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Comme Tary Ad Tra Slatio I Syriac Aristotelia Scholarship JLARC 4 (2010) 28-42 28 COMMETARY AD TRASLATIO I SYRIAC ARISTOTELIA SCHOLARSHIP: SERGIUS TO BAGHDAD 1 John W. Watt ([email protected]) Abstract: This article considers the relationship between the composition in Syriac of commentaries on Aristotle and the translation of his treatises from the time of Sergius of Reshaina through to the Baghdad scholars of the 8 th -10 th centuries. Surveying the work particularly of Sergius, the scholarly translators of Qenneshre, and the interests of Patriarch Timothy I as evidenced in his letters, it argues that the translation activity up to the 8 th century must be seen within the context of a school tradition in which the Syriac text of Aristotle was read in association with a written or oral commentary, or with the Greek text, or both. An appreciation of the link between commentary and translation, as also Syriac and Greek, in Graeco-Syriac Aristotelian scholarship of the 6 th -8th centuries enables a better understanding of its relationship to the Syro-Arabic Aristotelian scholarship of Abbasid Baghdad. Sergius Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536) is widely recognised as the pioneer who first wrote on Aristotelian philosophy in Syriac. A student in the school of Ammonius at Alexandria and later a physician at Reshaina, he also greatly admired the writings of Galen and rendered many of them into Syriac. His most important treatise is his commentary on the Categories of Aristotle (or rather, the larger of his two commentaries on the Categories ) – important in the sense that it was the starting point of the embedding of Aristotle’s thought, especially his logic, in the intellectual culture of the Near East, 2 a movement memorably encapsulated in Max Meyerhof’s felicitous title to his famous essay Von Alexandrien nach Baghdad . While the hypothesis espoused by Meyerhof on the authority of al-Fārābī 3 of a migration of a single identifiable 1 Abbreviations: CAG = Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca; CSCO = Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium. An earlier form of this article was presented at the Symposium Sy- riacum, Granada, September 2008. 2 On Sergius, see especially H. Hugonnard-Roche, La logique d’Aristote du grec au syriaque [collected articles 1987-2004], Textes et Traditions 9 (Paris, 2004), chapters VI-IX (pp. 123-231). Chapters VIII-IX (pp. 165-231) consist of introductions to and translations of (respectively) the Prologue and Book One of the larger commentary on the Categories ; the commentary contains seven books. The text remains unedited; I quote from the oldest manuscript, British Library Add. 14,658 (hereafter simply Add. 14,658). 3 M. Meyerhof, “Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad,” Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , phil.-hist. Klasse 23 (1930), pp. 389-429. The text of al-Fārābī is in Ibn Abī John W. Watt, “Commentary and Translation in Syriac Aristotelian Scholarship: Sergius to Baghdad,” in: Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 4 (2010) 28-42; ISSN: 1754-517X; Website: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/clarc/jlarc JLARC 4 (2010) 28-42 29 scholarly institution from Alexandria (via Antioch) to Baghdad is now held to be untenable, 4 the phrase nevertheless still serves as an appropriate symbol of that process. When it reached Baghdad it embraced both Syriac and Arabic scholars, and on the Arabic side it extended from there both eastward and westward. The further development, though primarily Arabic, included both Hebrew and Syriac scholars, among the latter the most prominent being Bar Hebraeus. The climax of the Syriac contribution, however, was the work of the Syro-Arabic scholars of the Baghdad school of philosophy of Abū Bišr Mattā. Its alumni included Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī and Ibn Zur‘a, but its most famous member was the Muslim al-Fārābī. Sergius is the earliest discernible link between philosophy in Alexandria and the Semitic-speaking lands of Syria and Mesopotamia. Like the commentaries of the Greek Alexandrians, his commentary on the Categories includes an introduction to philosophy in general and to the writings of Aristotle as a whole and is conceived as the first in a series of commentaries on the logical pragmateia of Aristotle, what we term the Organon , to be followed by others on the entire school corpus of the philosopher. It was certainly Sergius’ expressed intention to treat “the aim of each one of the [logical] treatises, beginning the chain with that On Categories and similarly treating each one of them in the same way … then to go on to his other treatises, those on the parts of practical (philosophy), then physics and mathematics, and finally those called theological.”5 Whether any of the others were ever written is unknown, but Sergius certainly did not consider the Categories to be the only work of Aristotle worth studying, and the designation of the work (the original title of which is unknown) by one or more copyists, On the Aim of all the Writings of Aristotle , reflects its nature which, like the Greek commentaries, deals with some of the standard preliminary questions posed at the start of the entire curriculum. I wish to draw attention here, however, not to the absence from his extant output of works which we know he at least intended to write, but to the absence of one of which we have no evidence that he intended to write, namely, a Syriac translation of the Categories itself. The early Syriac translation of that treatise of Aristotle in the same British Library manuscript (Add. 14,658) in which Sergius’ commentary is preserved was of course for long assumed to be by Sergius, but that has now been shown by Henri Hugonnard-Roche to be untenable. 6 If therefore Sergius did not make a translation of the Categories , although he made many other translations, we may well ask, “Why not?” Uṣaibi‘a, ed. A. Müller, ‘Uyūn al-anbā’ fī ṭabaqāt al- aṭibbā’ II (Cairo-Königsberg, 1882-1884), pp. 134-35; English translation in F. Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam (London, 1975), pp. 50-51. 4 Confidence in the historical veracity of al-Fārābī’s account started to crumble with the article of G. Strohmaier, “Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad – eine fiktive Schultradition,” in J. Wiesner (ed.), Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung. Paul Moraux gewidmet II (Berlin, 1987), pp. 380-89. 5 Add. 14,658, fol. 3rb. Cf. J.W. Watt, “Al-Fārābī and the History of the Syriac Organon ,” in G. A. Kiraz (ed.), Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone. Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock (Piscataway, NJ, 2008), pp. 703-31 at pp. 718-20; reprinted separately with Addenda and Corrigenda in Analecta Gorgiana 129 (Piscataway, NJ, 2009). 6 Hugonnard-Roche, La logique , p. 23-37. John W. Watt, “Commentary and Translation in Syriac Aristotelian Scholarship: Sergius to Baghdad,” in: Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture 4 (2010) 28-42; ISSN: 1754-517X; Website: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/clarc/jlarc JLARC 4 (2010) 28-42 30 It would seem natural to suppose that if Sergius wrote a Syriac commentary on the Categories , he would also have considered it desirable or necessary for his readers to have access to the work of Aristotle in Syriac. In principle, therefore, we appear to be faced with a number of possibilities: Sergius did make a translation of the Categories , but it is no longer extant; or he assumed his readers could refer to the old Anonymous previously often supposed to be by him; or he assumed his readers would refer to the Greek text of the Categories ; or he did not consider that his readers would need or wish to refer to the text of Aristotle himself. Let us con- sider each of these, beginning with the last of them. Sergius’ commentary has much in common with those of Ammonius and Philo- ponus. These Greek commentaries were not conceived to be read in isolation from the text of Aristotle, but in conjunction with it. A recent analysis of Alexandrian commentaries on Plato and Aristotle has distinguished two types, one the product of teaching in a classroom setting, the other separate from such a setting and offering an extensive amount of literary material in an effort to present a comprehensive account of a philosophical system. 7 In both types the commentator assumes that the listener or reader has available the text of the ancient philosopher (Plato or Aristotle), in the case of the former that the audience has the relevant Platonic or Aristotelian text in front of them, but not necessarily anything additional. It was certainly not envisaged by any of the Greek commentators that their work should be read in ignorance of the text which they were expounding. Sergius repeatedly states that his aim is to expound Aristotle’s teaching concisely (b-pāsīqātā , literally “in cuttings”), which clearly puts it into the second group of those differentiated (from a different point of view from that immediately above) by Simplicius, those whose intention was to “reveal ( ἀποκαλύπτειν ) the thoughts (ἐννοίας ) put forward by Aristotle, and them alone, concisely ( συντόμως ).”8 Sergius did not proceed, like Porphyry, by means of questions and answers, so it is not necessary to assume that he was tightly tied to one particular model among the Greek commentators, but if his commentary was written in the knowledge that his readers could not access the text of Aristotle himself, then he was doing something very different from his Greek models. Explaining, for example, (in the manner of the Greek commentators) why Aristotle used obscure language 9 is surely quite beside the point if Sergius himself did not employ the same obscurity and his readers were never expected to consult the text of the Philosopher himself.
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