John Walbridge - Explaining Away the Greek Gods in Islam

Explaining Away the Greek Gods in Islam

John Walbridge

Journal of the History of Ideas Vol 59 No 3 (Jul 1998) pp 389-403

Stable URL

httplinksjstororgsicisici=0022-50372819980729593A33C3893AEATGGI3E20CO3B2-O

Journal of the History of Ideas is currently published by University of Pennsylvania Press

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use available athttpwwwjstororgabouttermshtml JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe JSTOR archive only for your personal non-commercial use

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work Publisher contact information may be obtained athttpwwwjstororgjournalsupennhtml

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission

The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world The Archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishersand foundations It is an initiative of JSTOR a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology For more information regarding JSTOR please contact supportjstororg

httpwwwjstororgThu Jan 31 173039 2008


John Walbridge

Of the angels newly fallen from heaven Milton tells us

Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names

Men took

Devils to adore for Deities Then were they known to men by various Names And various Idols through the Heathen World

Among the devils worshipped as gods among the ancients were the Olympi- ans

ThIonian Gods of Javans Issue held Gods yet confest later then Heavn and Earth Thir boasted parents Titan Heavns first born With his enormous brood and birthright seisd By younger Saturn he from mightier Jove His own and Rheas Son like measure found So Jove usurping reignd these first in Creet And Ida known thence on the Snowy top Of cold Olympus ruld the middle Air Thir highest Heavn or on the Delphian Cliff Or in Dodona and through all the bounds Of Doric Land

Paradise Lost I 364-65 372-75 508-19

389 Copyright 1998 by Journal of the History of Ideas Inc

390 John Walbridge

Miltons assertion that the Greek gods were demons goes back to the centuries in which those ancient gods slowly yielded to the new and jealous triune God of the Christians Augustine in The City of God does not deny the reality of the old gods but identifies them as dead heroes or as demons The power of the old gods was still manifest to the Christians of antiquity it was their moral worth not their existence that was to be challenged

Such an interpretation is not found in Muslim accounts of the Greek gods For all practical purposes Greek polytheism was entirely dead by the time Is- lam came onto the scene Indeed even Arabian polytheism though still vigor- ous when Muhammad began his prophetic career died out within three de- cades of the proclamation of Islam Pious Muslims might be offended by the icons in Christian churches but the temples of the Greek gods were gone these three centuries or more their statues broken up and their stones stolen to build churches The other forms of polytheism with which Islam came into contact-Zoroastrianism (the most important) Buddhism Hinduism and gnostic religions like Manichaeism and Harranian Sabianism--could rightly be understood as forms of monotheism (or dualism) Only the occasional idol temple in some out-of-the-way place-the shrine of the god Ziin or ZUr in Zarnlndawiir in Afghanistan for example-might illustrate pure idol worship but such in- stitutions were soon destroyed and posed little intellectual challenge Thus by the time highly intellectual forms of Islam came into being in the eighth and ninth centuries there was no real idol-worshipping paganism to oppose De- spite the uncompromising monotheism of Islam polytheism aroused little emotion for the generations of Muslims born after the passing of the Prophets companions Shirkpolytheism went on to have a rich history in Islamic thought but it was idols of the soul not idols carved from stone and wood that stirred the imaginations and fears of serious Muslims

The Muslim contact with Greek polytheism was thus not with living pagans but with literary allusions in Greek philosophical and scientific texts In late antiquity philosophy had been the last bastion of paganism a fortress whose outworks may have been stormed perhaps but whose citadel still held out manned by doughty and commited fighters like Proclus and Simplicius But the fortress had at last fallen and even the ancient philosophers had finally been brought to the baptismal font

The fact that they knew little more than the names of Greek gods was another factor preventing Muslim scholars from taking alarm at Greek polytheism The obvious first question to ask when we examine what Muslims thought of the Greek gods is what they might have known about them How indeed do we know about Greek religion Mostly we know mythology from literature Hesiod Homer Greek drama and manuals of literature and rhetoric None of

C E Bosworih The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (Costa Mesa Calif 1994) 91-93

Greek Gods in Islam 391

these sources were available to Muslims The translators were not interested in literature which they knew resisted translation so even Homer appears in Ara- bic sources as a sage one of a number of authors of wise sayings For us such literary sources are fleshed out by archaeological materials but archaeology was also not understood in the Middle Ages Thus the Greek gods appeared to even the best informed medieval Muslims as little more than names

