Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (46 page)

THE CHURCH IN CHINA

The Chinese Empire had been ruled since 618 by the Tang dynasty, which in the years of its power and prosperity was ready to give a place to any religion which did not seem to threaten its security, providing Bishop Alopen with the opportunity for success on his mission of 635 (see pp. 252-3). Christianity's fortunes in China thereafter were mixed, depending on the whims or foreign policies of successive emperors, but in the mid-eighth century, thanks to the patronage of one general victorious in civil wars, Christians found themselves over several decades in a position of advantage in China which would not be repeated for some centuries. It was from this hopeful time that there survives one of the most remarkable and beautiful monuments of the Church of the East: a black limestone stele standing nearly ten feet tall, which caused justifiable excitement among the Jesuits of a later Christian mission when, in the early 1620s, they learned of its rediscovery (on a site now unknown, but very possibly that of the identifiable Ta Qin monastery in Zhouzhi (see Plate 7). Dated 781, surmounted by dragons and a cross and bearing inscriptions in Chinese and Estrangela, it is a silkily expressed commemoration of imperial favour shown towards the Christians since 635, culminating in their present protector, General Guo Ziyi. Besides its detailed if inevitably politically selective account of that history, it boldly recites a statement of Christian faith in Chinese, commendations of the faith, and poetry in praise of the triune God and of Christ 'divided in nature', with allusions to imperial literature which stake a bold claim for Christianity as the best expression of the universe's underlying principle, the Tao. With the stele's proud enunciation of various ecclesiastical dignitaries alongside emperors and imperial officials, there could be no better symbol of the integration of the Dyophysite Christian community into imperial life. The first and last visual impression that it leaves in its present setting in Xi'an's 'Forest of Stelae' is just how alike are all the other monuments around it.
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There are many more traces of the Church of the East's real attempt to explain the Christian message in terms which would make sense to people in this alien culture. From their first arrival in China, Christians seemed to have realized that it would be a good strategy to use language familiar to Chinese from Taoism, as the stele from 781 now at Xi'an witnessed. Taoism, after all, had a vision of the original goodness of human nature which was congenial to Dyophysites emphasizing the whole humanity of Christ's separate human nature alongside his divinity. Yet Dyophysite Christians were also ready to model themselves on another faith which the Chinese recognized as having come from beyond their borders, but which was by now well established and widely respected: Buddhism. So Alopen and his successors presented their faith in the form of sutras, discourses in Buddhist style, and they had no inhibitions in presenting Buddhism as a form of truth, albeit one which needed extending. So Alopen, drawing on the specialized titles of honour of the Buddhists, had written in his
Jesus Messiah Sutra
:

All the buddhas as well as kinnaras and the superintending-devas and arhans can see the Lord of Heaven. No human being, however, has ever seen the Lord of Heaven . . . All the buddhas flow and flux by virtue of this very wind, while in this world, there is no place where the wind does not reach.

Here, there seems to be a real attempt to suggest that the teachings of Buddhism are in a literal sense inspired by the Holy Spirit. Elsewhere in his
Discourse on the oneness of the Ruler of the Universe
, Alopen observed that, thanks to the Devil, '[i]t has become impossible for a human being to understand the truth and attain "liberation from sorrow" ' - the latter phrase simply being a Chinese Buddhist term which in turn translated the Sanskrit for liberation, one of many such familiar terms which the missionaries deployed to arouse recognition in their audiences. And in his
Lord of the Universe's discourse on almsgiving
, Alopen could warm to the Lord of the Universe's chosen theme so much that he raised the real possibility of salvation beyond those who recited the creeds of Christianity:

Therefore, you who have already embraced the faith, OR you who do all kinds of meritorious deeds, OR who will walk in his way with an honest heart, shall all enter heaven and remain in that abode of happiness for ever and ever.
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All this suggests a faith which, to a degree highly unusual in Christian history, allowed itself to listen to other great interpretations of the divine. Perhaps this was inevitable. Christianity's previous encounter with ancient, sophisticated wisdom had been with Plato and Aristotle; and that encounter had transformed it in the second century CE. Now, for the first time, it was meeting a variety of highly developed religious systems, in a situation where it had no power of coercion. Moreover, the Church of the East pushed forward its frontiers through Syrian merchants, who were renowned throughout Asia for their bargaining skills. Can it be any surprise that the result was a form of Christianity which delighted in theological give and take?

