John of Damascus and the Church in Syria in the Umayyad Era: The Intellectual and Cultural Milieu of Orthodox Christians in the World of Islam
Sidney H.
Griffith
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Sidney H. Griffith
John of Damascus and the Church in Syria in the Umayyad Era: The Intellectual and Cultural Milieu of Orthodox Christians in the World of Islam
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St. John of Damascus (c. 675 — c.
749) was a contemporary of the Umayyad caliphs (661-750). The
twin social processes comprising the
‘Arabicization’ and the concomitant
‘Islamicization’ of the public domain of the
caliphate at the turn of the eighth century set the stage for
the first Christian responses to the social and religious
challenges of Islam. St. John of Damascus and his
Arabic-speaking heirs were the spokesmen who upheld the
‘Melkite’ tradition and provided the basic
principles for the self-definition of ‘Melkite’
Orthodoxy in the world of Islam. The interests of the emerging
community of ‘Melkite’ Orthodox Christians in the
Umayyad era in Syria/Palestine furnish the most immediate frame
of reference for appreciating the significance of the works of
St. John of Damascus.
I
[1] The
lifetime of St. John of Damascus (c. 675 — c. 749)
coincided almost exactly with the length of years during which
the Umayyad line of caliphs ruled in the world of Islam
(661-750).
On the Umayyad and their policies see G. R.
Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate
A.D. 661-750 (London: Croom Helm, 1986); M. A. Shaban,
Islamic History A.D. 600-750 (A.H. 132) (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1971).
They had established their capital from the
beginning of their dynasty in John’s native city of
Damascus, thereby moving the center of Islamic government away
from Medina in Arabia, Islam’s birthplace, across the
former limes arabicus of the Roman Empire, into the
cosmopolitan world of Rome’s former provinces of Syria
and Palestine, where Greek and Syriac-speaking Christians far
outnumbered the Arabic-speaking Muslims. In this milieu, as a
recent study describes its own purview of the geopolitical
situation in Umayyad times,
Syria-Palestine is seen first... as a land in which a
combination of a well established Aramaean, Hellenistic,
Byzantine, Christian legacy interacted with the new Arab
Islamic rule and cultural values. Secondly, it is viewed as
an important province in an emerging Arab Islamic empire of
which it became the political centre.
Ahmad Shboul & Alan Walmsley, “Identity
and Self-Image in Syria-Palestine in the Transition from
Byzantine to Early Islamic Rule: Arab Christians and
Muslims,” Mediterranean Archaeology 11 (1998),
p. 255. In connection with these issues, see also Robert
Schick, The Christian Communities of Palestine from
Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological
Study (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1996).
[2] It was
during the Umayyad period, and particularly during the reigns
of the caliph ‛Abd al-Malik (685-705) and his sons and
successors that the twin social processes of Arabicization and
Islamicization began in earnest in the territories of the
Levant which the Muslim Arabs had conquered and occupied in the
generation prior to John’s birth.
See Chase F. Robinson, ‛Abd al-Malik
(Makers of the Muslim World; Oxford: One World, 2005).
These were also the
territories of the Roman Empire’s three ecclesiastical
patriarchates, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. The Umayyads
mounted a concerted campaign to claim the occupied territories
for Islam, and it was during their reign, in the years around
the turn of the eighth century, when “Syria underwent a
reorientation by 180 degrees in strategic and geopolitical
terms,”
Shboul & Walmsley, “Identity and
Self-Image in Syria-Palestine,” p. 256.
that the local Christian communities themselves
first registered their awareness that the invading and
occupying Arabs had established a new religious hegemony in the
land.
