VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 211about which it was possible to reach consensus (as much as philosophers ever
had).^54 To glance briefly at the last of these, perhaps the worst sticking point
between philosophers and scripturalists:^55 In the Timaeus, Plato had main-
tained that the world came to be in time. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle as-
serted the eternity of motion—and by implication of what moves. But in
those days none thought the whole universe contingent. Among philoso-
phers called on to face this Jewish and Christian notion, Proclus stood out
for his insistence on the eternity of matter (which, following the principle of
harmonization, he also read into the Timaeus). John Philoponus argued the
Christian case—philosophically, though—against both him and Aristotle,
and eventually, in Arabic translation, armed Muslim creationists too, notably
Kindī—a student of Aristotle, but on this point perhaps concerned to un-
derline the transcendent power of God and therefore the createdness of the
Qurʾān, to which his caliphal patrons were committed. Such deference to
scripture was not repeated, on this matter, by Fārābī or Ibn Sīnā, who saw the
natural world as timeless and immutable (for nonbeing is an absurdity),
while asserting its ultimate dependence on a causative divine act, emanation.
Nor was it what Abū ʿUmar found. Probably he consoled himself among the
mutakallimūn—though it has been shown that they too remained in some
respects dependent on Philoponus, even in attempting to go beyond him
and demonstrate the createdness not just of the universe as we see it, but of
its substrate too, the atoms.^56 Philosophers like Philoponus or Kindī might
choose to defend scriptural doctrines; scripturalists might exploit philo-
sophical arguments. Real life was more often complex like that, than based
on the self- conscious and no doubt temporary swap of faith for logic de-
scribed by Abū ʿUmar. Whatever intellectual consensus was achieved had to
emerge from a centuries- long accumulation of commentary and dialogue/
polemic, to which the Organon was merely accessory (chapter 6). We see this
nowhere more clearly than in the synthesis of kalām, philosophy, and Sufism
eventually offered by Ghazālī (noted at the end of chapter 5).
The tenth century—in Baghdad, but elsewhere in the Islamic Common-
wealth too, especially the East—saw a synthesis of ancient and modern
54 See, e.g., Adamson, Al- Kindī [5:148] 75–105; and the correspondence on problems in a range
of Aristotle’s writings between the Baghdadi Christian philosopher yahyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974) and the Jew
Ibn Abī Saʿīd, without any reference to their confessional allegiances even when discussing Providence: S.
Pines, “A tenth century philosophical correspondence,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish
Research 24 (1955) 103–36.
55 M. Terrier, “De l’éternité ou de la nouveauté du monde: Parcours d’un problème philosophique
d’Athènes à Ispahan,” Journal asiatique 299 (2011) 369–421. On Philoponus’s originality see R. Sorabji,
“Waiting for Philoponus,” in R. Hansberger and others (eds), Medieval Arabic thought (London 2012),
esp. 195–96.
56 H. A. Davidson, “John Philoponus as a source of medieval Islamic and Jewish proofs of cre-
ation,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89 (1969) 357–91.