The problem for the Dyophysites of China was that integration into Chinese society also meant dependence on power within it. As so often in the history of the Church of the East, the years of good fortune were comparatively brief. During the mid-ninth century the Emperor Wuzong turned against all religions which he regarded as foreign and the Church suffered accordingly. When the Tang dynasty finally collapsed in 907, the western trade routes which remained the lifeline of the Church were closed and the possibility of renewal through missions for the time being came to an end. But only for the time being. Three centuries later the accidents of history nevertheless offered a second chance for the Church of the East in China, because of its persisting ancient presence in Central Asia, and maybe in China too. Once more the Church came close to achieving what Islam was able to make permanent: winning the allegiance of successful military dynasties. The near-miss took place among the Mongols: the last in a centuries-long sequence of Central Asian nomadic peoples whose migrations shaped the history of both Asia and Europe, and, with it, the future of the Christian religion.

THE MONGOLS: NEW HOPE AND CATASTROPHE

The Mongols' rise among the various peoples of the steppes was comparatively sudden at the end of the twelfth century. They had their own religious system, which described the way in which sky and earth combined in cosmic consciousness, as do male and female; they also believed that souls animated both people and animals, and survived after death. Given their nomadic lifestyle close to one of the world's greatest trade routes, they had nevertheless long been familiar with and genially interested in a wide spectrum of other people's religious beliefs, and they were inclined to give an ear to any religious ideas which took their fancy - Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, Islam, Buddhism and Dyophysite Christianity were the principal wares on offer.
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When in 1007 Christianity gained its first success among the Mongols, it was thanks to the long-dead Syrian St Sergius - a tribute to how this hugely popular military saint had impressed himself on imaginations far away from the site of his Roman martyrdom seven centuries before (see pp. 237-8). Sergius had power, and the Mongols became increasingly interested in power. Perhaps also these warriors who relied for their success on their close bonding found Sergius's intimate relationship with his soldier-companion Bacchus a good model for their own warfare.