The most remarkable fact of the treatment of Greek religion in Islamic sources is how seldom the names of the gods even appear Rosenthals anthol- ogy of borrowings from Greek in Islamic sources contains a few references to Zeus but virtually no mention of the other Olympian~~ Only Hermes has any prominence but he is the sage of Egypt not the messenger of Olympus The Muslims did not receive a representative sample of Greek literature for the most part only scientific philosophical and occult works were translated With- out the Greek language and Greek poetry there was no need for manuals of Greek mythology In the works that were translated Neoplatonic quasi-monotheism dominated Specific references to the gods tended to be bowdlerized by the translators most of whom were Christians Gods became God or angels as in the famous example of the Arabic translation of the Hippocratic oath Deified heroes like Asclepius were restored to manhood

An interesting example is found in two translations of commentaries on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras one attributed to Proclus and the other to Iambli~hus~The beginning of the Golden Verses reads as follows in translation from the Greek

Honor the immortal gods first in the order appointed by custom and revere your oath Pay reverence next to the noble heroes and the spirits of the dead by performing the prescribed rites4

Franz Rosenthal The Classical Heritage in Islam (Berkeley 1975) Ibn al-Tayyib Proclus Commentary on the Pythagorean Golden Verses Arabic Text

and Translation ed and tr Neil Linley (Arethusa Monographs 10 np nd) Hans Daiber Neuplatonische Pythagorica in arabischem Gewande Der Kommentar des lamblichus zu den Carmina aurea Ein verlorener griechischer Text in arabischer Uberl iefer~n~ (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademies van Wetenschappen Verhandelingen Afdeling Letterkunde Nieuwe Reeks Dee1 161 Amsterdam 1995) The questions of the authenticity and attribution of these two works are not too important to my argument A cursory reading shows that at least the Proclus commentary certainly is a translation from a pagan source The Ibn al-Tayyib re- sponsible for the version we have was a Nestorian scholar in Iraq who died in 1043 His contribution to the work according to the MS title was in producing an i ~ t i t h ~ rof it which must mean extracts or summary The point is not important for us since the text is clearly a translation The editor of the Iamblichus commentary accepts the view that it is a translation from Greek

Trans Johan C Thom in The Pythagorean Golden Verses With Introduction and Com- mentary (Leiden 1995) 95 cf the translation in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library compiled and translated by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (Grand Rapids 1987) 163

392 John Walbridge

Ibn al-Tayyibs version renders this as God [Allamp] is the first of the immortals to be h~nored~ Soon however the Arabic text drops any pretense of monotheism and unselfconsciously refers to the god (al-ilamp ie Zeus) daimons (sakind) heroes (irliwis) divinization (taalluh) animal sacrifice libations and other pagan theme^^ Even in Arabic the text remains thoroughly pagan The Iamblichus commentary smoothly hides its pagan origins under monotheistic renderings of religious terms The same passage from the Golden Verses reads Venerate those who will not be touched by death They are the angels of God (Allamp tabampaka wa-ta dqand his saints In five lines of Arabic there are at least nine distinctively Islamic religious terms It is true that the Iamblichus translation is more natural Arabic but in translation it has ceased to be a pagan text and has become Islamic

Nonetheless as for Christians like Augustine so too for Muslims who wished to appropriate the heritage of ancient philosophy the intellectual problem still remained of the relation between Greek polytheism and Greek wisdom Was not philosophy tainted by its pagan polytheistic origins If not how could so lofty and divine an enterprise arise outside the system of revelation Such questions point to various areas of investigation the relation of philosophy to religion and of reason to revelation the religious views of the philosophers and how the Greek gods who appeared sometimes in the philosophies of the ancients might be replaced by the one God of Islam Here I wish to examine the ways in which Muslim scholars committed to the appropriation of the ancient heritage and non-Muslim scholars working in Arabic in the Islamic world reinterpreted the Greek gods so as to make them intellectually innocuous I will deal with three major approaches the anthropological comparative mythology of Bifini the interpretation of Greek religion as Sabian star-worship and the discovery of the origins of Greek philosophy in Judaism

Birtini Comparative Mythology

The medieval Muslim writer best informed about the Greek gods was probably al-BifinT-a fact clearly seen oddly enough in his India Bininl refers to various mythological characters casually citing the mythologists (a~hab al-amthd) the well-known histories (al-tawdrikh dl-mashhzira) and the historians (al-muJarrikhEn) as his sources of inforrnati~n~ He explicitly cites the

Ibn al-Tayyib 8 my translation Ibid 10 18 Iamblichus 38 Kitdbfi Tabqrq mmdlil-Hind (Hyderabad 1958) 73 Alberunis India tr Edward C Sachau

(London 1888) I 96 In citations from BiriinT I will use Sachaus translation unless otherwise stated Richard Walzer Al-Biruni and Idolatry in Commkmoration Cyrus Hommage universe1 (Leiden 1974) III3 17-23 See also Majid Fakhry Al-Bimi and Greek Philosophy An Essay in Philosophical Erudition in Hakim Mohammed Said (ed) Al-BinZnl A Commemorative Vol-

