“Life is Short, the Art is Long”: An Interpretation of the First Hippocratic Aphorism by an East Syriac Monk in the 7th Century Iraq (Isaac of Nineveh, Kephalaia gnostica 3,62)

Abstract

The so-called Second Part of monastic writings composed by the 7th century East Syriac author Isaac of Nineveh contains a paraphrased citation from the famous beginning of Hippocrates’ Aphorismoi. The article tackles the issue of Isaac’s awareness of the aphorism and tries to reconstruct its interpretation by the author. Though medical texts were available in the East Syriac monastic milieu of that time, it is not likely that Isaac had at his disposal a complete Syriac translation of the Aphorismoi, but rather his acquaintance with the aphorism was mediated by a source that would more likely have been read in monastic context. A good example offers the treatise De anima by the early 5th century monastic author John the Solitary, whose works exercised profound influence upon the entire East Syriac monastic tradition, including Isaac of Nineveh. The given case of a monastic interpretation of a piece of secular wisdom is an illustrative showcase that provides an opportunity to observe a particular sensitivity of the Syriac tradition to medicine and its power to embed it within an appropriate context.

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Moral Imperatives of Hippocrates’ First Aphorism

“…Which is to say that all a person's life, as long as it might be, is too short [for him] to comprehend in his mind the teaching of the richness of the branches of medicine. (Kessel 2015) While discussing neither the fourth and fifth epigrams, nor the second sentence, John the Solitary had suggested that the aphorism had been written after Hippocrates; his interpretations formed the basis of Isaac of Nineveh's comments in the seventh century. Thereafter, among the pre-Renaissance translations, "more than twenty authors between the tenth and sixteenth centuries" were in Arabic (Pormann 2019), which were to preserve Galen's Commentaries on Hippocrates for the scholastics in the early Renaissance universities.…”

The Syriac World

“…It is hardly possible to enumerate the Greek works that were translated into Syriac, since most of the evidence comes from secondary sources that one can only rarely verify. However, based on more trustworthy sources (such as Ḥunayn's personal account of his translations of Galen's works , but now available in a new edition and English translation, Lamoreaux 2016]), one can postulate that by the ninth century virtually the entire corpus of Galen's medical works extant in that period was available in Syriac (Degen 1981;Kessel 2016b). Thus, if Sergius must have translated two dozens of Galen's works (and nearly the whole of the Alexandrian canon of the sixteen books of Galen), Ḥunayn is credited with nearly a hundred.…”

“…192 (Figure 26.2), which contains the Syriac and Arabic texts in parallel columns and which dates to the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era. The Syriac text was recently edited (Wilson and Dinkha 2010), although the edition must be used with caution (Kessel 2012c). The availability of the Syriac original easily lends itself to a detailed study of the treatise, particularly its sources and transmission history.…”

“…The older manuscript (Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate 12/25) contains a commentary on book six of the Hippocratic Epidemics and hence was called the Syriac Epidemics (Kessel 2012a(Kessel , 2012b. Both in form and content, the Syriac Epidemics definitely belongs to the late Alexandrian medical tradition that flourished from the fifth to seventh centuries.…”

“…the life of Mar Qardagh, Bruns 2008), poetry (e.g. a poem Man as Microcosm by Giwargis Warda, Gignoux 1999), biblical exegesis (Reinink 2003), and monastic theology (Kessel , 2015. Voices occasionally raised against medicine indirectly demonstrate the widespread presence of medical theory and practice within the society and culture (see, for example, what the eighth-century monastic author Joseph Ḥazzāyā has to say on that subject, Kessel 2015: 147).…”