The Nestorian Detour

In 431 the Council of Ephesus condemned the position associated with Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, concerning how the divine and human natures were joined in Christ. Those who held it were pushed east, out of the Roman empire, into Sasanian Persia.

This is a routine episode in the history of Christian doctrinal disputes, and it turns out to have determined the route by which Greek philosophy reached the Islamic world and eventually Europe.

The expelled community carried its curriculum. The school at Edessa, and later at Nisibis in Persian territory, taught in Syriac, and Syriac scholars translated a large body of Greek philosophy and medicine into their own language across the fifth to seventh centuries. Aristotle's logical works, Galen's medicine, Porphyry's introduction to the categories.

So when the Abbasids began the Arabic translation programme, they did not have to start from Greek manuscripts and Greek-speaking scholars, both scarce in Baghdad. They had a local community with two or three centuries of experience translating exactly this material, and a technical vocabulary already built in a Semitic language structurally close to Arabic.

Hunayn ibn Ishaq, the most important figure in the medical translation effort, was a Nestorian Christian. The Bukhtishu family, hereditary physicians to the caliphs for generations, were Nestorians from Gondishapur. The translation movement's professional core came substantially from a church that Constantinople had expelled.

The academy at Gondishapur in southwestern Persia is where several of these threads meet, and it attracts more legend than the sources support. What is reasonably established is a functioning centre of medicine with Syriac, Persian and Indian input, which supplied physicians to the Abbasid court.

The structural observation is one this archive keeps arriving at from different directions. Knowledge frequently travels through the people an institution has ejected. The expulsion moves them somewhere else, and somewhere else is where the material ends up being useful.

Simplicius carried the Athenian curriculum out after 529 and preserved the Presocratics in his commentaries. The Nestorians carried Aristotle east after 431 and delivered him to Baghdad. In both cases the ejecting institution did not want the material and did not destroy it, and in both cases the receiving culture found a use.

That has an implication worth stating carefully. An institution's decision that a body of work is unacceptable does not usually kill the work. It relocates it, and relocation is often the condition under which it develops, because the receiving context has different questions.

A doctrinal quarrel about the natures of Christ, settled at a council in Asia Minor in 431, is one of the reasons Europe eventually got Aristotle back. Nobody at that council was making a decision about that.