393 Greek Gods in Islam

Phainomena of Aratus an epic poem describing the constellations and the myths associated with them9 Whatever his sources were-perhaps Christian-they were not widely known for the outlines of Greek mythology are almost un- known to other authors

His detailed knowledge of Greek mythology imposed on BlriinT the obli- gation to make some sense of it His method is anthropological-comparative mythology-and is governed by three principles that the religious beliefs and practices of the Greeks and the Indians tend to follow similar patterns that a distinction is to be drawn between popular beliefs and the beliefs of the elect and that polytheism is to be explained historically and rationally These principles give his analysis a curiously modem quality This is especially true since his India is the closest thing to a modem ethnography ever attempted by a medieval Muslim scholar These explanations are related but not identical so I will examine each in turn

1) Comparability of the religious beliefs and practices of the Greeks and the Indians In the beginning of the India BTfini writes

I shall place before the reader the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are and I shall mention in connection with them similar theories of the Greeks in order to show the relationship existing between them For the Greek philosophers although aiming at truth in the abstract never in all questions of popular bearing rise much above the customary exo- teric expressions and tenets both of their religion and law Besides Greek ideas we shall only now and then mention those of the SOfis or of some one or other Christian sect I0

His reason for this procedure seems to be both scientific and rhetorical He certainly is interested in comparisons between civilizations His Chronology of Ancient Nations for example is an attempt to bring into systematic relation all the data on calendars available from every people known to him One suspects that he also enjoys flaunting his erudition He is however anxious to combat the prejudice against India and Indian culture that he expects his readers will bring to the book India as he acknowledges in various ways is oftentimes an odd place odd in ways that were and are peculiarly objectionable to Muslims The elaborate mythology of Hinduism with its accompanying iconography and

ume (Karachi 1979) 344-49 repr in Fakhry Philosophy Dogma and the Impact of Greek Thought in Islam (London 1994) sect vii

No Arabic translation of Aratus is known to be extant but one certainly once existed see S E Honigmann The Arabic Translation of Aratus Phaenomena Isis 41 (1950) 30-31 The Sabians of Harran evidently considered Aratus to be a prophet al-Masudi KitEb al- Tanbih wal-IshrcTJ ed M J de Goeje (Leiden 1894) 16l

lo India 7 tr Sachau I 5-6

394 John Walbridge

ritual still strikes many Muslims as a particularly bizarre and irrational polytheism BTriinT an enthusiast for his subject knew well the esoteric sides of Hindu thought but his readers were likely to know Hinduism only through polemical Arabic works and travelers tales The Greeks had a better press and so he found it useful to identify parallels to ideas and beliefs held by the unquestionably civilized Greeks

BlriinTs scientific comparison of Greek and Indian religion seems to have been based on the belief that the Greeks and the Hindus were similar As we can see from the passage quoted above they shared in his view the trait of combining very high levels of scientific and philosophical accomplishment with a particularly anthropomorphic popular religion Their religions were sirni- lar It would be easy to read too much into it but this insight is at the least a canny premonition of the discovery of the Indo-Europeans Certainly he deserves credit for recognizing that the Greeks and Hindus shared something that they did not have in common with the Jews Christians and Muslims

2) The distinction between popular beliefs and the beliefs of the elect As he begins a chapter on the Hindu concept of God BTriinT writes

The belief of the educated and uneducated people differs in every nation for the former strive to conceive abstract ideas and to define general principles whilst the latter do not pass beyond the apprehen- sion of the senses and are content with derived rules without caring for details especially in questions of religion and law regarding which opinions and interests are dividedI2

The philosophical origins of this view can easily be identified in the Platonic political tradition In Islam the notion that the religions of the elect and the common people can and ought to differ is identified with the Platonic political tradition of FampZibT and the Spanish philosophers and with the IsmZiTlTs What- ever its philosophical pedigree it is certainly a fair portrayal of the religious situation in the classical world and in India In both civilizations colorful polytheistic cults thrived side by side with extremely sophisticated philosophical speculation whose authors in turn felt comfortable remaining within the exo- teric religions of their countrymen Once again this is an observation with both scientific and rhetorical implications It allows BTriini to make sense of the gulf between philosophy and popular religion in both cultures and to make the ex- cesses-in Muslim eyes--of Indian religion palatable by distinguishing between high and low religion

3) Polytheism to be explained historically and rationally But where the curious medieval anthropologist might ask did these odd beliefs and cultic

I India 18 tr Sachau I 24-25 l 2 India 20 tr Sachau I 27


practices come from in the first place and in particular what is the source of the belief in multiple gods The answer is apotheosis or divinization taalluh a term that Binini remarks has a particularly unpleasant sound to Muslim ears13 The origins of such cults and beliefs is to be explained in rational terms To be sure he piously states

