Introduction: Reframing the Question of Athens and Jerusalem

Following the theologian Tertullian’s pairing of Athens with paganism and Jerusalem with Christianity, these two cities are routinely identified as symbols of the polarity between philosophical speculation and religious belief. To this view, which has remained prevalent in Western European thought up until the era of Leo Strauss, this book opposes a different Mediterranean tradition: one that welded Abrahamic monotheism to Neoplatonism. The introduction traces the history of the emergence of this tradition in the context of conflict between Orthodox Christianity and Ismaʿili Shiʿi Islam, as represented on the one hand by the Byzantine Empire under the Macedonian dynasty, and on the other hand by the Islamic Caliphate under the Fatimid dynasty. It identifies the importance of Athens—and particularly of the Parthenon—during the Central Middle Ages as the site of a religious pilgrimage that promoted a form of Christianity indebted to pagan cultic practices and concepts traditionally associated with the locality. It is argued that the imperial regime supported these developments, despite the fact they came perilously close to heresy, in order to oppose claims made by the caliphate of ownership of the heritage of the “wisdom of the ancients”—equated by Muslim statesmen and intellectuals with Hellenism.