Anxious Vigilance: Heresy and Ritual Pollution in John of Tella
and Severus of Antioch
Christine
Shepardson
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
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Christine Shepardson
Anxious Vigilance: Heresy and Ritual Pollution in John of Tella
and Severus of Antioch
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John of Tella
Orthodoxy
Heresy
Purity
Didascalia
Severus of Antioch
File created by James E. Walters
Abstract
Anti-Chalcedonian Christians like John of Tella, Severus of
Antioch, Philoxenos of Mabbug, and John Rufus were concerned about orthodox
Christians mingling with heretics. This essay argues that John of Tella combined
narratives of heresy with those of bodily purity and pollution, such as those
related to menstruation, to frame heretics as dangerous to orthodox Christians not
only in their beliefs that could lure an unsuspecting Christian to accept heretical
views, but in their very bodies whose proximity brought the threat of contamination.
John integrated expectations of bodily purity and doctrinal orthodoxy in ways that
suggested that heresy could physically contaminate, while Severus tried to calm his
congregants’ fears about the same. The spread of COVID-19 and the global responses
to it have heightened our awareness of the dynamics of fear and anxiety that can be
produced by threats of physical contamination. The global pandemic in 2020 thus
helps to clarify the power that the rhetoric of these sixth-century
anti-Chalcedonian texts had to confront the spread of what John of Tella implied was
the dangerous physical pollution of Christian heresy.
The spread of COVID-19 and the global responses to it have
heightened our awareness of some of the dynamics of fear and anxiety produced by
threats of physical contamination. As we learn new habits of social distancing, and
experience the anxiety and vigilance produced by the potentially fatal spread of an
unseen contagion, we are better able to imagine some of the social dynamics that
early Christian rhetoric around heresy and ritual pollution, such as in relation to
menstruating bodies, might have hoped to produce. Sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian
leaders claimed that heresy threatened Christians’ eternal salvation and warned that
it was often difficult for the untrained eye to distinguish a heretic from an
orthodox Christian.
In this essay I use “anti-Chalcedonian” to refer to what some scholars call
Miaphysite (or, earlier, Monophysite) or sometimes non-Chalcedonian
Christianity. No terminology is without complications, but this term
accurately highlights the individuals’ hostile relation to the Council of
Chalcedon (451). Volker Menze recommends the term “non-Chalcedonian” in his
study of this period, concerned that “anti-Chalcedonian” retains too much
emphasis on doctrinal issues for his study, which “deals mainly with
historical and not Christological issues,” but the focus on doctrinal issues
is appropriate in this present essay: Volker Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. Furthermore, “non-Chalcedonian” could
also describe the churches in Persia that became the Church of the East,
which are not intended here. Cornelia Horn addresses similar concerns and
likewise prefers “anti-Chalcedonian”: Cornelia Horn, Asceticism and Christological Controversy in Fifth-Century
Palestine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8-9. On the
terminology used for one’s adversaries more generally, see Muriel Debié
“Désigner l’adversaire: La guerre des noms dans les controverses,” in Les controverses religieuses en syriaque, ed. Flavia
Ruani, 307-48 (Paris: Geuthner, 2016). On the terminology for the Christians
at the center of this project, see Fergus Millar, “The Evolution of the
Syrian Orthodox Church in the Pre-Islamic Period: From Greek to Syriac?” JECS 21.1 (2013): 43-92. John of Tella
combined this argument with familiar concepts of purity and pollution in order to
suggest that physical proximity to heresy could pose a risk of contamination. In
contrast, John’s colleague Severus of Antioch downplayed the danger that heresy
posed as a form of pollution in an effort to calm the fears of his congregants. As a
novel Coronavirus spreads through our world, health officials warn us about this
sometimes invisible contagion, and the safety precautions that should be taken at
all times because so many people who have the virus are asymptomatic. We are warned
to keep our distance from others to protect ourselves and the small communities with
whom we interact most closely. The global pandemic in 2020 thus helps to clarify the
power that the rhetoric of these sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian texts had to
confront the spread of what John of Tella implied was the dangerous physical
pollution of Christian heresy.
John of Tella (Yuḥanon bar Qursus) was fundamental to the development of the West
Syrian church, but his story is much less well known outside of that tradition. Volker Menze and Kutlu
Akalin, John of Tella’s Profession of Faith: The Legacy of
a Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Bishop (Gorgias Press, 2009), 1.
Joseph Ghanem traced a history of the modern western study of John of Tella
through 1970, and offered a historical background for John’s life: Joseph R.
Ghanem, “The Biography of John of Tella (d. AD 537) by Elias, Translated
from the Syriac with a Historical Introduction and Historical and Linguistic
Commentaries.” PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1970, esp.
1-39. John was born in 482 in Callinicus (Raqqa, Syria) in the
Roman province of Osrhoene, and knew both Syriac and Greek. Ghanem, “The Biography of John of
Tella,” 13. In 507 when he was twenty-five years old, John joined
a monastery near his hometown where he stayed until he was ordained as the bishop of
Tella (near modern Aleppo) in 519 by the famous seventy-year old scholar and poet
Jacob of Serugh (d. 521) and his colleagues. Regarding his title, see Menze and Akalin,
John of Tella’s Profession of Faith,
7-8. See also Volker Menze, “The Regula ad Diaconos:
John of Tella, his Eucharistic Ecclesiology and the Establishment of an
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy in Exile,” Oriens
Christianus 90 (2006): 46-8. John briefly lived in
residence as bishop of Tella from 519-521/2 but then he was sent into exile under
the emperor Justin I.
Menze and Akalin, John of Tella’s Profession of
Faith, 5. It was in exile, though, that John solidified his
place in history with the astonishing number of ordinations he performed, bringing
countless lay people and monks into the diaconate and the priesthood in an effort to
help the anti-Chalcedonian church not only survive but flourish. Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late
Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 62.
Volker Menze and Kutlu Akalin outline “John’s role in establishing
the first independent non-Chalcedonian ecclesiastical hierarchy,” a goal for which
by all accounts he worked tirelessly. Menze and Akalin, John of Tella’s
Profession of Faith, 7-8. John spent his exile primarily
in the Sasanian Empire’s western borderland region, including near modern-day
Mardin, Turkey. Early in 537, however, Roman leaders arranged for John’s capture in
the mountains of Persia, and he was brought as a prisoner to Antioch, which was
under the control of the staunchly Chalcedonian bishop Ephraim, whom
anti-Chalcedonian writers like John of Ephesus describe as a vicious
persecutor. See,
for example, John of Ephesus, Lives, PO 17.21;
18.608; 17.293-4; cf., 17.125. John of Tella died in 538 in his
mid-fifties while in Ephraim’s custody in Antioch. Warning of the danger that
physical proximity to heretics or other material objects associated with heresy
posed to orthodox Christians helped John in his relentless efforts to expand and
preserve the anti-Chalcedonian community during his itinerant exile.