[I do not compare them] in order to prove their truth for that which is not the truth is heresy and polytheism is a single religion for it is deviation from the truth14

This statement seems to be an effort to deflect accusations of an unhealthy interest in non-Islamic religions for it does not do justice to the complexity of his account of the origins of polytheistic beliefs and practices or even accu- rately represent the view that he presents in the rest of the book Binini gives several slightly different accounts of the origin of polytheism

The first involves the veneration of religious images Ordinary people BTninT observes are much affected by visual images While the learned may be able to conceive the immaterial world in rational terms even ordinary Muslims would venerate a picture of the Prophet were one to be shown to them Thus it is that in certain religions-Judaism Christianity and especially Manichaeism-religious leaders have decorated their temples and scriptures with images and the ordinary people will make little distinction between the reality and the image For this reason statues are made as monuments to venerated individuals such as prophets scholars and angels to keep alive their memory With the passage of time however these statues cease to be memorials and become objects of veneration in themselves The legislators of ancient times understanding this phenomenon ordered their worship as a way of instilling reli- gion15

A slightly different account omitting the element of deliberate religious propaganda explains idolatry as an evolution from funerary memorials

It is evident that the first cause of idolatry was the desire of commemo- rating the dead and of consoling the living but on this basis it has developed and has finally become a foul and pernicious abuse16

Another explanation for polytheism Binini thinks is in a misunderstand- ing about the meaning of the term god After a series of quotations from Galen and Plato he says

l 3 India 27 tr Sachau I 36 l4 India 18 my translation cf tr Sachau I 24 l 5 India 84 tr Sachau I1 1 1-12 l6 India 96 tr Sachau I 124

John Walbridge

These quotations prove that the Greeks call in general god everything that is glorious and noble and the like usage exists among many nations They go even so far as to call gods the mountains the seas etc Secondly they apply the term god in a special sense to the First Cause to the angels and to their souls According to a third usage Plato calls gods the SekinBt But on this subject the terms of the interpreters are not perfectly clear so that we only know the name but not what it means

In this passage and through the quotations that support it BTrtinT argues that a confusion exists due to the fact that the ancient peoples used the term god in a much broader sense than do Muslims Having cited a decidedly monotheistic passage from Plato to show that the concept of God as first cause was known to the Greeks he shows that the Greeks applied the word god to a great variety of people and things the souls of those blessed due to their role in ruling the world the great benefactors of mankind such as the founders of beneficial arts and the lawgivers the angels the great natural phenomena the stars and planets and abstract ideas

Perhaps more significant is the fact that BirtinT does not condemn polytheism in this passage but explains it as a matter of linguistic usage The reason seems to be that these examples are all taken from the works of eminent Greek philosophers and scientists Galen Hippocrates Plato Proclus and Asclepius are all either quoted or mentioned Such men cannot be accused of crude polytheism These are the elect of the Greek nation whose beliefs may be assumed to be in general agreement with the philosophers of other nations

Thus for BTrtinT the problem of the Greek gods is primarily anthropological and not religious or philosophical No nation has a monopoly on truth nor are the religions of the Greeks and Indians whether of the ordinary people or the elect to be understood simply as error Greek popular religion like the religion of any other nation not excluding Islam is a representation of the truth more or less imperfect but always based on the senses a representation shaped not only by the limitations of those who formed it but by historical accidents and the beneficial lies of legislators In contrast the religion of the elect whether of Plato or the Bhagavad Gita is detached from the material world Thus religions can converge on the plane of philosophy while their popular forms have wildly different sensible expressionsI8

India 26-27 tr Sachau I 35-36 This is the word that Ibn al-Tayyibs text uses to render daim6n Ibn al-Tayyib 18 It is obviously the Hebrew shekinahThe term appears several times in the QurBn (2248 92694048448 184826) where it generally refers to some kind of assistance sent down from heaven to the believers

l 8 See also Franz Rosenthal Al-Biriini between Greece and India in Ehsan Yarshater (ed) Biruni Symposium (New York 1976) 1-12 repr in Franz Rosenthal Science and Medi- cine in Islam (Aldershot Hampshire 1990) sect XI and Bruce B Lawrence Al-Bininis


This theory of religion probably has as its philosophical context the theory of prophecy and religion put forward by F2riibi half a century earlier and developed in Bikinis time by Avicenna and later by the Spanish philosophers Ibn Btijja (Avempace) Ibn Tufayl and Averroes Prophecy by this account was a matter of casting truth in the form of images suitable for ordinary understanding These images as well as religious laws and practices could differ depend- ing on the nature and circumstances of the particular community and would naturally be understood differently by those of different levels of ability- Btriinls educated and uneducated people The elect would understand the true meaning of the symbols and to the degree that they themselves were philosophers their understandings would agree with those of the philosophers of other nations l g

