EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 143Whatever these modalities of Christian response to Aristotle, it was the
Church that mainly patronized translation of Aristotle’s logical works into
Syriac from the sixth century onward, to facilitate its own priorities such as
the debates around Chalcedon.^74 The existence of commentaries on Aristo-
tle, as well as translations, implies there were schools where these texts were
studied.^75 The outstanding center of Syriac scholarship, including Aristote-
lianism, was the monastery of Qenneshre on the Syrian Euphrates, the seat of
the Syrian miaphysite patriarch for most of the seventh century.^76 Among its
alumni were members of that notable group of intellectuals who, during the
seventh and eighth centuries, ensured that Syria- Palestine, and in particular
its Syriac speakers, stayed far ahead of Constantinople culturally.^77 At a time
when East Roman intellectuals were focusing almost exclusively on theolog y,
various figures associated with Qenneshre, most notably Severus Sebokht (d.
666/67) and his pupil Jacob of Edessa (d. 708), were also working on Aristo-
tle, especially his logic,^78 and on cosmolog y, astronomy, the natural sciences,
and the astrolabe.^79 Their achievements parallel those of Ananias of Shirak in
Armenia, at the same period. Jacob perhaps did more than anyone else to
ensure the survival of Greek learning in Syriac, and hence in Arabic too.
What we see, then, in the sixth to seventh centuries, is a Syriac scholarly
elite at least part of which was eager to incorporate the whole of Aristotle,
and all useful secular knowledge (such as Galen’s medicine), into the Chris-
tian worldview. The tenth- century Muslim philosopher Fārābī, who studied
with Syriac Christian teachers, claimed (with some support in the texts
which survive to us) that Syriac commitment to logic extended no further
than Prior analytics 1.7. This is the point where Aristotle passes from syllo-
gistic (in which a pair of premises gives rise to an unavoidable conclusion,
e.g., A = B, C = A, therefore C = B) to modal logic (where the truth of the
premises, and therefore of the conclusion too, is qualified by “necessarily”/
“possibly”), which Christians supposedly regarded as inimical to their faith.
plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/elias; id., “David,” SEP, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives
/fall2008/entries/david/.
74 Walker, Legend of Mar Qardagh [5:72] 187–88.
75 H. Hugonnard- Roche, “Jacob of Edessa and the reception of Aristotle,” in Romeny (ed.), Jacob
of Edessa [3:92] 217, 218.
76 Tannous, Syria [1:10] 277–83, 344–46; M. Debié, “Livres et monastères en Syrie- Mésopotamie
d’après les sources syriaques,” in F. Jullien (ed.), Le monachisme syrien (Paris 2010) 142–43.
77 L. I. Conrad, “Varietas syriaca,” in G. J. Reinink and A. C. Klugkist (eds), After Bardaisan (Leu-
ven 1999) 85–105, esp. 90–91 on Severus and Jacob; Fowden, Qusayr ʿAmra [1:32] 299; G. Cavallo,
“Qualche riflessione sulla “collezione filosofica,”” in D’Ancona (ed.), Libraries [3:3] 164.
78 Severus Sebokht: Hugonnard- Roche, Logique d’Aristote [3:8] 18. Jacob of Edessa: id. [5:75], in
Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa [3:92] 205–22 (and 205–6 on Qenneshre generally); M. Wilks, “Jacob of
Edessa’s use of Greek philosophy in his Hexaemeron,” in Romeny (ed.), Jacob of Edessa [3:92] 223–38. See
also King, Earliest Syriac translation [5:52] 10–11, 36–37; J. W. Watt, “Von Alexandrien nach Baghdad,”
in A. Fürst (ed.), Origenes und sein Erbe in Orient und Okzident (Münster 2011) 213–26.
79 J. Teixidor (ed.), “La scienza siriaca,” Enciclopedia italiana: Storia della scienza 4(1) (Rome 2001)
3–71.