JOHN W. WATT Cardiff University

A PORTRAIT OF JOHN BAR APHTONIA, FOUNDER OF THE MONASTERY OF QENNESHRE JOHN W. WATT Cardiff University The period of Late Antiquity is one of profound cultural and reli gious change. For all its apparent and in many respects real conti nuity with the "classical" world, significant developments were taking place which were to influence the future shape of Europe and the Near East. The spiritual authority exercised by outstanding figures in such a context, and the manner in which they were admired by their followers, gives us important insights into the mentality of the time. This contribution will be concerned with a portrait of a figure who could be said to stand on two boundaries, a "historical" and a "geographical". The historical is that between classical urban culture and medieval Christian monasticism, the geographical that between the Greek world and the Near East. It has of course been long rec ognized that neither of these boundaries is rigid or precise, but that the historical and geographical overlaps are broad and complex. The narrower historical frame with which we are concerned is the fifth/sixth century, the geographical that from Antioch to Edessa, and the spiritual authority that exercised by john bar Aphtonia. This name does not spring to mind for a roll-call of the famous of late antiquity, but when we add "founder of the monastery of Qenneshre", the historical importance of this man's work becomes more appar ent. One of the most significant intellectual developments during the later Roman empire was the embedding of Greek culture in sections of the Aramaic-speaking Near East and the rise of a Syriac literary culture which, both in its translations from Greek and its own orig inal productions, preserved and continued the Greek heritage, not only throughout the Byzantine "Dark Ages", but beyond into the ninth and tenth centuries, eventually giving birth to the "renaissance" of classical culture in Islam. I This great process did not proceed I On Graeco-Syriac bilingualism in late antiquity, cr., e.g., S.P. Brock, "Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria", Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, eds. A.K. 156 JOHN W. WATT along just a single line of transmission. The idea, for example, of a single line of philosophy proceeding "from Alexandria to Baghdad", attributed to al-Farabi in Ibn abi U~aibi(a, is an ideological construct stemming from the Muslim ideal of the transmission of textbooks within a tradition of oral instruction, not an accurate account of the history of Greek philosophy in the late antique and early Islamic East.2 Yet the city of Edessa and the monastery of Qenneshre (on the east bank of the Euphrates) were both significant locations within the entire process, and in the person of John bar Aphtonia, a native of Edessa and the founder of that monastery, these two locations come together. Edessa was the home of classical Syriac, and at the same time a center of Greek culture in the Near East. 3 In the seventh and eighth centuries Qenneshre became one of the main centers of Greek studies in the region and boasted such outstanding scholars as Severus Sebokht, Jacob of Edessa, Athanasius of Balad, and prob ably George bishop of the Arabs.4 It is even possible that from Qenneshre much literature of Greek origin made its way first to Syrian Orthodox monasteries further east and then to the East Syrian scholars of the Abbasid period.5 The network of grammatical and rhetorical schools in the Hellenized cities of the East, and latterly the convent-schools of the Syriac-speaking monasteries, were the medium by which Greek culture was preserved and nurtured by Bowman, G. Woolf (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 149-60, esp. 154-6; for the later period, e.g., G. Strohmaier, "Hunain ibn Ishaq-an Arab Scholar translating into Syriac", Aram 3 (1991), pp. 163-70. On bilingualism in hagiography, cf. P. Peeters, Le trijimds oriental de l'hagiographie byzantine, Subsidia Hagiographica 26 (Brussels, 1950), pp. 165-218. 2 Cf. G. Strohmaier, '''Von Alexandrien nach Bagdad'----eine fiktive Schultradition", Aristoteles: Werk und Wirkung. Paul Moraux gewidmet II, ed. J- Wiesner (Berlin, 1987), pp. 380-9_ 3 Cf. HlW. Drijvers, "The School of Edessa: Greek Learning and Local Culture", Centres of Learning. Learning and Location in Pre-Modem Europe and the Near East, eds. J-w. Drijvers, AA MacDonald (Leiden, 1995), pp. 49-59. 4 Cf. S.P. Brock, "From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning", East of Byzantium. Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, eds. N.G. Garsoian, T.F. Mathews and R.W. Thomson (Washington D.C., 1982), pp. 23-4. On this group of scholars, cf. A Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur (Bonn, 1922), pp. 246-58. George is the only one of them who is not explicitly connected in the Syriac sources to Qenneshre, but his personal or literary associations with the others make a connection with Qenneshre very likely; cf. K.E. McVey, George, Bishop of the Arabs. A Homily on Blessed Mar Severns, Patriarch of Antioch, CSCO 531 (Louvain, 1993), pp. xxii-xxiii. 5 Cf. Brock, "From Antagonism to Assimilation", pp. 23-4 (pointing to the activ ity of David bar Paulos, who was born near Mosul in the eighth century). .

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