140 | CHAPTER 5
scholia, perhaps on the Physics. Among Boethius’s motives for undertaking
this project was his reverence for both Plato and Aristotle, and his wish to
demonstrate their harmony in line with the teachings of Porphyry, for whom
likewise he nourished the greatest respect. At the same time he was a Chris-
tian much involved in Church affairs. And while Aristotle was all too often
set to work by Christian thinkers in the course of party strife, Boethius was
convinced, to quote a scholar well versed in ecumenical negotiation,
that a number of divisive problems in ecclesiastical communion are
created simply by a fog of linguistic confusions. Among logicians he is
one of that rare species who hopes, by drawing distinctions and looking
for clear classification, to reconcile rather than to separate.^59In particular he set out to demonstrate, in the fifth of his theological trac-
tates, how Chalcedonian Christolog y holds the via media between two-
nature “Nestorianism” and the miaphysite view that Christ is one nature as
well as one person.
For at least six centuries, Boethius’s carefully literal versions, made with
almost religious respect for the originals, served as the Latin world’s sole di-
rect access to the Stagirite’s fundamental contribution to logic, and therefore
theolog y. After the Lombard invasion of Italy in 568 there was little margin
for learned leisure. Philosophy was not entirely done for in the Latin world—
its orderly habits of thought still underlay the encyclopedism of Isidore of
Seville (d. 636).^60 But where Boethius drew intellectual energ y from Alexan-
dria, while his far longer- lived contemporary and fellow- senatorial Cassio-
dorus (d. c. 580) aspired to upgrade the Christian schools of Rome on the
model of the schools of Alexandria and Nisibis,^61 in the following genera-
tions it was only in the East that philosophy was still cultivated outside its
Greek homelands—in Syria as we shall shortly see, but also in Armenia. Even
here, though, philosophy meant, in practice, almost exclusively the Orga-
non—in other words, it provided no more than the basic tools for thinking
with.
The Categories were, it seems, already translated into Armenian in the fifth
c entur y.^62 There followed, apparently in the later sixth or seventh century,^63
various other Aristotelian translations, including commentaries by one or
other of the two similar and sometimes hard- to- distinguish Alexandrian
philosophers and pupils of Olympiodorus (d. after 565), namely Elias (fl.
mid- sixth century) and David (fl. second half of sixth century), the latter
59 Chadwick, Boethius [5:42] 190, and the pages following, on the fifth theological tractate.
60 J. Fontaine, “Isidore de Séville,” D PA 3.879–90.
61 Cassiodorus, Institutions [ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford 1937); tr. L. W. Jones, An introduction to
divine and human readings (New york 1946)] 1.pref.1.
62 R. Bodéüs (ed.), Aristote [Catégories] (Paris 2001) CLVII.
63 A. Terian, “The Hellenizing school,” in N. G. Garsoïan and others (eds), East of Byzantium
(Washington, D.C. 1982) 178–83; Inglebert, Interpretatio Christiana [3:31] 567 n. 30.