Aristotle At Mont Saint Michel

The coverage of the trial is illustrated by the folio 195 of the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry , representing the Mont Saint-Michel and his boss fight the Archangel Michael against the Dragon.

Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: The Greek roots of Christian Europe is a test of Sylvain Gouguenheim historian, medievalist French. In this book, the author takes the foot against the historiography traditional view that the Muslim world has played a key role in the transmission to the medieval west of the ancient Greek cultural heritage.

This book, whose publication in 2008 to Seuil was heard in the press, has been criticized by most experts in the field, who, scarce, communicated their disagreement through the press. Several books have been published since then to combat the thesis of Sylvain Gouguenheim. However, it receives support from several historians and journalists.

Presentation of the book

The book takes its title from a study published in 1967 Viola Coloman which aims primarily to moderate the contribution Islamic debate in a logic "is that" evidence "I think, however, possible to discuss" . According to the author, the Muslim civilization has experienced a superficial Hellenization "Never Muslim Arabs did not learn Greek, even al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes did not know." Thus, much of this ancient heritage have been preserved by Eastern Christians, the Syrians, between ^fourth and ^seventh centuries, and secondly, that the West, the Middle Ages had never been cut its Hellenic philosophical sources (either through the linkages between the Latin and Byzantine), through the work of Boethius , or through the work of European translators who have continued to confront the original texts.

Other theses of his book are issued, thereby capturing the history of Europe in its relations with the East but have no purpose to fortify the clash of civilization by the author . Moreover, Gouguenheim does not minimize the contribution of Islamic civilization and the contribution of Muslim commentators (of Avicenna to Averroes ) to that of Europe. Gouguenheim and says, moreover, not as "Arabs" have brought nothing to Europe, he wrote, however they had given him less than what you thought. He proposes to "demystify" a number of positions, particularly the speeches he said dominate, especially those of the general public and the media sphere, according to which "the Arabs we have all learned or made" and therefore that Europe would be so indebted to them. In other words, it asserts that Islamic countries can not be regarded as the only channel of transmission of ancient knowledge. Moreover, it also denies the vision of a contemptuous medieval bent under the yoke of Christianity obscurantist behind Crusades barbarians. He found, as others have done before him, including historians Pierre Riche and Jacques Heers , the Middle Ages in the West this is not some dark age "have delighted in portraying." Indeed, the Renaissance was preceded by a Carolingian Renaissance , where the influence of Greek thought was already significant.

If "everyone already knew," all, "All is reflected here by medieval scholars who refute the caricature as well established and a number of elements already known to specialists as Gouguenheim reproduced. However, Gouguenheim will clarify new or rarely expressed in the period between the ^eighth and ^twelfth centuries, which is considered a time when the West had little knowledge of Greek and they had no access by the "Arab intermediary" . Thus, it goes against several medievalists whose Alain de Libera, "which credits Islam for having done" the first confrontation between Hellenism and monotheism "- forgetting the Greek Fathers! " . It also challenges other views, like those of D. Jacquart, F. Micheau and again: "the position adopted Detienne led to questionable judgments" . He used a lot of work and explained that several times that on page 184 of his book 'reluctance to do individual work, characteristic of medieval Christianity "has led some thinkers" to hide their originality and attribute their findings to others " .

Thus, for Gouguenheim, direct transmission from the East Byzantine is more important than previously thought. By undervaluing the direct pathway via Byzantium and Sicily and to Mont-Saint-Michel , we overvalue the other, the Arabs. His book aims to expose so that Europeans have never ceased to recover "the Greek miracle" constant glancing towards Constantinople. He then resumed many tests Rmi Brague : "I am sympathetic to the idea of Rmi Brague that Europeans have thirsted to find in Greece" .

This thesis, namely that the Greek knowledge, irrigated Europe long before the confrontation with Islam, is less recognized specialists. Accordingly, Gouguenheim drew attention to the copyist monks of Mont Saint-Michel, and in particular a character, Jacques Venice , who translated Aristotle directly from Greek to Latin, a half-century translations of Arabic made at Salerno , Sicily, and in Toledo or elsewhere.

