One of the myths of modern humanism, says Gouguenheim, is that Christianity owes much – sometimes it is said that everything – to Islam. Indeed, Islamic scholars were to be the first to salvage, then deliver to the Western world, the texts of the Greek philosophers. But how can we be sure, asks Gouguenheim, that the Arabs collaborating with Christianity were Muslims? After all, not all Arabs profess Islam! In this case, a large part of the ancient heritage was brought to Europe by Arab Christians, or more precisely, Eastern Christians from Syria. 'This erroneous thinking stems from the fact that it is difficult to understand that one can be an Arab without being a Muslim. Moreover, one can be an Arab and a Christian, as was – and still is the case with the Assyrians, to whom we owe the transmission of these famous Greek texts to the West. Consequently, it was not Islam that made the West possible, but Christians pursued by Muslims extending the Islamic sphere of influence across the planet,' – writes Michel Onfray, a French apologist for Gouguenheim’s work, whose findings I refer to in this article.
Here is the first and most widespread, albeit suitably modified, version of the story of how Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, Plotinus, Iamblichus and Proclus made their way to Europe – I think acceptable to most progressive French humanists even with this correction. After all, the real rock of offence for them turned out to be another Gouguenheim thesis. Indeed, the French scholar proved that the Ancients were discovered in Europe fifty years before the Assyrians brought them here. James of Venice, a monk at the monastery of St Michael the Archangel, together with the copyists working there, contributed to the process. It was he who, with the help of other monks, translated the works of the Greek philosophers from Greek into Latin. His work represents 'the missing link in the history of the transfer of Aristotelian philosophy from the Greek to the Latin world. This man deserves to have his name written in capital letters in cultural history textbooks.
Let us be more explicit: if the whole of medieval Europe contracted somewhere a debt that it has not been able to fully settle to this day, it was with these copyists from the Norman abbey, patiently transcribing ancient papyri. Therefore, it cannot be argued that the West in the Middle Ages was cut off from Hellenistic sources, if only for a time. That was not the case. Islam, on the other hand, took as much as it managed to take from the Greeks and as much as its doctrine allowed it to take. Muslim scholars did not learn Greek or Latin. The former was considered the language of pagans, the latter the language of Christians. And both were rejected. Minds as powerful and profound as Al-Farabi, Averroes, and Avicenna knew the Ancients in Arabic translations made by Assyrian Christians. This can hardly come as a surprise since before the 10th century, the Arabic language had not assimilated any scientific term in the European, i.e. scholastic, sense of the word. Logos is a matter of the Greeks and Christians, and a matter of Europe. A politically and religiously strong Islam could not succumb to Hellenisation, much less become rational.
Sylvain Gouguenheim’s work, which he has never made a secret of, is a mixture of historical facts, speculation based on relevant premises, conjecture and, at times, imagination. Unfortunately, the hard evidence attesting to the veracity of the French medievalist’s hypothesis went up in smoke in June 1944 during the landing of Allied troops in Normandy.
Here is another version of The Name of the Rose, only that one is in a scientific wrapper, ruled the Areopagus of French historians. How – we ask (French scholars ask) – does Gouguenheim know this, where did he read about all this, why did he not ask us – who always know better – how things really are? Even a child is well aware that not only France but the whole of Europe owes its shape to Islamist influence. This can still be seen even today in the streets of French cities, where the coloured mixes with the white in a harmonious, peaceful coexistence. Can the author of Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel not see this? However, the lecturing, insulting and ridiculing of Gouguenheim did not seem enough. The French scholar was decided to be punished. He was accused of being a political (right-wing) agent in the Academy. His scholarly work was negatively commented on by his fellow academics, who initiated a petition, subsequently published in the progressive Libération, urging him to renounce his disgusting Islamophobia.
Subsequently, he was removed from teaching at his home École normale supérieure in Lyon. His request to transfer to another academic centre was refused, and he was removed from the adjudication committee for doctoral dissertations, and his doctoral students were taken away. That still was too little. Soon a proper ‘witchcraft trial’ was unleashed. Conferences were held – one national and one with guests invited from abroad – at which Gouguenheim’s theses were refuted step by step. In parallel to these efforts, he was effectively prevented from publishing his response to the charges formulated against him in all scholarly historical journals, so even the doyen of French historiography, Professor Jacques Le Goff, asked for more restraint in this debate. When Sylvain Gouguenheim finally became a media corpse, his loved ones died. This was all happening these days, in the heart of Europe, in brightly enlightened France. If one clears away all the smoke hiding the real intentions of the polemicists, it becomes clear that their attack was provoked by the scholar’s failure to submit to the ‘politically correct deconstructionist ideology, which proclaims that France and Judaeo-Christian Europe would be nothing without the salutary interference of the non-white, the non-Christian and the non-Western’.
Michel Onfray, who considered the details of this scandal, pointed out the similarity of the contemporary defamation mechanism with the Moscow trials of the 1930s. I share this view of the matter. If someone states that in Soviet Russia, self-criticism did not save from death and people were losing their lives on a massive scale, whereas today in France, no one is killing anyone, then I would ask them: what is a life in which everything you have lived up to, everything you have loved most, everything you have devoted all your energy and all your efforts to, has been taken away from you?
On 12 June 2008, in the pages of L’Express, [Gouguenheim] told Pascal Ceaux and Christian Makarian, who quoted the words of those claiming that there is no evidence that James of Venice came to the Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey: