Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (41 page)

This anti-Chalcedonian version of Orthodoxy came to dominate a centre of monastic life in the mountainous region of Tur 'Abdin, in what is now south-east Turkey. Tur 'Abdin contained (and, against formidable odds, still contains) monasteries of comparable importance to those which later emerged for Greek Orthodoxy on Mount Athos (see p. 470). Monastic life flourished generally among both Syrian and Arab Christians; their monks built settlements which were as much fortresses as monasteries, complete with towers, as elaborate and impressive structures as those being built at the same time inside the Byzantine Empire. The commentator most familiar with the Ghassanids has seen their Christianity as a 'religion of monks', yet with the coming of Islam, this chapter of Christian monasticism and its buildings has been almost entirely lost. Archaeology may still recover a great deal.
¹⁶

The warrior traditions of the Ghassanids attracted them to yet another soldier-martyr like George: his name was Sergius and he had been killed in Syria during Diocletian's Great Persecution. They developed a fierce devotion to him and he became patron saint among the Arabs. His cult spread through the Byzantine Empire as well, encouraged by patronage from Justinian, who was only too ready to win esteem among his Eastern subjects by judicious investment in church-building in honour of this popular martyr. Sergius came habitually to be associated in partnership and iconography with his fellow soldier-martyr Bacchus, in a union so close as to be described as that of 'lovers', which has bequeathed an interesting image of same-sex love to Eastern Christianity, even though it has rarely felt able fully to explore the possible implications.
¹⁷
Even a Zoroastrian monarch, the brutal Sassanian Shah Khusrau II (reigned 590-628), realized the strategic advantage of showing respect to St Sergius when he began expanding his conquests westwards into Byzantine Christian territories. Khusrau is reported as having twice made offerings at Sergius's shrine at the Ghassanid city of Sergiopolis (Resafa in Syria), first after winning back his throne from a rival with Byzantine military help in 591 and then in thanksgiving for his Byzantine wife's successful childbirth; he also rebuilt the shrine after it had been burned down by Christians opposed to the Miaphysites.
¹⁸

Across the imperial border to the north, there was also suspicion of the work of the Council of Chalcedon in the various kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia, none of which had been represented in the council's discussions. One monarchy among those which ruled Georgia, K'art'li, which the Romans called Georgian Iberia, officially converted to Christianity not long after the Armenians in the early fourth century. A century later, a member of that same royal house of K'art'li proved to be a major force in prompting hostility to Chalcedon among the Georgians. In his teenage years, the prince was sent to Constantinople as an official hostage for K'art'li's alliance with the Roman Empire, and he was brought up at the imperial Court in the turbulent years which witnessed the abrupt twists and turns in theological supremacy around the Council of Ephesus in 431 (see pp. 225-6). He took the name Peter when he turned to the monastic life in Palestine, where, despite extensive travels around the Middle East, he spent most of his life. He briefly became a bishop in Maiuma in what is now the Gaza Strip, as well as founding the first Georgian monastery in the city of Jerusalem. A great admirer of Cyril of Alexandria, Peter was infuriated when Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, abandoned his support for Alexandrian theology (Juvenal literally crossed the floor from one party to another at the Council of Chalcedon); Peter's reputation as an ascetic lent authority to his bitter denunciations of Chalcedon.
¹⁹
His uncompromising Miaphysite views have been problematic for the later Georgian Church to square with its devotion to Peter the Iberian as one of the premier national saints - for the Georgians eventually agreed to recognize the Chalcedonian Definition, although it took until the beginning of the seventh century, long after Peter's time.
²⁰

By contrast, the Armenians specifically declared themselves against Chalcedon in the sixth century and have never been reconciled to its formulae since. They saw its language as expressing unacceptable novelties, partly because, like the Georgians, their normal word for 'nature' was closely related to the Iranian root-word for 'foundation', 'root' or 'origin' - so any description of Christ as having two natures, even the qualified definition of Chalcedon, sounded like blasphemous nonsense to them. They took care to construct their own Armenian theological vocabulary on the basis of Greek writings from an impeccable succession of theologians from the Cappadocian Fathers to Cyril of Alexandria - all dating before the taint of Chalcedon.
²¹
In fact, the Armenian Church was so concerned to build up an arsenal of Christian literature to guarantee its own view of orthodoxy that it undertook a sustained programme of translating classic Greek and Syriac theological manuscripts. This has proved an immense service to modern students of the ancient Church, because thanks to accidental destruction or deliberate censorship of the originals, often these Armenian translations are the only texts surviving.
²²

Armenian liturgy came to incorporate a distinctive feature which was a permanent reminder of the conflicts of the fifth and sixth centuries. Characteristic of Eastern Christian worship generally, used in every service, is the chanting of a plea for mercy, 'Holy God, Holy and Strong, Holy and Immortal, have mercy upon us' - the
Trisagion
('Thrice-Holy').
²³
There is no common consent among the wide spectrum of Christians who use this chant as to whether it is addressed to the whole Trinity of the Godhead, as its threefold shape might suggest, or to Christ alone. Peter the Fuller, a late-fifth-century Miaphysite monk from Constantinople, made the latter assumption. That led him to express his theology in liturgical form by adding to the
Trisagion
the phrase 'crucified for us' - so the Second Person of the triune God is liturgically acclaimed as having been crucified.

