Download PDF | Peter Adamson - Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy-Oxford University Press (2022).
508 Pages
PREFACE
I t’s always nice when you’re forced to do something, and then discover that you should have done it anyway. That’s more or less what happened with this book. Having covered two traditions of medieval thought in previous installments of the series, those of the Islamic world and Latin Christendom, there was Byzantium still to tackle. I am giving Byzantine philosophy (much) more coverage than you might have expected: many general histories of philosophy cover it fleetingly, or not at all. Nonetheless, I knew it would not give me enough material for a volume comparable in size to others in the series.
So just for pragmatic reasons, it seemed unavoidable to combine it with the next topic, philosophy in the Italian Renaissance. Happily, it turns out that this makes a huge amount of sense in intellectual terms, to an extent that I myself did not fully appreciate when I first embarked on this part of the project. Any overview of either culture will inform you about the links between Byzantium and Renaissance Italy, explaining how an influx of manuscripts and scholars from the Greek East helped to trigger Italian humanism. But treating the two philosophical traditions together in one volume, as I will do here—and as no other book has ever done, as far as I know—reveals a much stronger degree of continuity.
There is a single story of humanist achievement that stretches from early Byzantine collectors like Photius (or even from late antiquity, if one thinks of figures like the commentator Simplicius) all the way to the late fifteenth century, when Ficino rendered Plato’s dialogues into Latin, and early printed editions made Greek texts available as never before. Nor did the influence travel in just one direction, given that Latin scholasticism also influenced Byzantine thought (see Chapter 19). When we divide up the history of philosophy, we tend to overestimate the relevance of language barriers. In this case it is easy to assume that there must have been a sharp divide between philosophy written in the Greek East and the Latin West. But in fact there was extensive overlap between the values, interests, and preoccupations of Byzantine and Renaissance philosophers, just as there was between the concerns of late ancient thinkers who wrote in Greek and philosophers who wrote in Syriac and Arabic.
One way that I’ve tried to bring this out is by exploring certain issues in both contexts, for example gender (Chapters 12, 29–30), economic theory (Chapters 13, 43), mathematics (Chapters 17, 48), rhetoric (Chapters 9, 24–5), and history writing (Chapters 10, 41). Some of the same sources will also come up in both halves of the book. This applies to Aristotle and Plato, of course, but also Averroes (Chapters 20, 46), Plotinus and Proclus (Chapters 6–7, 31–3), and the ancient commentators on Aristotle (Chapters 11, 44–7). To understand both traditions, we will also need to familiarize ourselves with the changing technology for the preservation and transmission of texts (Chapters 14, 45). All of which is not to minimize the distinctive nature of Byzantine philosophy, on the one hand, and Italian Renaissance philosophy, on the other.
Several factors combine to give Byzantium its special character. If pressed, I would name above all: the centrality of Constantinople as a seat of “Roman” power (however diminished); continuity of language and textual transmission from ancient Greek culture; the concerns of Orthodox Christianity; and the direct challenge posed by neighboring polities, especially those that were in Muslim hands. Thanks to these features of Byzantine society, we’ll be seeing monarchial political theories in Byzantium (Chapter 8) that contrast starkly with the republicanism of medieval and Renaissance Italy (Chapters 38–40). Iconoclasm and Hesychasm are unique to Byzantium, both of them much discussed by historians but routinely underestimated in terms of their philosophical interest (Chapters 3, 18).
Then there is the fact that Greek Christianity in the Near East went beyond the borders of the Byzantine empire, and also existed in the lands of Islam (Chapters 2, 16). As for the Renaissance, I need not belabor its singularity as a transformative period in the history of European thought. But, aside from the epochal contributions of figures like Bruni, Ficino, and Machiavelli, I might note that Italian philosophy in the sixteenth century will already give us a foretaste of what is to come in the seventeenth, thanks to the empiricist anti-Aristotelianism of Telesio and of course the revolutionary ideas of Bruno and Galileo (Chapters 51, 53–4). I have stretched past the chronological boundary of 1600 to include some of these figures, especially Campanella, whose works were well paired with Telesio in natural philosophy, and with earlier utopian treatises written in Italy (Chapter 42).
