The Philosopher, or On Faith

“God necessarily exists, since it is not possible for things to be otherwise, as Aristotle shows in the Metaphysics.” So Mehmed II, the Ottoman conqueror of both Constantinople and Trebizond, tells George Amiroutzes, the Byzantine scholar and native of Trebizond, in the beginning of a conversation reported in Amiroutzes’s dialogue The Philosopher, or On Faith.

The dialogue is a literary recreation of the conversations between Mehmed, a Muslim, and Amiroutzes, a Christian. In the course of Th...