Abū l-Faraj ibn al-ʿlbrī (Barhebraeus)

Abstract

Barhebraeus was the leading Syriac philosopher and man of letters in the thirteenth century. While not usually credited with being a particularly original thinker, he had an encyclopedic command both of Arabic and Islamic thought, especially that of Avicenna and al-Ġazālī, as well as of the Greek tradition as it was preserved in Syriac. Writing during the period of great social upheaval caused by the Mongol invasion of the Near East, he sought to create compendia in the Syriac language of philosophical and scientific knowledge as it was available to him. His most important work, the Butyrum sapientiae, was modeled on Avicenna’s Shifā’, following it closely in form and content. It is not simply a translation into Syriac of the Shifā’, however, as Barhebraeus in many places synthesizes Avicenna’s thought with the Syriac translations of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers. His shorter works the Sermo sapientiae and the Mercatura mercaturarum serve as primers to Aristotelian–Avicennan thought in Syriac. In addition to his purely philosophical pursuits, he was also a bishop of the Syriac Orthodox (sometimes called “Jacobite”) Church. In this capacity, he wrote extensive theological works which also discuss philosophical questions, occasionally in ways contradictory to the positions held in his philosophical writings. Despite this, Barhebraeus argued that philosophy and theology were ways of discussing the same truths using different vocabularies.