Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (40 page)

How can this extraordinary cultural chameleon have been conceived? What seems to have happened is that a version of the Sanskrit original life of Buddha, probably translated into Arabic in Baghdad, fell into the hands of a Georgian monk some time in the ninth century. He was so charmed by the story that he rewrote it in Georgian in Christian form as
Balavariani
, and fellow monks who spoke different languages also loved it and moved it into their own tongues. When it made its way into Greek, it took on a spurious authorship and plenty of pious quotations from the safely Orthodox giant of theology and philosophy John of Damascus to lend it respectability and increase its selling power, and now it was
The Life of Barlaam and Joasaph
. The two heroes became saints, with their own feast days, hymns and anthems. Small bony fragments of St Josaphat acquired in the East by Venetian merchants can be seen in a church in Antwerp.

The tale's travels had by no means ended. It spread from the Byzantine Empire through western Europe and south via Egypt: one could pick up copies of it in Latin, Hebrew, Old Norse, Old Russian, Ethiopic, medieval Catalan, Portuguese, Icelandic, Italian, French and English. The pioneering English printer William Caxton showed his usual commercial good sense when, in 1483, he chose to print it in his new translation of the great collection of saints' lives known as
The Golden Legend
, and Shakespeare used an episode from it in
The Merchant of Venice
. Perhaps we can appreciate just how far the Eastern Christian legacy eventually reached if we join the cultured English Roundhead military commander Thomas Fairfax, third Lord Fairfax of Cameron, in his Yorkshire study in the 1650s. Smarting from the end of his military career after a principled quarrel with Oliver Cromwell, Fairfax pulled his Latin or Greek Barlaam from his bookshelves and whiled away his retirement with his own English translation, some 204 folio pages long. Puritan (and Chalcedonian) Yorkshire was a long way from the home of the Buddha, and Fairfax would have had no idea of his debt to that long-dead Georgian monk.
²

All this was thanks to the large number of Eastern Christians who hated the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon and decided to ignore or oppose them. It took a long time for those who felt like this to make a formal break with the Church authorities who had accepted the council's pronouncements. Of the two opposite points of view excluded by Chalcedon, Miaphysitism and Dyophysite 'Nestorianism', it was the Miaphysites who most worried the emperors in Constantinople. The Miaphysites' power base, Alexandria, was one of the most important cities in the Eastern Empire, essential to the grain supply which kept the population of Constantinople in compliant mood, and Miaphysites continued to have support in the capital itself. Already at the Council of Chalcedon, the Egyptian bishops present insisted that if they signed its Definition, they faced death back home, and it soon became clear that they were not exaggerating. Alexandria was, after all, the city which had lynched Hypatia forty years before.

The council had infuriated opinion in Alexandria by deposing its bishop, Dioscorus, a punishment for his prominence in the group who had disruptively proclaimed 'one-nature' theology as orthodoxy at the previous Council of Ephesus in 449 (see pp. 225-6). The Emperor Marcian and his wife, Pulcheria, were determined to find a pliable successor for Dioscorus. They brought pressure to bear on the Alexandrian clergy, which led to the election of one of Dioscorus's assistant clergy, Proterius, but the new bishop found his position steadily eroded. On Marcian's death in 457, he was left defenceless. A mob who regarded him as a traitor to Dioscorus pursued him into the baptistery of a city church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the
mia physis
of Jesus Christ.
³
The emperor's authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident: increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as 'Dyophysites' and sneered at them as 'the emperor's people' - Melchites.
⁴
The word 'Melchite' has had a complicated later history, and now various Churches of Orthodox tradition in communion with the pope in Rome are happy to use it to label themselves, but it thus started life as a term of abuse as poisonous as 'collaborator' in the aftermath of Nazi occupation in the Europe of the 1940s.

From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic. The Church had long been ready to use various Coptic dialects, liberally seeded with loanwords from Greek, and already in the third century Coptic was being written in a version of Greek script, developed specifically for translating the Christian scriptures. The prestige of Antony, Pachomius and the ascetic movement sealed the respectability of Coptic in Christian life and worship, and it developed a considerable literature both of translated and original devotional texts, both mainstream Christian and unorthodox.
⁵
Now Coptic language and distinctive culture were becoming badges of difference from the Greek Christianity of the Church in Constantinople. There was a tendency all round the eastern Mediterranean for 'Melchites' to be concentrated in urban, affluent outposts of Greek society, while anti-Chalcedonian views on either side increasingly found strength in other communities.

