Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (32 page)

This highlights one of the most significant features of Syrian Christianity: it was a pioneer in creating a repertoire of church music, hymnody and chant. Although hardly anything of Bar-Daisan's pioneering hymns survives except through the hostile filter of Ephrem, hymns are preserved from Syria in a collection known as the Odes of Solomon which are likely to be second century in date. One of them gives what may be the first reference beyond the biblical text to Mary the mother of Jesus as a virgin mother, and they pioneer a characteristic feature of Syrian Christianity, reference to the Holy Spirit as female. Grammatically, after all,
ruha
, the Syriac word for spirit, is feminine, although later Christians found this disconcerting and from around 400 CE arbitrarily redefined the word as masculine in grammatical gender.
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Ephrem himself triumphantly used metrical verse for a major part of his writings, whether polemic or spiritual, and he wrote hundreds of hymns, often to be sung in the liturgy complementing the chanting of scripture, and they were widely translated from an early date for use in other Eastern Churches. Here he sings the praise of the Festival of Christmas in images of a riot of wealth, hospitality and also - audaciously, but just like Jesus before him - wild looting:

Behold, the First-Born has opened His feast-day for us
like a treasure-house. This one day,
the [most] perfect in the year, alone opens
this treasure-house. Come, let us prosper
and become rich from it before it is closed.
Blessed are the vigilant who plunder from it
the spoils of life. It is a great disgrace
if one sees his neighbour
carrying away treasures, yet he in the treasure-house
reposes and sleeps to come out empty-handed.
On this feast let everyone garland
the door of his heart. May the Holy Spirit
desire to enter in its door to dwell
and sanctify. For behold, She moves about
to all the doors [to see] where She may dwell.
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Ephrem's musical precedent remains one of the most widely appreciated (if not always acknowledged) legacies of Syrian Christianity. His achievement prompted the writing of hymns in Greek, and the result has been that all Eastern liturgy has become far more based on poetry and hymns than the liturgy of the Western Latin Church. The Syriac musical tradition contains hymns sung in vigorous repetitive metre, a very different sound from that of the Greek or Russian Orthodox tradition. Moreover, preserved in the worship of Syriac Orthodox Christians from Edessa, who were expelled in the 1920s and are now living just over the border in the Syrian city of Aleppo, there is a distinctive form of liturgical music in chant and hymns. This is a proud heritage for the descendants of the refugees in Aleppo who have formed the Church of St George; it is likely to represent a living tradition from the oldest known musical performance in Christian history.
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But music is only part of the Syriac legacy. Music is an aspect of worship. In the Syrian Churches, principally the Church known as the Church of the East (about which we will have much more to say in Chapters 7 and 8), but also parts of the Church which over the centuries have accepted the authority of the Catholic Church of the West, there remains a regularly used form of prayer for the Eucharist which is the most reliably ancient of any in Christianity. Today this prayer is the heart of a structure of eucharistic worship for the Church's year and for ceremonies such as baptism and ordination which is known as the Liturgy of Addai and Mari. That lends it an association with those whom the Syrian Church reveres as its founders, but there is little doubt that it was the form of eucharistic prayer used in the Church of Edessa and it may be as early as the late second century. Nothing else preserved from anywhere in the Christian world has survived the austere scrutiny of modern liturgical scholars, to be authenticated as a form of worship that would have been familiar to very early Christians week by week.
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It is a rare privilege to have been welcomed as I was to a congregation of exiled Christians from Baghdad in their refuge in Damascus, still mourning those murdered in the latest agonies of the Syriac Church, and to know that words were being solemnly sung as so many centuries ago they had first been chanted in Edessa:

Your majesty, O Lord, a thousand thousand heavenly beings worship, and myriad myriads of angels, hosts of spiritual beings, ministers of fire and spirit with cherubim and holy seraphim, glorify your name, crying out and glorifying, 'Holy, holy, holy, God almighty, Heaven and earth are full of his glories' . . .

