§ 139. THE NESTOEIANS. 73J
empire it found an asylum in the kingdom of Persia, wliither several teachers of the theological scliool of Edessa fled. One of them, Rarsumas, became bishop of IN'isibis (435-489),' founded a new theological seminary there, and confirmed the Persian Christians in their aversion to the Cyrillian council of Ephesus, and in their adhesion to the Antiochian and Nestorian theology. Tliey were favored by the Persian kings, from Pherozes, or Firnz, onward (461-488), ont of political opposition to Con- Btantinople. At the council of Scleucia (498) they renounced all connection with the orthodox church of the empire. They called themselves, after their liturgical language, CnALDiEAN or Assyrian Christians, while they were called by their opponents Nestorians. They had a patriarch, who after the year 496 resided in the double city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and after 762 in Bagdad (the capital of the Saracenic empire), under the name of Yazelich (catholicus), and who, in the thirteentli century, had no less than twenty-five metropolitans under his supervision.
The Nestorian church flourislied for several centuries, spread from Pei'sia, with great missionary zeal, to India, Arabia, and even to China and Tartary, and did good service in scholarsliip and in the founding of schools and hospitals. Mohammed is supposed to owe his imperfect knowledge of Christianity to a Nestorian monk, Sergius ; and from him tlie sect received many privileges, so that it obtained great consideration among the Arabians, and exerted an influence upon their cultm-e, and thus upon the development of philosophy and science in general."
' Not to be confounded with the contemporary Monophyaite abbot Barsumas, a eaint of the Jacobites.
' The observations of Alex, von Humboldt, in the 2d vol. of his Kosmos (Stuttg. and Tiib. 1847, p. 24*7 f.), on the connection of Nestorianism with the culture and physical science of the Arabians, are worthy of note: "It was one of the wondroua arrangements in the system of things, that the Christian sect of the Nestorians, which has exerted a very important influence on the geographical extension of knowledge, was of service even to the Arabians before the latter found their way to learned and disputatious jilexandria; that Christian Nestorianism, in fact, under the protection of the arms of Islam, was able to penetrate far into Eastern Asia. The Arabians, in other words, gained their first acquaintance with Grecian literature through the Syrians, a kindred Semitic race ; while the Syrians themselves, scarcely
73ii THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
Among the Tartars, in tlu; clcventli century, it suecjeed&J in converting to Christianity a king, the priest-king Presbyter John (Prester John) of the Kerait, and his successor of the same name.' But of this we liave only uncertain accounts, and at all events JSTestorian Christianity has since left but slight traces in Tartary and in China.
Under tlie Mongol dynasty the j^estorians were cruelly persecuted. The terrible Tamerlane, the scourge and the destroyer of Asia, towards the end of the fourteenth century almost exterminated them. Yet they have maintained themselves on the wild momitains and in the valleys of Kurdistan and in Armenia under the Turkish dominion to this day, with a separate patriarch, who from 1559 till the seventeenth century resided at Mosul, but has since dwelt in an almost
a century and a half before, had first received the knowledge of Grecian literature through the anathematized Nestorlans. Physicians who had been educated in the institutions of the Greeks, and at the celebrated medical school founded by the Nestorian Christians at Edessa in Mesopotamia, were, so early as the times of Mohanamed, living, befriended by him and by Abu-Bekr, in Mecca.
" The school of Edessa, a model of the Benedictine scliools of Monte Casino and Salerno, awakened the scientific search for materia medica in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms. When it was dissolved by Christian fanaticism under Zeno the Isaurian, the Nestorians scattei'cd towards Persia, where they soon attained political importance, and established a new and thronged medical institute at Dschondisapur in Khuzistan. Tliey succeeded in spreading their science and their faith to China towards the middle of the seventh century under tlie dynasty of Thang, five hundred and seventy-two years after Buddhism had penetrated thither from India.
" The seed of Western culture, scattered in Persia by educated monks, and by the philosophers of the last Platonic school of Athens who were persecuted by Justinian, took beneficent root among the Arabians during their first Asiatic campaign. Feeble as the science of the Nestorian priests may have been, it could still, with ita peculiar medical and pharmaceutic turn, act genially upon a race which had long lived in free converse willi nature, and had preserved a more fresh sensibility to every sort of study of nature, than the people of Greek and Italian cities. What gives the Arabian epoch the universal importance which we must here insist upon, is in great part connected with the trait of national character just indicated. The Arabians, we repeat, are to be regarded as the proper founders of the physical sciences, in the sense which we are now accustomed to attach to the word."
' On this fabulous priest-kingdom, which the popes endeavored by unsuccessful embassies to unite to the Roman churcj, and whose light was quenched by the tide of the conquests of Zengis Khan, comp. Mosiieim: Ilistoria Tartarorum eccles. Helmst. 1741 ; Neander : K irchengesch. vol. v. p. 84 ff. (0th part of the whole work, ed. 1841); and Ritter: Erdkunde, part ii. vol. i. pp. 256, 283 (2d cd. 1832).