Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/18

14 and men of learning were suspected of heresy or worse. An aristocracy of learning has always been more odious to the people than one founded on wealth or birth; and there is no intolerance like that of the ignorant. Their princes could do no act more popular than to order the destruction of heretical books and manuscripts in the public square. All Hakim's manuscripts were so destroyed after his death to conciliate the people. Works on theology, grammar and medicine were alone spared, with a few treatises on elementary astronomy—for it was necessary to be able to calculate the direction in which Mecca lay, the Kibla towards which every Moslem turns his face in prayer.

In Arabia, in Spain and in Europe, the mass of the people was fanatical, brutal and ignorant. Dominion over them was gained and held by exciting their passions. The influence of sages, like Bacon and Averroës, of liberal princes, like Hakim and Frederick II., saved learning from extinction; but it has required the experience of centuries to raise the tolerance of new ideas to its present level; and even now, is not tolerance composed quite as much of indifference as of enlightenment? If the history of the renaissance of art in Italy is closely examined a corresponding ignorance and indifference is exhibited. Where art ministered to religion, to superstition or to local pride, the multitude was concerned for it. For art as art, only a select few were interested.

The writings of the Greeks first became known to the Arabs through translations from the Syrian. In the year 431 the Nestorian heresy was condemned at the council of Ephesus. Nestorian priests were banished and dispersed throughout Syria, Persia and the further east, and everywhere carried somewhat of the learning of the west. Under the caliphs they spread from Cyprus to China and outnumbered the Greek and Latin churches. There was a Nestorian bishop in Merv in A. D. 334; and at Herat and Samarkand in A. D. 500. The Kerait Turkomans accepted Christianity about A. D. 1000, as a tribe. A Nestorian christian was superintendent of the city schools of Bagdad under one of the Abbaside caliphs. Until the death of Tamerlane (1405) Nestorians were to be found everywhere throughout the orient.

It is doubtful whether a single Arab scholar was acquainted with the Greek language, and certain that none of the Moorish doctors were so. The printed volumes of Averroës' Aristotle are a Latin translation of a Hebrew translation of a commentary made on an Arabic translation of a Syriac translation from a Greek text. The meaning of the original was almost lost in its transmigrations through tongues so different in spirit as Greek, Syrian, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin.

Latin editions of the whole or of parts of Averroës' Aristotle were greatly multiplied in Europe after the invention of printing. During the century 1480-1580 nearly a hundred editions were issued. At Venice alone more than fifty were put forth. It is in Avicenna that