152 | CHAPTER 5
ence—on the body, the intellect, the soul—and on the quadrivium, i.e.
on arithmetic,... geometry,... astronomy,... and music.... The sci-
ences continued to be in great demand and intensely cultivated...
until the religion of Christianity appeared among the Romans. They
then effaced the signs of philosophy, eliminated its traces, destroyed its
paths, and changed and corrupted what the ancient Greeks had set
forth in clear expositions.^118
Jāhiz, Masʿūdī, and Fārābī too, up to a point, see the coming of Christian-
ity as marking a change for the worse in human culture, at the very least a
narrowing of interests, while the coming of Islam is a return to a more ele-
vated culture that had been lost sight of. We know that the Muslim writers’
schematic contrast between Greece and Christian Rome is a misrepresenta-
tion of history, because the Greek heritage went on developing under Rome:
if late antique studies have taught us anything, this is it. Philosophy in par-
ticular reached its most sophisticated form in already substantially Chris-
tianized fifth- and sixth- century Alexandria. Likewise, Masʿūdī’s contrasted
picture of East Rome and Caliphate is inspired more by religious animus
than any serious assessment of their relative cultural standing. ( Jāhiz at least
admits the East Romans’ superiority in art and architecture, and competence
in arithmetic, astrolog y and calligraphy.) What we are dealing with is po-
lemic not history, aimed at those in the Islamic world who rejected the learn-
ing of the Greeks. But whether Muslim civilization is read as developing—at
least in part—from Christian civilization, or returning to the earlier Greek
model from which Christian Rome had strayed, the First Millennium is still
the chronological framework appealed to, since—as Masʿūdī recognizes—
Hellenism had continued to be the dominant culture at the beginning of the
Roman Empire.
Several of the points I have just touched on are resumed, and a transition
to the world of the Arabic translators effected, in the person of Theodore
Abū Qurra (c. 755–c. 830), a Syrian Christian who served as Chalcedonian
bishop of Harrān.^119 Theodore’s theological writings place him in the tradi-
tion of John of Damascus, who constructed what was to remain the only
comprehensive statement of Chalcedonian—in other words Greek Ortho-
dox—doctrine using basic concepts of Aristotelian logic compiled from the
Isagoge and the Categories mediated through their late Alexandrian commen-
tators.^120 John proves that, at a low level, Greek as well as Syriac Aristotelian-
ism was alive on Muslim territory up to the eve of the first Arabic transla-
tions. As for Theodore, he was familiar with both Aristotle and late Greek
philosophy. He translated into Arabic a compendium of ps.- Aristotelian
118 Al- Masʿūdī, Meadows of gold [4:22] 741 (tr. Gutas, Greek thought [5:92] 89).
119 S. H. Griffith, The Church in the shadow of the Mosque (Princeton 2008) 60–61.
120 A. Louth, St John Damascene (Oxford 2002) 40–44.