Severus of Antioch, on the other hand, has remained better known. A Greek-speaker
born in the mid-460s in Sozopolis in the region of Pisidia, in western modern
Turkey, he was educated at some of the best schools in the Roman Empire, first in
Alexandria and then in the famous law school in Berytus (Beirut). On Severus’s life and works, see,
for example, Pauline Allen and C.T.R. Hayward, Severus of
Antioch (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3-55; John D’Alton and
Youhanna Youssef, eds., Severus of Antioch: His Life and
Times (Boston: Brill, 2016); Sebastian Brock and Brian Fitzgerald,
Two Early Lives of Severos, Patriarch of Antioch
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 1-29; Moss, Incorruptible Bodies; Iaian Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the
Monophysite (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1988), 3-25; Lucas Van
Rompay, “Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512-538), in the Greek, Syriac, and
Coptic Traditions,” Journal of the Canadian Society for
Syriac Studies 8 (2008): 3-22; René Roux, L’Exégèse Biblique dans les Homélies Cathédrales de Sévère
d’Antioche, Studia Ephemerides Augustinianum 84 (Rome: Institutum
Patristicum Augustinianum, 2002), 5-19; and Aryeh Kofsky, “Severus of
Antioch and Christological Politics in the Early Sixth Century,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 57 (2007): 43-57.
According to his hagiographers, Severus was baptized in 488 at the church of St.
Leontius in Tripolis (Tripoli, Lebanon) and committed himself to a life of
asceticism as Ambrose, Augustine, and many other elite Romans also did. Soon after
this, a side-trip to Peter the Iberian’s monastery near Gaza during a pilgrimage to
Jerusalem changed Severus’s plans to practice law, and he spent the next twenty
years as an ascetic in southern Palestine where he was also ordained as a
priest. Brouria
Bitton-Ashkelony and Aryeh Kofsky, The Monastic School of
Gaza (Boston: Brill, 2006), 33. In 508, Severus began a
new and more public and politically involved phase of his life when he led a large
delegation of monks to Constantinople. In 512 the emperor Anastasius deposed Flavian
II from the see of Antioch, thanks in large part to the maneuverings of Philoxenos
of Mabbug, and appointed Severus as the city’s new bishop. Severus was forced into
exile in 518 upon Justin I’s accession to the throne, and lived most of the rest of
his episcopacy in Egypt until he died in 538, within days of John of Tella’s death
in Severus’s episcopal home of Antioch. On Severus’s exile, see Allen and Hayward, Severus of Antioch, 25-30. Severus’s
influence in the controversies over the definition of Christian orthodoxy and
orthopraxy was far-reaching, particularly in the West Syrian tradition of Syrian
Orthodoxy. Severus differed from John of Tella, though, in his insistence that
anti-Chalcedonian orthodoxy remained a universal church, and as a result Severus was
sometimes more flexible and willing to compromise than John. On Severus’ willingness to
compromise in order to preserve his coherence within imperial orthodoxy, see
Moss, Incorruptible Bodies, 1-6,
44-74. This, along with his context in residence as bishop of
Antioch, could explain Severus’s efforts to calm rather than stoke his audience’s
fears about heresy’s ability to pollute the liturgy and congregation.
Anti-Chalcedonian leaders like Philoxenos of Mabbug (d. 523), John Rufus (fl.
500-18), Severus, and John of Tella all expressed concern about anti-Chalcedonian
Christians mingling with heretics, and as late antique Christians they inherited a
variety of ways to think about retaining the spiritual purity and health of their
community. New Testament comments attributed to Paul offered one relevant discourse,
such as of their community as a body in which the spiritual health of one part
affected the whole.
1 Cor 5-6. See also 1 Cor 6.15-16. All biblical quotations are from the
NRSV. Paul asked, “Do you not know that a little yeast leavens
the whole batch of dough?” 1 Cor 5.6. When Paul taught his audience
“not to associate with anyone
who bears the name of brother or sister who is sexually immoral
or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber. Do not
even eat with such a one,”1 Cor 5.11.
he established a method of defining
and defending community boundaries that prioritized
associating only with those who were spiritually healthy, which
anti-Chalcedonian leaders insisted did not include Chalcedonian heretics or
“Nestorian” Persian Christians. Like Paul, later Christians also inherited
scriptural teachings about bodily purity, reinterpretations of which kept them
relevant long past the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. John of Tella drew on
familiar narratives of bodily purity and pollution, such as those related to
menstruation, to frame heretics as dangerous to orthodox Christians not only in
their beliefs that could lure an unsuspecting Christian to accept heretical views,
but in their very bodies whose proximity brought the threat of contamination. In two
letters from his time in residence as Antioch’s powerful bishop, Severus, in
contrast, wrote to counter the fear that the perception of heresy as a physical
pollution had provoked in his own congregants. That these letters (Severus, Ep. 44, 45) date from Severus’s time in Antioch is suggested in
part by his address of his congregation regarding their concerns over the
names read in the liturgical diptychs, which implies that Severus is
currently leading the services. E.W. Brooks dates Severus, Ep. 44 and 45 to 516-7 in his edition and translation (PO
12.310-15) These texts suggest that the idea that heresy was a
contaminating pollution was a particularly powerful tool for besieged leaders like
John during his long exile, because it inspired vigilant boundary-maintenance among
Christians who faced pressure to abandon anti-Chalcedonian teachings in favor of the
imperially sanctioned Chalcedonian church.