This would be a good moment to admit that the title of this volume is both misleadingly narrow and misleadingly broad. Narrow, in that it speaks of “Byzantine” philosophy. In fact, as just mentioned, we will venture outside the confines of Byzantium and the Orthodox tradition, to consider Near Eastern Christian thought more broadly. Also, I will not end the story with the fall of Constantinople, but give you a quick survey of philosophy in Eastern Greek culture all the way down to the twentieth century (Chapter 21). As for “Renaissance” philosophy, that term arguably promises more than I will be offering, in this book at least. As I’ve already noted a few times, the second part of this volume is only going to deal with the Italian Renaissance.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and the British Isles produced philologists to match anyone Italy had to offer, like Erasmus and Isaac Casaubon. In the same period, the Protestant Reformation was unfolding, with its untold significance for European history including the history of philosophy. This then provoked a religious and cultural backlash in southern Europe, sometimes called the “Counter-Reformation,” though not all historians like this term. That was the context for, among other things, exciting developments in scholasticism in the Iberian peninsula. In fact, the story of philosophy in these centuries outside Italy is so rich and diverse that it is going to need a book of its own. More accurate, then, would have been to call this volume “Philosophy in Byzantium, Near Eastern Christianity, and the Italian Renaissance,” while the title of a further planned volume should be something like “Philosophy in the Northern Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation.” But faced with a choice between snappy book titles and strictly accurate ones, I have to admit that I found the choice pretty easy, and am thus using the labels “Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy” and “Philosophy in the Reformation.” More difficult was the decision of where to place certain figures who cross the Italian/non-Italian divide.
Two prominent cases are Nicholas of Cusa, who was from Germany but spent time in Italy and was strongly influenced by the humanist climate there, and Christine de Pizan, who conversely was from Italy but lived and wrote in France. I have postponed Nicholas until the next book, in hopes of enriching my portrayal of German philosophical culture in the fifteenth century, while Christine is covered here, since her works resonate so well with those of the female Italian humanists (Chapters 28–30). A related problem is that, occasionally, developments outside Italy had a major impact on philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. That applies especially to the printing press, whose impact on all European thought was immense. In Italy this technology arrived in 1465. While I will touch on its impact here (especially in Chapter 45), a fuller discussion of print culture is reserved for the volume on the Reformation, since this invention played such an important role in the dissemination of ideas from Luther, Calvin, and other reformers.
Texts written elsewhere in Europe will occasionally enter our story too, notably with the case of Thomas More’s Utopia (Chapter 42). Finally, it almost goes without saying that the astronomical theories of Copernicus made an impression on Italian scientists, especially Galileo (Chapter 54). This gives us another foretaste of the seventeenth century, when I’ll often find it necessary to refer to the influence exercised by thinkers who haven’t yet been properly covered in the book series, because of the way that texts and ideas passed from one part of Europe to another. But since the seventeenth century is two volumes away still (assuming I even get that far), let’s not worry about that yet. We have plenty to keep us busy, starting with the question of why the Roman empire didn’t fall until 1453.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like other volumes of this series, this book has benefited at every stage of its development from expert advice. This began with input from several colleagues on my initial list of topics to cover, and ended with extremely helpful feedback on the final manuscript from Michele Trizio, Cecilia Muratori, and Melina Vogiatzi. For suggestions, corrections, and encouragement, I would like to thank both of them as well as Lela Alexidze, Charles Burnett, Börje Bydén, Thony Christie, Brian Copenhaver, Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, Christophe Erismann, Guido Giglioni, Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Judith Herrin, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Giorgi Kapriev, George Karamanolis, Jill Kraye, David Lines, Andrew Louth, Dominic O’Meara, Robert Pasnau, Oliver Primavesi, Denis Robichaud, Ingrid Rowland, Quentin Skinner, Okihito Utamura, and Dimitris Vasilakis. Many of these scholars also kindly agreed to be interviewed for the podcast series, and I highly recommend listening to those episodes as a supplement to reading this book.
I am also grateful to Peter Momtchiloff from Oxford University Press for his support of the book series, and Konrad Boeschenstein for preparing the index. The podcast series for the relevant episodes was supported by Jim Black, Julian Rimmer, and Bethany Somma. I could not keep pursuing this series without the love, patience, and support I receive from my family: my wife Ursula, my daughters Sophia and Johanna, my brother Glenn, and my parents Joyce and David. The book is dedicated to two of my biggest fans (and the feeling is mutual): my Aunt Judy and Uncle Fred.
