Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/10

 on, developed, and modified by circumstances. As the Empire fell to pieces the body of culture became subject to varying conditions in different localities, of which the divergence between the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West is the most striking example. The introduction of Muslim influence through Spain is the one instance in which we seem to get an alien culture entering into this Roman tradition and exercising a disturbing influence. In fact, this Muslim culture was at bottom essentially a part of the Hellenistic-Roman material, even the theology of Islam being formulated and developed from Hellenistic sources, but Islam had so long lived apart from Christendom and its development had taken place in surroundings so different that it seems a strange and alien thing. Its greatest power lay in the fact that it presented the old material in an entirely fresh form.

It is the effort of the following pages to trace the transmission of Hellenistic thought through the medium of Muslim philosophers and Jewish thinkers who lived in Muslim surroundings, to show how this thought, modified as it passed through a period of development in the Muslim community and itself modifying Islamic ideas, was brought to bear upon the culture of mediæval Latin Christendom. So greatly had it altered in external form during the centuries of its life apart, that it seemed a new type of intellectual life and became a disturbing factor which diverted Christian philosophy into new lines and tended to disintegrate the traditional theology of the Church, directly leading up to the Renascence which gave the death-blow to mediæval culture: so little had it altered in real substance that it used the same