Bringing the Heavenly Academy Down to Earth: Approaches to the Imagery of Divine Pedagogy in the East Syrian Tradition

Abstract

The School of Nisibis was a semimonastic East Syrian institution of exegetical learning that flourished in the sixth century c.e. Several examples of an East Syrian genre of “Cause” literature are extant, some composed by members of this school. The most interesting of these texts is the Cause of the Foundation of the Schools , a late sixth-century address to the incoming class at Nisibis that purports to give a history of education, beginning with God's instruction to the angels at the time of creation and concluding with the tenure of Henana of Adiabene, the head of the school at the time of the speech's composition. The Cause employs rich pedagogical imagery in recasting cosmogonic, Israelite, pagan, and Christian history as a long series of different schools. The few scholars who have commented on this bizarre text have suggested that the Cause is heavily dependent on the ideas of Theodore of Mopsuestia, particularly his notion of divine Paideia . This supposition is no doubt true. The purpose of this paper, however, is to propose that other factors also lie behind the pedagogical imagery of the Cause . After demonstrating the Cause 's dependence on Theodore, I propose three other approaches to understanding the origins of this striking imagery. The Heavenly Classroom in the Cause of the Foundation of the Schools Although my analysis has bearing on the Cause as a whole, I focus particularly on a passage that describes the heavenly classroom at the time of creation.

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