1 THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK INTRODUCTION TO BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY
There almost was no Byzantine philosophy. In fact, there was almost no Byzantine empire, at least not in the sense we usually think of it. If the capital city of Constantinople had fallen to a year-long siege laid by Arab forces from 717 to 718, then we would not bother to speak of “Byzantium” at all but just say that the Eastern Roman empire collapsed somewhat later than the Western empire. And we might well be saying it in Arabic. If it hadn’t been for the Byzantines holding the line against the armies of Islam, those armies would have made their way into Europe.
Probably they would have brought their religion and language into central Europe and perhaps as far as the English Channel and the North Sea, just as they brought it to northern Africa, Spain, and central Asia. That this alternate history did not occur was thanks above all to the fortifications of Constantinople, built generations earlier at the behest of Emperor Theodosius. They surely rank as one of history’s most successful building projects and would be finalists in a “most important ever walls” competition, alongside the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, the Berlin Wall, and an album by Pink Floyd.
The Theodosian Walls would be needed many times, because the Byzantines were surrounded by enemies and not infrequently riven by internal conflict. Here’s a quick overview of historical developments starting in the seventh century or so.1 It was at this time that the Byzantines were confronted with the rise of Islam, a challenge that caught them unprepared—it didn’t help that in the sixth century they’d been weakened by wars of attrition with the Persians and outbreaks of the plague. Following a catastrophic loss at the Battle of the River Yarmuk in 636, the Christians lost the symbolically crucial city of Jerusalem and then vast swathes of territory in Anatolia and the agricultural heartland of Egypt. To make matters worse, there was pressure from the other direction in the form of the Bulgar tribes in Thrace. This sort of thing would continue to be a problem, as Byzantine emperors had to cope with threats on two fronts, the armies of Islam to the south and east and various “barbarian” tribes like the Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Rus to the north and west; not to mention forces from Western Christianity such as the Franks and Normans.
The losses of the seventh century ushered in a period often called the “dark ages” of Byzantium. It’s not a time that will be featuring much in this book, because of the lack of surviving texts. Much as with the seventh and eighth centuries in the Latin West, philosophical activity was evidently sparse in the Greek East. The empire had lost Alexandria, home of so much intellectual endeavor in late antiquity, and other cities where philosophy was pursued, like Gaza. By seizing these urban centers, the Arabs administered a kind of lobotomy to Greek Christendom. Of course there was still Constantinople, which will be the home for most of the developments we’ll be considering under the heading of Byzantine philosophy. But even there, the political upheaval of this early period did not provide an ideal context for scholarship. Some of the upheaval was occasioned by that most famous response to military defeat: iconoclasm. For a full century the Byzantine elite were consumed by the question of whether it was acceptable to venerate icons of Christ and the saints.
The iconoclasts said no. They believed that this was an idolatrous practice for which the empire was being punished. Leo III, the same emperor who had successfully faced down the siege in 718, began the removal of icons in 730, and his policy was carried on with enthusiasm by Constantine V. After decades of iconoclasm, the empress Irene reintroduced the icons, only for them to be banned again from 815 to 843. As we’ll be seeing, philosophical justifications were offered by both iconoclasts and their opponents, the iconophiles. For now we might just note that one outcome of the dispute was the destruction of many texts, because when the iconophiles prevailed they destroyed the works of the iconoclasts. So this is another reason for the relative silence of the historical record leading up to the ninth century. That century is a more important one for us,2 in part because it was at this time that we see changes in book production, making it a landmark era for the dissemination of philosophy and other sciences. Again, we’ll be getting into this in detail later.
But to make a long story short, ninth-century scribes began using a more efficient script and, gradually, the new technology of paper, which had come from China via the Islamic world. Around the same time, the Byzantines were able to recover significantly in political and military terms. Thanks in part to the breathing space afforded by Islamic infighting, especially the disintegration of the Abbasid state in the tenth century, the empire struck back between the years 800 and 1000. It took control of Bulgaria, re-extended its territory towards the west as far as the River Danube, and recovered some of what had been lost to the Muslim armies. By the middle of the eleventh century, the empire included southern Italy, the islands of Crete and Cyprus, mainland Greece, Macedonia, and the region around the Black Sea including all of Anatolia, plus a foothold in what we would call the “middle east” with the city of Antioch.