The author notes that from 500-550, Greek falls into oblivion, at the same time that Christianity is required (by force) against the paganism. But even if an Eastern religion, Christianity has Greek origins and European, the Gospels being written in Greek, the Fathers of the Church is steeped in Greek culture and (despite the interlude of Theodosius , which harshly suppressed any representative or any institution suspected of Hellenism) the clergy of the church at enacting As certain elements of the philosophy Greek to better build their theology in European soil. Aristotle began to be rediscovered and from the ^eighth century, books of antiquity are collected. And Pepin the Short books in Greek demand for the education of his daughter, the court of Charlemagne know Aristotle and Homer and after the Carolingians , the new empire Germanic founded by Otto ^I in 962 deals with the Greek roots including through the Archbishop Bruno of Cologne or the learned abbess Hrotsvitha , both of mastering Greek.

The author argues that while the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, from the ^twelfth century, was the scene of a major work of translation directly from Greek into Latin, most of the available works of Aristotle. If one knows little about the team of translators (which Jacques was part of Venice, who lived in Constantinople and had a lengthy translation from 1127 to 1150), we know that the dissemination of these translations was considerable: a hundred manuscripts of Physics, scattered throughout Europe, the Posterior Analytics which are lists 289 copies of the Vatican in Toulouse, Metaphysics used by Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus.

The author does not insist so much on the role of Byzantium as that of Sicily, which has never outlawed the legacy ancient , even once it became the seat of a great kingdom Norman ^eleventh to ^twelfth century. In Rome , the Greek books were translated, the library of the Lateran redistributes across the Europe whole copies often claimed by monasteries , and bishops (Reims, Laon or Le Puy), the royal courts (The Plantagenets ) ducal (in Saxony). Sometimes bordered on the Aristotelian heresy ...

The eastern provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire (Syria, Palestine) conquered by Islam (Conquest of Jerusalem 638, Egypt 640, from North Africa, 647), housed Christians Syriac wishing to retain Hellenistic cultural identity. It was they who made the first translations from Greek into Syriac and Syriac into Arabic. It was essentially scientific texts (including medicine). The absence of concepts in the Arabic language also forced many neologisms.

Then the second argument is to refute Gouguenheim comparison of lights of Islam with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth ^century, comparison involving the Middle Ages in the West would be an era of darkness . He also refutes the myth of Andalusia, that is to say the myth of the harmony that would have lived three monotheistic religions in Andalusia in the Arab-Muslim power. It makes a crucial question: why the Arabs who had access to Greek heritage did they not made the same use as the Europeans?

It should also be noted that the argument that the Greek heritage was not dispatched to Western Europe by the world Muslim was already advanced in previous centuries by some authors as Petrarch , one of the greatest figures Italian literature, which in the fourteenth ^century rebelled against the influence of Arab authors on the thought of his contemporaries or Leonhart Fuchs in 1535 which ensures that the Arabs did not invent anything, but they have plundered the Greeks .

Controversy media

The book is published in March 2008 Editions du Seuil , in the collection renamed "The Universe history" .

The publication is first greeted by an article by journalist and philosopher Roger-Pol Droit , "And if Europe was not to his knowledge of Islam? "In The World of Books , 4 April 2008: "Amazing correct the prejudices of the time, the work of Sylvain Gouguenheim will spark debate and controversy" . Then in Le Figaro littraire , 17 April 2008 by Stphane Boiron, professor at the University of Rouen , and expert canon law

A number of academics and researchers will then react in the press. April 25, Le Monde published a letter sent by then Helen Bellosta and signed by forty researchers, including Alain Boureau. Other specialists in medieval history and philosophy as Gabriel Martinez-Gros and Alain de Libera accuse him of denying, for ideological purposes, the contribution of Arab intellectuals in the transmission of Greek knowledge to Europe during the Middle Ages or write "nonsense" ) and suspected of developing a thesis that feeding the clash of civilizations .