Purity and Pollution: Regulating Menstruating Bodies
Interpretations of biblical regulations involving the ancient contact-contagion
of ritual impurity provide a critical contextual frame for understanding John of
Tella’s rhetoric about the dangers of proximity posed by heresy, and the related
concerns of Severus’s congregants. While metaphors of heresy as an illness or
disease were familiar in late antiquity, Severus, for example, referred to the
“disease” of Arius, and referred to Eusebius as “contaminated by the
sickness of Arius.” Severus, Hom 30 (PO
36.4.610-11). Translations of this text are from the Syriac edition and
French translation by M. Brière and F. Graffin in PO 36.4. Jennifer
Barry notes, “Heresy, imagined as a disease, was a popular concept that
flourished after the second half of the fifth century…. by overlapping
the medical with the theological, Christian authors helped their readers
to distinguish the guilty from the innocent”: Jennifer Barry,
“Diagnosing Heresy: Ps.-Martyrius’s Funerary Speech
for John Chrysostom,” JECS 24.3 (2016):
395-418, at 402. in Greek traditions illness was not
consistently understood to be contracted through person-to-person contact. Vivian Nutton
notes that many Greek medical writers were influenced by Aristotelian
and Platonic ideas and not the “mechanistic view” of the universe of
many Epicureans; as a result they often did not describe diseases
passing through human-to-human contact. Nevertheless, Nutton admits that
many Greek authors who were not medical experts did believe that
proximity to a sick person could pose a risk to one’s health. Vivian
Nutton, “Did the Greeks Have a Word for It? Contagion and Contagion
Theory in Classical Antiquity,” in Contagion:
Perspectives from Pre-Modern Societies, ed. Lawrence Conrad and
Dominik Wujastyk, 137-62 (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2000). On the Greek
concept of miasma, which often stood in place of
human contact to explain disease spread, see Jacques Jouanna, “Air,
miasma and Contagion in the Time of Hippocrates and the Survival of
Miasmas in Post-Hippocratic Medicine,” in Greek
Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers, ed. Philip
van der Eijk, trans. Neil Allies, 121-36 (Boston: Brill, 2012).
Moral impurities, on the other hand, could be described as being
transmitted from one person to another along the lines of ritual bodily
impurities. As Naomi Koltun-Fromm and Christine Hayes note, the apostle Paul
left Christians with the concept that “the individual body can contract ‘moral’
impurities from others who are ‘morally impure’.” Naomi Koltun-Fromm, The Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and
Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 88; Koltun-Fromm relies on
Christine Hayes, Gentile Impurities and Jewish
Identities: Intermarriage and Conversion from the Bible to the
Talmud (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Nutton agrees
that in antiquity, “Whether pagan or Christian, heretic or libertine,
the views of one’s opponents are characterized by the metaphors of
disease and contagion, of pollution and contamination,” such that
“physical and moral diseases are almost interchangeable” (Nutton, “Did
the Greeks Have a Word for It,” 153). More consistently than
metaphors of sickness, it seems to have been the language of purity and
pollution that provoked a heightened sense of Christian vigilance about physical
proximity. Mira Balberg has discussed concepts of purity and impurity that lived
on in rabbinic traditions after the Temple’s destruction, especially “as
powerful conceptual and hermeneutic tools through which ideas about self and
other can be manifested, through which one’s body and environment can be
scrutinized and manifested, and through which one constitutes and forms oneself
as a subject.”
Mira Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic
Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014),
3. Early Christians – despite a frequent rhetorical disdain
for a “Jewish” focus on ritual, purity laws, and the body – likewise continued
to see religious significance in the perceived state of a person’s body, whether
it was praising the virginal body, preventing certain types of bodies from
ordination, or regulating the participation of bodies with discharges in the
rituals of baptism and the Eucharist. Tracking some of the expectations that
sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian Christians inherited regarding perceptions of
ritual purity and the pollution caused by bodily discharges such as menstruation
provides a new lens for understanding their concerns about the risk that bodies
contaminated by heresy could pose.
Late antique readers of scripture, of course, like readers in any period, updated
the biblical rhetoric around bodily purity for their own context. Balberg notes
that the early rabbis inherited a variety of narratives about bodily purity “as
one of the pivots of the consistent effort to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them’,” and
she demonstrates that “the rabbis posit the engagement with impurity… as a
critical component in one’s formation as a committed rabbinic Jewish
subject.”
Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self, 15.
She argues that these post-Temple leaders transformed earlier conversations to
be newly focused on the purity of a religious self under the authority of the
rabbis.
Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self, 4-5.
Among these discussions, Balberg notes mishnaic descriptions of Gentiles as
those who were “considered to convey the same impurity as persons with abnormal
genital discharges, regardless of their physical condition,” such that “if a Jew
or a Jew’s property comes into physical contact with a Gentile, the Jew or her
property is immediately rendered impure.” Balberg, Purity, Body, and
Self, 16, 124. Balberg argues, “the rabbis’
insistence that Gentiles are categorically impure seems geared to cultivating a
particular way of thinking about Gentiles.” Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self, 131. I
suggest that John of Tella deployed “heretics” in a way similar to these
rabbinic texts’ use of Gentiles by suggesting that heresy was a form of
pollution that could contaminate orthodox bodies, which would have had the
benefits of sharpening a distinction between “us” and “them,” thus encouraging
Christians to keep their distance from heretics, and giving John the authority
to define those boundaries.
Early Christian readers, like the rabbis, interpreted these biblical texts about
bodily discharges for their own historical and theological contexts. Some
Christians believed that honoring God required approaching the divine with a
pure body as well as soul, based on early biblical traditions where, as Naomi
Koltun-Fromm says, “It is assumed that human bodily impurities, such as semen,
are anathema in some way to God’s presence and must be neutralized through
purification rites before a divine encounter.” Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics
of Holiness, 40. Koltun-Fromm argues that in the
early biblical priestly tradition “purity functions as a means to protect the
holy,” while “nonpriestly biblical narratives in general have a looser notion”
in which “purity is something one does in order to handle holy items such as a
sacrifice.”
Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness,
37. Eastern Christian responses to menstruating women’s bodies in
late antiquity provide some relevant interpretive context for thinking of heresy
as a physical, polluting contaminant among Severus’s congregants and in John of
Tella’s sixth-century Syriac texts.
The third-century Didascalia, for example, offers two ways
in which biblical purity laws were interpreted by Christ-followers, one through
the voice of the narrator and the other through the arguments attributed to some
women in the community. As Charlotte Fonrobert explains, the Didascalia argues against women whom the text claims “keep themselves
from prayer and from receiving the Eucharist [eucharistia], or from reading the Scriptures” during the “seven days of
their menstrual period.” Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of
Biblical Gender (Stanford University Press, 2000), 173; Didascalia 26 (Vööbus, 255-63/238-45, cited by
the page of the Syriac/English edition and translation). Translations of
this text in this essay are revised from the edition and English
translation in Arthur Vööbus, The Didascalia
Apostolorum in Syriac II, CSCO 407-8 (Louvain: Secrétariat du
Corpus SCO, 1979). Fonrobert usefully compares this with a
passage from the early rabbinic Tosefta that allows menstruating women to study
and read the scripture, noting that here the Tosefta and the Didascalia agree with each other against the behavior attributed to
the Didascalia’s women, although the Tosefta expects
women to keep other “biblical regulations concerning menstruation” whereas the
Didascalia does not. Fonrobert, Menstrual
Purity, 173-4; tBer 2:13. The Didascalia argues that unlike earlier ablutions for ritual impurity
that were temporary, Christian baptism, with its subsequent indwelling of the
Holy Spirit, protects an upright Christian for the long term and removes the
need for further purification, including from menstruating.