This isn’t to say that the rulers had a firm grip on all those territories. There was always the danger of raids if not outright warfare across the borders. In many regions within direct Byzantine control that control was actually rather nominal, and some of the areas you’ll see marked on maps as part of the “Byzantine empire” were really buffer states ruled by independent Christian allies, like the Serbs and Armenians. Still, if we generalize and ignore the many individual losses and victories experienced from the ninth to mid-twelfth centuries, we can say that this was the most politically successful period for Byzantium, and hence the time that will get the lion’s share of our attention. In the late twelfth century, though, things started to go wrong. Political infighting at Constantinople was compounded by territorial losses, for instance of Thessalonike at the hands of the Normans. Then disaster truly struck. The farcical fourth crusade brought a Latin Christian army to the gates of Constantinople in 1204.
After a dispute over money, the crusaders managed to get into the great city and ruthlessly sack it, a shocking tragedy in which a Christian army destroyed the greatest of Christian cities. As the historian Judith Herrin has pointed out, some of the negative connotations still evoked by the word “Byzantine”— absurd bureaucratic complexity and a soft, luxurious lifestyle—go back to Western attempts to justify the sack of Constantinople after the fact.3 As with the wars of our own times in places like Iraq and Syria, the obvious violence was accompanied by a more quiet cultural destruction.
There was massive loss of artworks, some spirited back to Latin Christendom, like the four bronze statues of horses that were brought to Venice and used to decorate the church of San Marco. The sack of 1204 was also a tremendous blow to the history of philosophy. It was here, and not in the eventual fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, that we lost the many texts that were known to earlier Byzantine scholars but are no longer preserved today.4 On the political front, the fall of the city ushered in a long period of relative weakness for Byzantium.5 After retrenching to Nicaea, the Eastern Greek Christians managed to retake Constantinople from the Latin Christians in 1261. A new dynasty, the Palaiologoi, would rule there for the better part of two centuries. Then came May 29, 1453, when the Ottomans did what their Muslim predecessors had failed to do in 718: get past those walls and finally put an end to the Roman empire.
That it was still a Roman empire is something worth bearing in mind, as we approach this third tradition of medieval philosophy alongside those in the Islamic world and in Latin Christendom. We tend to think of the Western medievals as the heirs of the Romans, in part precisely because they used Latin. But Greek had always been the dominant language in the Eastern realms under Roman domination, so the inhabitants of those places would have seen no break with antiquity on that score. Nor was there any break in religious terms. Christianity had already become the religion of the empire in late antiquity. As for the idea of a Roman empire not centered in Rome, that too was a development that came well before the fall of the West, never mind the rise of Islam. Even the Muslims called the Eastern Greek Christians the “Romans”: a rare point of agreement between the two sides, since the Greek Christians too thought of themselves as Romans. So in this volume we are really just circling back to where we left things in late antiquity with the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor, and carrying on the story of “Roman” philosophy written in Greek.6 Suppose, though, that there had been no Byzantine empire, and thus no Byzantine philosophy.
What would we be missing? For starters, pretty much all of ancient philosophy. I will be making a case for the idea that historians of philosophy should be interested in Byzantium in its own right, and not only because its scholars preserved older texts for posterity. But it’s hard to deny that our greatest debt to them lies here. Without the scribes of Constantinople, nearly all ancient Greek literature would be lost, with the sole exception of a few papyrus texts like those found in Egypt or encased within volcanic ash at Herculaneum. We have the original works of Plato and Aristotle, for instance, only thanks to Greek manuscripts of their works that were dispersed across Europe after the fourth crusade. Without such manuscripts our access to Aristotle would be almost only through medieval Arabic translations.