The leaders of the Miaphysite cause across the empire still loudly proclaimed their loyalty to the imperial throne, and there is no reason to doubt that most were sincere. Their loyalty was certainly worth trying to secure. For two centuries and more a succession of emperors in Constantinople desperately tried to devise ever more intricate theological formulae which would reconcile the Miaphysites to the imperial Church, preferably but not necessarily preserving the essence of the Chalcedonian settlement. In doing so, they constantly imperilled their relations with the Western Latin Church. It was only natural that the Eastern emperors had shifted their political priorities away from the western half of the old empire as that disintegrated. In 410 had come the sack of Rome itself by barbarian armies: a deep humiliation for Romans proud of their history, even if the city had long ceased to be the capital for the emperors. In 451 there had still been an emperor in the West - more or less - but in 476 the barbarian rulers who were taking over so much of the former western territories of Rome allowed the last emperor to reign for no more than a few months of his teenage years before consigning to oblivion both the boy and the increasingly wraith-like imperial succession in the West.

Now that the Eastern Empire stood alone, it often paid little attention to the opinions or outraged representations of the leading bishop in the surviving Western Church, the pope in Rome. A series of popes, increasingly assertive in the Church (see pp. 322-9), took it as axiomatic that their sainted predecessor Leo had said the last word on the subject of the natures in Jesus Christ in his 'Tome', delivered to the unreceptive Miaphysite bishops at Ephesus in 449 (see pp. 225-6). Rome measured every turn of policy in Constantinople by how much it seemed to honour the 'Tome', and popes could not appreciate the multitude of political and military considerations preoccupying Eastern emperors when they contemplated questions of Christology. As a result, from 482 until 519, Rome and Constantinople were in formal schism because the Byzantine Emperor Zeno and his bishop, Acacius, in the capital backed a formula of reunion (
Henotikon
) with the Miaphysites: it contained fresh condemnations of Nestorius (an easy target), praised key documents from Cyril's attack on him, but in a manner deeply offensive to Rome remained silent on the 'Tome of Leo', which the Miaphysite party at Ephesus had treated with such contempt.
⁶
It took a change of emperor in 518 to put an end to the
Henotikon
and the 'Acacian schism'. Justin I was an illiterate Latin-speaking soldier from a Western background who had an instinctive respect for the Bishop of Rome and he abruptly speeded up negotiations for reconciliation which had been languishing for years.
⁷

The emperors' preoccupation with the Miaphysites is all the more understandable since, not just in Egypt but throughout the Eastern Empire, there continued to be Miaphysites hostile to the work of the Council of Chalcedon. Western Syria and Asia Minor were full of them.

The Emperor Zeno, himself a native of south-west Asia Minor, tried posthumously to recruit the celebrated pillar-dweller Simeon Stylites (see pp. 207-8) as a champion of the Chalcedonian deal, and he rapidly and vigorously promoted Simeon's cult. Within a couple of decades of the hermit's death, Zeno was pouring money and labour into the building of what was then the largest church in the Middle East to shelter the Stylite's pillar at its heart.
⁸
The church's magnificent surviving ruins still testify to Zeno's anxiety to bring back Syrian Miaphysites into the fold of Chalcedon, but although Simeon's cult flourished in the region, the Chalcedonian cause did not. The most impressive and articulate theologian of the early sixth century was Severus, who came from what is now south-western Turkey. He was so firm in his Miaphysite views that at first he rejected the
Henotikon
as an unsatisfactory compromise, until the prospect of the Bishopric of Antioch changed his mind. His hold on that powerful see ended with the theological revolution of 518, but from his exile among friends in the safety of Egypt, Severus remained a powerful voice as the factions struggled for dominance at the imperial Court. In 527 there came to the throne one of the most significant emperors in the history of Byzantium: Justinian, nephew and adopted son of Justin, who was destined to do so much to transform the former Eastern Roman Empire (see pp. 429-31). He was torn between his wish to preserve the fragile agreement of 519 with Rome and his continuing awareness of Miaphysite partisanship in the East - not least from his energetic and unconventional wife, Theodora, who became an active sympathizer with the Miaphysite cause, very ready to express her own opinions and act on them.

