Doctors of the other two churches

Jacob Tate over at OnePeterFive is reminding us Latins of Thomas Aquinas. I am considering if the non-Chalcedonians own anyone close to him.

To start with the Miaphysites, I shall expand the net to the early Maronites also. This, then, starts with Cyril of Alexandria (not one of us!). The two councils of Ephesus were a great victory for that side. Following the Chalcedon reaction, officially Severus and Jacob bar Addai are credited with founding the independent Ephesian church. Among the west-Syrians (using Andrew Palmer's hyphen): Bar Salibi, Michael the Syrian, Bar Hebraeus. Jacob of Edessa's correspondence amounts to an excellent practical guide for a Christianity under alien rule. And there was Dionysius of Tel Mahré among the historians.

I am less familiar with the rest, but the Coptic tradition can certainly look to Severus ibn al-Muqaffa', and of course the Copts are persistent to the present (writing mostly in English). The Tawahedo in Ethiopia was heroic at least to preserve this line of work. Then there's the Caucasus, although over the Middle Ages they have inclined to the Greeks and then to the Russians.

Over the centuries, then, the Miaphysites mustered a formidable intellectual defence against our Church and then against Islam.

Looking at the Church of the East, I cannot think of as many great names offhand. Here it should start with the Antiochene tradition, Theodore of Mopsuestia (less so Nestorius himself); Aphrahat, perhaps, among the para-Nicenes. The "catholicoi" popes Babai the Great, Isho'yahb III, and Timothy II produced impressive literatures. The school of Nisibin was also productive, partly as countervail. Among their historians were Elias bar Shenaye and all the contributors to Siʿrt.

The Orient suffered by contrast with the nearest East. This is not entirely their fault: there was always something of an iron-curtain keeping their literature even from crossing the Euphrates, much less into Greek and Latin. Over there, first the Iranians and then the Muslims sporadically suppressed their libraries. And the Portuguese did no favours for the native Christianity in India.

Also, though, I find the Eastern Church to be riven with schism of its own. Isho'yahb III exerted much more energy against heretics and the breakaway provinces than he did against (pre?-)Islam right under his nose. Other churchmen had Henana's Origenism with which to deal, and various strange ideas seeping out of Nisibin.

The Eastern Church had trouble even defining what it was, beyond "not Ephesian" and, later, "not Islamic". Should they accept a subordinative Christology, like Arius and their own Aphrahat? (Once the Muslims came along, that proposal was an embarrassment.) To revive Origen, like Henana? (Babai killed this one dead.) What of Bar Sauma's "Baptist Convention" theory of a seminary-run Church? Above all, what to make of Chalcedon?