aries
on the treatises of the Peripatetic system which, modified often
unconsciously by the dominant ideas of its expositors, became in the 6th
and 7th centuries the philosophy of the Eastern Church. But the
instrument which, in the hands of John of Damascus (Damascenus), was
made subservient to theological interests, became in the hands of others
a dissolvent of the doctrines which had been reduced to shape under the
prevalence of the elder Platonism. Peripatetic studies became the source
of heresies; and conversely, the heretical sects prosecuted the study of
Aristotle with peculiar zeal. The church of the Nestorians, and that of
the Monophysites, in their several schools and monasteries, carried on
from the 5th to the 8th century the study of the earlier part of the
Organon, with almost the same means, purposes and results as were found
among the Latin schoolmen of the earlier centuries. Up to the time when
the religious zeal of the emperor Zeno put a stop to the Nestorian
school at Edessa, this "Athens of Syria" was active in translating and
popularizing the Aristotelian logic. Their banishment from Edessa in 489
drove the Nestorian scholars to Persia, where the Sassanid rulers gave
them a welcome; and there they continued their labours on the Organon. A
new seminary of logic and theology sprang up at Nisibis, not far from
the old locality; and at Gandisapora (or Nishapur), in the east of
Persia, there arose a medical school, whence Greek medicine, and in its
company Greek science and philosophy, ere long spread over the lands of
Iran. Meanwhile the Monophysites had followed in the steps of the
Nestorians, multiplying Syriac versions of the logical and medical
science of the Greeks. Their school at Resaina is known from the name of
Sergius, one of the first of these translators, in the days of
Justinian; and from their monasteries at Kinnesrin (Chalcis) issued
numerous versions of the introductory treatises of the Aristotelian
logic. To the Isagoge of Porphyry, the Categories and the Hermeneutica
of Aristotle, the labours of these Syrian schoolmen were confined. These
they expounded, translated, epitomized and made the basis of their
compilations, and the few who were bold enough to attempt the Analytics
seem to have left their task unaccomplished.

The energy of the Monophysites, however, began to sink with the rise of
the Moslem empire; and when philosophy revived amongst them in the 13th
century, in the person of