Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (43 page)

The 'Thomas Christians' settled down to a comfortable relationship with the non-Christian elites and society round them. Besides a number of carved stone crosses, the earliest datable artefacts of their history are five copper plates which record tax privileges and corporate rights granted them by local monarchs and rulers in the eighth and ninth centuries.
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Their lifestyle, despite various individual customs, became very similar to that of their Hindu neighbours; they found a rather respectable niche in Indian society. They were never totally cut off either from their Dyophysite co-religionists in the Middle East or indeed from the Church further west. One of the most remarkable contacts may have been with ninth-century England, where several versions of
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
report that a prominent Anglo-Saxon courtier called Sigehelm was sent by the great King Alfred of Wessex on a pilgrimage to the tomb of St Thomas in India.
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It was only in the sixteenth century that the Thomas Christians' ancient place in Indian society became a disadvantage, when they re-encountered armed and aggressive Western Catholic Christians, who were unsympathetic both to their cultural compromises and to their 'Nestorian' heresies, and who then did much to destroy their distinctive way of life and the records of their history (see pp. 704-5).

Consistently, the Church of the East remained united by adhering to its Syrian roots, displaying the vigorous individuality which Syriac Christianity had exhibited from its earliest years. It gloried in its difference from the misguided Christianities further west. Everywhere it went, it treasured the memory of the prophet Jonah (one of the Bible's most entertaining explicit fictions). Most Christians honoured him as a symbol of the Resurrection because of his three days spent in the belly of the great fish, but the Church of the East remembered that the point of his sojourn in the fish was that Jonah had been unsuccessfully trying to avoid God's call to preach salvation to the Assyrians' hated city Nineveh - and now there was a Christian bishop of the Church of the East in Nineveh, to complete Jonah's work! A theology of two natures in Christ kept the Church of the East faithful to the emphasis in Theodore of Mopsuestia's teaching that Christ in his human nature was the Second Adam. As such, he was a true pattern for all sons and daughters of Adam, so that human beings could do their best to imitate the holiness of Christ. Such belief did lead monks in the Syrian tradition into their extraordinary self-punishments to achieve such imitation, but it also represents an optimistic pole of the Christian spectrum of beliefs in human worth, potential and capacity, because if Jesus had a whole human nature, it must by definition be good, and logically all human nature began by being good, whatever its subsequent corruptions. This was a contrast with the savage pessimism that has often emerged from Latin Western Christianity, following Augustine of Hippo's emphasis on original sin (see pp. 306-9).

That outlook continued to illuminate the theology of the Church of the East. It was unimpressed and uninhibited by the condemnations which such teachings had received in the imperial Church around 400, and equally unimpressed by the imperial Church's later condemnation of the monk and spiritual writer Evagrius Ponticus (see pp. 209-10). Much of Evagrius's work is now preserved only in Syriac translation, the Greek originals having been deliberately destroyed.
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Isaac, a seventh-century monk from Qatar who briefly held the resonant title Bishop of Nineveh, took up the notion which Evagrius had derived from the writings of that audacious Alexandrian Origen that in the end all will be saved. He saw divine love even in the fire of Hell, which prepared humanity for a future ecstasy:

out of it the wealth of His love and power and wisdom will become known all the more - and so will the insistent might of the waves of His goodness. It is not [the way of] the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction . . . for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned.
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In the writings of Isaac's successor in the eighth century, the monk John of Dalyatha, the Syriac emphasis on bodily penance was pressed to an extreme as forming a road back to the original purity of human nature. John proclaimed that through humility and contemplation (especially while prostrate), a monk could unite his purged nature not simply with all creation, but also with his creator, to achieve a vision of the glory of God himself: 'in the same way that fire shows its operation to the eyes, so God shows his glory to rational beings who are pure'. John went so far as to deny that a layperson could experience the mystical union with God which resulted from such self-purging: 'Christ cannot live with the world . . . but always, he comes to the soul's home and visits her to live in her, if she is empty of all that is of the world.' As so often in the history of Christianity, when mystics try to explain their experience of transcendence, the results are not just difficult for those beyond to understand, but seem to overstep the mark between creator and created. John's teachings were condemned by a synod of the Church of the East soon after his death, but they continued to hold a fascination for mystics, and much of what he said would be echoed in later centuries in other settings.
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There was one remarkable aspect of the Church of the East's faithfulness to a single tradition. The Miaphysites, thanks to various political successes and alliances with power at crucial stages of their history, were ready to develop their culture and theology in such diverse languages as Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Nubian and Ge'ez, and retained no common language as a point of reference. By contrast, although the Dyophysite Church did indeed likewise translate many of its biblical, liturgical and other texts into the languages of the East, it still hung on to Syriac as a common liturgical and theological language in the most exotic of settings, as far east as China, using the 'Nestorian' script developed out of the original Syriac Estrangela. Unlike most alphabetic scripts, neither this Nestorian script nor its western Syrian counterpart (Serto) developed a cursive or minuscule form for rapid writing, so it was possible for readers over several centuries to follow and understand very ancient texts written in it. It has been suggested that this is one of the reasons why Syriac Christianity has changed so little in its long existence.
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Yet the common Syriac language of the Church was a source of weakness as well as of strength and stability. It meant that in the many cultures which the Eastern Christians encountered, Dyophysite Christians were destined to remain a minority with an alien lingua franca - far more alien than the use of the imperial language Latin in the Western Church. Worse still for their general popularity, often they were a minority with some social status and special privileges. They nowhere achieved the critical mass necessary to become the dominant culture.

