foundation · 470 · Nisibis
Narsai taught at the school of Edessa, the great centre of Syriac learning, in the years when the christological quarrels were hardening. Edessa was in Roman territory and the school's Antiochene theology — two natures, and a suspicion of anything that blurred the humanity of Christ — became untenable there after Ephesus and Chalcedon; it was finally closed by imperial order in 489. Narsai had already gone, some years before, across the frontier to Nisibis, where Barsauma the bishop welcomed him and the school was rebuilt. It taught for two centuries and it is the reason the Church of the East has the theology it has: Antiochene, exegetical, suspicious of allegory, and unpersuaded by Ephesus. Narsai himself wrote verse homilies by the hundred, in the metre Ephrem had made Syriac poetry out of, and he is the second great name of that literature. That the school prospered under a Persian king while a Roman emperor closed its parent is a fact this dataset should state plainly, because it is easy to tell the story of the eastern church as a story of decline and it was not that.
What happens to a school when the empire closes it?
It moves across the frontier and becomes the mind of another church.