Which would actually be convenient for those of us who are of European descent, since as already noted, if it wasn’t for the Byzantines we might be speaking Arabic anyway. Of course, if all the Byzantines had done was to make copies of older Greek philosophical works, I could pass over them briefly. But they did more: they engaged with the ideas of both pagan and Christian antiquity, carrying on the late ancient practice of writing commentaries, especially on Aristotle. This is something that unifies the three medieval traditions. In tenth-century Baghdad and twelfthcentury Spain, in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Paris and Oxford, and throughout Byzantine history, philosophers busied themselves with the careful exegesis of Aristotle’s works—the difference being that unlike such commentators as al-Faˉraˉbˉı, Averroes, Aquinas, or Buridan, the Byzantine commentators could read him in the original Greek instead of having to use Arabic or Latin translations.
We will see, especially with the group of scholars associated with the princess Anna Komnene in the first half of the twelfth century, that there was even a completist ambition to comment on all the Aristotelian works that had not yet received this treatment in late antiquity. Nor was Aristotle the only non-Christian thinker who was admired by the Byzantines. Also in the twelfth century, a heated dispute broke out between proponents and critics of Proclus, one of the most enthusiastically pagan philosophers of antiquity. Later on, in the fifteenth century, there was another debate about the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, with George Gemistos Plethon asserting the superiority of Platonic philosophy and Bessarion coming to Aristotle’s defense. It may seem surprising that the Eastern Christians were so concerned with the preservation, exposition, and evaluation of these pagan thinkers. But it fits into a wider tendency of the Byzantines to cherish classical culture.
They recognized the value of writings that pre-dated Christianity, in part on aesthetic grounds. As in late antiquity and Latin Christendom, education had at its center the three linguistic arts of the “trivium”—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic—which were supplemented with the four mathematical arts of the “quadrivium.” Youngsters, at least those elite enough to receive such an education, were schooled in Homer and other classical authors, just like students learning Greek today. Late ancient authors such as Galen, the great doctor of the second century AD, had already venerated Attic Greek as a particularly exalted form of the language, and the Byzantines followed suit. A good illustration would be the philological annotations that were added to the plays of the Athenian poet Aristophanes. These were intended to help readers understand and appreciate the archaic language, much like the footnotes that guide the modern-day reader through an edition of Shakespeare. The Byzantines also preserved the works of classical historians, and imitated their example by producing a number of histories about their own times.
The just-mentioned Anna Komnene was one such historian, as was Michael Psellos, one of the thinkers who raised eyebrows with his embrace of pagan Neoplatonism. But of course, the leading preoccupation of Byzantine intellectuals was not pagan philosophy or history. It was the Christian faith. As in the books this series has devoted to the Islamic world and medieval Latin Christendom, we’ll be seeing that philosophically intriguing ideas were often put forward in the context of theological movements and writings. A notable example is the Hesychast movement associated with the fourteenth-century theologian Gregory Palamas. According to Hesychasm, humans cannot grasp God directly but only through His energeiai, or “activities.” You might recognize the term energeia from Aristotelian philosophy, and indeed Palamas’ teaching reaches back to Aristotle by way of the late ancient Cappadocian fathers, who took up the tools of classical philosophy to explain our epistemic access to God (or lack thereof) as well as the divine Trinity.
Of course, it’s a contentious question whether theological doctrines like this should be counted as “philosophy.” For a spirited argument against this idea, one can turn to a chapter in the recently published Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. 7 Its authors Dimitri Gutas and Niketas Siniossoglou would object to the first sentence of this chapter, when I said that there almost was no Byzantine philosophy—because they would strike the “almost.” To quote their exact words: “the Byzantines had no philosophy (or very little of it, in the margins).” For them, the attempts of recent scholars to integrate Byzantium into our histories of philosophy are a case of “political correctness.” Their point is that we should not just grant every culture the compliment of having managed to produce philosophy, and that the Byzantines in particular do not pass the test.
These Christian intellectuals were, with a handful of exceptions, so committed to the superiority of revelation over human reason that they could see pagan learning only as a “dangerous antagonist.” As a result, though some attention was paid to classical philosophy, this was an “ancillary scholarly pursuit” alongside the exposition of religious orthodoxy. They complain that “classroom philosophy” was not allowed to “freely compete with doctrinal, clerical, and ascetic tradition,” and that the scholars of Byzantium “do not show signs of entertaining the possibility that the Hellenic metaphysical, cosmological, and moral outlook might be more true than Orthodox doctrine” (my emphasis). Here they seem to catch themselves realizing that this is implausibly demanding, and concede in parentheses that it would be enough if philosophy was at least conceived as offering “different solutions,” as a kind of independent alternative to Christianity. Of course, even that is raising a pretty high bar for the Byzantines to clear.
