EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 129and eventually Muslims too, often did when they got together, or encoun-
tered worshippers of the old gods—was based on Aristotle’s logical works,
the group of treatises known as his Organon, or Instrument. The First Millen-
nium was chiefly remarkable for its generation of a Greek philosophical syn-
thesis plus mature versions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Much of this
was done in the language of Aristotle. Hence the present sketch of how inter-
est in Aristotle evolved across the whole of this extended period.^5
By highlighting Aristotle it may be felt that I give short shrift to Helle-
nism more generally. The expected comparison for Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam would be the whole of Greek philosophy, not just one representa-
tive. Nevertheless Aristotle was seen, as David bar Paulos puts it in the epi-
graph to this chapter, as having formulated “entire wisdom... making phi-
losophy a single body.” Not only was his doctrine deemed, as we shall see,
compatible with that of his main competitor, but even the works of a late
Platonist such as Plotinus (d. 270) might be circulated, at least in Arabic, as
Aristotle’s. Furthermore, emphasis on Aristotle has an expository advantage
in a brief survey, in that it provides a single representative for a tradition that
possessed powerful individual thinkers and schools, but no body of doctrine
enshrined in scriptures comparable to those of the monotheist religions. It
was a way of thinking, not a system of thought.^6 But since in Aristotle’s mind
it did prove susceptible to a degree of synthesis and systematization, he is the
best choice to represent it, indeed “the most prominent (mubarriz) of the
Greeks”^7 —also because his philosophy helped articulate Christian and Mus-
lim thought too.
Greek Aristotelianism
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE and died in 322. His relationship with Plato,
his teaching career at the Lyceum in Athens, his tutoring the youthful Alex-
ander, and his immense, innovative corpus of writings all guaranteed posthu-
mous fame. The prophetic impetus both he and Plato gave philosophy led to
major new developments in their own schools, such as Academic Skepticism,
and to the emergence of new schools whether related (Stoicism) or reactive
(Epicureanism). But around the start of the first century BCE a need was felt
for a return to the sources, a canonization of classical masters such as had al-
5 Surveys of ancient Greek and Latin Aristotelianism in the same (collaborative) volume are not
unknown, e.g., R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle transformed (London 1990). On the Categories (only) in Greek,
Latin, and Arabic, see O. Bruun and L. Corti (eds), Les Catégories et leur histoire (Paris 2005). The Syriac
and Armenian traditions are just starting to be incorporated: see below, pp. 140–46.
6 Cf. the parallel observations of A. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium (Cambridge 2007) 390.
7 Al- Kindī, Letters [ed. M. ʿA. H. Abū Rīda, Al- Kindī: Rasāʾil al- falsafīya (Cairo 1950–53)]
1.103.