[3] The
construction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem in the days of the caliph ʿAbd
al-Malik,
See Julian Raby & Jeremy Johns (eds.), Bayt
al-Maqdis: ‘Abd al-Malik’s Jerusalem (Part I;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Oleg Grabar, The
Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996).
and the building of the Great Umayyad Mosque of
Damascus on the ruins of the church of St. John the Baptist in
the time of the caliph al-Walīd (705-715)
See K.A.C. Cresswell, Early Muslim
Architecture: Umayyads A.D. 622-750 (2nd ed. In
2 parts, vol. I, pt. II; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1969), esp. pp. 246-290. The caliph reportedly said to the
Christians of Damascus, “We want to add this church of
yours, the church of St. John, onto our mosque; it is an
exceedingly beautiful church, and there is nothing else like it
in the land of Syria.” L. Cheikho et al. (eds.),
Eutychii Patriarchae Alexandrini Annales (CSCO, vol.
51; Paris: Carolus Poussielegue, 1909), p. 42.
were undertakings
which monumentally testified to the on-going campaign of the
Umayyad government to co-opt the public space in
Syria/Palestine for Islam. Numerous other enterprises of a
humbler sort undertaken at the same time, such as the minting
of a distinctive Islamic coinage,
See J. B. Chabot, Chronique de Michel le
Syrien: patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche 1166-1199 (4
vols.; Paris: E. Leroux, 1899-1910), vol. II, p. 473: “In
the year 1008 (i.e., A.D. 697) the
Tayyāyê began to strike
dinārs, zūzê, and oboloi on
which there was no image at all, but only inscriptions.”
See Philip Grierson, “The Monetary Reforms of ‘Abd
al-Malik, their Metrological Basis and their Financial
Repercussions,” Journal of the Economic and Social
History of the Orient 3 (1960), pp. 241-264; G.C. Miles,
“The Iconography of Umayyad Coinage,” Ars
Orientalis 3 (1959), pp. 207-213; Michael Bates,
“History, Geography and Numismatices in the First Century
of Islamic Coinage,” Schweizerische Numismatische
Rundschau 65 (1986), pp. 231-163; idem,
“Byzantine Coinage and its Imitations: Arab Coinage and
its Imitations: Arab-Byzantine Coinage,” ARAM 6
(1994), pp. 381-403.
mandating the use of Arabic
instead of Greek in the maintenance of the public
records,
See J. B. Chabot, Anonymi Auctoris Chronicon ad
Annum Christi 1234 Pertinens (CSCO, vol. 81; Paris: J.
Gabalda, 1920), pp. 298-299: “Walīd, the king of the
Tayyāyê, ordered
that in his chancery, i.e., the treasury, which these
Tayyāyê call the
diwān, one should not write in Greek but in the
Arabic language, because up to that time the ledgers of the
kings of the
Tayyāyê
were in Greek.
and even the design of road signs positively
served the same purpose.
See, e.g., Moshe Sharon, “An Arabic
Inscription from the Time of ‘Abd al-Malik,”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
29 (1966), pp. 367-372.
Negatively, the concomitant Umayyad
campaign to remove the public display of the ensigns and
emblems of an earlier Christian hegemony, such as the hitherto
ubiquitous sign of the cross and the open exhibition of
Christian icons, also helped to change the public appearance of
the cityscape of Jerusalem and Damascus alike, to name only the
most prominent urban localities of Syria/Palestine.
See A.A. Vasiliev, “The Iconoclastic
Edict of Yazid II AD 721,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers
9/10 (1956), pp. 25-47; Sidney H. Griffith, “Images,
Islam and Christian Icons: A Moment in the Christian/Muslim
Encounter in Early Islamic Times,” in Pierre Canivet
& Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais (eds.), La Syrie de Byzance
à l’islam VIIe-VIIIe siècles: Actes du
colloque international, Lyon-Maison de l’Orient
Méditerranéen, Paris-Institut du Monde Arabe,
11-15 Septembre 1990 (Damas: Institut Français de
Damas, 1992), pp. 121-138. See also the discussion in Garth
Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism
in Late Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993).
As a
recent historian of the Umayyad era points out, the period of
the combined reigns of the caliphs ‘Abd al-Malik and his
son al-Walīd “was in some ways the high point of
Umayyad power, witnessing significant territorial advances...
and the emergence of a more marked Arabic and Islamic character
in the state’s public face.”
