Periodic Reporting for period 4 - FLOS (Florilegia Syriaca. The Intercultural Dissemination of Greek Christian Thought in Syriac and Arabic in the First Millennium CE)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-08-31
The second purpose of the project was to understand how the religious education that Christians gained from these florilegia had an impact on the actual cultural debate. Between the 7th and the 10th centuries many Syriac Christian authors wrote theological works, often for the purpose of controversy with other Christian competitors or with Muslims; they wrote in Syriac, but also more and more often in Arabic. Our question was: did these authors use the florilegia? Did they construct their arguments with themes drawn from them? In many published or forthcoming studies, the FLOS team was able to demonstrate that this was actually the case. We also showed that our comprehension of the debates between Christians and Muslims in the early Abbasid age is strongly improved if we understand that Syriac and Arab Christians relied not only on pure dialectics to dispute with Muslims, but also on their own theological tradition, which they received especially in the form of florilegia. Our research can thus increase historical awareness for the understanding of our present. Studying the intellectual history of a Christian culture that was the first to face Islam and to equip itself for this confrontation is tantamount to realizing how the Middle East has been the place of a cultural and religious plurality that today is little perceived and threatened.
The results of our work were disseminated worldwide, e.g. at the Universidad Panamericana in Mexico City (2019), at the Patristic Conference in Oxford (2019), at the International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Venice 2022) and the International Syriac and Christian Arabic Symposia (Paris 2022), at Brown (2019) and Yale Universities (2023), but also by involving external experts in two highly successful workshops (Venice, 2020 and 2023) and in two cycles of online lectures during the pandemic (now on Youtube).