Crucially, in contrast to the Miaphysites in Ethiopia, Nubia and Armenia, the Church of the East never permanently captured the allegiance of any royal family, despite the frequently important role played by Eastern Christians in various royal and princely Courts. Only once in this period did the Church of the East come close to any such prospect, and the result was in the long term a disaster for it - fateful indeed for all Christianity, as we will see. The opportunity came in the violent end to the reign of the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II in 628. He was murdered by his own son, Crown Prince Shiroi, who took the precaution of murdering all Khusrau's other male children as potential rivals, and took the name Kavad II. Kavad was backed in his palace coup by several prominent Dyophysite Christian families, and because his father's military successes against the Byzantine Empire had dramatically extended Sassanian territories westward, for the first time in the Sassanian Empire's history it is likely that a majority of the Shah's subjects were Christian.
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Already the late Khusrau, whose two successive wives were both Christian, had shown fitful strategic favour to the Church (see p. 238). Now there was a moment when the new shah or his successors might well have decided to make the sort of turnaround to Christianity which had seized Trdat, Constantine and Ezana.

The new reign proved to be brief, as Shah Kavad died only a few months after his coup, but significant goodwill gestures to Christians and their advance into the centre of action in the empire continued. Kavad had quickly ordered that a new Catholicos should be chosen for the Church, ending a hiatus of twenty years in which Shah Khusrau had prevented the office being filled. The man singled out, Ishoyahb II, proved an outstanding diplomat of wide vision who gave official encouragement to those taking Christianity into China. He sent a delegation to the Chinese Tang emperor led by a bishop whom the Chinese called Alopen. Alopen was well received on his arrival in 635. The occasion was long remembered and celebrated by Chinese Christians, for it led to the foundation of the first of several monasteries in China, with official encouragement, and in no less a setting than the then Chinese imperial capital, Chang'an (now Xi'an). The library pagoda on the site of one once-celebrated monastery rebuilt a century or so later still survives in Zhouzhi, forty-five miles south-west of Xi'an (see Plate 6). Despite the site's centuries of later use by Taoists and then Buddhists, the building still bears the Chinese name which signified both Christianity and the world of the eastern Mediterranean,
Ta Qin
, and although local people had always remembered its Christian origins through the centuries, their significance was not more widely recognized until the 1930s. The pagoda stands proudly on a hillside; remarkably and surely significantly, it is within easy sight of the next hill, on which stands the famous Taoist Louguan Temple, much favoured as a centre of higher education by the early Tang emperors in those years when the Church of the East flourished here. Here is a tangible link to the Chinese community of the Church of the East, which although long lost now was destined to persist over seven centuries. In the former Japanese capital of Kyoto, recent investigations suggest that there too one surviving ancient temple started life as a building of the Church of the East. Mongolia is yielding parallel finds. These unexpected rediscoveries may not be the last.
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There were equally promising moves for the Church of the East towards the west and Byzantium. One of Khusrau II's most significant trophies in his campaigns against the Byzantines had been not territory but a prime Christian relic: no less an object than the True Cross, which had somehow appeared in Jerusalem in the fourth century during the city's self-promotion as a holy place (see pp. 193-4). To the fury and humiliation of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, the Shah seized the Cross from Jerusalem when he sacked the city in 614. Yet Khusrau treated it with respect, entrusting it to his Christian wife; it then became a prime bargaining counter in diplomacy when the new Sassanian Queen Boran, recognizing reality in the wake of Heraclius's successful counterattacks, sought a peace settlement with Byzantium. The Sassanian peace delegation which returned the True Cross was led by Patriarch Ishoyahb, and in 630 he had a satisfaction unprecedented in the history of the Dyophysites when he celebrated the Eucharist according to the rites of his Church in the city of Berrhoea (now Aleppo) in the presence of the Byzantine Emperor and of Chalcedonian bishops. The treaty was a triumph for Heraclius too, for it enabled him to parade his relic back in what remained of Byzantine Jerusalem after its comprehensive trashing by the Sassanian armies.
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This climax of peace between the two traditional enemy great powers in fact proved a sad irrelevance to the future. Kavad II's murder of his father, Khusrau II, swiftly followed by his own death, had poisonously destabilized Sassanian Court politics, leading to a procession of short-lived rulers struggling to maintain their position, while the constant frontier warfare with the Byzantines devastated the Middle East and weakened both imperial armies. Moreover, the clash of the two empires brought destruction to lesser Christian military powers, principally the Miaphysite Ghassanids, who for more than a century had kept the Byzantines in touch with events in Arabia and had brought security to the region. The Ghassanids could have alerted the Byzantines to the early formation of a new military power which had appeared quite unexpectedly from the south: the armies of Islam. The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang'an.
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Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia - consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.

8

Islam: The Great Realignment (622-1500)

MUHAMMAD AND THE COMING OF ISLAM

In the late sixth century, at the time of the birth of Muhammad in the city of Mecca (Makkah in Arabic), three varieties of religious belief confronted each other in the Arabian peninsula. Over the previous century, Judaism and Christianity (itself bitterly divided, as we have seen) had been locked in murderous clashes. Both despised the traditional cults of the region, which amid their considerable variety boasted one of the Middle East's ancient centres of pilgrimage at Mecca, around a sacred black stone contained in the shrine known as the Ka'aba. For centuries the shrine at Mecca had been of merely local importance, far outshone by the Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, whose cult Christians had in good measure renewed by their pilgrimage in honour of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, while leaving the actual site of the Jerusalem Temple dishonoured and waste. Then in the fifth century one prominent family of Mecca had vigorously promoted their local shrine and set it on the road to fame and prosperity. A proud descendant of that family, born around 570, was the merchant Muhammad.
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