Hawting, The First Dynasty of
Islam, p. 58.
[4] The twin
social processes comprising the ‘Arabicization’ and
the concomitant ‘Islamicization’ of the public
domain of the caliphate at the turn of the eighth century set
the stage for the first Christian responses to the social and
religious challenges of Islam. The earliest ones included
polemical attacks, such as the one contained in the De
Haeresibus section of St. John of Damascus’
Pēgē Gnoseos, written in Greek,
See Raymond Le Coz (ed. & trans.),
Jean Damascène: Écrits sur l’islam:
présentation, commentaires et traduction (Sources
Chrétiens, no. 383; Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf,
1992).
as
well as a number of apocalyptic texts written in Syriac, such
as the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius,
See G.J. Reinink, Die syrische
Apokalypse des Pseudo-Methodios (CSCO vols, 54 & 541;
Louvain: Peeters, 1993). See also G.J. Reinink,
“Ps.-Methodius: A Concept of History in Response to the
Rise of Islam,” in Averil Cameron & Lawrence I.
Conrad (eds.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East:
Problems in the Literary Source Material (Studies in Late
Antiquity and Early Islam, 1; Princeton: The Darwin Press,
1992), pp. 149-187.
and apologetic
texts such as the Dialogue of a Monk of Bêt
Hālê with a Muslim
Notable, written in Syriac.
See Sidney H. Griffith, “Disputing
with Islam in Syriac: The Case of the Monk of Bêt
Hālê and a Muslim
Emir,” Hugoye vol. 3, no. 1 (January, 2000):
http://syrcom.cua.edu/Hugoye.
As the eighth century stretched
into the early years of the ninth century, the Christian
communities in the world of Islam, and especially those who
would soon be called ‘Melkites’ in Syria/Palestine,
whose ecclesiastical center for all practical purposes was the
see of Jerusalem with her attendant monastic communities in
Judea and the Sinai, adopted Arabic not only as their public
language in the caliphate but as an ecclesiastical language as
well, and their writers were the first among the subject
Christians to address issues of public religious behavior in
the Islamic realm and to make claims for a public presence of
Arabophone Christians in the ‘World of Islam’
(dār al-islām).
See Sidney H. Griffith, “From Aramaic
to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the
Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods.” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 51 (1997), pp. 11-31.
II
[5] For a
century and more in the Roman Empire, from the time of the
emperor Justinian I (527-565) and the council of Constantinople
II (553) until the council of Constantinople III (681) in the
time of the emperor Constantine IV (668-685), Christians in the
east were embroiled in the church-dividing struggles
precipitated by the Christological controversies which followed
upon the decisions of the councils of Ephesus (431) and
Chalcedon (451) in the fifth century. The theological and
confessional struggles were exacerbated and complicated by the
multiplicity of languages and cultures into which the seminal
texts and doctrinal formulae of the several interested parties,
in the several different geographical areas, were translated
from their originally Greek sources.
On the multiple vicissitudes involved in
such an enterprise, see the pertinent parts of the discussion
in John F. A. Sawyer, Sacred Languages and Sacred
Texts (London & New York: Routledge, 1999).
[6] In the
case of Syria/Palestine, where the so-called
‘dyophysite’ or Chalcedonian orthodoxy came to hold
sway from the later fifth century onward,
See Lorenzo Perrone, La Chiesa di
Palestine e le Controversie Cristologiche (Brescia:
Paideia Editrice, 1980); Alois Grillmeier, Jesus der
Christus im Glauben der Kirche (Band 2/3, “Die
Kirchen von Jerusalem und Antiochien nach 451 bis 600,”
hrsg. T. Hainthaler; Freiburg: Herder, 2002).
and where Greek
was the dominant ecclesiastical language in the numerous
international monastic communities,
See John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors
of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314-631 (Oxford
Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Joseph
Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism: A
Comparative Study in Eastern Monasticims, Fourth to Seventh
Centuries (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995). See also
Sidney H. Griffith, “The Signs and Wonders of Orthodoxy:
Miracles and Monks’ Lives in Sixth-Century
Palestine,” in John C. Cavadini (ed.), Miracles in
Jewish and Christian Antiquity: Imagining Truth (Notre
Dame Studies in Theology, vol. 3; Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 139-168.
the Aramaic dialect of the
local churches was Christian Palestinian Aramaic.