Since Syrians lived either side of the shifting frontier between Rome and its eastern neighbours, the Church was naturally as liable to spread eastwards as westwards. At the beginning of the third century, Bar-Daisan could speak of Christian communities in the sprawling regions of Central Asia which now form such ex-Soviet Republics as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, while from further south Christian graves have been found on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf which can be dated to the mid-third century. The Parthians showed little hostility to this new religion, but there was a significant shift with the founding of the Sassanian Empire in the 220s; the first restored shah, Ardashir, was the grandson of a high priest of the Zoroastrian faith and a Zoroastrian restoration became a keynote of the new empire's drive to restore Iranian tradition.
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Relations between episcopal Christians and Manichaeans were tense enough, but that was because they had much in common in the role which they assigned to Jesus Christ. Zoroastrianism, by contrast, was an ancient religion which looked with contempt on the Christian revelation and its developing doctrine of the Trinity. Like Manichaeism, it was a dualist faith, but it was not the dualism which led Manichees and gnostics to regard the world and matter as evil. The Zoroastrian dualist struggle was between being and non-being, in which the world created by the 'Wise Lord' (Ahura Mazda) was the forum for a struggle between the creator and an uncreated 'Evil Spirit' (Ahriman). The Zoroastrians' experience of the world was therefore shot through with divinity; Zoroastrians made animal sacrifices to Ahura Mazda and paid reverence to fire. They despised Christian and Manichaean asceticism, which were developing in Syria just as the Sassanians seized power.
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A confrontation became more and more likely as Christian numbers in the Sassanian Empire grew, just as they were growing in the Roman Empire through the third century. Refugees crossed the frontier from the Roman Empire, fleeing the imperial persecutions, and there were also huge groups of prisoners from successful Sassanian military campaigns; a mixture of Greek-speakers and Syrians in numbers running into thousands, so that the shah settled them in newly built cities. One of these places, Gondeshapur (in south-west Iran, also anciently known as Beit Lapat), developed a school of higher education where the medium of instruction was Syriac. This was destined to become a major centre of Christian scholarship (see p. 246). By around 290 there was a bishop based in the Sassanian capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, very near the modern Baghdad, whose successors increasingly took on the role of presiding bishop in the East beyond the Roman frontier. These bishops faced a problem in uniting two different language groups of Christians under a single authority. Tensions developed between Greek- and Syrian-speaking Christians, and they underlined the fact that the Sassanians could easily treat both groups as an alien threat to their rule. That tension became acute after Constantine established his alliance with Christian bishops at the beginning of the fourth century. Now it was easy for successive shahs to see Christianity as a fifth column for Rome.

In the third century the Sassanian shahs had occasionally put some of their Christian subjects to death, although in that era the Sassanians were even more hostile to the newly developing religion of the Manichees.
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In the fourth century the Church faced much greater trials. From the beginning of the 340s Bishop Simeon (Shem'on) of Seleucia-Ctesiphon led opposition to separate taxation for the Christian community in the Sassanian Empire, and that provoked Shah Shapur II to a massacre of the bishop and a hundred of his clergy. The Shah's anger and fear persisted in a persecution whose atrocities outdid anything that the Romans had achieved in their third-century attacks on the Church. There was a sickening attention to prolonging individual suffering which has rarely been equalled in the history of persecuting Christians until the concentrated Japanese persecutions of the early seventeenth century (see pp. 707-9). The situation was so dire that the bishopric in the Sassanian capital remained vacant until the beginning of the fifth century.
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When we consider the astonishing acts of ascetic self-destructiveness by western Syrian monks in the fourth century and later (see pp. 206-9), it is worth remembering that they would be acutely aware of the grotesque sufferings inflicted on countless Christians over the border in the Sassanian Empire during these grim years.

To the north of Syria lay the kingdom of Armenia, protected over the centuries by its rugged geography from much direct interference from its powerful neighbours. Although its dominant cultural influences had long been from Iran, it had also over the centuries reached a comfortable understanding with the Romans, allowing them to believe that it was a Roman client state, to the extent that some of the coins of the Emperor Augustus could proclaim the propaganda message 'Armenia has been captured'.
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The Romans, reluctant to take on the expense of governing such a difficult and remote area, were happy not to interfere too much. The early stages of Christian contact with the kingdom are obscure, but there are plausible stories of Syrian missions to it during the second and third centuries.
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These predate the more widely circulated story of the founding bishop, Gregory the Illuminator (or 'Enlightener'), which describes a dramatic turnaround for Christianity as a result of the conflicted relationship between the saint, a minor member of the royal family brought up a Christian in exile in the Roman province of Cappadocia in Asia Minor, and his distant cousin Trdat.