It was indeed to one of the most powerful rulers among the Mongols that Sergius appeared in a vision. In or around 1007, the Mongol Khan of the Keraits, adrift in a snowstorm, became convinced that he would die lost and alone, but the saint promised deliverance in return for conversion, and deliverance from the blizzard duly arrived. The Dyophysite clergy who then received the large numbers of Keraits trooping into baptism in the wake of their hugely relieved khan were, with characteristic flexibility, creative in their tolerance of existing Mongol religious beliefs. They were happy to preside over the solemn corporate drinking of mares' milk blessed on their altar by the Khan himself. Amid the immensity of the Central and East Asian steppes, with few clergy of any persuasion to badger their beliefs into tidiness, Mongols preserved a comfortable mixture of Christianity and tradition. It is clear from archaeological finds that they enjoyed wearing Christian crosses, though they might enliven these with such symbols as the Indian swastika which Buddhists had brought them. Some of their rulers took Christian names; the greatest Mongol ruler of them all, Temujin, who in 1206 was proclaimed 'Genghis Khan' ('Ruler of the Ocean'), had been the vassal of a Christian Kerait khan and married his overlord's Christian niece.
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It was through Temujin's leadership that, in the space of a few decades, the Mongols became a world power to terrify people from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His successors were convinced that they had been destined for world supremacy, and for a while it looked as if they were right.
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This was a moment when the immense conquests of Genghis and his successors might have promoted an official Dyophysite Christianity throughout Asia from the Black Sea to the China Sea. During the thirteenth century, the Turkic people in Inner Mongolia known as the Ongguds mostly became Christian, including their royal family, and they remained so for more than a century. As a result of Genghis's carefully planned set of alliances with Christian Kerait Mongol princesses, a series of Great Khans had Christian mothers, including Kublai Khan, who in the years up to 1279 fought his way to become the first Yuan emperor of China. Under Kublai Khan, Dyophysite Christians returned to the centre of power in China. After nearly three centuries in which their presence had been scarcely perceptible, they revealed themselves from generations of outward profession of other Chinese religions which had official favour. Yet the old pattern repeated itself. The Yuan rulers of China quickly conformed themselves to the rich and ancient culture which they had seized and, worse still, successive Yuan monarchs showed themselves steadily more incompetent to rule. Their overthrow by the fiercely xenophobic native Ming dynasty in 1368 was a bad blow to Christianity in the empire. It still had yet to interest more than a minority of Chinese. It is perhaps appropriate that the only apparent modern linguistic survival of the Syriac missions in the Far East is the word for 'tomb',
qavra
, used by the Turco-Mongol people known as the Uyghur, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China.
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So in neither of its great missionary ventures did the Church of the East achieve enough indigenous support to make an open stand against whatever the emperor decreed. By the time that a new wave of Western Latin Christians arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century, Christian faith and practice had once more virtually disappeared - at least in public. What has become evident in recent years in the countryside beyond the former imperial capital Xi'an, around that extraordinary survival the Ta Qin monastery pagoda, is the likelihood that a consciousness of the Christian tradition and even a Christianity disguised as Taoism did persist. After the Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this small area became and remains a stronghold of rural Chinese Catholicism, Catholic parish churches now peppering the skyline as they might do in southern Europe. Maybe this was not the only place in China which was home to such a survival. Maybe secret Christians remained to welcome the first Western missionaries, as they did in later centuries after later persecutions, and there are many remarkable possibilities still to be investigated in the history of Chinese Christianity.
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The Mongols' conquests turned west as well. They finally shattered the power of the already declining Abbasid dynasty; their leader in this was Il-Khan ('Subordinate Khan') Hulagu, whose principal wife belonged to the Church of the East. That was a happy circumstance for the Christians of Baghdad, who were the only community whom the Mongols spared massacre when the city fell in 1258; indeed the Mongols gave the Catholicos one of the caliphs' palaces in which to establish his headquarters and cathedral complex.
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Now the Il-Khan established a new Mongol dynasty in Iran. It was not just the Dyophysites who had real expectations of a new Christian empire based on the dubious authority of these spectacularly brutal warriors. Hope flared up among Western Latin Christians, whose Middle Eastern Crusades against Muslim powers were looking increasingly hopeless (see pp. 384-6). The results were some epic Christian ventures into unknown territories to investigate the new diplomatic possibilities, led by a formidable set of missionaries from an innovative Latin organization, the Order of Franciscan Friars (see pp. 402-4).
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In the early 1250s, the great Crusader-king of France, Louis IX, was inspired to send William of Rubruck, a sharp-eyed Franciscan, as an emissary to the Great Khan Mongke in Central Asia. William recorded his travels in an absorbingly interesting journal of one of the most remarkable diplomatic exploits in this unprecedented episode of Western exploration.
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Just as enterprising and exotic visitors in the other direction, in 1285 and 1287-8, were successive envoys of the Il-Khan Arghun: first a Chinese Christian official of Kublai Khan and then a Dyophysite monk of Mongol descent called Rabban Sauma, who successively travelled to Constantinople, to the pope in Rome and then westwards all the way to the kings of England and France. In turn, Sauma's visit inspired fresh Franciscan efforts to penetrate Central Asia in the name of Chalcedonian Christianity. One result was the erection in the 1290s of a Gothic-style cathedral of the Western Latin rite in the improbable setting of Inner Mongolia, where its foundations have been excavated at the site of the city of Olon Sume. The Franciscan friar responsible travelled on to China, where he spent most of his time pestering Dyophysite Christians to become Chalcedonians.
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By that time, optimism on either side was running out.