The religious sciences

In Byzantium

The term religious sciences doesn't really apply to Byzantium, where theology wasn't based on reflection, but on revelation, liturgy, and contemplation. In Byzantium, unlike the Christian West, there was little ‘dialectic’ theology, which is more of a science.

The relation between secular and religious reflection was often conflictual in Byzantium. This conflict took the form of various crises.

In the sixth century, the Antiochian theologian Cosmas Indicopleustes criticized the Alexandrian philosopher, John Philoponus, for using secular philosophical notions to defend theological assertions (e.g. on the eternity of the world). John Philoponus responded by developing a cosmology based on Hellenistic science (Ptolemy and Hipparchus), while asserting the fundamental compatibility between science and the Bible[1].

In the twelfth century, John Italus, who claimed it was possible to unravel the masteries of the faith with the aid of secular philosophical notions, was condemned by the synod of Constantinople. In the fourteenth century, there was further debate about the possibility of knowing God. The monk Gregory Palamas, who maintained that the contemplation of the prophets gave them a knowledge of God, was condemned by Barlaam the Calabrian, who believed that it's impossible to know God, but that reasoning may give mankind some enlightenment about Him. Shortly afterwards, Prochoros Kydones, who wanted to combine Latin scholarship with Orthodox theology and introduce dialectics in theology, was condemned by the synod for his opposition to Palamas.

The religious sciences were generally reserved for clerics. However, learned lay people, and even emperors, concerned themselves with and practiced the religious sciences throughout the course of Byzantine history. From the eleventh century, the teaching of theology was provided—in the patriarchal school, which was dependent on Hagia Sophia  of Constantinople—, by teachers, whose status was specified in an edict issued by Alexios I Komnenos in 1107. The main types of teacher were teachers of the Scriptures, who held the rank of deacon, teachers of the Gospels (which carried the title of ecumenical teacher), teachers of the Apostles, and teachers of the Psalms. These teachers educated future bishops and the preachers whose mission was to teach the people.

In the monasteries, the hegumen used catechisms (Catechism of Theodore the Studite of Stoudios in the ninth century, and that of Simeon the New Theologian in the tenth century)[2] to provide the monks with daily or weekly spiritual instruction.

Exegesis is the critical interpretation of biblical text. The scriptural canon was defined much later than in the West—the canonicity of the Apocalypse of John, for example, wasn't recognized until the sixth century. Up until the seventh century, there were two main schools of interpretation in the Christian East: the allegorical method that was mainly used in Alexandria, and the literal method in Antioch. However, many patristic exegesists used a combination of the two methods. Anthologies of patristic commentaries were composed in the margins of manuscripts, uniting the quotations of the Fathers in a single passage of biblical text. After the Council in Trullo (692), the critical interpretation of biblical texts was reserved for clerics, who had to remain faithful to the tradition of the Fathers.

And in the theology of the time, the texts of the Fathers were regarded as being as authoritative as the Scriptures. In the eighth century, John of Damascus summarized Orthodox theology in his De fide orthodoxa treatise, which was very popular at the time. The patristic tradition was also transmitted through liturgy, which became the expression of the Orthodox faith. From the tenth century, the clerics' monopoly on theology was challenged by monks like Simeon the New Theologian who, conversely, wanted to reserve theology for monks who experienced the grace of the Holy Spirit through contemplation. This line of thought, which was abandoned in the centuries that followed, re-emerged in the fourteenth century with the Hesychast controversy and the doctrine of Gregory Palamas.

Byzantine canon law incorporated ecclesiastical and civil laws into a single collection of laws (nomocanon), which grouped imperial laws and canons from the Apostles, Councils, and Fathers into themes. Canonists (Zonaras, Balsamon, and Aristenos in the twelfth century; Blastares and Harmenopoulos in the fourteenth century), who endeavoured to adapt the legislation to the new conditions, produced commentaries on these collections of law.

Despite attempts by some independently minded people, who then had to face the consequences, the religious sciences were not autonomous. The emperor and guardian of Orthodoxy could sometimes preside over the synod of bishops assembled around the  patriarch—this is how Alexius Comnenus condemned Jean Italos in 1082. In 1166, Manuel I Komnenos imposed the Latin theory that the saying of Christ, ‘My Father is greater than I’ refers to the Word incarnate and not the eternal Son.

However, the Church was chiefly responsible for protecting the orthodoxy of the doctrine. Several synodal courts condemned spiritual or theological deviations. These deviations were listed in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy[3], which dates from the victory of the images after the second iconoclasm and which—it is regularly updated—, lists the heresies and must be read each year on the first Sunday in Lent (the Sunday of Orthodoxy).

M.-H. C.

In Islam

The Arabic word ‘ilm (knowledge) initially referred to knowledge of Islam before acquiring a wider scope of meaning (especially from the ninth century) when works from Greek antiquity on medicine, mathematics, and philosophy were translated into Arabic. There then arose a need to make a clear distinction between the field of religious sciences, or al-‘ulūm al-dīniyya, and the secular science of the Ancients, or ‘ilm al-awā’il (knowledge of antiquity). Nevertheless, knowledge derived from Islam was always predominant and became even more so during the twelfth century—to such a point that the ʿulamāʾ (‘the learned’, who were in fact ‘specialists in the religious sciences’) played a preponderant role in Muslim society and even formed their own hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire.

