Brague on the role of "digestion" in the disappearance of philosophy from the Islamic world

"I attach the greatest importance to a fact that Jean Jolivet has stressed: the 'philosopher' (philosophus) who debates with a Jew and a Christian in Abelard's [Dialogue between a philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian] is a Muslim. That personage, who is circumcised and claims descent from Ishmael, attempts to set up an ethics independent of revelation. . . . What is important is that this human type--one that some find a temptation and others, a type to be exorcised--continued to haunt Latin Christianity. As it happens, that model was by then exclusive to Andalusia, which stood out as different from the Islamic East; in its land of origin, it was already petering out.
"This means that it was precisely at the time when the Latin philosophus--when it did not designate Aristotle--came to signify faylasuf that, in the Islamic world, the use of the Arabic word faylasuf began to give way to other terms. Call that development what you will. The fact remains that, in the East, the word for 'philosophy' declined in favor of other words. In parallel fashion, in the same period the relationship with the Philosopher par excellence--Aristotle--ceased to have a textual dimension in that world. The twelfth century is the age in which Islamic thought fully digested Greek philosophy, the same Greek philosophy that Europe, somewhat later and perhaps to our own times, was to find hard to digest."

Rémi Brague, "The meaning and value of philosophy in the three medieval cultures," chap. 2 of The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 55 (41-55). "'inclusion' is an appropriation in which the foreign body is maintained in its full alterity but is enveloped by procedures of appropriation, the presence of which highlights that alterity; . . . 'digestion' is an appropriation in which the foreign body is assimilated to the point of losing its independence" (51). Christianity "included" Aristotle, whereas Islam "digested" him, thereby abandoning philosophy--though not thought (47)--in the process.

Brague sins less than he lets on

"If you don't know a number of things, compare them."

Rémi Brague's riff on "if you don't know something, . . . teach it". In "The meaning and value of philosophy in the three medieval cultures," which is chap. 2 of The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 42 (1-22).

"I mean, theologians' theology, not the variety knocked together by the profs de philo"

"is it not also true that, in the final analysis, believing in God is, in a sense, refusing the world as it is and as it appears to an unprejudiced eye, with the result that according to a logic of 'communicating vases' (found, for example, in Nietzsche), all that we take from God would be that much gained for the world?
"It is true that I have had occasion to note in Nietzsche a fairly unsophisticated representation of the relationship between the divine and the human according to which the one gains what the other loses. To be sure, Nietzsche said many powerful things. But his writings contain a fully worked-out version of the hydraulic image: 'There is a lake which one day refused to flow off and erected a dam where it had hitherto flowed off: ever since, this lake has been rising higher and higher. Perhaps that very renunciation will also lend us the strength to bear the renunciation itself; perhaps man will rise ever higher when he once ceases to flow out into a god.' This image already appears, discreetly, in the young Hegel, and emphatically in Feuerbach. Today even more mediocre minds wallow in the idea: man must demand his good, supposedly projected in God, and so on. . . .
"If the relationship between the world and God were of this sort, Prometheus (in the Romantic interpretation of that figure) would be right. But how much naïveté does that imply! To begin with, man and God exchange homogeneous goods, in finite quantities, within the same system. One of the first rules of theology, however, is that it is not in the same sense that we attribute properties (justice, power, knowledge, etc.) to God and to man. A bit of Neoplatonic therapy is called for: ideas do not possess the qualities that they confer. As well as a small dose of theology--I mean, theologians' theology, not the variety knocked together by the profs de philo. Let me offer you two phrases of Thomas Aquinas for your meditation: 'To detract from the creature's perfection is to detract from the perfection of divine power'; 'We do not wrong God unless we wrong our own good.'"

Rémi Brague, "Interview with Christophe Cervellon and Kristell Trego," The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 10-11 (1-22).

Brague on the damage done by fast-talking media stars and intellectuals

"legends abound about the Middle Ages. I have done my utmost to destroy that teeming vermin. . . . I have no illusions about the sucess of my venture: any fast-talking media star can do a thousand times more in one minute to perpetuate falsity than we library rats can do in ten lifetimes to unmask it. That said, you do not have to have hope to take on a challenge. And if what the 'intellectual' has to sell is a 'fine-talk' version of the dominant opinion, the duty of the university professor is above all to reestablish what he or she believes to be the truth, whether it is agreeable or not."

Rémi Brague, The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): viii-ix.

Christum aufer, mutus fiet mundus

Remove Christ, [and] the universe will fall silent.

I.e., become incapable of articulate speech; be rendered mute or inarticulate; be struck dumb (cf. Ps. 19:1-4). Peter M. Candler after Antonio Cittandini (Thomae aufer, mutus fiet Aristoteles): "apart from Christ, the world cannot speak to us." In "The logic of Christian humanism," Communio: international Catholic review 36, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 79. Candler got Cittandini from Ralph McInerny, Praeambula fidei: Thomism and the God of the philosophers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006): 306.

Aquinas on the non-comprehensive sight of the beatific vision

"The blessed soul of Christ himself does not have this comprehensive understanding; only the unique Son of God who is in the womb of the Father enjoys it. . . . No one . . . [will ever] comprehend [(comprend)] the divine essence except God alone, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit [(Anima autem Christi Deum cognoscendo non comprehendit, quia hoc non dicitur, nisi de unigenito, qui est in sinu patris. . . . Nullus enim divinam comprehendit essentiam, nisi solus Deus pater, et filius, et spiritus sanctus)]."

St. Thomas Aquinas, Super evangelium S. Ioannis lectura, cap. 1, l. 11, as quoted by J.-P. Torrell, in his "Saint Thomas d'Aquin, maître de vie spirituelle," Revue des sciences religieuses 71, no. 4 (1997): 456 (442-457), italics mine. The Latin is taken from the Turin (i.e. Marietti) edition of 1952 ed. Raffaele Cai, as reproduced by Corpus Thomisticum here: http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/cih01.html#87429 (where there is much more, including the distinction between seeing the divine essence tota and totaliter).

Pesch on the properly THEOLOGICAL thrust of the Second Part of the Summa

"The IIa Pars [of the Summa theologiae] doesn't compile [a list of] does and don'ts, not even divine dos and don'ts [(stellt nicht Forderungen zusammen, was der Mensch tun und lassen soll, und wären es auch göttliche Forderungen)], but [rather] describes what happens of itself when the grace of God gets ahold of a man and all of the powers of his soul [(und seinen ganzen seelischen Kräftehaushalt)]. [The IIa Pars] is therefore theology, [not ethics, and] here, therefore, [the] doctrine of the activity of God in the activity of man."

Otto Hermann Pesch, "Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005): 436.