Didascalia 26 (Vööbus,
255/238). Fonrobert also details the arguments in the Didascalia, and the ways in which the text’s logic is tied to
its representation of what it calls the “second legislation,” that is,
some biblical expectations that the author believes to have been
abrogated by the resurrection of the messiah in the person of Jesus
(Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 172-85).
This relation between bodily and spiritual purity relies on what Jonathan
Klawans notes seems to have been an innovation by John the Baptist to advocate
for a ritual cleansing that was “more frequently associated in the past with
ritual impurity” as newly a one-time means “of achieving moral purity” through
baptism.
Jonathan Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient
Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 160. See
also Hayes, Gentile Impurities.
The Didascalia critiques these women “because of the
observances that you keep,” arguing that “all these observances are foolish and
hurtful,” and reminds the women of all the other laws they would also have to
keep if they followed this one aspect of what the text calls the former
legislation.
Didascalia 26 (Vööbus,
258-9/241-2). The Didascalia asks the
women to “flee and avoid such observances…. do not observe these things, nor
think them pollution [ṭamutā]; and do not refrain
yourselves on their account, nor seek after sprinklings, or baptisms, or
purifications [dukaye] for these things;” but rather
“come together even in the cemeteries, and read the holy Scriptures, and without
hesitation perform your ministry and your supplication to God; and offer an
acceptable Eucharist [eukarisṭia].”
Didascalia 26 (Vööbus,
261/243). Thus while these women are said to have kept
themselves from the Eucharist, prayer, and reading scripture during menstruation
as an extrapolation of biblical observances, the Didascalia’s narrator made a strong argument that bodily discharges
did not make a person impure, and therefore should not curtail Christians’
behavior, including in taking the Eucharist.
Despite the Didascalia’s passionate argument and its
repetition in the late fourth-century Apostolic
Constitutions, some church leaders did ask menstruating women, among
others with bodily discharges, to delay Christian rituals until their bodies
were cleansed. As Fonrobert notes, for example, “Whereas the Didascalia tried to
convince women in its community to partake in the Eucharist while they are
menstruating,” a nearly contemporary Greek text by Dionysius of Alexandria (d.
265) “attempts to keep them away from it, as well as from the altar and the
church altogether.” Fonrobert, Menstrual
Purity, 196; text from Ross Kraemer, Maenads,
Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: A Sourcebook on Women’s Religions in
the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 43.
This text is attributed to Dionysius in a “larger collection of epistles
of the Greek church which served as one of the sources of that church’s
canon law” (Kraemer, Maenads, 397); Kramer found
the text in Charles Feltoe,
Dionusiou Leipsana: The Letters and Other Remains of Dionysius of Alexandria (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1904); ANF translation 6:94-96.
The text described here is a letter attributed to Dionysius and written to the
Bishop Basilides, which comes to be part of later Greek canon law. It responds
to a question about whether “women in the time of their separation” can “enter
the house of God” by saying, “I do not think that, if they are believing and
pious women, they will themselves be rash enough in such a condition either to
approach the holy table or to touch the body and blood of the Lord…. For to
pray… in whatever condition a person may be” is blameless, but “the individual
who is not perfectly pure [katharas] both in soul and in
body, shall be prohibited from approaching the holy of holies.” Kraemer, Maenads, 43; Canon II (PG 10,
1272-77). In this case, bodily purity is expected of Christians
approaching the divine.
The West Syrian Synodicon, a compilation of earlier
sources, reveals that the Didascalia’s narrator did not
have the final say, such as in letters attributed to the anti-Chalcedonian
bishop-saints Timothy II (Aelurus) of Alexandria (d. 477) and Severus of
Antioch. The Synodicon says that Timothy II answered the
question, “If a woman… on the day of baptism is menstruating [hawā lāh kepsā], is it lawful for her to be baptized or shall she be
postponed?” with the response, “It is lawful that she should be postponed until
she becomes purified [metdakya].” Timothy Aelurus, Questions and Answers, in Arthur Vööbus, The Synodicon in the West Syrian Tradition, CSCO
367-8, 375-6 (Leuven: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 197506), I.141/139,
cited by volume followed by the pages of Vööbus’s Syriac/English edition
and translation. Similarly, he replied to the question, “If a
faithful woman is menstruating [hawā lāh kepsā], is it
lawful for her to approach in order to approach the holy mysteries [rāze qadiše] on the same day or not?” with the answer,
“It is unlawful that she approach before she becomes purified.” Timothy Aelurus,
Questions and Answers (Vööbus, Synodicon I.141/139). The Synodicon attributes similar teachings to Severus in an
otherwise unattested letter to Caesaria: “it is not lawful for a woman who has
the usual flow of blood [marditā dadmā] to participate
[teštawtap] in the divine communion [šawtaputa alāhāitā] until the coming of blood
stops.”
Severus of Antioch, Letter to Caesaria (Vööbus,
Synodicon I.144/141). These
anti-Chalcedonian texts continue the tradition of separating bodies with
discharges from Christian rituals until they were cleansed.
The Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ not only contains
similar expectations but also explains how they should be understood. As
Sebastian Brock has summarized, this text appears to have originated in Greek in
the late fourth or late fifth century and was translated into Syriac in 686/7 by
a man named Jacob, usually identified as Jacob of Edessa, and it became part of
the Synodicon. Sebastian Brock, “Testament of our Lord Jesus
Christ,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the
Syriac Heritage: Electronic Edition, edited by Sebastian P.
Brock, Aaron M. Butts, George A. Kiraz and Lucas Van Rompay,
https://gedsh.bethmardutho.org/Testament-of-our-Lord-Jesus-Christ.
It teaches about widows, “If she is menstruating [kepsā], she shall abide in the temple [haiklā], but shall not approach the altar [madbḥā]. This is not because she has pollution [saibutā], but in order that the altar shall have honor. Afterwards
when she fasts and washes herself,” she can approach.
Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ (Vööbus, Synodicon I.24/45). It is worth noting that this
text is unusual in signaling the pollution with the term saibutā rather than ṭamutā, the former of which appears in Marcus Jastrow’s dictionary
of early rabbinic Hebrew, but is not in Brown, Driver, Briggs’s
dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. A section on catechumens
teaches that if a woman is menstruating when the time comes for baptism, she
should wait an extra day for washing and cleansing.
Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ (Vööbus, Synodicon I.32/52); cf., Apostolic Tradition of
Hippolytus of Rome 20.6. Finally, its canons include a
variety of teachings about bodily purity and the Eucharist, teaching that if a
priest has a nightly emission, he can neither give nor receive the Eucharist
until he has fasted and washed; likewise anyone of the bnai
qyama in a similar condition cannot approach (the altar) without
fasting and washing, and a widow or any woman who is menstruating [kepsā] “shall not approach the communion of the mysteries
[šawtaputā d-rāze] until she is cleansed and
washed.”
Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ (Vööbus, Synodicon I.40/57). As in the section
on widows, the text again stresses that these regulations are not because the
bodies are polluted [saibutā] but for the honor of the
altar.
Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ (Vööbus, Synodicon I.40/57). Despite their
protests, these Christian texts recall biblical injunctions regarding pollution
by precluding bodies with discharges from having contact with, or even proximity
to, the altar and the Eucharist.
Like the letter attributed to Severus, John of Tella also kept menstruating women
from his liturgical rituals. While John normally allowed deaconesses to give the
qurbānā to children under five years old, John of Tella,
Questions and Answers #32 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.218/202); note that this is #33 in
Nau, Canons, 16, who depended on the Syriac
edition in Thomas Lamy, Dissertatio de Syrorum Fide et
Disciplina in Re Eucharistica (Louvain: Vanlinthout, 1859),
61-97. he taught that for a deaconess, “It is not permissible
when she is menstruating to enter (the sanctuary) or draw near to the qudšā,” which he equates in a nearby passage with the qurbānā. John of Tella, Questions and
Answers #36 (Vööbus, Synodicon
I.218/203); Nau, Canons, 16; note is Question 37
in Nau. Note that the two Syriac editions allude to menstruation through
versions of a scriptural phrase: Lamy’s text retains “the way of women”
[urḥā d-neše] (cf., Gen 18.11, 31.35 derek našim), and Vööbus’s “that of women” [hai d-neše]. The text conflates qudšā with qurbānā in John of Tella,
Questions and Answers #33 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.218/203). This highlights
John’s concern for the physical purity of those approaching the divine. He is
asked with respect to the laity, “Is it permitted for a laywoman who is
menstruating [hai d-neše] to enter the temple of God in
order to pray?”
John of Tella, Questions and Answers #31 (Vööbus,
Synodicon I.218/202); Nau, Canons, 16; note that it is Question 32 in Nau. I have
replaced Nau’s and Vööbus’s translation of “young woman” or “girl” with
“laywoman” because the Syriac in both Lamy and Vööbus is ‘ālmāyātā not ‘alimtā.
Lamy’s Syriac edition with Latin translation commented on this word and
suggested the spelling ‘ālmāyātā in the
manuscript should be emended for ease of translation (Lamy, 86), and Nau
thus translated it as “young girl”; Vööbus retains the Syriac ‘ālmāyātā without emendation but translates it as
“girl” without further comment. John replies, “When she is
menstruating it is permitted for her to enter the temple of God to pray, but the
canons order her not to participate [teštautap] in the
holy mysteries.” John of Tella, Questions and Answers #31
(Vööbus, Synodicon I.218/202); Nau, Canons, 16; note that it is Question 32 in Nau.
In this case, John provides an explanation that echoes the
reason given in the Testament of our Lord, explaining
that the delay is “not because of her pollution [ṭamutā],
but out of honor for the divine mysteries,” John of Tella, Questions
and Answers #31 (Vööbus, Synodicon
I.218/202); Nau, Canons, 16; note that it is
Question 32 in Nau. Note that the women criticized in the Didascalia explicitly purport to consider
themselves impure: “according to your opinion you are unclean [ṭamutā]” and “do not observe these things, nor
think that it is uncleanness”
(Didascalia 26 [Vööbus,
259/242, 261/243]). a tradition that continued according to
the Synodicon in the seventh-century teachings of Jacob
of Edessa (d. 708), who translated the Testament of our
Lord.
Jacob taught regarding the qurbānā, “She who has
the way of women shall not participate until the flow of blood stops –
if there is no emergency – and until she has washed, not because of
uncleanness but out of honor for the qudshe”:
Jacob of Edessa, Questions #24 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.262/239). Such concerns are also
visible in the Greek Chalcedonian late seventh-century Questiones et responsiones of Anastasius of Sinai.
Thus while these anti-Chalcedonian traditions explicitly claimed that bodily
impurity was not the reason for the separation, the end result is that these
same bodies were kept from participating in the central ritual that defined
membership in the orthodox community until they were cleansed. As Derek Krueger has shown,
“sixth-century liturgists associated liturgical participation with the
shaping of affect and identity”: Derek Krueger, Liturgical Subjects: Christian Ritual, Biblical Narrative, and the
Formation of the Self in Byzantium (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 106. John’s and Severus’s writings
suggest that these traditions that originated with ritual pollution came to
inform representations of heresy in some of the same ways that rabbis used them
to regulate interactions with Gentiles.
Mind the Gap: Regulating Orthodoxy and Heresy
The conflicts over the legitimacy of the Council of Chalcedon (451) were complex
and long-lived, and leaders from all sides wrote vigorously through the late
fifth and sixth centuries to argue for their own legitimacy and against the
heretical views of their opponents. The plethora of references in the writings
of Philoxenos, John Rufus, John of Tella, and Severus to concerns about the
unacceptable social and ritual mixing of people with different doctrinal
commitments suggests that these authors hoped to inspire greater vigilance,
separation, and distinction among some who currently socialized together.
Anti-Chalcedonian writings discouraged not only ritual submission to, but often
any social contact whatsoever with anyone outside of anti-Chalcedonian
orthodoxy. While all of these writers called for greater separation between
their anti-Chalcedonian listeners and their opponents, and reminded them of the
eternal reward or punishment they would earn through their zeal (or lack
thereof), they did not all describe the danger that heresy posed in the same
terms. Most often their writings reflect a concern that anti-Chalcedonian
Christians might be persuaded to abandon their doctrine and join the
Chalcedonian communion. John of Tella is unusual in encouraging the perception
of heresy as a physical contamination. Severus’s letters offer a glimpse of the
anxiety that such a notion could inspire. Under Justin I, anti-Chalcedonian
Christians faced a variety of pressures to join the Chalcedonian church, from
ridicule and peer pressure, to financial and material incentives (or
disincentives), to arrest and physical violence. Contrasting these authors’
different representations of Christian heresy suggests that the notion of heresy
as pollution could have been particularly useful in encouraging
anti-Chalcedonian zeal among John of Tella’s followers, scattered as doctrinal
and ritual minorities in the borderlands of the Roman and Sasanian empires,
during the years of his exile.
