Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (48 page)

At some periods Ethiopia was almost completely cut off from other Christians and might even have been without any
abun
sent from Alexandria to link it to the worldwide apostolic succession of bishops. Its available theological literature was selective and haphazard in character - so the Ethiopians came to treat the book known as I Enoch as part of the scriptural canon when it had lost respectability anywhere else, and indeed I Enoch played a special part in Ethiopian tradition by providing material for the foundation for the royal epic, the
Kebra Nagast
(see p. 244).
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Naturally prominent was a Miaphysite doctrinal anthology, named the
Qerellos
after the main content extracted from the works of Cyril of Alexandria, but despite this link with one part of the wider Christian world, it was small wonder that the preoccupations and character of Ethiopian faith developed on very individual (not to say eccentric) lines. It was the Ethiopians, for instance, who meditated on various Coptic apocryphal accounts of Pontius Pilate and decided that the Roman governor who presided over Christ's crucifixion should become a Confessor of the Church, to be celebrated in their sacred art and given a feast day in June and a star place in the liturgy at Epiphany, the greatest feast of the year, when the priest intoned a phrase from the Psalms which was also an echo of his words: 'I will wash my hands in innocence'. The Copts and Ethiopians did not forget Pilate's complicity in the death of Christ, but in retelling his story they made him realize the full extent of his guilt, and they brought a symmetry to his fate by making him die on a cross, like the trio whom he had killed at Golgotha on the day that the sun hid its face. Thus Ethiopia's royal Church found a unique way of assuaging the prolonged Christian embarrassment that the life of Christ had been played out far from the contemporary institutions of worldly power.
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It is to a new dynasty, the Zagwe kings (1137-1270), that Ethiopian Christianity attributes a cluster of Christian monuments which are as haunting and astonishing as the earlier stelae of Aksum: the twelve churches of the Zagwe capital city of Lalibela, cut from the living rock (see Plate 9). What is now a small rural town was renamed after a Zagwe king who reigned at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to whom these extraordinary buildings are attributed. In fact, they must have taken much longer to construct than Lalibela's reign alone; some may be much earlier and may have survived the havoc attributed to Gudit through their indestructibility. It is said that King Lalibela conceived the idea of recreating Jerusalem in his capital after a visit to the Holy Land, in an effort to compensate for the renewed fall of the Holy City to Muslim armies in 1187 (see p. 385). As so often in Ethiopian history, it is impossible to know whether centuries of subsequent meditation, wishful thinking and purposeful political rebranding have overlaid whatever original scheme was intended at Lalibela, to produce its present rich skein of associations with Jerusalem - the Church of Golgotha now includes two tombs designated respectively for Jesus Christ and King Lalibela, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre lies at the heart of the Lalibela complex.
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What is clear is that this wave of new monuments to Ethiopian Christian confidence was followed by a major expansion of Christian life in a renewal of monasticism. Monks founded their communities for the first time in the central highlands, usually deliberately seizing pre-Christian holy sites, and they displayed all the heroic feats of ascetic self-denial which had been pioneered in Syria and Egypt. They were at the heart of two centuries and more which were another golden age of Ethiopian Christianity, as well as one of its greatest periods of contention and struggle.
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At the end of the thirteenth century, another dynasty supplanted the Zagwe, and between its founder, Yekuno Amlak (reigned 1270-85), and his grandson Amda Seyon (reigned 1314-44), it came to restore the military might of Ethiopia. It appears that the Egyptian Coptic Church was affronted at the usurpation and refused to supply an
abun
, so for some considerable time the Ethiopians had to resort to bishops from Syria to preserve their episcopal succession.
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Such internationally expressed doubts needed addressing and a sustained campaign began to plug the dynasty into ancient history, with the aid of King Solomon: Amda Seyon's name ('Pillar of Zion') was no casual reference. It may thus be that this was the stage at which the Ethiopian Church's identification with Israel really began to become distinctive. The existence of the
Kebra Nagast
may have been the inspiration for this stratagem, and it is likely that its present literary form dates largely to around 1300.
⁵⁴

