The Church and the Barbarians Part 7

THE CHURCH IN ASIA

[Sidenote: The Church in Persia.]

In the East Christianity had spread to Persia from Edessa.[1] The Parthians seem to have put no obstacle in its way, but when the Persians came into conflict with the Roman Empire, now Christian, there was long and bitter persecution. At last toleration was reached, after Sapor II., and from the beginning of the fourth century the Church in Persia was organised, and governed by many bishops; the primate took the t.i.tle of Catholicos and had his see at Seleucia, and had suffragans on both sides of the Persian Gulf. In a.s.syria and Chaldaea the ma.s.s of the population became Christians, and Christians were spread, less thickly, over Media, Khora.s.san, and Persia itself. The dignity of the Persian catholicos was considerable; he might be compared with the Byzantine patriarchs, and the Church almost occupied the position of an established religion, related to the civil power. But the distance, and the constant wars between the Empire and Persia, tended inevitably to separate the Churches. From the end of the fifth century the Church in Persia, surrendered to {94} Nestorianism, had begun visibly to decay. It was controlled by the Persian kings, it was a prey to endless controversy and intrigue, and when the Persian kingdom was at war with the Empire it was in grave danger. It held councils furtively; it pa.s.sed canons, and, itself heretical, condemned other and more recent heresies than its own. But often its catholicos engaged in the dynastic politics of the Persian dynasties, and Christianity, regarded as one among many religions, and tainted with the same materialism as the rest, sank into impotence and was torn by schism.

Meanwhile, in the neighbourhood of the Persian realm, Christianity was spreading.

[Sidenote: Growth of the Church under Justinian.]

Many barbarous tribes during Justinian's reign were admitted to the Christian faith and fellows.h.i.+p. The Tzani dwelling on the border of Armenia and Pontus, "separated from the sea by precipitous mountains and vast solitudes, impa.s.sable torrent beds and yawning chasms,"

[2]--in a land where, Procopius tells us,[3] "it is not possible to irrigate the ground, to reap a crop, or to find a meadow anywhere; and even the trees bear no fruit, because for the most part there is no regular succession of seasons, and the land is not at one time subjected to cold and wet, and at another made fertile by the warmth of the sun, but is desolated by perpetual winter and covered by eternal snows. They changed their religion to the true faith, became Christians, and embraced a more civilised mode of life." The king of those Heruls who served in the Roman army, and a Hunnish king, Gordas, {95} became Christians. The Abasgi (or Albagrians) of the Caucasus were converted, and for the most part remained a.s.sociated with the Armenians and the Iberians of Georgia,[4] "when they were compelled by the Persian king to wors.h.i.+p idols," put themselves under the imperial protection, and they remained closely in connection with the Armenian Church till 608 when they accepted the decisions of Chalcedon. They remained independent and orthodox till their union, a century ago, with the Russian Church.

[Sidenote: Separation from the Church.]

In Armenia, similarly, had grown up a national Church, which had a catholicos, a hierarchy, a vernacular liturgy of its own. When in the middle of the fifth century the ancient kingdom was split up between the Empire and the Persians, the Armenian Church still remained apart.

Its national features were strongly marked even before dogmatic differences arose. With the Nestorian and Monophysite heresies new divisions took place. The Persians gradually, between 435 and 480, accepted Nestorianism, and in 483 definitely separated from the Catholic Church, and Nisibis became a school of Nestorian theology.

The Armenians survived this danger but were led into Monophysitism, and in 505 they p.r.o.nounced against the Council of Chalcedon. Their theology became tainted with further heresy in the sixth century, and they are still separate from the orthodox Church of the East. Thus, at the time with which we have to deal, as we have said, Christianity east of Antioch and on the borders of Persia was under Nestorian influence.

After 431 Nestorianism became gradually established {96} as the dominant creed. The Church of the East, as it was officially called, rejected the Third General Council, and was cut off from the Catholic Church. It long remained a strong body. The great schools of Nisibis, Edessa, and Baghdad were centres of religion, learning, and civilisation.

[Sidenote: The Nestorians.]

The Nestorians[5] also sent out missionaries northward among the wandering Tartar tribes and along the sh.o.r.es of the Caspian; southward to Persia, India and Ceylon; and eastward across the steppes of Central Asia into China. The bilingual inscription of Singanfu, in Chinese and Syriac, relates that Nestorian missionaries laboured in China as far back as A.D. 636.[6] In the sixth and seventh centuries the Church of the East could count its twenty-five metropolitans or archbishops; and the number and remoteness of their sees, stretching from Jerusalem to China, testifies to her missionary zeal. Those who dwelt nearest to Baghdad met the catholicos in yearly synod; those farthest off sent their confession of faith to him every sixth year.