Philoxenos, John Rufus, and Severus, for example, all warned their audience about
the dangers of mingling with their doctrinal opponents, but primarily because
they might be persuaded to abandon their anti-Chalcedonian commitment.
Philoxenos wrote, “Do not associate [ḥulṭānā] with any of
the heretics of the Persians, by communion [šawtāputā],
or by being eager to ask after their welfare, or by gifts.” Philoxenos, Particular Chapters [that We Should Anathematize Each One Who is
Nestorian] in British Library, MS Add. 14529, ff. 66v-68r, ed.,
and with a partial English transl. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Discourses of Philoxenos, Bishop of Mabbôgh, A.D. 485-519,
vol. 2 (London, 1894), Syriac cxx-cxxiii, English xxxvii-xxxix, at
xxxix, cxxii. As Philoxenos wrote with hope at the end of
his Letter to Abu Ya‘fur, “My Lord God will deliver us
just as all the children of the holy church, from association [ḥulṭānā] and communion [šawtāputā] with” the
heretics.
Philoxenos, Letter to Abu Ya‘fur, published as
“Lettre de Philoxène de Mabbûg au phylarque Abū Ya‘fūr de Hīrtā de
Bētna’mān (selon le manuscrit no 115 du fond patriarcat de Šarfet),” ed.
and French transl. Paul Harb, Melto 3.1-2 (1967):
183-222, at 221. In other cases Philoxenos criticized those
who had relaxed their zeal on account of temporal presents, Philoxenos, Letter concerning Zeal, in A. Vööbus, Syriac
and Arabic Documents Regarding Legislation Relative to Syrian
Asceticism (Stockholm: Estonian Theological Society in Exile,
1960), 51-54, at 53. and praised others who had resisted the
impulse to do the same. Philoxenos, First Letter to the
Monks of Beth Gaugal, in Arthur Vaschalde, ed. and trans. Three Letters of Philoxenus, Bishop of Mabbogh
(485-519): Being the Letter to the Monks, the First Letter to the
Monks of Beth-Gaugal, and the Letter to Emperor Zeno (Rome:
Tipografia della R. Accademia dei Lincei, 1902), 105-18, 146-62, at 106.
These examples imply that the danger of interacting was that the
Christian might cease to be zealous in defending anti-Chalcedonian doctrine and
might acquiesce, perhaps on account of pressure or bribes, to Chalcedonian
teachings and rituals. The danger, then, was not so much the physical body of
the heretic that threatened to pollute the orthodox body, but the potential of
the heretic to persuade the orthodox to abandon Philoxenos’s teachings and
Eucharist community.
Severus and John Rufus likewise often focused on the danger of social
interactions for the person’s doctrinal commitment more than their bodily
purity. Severus addressed the noblewoman Caesaria by writing, “you ask whether
some of the orthodox are doing well in not communicating [meštawtpein] with heretics but listening to the reading of the holy
Gospel or even staying during the time of the mysterious prayers but not
communicating in the rites that are being performed.” Severus, Ep. 6.4.10, 306/272, in Ernest Brooks, ed. and trans., The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus of
Antioch, vol. 2.1-2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904). This
citation represents Book 6, section 4, letter 10, followed by the pages
in Brooks’s Syriac/English edition and translation. Echoing
Paul’s concerns in 1 Corinthians 5, Severus cited 2 John 10-11, and concluded,
“If then it is not right to offer even a bare greeting to those who bring
another teaching and do not teach the orthodox faith, how can one communicate in
prayers and in lessons or in any other such things with such as these?” Severus, Ep. 6.4.10, 306-7/272-3. Severus
relied on Titus 3.10, which he believed was written by the apostle Paul, to
argue, “Paul the wise commands us to turn away even the very face from those who
are in servitude to heresy,” leading Severus to conclude, “One therefore who
comes together [metkanaš] with the guilty renders
themself subject to the same judgment.” Severus, Ep. 6.4.10,
307/273. John Rufus presented a similar story that he
attributed to the famous ascetic Peter the Iberian who had a vision that he was
condemned after he unthinkingly returned a greeting in a tight alleyway where he
could not escape the notice of a former friend who had since joined the
“heretical” Chalcedonian community. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 76
(PO 8.130-132). Although he does not engage with ancient medical
perceptions of illness and contagion and conflates them with pollution,
Jan-Eric Steppa has written about the rhetoric of John Rufus’s striking
“notion of heresy as a contagious disease that could affect even the
most holy and orthodox of God’s servants – a dangerous kind of pollution
that spread into the society of the orthodox through even the slightest
contact.” See Jan-Eric Steppa, “Heresy and Orthodoxy: The
Anti-Chalcedonian Hagiography of John Rufus,” in Christian Gaza in Late Antiquity, ed. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony
and Aryeh Kofsky, 89-106 (Boston: Brill, 2004), 103. These
authors worked to keep their congregants from joining Chalcedonian services and
from associating with heretical Christians more generally, but in order that
they would not be persuaded to join the Chalcedonian church or even so they
would not be thought to have joined the competing communion. For these leaders,
proximity to heretics was dangerous because a person might be persuaded to
abandon their zeal and become (or appear to become) associated with the
communion of the heretics.
John of Tella, on the other hand, encouraged Christians to keep their distance
from heretics and objects that had been used in heretics’ rituals in ways that
echo his teachings about keeping menstruating bodies from the orthodox altar,
suggesting a different kind of contamination. Some of John of Tella’s writings,
on the one hand, demonstrate that he considered the material objects of
heretics’ rituals, like Christian altars and the Eucharist itself, to be
contaminated and thus inappropriate for orthodox rituals. John’s Questions and Answers, for example, have a series of
questions about what a priest should do if anything related to an altar or the
Eucharist should arrive in a community from outside. If its heretical past is
certain, then John’s answer is clear: “It is not allowed to put an altar [madbḥa] of the heretics of Persia in the sanctuary [beit qudšā],” although he does allow it to be placed
elsewhere for common or ordinary service [ḥšaḥtā
šḥimtā]. John of Tella, Questions and
Answers #43 (Vööbus, Synodicon
I.220/204). An earlier French translation is also in François Nau,
Canons et les Résolutions Canoniques de Rabboula, Jean de Tella, Cyriaque d’Amid, Jacques d’Edesse, Georges des Arabes, Cyriaque d’Antioche, Jean III, Théodose d’Antioche, et des Perses (Paris:
P. Lethielleux, 1906), 18. John here seems most concerned about Persian
Christians whom we might associate with the Church of the East, though
he also was in exile because of his rejection of Chalcedonian
Christianity; anti-Chalcedonian leaders like John conflated both groups
as heretics who inappropriately followed the teachings of
Nestorius. The same text also includes the question, “If one
finds a portable altar [ṭablitā] and some people say they
heard from others that it was consecrated by the orthodox, what should one do
with it? Should one believe those who heard that it belonged to the orthodox
when they are trustworthy people, or rather leave it and not serve with it, as
if it came from the heretics?” to which John of Tella gives the answer, “As I
said above for the altars [madbḥe] that come from the
Persians, the same one (Mar Abas) ordered certainly not to celebrate [the
Eucharist] on them. If, however, there are trustworthy people who say they heard
from others that a portable altar [ṭablitā] was
consecrated by the orthodox, one can use it for the sanctuary without however
celebrating on it.” John of Tella, Questions and
Answers #47 (Vööbus, Synodicon
I.220-1/205); Nau, Canons, 19.
Regarding the ritual components of heretics’ liturgy, John also teaches, “One
must flee their Eucharist [qurbānā] as a deadly
drug,” John
of Tella, Questions and Answers #44 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.220/205); Nau, Canons, 18. On the language of the deadly drug, see Ephrem,
Azym. 19; Ignatius, Letter
to the Trallians 6. and if they should somehow
acquire a heretic’s Eucharist, “The qurbānā that is found
on [the altars (madbḥe)] will be placed in an honorable
spot or hidden in the ground or in the wall, lest the orthodox approach
it.” John
of Tella, Questions and Answers #46 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.220/205); Nau, Canons, 18-9. These material objects are in John’s
view compromised by their association with heresy and must be separated from
orthodox bodies and rituals.
On the other hand, John of Tella also had a strong sense of the importance of
physical separation between people he considered to be heretics and those he
considered orthodox. In his Canons, John of Tella wrote,
“Promise … to anathematize all heresies,” and he instructed his audience not to
“associate with their adherents.” John of Tella, Canons #1
(Vööbus, Synodicon I.147/143, 147/143-4); Nau,
Canons, 21. John’s Questions and Answers say, “The canon does not allow
eating with heretics, whether the person makes the sign of the cross or not, and
even if it would be out of the necessity of a journey;” John of Tella, Questions and Answers #23 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.215/201); Nau, Canons, 14; this is Question 24 in Nau. and he
further stated, “If it is not necessary for lack of tombs for the faithful, it
is not permitted to inter a faithful in the tombs of the heretics.” John of Tella,
Questions and Answers #27 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.215/201); Nau, Canons, 14-5; this is Question 28 in Nau. The question that
follows is also about burials. John did make an exception
that he seemed to feel was unavoidable to allow greetings between heretics and
orthodox, “provided,” he said, “that we don’t give them a kiss on the
mouth.”
John of Tella, Questions and Answers #25 (Vööbus,
Synodicon I.216/201); Nau, Canons, 14; this is Question 26 in Nau. On drawing community
boundaries through kissing, see Michael Penn,
Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). In his Canons to Priests, John again instructed, “do not eat
with the heretics,” and this time he added, “and do not receive any blessing [or
gift], because their hand is the hand of the lawless one”; nor should the
orthodox give any blessing/gift to a heretic. John of Tella, Canons
#2 (Vööbus, Synodicon I.147/144); Nau, Canons, 21. John thus sent a clear
message that his audience should avoid heretics as much as possible, in addition
to the material objects of their rituals.
While John thus encouraged orthodox bodies to distance themselves from heretics
just as an orthodox altar was kept from contact with menstruating bodies, it is
through Severus’s letters explicitly about heresy as pollution that the fear and
anxiety that such rhetoric could produce becomes clear. The experience of the
global pandemic of 2020, and the anxiety that accompanies our efforts to
practice social distancing in order to avoid contracting the potentially fatal
virus, suggests that John’s rhetoric could likewise have caused anxiety as his
audience tried to avoid contamination, especially in a context where notoriously
unstable definitions of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” made it difficult to be certain
who posed a risk. Barry notes that church leaders often used this
challenge in order to argue for their own role as specialists in
“diagnosing” heresy (Barry, “Diagnosing Heresy”). Severus’s
Epistles 44 and 45 confirm that anti-Chalcedonian
Christians in the early sixth century were indeed anxious that they might
unwillingly and unwittingly contract heresy in the manner of a bodily pollution.
Unlike John, however, Severus addressed these concerns in 516-7 as a bishop in
residence under the sympathetic emperor Anastasius. In this context, Severus
tried to calm his congregants’ worries rather than stoking their fears.
Severus’s discussion of the pollution associated with heresy highlights the
effects that John’s language could have had on his community.
Two letters from Severus, written in Greek but preserved in Syriac, provide
evidence that at least some of his congregants understood heresy to be a
dangerous form of pollution. In Epistle 45, Severus
addressed congregants’ concern that Christians might find themselves polluted by
heresy despite their vigilance, a fear that suggests that such rhetoric could be
a powerful motivator for creating and maintaining clear boundaries between
competing doctrinal communities. Severus tried to assuage their concern by
explaining that despite their fears, the orthodox Eucharist would not be
polluted if the name of an earlier church leader whom Severus considered a
heretic was included in the liturgical diptychs that were read during the
service. On
Severus’s liturgy, see: G.C. Cuming, “The Liturgy of Antioch in the Time
of Severus (513-518),” in Time and Community: In Honor
of Thomas Julian Talley, ed. J.N. Alexander, 83-103
(Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1980). Severus supported
this opinion by means of Cyril of Alexandria’s defense of keeping Theodore of
Mopsuestia’s name in the liturgical diptychs despite the fact that, in Severus’s
words, Theodore “was the putrid sources of the hateful and putrid tenets of
Nestorius.”
Severus, Ep. 45 (PO 12.314). Translations of this
text in this essay are revised from the Syriac edition and English
translation by E.W. Brooks in PO 12. Cyril allowed Theodore’s
name, Severus argued, “in order not to give an opportunity to those who wished
to disturb the church,” and even though the name was read, Christians did not
believe “that thereby some pollution [ṭamutā] and stain
[mumā] of heresy was inflicted on the qurbānā of the orthodox,” nor did such names “cause any
injury to the whole fullness of the body of Christ.” Severus, Ep. 45 (PO 12.314). Severus insisted, “They are not
acting rightly who think that our qurbānā is not pure on
account of the names of those who have already died and who have fallen into
heretical tenets and have not been removed from the sacred tablets.” Severus, Ep. 45 (PO 12.313); cf. Ep. 44 (PO 12.310-12). Contrary to what his audience
seemed to believe, Severus denied that the name of a heretic would contaminate
his orthodox Eucharist and thereby threaten the orthodoxy of his
congregants.