For Gutas and Siniossoglou, a given thinker only counts as a philosopher if he or she pursues rational argument wherever it leads, without being constrained by religious dogma. While that might strike you as eminently reasonable, a moment’s reflection shows that it would have some very surprising consequences for our study of the history of philosophy. It would imply that there was also no philosophy at all in Latin medieval Europe, or, to borrow their phrase, only “philosophy in the margins.” It would be found, if at all, then only in the works of confirmed members of the university arts faculties like John Buridan. Just consider Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, or Ockham. They may have been among the greatest philosophical minds in history, yet none were “philosophers” according to this exclusivist definition. Nor by the way was the aforementioned Proclus, who was just as devoted to paganism as Aquinas or your average Byzantine thinker was to Christianity.
What about the Islamic world, where intellectuals were in explicit competition with the Byzantines, and often presented themselves as the true heirs of Hellenic wisdom? As it happens, Gutas is a leading expert in this area. He could point to a small number of outright rationalists like al-Faˉraˉbˉı, Avicenna, and Averroes, and identify them as the true philosophers of the medieval age.
For they were prepared to see human reason as independent from and even in some ways superior to religion. But the fact is that, in Islamic culture and even within the intellectual elite, they were the ones who were “marginal.” Philosophy and rational argumentation in the Islamic world, as in Latin Christendom and Byzantium, was mostly used to buttress and expound the teachings of one or another Abrahamic religion.
This is what we find in such diverse thinkers as the Muslim al-Kindˉı, the Christian Ibn ʿAdˉı, and the Jewish Maimonides, all of them expert readers of Aristotle and deeply committed to the idea that Aristotelian philosophy could be interwoven with sensitive exposition of revealed texts and religious doctrine.8 Gutas and Siniossoglou make an important and valid point in noting that pagan thought was greeted with more unease than enthusiasm among Byzantine churchmen. Yet some theologians would have rejected, or just been puzzled by, the idea that philosophy means using reason independently of faith. Gutas and Siniossoglou themselves quote the early medieval thinker John of Damascus defining philosophy in the following way: it is “love of wisdom, and true wisdom is God; therefore the love of God, this is the true philosophy.”
So in approaching this tradition we do need to recognize that the Hellenic philosophical heritage was much debated, and occasionally outright condemned, by Byzantine theologians; but we don’t want to miss out on the philosophically fruitful ideas that were put forward even by the harshest critics of that heritage. If that is our goal, it seems to me unhelpful to focus on the question of which thinkers should and should not be classified as “philosophers.” After all, the job of the historian of philosophy is not to police the textual traditions of earlier times, discarding any thinkers who might be tainted by theological, mystical, or other ideological concerns. Rather, we should look for and study texts that address perennial philosophical questions, for instance about knowledge, being, human nature, and ethics.
The Byzantines did this when commenting on Aristotle, but they also did it in explicitly religious contexts, when arguing about the nature of God, the sense in which God is accessible to the human mind, the virtues of the monastic life, and so on. Thus I’ll deliberately be taking what Gutas and Siniossoglou would call a “relativist” approach. That is, I will discuss whatever strikes me as philosophically interesting, or rather anything I think will strike you, the reader, as philosophically interesting, rather than restricting my attention to works that would have been seen at the time as falling under the literary genre of “philosophy.
There’s another, more distinctive sense in which the following chapters will cast a broad net. Usually the phrase “Byzantine philosophy” is applied only to the intellectual output of the Greek intellectuals of the empire, who as I’ve said were mostly in Constantinople. But in fact, quite a lot of philosophy was going on elsewhere and in languages other than Greek. I just mentioned John of Damascus, who did write in Greek but lived in the Islamic world, as his name indicates. There was philosophy written in Syriac and Armenian, some of it in that familiar genre of commentary on Aristotle. And there was philosophy in Georgian, notably with the twelfth-century philosopher John Petritsi. In fact, it would be strictly speaking more accurate to say that the first half of this book covers “philosophy in Eastern medieval Christianity.” We’ll kick things off in that spirit by turning first to the reception of Aristotelianism in Syriac and Armenian.
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