Thread by @salam_rassi

Last month I gave a talk on a thorny issue in religious and intellectual history: the distinction between believing and knowing (or more simplistically, faith and reason) in Late Antiquity. My focus was on two #Syriac authors, Paul the Persian and Babai the Great.

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This is the culmination of research I've been working on since 2018 (alongside so many other projects). I'm currently writing up the talk as a publication. For now, here's a research 🧵 with some broad outlines.

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I'm interested in how faith––a concept we take for granted––came to define Christianity in Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages. Is believing on a par with knowing? Most Syriac Christian writers would say yes. In short, one needs faith to get at divine truths.

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Early Syriac writers like Ephrem (d. 373) & Narsai (d. ca. 502) tended to discourage inquiry and investigation (ʿuqqāḇā, bṣāṯā, bʿāṯā), regarding them as superfluities (yattīrāṯā). Instead, one comes to know divine matters in silence (šeṯqā).

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A significant departure is the Christian philosopher Paul the Persian, who sees opinion and understanding as distinct modalities. As in Plato's Meno and Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, Paul holds knowledge (īḏaʿṯā) to be superior to belief (haymānūṯā).

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But how big a departure is this? There's one area where Paul's Neoplatonism and more 'traditional' Christian attitudes converge: the role of reflection and contemplation (Syriac meṯbaynānūṯā, or tēʾōrīya from the Greek theoria) in achieving certain knowledge.

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In my talk, I examined notions of contemplation in writers up to and after Paul the Persian. A big name here is Sergius of Rēsh ʿAynā (d. 536), whose theory of contemplation I discussed in an earlier Tweet about storks!



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In short, I argue that faith and knowledge often came together in contemplation. Paul distinguishes faith from knowledge, but his account of contemplation (the means by which one attains knowledge) falls very much within the paradigm of late ancient Christian Neoplatonism.

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That's what brought me to Babai. For him, contemplation was part of an anti-empirical approach to 'true' knowledge. As a monastic thinker of the Evagrian school, Babai argues that clarity in divine matters comes from stepping away from the body and returning to the soul.

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In Babai's scheme, this asceticised notion of contemplation applies to all all subjects, ecclesiastical and profane. It's an idea common in many philosophically minded Christians in Late Antiquity, including Paul the Persian.

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Paul the Persian wrote an introduction to logic addressed to the #Sasanian king Khusrow I (r. 531–79). It's preserved in a single #Syriac manuscript but may have originally been written in Pahlavi.

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Paul is also the author of a commentary on Aristotle's De Interpretatione, thought to be translated from Persian by Severus of Sebokht (d. 667), and a treatise on the division of philosophy preserved in Ibn Miskawayh's Tartīb al-Saʿādāt ('The Order of Happiness').

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Babai is of huge significance to the ('Nestorian') Church of the East. He is one of Syriac Christianity's foremost writers on Christology, hagiography and asceticism. I look at his monumental Book of Union and his vast commentary on Evagrius' Gnostic Chapters.

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Why Paul and Babai? They are among the last important representatives of late Sasanian intellectual culture. Each is witness to the migration of late-antique Alexandrian Neoplatonism from Eastern Roman lands to Iran.

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Just as importantly, they are writing as Christians under Zoroastrian rule, at a time of heightened religious tensions. This makes what they have to say about belief and knowledge all the more interesting.

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I touch on definitions of faith in my book, looking more at medieval Syriac and Christian Arabic and points of contact with Islamic notions of imān and iʿtiqād (see Ch. 1, Section 1.8).

global.oup.com/academic/produ…

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