Sabianism the Religion of the Greek Star-Worshippers

BiriinTs anthropology of religion was only possible for a scholar deeply immersed in the lore of other nations For those less versed in the mythology of the Greeks there were other imperatives in particular the need to find an Is- lamic explanation of Greek religion Of course it would have been simple to class the devotees of the Greek cults as mushrikrin those who associate other gods with God either denying the reality of the old gods or identifying them as demons as the early Christians had done Such a solution would not do First the early Christians had developed their theologies at a time when the old gods still retained some of their strength-for who could deny the reality of their occult powers By the time of Islam the gods were dead their power gone forever from the world It was no longer necessary to provide an explanation for their malevolent influence

Second the logic of the Islamic revelation demanded of those in serious contact with Greek thought that the Greek religion be legitimized in some sense This demand was felt not only by Muslim philosophers and philhellenes but even by enemies who had taken serious notice of Greek thought notably Ghazali (d 111I) the author of the most important Islamic attack on Graeco-Islamic philosophy The Qurtin had offered a universal account of history in which a succession of prophetic religions expressed the divine truth Such a theory

Approach to the Comparative Study of Indian Culture in Yarshater (ed) Biruni Symposium 2 7 4 8 Rosenthal is interested in the way that Binin recognizes the achievements of the Indians while continuing to assert the superiority of Greek achievements Lawrence analyzes the specific limitations that prevented Binini from obtaining a truly accurate understanding of Hindu thought

l9 The main texts expounding this view are collected for the English-speaking reader in the Islamic section of Ralph Lemer and Muhsin Mahdi (eds) Medieval Political Philosophy (Ithaca 1972) Its most vivid presentation is in Ibn Tufayls philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzdn ed and tr U o n Gauthier (Beirut 19362) tr L E Goodman (New York 1972)

398 John Walbridge

worked admirably for the Judeo-Christian tradition with which Muhammad and the Arabs had been familiar It could easily be extended to account for Zoroastrianism and had anyone wished to do so could even include Buddhism and Manichaeism It did not work for Greek religion which was in no sense monotheistic and had no prophets On the other hand the failure to account for so conspicuous a part of cultural history must inevitably call the whole system into doubt-as eventually happened in Europe Thus Greek religion needed to be fit into the Quriinic sacred history The answer was Sabianism

In three passages the Qur5n had mentioned the Sibizin along with the Jews and Christians as believers in Allah20 Who these people were was a mys- tery to the early commentators on the QurZn and remains an unsettled question Several groups notably the pagans of the city of Harran and a gnostic group in Iraq claimed to be Sabians Their motivations for doing so seem simple enough as Sabians they were people of the Book monotheists en- titled to the free exercise of their religion under the protection of the Muslim state2 A more interesting question is why Muslims accepted such claims and indeed extended the use of the term Sabian to refer to a variety of extinct polytheistic religions including those of Greece and Egypt

Sabians the great heresiographer ShahrasGnT tells us are those who ac- cept both the sensible and intelligible worlds who obey religious laws and ordinances (hudzid wa-ahkrfm) but who unlike the Zoroastrians Jews Chris- tians and Muslims do not believe in a sharia (religious law) or i ~ l i m ~ ~ Their religion he adds centers on zeal for the spiritual beings (~ -h ini t ) ~~ Ac-cording to the Spanish historian of science Siid al-Andalusi Most of the Greeks were Sabians who venerated the heavenly bodies and persisted in their worship of idols24 The same was true of the ancient Egyptians In the distant past the people of Egypt were Sabians they worshiped idols and maintained temples25 The best-known Sabians were the Harranians whose pagan star cult has been often discussed It seems that the ancient moon cult of Harran had

O 26256922 17 2 A summary of the current state of the art in Hamian studies with all the major bibliog-

raphy is Tamara M Green The Cil) of the Moon God Religious Traditions of Harran (Leiden 1992) especially chaps 4-8 Another recent work is Sinasi Giindiiz The Knowledge ofLife The Origins and Early History of the Mandaeans and their Relation to the Sabians of the Qur in and to the Harranians (Oxford 1994) who concludes that the Sabians of the QurZn were the Mandaeans of southern Iraq and that this group had no significant connection with the Harranians See also G FehCrvari Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed) svHarrHn The definitive study of the Sabians as they appear in Islamic literature is C ChwolsohnDie Ssabier und der Ssabismus (2 vols St Petersburg 1856) which includes all the texts then known with translation and commentary