April 30, Liberation call to 56 researchers (European historians, philosophers and directors of research at CNRS ) with Barbara Cassin , Alain de Libera and Jacques Chiffoleau , "Yes, the Christian West is indebted to the Islamic world" whereas author's approach was "unscientific" and it was only "an ideological project to unacceptable political connotations" .

On 28 April, a call is made by 200 "teachers, researchers, staff, listeners, students and alumni" of the ENS-LSH (where Gouguenheim sign) requesting an investigation .

Jean-Luc Leservoisier , curator of the library at Avranches last twenty years, since 1986 and participating in the preservation and enhancement of the 199 medieval manuscripts of Mont Saint-Michel, whose treatises of Aristotle writes: 'C' is pure romance! ... We know next to nothing about Jacques Venice. His name is mentioned only in two lines of the Latin chronicle of Abbot Robert de Torigni between the years 1128 and 1129, which stated that he translated the works of Aristotle. But in any case he could not come at Mont Saint-Michel in the late 1120, a period of extreme unrest that culminated with the burning of the abbey by the inhabitants of Avranches in 1138. "

Conversely, the writer Paul-Franois Paoli sees these attacks Sylvain Gouguenheim cons of "intellectual terrorism" from the "left -righteous "French, while the issue had aroused in another country" learned of panel discussions. " Their goal is to see him as the author "branded the suspicion" and to discredit his ideas. Sylvain Gouguenheim for its part considers that created the petitions against him were thrown "by people who did not read the book and asked after the fact" . Nevertheless, the controversy no less that the book was the subject of an article by John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune ^, . Sevillia John considers for its part that is Gouguenheim "victim of a conspiracy to About inconsistent with the times " .

According to L'Express on 15 May the medievalist Jacques Le Goff considers the thesis developed by Gouguenheim as "interesting but debatable." He deplored the "vehemence" of the attacks against his younger colleague, and noted that the petition against him was signed only by "some major medievalists. Goff was invited as support, June 2, 2008, on his show Monday of the History of France Culture on the Teutonic Knights .

The 4000 copies of the first edition are so exhausted . Many Arabists have indeed supported the historian Sylvain Gouguenheim. On November 5, 2008, in Le Figaro , the philosopher Christian Jambet and historian Rmi Brague Gougenheim argue, however, on the second questioning the "recovery of uncritical stereotype" because the Greek '" . On the other hand Rmi Brague about the choice of Gouguenheim to stop his investigation in the early thirteenth century, says that "an overall presentation would have better balance about" since "the thirteenth century and the beginning of fourteenth centuries are in any case the height of the influence on European thinkers by Arab thinkers, and above all by philosophers. "

Finally, the monthly Le Conversationalist devotes a section to impute motives and criticizes the methods used to discredit the author: trying to block his career, intimidation of its hierarchy and the director of the collection has accepted his book, organization a symposium on his book without an invitation, etc..

Academic reception

Accounts of the work are published in 2008 by Jacques Verger and Max Lejbowicz .

For Jacques Verger, Gouguenheim "neither Hellenistic nor Arabist 'is not original research, and selected works from its meaning without exposing the arguments to the contrary. It has a number of "reserves", including the lack of comparison between the spread of Greco-Latin translations and Arab-Latin, and explanation on the success of those of Gerard of Cremona and Michael Scot. It challenges the interest of the Latins to Hellenism, based on the fact that medieval authorities (such as Abelard , Oresme , Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas ) did not learn Greek, as theologians ^XIII century consistently opposed to the Orthodox Church , and finally the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. He disputes the fact that Christians or Jews who translated from Greek to Arabic "belonged to a cultural universe totally different from the Arabic-speaking Muslims, who were in any case the main recipients.

In 2009, a book containing a series of articles, Islam in medieval Christian lands: Science and ideology , intends to remove the point by point the entire thesis Gouguenheim.

In September 2009 seems a collective work Greeks, Arabs and us: Survey scholarly Islamophobia (among others led by Alain de Libera ), which aims to better understand the changing face of Islamophobia in the academic world , which would go Fernand Braudel to Gougenheim, through Remi Brague , Marie-Therese and Dominique Urvoy, and Benedict XVI ^, .

References

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