Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/49

 "fusionists" or Monophysites or Jacobites, as they were called after Jacob of Serugh, who was mainly instrumental in organizing them as a church: in Syria also they had a strong following. Like the Nestorians they were persecuted by the Emperor and the state church, but unlike them they did not migrate outside the Byzantine Empire, but remained an important though strongly disaffected body within its limits, though later on they sent out off-shoots into other lands. Like the Nestorians they tended to discard the language of their persecutors and to use the vernacular Coptic and Syriac: it is rightly claimed that the golden age of Syriac literature and philosophy begins with the Monophysite schism. A curious line of demarcation however, is observed in Syriac between the Jacobites in the West and the Nestorians in the East: they used different dialects, which is probably the result of their geographical distribution, and they used different scripts in writing which was partly due to deliberate intension, though partly also to the use of slightly different implements for writing.

When we consider the results of the Monophysite and Nestorian schisms we begin to understand why so much Greek philosophical material was translated into Syriac, whilst the Nestorian movement was the effective reason why Syriac gradually became the medium for transmitting Hellenistic culture into the parts of Asia which lay beyond the confines of the Byzantine Empire during the centuries immediately