Shahrashi al-Milal wa I-Nihal ed Mubarnmad Sayyid KT156 (Beirut 19752) II4 23 Shahrashi 11 5 24 SZid al-Andalusi Science in the Medieval World tr and ed Semaan I Salem and Alok

Kumar (Austin 199 I) 2 1 25 al-Andalusi 35


evolved into a Hermetic sect that worshipped the planets The details of the cult are not as well known as we might like (the ubiquitous Blriinf is one of our better sources) but certainly it was a survival of Greek paganism and may have played a significant role in the survival of Greek philosophy after the crack- down on pagan philosophers in the early sixth century The Harranians also played a significant role in the transmission of Greek learning to the Muslims

The Hananians had every reason to assert the claim to be Sabians if the term included the polytheistic religions of ancient Egypt and Greece As a Her- metic cult their religion had its origins in both Greece and Egypt Hermes being an ancient Egyptian and the rest of their cult being thoroughly Hellenic Aratus the author of the poem on the mythology of the constellations cited by Birihi was one of their prophets for example Such an identification would be attractive to Muslims for their own reasons To scholars committed to both Islam and Greek philosophy the appearance of philosophy in a pagan nation poses a problem For medieval Christian philosophers there was only one full revelation of Gods truth the incarnation of Christ a light compared to which all else was darkness God emerges into history decisively only once Greek philosophy is a remarkable achievement of unaided human reason but the pagan philosophers are fundamentally no different from any other non-Chris- tians

The QurBn however had injected revelation into history in a more thor- oughgoing way There was one religion often renewed It was embarrassing that the greatest achievements of human reason should take place precisely in that civilization least amenable to explanation in terms of revelation Much the same was true of Egypt whose material achievements could still be seen and whose intellectual achievements had not been forgotten Identifying the religions of these two civilizations as Sabian brought them into the realm of the prophetic To be sure no one knew exactly how the Sabians originated but the label at least protected the integrity of Islamic sacred history and allowed Mus- lim scholars to justify philosophy as a fundamentally religious enterprise

The legitimacy of such an identification could be strengthened by the char- acterization of the Sabians as star worshippers The worship of stars was scarcely pure monotheism and the Abraham of the QurBn had rejected it When night came he saw a star He said This is my Lord But when it set he said I love not those that set Likewise in subsequent verses he rejects the worship of the moon and sun26 Nonetheless star worship could be justified as a legitimate but primitive practice It was even easier for the philosophers for whom the stars and planets were living beings of a higher and purer nature than ourselves They were angels or something very like angels They were certainly beings closer to God than us The worship of the stars was thus not shirk in the same sense as the old Arabian worship of stone idols Like Christianity

400 John Walbridge

and Judaism such a religion fell short of the pure monotheism of Islam but like them it had a portion of the truth Thus the identification of the Greeks (and the Egyptians) as Sabians served several intellectual and practical interests It allowed the Harranians to practice their pagan cult in peace It allowed Muslim philhellenes to defend Greek thought as the product of the monotheistic religious tradition Finally it safeguarded the integrity of QurFinic sacred history by placing Greek philosophy and science both of them unquestionably great achievements of humanity within the realm of the prophetic religions

The Greek Philosophers as Biblical Monotheists

There is one other solution to the challenge posed by pagan philosophy to the sacred history of monotheism a solution that makes the divine Greek philosophers monotheists of the biblical tradition--or for their enemies pla- giarists of the wisdom of the prophets

It is not hard to defend the claim that the Greek philosophers at least the Platonists were monotheists or at least well on the road to monotheism Au- gustine for example considered Neoplatonism to be a suitable waystation on the way from paganism to Christianity Procluss proof that all existence pro- ceeds from a single first cause and that this first cause is the Good and the One2 is as pure a statement of monotheism as one could wish The issue was even clearer to a medieval Islamic reader for the Arabic translations of works like pseudo-Plutarchs doxography used terms like Alldh al-ildh and ildh all respectable Islamic terms for the Di~inity~ We find two explanations offered for such pagan monotheism

The first and less philosophical explanation concerns the history of philosophy in Greece In an often copied account we read that Empedocles had learned his wisdom in Syria from Luqman the sage a legendary figure mentioned in the Q ~ r i i n ~ ~ LuqmGn had lived in the time of David and we pre- sume learned from that great prophet Pythagoras placed incorrectly after Empedocles had studied in Egypt with the disciples of Solomon another prophet according to the Quriin With such a pedigree we are not surprised to learn that Socrates

derived [his] wisdom from Pythagoras but limited himself to the divine sciences to the exclusion of other kinds He turned away from worldly pleasures and publicly declared his disagreement with the Greeks on religion confronting the leaders of the polytheists with rational arguments and logical demonstrations The king consigned him