However, theologians were slow to arrive at a definition of religious sciences during the medieval period and the various writers who’ve attempted to define them over the centuries haven’t always agreed on the disciplines they cover and their scope of application. The various classifications adopted—a distinction was made between secular or rational sciences and religious sciences, and later al-Ghazālī (died 1111) distinguished between earthly sciences and sciences of the beyond—reflect a constant hesitancy with regard to the hierarchy of the sciences and the ambiguous relationship between religion and reason.

The central text of the Islamic faith—the Qurʾān, the sacred scripture for all Muslims and the very word of God—and Ḥadīth, comprising all the accounts of the statements and actions of the Prophet Muhammad, serve as the basis of all the religious sciences. People acquired the basic principles (or the uṣūl) by memorizing the entire Qurʾān—these Muslims then earned the honorific title of ‘Hafiz’—and, most importantly, by making commentaries on and clarifying the sacred scripture, i.e. exegesis (tafsīr), a discipline that was first established by Ibn ‘Abbās (died 687), Muhammad’s cousin. The Qurʾānic commentaries only developed with the aid of the complementary sciences, often understood as being religious sciences, such as lexicography, grammar, and the stories and traditions of the biblical prophets (or Isrāʾīliyāt, things Jewish) and the first Arabs. However, it was in the field of Ḥadīth, or ‘Tradition’, that learned Muslims conducted comprehensive investigative work by searching for new traditions (talab al-‘ilm) throughout the Dār al-Islam (house/abode of Islam); and, in particular, by developing a concerted scientific approach when the need arose in the ninth century to record in writing the Prophetic Tradition and distinguish the authentic traditions from those that had been created over the course of time to defend various religious and political causes. The investigation focused as much on the ‘chains of oral or written transmission’ by which the reliability of hadiths transmitted orally since the time of Muhammad were determined, as on the actual accounts. There then arose a need to produce biographies of these narrators—to establish their origins, when they lived, and the level of their religious devotion—to ascertain the validity of the narrated accounts. The genre of the biographical dictionary experienced unprecedented growth after the compilation of Ibn Sa‘d’s (died 845) Kitab al-tabaqat al-kabir (Large book of the generations), a comprehensive reference work that provided information about more than 4,000 narrators. Once all the authentic hadiths had been assembled in the canonical works, such as the two Ṣaḥīḥ by al-Bukhārī and Muslim, they contributed to the development of the sunna or normative practices of the prophet Muhammad that Muslims had to follow.

Closely linked to the science of traditions, Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh) is however a separate branch of the religious sciences, coming under the category of the derived sciences (furu’) which focus on the study of the foundations of religious law (Sharīʿah) and its development. The science of fiqh (literally ‘understanding’) deals with the establishment of social rules for Muslims, while preparing them for life after death, by covering all the areas and providing set solutions to the various situations with which the faithful may be confronted. In the second half of the ninth century, jurists (faqihs), such as Mālik and Abū Ḥanīfah, began to develop systems of thought and approaches to tackle the new problems—which weren’t precisely covered in the Qurʾān—faced by the Muslim community. The legal reasoning (ijtihād) of these jurists produced several types of reasoning, such as ijmāʿ (scholarly consensus) and qiyās (analogical reasoning), which contributed to the development of new sources of Islamic Law after the Qurʾān and the sunna. They also formed the basis of the four Sunnī legal schools which then developed in Islam and have survived to the present day: Ḥanafīyah, Shāfiʿīyah, Mālikīyah, and Ḥanābilah.

The adoption of a speculative approach (kalām) in the religious sciences began in the second half of the eighth century in the wake of the Mu‘tazilite movement. The approach consisted of justifying a priori the faith and religious belief, and was based not only on the sacred scripture, which remained of primary importance, but also on reasoning and thinking. Mu‘tazilite kalām, which was rejected by the most fundamentalist branches of Islam, such as the Hanbalites, nevertheless survived in Sunnī Islam in a watered-down form in the Ashʿariyyah and Māturīdīyah schools of theology, which appeared in the tenth century. Kalām was no longer restricted to theology, but was also used to defend the Islamic faith to convince sceptics and as a form of reasoning against heretical innovations.

The traditional place for teaching the religious sciences was for many centuries confined to large urban mosques where the ʿulamāʾ transmitted their knowledge in areas reserved for study, often at the foot of a pillar, with a study circle (halqa) seated around the master. However, at the beginning of the twelfth century—when the religious sciences became hegemonic in the field of knowledge—edifices dedicated to each discipline were constructed, generally under the patronage of the local dynasties, who were keen to attract the ʿulamāʾ class and exert control over it: hence, dār al-hadith institutions, where the prophetic tradition was taught—and especially madrasahs for the teaching of fiqh—spread from Iran to the Maghrib. These edifices, which weren’t initially built according to a specific architectural scheme, were subsequently characterized (primarily in the East) by their four classrooms with an iwan—corresponding to the four schools of law—which opened onto a central courtyard.

These institutions, which were controlled by the ruling authorities and had a rigid curriculum, were built at a time that corresponded with the ‘closure of the gates of ijtihād’, marking a long period of stagnation in the religious sciences, which ended only recently.

J. –M. M.