Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (893-974 d.C.), Trattato sull'unità (Maqālah fī al-tawḥīd). L’uno, il molteplice e l’unità di Dio. Testo arabo a cura di Samir Khalil Samir sj. Introduzione, traduzione e note a cura di Olga Lucia Lizzini, prefazione di Gerhard Endress.
Edizioni del Gruppo di Ricerca Arabo-Cristiana, Bologna 2020.
مقالة في التوحيد
ليحيى ابن عدي
(م893-974)
ISBN: 9791280091000
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How can we say that God is one? When we say it, are we saying it because – as Muslims believe – we wish to affirm God’s absolute oneness and uniqueness, or because – as Christians understand it – we recognize and accept a modulation within it?
With his Treatise on Divine Unity, the Christian philosopher Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974) sets out to demonstrate that the true meaning of the One does not contradict that of the multiple: on the contrary, it actually implies it. The Christian concept of divine Oneness, which is also simultaneously a “Trinity”, takes its solid philosophical basis from this reasoning.
The method of the Treatise is in reality philosophical, even if its purpose is purely theological: the consideration of the notion of the one (al-wāḥid) aims, in fact, to define the quiddity (māhiyyah) of God. In the wake of Plato’s Parmenides, and with particular attention to the Aristotelian discussion of the one, the different meanings of the one and unity, as Yaḥyā presents them, are conceived in polemical dialogue with the Islamic theological context: the opposition between the Christian and the Islamic conceptions of divine Oneness is implicit but constant throughout the whole Treatise.
