of the Neoplatonic Aristotle. It was not only the Muslims until 1150, and the
Christians prior to the upsurge of Averroism at Paris around 1260, who forced
Aristotle into idealist garb. One can ask how Aristotle got into this mode in
the first place. This question has nothing to do with the transmission of texts.
These were continuously available in the eastern Greek world from 50 b.c.e.
on. We have seen in Chapter 3 how Aristoteleanism was gradually submerged
before the dominance of the Middle Platonist schools, and the materialist side
of the field had been preempted by the Epicureans. Aristoteleanism became
part of an eclectic middle ground of pagan religious politics. With the growing
power of Christianity, it became fused into the Neoplatonic pagan coalition
that huddled together for strength against its external enemies. After the fall
of the Roman Empire, none of the subsequent regimes was very favorable to
philosophy as an alternative to scriptural theology. In Islam the balance of
power was strongly on the side of the theologians. Under the law of small
numbers, this implies that the theological thinkers had more space to develop
oppositional schools than the secular philosophers, who had to maintain a
coalition of defense; hence the continuation of the Neoplatonic fortress men-
tality. Possibly something like this also applies to philosophy in Byzantium,
where little innovation is evident, and the more assertive philosophers such as
Michael Psellos and Eustratios (in the generations just before and after 1100)
were condemned by the authorities for intruding on theology (EP, 1967:
1:436–439). What is to the point is that, although Islamic scholars at the time
of the Baghdad House of Wisdom (including Hunayn, Qusta ibn Luqa, and
later al-Farabi; DSB, 1981: 4:523, 11:244, 15:230) visited Constantinople in
search of texts, as did European Christian scholars in the mid-1100s (DSB,
1981: 1:270), none of them got anything which challenged the prevailing view
of Aristotle.
The Neoplatonist Aristotle was already a fait accompli when Aristotle was
transmitted into the Arab world. The acceptance of this interpretation was no
foregone conclusion, given the availability of all the important original texts
and the dynamism of the Islamic intellectual community. The law of small
numbers suggests that the idea-importing faction in Islam had to maintain its
unity, a coalition of the weak against the attacks of the nativist theologians.
If this is correct, we should expect the basis of the entire intellectual field to
look different in Spain at the time when Averroës broke up the Neoplatonist
coalition.The Hinge of the Hinge: Realignment in Jewish Philosophy
The Jews formed the hinge of intellectual development in Spain, and they
underwent a crucial shift in their relationship to their host communities at just
the time of the Spanish creativeness in philosophy.^23432 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths