Islam and the West… for a better world @
it was because Raymond of Sauvetat, with Juan of Sevilla and Gundisalvo, had founded there a school of translation. Surely it is obvious that the translation of essential texts (not just stuff on some bestseller list) is part integral both of any internal cultural advance and of anything like world culture. At the Toledan translation centre, Greek texts (Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus) were translated into Arabic, and therefore discussed in Arabic, Latin and Spanish by all the intellectual pilgrims of the period. Eminent among them was Avicenna, who read Aristotle and Plato, and extended the thought and language of both in original ways. To the enlightened and enlighening thought of the peripatetician and the metaphysician he added his own illuminations : he pushed intelligence to its most abstract limits, his latent mysticism so intellectualised that it was no longer mystical. The political and religious authorities of the time were worried. They were willing enough to take from Aristotle elements of empirical knowledge, and from Plato elements of aesthetics. As for the Neo-Platonists (Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus), they could be used as adjuncts to a religious philosophy of the infinite. But the said authorities drew the line at what they considered to be the more extravagant developments of these minds. Avicenna was to be condemned as a heretic, a dangerous intellectual anarchist, by both Christians and Muslims. The Toledan colloquium of East and West went on outside any kind of orthodoxy. These free minds did not belabour the passion of Christ, they spoke about ecstasy. If they used the term ‘angel’, it was not to designate a messenger of God, but as the bearer of a hermeneutics of silence. In this new context, the (hypothetical) relationship between God and His creature is relegated more or less to the level of infantile pantomime. The accent is on the ultimate possibilities of human nature, on the capacity of the mind to
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