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concept and history of philosophical religions 41Bishop Tempier in Paris which institutionalized the division betweenChristianity and many of the teachings constituting the Greco-Arabicphilosophical legacy in the West. 15 In part these differences can beaccounted for by the fact that the Platonic conceptual frameworkwhich informs the interpretation of religious traditions as philosophicalreligions did not play a significant role in the medieval Latin context.This, of course, does not answer the question, but only moves it up onelevel: since Christian appropriations of this Platonic framework wereavailable in patristic literature, it remains to be explained why it wasnot adopted for integrating Christianity with Greco-Arabic philosophyin the Middle Ages. Attempting to answer this question would go farbeyond what I can accomplish in this chapter. It is safe to assume, onthe other hand, that one important reason for the lack of a comprehensivestudy of the concept and the history of philosophical religionsis the fact that the historiography of medieval philosophy was traditionallyshaped by the specific character of medieval Latin philosophyand hence did not pay attention to a tradition that does not fit on thelatter’s intellectual map.Let me fi nally address—with some reluctance I admit—what issometimes called the “principle of accommodation,” because scholarshave claimed that several of the authors examined in this chapter—e.g.,Origen, Eusebius, and Maimonides—have adopted such a principle. 16According to Stephen Benin,divine accommodation . . . alleges, most simply, that divine revelation isadjusted to the disparate intellectual and spiritual level of humanity atdifferent times in history. . . . The Lord accommodates or condescends,freely and benevolently, to the human level lest his salvific message gounheard or unheeded. 17I am not competent to judge whether this view has ever been held inthe way Benin describes it. I am confident, by contrast, that its strikinganthropomorphism is incompatible with the metaphysical commitmentsof all the philosophers whom I will discuss in this chapter. To besure, they sometimes write as if they subscribed to such a principle.But this is because they themselves—not God!—use traditional religiouslanguage in order to mediate between their philosophical views15For a recent edition with commentary, see Tempier 1999.16See Benin 1993, 10–13; 13–22; 147–162.17Ibid., xiv.