[Sidenote: Prester John and his conversion.]

By the Middle Ages the Church of the East had spread over the whole of Central Asia. The curious legends of the powerful kingdom of Prester John, somewhere in the heart of Asia, grew out of the conversion, by Nestorian merchants in the eleventh century, of a certain King of Kerait, a kingdom of Tartary to the north of China. This king is said to have requested that missionaries might be sent to him from the Church {97} of his converters; and, when they were come, these missionaries baptized him, naming him John,[7] and he was ordained priest (Presbyter or Prester). Two hundred thousand people of the nation embraced Christianity; the successors to the kingdom bore the dynastic name of John, and were ordained priests. However uncertain this story is, the fact of the conversion of the princes of Kerait in Tartary is sufficiently well established. [Sidenote: Height of prosperity.] The prosperity of the Church of the East culminated in the eleventh century. The khalifs of Baghdad protected their Christian subjects, and important offices of state were often filled by them.

The Indian Church, which was believed to date back to the time of S.

Thomas the Apostle, had probably its origin in Nestorian missions, and accepted Monophysite opinions.

[Sidenote: Their missions]

As we have seen, the wider field of missionary work owed much to the labours of the Nestorians. It is possible that Cosmas,[8] who had travelled far afield in the first half of the sixth century, may have been a Nestorian; but the reverence with which he speaks of the orthodox faith, and his constant use of the Catholic writers, would seem to show rather that, when he became a monk at any rate, he was orthodox. From him, however, we obtain knowledge of the wide field of Nestorian missions. Recent discoveries have largely added to our knowledge. It is clear that in the sixth century, {98} apparently before 540, Nestorian bishoprics were founded in Herat and Samarkand.

Monumental inscriptions date back as far as 547. [Sidenote: in the Far East.] Merv, as early as 650, is spoken of as a "falling church" [9]

amid the triumphs of Islam. China has been already mentioned, and though it is not clear that only Nestorian missions prospered in the far land, there is no doubt that their success was the most prominent.

Christian communities existed near the borders of Tibet[10] in the seventh century; and in the eighth and ninth they were strong in India.

Even in the eleventh century the "Nestorian wors.h.i.+p retained a great hold over many parts of Asia, between the Euphrates and the Gobi desert." Into the later and fragmentary history of these missions it is not here the place to enter. Let it only be remembered that the labours of "those Nestorian missionaries who preached and baptized under the shadow of the wall of China, and on the sh.o.r.es of the Yellow Sea, the Caspian, and the Indian Ocean" [11] were made possible by the diplomatic and military triumphs which radiated from Constantinople in the sixth century, and by the Christian zeal of orthodox emperors and patriarchs.

[Sidenote: Nestorianism in Persia.]

Meanwhile in Persia the Monophysites contended for supremacy with the Nestorians, and organised themselves with considerable skill. But the Nestorians, who founded schools and developed a Christology on lines different from those on which European thought was {99} proceeding, became still more rigid in their rejection of the Catholic teaching.

Maraba the catholicos (540-52) and Thomas of Edessa, his pupil, seem to have drawn very near to orthodoxy; but the controversy of the Three Chapters widened the breach. Council after council, theologian, catholicos, monastery, bishop, alike denounced Justinian; and they had the support of the pagan philosophers whom he had expelled from the schools of Athens.

In Persia monasticism and the life of hermits--though the introduction of either is difficult if not impossible to trace[12]--flourished and developed on lines of their own. For a long time there was no distinction between monastic and secular life: it was only gradually that an organised monasticism grew up out of the coen.o.bitic life for men and for women. But from the sixth century onward the organisation of monasticism gave strength to the Church, and enabled it for some time to resist the Muhammadan invasion. The Church, mapped out into dioceses and well served by numerous clergy, and having its own canon law, its own liturgical forms, and its own theology, was able for long, in spite of the absence of all state support and in spite often of state persecution, to survive in some appearance of strength till the Muhammadan invasion. The Mussulman conquest, when once it was achieved, gave something like security to the Nestorians. Though there was a time of persecution in the ninth century, it was short.