This central statement of a theological movement known as 'Theopaschism' was controversial even among Miaphysites, causing major divisions in their ranks, although it is pleasing to note that around the time of Peter the Fuller the Miaphysite poet Isaac of Antioch wrote eloquently and at epic length celebrating a parrot who had learned to sing the
Trisagion
with Peter's additional phrase.
²⁴
The imperial Church in Constantinople eventually rejected the addition, but the Armenians defiantly adopted it into their liturgical practice; so every congregation in the Armenian Church continues in this solemn prayer to affirm the intimacy of relationship of divine and human in Christ. As the Church's season of liturgical year moves round, they replace the phrase with others commemorating Christ's human birth and resurrection, still addressing these commemorations to 'Holy God'. With Peter the Fuller's phrase in mind, devotion, literature and art in both Armenia and Georgia assigned a special significance to the Cross. In Armenia, one of the most familiar monuments of sculpture is a quadrilateral stone bearing carvings of the Cross in forms of extreme elaboration and variety in treatment.
²⁵

ETHIOPIA: THE CHRISTIANITY OF 'UNION'

The most remarkable and exotic triumph of the Miaphysite cause around the Byzantine Empire was far to the south even beyond Nubia, in Ethiopia. The origins of Christianity in this remote and mountainous area are not clear, beyond a mysterious self-contained story in the Book of Acts of an encounter in Judaea between Philip, one of the first Christian leaders in Jerusalem, and a eunuch servant of the 'Queen of Ethiopia', who was fascinated to hear that Jewish prophecy had been fulfilled in the coming of Christ.
²⁶
The first historical accounts are from the fourth century, and make it clear that Christian approaches came not southwards from Egypt but from the east across the Red Sea, via Ethiopia's long-standing trade contacts with Arabia and ultimately Syria. It was a Syrian merchant, Frumentius, who is credited with converting Ezana, the Negus (king or emperor) of the powerful northern Ethiopian state of Aksum. Certainly Ezana's coins witness to a conversion no less dramatic and personal than Constantine's: they change motifs from traditional symbols of a crescent and two stars to a cross. Ezana has left a surviving inscription in Greek announcing his renunciation of his status as son of the Ethiopian war god, putting himself instead under the care of the Trinity.

An energetic monarch determined to secure immortal memory in this world as in the next, Ezana was responsible for beginning a tradition of monumental religious sculpture in the city of Aksum which is breath-taking, though now difficult to interpret: scores of monolithic stelae (upright monoliths) imitating tower-like buildings with multiple doors and windows. Some of them are immense: one, probably originally more than a hundred feet high and which may have fallen down almost as soon as it was put up, is among the biggest single stones ever quarried in the ancient world.
²⁷
There is no good reason to doubt the story that it was also Ezana who made contact with the Church in Alexandria, asking no less a divine than Bishop Athanasius to supply his people with a bishop. Thus from a very early date comes that peculiar Ethiopian arrangement which persisted for sixteen hundred years, as late as 1951: the presiding bishop (
abun
) in the Church of Ethiopia was never a native Ethiopian, but an import from the Coptic Church hundreds of miles to the north, and there was rarely any other bishop present in the whole country.
²⁸

6. Ethiopia, Eastern Arabia, Red Sea and Egypt

This has meant that the
abun
rarely had much real power or initiative in a Church to which he came usually as an elderly stranger with a different native language. Authority was displaced elsewhere, to monarchs and to abbots of monasteries; monasticism seems to have arrived early in the Church in Ethiopia and quickly gained royal patronage. Around these leaders are still numerous hereditary dynasties of non-monastic clergy who, over the centuries, might swarm in their thousands to seek ordination on the
abun
's rare visits to their area. The education of these priests, deacons and cantors might not extend far beyond a detailed knowledge of how to perform the liturgy, but that was a formidable intellectual acquisition in itself. They were ordinary folk who thus shaped their religion into that of a whole people rather than simply the property of a royal elite. Over the centuries of trials and bizarre disasters to afflict the Ethiopian Church, they are the constant underlying force which has preserved its unique life against the odds.

King Ezana may have renounced traditional gods, but the worship of the Church over which he first presided has remained unique and unmistakably African in character. Since church buildings are often temple-like in character rather than congregational spaces, much of the liturgy is conducted in the open air, accompanied by a variety of drums and percussive and stringed instruments, and with the principal clergy and musicians shaded from the weather by elaborately decorated umbrellas. Instead of church bells, sonorous echoes struck on stones hanging from trees summon worshippers to prayer (see Plate 20). The Church's liturgical chant, inseparable from its worship, is attributed to the sixth-century Court musician Yared. According to legend, his genius rather backfired on him when Gabra Maskel, the then king of Aksum, was so entranced by Yared's singing that he failed to notice that the spear on which he was leaning had pierced the singer's foot. Yared himself was (perhaps diplomatically) too absorbed in his own art to comment.
²⁹

It was not surprising that during the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Church, which derived its fragile link to the wider episcopal succession via Alexandria, followed the Egyptian Church into the Miaphysite camp. One of the concepts which remain central in Ethiopian theology is
tawahedo
, 'union' of humanity and divinity in the Saviour who took flesh. Nevertheless, despite the crucial role of the
abun
, the Ethiopian Church did not become Coptic in character. Far more all-pervasive were its links with the Semitic world, already evident before the coming of Christianity in Ethiopian language and even place names in the coastal regions of Tigray and Eritrea.
³⁰
It was one of those Semitic languages, Ge'ez, which became the liturgical and theological language of the Ethiopian Church, and remains so, even though it is not otherwise in current use. The arrival of Miaphysite faith is also connected to the Semitic world, because in legend it is associated with 'Nine Saints' of mostly Syriac background, who are said to have arrived as refugees from Chalcedonian persecution in the late fifth century and to have been instrumental in establishing the Ethiopian monastic system.