Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (review)

Adam Becker's Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom offers a compelling and important reappraisal of the School of Nisibis. In addition to its importance in East Syrian intellectual and religious life, the School of Nisibis has long played a vital yet rather idiosyncratic role in modern reconstructions of late antique intellectual history. It has been compared to classical schools of literature and philosophy. It has been seen as a repository of Greek learning upon which the Abbasid translation movement drew. It even has been proposed as the model for the (historically dubious) Neoplatonic Academy of Harran. Becker provides a nuanced and persuasive corrective to these perspectives. While acknowledging the influence of classical learning, Becker argues that the School must be understood as evolving out of a distinct Syrian cultural, intellectual, and religious context. The School caps an evolutionary process through which the important early Syriac metaphor of divine pedagogy becomes concrete and gradually incorporated into a sophisticated institutional structure.

Becker's study begins by exploring the tendency of East Syrian thinkers to understand Christianity in pedagogical terms. He examines a range of texts, from the Acts of Thomas to the Peshitta, and shows the importance of pedagogical metaphors in early Syrian Christian discourse. This tendency extends into later Syriac hagiographical descriptions of conversion, with new converts explicitly replacing both classical Greek and Zoroastrian learning with a superior Christian alternative. Becker's second and third chapters then treat the early institutional structures that enabled the practical pursuit of this sort of Syrian Christian scholasticism. These first examine the problematic sources describing the School of the Persians in Edessa, the Roman precursor of the School of Nisibis. Becker argues that these sources largely present an anachronistic picture of the fifth-century Edessene institution that is heavily influenced by the shape of its sixth-century descendant. The fourth chapter shifts focus to describe the basic operations of the School once established in Nisibis. It examines two sets of Canons. These established a "scholarly habitus" that used models of dress, appearance, and behaviors to distinguish scholars from non-scholars while also laying out the School's particular institutional hierarchy.

Becker's fifth chapter discusses the Cause of the Foundation of the Schools, a sixth-century address to the incoming class giving a history of the transmission of learning as well as a basic introduction to some of the School's most important ideas. He notes that the Cause contains elements drawn from four distinct literary genres and illustrates a variety of Syriac, Greek, and Jewish influences upon its content. The next two chapters explore some of the specific intellectual trends that help to shape the ideas expressed in the Cause. The sixth chapter looks at the Cause's dependence upon the thought of Theodore of Mopsuestia and, to a lesser degree, Evagrius. The seventh turns to the importance of Aristotelian logic. Becker argues, quite reasonably, that this system entered the Syriac intellectual environment indirectly, probably through the later Neoplatonic commentary tradition. He concludes this discussion with the important qualification that the Cause "does not demonstrate how the East Syrians received Aristotle; rather, it is an example of how they took Aristotle and employed his ideas" (153). The final two chapters contextualize the School. Chapter eight places the School within a late-antique Mesopotamian scholastic environment. Chapter nine looks at the conflict between scholastic and ascetic culture as well as the factors that led the school to decline in the seventh century.

Becker aims for the book to not only re-examine the School of Nisibis, but also show the interaction of Syriac studies, Greek philosophy, the Arabic translation movement, Rabbinic Judaism, and late-antique Christian culture. He largely succeeds in this ambitious project. He strikes precisely the right balance between a specific focus upon the School of Nisibis...