Some extraordinary double messages began emerging from the imperial Court.
⁹
Justinian sought repeatedly to make concessions to the Miaphysites, but also fitfully treated them as dangerous rebels, and remained open to advice or active intervention from the pope. In 535 and 536 there were starkly contrasting choices to fill key bishoprics: following Theodora's intervention in the episcopal election in Alexandria, an avowed Miaphysite called Theodosius became bishop there. Yet in Constantinople, Bishop Anthimus, a Miaphysite sympathizer, was forced out after Pope Agapetus, who happened to have travelled east on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor, directly lobbied Justinian for his removal. The exiled Bishop Severus was faced with condemnation by a synod of pro-Chalcedonian bishops; against a background of increasing repression and even executions of Miaphysite sympathizers, he made a decision with great significance for the future. He gave his blessing to discreet consecrations of bishops who would be reliable Miaphysites: a complete parallel succession to their rivals backed by the Emperor. When Theodosius was likewise swiftly deprived of the see of Alexandria in 536, the Empress secretly made sure that he had a safe refuge in Constantinople, and, like Severus, Bishop Theodosius began to build up a Miaphysite alternative to the Chalcedonian Church.

The Empress's proteges even began spreading Miaphysite Christianity beyond the formal boundaries of the empire. To the south of Egypt, the King of Nobatia (a northern kingdom of Nubia) was converted in the 540s, turning what had previously been a small cult into a Court religion. Christianity eventually spread eastwards through much of what is now Sudan, halfway to the Niger as far as Darfur, and remnants of it survived in one Nubian kingdom into the eighteenth century. Archaeology has revealed the ruins of superb churches, some of which have preserved extensive remains of wall paintings in a tradition created over several centuries depicting biblical scenes, saints or leading bishops.
¹⁰
Like the Copts, Nubian Christians achieved a blend of Greek culture with their own, using both Greek and their vernacular in their worship. Fragments of manuscripts reveal that they shared the common devotion of eastern Mediterranean Christianity to St George, a shadowy figure who may have died in persecutions of the late fourth century, but who gained huge popularity as a Christian martyr who was also a soldier.
¹¹
In an age when the frontiers of the various great powers were increasingly unstable and life was insecure and frightening, the thought of a military protector in Heaven was a particular comfort.

A further triumph for the Miaphysites came on the eastern border of the empire in Syria, where an Arab people known as the Ghassanids had migrated from the south of the Arabian peninsula and set up a formidable independent kingdom. This stretched all the way from southern Syria along the borders of the Holy Land to the Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) at the north-eastern end of the Red Sea, and its military strength made it a crucial buffer state for Byzantium against the Sassanians, though the relationship was troubled and often fractured, because the Ghassanids, on their initial conversion to Christianity, set their faces firmly against the decrees of Chalcedon.
¹²
When the Ghassanid ruler Arethas demanded bishops to organize a Church for his people, once more the Empress Theodora took an active but clandestine role in supplying clergy ordained by Bishop Theodosius to minister to them.

One of these clergy was a charismatic eastern Syrian called Jacob Baradeus, who had already achieved spectacular missionary success in remote parts of Asia Minor, and whose Latinized second name comes from a no doubt originally jocular reference to his incessant travelling: it means 'the man who has a horse-cloth'.
¹³
While the Empress was alive, she contained the threat of Miaphysite confrontation with the imperial authorities. After her death, in 548, despite Justinian's continuing efforts to find a formula to heal the splits in the Church, Miaphysite defiance of the Court became systematic: Jacob and other Miaphysites sought to create an alternative episcopal hierarchy both among the Ghassanids and elsewhere.
¹⁴
Travelling often in disguise, Jacob undertook a prodigious programme of ordinations and consecrations of bishops which extended across the imperial border into Ghassanid territory and further into the Sassanian Empire. He created a Syrian Miaphysite Church which is often called Jacobite in acknowledgement of his founding energy, but which also insists on Orthodoxy in its official title, the Syriac Orthodox Church.
¹⁵
Its eucharistic liturgy is named after St James of Jerusalem, brother of the Lord, embodying the proud claim of the Church to reach back to the Semitic fountainhead of Christianity. At the heart of the liturgy, the prayer of consecration celebrates the first three General Councils of the Church, Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus, and name-checks an impressive array of orthodox Fathers of the Church before the disruption of Chalcedon, with special mention of the 'exalted and firm tower', Cyril of Alexandria.