 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 historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, People of the South by Zantium and Islam. If you're looking for an argument, I have two places to suggest you go. First, any room containing an analytic philosopher. Analytic philosophers love arguing so much that not content with arguing for a living. They go out for drinks with one another after work to argue in their free time, and then go home where they get into arguments with their loved ones about whether they are too argumentative. Second, if you can find a way to get there, the medieval Near East. Starting in late antiquity, the goddess of history devoted all of her efforts to producing the ideal conditions for disagreement. After breaking the Roman Empire in half so that Latin Christians could come into conflict with Greek Christians, she also oversaw sectarian disputes between Christians in the Eastern realms. The Chalcedonians, the Miaphysites, and the Church of the East, sometimes referred to respectively as Melkites, Jacobites, and Nestorians. But she was just getting warmed up. The rise of Islam cut the size of the Byzantine Empire in half as Syria and Egypt were lost and gave Christians a whole new set of opponents. That rivalry was often pursued in the good old fashioned way, namely hideous violence. The history of Byzantium is in no small part the history of warfare with Muslim powers, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Fatimids, the Seljuks, then finally and fatally the Ottomans. In many periods, annual raids were a fact of life for anyone living in striking distance of the border. Emperors could secure legitimacy by defeating the Muslims on the field of battle or lose it by being defeated. And the same was true on the other side. Caliphs and other Muslim rulers tested their armies against those of the Christians and attempted numerous times to fulfill a promise supposedly made by the prophet, The first among my people who conquer the city of the Caesar, that is Constantinople, will have his sins forgiven. Yet the relationship between the two faiths involved more than military conflict. To see this, we need look no further than the actions of these same emperors and caliphs. They wanted to be seen as religious leaders, not just as warlords. On the back foot after the Arab invasions, Byzantine emperors presented themselves as being victorious in faith, if not in war, as leaders of a process of reform and renewal that would win back God's favor. Throughout the history of the empire, emperors also sought to overawe and humble Muslim visitors with the glory of their court at Constantinople and they sent emissaries who could display the best that Greek scholarship had to offer. We saw that in the middle of the 9th century, Photius was chosen for just such a diplomatic mission, a somewhat earlier example was John the Grammarian, a scholar dispatched to Baghdad in 829. Emperors were also known to send documents instructing their opposite numbers in the errors of Islam. We have a letter supposedly written by the iconoclast emperor Leo III to the reigning caliph, one of the earliest Christian refutations of Islam. The correspondence went both ways. In the 9th century, the famed Abbasid caliph Harun al-Ashid had a letter sent to Constantinople penned by a scholar named Muhammad ibn al-Laith. It explains the superiority of Islam to Christianity and then suggests that the emperor either come to his senses and convert, or agreed to pay the tax owed by Christians to their Muslim overlords. Many if not most religious refutations though were not aimed at members of the rival faith. Instead they were, almost literally, preaching to the choir. In the middle of the 9th century, Niketas of Byzantium wrote an attack on the Qur'an, condemning it as untruthful, inconsistent, and idolatrous. Far from being a true revelation, founding a new religion devoted to the one god, this book leads to the worship of the devil. Niketas' goal was obviously to strengthen the confidence of his co-religionists not to win over potential converts, even if the treatise is remarkable for showing some knowledge of the Qur'an, which was at least partially known to him in Greek translation. Other diatribes against Islam include one written by a 14th century emperor, John VI Kantakouzenos, and several pages from Eustratus' commentary on Aristotle's ethics. This rare allusion to Islam in a strictly philosophical work is no more polite than what we find in Niketas. It describes Muhammad, without naming him, as a false prophet who engaged in adultery. Eustratus depicts Muslims in general as hedonists who are under the impression that it is good to give full rein to the base functions of the body rather than giving primacy to reason. The polemic draws on the pagan Proclus, giving us another glimpse at the fad for Neoplatonism we discussed last time. Evidentially, Eustratus thought far more highly of Proclus than of the prophet of Islam, whom he compares to the notoriously debauched Persian king Sardanapolis. Of course, it was easy to be rude about Islam when you were sitting safely in Constantinople. Encounters between Christian and Muslim scholars in the Islamic world tended to be more polite. Most of the surviving works of inter-religious disputation actually come from there, not from the Byzantine Empire. Eustratus stands to reason because of the large Christian population in places like Syria and Egypt. The Arab conquests occurred with breathtaking speed, but the spread of Islam was a much slower process. In part, this is because the Muslim rulers had a concrete disincentive to promote conversion. All non-Muslims were made to pay a special tax, the jizya, a policy already mentioned in the Qur'an. So, as more people converted, tax revenues would decrease. Furthermore, the Qur'an instructed, let there be no compulsion in religion, and commanded Muslims to be courteous when disputing with the so-called people of the book, that is, groups like Jews and Christians who were in possession of their own revelatory texts. The Old Testament prophets are recognized in Islam, and Jesus is also held to be a genuine prophet. Verses in the Qur'an do however deny that Christ was the Son of God, critically remarking that the Christians