Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

(Michael S) #1
EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 145

teries made up of individuals who may never proceed to the “greater myster-
ies” but even so—to quote Wittrock once more—“bring about changes in
the world... ma[k]e new forms of institutions and practices.”
Sergius, Severus, and Jacob all had a vision of how Greek learning might
inform and nourish a Christian worldview that extended far beyond logic
and Christolog y to embrace not only theolog y but the whole material world
through study of physics, cosmolog y, and also medicine. We glimpse more of
this vision in a unique Syriac manuscript, British Library Add. 14658.^85 This
is a seventh- century collection of mainly philosophical texts covering espe-
cially cosmolog y, rhetoric and logic by drawing on such as “Plato,” Alexander
of Aphrodisias and Porphyry, but also the Categories and works falsely at-
tributed to Aristotle (“pseudo- Aristotle”)—notably, in the latter case, Ser-
gius of Reshʿaina’s translation of On the universe. There seems to be some-
thing here of Sergius’s aspiration to make coherent the scattered domains of
human knowledge and bring them together into a single whole, with Aristot-
le’s aid. On the universe even assigns Aristotle the doctrine of a transcendent
God. It has been suggested that this collection reflects the enduring influence
of Sergius’s interest in the cosmological and astrological teachings of the third-
century Edessene thinker Bardaisan—in other words of a rational and natural-
philosophy approach to reality, allied with Christian faith. No doubt it was
this strand of “free- thinking” that got Sergius labeled an “Origenist”—too
intellectual/speculative/Alexandrian, not a simple ascetic Christian. His taste
for Ps.- Dionysius cannot have helped. Exegetical traditions disseminated phil-
osophical ideas in society at large, but nothing obliged society to like them.
We also detect here symptoms of what we have seen is a recurring feature
of sixth- to seventh- century intellectual life, namely its encyclopedism. This
is a Renaissance term used here in the loose sense—the only one applicable
to premodern times—of collecting or anthologizing and maybe organizing
too, even if only alphabetically, in a single work or collection of works, mate-
rials either possessed of general interest or focused on a theme, but not neces-
sarily achieving or even aiming at comprehensive or systematic coverage.^86 In
Armenia Ananias of Shirak had a similar vision and put it into practice. In
the Latin world there was Boethius and then Isidore of Seville, whose Ety-
mologies served as the basic encyclopedia of useful knowledge for centuries
to come throughout the West, and thanks to which Isidore is the patron saint
of the internet.
None of these men was in a position to engage with the entire range of
Aristotle’s research, though Boethius at least dreamed of translating the


85 D. King, “Origenism in sixth century Syria,” in Fürst (ed.), Origenes [5:78] 179–212.
86 See the debate about the usefulness of the term “encyclopedism” among P. Schreiner, P. Odorico,
and P. Magdalino in P. van Deun and C. Macé (eds), Encyclopedic trends in Byzantium? (Leuven 2011)
3–25, 89–107, 143–59.

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