146 | CHAPTER 5
whole corpus (and Plato!). The father of encyclopedism, the catalogue of
whose works served as a general classification of human knowledge,^87 re-
mained a distant, awesome figure. yet the encyclopedic ideal itself was em-
braced, perhaps because there was a widespread sense that civilization, learn-
ing and “orthodoxy” were threatened, while the new Christian dispensation
imposed a revision of how inherited ancient knowledge was presented. Bo-
ethius belonged to the first generation of Catholic Christians who had only
ever known Arian Ostrogothic rule, and saw how easily his world might lose
touch with the Greek East. Isidore’s family had fled North Africa and been
forced to live as a Catholic under Arian Visigothic rule, at least until King
Reccared’s conversion to Catholicism in 589. He looked back to the example
of Varro (d. 27 BCE), who had propounded another vastly influential ency-
clopedia at a time of civil strife and incipient Augustan transition. Both men
felt a vocation to undertake an intellectual and moral renewal of Romanitas
under a new monarchy, in Isidore’s case that of the learned and Catholic Sise-
but, who commissioned his Etymologies.^88 As for Ananias, he lived through
the rise of Islam and the first Arab assaults on Armenia.
It is an open question whether Boethius, Isidore, and Ananias, who exer-
cised literary influence but lacked posterity in the sense of imitators, self-
consciously aspired to “build up local Christendoms” in competition with
East Rome.^89 But they were certainly aware—as had been Eusebius—of the
need to reformulate the encyclopedia for the needs of Christian societies
under extraordinary pressures. And what underlay and made possible this
whole effort was the Alexandrian philosophical curriculum, above all the or-
ganizing and logical genius of Aristotle.
Alexandria to Baghdad
That there was something exceptional about the Syriac strand in all this, I
have already suggested. In assessing the Syriac philosophical achievement we
must bear in mind its direct contribution to the emergence of Muslim civili-
zation. Given the familiarity with Syriac Christian language and arguably
literature manifest in the Qurʾān,^90 and its animadversions on Christian dis-
87 Cf. D. Gutas, “The Greek and Persian background of early Arabic encyclopedism,” in G. Endress
(ed.), Organizing knowledge (Leiden 2006) 91–96. Encyclopedism is deemed a Roman not Greek inven-
tion, but so too was the Aristotelianism we are here concerned with, and which conveniently appeared at
Rome just as the encyclopedic habit was catching on: T. Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural history: The
empire in the encyclopedia (Oxford 2004) 13, 194–97.
88 Fontaine, D PA [5:60] 3.882–83, 885, 887–89.
89 P. Brown, The rise of Western Christendom (Malden, Mass. 2003) 365.
90 See, e.g., S. Griffith, “Christian lore and the Arabic Qurʾān,” in Reynolds (ed.), Qurʾān in its
historical context [1:31] 109–16, 131.