exaggerate in their religion. The Revelation also rejects the fundamental Christian belief that God is a Trinity, insisting that God is one. So we see that the goddess of history, for all her mischief, is capable of subtlety. Christians living in Muslim territory were free to pursue their religion, even if they suffered from that extra tax and certain other measures, for instance the requirement to wear distinctive clothes. Christians could pursue philosophy and the sciences too. As we know, it was Christian scholars living under Islam who translated the works of Aristotle and other philosophers into Arabic. None of those translators was more highly placed than Timothy I, an East Syrian patriarch who died in 823. At the behest of the Muslim caliph al-Mahdi, Timothy translated Aristotle's Topics, a handbook of dialectic. It's been speculated that this was chosen as an early text to render into Arabic, precisely because of his usefulness in interreligious debate. Al-Mahdi evidently had a personal interest in such debate. He personally challenged Timothy to defend the cogency of Christianity at the royal court. We have a record of the debate between the two men, written by Timothy in Syriac and also extant in Arabic translation. It was probably written to give other Christians guidance, showing them how one should answer the frequently asked questions of Muslim opponents. Yet it is far less rude about the Islamic point of view than what we just found in authors from the Greek-speaking realm like Niketas and Eustratus. The caliph is shown to be an acute and clever opponent, and Timothy does not denigrate Islam. Of course, it would have been foolish of him to do so given the setting. In this respect, and in the issues covered, Timothy's account sets the tone for later works of disputation. Much attention is paid to the cogency of the Trinitarian teaching, with Timothy offering several analogies that reappear in other Christian texts. God the Father gives rise to the sun like the sun emanating its rays, or like the soul giving forth speech. Al-Mahdi challenges this by pointing out that speech disappears as it is uttered whereas the divine sun is meant to be eternal. But Timothy points out that the meaning of a speech remains in the soul of the one who is speaking. This is one of many passages in the disputation that touch on philosophical issues, in this case philosophy of language. Another example comes when Al-Mahdi demands to know whether God willed the crucifixion to happen or willed the sins of Adam and of the fallen angel Satan. Here we have a particularly challenging instance of the problem of evil. The caliph is asking whether God does not merely allow evils to occur but actually wants them to happen so that his divine plan may be fulfilled. To this, Timothy replies that evils are freely committed, but God uses them to good ends as the caliph himself might take advantage of a burnt down house to build something new. Yet Timothy admits the limitations of his or any human's ability to explain Christian doctrine fully. God is ultimately unknowable and the metaphors he uses to explain such things as the Trinity remain just that, metaphors. Timothy's response to Islam is very different from what we found in John of Damascus, who lived only a couple of generations earlier. Where John presented Islam as one of many heresies, an unacceptable divergence from Christian belief, Timothy sees it more as a misstep on the road from Judaism to Christianity. He goes so far as to cite a passage from the Qur'an that could be read as supporting the Trinity and Ummati returns the favor by mentioning passages in the Bible that foretell the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. But in the long run, this debate was not going to be fought over scriptural exegesis, if only because neither group accepted the legitimacy of the other's revelatory texts. Of course, Christians rejected the Qur'an, while Muslims claimed that the New Testament distorted Jesus' true teachings and argued that the biblical text had been corrupted. Back then, people were well aware of the difficulties of accurately transmitting handwritten documents. The weapon of choice for interreligious dispute was instead rational argument. Muslims were confident that they could show Christianity to be incoherent, given its commitment to a God who is both one and three, both divine and human. Not long after Timothy, we have Muslim authors like Akasim ibn Ibrahim and Abu Isa al-Warak, who composed diatribes against the irrationality of Christian belief. These are well-informed texts. They mention those Christian metaphors for the Trinity, like comparing God to the sun, are able to quote from the Gospels, and display an understanding of the differences between the various Christian sects. A favorite Muslim argument is that there is no way to describe God as a Trinity without running into self-contradiction. The sun would have to be both created and uncreated, and God would have to be both one and many. This provides us with a context for understanding the emphasis on God's unity found in the contemporaneous philosopher of Kindi, who actually wrote a short treatise against the Trinity in much the same spirit, explicitly deploying the tools of Aristotelian logic. The treatise provoked a counter-refutation from Yahya ibn Adi, who was a leading member of the so-called Baghdad school of Christian Aristotelian philosophers in the 10th century. We covered this group back in episode 128 of the podcast. They represent an early peak for philosophical activity among Christians in the Islamic world, and provide us with a reminder that serious interest in philosophy was compatible with serious interest in theology. The last member of the Baghdad school Ibn Atayeb devoted himself to both Aristotle and his own faith, writing logical commentaries and a massive commentary on the Bible. As for Ibn Adi, he wrote not only that response to Akindi, but several more treatises in defense of the Trinity. You may also remember that the Christian founder of the school, Abu Bishr Matan, was humiliated in a public debate with a Muslim linguist who argued for the superiority of Arabic grammar to Greek logic. This was, among other things, a proxy debate, inter-religious disputation transposed