Between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers took up the philosophy of ancient Greece and asked how reason relates to revelation. Their conversation crossed religious and linguistic borders.
The translation movement
In ninth-century Baghdad, scholars translated works by Aristotle, Plato and Greek physicians into Arabic, often by way of Syriac. This movement gave Arabic-speaking thinkers access to the Greek philosophical tradition and set the stage for centuries of debate.
Muslim philosophers and theologians
Al-Kindī, often called the first philosopher of the Arabs, argued that philosophy and revelation lead to the same truth. Al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, known in Latin as Avicenna, built comprehensive systems of logic, metaphysics and psychology. Al-Ghazālī criticised some philosophical positions as incompatible with Islamic belief while adopting logic as a tool of theology. Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes, defended philosophy and wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle.
Jewish thinkers
Saadia Gaon, writing in Judeo-Arabic in the tenth century, argued that reason and revelation agree. Moses Maimonides, born in Córdoba in 1138, sought to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with the Torah and wrote on the limits of human language about God.
Christian thinkers
In the Latin West, Anselm of Canterbury described theology as “faith seeking understanding”. Translations made in twelfth-century Toledo brought Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd into Latin. Thomas Aquinas drew on them, and on Maimonides, as he set out his account of the relationship between faith and reason.
A shared inheritance
These thinkers disagreed on much, but they shared a set of questions: whether the world had a beginning, how God can know particulars, and what human reason can grasp of God. Their exchange is one of the clearest examples of intellectual contact among the Abrahamic traditions.