From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

The Maronites constitute almost the entire population of the Lebanon. There is besides a considerable number in Western Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, and Palestine. According to the most reliable estimates available their total number is about three hundred thousand.[328] The usual place of residence of their Patriarch is the great monastery of St. Mary of Kanobin in the Lebanon where for centuries the Maronite Patriarchs have found their last resting place. The title of the Maronite Patriarch is Patriarchus Antiochenus Maronitarum, but, curiously enough, this Antiochene title is shared with him by no fewer than five other Patriarchs, two of whom are schismatical and three Catholic. These are the schismatic Patriarchs of the Jacobite and Orthodox Churches and the Melchite, Syrian Catholic, and Latin Patriarchs, the last named of whom is only titular. And strange to say, not one of these six Patriarchs lives in Antioch. The language used in the Maronite liturgy is ordinarily Syriac. But to priests who are not sufficiently familiar with Syriac, permission is given to perform the liturgy in Arabic—but Arabic written Syriac characters.

But a word needs to be said about the so-called Church of St. Thomas in Malabar. Although Malabar Christians love to trace the origin of their Church to St. Thomas the Apostle, it seems more probable that it was founded by Nestorian missionaries when their activities extended over a great part of Asia. At any rate, they were once Nestorians. At a later period most of them became Monophysites. Now, however, the majority of them are in communion with Rome under the name “Uniates of Malabar,” with a peculiar rite of their own called the “Rite of Malabar.”

The different Churches which have engaged our attention in the preceding pages and which cannot fail to enlist the interest of the observant traveler in the Orient, suggest at least two questions which demand an answer. What was originally the real cause of these schismatic organizations which have no communion with one another? And how explain the tenacity with which each of them, during more than fourteen centuries, has clung to its peculiar rites and customs and liturgies, and despite all the vicissitudes of war and conquest, has preserved them intact to the present day?

In answer to the first part of the question it is usually asserted that the cause of each of the dissident Churches in question was some specific heresy. This is the truth but, as history proves, it is not the whole truth. Misunderstanding, deception, national jealousies and aspirations had probably as much—if not more—to do with the separation of these Churches from Rome as the particular heresies with which they are usually associated.

A striking proof of this assertion is the peculiar manner in which Monophysitism was introduced into Egypt. The people of the Nile Land readily embraced it because they were under the impression that it was the teaching of St. Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria. As the chief opponent of Nestorius and the valiant champion of Our Lady’s title of Mother of God at the Council of Ephesus, he was regarded by the Egyptians as their national hero and acclaimed their Christian Pharaoh. They were confirmed in this view because Dioscur, Cyril’s successor as Patriarch of Alexandria, was an avowed advocate of Monophysitism. When his teaching was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon and he was deposed from the office of bishop, the people of Egypt, who were always loyal to their ecclesiastical Pharaoh, rallied to his support. They did not stop to examine the merits of the case. The fact that the doctrine, for which their Patriarch was deposed, was known to be opposed to “the faith of the tyrant of the Bosphorus”—as the Byzantine Emperor was called—was an additional reason why it approved itself to the ever patriotic Egyptians. “Lurking under the dispute about one or two natures in Christ was the old national feeling, the old hatred of the Roman power.”[329] The decree of Chalcedon and the consequent deposition of their Patriarch gave occasion for a recrudescence of this hatred of Cæsar and Cæsar’s religion and for an anti-imperialistic outbreak in Alexandria such as this great city had never before witnessed. Thenceforth Monophysitism in its opposition to Byzantine imperialism was identified with Egyptian nationalism. And when the Mohammedans under Amru swept over Egypt, so great was the hatred of the Copts for the Melkites that they sided with the Arabs against the forces of Byzantium. But this with Monophysitism was the cause of their downfall. “The great days when the Christian Pharaoh was the chief bishop of the East have gone forever.”[330] And by a strange irony of fate it was Constantinople, Alexandria’s detested rival, that was eventually to hold the second place among the patriarchates of the Church—a position which, since the days of St. Mark, had been held by the world-famous metropolis of Egypt.

The events which attended the introduction of Monophysitism into Syria were almost a repetition of those which occurred on the entrance of this heresy into Egypt. And the causes which led to the introduction of Monophysitism into the two countries and favored its development there were practically the same. For Antioch, the capital of the Seleucids, as well as Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemies, was a Greek city and each from the disruption of Alexander’s Empire had been a center of Greek civilization and culture. But neither the Syrians nor the Egyptians had ever become reconciled to the intrusion of the Macedonians or other Greek-speaking peoples into their native lands. Nor was their antagonism to foreign domination diminished when their countries became appanages of Rome and Byzantium. They clung as tenaciously as ever to the laws and customs and languages of their fathers and welcomed an opportunity of concealing under the guise of heresy their hatred of Cæsar’s religion as well as their ill-concealed disloyalty to Cæsar’s empire.

In spite of the repeated efforts of the Emperors of Constantinople to conciliate their disaffected subjects in Egypt and Syria and to suppress a heresy that was a constant menace to the State, all their endeavors proved abortive. And when the Moslems invaded Syria it was in Monophysitism that its inhabitants found an outlash of their long pent-up national and anti-imperial feelings which made the conquest of Islam as easy in the Levant as it had been in the Delta of the Nile. But the penalty paid by Syria for its disloyalty and schism was no less terrific than that which reduced Egypt from its high estate and degraded it to the rank of a dishonored province in the ever-extending dominion of the Saracens. For just as it was schism that led to the downfall of Alexandria—the seat of the greatest and most celebrated patriarchate in the East—so was it schism that heralded the inglorious collapse of her great rival—Antioch, the third city of the empire—Antioch, where the followers of the Crucified were first called Christians.

What has been said of Monophysitism as an outlet of national feeling in Egypt and Syria holds equally true of it in Armenia. Its introduction and rapid diffusion was in great measure due to jealousy of the Orthodox Church and hatred of the Byzantine government. But far more than in the case of other Eastern Churches, Monophysitism is the religious bond that during long centuries of oppression and persecution held the Armenians together as a nation and that, especially during recent times, has won for this long-suffering people the sympathy of the entire civilized world.

Only those who have traveled in the Near East and studied there the aspirations of its peoples can fully realize the intense national feeling of the Eastern Churches. Similarly only those who have carefully studied the history of these various ecclesiastical bodies can duly appreciate their present attitude toward the great Latin Church of the West and understand that remarkable conservatism which has ever been one of their most striking characteristics.

The truth is that in all the Eastern Churches—especially the Armenian—national loyalty and national pride count for more than religious conviction or dogmatic teaching. This, strange as it may appear, means that the nation comes before the Church; that politics takes precedence of theology.