to the context of an argument about language, as is clear from the fact that the grammarian mocks Abu Bishr for his belief in the Trinity. Which brings us to the question, what is the difference between medieval Christians and myotonic or fainting goats? I highly recommend looking them up online. Answer, the Christians were not going to take this aggression lying down. The tradition of apologetic writing inaugurated by Patriarch Timothy would continue throughout the classical period of Islam and beyond. An excellent example from about the same time as Timothy is provided by Abu Ra'ita, a Miaphysite theologian from the Iraqi city of Tikrit. He proposes to defend his own religion on rational grounds, presupposing that his opponents, the Muslims, whom he calls the people of the south, ought to be reasonable enough to accept valid demonstrations. To explain the Trinity, he offers analogies like those given by Timothy, while also admitting that such analogies can never be really adequate. The unity of the persons is like the mingled light of three lamps. He also deploys the tools of Greek logic, suggesting that the one god relates to the three persons as a species relates to its individuals. Three fainting goats will, despite sharing a species, differ in specifying characteristics, like the pattern on their fur or how loud an alarming sound needs to be before they topple over and pass out. Like I say, look them up online. In much the same way, the persons are distinguished by properties, yet agree in being divine. The species functions here as the substance, a line of thought we already found in John of Damascus. Usually, Christian philosophy in the medieval Middle East is reduced to the sort of figure I've discussed so far, translators and the members of the Baghdad school. But this is to forget two remarkable cultural developments that occurred somewhat later. First, a blossoming of scholarship in the city of Antioch. It temporarily fell under Byzantine control beginning in the year 969, creating the conditions for a further transmission of knowledge across linguistic barriers. Works were translated from Greek into Arabic, Georgian and Armenian, and the productions of Antioch were later used by Coptic Christians in Egypt and rendered into Ethiopic. One figure worth mentioning here is Abdallah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki. Alongside his works as a translator, al-Antaki wrote another defense of the Trinity echoing the way that Abu Ra'ita used Aristotelian logic. Again, the persons are described as individuals with distinguishing properties and the godhead itself can be understood as a kind of universal. That might surprise a faithful Aristotelian, since Aristotle tends to see universals as in some sense less real than individuals. And the Christians obviously don't want to say that God is less real than the persons. Al-Antaki is presumably following a more Platonist line of thought, according to which universals are indeed fully real, more genuine cases of being than their individual participants. A second cultural development unfolds from the 11th to the 14th centuries or so. It has been called the Syriac Renaissance. This too is something modern scholars tend to ignore. They often think of philosophy in Syriac, if they think of it at all, as a minor transitional phase between the more celebrated philosophical literature written in Greek and Arabic. But if you were going to name the most significant philosopher to write in Syriac, you might plausibly choose a relatively late author whose name was Gregory Abulfaraj Bar-Hebroyo. You'll be glad to know he's usually known in English by the more memorable name Bar-Hebraeus. He was a well-travelled man who spent time in Aleppo, Baghdad, and most importantly, Maragh, site of a famous observatory erected by the newly arrived Mongol regime. Here, Bar-Hebraeus would have come into contact with the circle gathered around the Evasenan philosopher and astronomer Atuzy. As a result, Bar-Hebraeus was able to draw extensively on philosophical works by Muslims, which he gathered together in encyclopedic treatises of his own written in Syriac. Note that this was in the middle of the 13th century, so not long after some of these same works were being received by Christians in Latin over in Western Europe. Particularly important for Bar-Hebraeus, just as for the Latin schoolmen, was Avicenna. For his most important work, called The Cream of Wisdom, Bar-Hebraeus follows the model of the healing, Avicenna's masterpiece, though he uses many other authors too. Especially for topics like ethics and politics, where Avicenna was less central, he drew on other authors like Atuzy. Bar-Hebraeus freely admitted the need to make use of Muslim scholarship. As he ruefully admitted, we, from whom the Muslims have acquired wisdom through translators, all of whom were Syrians, find ourselves compelled to ask them for wisdom. This brings us to another way that philosophical learning was important for interreligious rivalry. Such expertise was recognized as a sign of cultural superiority. Back in the 9th century, the polymath Al-Jahis acidly remarked that, On the other side of the border, there was understandably not much willingness to concede that the Muslims were outdoing the Greek Christians in mastery of Greek science. But occasionally we find acknowledgement of the achievements being made in the Islamic world. Simeon Seth, who died in the early 12th century, pointed out that much could be learned from consulting the literature of the Muslims, Persians, and Indians. Simeon translated texts from Arabic into Greek, adding to our sense that in this period pretty much every language of scholarship was being translated into pretty much every other language. He himself was an expert on astronomy and medicine, and followed his own advice when it came to learning from the Muslims. We'll be seeing how he did that soon when we look at the works of Simeon and other Byzantine intellectuals who wrote on the sciences. But before we get to that, we're going to stay with the interrelation of Islam and Byzantium, as I'm joined by one of the most accomplished historians to have written on the topic, Judith Heron. She'll be our guest on the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.