On Attributes and Hypostases

As Christians and Muslims encountered each other in the Middle East from the beginning of Islam in the 7th century CE onward, theology was not only a field of setting boundaries to distinguish oneâ s own community from the other but also an area of mutual influence between the communities. This article analyzes two letters of the East Syriac patriarch Timothy I (d. 823), both of which have an apologetic agenda but at the same time demonstrate Timothyâ s familiarity with the Muslim intellectual milieu of his day. To defend the Christian doctrine of the Trinity against Muslim objections, Timothy made reference to the Islamic doctrine of divine attributes. He used relational attributes which consist of a subject, an act, and an object to show that there must be a certain plurality as well as relationships between the subjects, acts, and objects of the divine attributes. These relationships serve Timothy as a proof for the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. In this article, Timothyâ s arguments and the teachings he ascribed to his Muslim counterparts are compared with what modern scholars have reconstructed about the teachings of Muslim thinkers from Timothyâ s period; so far, such comparisons have been done for Christian Arabic writings more commonly than for Syriac ones. The result of this comparison shows that the positions of Timothyâ s Muslim counterparts approximate very closely the ideas of the MuÊ¿tazilite AbÅ« l-Hudhayl al-Ê¿AllÄ f. Thus, based on their content, it is possible to connect Timothyâ s letters to the teachings of a concrete person among Muslim intellectuals of the period or to circles where AbÅ« l-Hudhayl al-Ê¿AllÄ f seems to have been somehow involved

Aesthetics · Arabic · Doctrine · Islam · Linguistics · Theology · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Computer Science · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Religious studies

• The Muslim Attributes and the Christian Trinity

  Open Access•H A Wolfson•Harvard Theological Review•1956

  Add to list

• Aristoteles Arabus

  Nicholas Rescher, F E Peters•The Classical World•1969

  Add to list