalization in logic and towards a more metaphysical reading. What I mean by this is that for Paul, when a scientific demonstration yields its conclusion, the conclusion is necessarily true because of the natures of the things the demonstration is about, not because the argument's form is necessarily valid. Thus, if we argue, giraffes are ungulants, ungulants walk on tiptoe, therefore giraffes walk on tiptoe, that result is a necessary truth and its necessity resides in the nature of giraffes, not just on the unimpeachable structure of the proof. The reason that logic was a primary interest of Syriac and Armenian scholars is that it had already had this status at Alexandria. You began your study of philosophy with logic, the necessary instrument for everything that came after, which meant that students had most need for commentaries and translations of logical works. But logic was only the beginning, and we do see the intellectuals of these traditions pursuing other interests. Sergius translated a treatise on cosmology and works of medicine, while Severus Seboht, the influential teacher at Kneshre, had particular expertise in astronomy and other areas of mathematics. There are also examples of history writing, for example with the History of Armenia, written by Moses of Khorren, notable for its lack of theological framing, his purpose is just to tell us what happened, not to display God's providence at work in the world. Still, there's no denying that theological interests did motivate much of what these translators and commentators were doing. As I've said several times, there was extensive effort to translate Christian theological literature and even the attention paid to logic had a theological dimension. Severus' pupils seem to have thought of logic as an instrument of theology as much as an instrument of philosophy. In Armenia, one churchman remarked that the devising of a script for Armenian was in part so valuable because one would otherwise need knowledge of Greek and Syriac to resist the seduction of old pagan traditions. A point I made in the last episode, that in Byzantium philosophy itself was defined in a theologically colored way, applies in these other eastern Christian cultures too. Plato had prepared the way for this by saying in his dialogue, the Theaetetus, that philosophy is the attempt to achieve likeness to God insofar as is possible for humans. This appears repeatedly in Armenian and Syriac texts as one popular definition of philosophy. A fine example of the interpenetration of philosophical and theological concerns is provided by George of the Arabs. In his Syriac Works on Logic, he is not content merely to quote that Platonic definition. He explains how likeness to God is achieved, using a whole series of metaphors that have to do with vision and light. The intellect is the eye of the soul, and it is by seeing the light of truth that we fulfill our role as images of the divine. God himself is a light with which the light of our souls can mingle when they come close to him. They do this by polishing the mirror of intellect through virtue, something that even some pagans manage to do. The path is full of danger, since reason is bound to go astray when it is not guided rightly by the will. Still, when things do go wrong it is the evil will that should be blamed, not reason itself. Thus, George implores his reader, This statement is, like David the Invincible, impossible to argue with, though George is perhaps somewhat less convincing when he suggests that the three figures of the syllogism in Aristotle are an image of the Holy Trinity. The Syriac and Armenian philosophers were clearly not innocent of religious motivation, and if they had been asked why they were spending so much time writing about Aristotle, they would surely have placed that project within a Christian context. Next time we'll be looking at a famous debate that illustrates this very point, the controversy over the permissibility of depicting the saints and Christ himself in what were called icons. Why was there such a heated dispute over these pictures, and what was the role of philosophical argumentation in iconoclasm and its ultimate defeat? It's a topic worth a few thousand words, which we'll hear next time, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye!