A Tribute to the Churches of the East

Some time ago, in the thread that Matthew started on the Church of the East, I had noted that the schism caused by the Council of Ephesus "was far greater extent than either the 1054 split with the EO's or the Protestant Reformation".

Viisaus asked me about this, and I told him I'd get back to him on it.

According to Samuel Hugh Moffett, in his work "A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume 1" (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1997) the schism that happened at the time of Ephesus and Chalcedon caused splits very much akin to what happened in Europe during the Reformation. He describes it:

What finally divided the early church, East from West, Asia from Europe, was neither war nor persecution, but the blight of a violent theological controversy, that raged through the Mediterranean world in the second quarter of the fifth century. It came to be called the Nestorian controversy, and how much of it was theological and how much political is still being debated, but it irreversibly split the church not only east and west but also north and south and cracked it into so many pieces that it was never the same again. Out of it came an ill-fitting name for the church in non-Roman Asia, "Nestorian."

(Moffett pg 169)

He describes the geographic scope of this church, first of all, which extends from Syria up along the "Old Silk Road" through Edessa in what is now the town of Urfa, "a dusty town in eastern Turkey just north of the Syrian line," through Nisibis (one of the great "schools" of the early church), through names we know such as Mosul, Tekrit, Seleucia-Ctesiphon (just south of modern Baghdad), and easward through Persia, Afghanistan, and eastward to China.

What was striking for me was Moffett's description of "the Great Persecution," which didn't happen in the Roman empire at all, but rather, in the churches of Persia (which included modern Iraq), which began in around 339 and extended through to the year 400, in which "as many as 190,000 Persian christians died in the terror. It was worse than anything suffered in the West under Rome, yet the number of apostasies seemed to be fewer in Persia than in the West, which is a remarkable tribute to the steady courage of Asia's early Christians." (145)

Interestingly, this persecution was set off by Constantine's conversion to Christianity. "It was enough to make any Persian ruler conditioned by three hundred years of war with Rome suspecious of the emergence of a potential fifth column. Any lingering doubts must have been dispelled when about twenty years later Constantine began to gather his forces for war in the East... Faced with what seemed to be a double threat, a threat not only to national security but to the national religion as well, Persias priests and rulers cemented their alliance of state and religion in a series of periods of terror that have been called the most massiver persecution of Christians in history, "unequalled for its duration, its ferocity and the number of martyrs." (138).

It should be noted that this all occurred before the council of Ephesus, before the Schism. There is no way to say "these are not our people."

* * *

Philip Jenkins, in his work "The Lost History of Christianity" (New York: HarperCollins, 2008) goes into some more detail about the scope of the church in this world before describing how it "dies".

To appreciate the scale of the Church of the East, we can look at a list of the church's metropolitans -- that is of those senior clergy who oversaw inferior hierarchies of bishops grouped in provinces. In England, to give a comparison, the medieval church had two metropolitans: respectively, at York and Canterbury. Timothy (a bishop of the eighth century) himself presided over nineteen metropolitans and eighty-five bishops. Though the exact locations of the metropolitan seats changed over time, map 1.1 on page 12 identifies some of the leading centers. Just in Timothy's lifetime, new metropolitan sees were created at Rai near Tehran, and in Syria, Terkestan, Armenia, and Dailumaye on the Caspian Sea.

The presence of metropolitan seats in Turkestan and central Asia is amazing enough, but the list of bishoprics and lesser churches includes just as many shocks. Arabia had at least four sees, and Timothy created a new one in Yemen. And the church was growing in southern India, where believers claimed a direct inheritance from the missions of the apostle Thomas...

Timothy himself was committed to the church's further expansion, and he commissioned monks to carry the faith to the shores of the Caspian Sea, even into China. He reported the conversion of the Turkish great king, the khagan, who then ruled over much of central Asia. In a magnificent throwaway line, Timothy described, about 780, how "[i]n these days the Holy Spirit has anointed a metropolitan for the Turks, and we are preparing to consecrate another one for the Tibetans. Timothy was deeply conscious of the church's universality. When debating a technical liturgical question, he drew support from the practice of the wider churches of the sprawling Christian world he knew: the Persians and Assyrians don't do this, he argued, and nor do the churches of "the countries of the sunrise--that is to say, among the Indians, the Chinese, the Tibetans, the Turks." The church operated in multiple languages: in Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, and Chinese, but not Latin, which scarcely mattered outside western Europe.

To put this geographical achievement in context, we might think of what was happening in contemporary Europe. Before Saint Benedict formed his first monsastery, before the probable date of the British king Arthur, Nestorian sees existed at Nisapur an Tus in Khurasan, in northeastern Persia, and at Rai. Before England had its first archbishop of Canterbury--possibly before Canturbury had a Christian church--the Nestorian church already had metropolitans at Merv and Herat, in the modern nations of (respectively) Turkmeistan and Afghanistan, and churches were operating Sri Lanka and Malabar. Before Good King Wenceslas ruled a Christian Bohemia, before Poland was Catholic, the Nestorian sees of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Patna all achieved metropolitan status. Our common mental maps of Christian history omit a thousand years of that story, and several million square miles of territory. (10-11)

Maybe our "mental maps" omit this information because it is just simply too painful to recollect. "When Timothy died in 823, he had every reason to hope for his church's future" (19)

But of course, the anger of the Muslims set off by the Crusades wreaked havoc among these churches. "Still, in 1050, [Asia Minor] had 373 bishoprics, and the inhabitants were virtually all Christian, overwhelmingly members of the Orthodox Church. Four hundred years later, that Christian proportion had fallen to 10 or 15 percent of the population, and we can find just three bishops. According to one estimate, the number of Asian Christians fell, between 1200 and 1500, from 21 million to 3.4 million. In the same years, the proportion of the world's Christians living in Africa and Asia combined fell from 34 percent to just 6 percent. Actually, the contraction outside Europe was probably more dramatic than even these figures suggest, but the basic point is accurate" (23-24).

The Great Schisms of the Fifth Century

This is a digression from my series of posts from Paul Johnson’s “A History of Christianity,” but the material is related, and it provides some background information for what I’ll hope to be writing about with regard to the Crusades, and how that crusading spirit was funneled into the Inquisition.

Part 1: Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition
Part 2: How Confession became a Divinely Instituted Sacrament
Part 3: The Origins of Payment for Penance
Part 4: Crusading and Other Indulgences

The councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381) contended with Arianism and finalized, to a large extent, the doctrine of the Trinity. (There were other battles fought, to be sure, but at this point the doctrine of the Trinity included one God, three persons, and rejected the Arian notions that Christ was a created being and that “there was a time when he was not”.)

These councils affirmed the Scriptural teaching that Christ was the eternal Word of God, and supplied the phrase “homoousious,” “of one substance with the Father,” that is, that Christ was the eternal God made flesh. But once this was determined, there arose questions as to precisely how God and flesh related within the person of Christ. Even at the time of Constantinople, Christological ideas were being posited and rejected. For example, Constantinople also rejected the notion of Apollinarius that in Christ, “the Word of God dwelt in human flesh in lieu and place of the human rational and intellective soul.” (from here).

But other controversies developed. Here I’m following the account of Justo Gonzalez, “The Story of Christianity,” (253-4):

The next episode of the Christological controversies was precipitated by Nestorius, a representative of the Antiochene school who became patriarch of Constantinople in 428. There were always political intrigues surrounding that office, for the patriarchate of Constantinople had become a point of discord between the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria. The Council of Constantinople had declared that the bishop of Constantinople should have in the East a precedence similar to that which the bishop of Rome had in the West. This was a simple acknowledgement of political reality, for Constantinople had become the capital of the Eastern empire. But the bishops of the older churches in Antioch and Alexandria were not content with being relegated to a secondary position. They responded, among other things, by turning the bishopric of Constantinople into a prize to be captured for their own supporters. Since Antioch was more successful at this game than Alexandria, most of the patriarchs of Constantinople were Antiochenes, and therefore the patriarchs of Alexandria regarded them as their enemies. … For these reasons, Nestorius’ position was not secure, and the Alexandrines were looking to catch him at his first mistake.

This happened when Nestorius declared that Mary should not be called theotokos – that is, bearer of God – and suggested that she should be called Christotokos – bearer of Christ. It is difficult for Protestants to understand what was at stake here, for we have been taught to reject the notion that Mary is the “Mother of God, and at first glance, this seems to be what is at stake here. But in truth, the debate was not so much about Mary as about Jesus. The question [at this time] was not what honors were due to Mary, but how one was to speak of the birth of Jesus. When Nestorius declared that Mary was the bearer of Christ, but not of God, he was affirming that in speaking of the incarnate Lord one may and must distinguish between his humanity and his divinity, and that some of the things said of him are to be applied to the humanity, and others to the divinity. This was a typically Antiochene position, which sought to preserve the full humanity of Jesus by making a very clear distinction between [his humanity] and his divinity. Nestorius and the rest of the Antiochenes feared that if the two were too closely joined together, the divinity would overwhelm the humanity, and one would no longer be able to speak of a true man Jesus.

Actually, there is yet another concept wrapped up here. “Theotokos” more correctly means “God-bearer,” or as Gonzalez relates, “bearer of God.” But other theologians conflated “bearer of God” into “mother of God” (the Greek “Mater Theou”). In proposing the term “Christotokos,” Nestorius was intending to provide a caution and a mediating position against the very misunderstanding that, as we have seen, has led to all of the later emphasis on Mary throughout church history. So history has shown that Nestorius was correct with his caution.

On the other hand, it is clear that Nestorius’s theology was not as precise and helpful as it could have been. Samuel Hugh Moffett, writing in “A History of Christianity in Asia” (176-177) notes, “As early as [the Council of Ephesus, 431 A.D., Nestorius] struggled to find a way to express the essential unity of the person of the incarnate Christ without denying the essential reality of both the humanity and deity of the Savior without surrendering the all-important truth that there is an ultimate, basic distinction between deity and humanity.” As Nestorius later wrote:

The divine Logos was not one, and another the man in whom he came to be. Rather, one was the prosopon [“person”] of both in dignity and honour, worshipped by all creation, and in no way and no time divided by otherness of purpose and will.

Moffett continues, “This doctrine of the unity of the person (prosopon) of Christ in two natures may have rested on the use of a word too weak to support the theological weight it was required to bear, but it was in no sense heresy.” (177)

Nevertheless, for political reasons and other reasons, Nestorius had attracted an enemy in the “strong-minded, hot-tempered patriarch” of Alexandria, Cyril. (Moffett, 170). Cyril put his emphasis on the unity of the person of Christ. As Moffett explains, “But in order to preserve the oneness it was difficult not to weaken either his deity or his humanity, for ‘complete God’ and ‘complete man’ strongly implies duality of person. Cyril’s explanation of the two natures seemed to Antioch to weaken the humanity of Christ and to stress his deity as of higher significance. The Alexandrian school, strong on the doctrine of redemption, genuinely and naturally defended the deity in Christ’s nature, for only a divine Christ could save sinners. But in doing so, the Alexandrians ran the risk of losing some of the historic authenticity of Christ’s human nature.” (Moffett, 171)

This dispute led to the calling of another council, at Ephesus in 431 A.D.

For a variety of reasons, Cyril won the day, but only the day – not least because of his mischaracterization of Nestorius’s theology (he accused Nestorius of positing two persons in Christ), and the actions of his own bishops (50 in number, plus their entourages) who

acted as if it was a war they were conducting … [and they] went about in the city girt and armed with clubs… with yells of barbarians, snorting fiercely … raging with extravagant arrogance those whom they knew to be opposed to their doings, carrying bells about the city and lighting fires …. They blocked up the streets so that everyone was obliged to flee and hide, while they acted as masters of the situation, lying about, drunk and besotted and shouting obscenities…(Moffet, 174, citing Nestorius’s “accurate description of the proceedings.”)

The decision at Ephesus was “an embarrssement and blot on the history of the church” (174); its legality was “questionable, its conduct was disgraceful. And its theological verdict, if not overturned, was at least radically amended by the Council of Chalcedon (451).” (175) It led to a massive split in the church, “irreversibly … not only east and west but also north and south, and cracked it into so many pieces that it was never the same again.” (Moffett 169)

The controversies continued: in 451, Chalcedon instead used “Theotokos” language (and failed to pick up the “Mater Theou” language), and largely incorporated Nestorius’s “one-person, two-natures” theology into the definition that is held to be orthodox today.

The followers of Cyril of Alexandria, however, rejected Chalcedon, adhering more to a “one-nature” (Monophysite) theology. Monophysites continued to reside largely in Egypt and Syria.