Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World最新文献

The Life and Times of a ‘Most Obscure Syrian’ “最不为人知的叙利亚人”的生活和时代

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0003

Salam Rassi

{"title":"The Life and Times of a ‘Most Obscure Syrian’","authors":"Salam Rassi","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 2 explores ʿAbdīshōʿ’s world based on his own testimonies and those of his contemporaries. While we possess few facts about his life, the cultural, political, and intellectual history of the Church of the East in the thirteenth century is relatively well-documented. ʿAbdīshōʿ’s literary activities took place at the height of Mongol rule over a region of Upper Mesopotamia known as the Jazīra. The destruction of the Baghdad Caliphate in 1258 and the subsequent establishment of the Ilkhanate inaugurated four decades or so of non-Muslim rule by mainly Shamanist and Buddhist sovereigns over a largely Muslim region. In 1295, the Mongol elite in the Middle East officially converted to Islam. This development had far reaching consequences for the region’s non-Muslim population and may have partly formed the historical backdrop to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s anti-Muslim apologetics. The chapter also situates ʿAbdīshōʿ’s literary output in a period in which Syriac and Arabic Christian scholarship had become markedly receptive to Islamic theological and philosophical models. While ʿAbdīshōʿ’s own involvement in the broader intellectual networks of his day appears limited, his work on alchemy evinces a high level of engagement with Arabo-Islamic modes of knowledge production, particularly in the area of alchemy. The receptiveness to non-Christian models is less obvious in ʿAbdīshōʿ’s other works but is nevertheless present in his apologetics.","PeriodicalId":136341,"journal":{"name":"Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129920363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Debating Natures and Persons 辩论自然和人

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0005

Salam Rassi

{"title":"Debating Natures and Persons","authors":"Salam Rassi","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 4 discusses the Incarnation in ʿAbdīshōʿs works. Central to his defence of this doctrine is the argument that Christ possessed a divine and a human nature, each united in a single person. For Muslim polemicists such a notion was further proof of Christianity’s denial of God’s oneness, leading ʿAbdīshōʿ to make a case for the Incarnation’s rootedness in reason and revelation. As in his Trinitarian doctrine, our author appeals to a theological and literary vocabulary shared in by Christians and Muslims. Nevertheless, he explicitly cites Christian authorities, suggesting that it is to the language of Islamic theology rather than its substance that he wishes to appeal. With that said, ʿAbdīshōʿ does not merely instrumentalize this language for the sake of apologetics. By employing poetic and narrative techniques shared between Christian and Muslim literatures, our author supplies renewed meaning and relevance to the mystery of the Incarnation and the biblical story of Christ’s mission. In contrast to his Trinitarian dogma, which appears uniformly directed against external criticisms, aspects of ʿAbdīshōʿ’s Christology are grounded in intra-Christian polemics, since various Christian confessions under Islamic rule were for centuries divided over the issue of Christ’s natures. Later in life, however, ʿAbdīshōʿ skilfully negotiated this vexed theological inheritance to formulate a Christology that was no longer hostile to other Christians.","PeriodicalId":136341,"journal":{"name":"Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114205401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Authority, Compilation, and the Apologetic Tradition 权威、汇编与护教传统

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0002

Salam Rassi

{"title":"Authority, Compilation, and the Apologetic Tradition","authors":"Salam Rassi","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of this study. It outlines the Syriac-language works for which ʿAbdīshōʿ is chiefly known, followed by a full inventory of his extant writings. It then surveys his five main theological works and aspects of their afterlife. Three of these works comprise encyclopaedic summaries of church doctrine that were responsive to Muslim and Jewish critiques of Christianity. This chapter also outlines an approach to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s apologetic oeuvre that takes into account genre, language, composition, subject matter, and audience. The chapter argues that while his apologetics might appear as a patchwork of earlier sources, the practice of compilation was in fact part of a centuries-long catechetical tradition. Common to many churches under Muslim rule, this tradition sought to uphold and a stable canon of dogma and, consequently, a distinct religious identity. This chapter establishes a typology for such Syriac and Christian Arabic theological compendia, or summae. It also discusses the kinds of religious authority that ʿAbdīshōʿ sought to affirm through his apologetics—authorities that included earlier medieval Arabic Christian authors as well as patristic and late antique theological traditions. It explores points of contact and divergence between the types of apologetics that ʿAbdīshōʿ produced and comparable genres in the Islamicate world, Christian and non-Christian. Situating such works in a ‘shared lettered tradition’, an ‘intellectual koinē’, and a ‘religious cosmopolitanism’, the chapter argues that ʿAbdīshōʿ’s apologetics are rooted in symbols and motifs common to Muslims while simultaneously setting Christians apart from them.","PeriodicalId":136341,"journal":{"name":"Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131087932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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General Conclusion 一般的结论

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0007

Salam Rassi

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The One is Many and the Many are One 一即多，多即一

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0004

Salam Rassi

{"title":"The One is Many and the Many are One","authors":"Salam Rassi","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 (‘The One is Many and the Many are One’) explores ʿAbdīshōʿ’s writings on the Trinity, a key Christian tenet that many Muslim polemicists believed to be a form of tritheism. This charge was levelled repeatedly in the centuries leading up to ʿAbdīshōʿ’s lifetime, prompting Christian apologists to demonstrate that God was a unitary being without denying His triune nature. In line with earlier authors, ʿAbdīshōʿ begins by establishing the existence of the world and its temporal origins from a single, infinite cause, which he infers from the orderliness and composite nature of cosmos. He then argues that this cause must possess three states of intellection identical to its essence, while affirming the three Trinitarian Persons as essential attributes in a single substance. While these strategies owe much to earlier apologies, ʿAbdīshōʿ frames them in a technical language reminiscent of the Muslim philosophized theology (kalām) of his day, in particular, by making use of Avicennian expressions of God as a Necessary Being. But rather than simply borrowing from Islamic systems of thought to justify the Trinity, our author demonstrates that the issues raised by Muslims regarding the Trinity could be resolved internally, that is, through recourse to the works of earlier Christian authorities and to Christian scripture.","PeriodicalId":136341,"journal":{"name":"Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133942859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

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Introduction: ‘A Constant but not Frozen Tradition’ 引言:“不变但不冻结的传统”

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0001

Salam Rassi

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Christian Practices, Islamic Contexts 基督教习俗，伊斯兰背景

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World Pub Date : 2022-02-01 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846761.003.0006

Salam Rassi

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