Trdat, known to the Romans as Tiridates, became king of Armenia in the 280s or 290s with the support of the Emperor Diocletian, and at first he followed Diocletian's increasingly hostile policies towards Christianity. In the conversion story, it was after suffering acute mental disorder that the new king turned to Gregory for counsel, having previously subjected him to savage torture. The King then ordered his people, including the priesthood of the old religion, to convert en masse to Christianity, in a year which is uncertain but most calculations place in the decade before the Roman Emperor Constantine's victory at the Milvian Bridge in 312. Trdat reputedly went further than Constantine's new favour shown to the Church, ordering his people to become Christian en masse.
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Such wholesale conversion cannot have been as straightforward as the story implies, but it did represent the beginning of a passionate melding of Christianity and Armenian identity. Members of Gregory's family succeeded him in the newly established bishopric, which received its succession from the Church of Cappadocia, in which he had grown up. A century after the conversion, a new Armenian alphabetic script was devised by a scholar-monk, Mesrop Mastoc'. Within a few decades there was a complete Bible in Armenian, adding one or two more books than those accepted into the canon of the imperial Church. It was a foundation document for Armenian literary culture, even more than Homer was for the Greeks.
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When it looked beyond its frontiers, the Armenian Church began by cherishing its links with Cappadocia and the Roman Empire. Christianity was a force pulling Armenia out of its previous careful balance between Rome and the Eastern powers. While Roman emperors had now taken the same action as Armenian monarchs in establishing Christianity as the official Church, the Sassanian shahs were persecuting Christians in their lands with increasing frequency, and during the fifth century, they made a concentrated effort to conquer Armenia and destroy its adopted faith in favour of their own Zoroastrianism. That only served to link Armenian and Christian identity all the more intimately, but the Armenian Church remained distinctive in character. It broke with the imperial Church after the Council of Chalcedon (see pp. 226-8), but there were other local elements of difference. One incident in the Gregory legend seeks to account for a curious feature of Armenian worship which has persisted in its homeland to the present day: every church has a space reserved for the ritual killing of animals at the end of worship. This is said to derive from the compromise Gregory reached with the existing priesthood: if they became Christian priests, he allowed them to continue with these traditional sacrifices, which would afterwards be eaten communally.
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In 303, as persecution of Christians gathered momentum in the empire, the last thing anyone would have expected was for the Church to enter an alliance with the Roman state in any way comparable with what had happened in Osrhoene or Armenia. Yet between the military campaigns of Constantine I and the end of the fourth century, the alliance became so complete that it governed the way that the Greek and Latin Christian traditions thought of themselves through to the twentieth century. Europe became a self-proclaimed Christian society, although often in ways remote from the challenges to human assumptions posed by Jesus's teachings in his Sermon on the Mount (see p. 88). Only now are the long centuries of 'Christendom' apparently coming to an end and the consequences of this new stage in Christian life have yet fully to be assessed.

6

The Imperial Church (300-451)

CONSTANTINE AND THE GOD OF BATTLES

The year 306 was crucial for the Christian Church. It was then that the senior emperor in the west, Constantius I, died at the British military headquarters at Eboracum or York (the second Roman emperor to do so). The army there proclaimed his son Constantine emperor. In 293 Diocletian had instituted a team of four emperors under his leadership (the 'Tetrarchy'), with a senior and a junior emperor in east and west, in the hope that it would make the empire more manageable and stable; in fact, after he retired in 305, he had to watch the Tetrarchy trigger further civil war. Following a series of complex manoeuvres, in 312 Constantine led his army to face the army of his rival, Maxentius, at the Milvian Bridge, which crossed the River Tiber and was barring his passage into Rome. During what became a crushing victory for Constantine, his troops bore on their shields a new Christian symbol: the Chi Rho
, the first two letters of Christ's name in Greek combined as a monogram.
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This striking device, with no precedent in scripture or early Christian tradition, was now to become an all-pervasive symbol of an imperial Christianity, soon even on the small change of imperial coinage jingling in the wallets of the emperor's subjects throughout his lands.