Later tradition represents a vital element in Negus Yekuno's support as his understanding with the chief activist in the expansion of monasteries, the monk from Dabra Damo, Iyasus Mo'a ('Jesus has prevailed'). It is a plausible but also a convenient story, since the monks were to prove a constant source of difficulty for the 'Solomonic' dynasty, through their independent charismatic authority and individual opinions. The chief disciple of Iyasus Mo'a, Takla Haymanot ('Plant of Faith'), was a formidable ascetic, said to have spent a considerable proportion of his life standing on one leg in his monastic cell, feeding on one seed brought by a bird once a year. When the other leg atrophied away, God rewarded the monk with an array of wings.
⁵⁵
We can take these stories as a shorthand indication for a religious leader with an intimidating arsenal of power. Takla Haymanot was the first in a series of monks to become a key figure at Court, as the Echage (
ecage
). This official came to exercise the sort of power over Church life and government which might have been the
abun
's, if the
abun
had not been an elderly Egyptian.

Tensions soon evolved between monarchy and monastery, whose new vigour naturally looked on existing Ethiopian institutions with reforming zeal, and did not always welcome the new close association between the Court and some leading monks. One vexed issue has continued to agitate Christians throughout Africa to the present day: polygamy versus monogamy (see pp. 883-5). The Church was anxious to outlaw polygamy, which, despite having a perfectly respectable presence in the Tanakh, is clearly unacceptable in the New Testament. Ethiopian monarchs conformed to African tradition and habitually took several wives: the monk BaSalota Mika'el had the temerity to denounce Negus Amda Seyon himself for both polygamy and an array of concubines, and it is noticeable that the
Kebra Nagast
insists on monogamy for Christians.
⁵⁶
The monarchy stilled much of the criticism with generous grants of land to leading monasteries, and it did not give up polygamy. Neither did most of the Ethiopian laity, who virtually all accepted that the price of their maintenance of polygamy was that they would not get married in church, and that between marriage and final bereavement from their partners they would face exclusion from the Eucharist. They made something positive of their exclusion by turning it to the enthusiastic ritual practice of fasting.
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Parties developed among the monks and particular groups of monasteries, which were something like the orders of monks which evolved in the twelfth-century Western Church (see pp. 389-93). Particularly important over several centuries from the early fourteenth was the northern grouping known as the House of Ewostatewos, named after a monk who ended his life an exile, travelling extensively beyond his country as far as Miaphysite Armenia. Despite this unusual cosmopolitanism in their founder-hero, admirers of Ewostatewos concentrated their devotion on a peculiarly Ethiopian issue reflecting the Church's exploration of Judaism: the observance of the Jewish Sabbath as well as the Christian Sunday. This aroused opposition, especially from Christians encouraged by Alexandrian-born
abuns
who knew the practice of the wider Church. Among a number of wooden inscriptions from Lalibela dubiously attributed to King Lalibela himself, the longest contains praise of Sunday; this probably tells us nothing about that particular king's attitude to the subject, but may be taken as a contribution to the debate at some date which is uncertain.
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At issue was how far the Ethiopian Church was prepared to travel in its own direction and ignore what links it had with the wider world: monks of the House of Ewostatewos rejected ordination by the
abun
, and it is possible that they might have ended up as separate from their parent Christianity as that other independent-minded Ethiopian movement, the Falasha (see pp. 243-4).