27 Proclus Elements of Theology prop 11-13 28 Pseudo-PlutarchDe placita 16-7 in Hans Daiber Aetius Arabus Die Vorsokratiker in

arabischer Uberl iefer~n~ (Wiesbaden 1980) 29 3112-13


to prison in order to appear praiseworthy to them and he gave him poison to drink in order to guard against their wickedne~s~~

Variants of the story make clear that Socrates had opposed the idol worship of the Athenians An alchemical text attributed to Jibir ibn HayyZn for example alludes to Socrates rejecting Z e u ~ ~ Socrates story is thus merged with the story of Abrahams rejection of polytheism in the Quriin and he becomes a martyr not of philosophy but of Islam

Variants of this account are to be found elsewhere Sometimes Hermes identified with the Qurtinic prophet Idris and the Biblical Enoch is the first link in the chain of philosophy-whence his title father of philosophers Empedocles is said to have been the first to combine the meanings of the attributes of God perhaps to be read as a uniting of the separate aspects of the divinity formerly expressed as many gods in one God The details do not matter much since once linked with the Jews the philosophers can be left in peace to elaborate their arguments about God in the shade of the tree of prophecy

The same account describes a plague in the time of Plato The Greeks pray to God (Allah) and consult a prophet of Israel as to the cause of the plague and how it might be averted God reveals to the prophet that the Greeks must double the size of a certain cubical altar The Greeks at first misunderstand the instruc- tion doubling each side of the cube and the plague is only averted by Platos mathematical skill in creating a cube of double the volume of the original The original story is well known in Greek where in the earliest sources the story is set at Delos the offended God is Apollo and the prophet is the famous oracle there32

Curiously this explanation is also given by the greatest opponent of philosophy in Islam al-Ghazlli In his autobiography The Deliverer from Error he tells how he had investigated the claims of philosophy by mastering it from the inside While we may question whether his two years of study provided him with quite the mastery of philosophy that he claimed he certainly had a solid understanding of its strengths and weaknesses and a healthy respect for its achievements What he does not do is denounce it as tainted by its polytheistic origins In the introduction to his great refutation of philosophy The Inco- herence of the Philosophers he hotly denies that the great philosophers were polytheists or that they had denied the existence of God prophecy and religious law and insists that those who have rejected religious belief thinking that they are imitating the great philosophers have simply failed to understand their

O al-kmiri Kitamp al-Amad a l i I-Abad in Everett K Rowson A Muslim Philosopher on the Soul and its Fate (New Haven Corn 1988) 71 The Arabic accounts of Socrates are studied in Ilai Alon Socrates in Mediaeval Arabic Literature (Leiden 1991) esp 56-93

Mukhtir Rasiil Ja3ir b Hayyin ed Paul Krause (Cairo 135411935) 187 I2al-hiri 73 and Rowson 211-13

402 John Walbridge

supposed masters In actuality Ghazdi says the philosophers errors are on points of detail not on fundamental issues of prophecy religion and the unity of God33

It is in regard to ethics and politics that Ghazdl claims monotheistic origins for philosophical doctrines stating that their ethical doctrines were plagia- rized from the mystics and their political doctrines from the prophets34 Al- though he does not discuss them in much detail in some ways philosophical ethics and politics are more dangerous to Ghazdi than the physics and meta- physics It was easy to show that the philosophers themselves disagreed about many important metaphysical doctrines and moreover that these doctrines were contrary to Islam and in G h d i s view internally inconsistent The same could not be said of ethics and politics subjects on which the philosophers were in general agreement In the case of ethics their doctrines were in full agreement with Islam In the case of politics they provided a philosophical explanation of religion in general and Islam in particular one with which he had some sympa- thyj5 GhazZ as he was probably well aware faced a dangerous dilemma here He could not reject these sciences outright because he agreed with them but if he admitted their validity he was also implicitly accepting the philosophical explanation of religion and thus the claim of the philosophers to have given a master explanation of religions in general and Islam in particular His solution was to claim that these two sciences were the products of revelation not reason and to hurry on before too many questions were asked

Among the historians who study late antiquity it is a popular amusement to trace the disappearance of classical paganism and identify exactly when and how the old gods disappeared from various places and aspects of life and soci-

AS we have seen the Greek gods are so thoroughly banished from medieval Arabic texts that when they appear they are curiosities not major intellectual and spiritual threats as they would have been for Augustine half a millen- nium earlier Nevertheless they did pose a challenge even to Muslims born far too late to have met living polytheists for the old gods were the patrons of Greek philosophy and science enterprises too lofty successful and useful for those familiar with them to dismiss out of hand For Muslim scholars the challenge was intellectual not religious the old gods had to be explained not exorcised

33 al-GhazSli The Incoherence of the Philosophers ed and tr Machael E Marmura (Provo Utah1997) 3

