Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/43

 body, a conclusion possibly not intended by those who expressed their views but pressed by their opponents. This had been the teaching of Diodorus and of Theodore of Mopseustia both associated with the school of Antioch, and defended in its extremer form by Nestorius, a monk of Antioch, who was made bishop of Constantinople in A.D. 428. Violent controversies ensued which resulted in a general council at Ephesus in 431, where the Alexandrian party succeeded in getting Nestorius and his followers condemned as heretics. Two years later the Nestorians, absolutely confident that their opponents were utterly illogical in supposing that the rational soul and the Logos in Christ were fused or united together, repudiated the official church and organised themselves as the Church which had no part with the heretics of Ephesus. The state Church, however, had the weight of the temporal authority behind it, and the heavy hand of persecution fell severely upon the Nestorians. In Antioch and Greek speaking Syria persecution did its work effectually and the Nestorians were reduced to the position of a fugitive sect, in Egypt, as might be expected, they had no footing, and the westerns as usual agreed with the dominant state church: only amongst the Syriac speaking Christians the Nestorian teaching had a free course, and that section for the most part adhered to it.

Some time before this the school at Nisibis had been closed, or rather removed to Edessa. In A.D. 363