The triumph of the Sabbath was sealed by devoted advocacy from one of Ethiopia's most remarkable monarchs, Zar'a Ya'qob (reigned 1434-68), who combined military success with intense piety, himself writing works of Christian instruction for his subjects. Thanks to Zar'a Ya'qob, Ethiopia's effective rule extended once more to the coast of the Red Sea, and despite the Negus's pride in the special character of Ethiopian devotion, he was intensely aware of his links with a wider world; he took the regnal name Constantine. There was a great sensation in Europe when a delegation of two monks from the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem arrived in 1441 at the Pope's council at Florence (see pp. 492-3) and uttered the name of their far-distant monarch - this was the same council which also received representations from the beleaguered Copts. Zar'a Ya'qob also derived great spiritual comfort from an unlikely source, a short popular work of devotion called
The Miracles of Mary
, which seems to have been compiled for use in Marian shrines in France in the twelfth century; having gained great popularity in western Europe, it had been translated into Arabic and then into Ethiopic. The Negus made it a mandatory work of devotion for his clergy: a strange stray from an alien world which he nevertheless found a useful tool in moulding his people to a single style of faith, and Marian devotion was hugely reinforced in the Ethiopian Church.
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Less indebted to French devotional style was Zar'a Ya'qob's decree that all his subjects should be tattooed on their foreheads with the words 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' and on their right and left hands respectively 'I deny the Devil' and 'I am a servant of Mary'. Ethiopian Christian tattooing still characteristically features a cross in blue on the chin or the forehead.
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Zar'a Ya'qob was determined that religious divisions should not undermine his newly extended empire, and key to this was a full understanding between the Solomonic monarchy and the awkward monks of the House of Ewostatewos. This was achieved at a major council of the Ethiopian Church summoned to the Negus's newly founded monastery of Dabra Mitmaq in 1449, at which the main agreement was that both the Sabbath and Sunday should henceforth be observed. In return, monks of the House of Ewostatewos agreed to be reconciled to the
abun
and accept ordination at his hands; so the forces of Ethiopian particularism were not terminally separated from the Church's link to the wider Christian world. It was an important moment for the future of Ethiopian Christianity, a moment nevertheless when, in continuing to observe the Sabbath, it explicitly separated itself from the devotional practice of the Church it knew best, the Miaphysite Church of Alexandria.

The Council of Dabra Mitmaq was a triumph for the Negus himself, the zenith of one of the most prosperous and self-confident eras in the empire's existence. His last years were troubled, as (in a pattern which would be repeated in Ethiopian history) this exceptionally talented man descended into paranoia and obsessive brutality. He became a recluse; his drive to regulate his Church, his hostility to any Judaism beyond the extent of his own ordinances and his determination to eradicate traditional non-Christian religion all led him into a spree of punishment killings. Among the victims accused of betraying their Christian faith were one of his wives and several of his children, flogged to death. After the Negus's own death, the movement away from the wider Church might have proceeded further, as powerful voices continued to question the role of the Egyptian
abun
in the Church, but in 1477 a further council of the Church presided over by his son reaffirmed this ancient link with the Patriarch of Alexandria. The fifteenth century thus set patterns and boundaries for Ethiopian Christianity which survived into modern times. Yet those links to a wider Catholicity were still to a Christianity which rejected the Roman imperial Church's conclusions at Chalcedon. This was a matter of great significance when the wider world erupted into the remoteness of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century, during one of the worst tests and most terrible times in its history (see pp. 711-12).

The Western bishops at the Council of Florence had not expected to hear of a king of Ethiopia called Zar'a Ya'qob, but they did know (or thought they knew) of a priest-king in the East called Prester John. Since the twelfth-century Crusades had first brought intensified contacts between Europe and the Middle East, there had been tales of this mighty Christian ruler who would be an ally for hard-pressed Latin Europeans against the threat of Islam. Some placed him in India, others, vague about geography beyond their own world, further north in Asia - this drew on the reality of Muslim defeats by Mongol khans in twelfth-century Central Asia who were in fact adherents of Buddhism, a religion which meant nothing to western Europeans. Friar William of Rubruck, one of the few to know better, had commented sourly in the 1260s that the stories about Prester John were all the fault of the Nestorians (Dyophysites), who were prone to 'create big rumours out of nothing'.
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At the Council of Florence in 1441, it was the reality of Ethiopia, a remote but powerful Christian monarchy south beyond Egypt, that encouraged new European excitement about Prester John. Prester John went on prompting optimism for a turn for the better in Christian fortunes; in addition to two hundred known manuscripts of the Latin letter written by the imaginary king between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, there were fourteen early printed editions of the letter up to 1565, and large numbers of translations into vernacular European languages.
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Nevertheless, in cold practical results, Prester John turned out to be a disappointing myth, and what it chiefly revealed was just how little Western Chalcedonian Christians knew about centuries of Christian struggle, scholarship, sanctity and heroism in another world. Western Christianity, heir to Chalcedon, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still has a long way to go before the balance is fully righted.