34 al-GhazLli al-Munqidh min al-Dalal [The deliverer from error] ed Abd al-Halim Mamod (Cairo 19623) 154-55 W Montgomery Watt tr The Faith and Practice of al-GhazdC (London 1953) 38-39

35 Incoherence 16769 36 See for example Pierre Chuvin A Chronicle of the Last Pagans tr B A Archer

(Cambridge 1990)


The most sophisticated of the Muslim students of Greek religion Blrtinl interpreted Greek religion from within what was basically a Platonic frame- work In the process he developed the beginnings of an anthropology of religion an achievement for which he perhaps deserves more credit After all most other Islamic philosophers and scientists simply ignored the details of Greek popular religion on the grounds that only the elite religion of philosophical theology was worth their trouble

More often the Greek gods posed a challenge to Islamic sacred history which explained religious development in terms of successive prophetic religions Greek religion had to be made to fit one of the existing categories in Islamic sacred history The two that were used were Sabianism usually identified as star worship and the biblical prophets whose monotheism was trans- mitted to early Greek philosophers who visited Syria and Egypt Medieval Muslims were not alone in finding such an explanation appealing the Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi wrote

What is thy opinion of Solomons accomplishments Did he not with the assistance of divine intellectual and natural power converse on all sciences The inhabitants of the earth travelled to him in order to carry forth his leaming even as far as India Now the roots and principles of all sciences were handed down from us first to the Chaldaeans then to the Persians and the Medians then to Greece and finally to the Ro- mans On account of the length of this period and the many disturbing circumstances it was forgotten that they had originated with the He- brew~~

Leopold Bloom in Joyces Ulysses also held such a view

What statement was made under correction by Bloom concern- ing a fourth seeker of pure truth by name Aristotle mentioned with permission by Stephen

That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher name un~er ta in ~~

Our texts thus give us one more answer to the old question of when paganism finally died it died when Muslim scholars looked upon the names of the old gods and did not fear their power

Indiana University Judah Halevi The Kuzari An Argument for the Faith of Israel tr Hartwig Hischfeld

(New York 1964) part two para 66 38 James Joyce Ulysses (New York 1961) 687 The origins of this theme in Philo and

medieval Jewish thought are discussed in Hany Austryn Wolfson Philo Foundations of Reli- gious Philosophy in Judaism Christianity and Islam (Cambridge 19825) I 140-43 160-63

You have printed the following article

Explaining Away the Greek Gods in IslamJohn WalbridgeJournal of the History of Ideas Vol 59 No 3 (Jul 1998) pp 389-403Stable URL


This article references the following linked citations If you are trying to access articles from anoff-campus location you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR Pleasevisit your librarys website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR

[Footnotes]

9 The Arabic Translation of Aratus PhaenomenaErnest HonigmannIsis Vol 41 No 1 (Mar 1950) pp 30-31Stable URL

httplinksjstororgsicisici=0021-17532819500329413A13C303ATATOAP3E20CO3B2-N

httpwwwjstororg

LINKED CITATIONS- Page 1 of 1 -

NOTE The reference numbering from the original has been maintained in this citation list


John Walbridge

Of the angels newly fallen from heaven Milton tells us

Nor had they yet among the Sons of Eve Got them new Names

Men took

Devils to adore for Deities Then were they known to men by various Names And various Idols through the Heathen World

Among the devils worshipped as gods among the ancients were the Olympi- ans

ThIonian Gods of Javans Issue held Gods yet confest later then Heavn and Earth Thir boasted parents Titan Heavns first born With his enormous brood and birthright seisd By younger Saturn he from mightier Jove His own and Rheas Son like measure found So Jove usurping reignd these first in Creet And Ida known thence on the Snowy top Of cold Olympus ruld the middle Air Thir highest Heavn or on the Delphian Cliff Or in Dodona and through all the bounds Of Doric Land

Paradise Lost I 364-65 372-75 508-19

389 Copyright 1998 by Journal of the History of Ideas Inc

390 John Walbridge














392 John Walbridge
















394 John Walbridge

















John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



390 John Walbridge














392 John Walbridge
















394 John Walbridge

















John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg











392 John Walbridge
















394 John Walbridge

















John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



392 John Walbridge
















394 John Walbridge

















John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg












394 John Walbridge

















John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



394 John Walbridge

















John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg












John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



John Walbridge














398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg










398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



398 John Walbridge













400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg








400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



400 John Walbridge

















402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg











402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



402 John Walbridge








(Cambridge 1990)
















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg


















[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg







[Footnotes]



httpwwwjstororg



Date post:	06-Apr-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	thisfalsereality-scott-jenson
View:	259 times
Download:	5 times

John Walbridge - Explaining Away the Greek Gods in Islam

Documents