Christians as teachers, physicians, philosophers, were famous in the foundation of the learning of the palmy days of the khalifs. But the whole {100} structure fell before the invasions, in later days, of the Mongols and the Turks.

[Sidenote: The Church in Palestine.]

From the more distant parts of the Persian Empire we may pa.s.s to the land where the Church had its birth. During the period of revived power in the Empire, Palestine was at peace under Justinian's rule.

In Jerusalem itself[13] it is chiefly to be said that the emperor engaged in large restorations and some original church building after the style of his better known work. He had a severe struggle with the Samaritans, but it led to many conversions.[14]

[Sidenote: Conquest by the Persians.]

But here, as elsewhere, as time went on the encroachments of the Persians were a perpetual danger to the Christianity of the East. In 615 Jerusalem fell into their hands. The Jews, whom earlier emperors had, like Justinian, kept in subjection, had grown in the days of Heraclius to be much more powerful in Syria than the Christians, and it was they who secured Jerusalem and gave it into the hands of the Persians; and again, after the Christians had overpowered the garrison, the city was given back to them and to scenes of pillage and outrage; the churches, so splendid as early as the fourth century, and described in glowing language by Procopius in the sixth, were sacked and defiled; the clergy and the patriarch were made captive; the Holy Cross, discovered by the Empress Helena, was sent away into Persia; and "all these things," says the chronicler, "happened not in a year or a month, but within a few days." The ruined churches were, however, restored {101} before long by the alms of the faithful, and it was not long before the Christians themselves were favoured by the Persian king, and Chosroes, in consequence of a council at Jerusalem in 628, legalised, it would seem, the Monophysite heresy as the representative of Christianity. [Sidenote: Reconquest by Heraclius, 622.] The conquest of Egypt followed on that of Syria; and the union of the Coptic Church with that of the Syrian Monophysites was a result, natural and almost inevitable, of the community of suffering between them. Within a few years--his campaign began in 622--the heroic emperor Heraclius won back all that had been lost, utterly defeated the Persians, won back the Holy Rood, restored the patriarch Zacharias to Jerusalem, and returned in triumph to the imperial city. In 629 he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy City, and on September 14th--still observed as the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross--he restored the Rood to the Church of the Resurrection.

[Sidenote: Conquest by the Muhammadans.]

In the year 610 Muhammad began his career as a prophet. It is no part of Church history to trace the origin of his opinions or his power, to tell how he learnt from Jews and Nestorians, or how he established a marvellous organisation on a basis of theocratic militarism. The migration from Meccah to Medinah in 622 was the beginning of his active ministry, of religious teaching carried forward by sword and fire. The capture of Meccah, the submission of Arabia, the extinction of the Christian (Monophysite) communities in the peninsula, were followed before long by the invasion of Syria and the capture of Jerusalem by the Khalif Omar in 637. The year before, Heraclius {102} had taken away the Holy Rood and the treasures of the churches to Constantinople.

Two years later the Muhammadans seized Egypt, from which the Persians had not so long been driven out by the armies of the Empire. The fatal policy of the Monothelite emperors had opened the way to the triumph of Islam. Of this we shall see more, in Africa and in Southern Europe, in later days.

[1] See _The Church of the Fathers_ (vol. ii. of the present series), chapter xxix., for the earlier history.

[2] Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_, i. 441.

[3] _Aedif._, iii. 6.

[4] Joannes Biclarensis, p. 853.

[5] I quote from the admirable summary in the Reports of the Archbishop's Mission to the a.s.syrian Christians.

[6] See an interesting account in Williams's _Middle Kingdom_.

[7] His name was Ung; his t.i.tle Khan; Ung Khan was Syriacised into Yukhanan, i.e. John.

[8] The _Christian Topography_ was written between 535 and 537.

Beazley, _Dawn of Modern Geography_, p. 279.

[9] a.s.semani, _Bibl. Orient_, iii. i. 130, 131.

[10] See Waddell, _Buddhism in Tibet_, pp. 421, 422.

[11] Beazley, _Dawn of Modern Geography_, p. 211.

[12] Cf. Budge, _The Book of Governors_, i. cxvi., and Labourt, _Le Christianisme dans l'empire perse_, 303.

[13] Cf. Procopius, _Aedif._; and John Moschus, _Pratum Spirituale_ (Migne, Patr. Groec., lx.x.xvii. [3]).

[14] Procopius, _Aedif._, v. 8.

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CHAPTER IX