Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

126 | CHAPTER 4 probable that Edessene Christian traders implanted their faith on the Mala- bar coast where it flourishes to thi ...

5 EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 ARISTOTELIANISM Above all the Greeks is the wise Porphyry held in honour, the master of all sciences, af ...

128 | CHAPTER 5 society creative or destructive. Our First Millennium begins with Augustus as well as Christ, and any account of ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 129 and eventually Muslims too, often did when they got together, or encoun- tered worshippers of the ol ...

130 | CHAPTER 5 ready occurred in literary studies, and a fresh engagement with the texts of Plato and Aristotle themselves.^8 A ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 131 Since Cicero (d. 43 BCE), who pretended to considerable knowledge of Peripateticism, does not mentio ...

132 | CHAPTER 5 in particular, is concentrated in them.”^17 An eminent twentieth- century stu- dent of Plotinus added that his o ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 133 One might put it another way: that Aristotle conveyed the “lesser mysteries,” which opened the way t ...

134 | CHAPTER 5 Though Plato, not Aristotle, had the last word in theolog y, the over- whelming bulk of the philosophical litera ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 135 attacked, as by the Christian John Philoponus (d. 570) in his On the eternity of the world against A ...

136 | CHAPTER 5 orientation, shared by learned exponents and systematizers of all these First Millennium traditions of thought, ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 137 on each other as well as their pagan critics. The teachings of Arius of Alexan- dria (d. 336) had a ...

138 | CHAPTER 5 supporters and opponents of Chalcedon mired themselves in Aristotelian logic and syllogistic and churned out col ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 139 Qurʾān was vouchsafed, and whose divisions it vigorously condemned (below, p. 188). Aristotle in Lat ...

140 | CHAPTER 5 scholia, perhaps on the Physics. Among Boethius’s motives for undertaking this project was his reverence for bot ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 141 possibly himself an Armenian.^64 These translations tended, like Boethius’s, toward the literal, ful ...

142 | CHAPTER 5 (d. 536) emphasized how Aristotle was the first to unite the scattered do- mains of human knowledge into a coher ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 143 Whatever these modalities of Christian response to Aristotle, it was the Church that mainly patroniz ...

144 | CHAPTER 5 But apart from (1) the difficulty of modal logic, which had caused it to be skirted by many Greek and Latin stud ...

EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 145 teries made up of individuals who may never proceed to the “greater myster- ies” but even so—to quot ...