Severus addressed the same concern in Epistle 44, in this
case acknowledging that if orthodox Christians ever found themselves utterly
surrounded by those who were “sick [krihā] with heresy,”
then they should indeed avoid that “dead body” that could “pollute” the purity
of their communion [šawtaputā], using forms of ṭamutā throughout to refer to polluting. Severus, Ep. 44 (PO 12.310-11). Translations of this text
in this essay are revised from the Syriac edition and English
translation by E.W. Brooks in PO 12. But as with pollution in
water, the larger the body of clean water, the less harm a small pollutant could
do, so that “if the holding of the orthodox faith and an anathema of every
heresy reigns in the churches, and whole regions and provinces, and populous
churches confess one uncorrupted confession, then names that are thought to
pollute are inundated by the multitude of streams” and thus are safely diluted;
while ideally, Severus agreed, “no particle of a dead body” (that is, people
infected with heresy) “should be introduced even into a large quantity of water,
if perchance it in fact happens to be introduced, it is overpowered by the
quantity of streams and swamped by the quantity of cleansing.” Severus, Ep. 44 (PO 12.311). This echoes language in Epistle 45 where Severus argued, “when churches of many
provinces and of dioceses are held in one bond of faith, and resemble fair
fountains and pools and cisterns of water, the dead thing which has the property
of polluting if it fall cannot injure, for it is swamped by the flow, and by the
abundance of many streams.” Severus, Ep. 45 (PO
12.315). In these letters, Severus explicitly described
those “infected with heresy” as the equivalent of a “dead body” that early
biblical traditions taught could pollute the purity of those who came into
contact with it. Writing from the comfort of his episcopal see, Severus argued
that the orthodox majority could accommodate and tolerate small amounts of the
pollution of heresy without harm.
Despite Severus’s pastoral efforts to calm congregants’ fears, though, he
nevertheless does in both of these letters equate heresy with a form of ritual
impurity, in this case from contact with a corpse rather than from menstruation
or the like. While Severus is willing to negotiate the degree of the threat that
heresy posed in a sea of orthodoxy, in Epistle 45 he
nevertheless maintains that it poses a significant risk when the proportions are
reversed. Severus wrote, “when certain people who are by themselves, in a church
for instance, or in one city or in monasteries perhaps make mention of the names
of those who are under suspicion and of dead men, like the similarly small
amount of water contained in a vessel they are polluted by the mention, as if
something dead had fallen in.” Severus, Ep. 45 (PO
12.314-5). While the contamination that Severus describes
happens aurally through hearing a heretic’s name as part of the liturgy, the
fact that he compares it to the ritual pollution of corpse impurity suggests
both that it could cause a person to be separated from the orthodox altar and
that its effects were independent of the hearer’s consent. Both factors would
have raised the stakes for orthodox Christians to take responsibility for
keeping themselves far from any manifestation of heresy on account of the risks
it could pose.
John of Tella’s implied comparison of menstruating bodies and heretics is made
explicit in Severus’s letters and his congregants’ expectation that heresy could
contaminate the liturgy and its participants. John’s fervent interest in
increasing anti-Chalcedonian Christians’ vigilance in performing a sharp
distinction and separation between the bodies, rituals, and other material
manifestations of orthodoxy and heresy would have been magnified during his
exile during the hostile reign of Justin I. Unlike John of Tella, Severus
addressed the relation of heresy and pollution from his powerful see of Antioch
where the reign of Anastasius buoyed his belief that anti-Chalcedonian
Christianity represented the one universal church. In this more favorable
context, Severus took pains to reassure his nervous audience that any pollution
that might come through hearing a heretic’s name in the liturgy would be diluted
to safe levels by the flood of orthodoxy represented in his church, even if they
should still remain vigilant in less favorable circumstances. Severus’s writings
thus concurrently suggest the anxiety that associating heresy with the
contact-contagion of ritual pollution could inspire as well as his pastoral
decision to try to alleviate rather than foster his congregants’ fear.
Conclusion
John of Tella is interesting not only for his sixth-century teachings about
menstruating bodies and other bodily discharges, but especially for how those
ideas interact with his understanding of the dangers of Christian heresy.
Rhetoric about ritual pollution and concerns about contamination were familiar
to these late antique Christians, particularly through the continuing
conversations about bodily purity and the Eucharist. John of Tella instructed
that orthodox Christians must not use the contaminated altars or oblations of
the heretics in their own rituals, that menstruating bodies should be separated
from the divine until they had been cleansed, and that orthodox bodies should
avoid heretics at meals, greetings, or burials, all of which his audience might
well have heard with concerns of pollution in mind. John’s teachings about
heretics parallel rabbinic teachings that hoped to preserve community identity
by equating Gentile bodies with those with abnormal genital discharges. Although
Severus did not want his congregants to worry about his own church services, he
and his audience both associated heresy with bodily pollution and his letters
reveal that this correlation caused such anxiety that Severus addressed the
issue twice in an effort to allay his congregants’ fears.
The global pandemic of 2020 provides a unique opportunity to grapple with the
effects of sixth-century anti-Chalcedonian warnings that heresy had the
potential to convey pollution to orthodox bodies – the anxiety that such a risk
could produce, and the behavioral responses that it could lead to if Christians
made an effort to avoid contamination. John asked his audience to put physical
distance between orthodox Christians and heretical objects and people. Since the
pollution of heresy shared with COVID-19 the possibility that those who carried
it might sometimes be indistinguishable to the layperson from those who did not,
John urged rigorous zeal in the face of imperial opposition. His rhetoric
encouraged anyone who wanted to be assured of their eternal salvation to
separate themselves physically from Chalcedonian and Church of the East altars
and neighbors. In a context where people of various doctrinal and ritual
commitments intermingled on a regular basis, See, for example, Jack Tannous, The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion,
Society, and Simple Believers (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2018), e.g., 65-7, 105. John of Tella strove to
preserve anti-Chalcedonian Christianity in challenging circumstances from his
nearly twenty years in exile. John seems to have hoped that rhetoric about
heresy that echoed concerns about bodily pollution could increase the perceived
risks and potential consequences of socializing with heretics, thereby
increasing his followers’ devoted vigilance to maintaining anti-Chalcedonian
orthodoxy in his absence.
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