See Griffith, “From Aramaic to
Arabic.”
In the
hinterlands of Syria and Mesopotamia, the far-flung territories
of the patriarchate of Antioch, where the local Christian
communities straddled the frontiers of the Roman and Persian
empires, and where ‘Byzantine’ imperial orthodoxy
was widely rejected by both the so-called
‘Monophysite’ ‘Jacobites’ and the
‘Dyophysite’ ‘Nestorians’; Syriac was
the Aramaic dialect which served as the dominant ecclesiastical
language. In Egypt, Coptic and Greek were the languages of the
burgeoning Coptic Orthodox Church,
See A. Gerhards & H. Brakman (eds.),
Die koptische Kirche: Einfürung in das ägyptische
Christentum (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1994).
while Ethiopic and Armenian
quickly became the ecclesiastical languages of their own
respective homelands.
See S. Munro-Hay, Axum: An African
Civilization of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1991) and the magisterial study by Nina
Garsoïan, L’Église arménienne et
le grand schisme d’Orient (CSCO, vol. 574; Lovanii:
Peeters, 1999).
Most Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic and
Armenian-speaking Christians in the early Islamic period
accepted Christological formulae articulated the most
effectively either originally in Greek by Severus of Antioch
(c. 465-538) and in Syriac by Philoxenus of Mabbug (c.
440-523), echoing the earlier theology of the Greek-speaking
St. Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444),
See the essays on ‘Jacobite’
theology in Syriac by Tanios Bou Mansour and Luise Abramowski
in Grillmeier, Jesus der Christus, Band 2/3, pp.
438-647.
or in Syriac by Narsai (d.
503) and Babai the Great (551/2-628), reflecting the positions
of Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350-428), composed originally in
Greek a hundred years earlier.
See the collected studies on the history and
theology of the ‘Church of the East’ in Alfred
Stirnemann & Gerhard Wilflinger (eds.), Syriac
Dialogue (3 vols., ‘Non-Official Consultation on
Dialogue within the Syriac Tradition’; Vienna: Foundation
Pro Oriente, 1994, 1996, 1998).
After the middle third of
the sixth century, double hierarchies for the competing
communions arose in the patriarchates of Alexandria (535) and
Antioch (557). In Persia, the ancient ‘Church of the
East’ had its own Metropolitan bishop, sometimes styled
‘Catholicos’, and later ‘patriarch’,
seated in the capital city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. This church
accepted the Nicene faith at the synod of 410, and thereafter,
in a series of councils and synods stretching into the eighth
century, articulated its own distinctive creed, based on the
teaching of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which most other churches
eventually characterized as ‘Nestorian’.
See Sebastian P. Brock, “The
Christology of the Church of the East in the Synods of the
Fifth to Early Seventh Centuries: Preliminary Considerations
and Materials,” in G. Dragas (ed.), Aksum-Thyateira:
A Festschrift for Archbishop Methodios (London/Athens:
Thyateira House, 1985), pp. 125-142; Sebastian P. Brock,
“The ‘Nestorian’ Church: A Lamentable
Misnomer,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University
Library of Manchester 78 (1996), pp. 23-35.
[7] In the
early years of Umayyad times, all of these ecclesial
communities had interests in the Holy Land. The see of
Jerusalem, with its single officially
‘Chalcedonian’ hierarchical establishment,
nevertheless remained the pilgrimage center for all Christians
and under Muslim rule Syrian and Armenian
‘Jacobites’ and ‘Nestorians’ were a
notable presence in the environs of the church of the
Anastasis, the Holy Sepulchre.
See J. M. Fiey, “Le pèlerinage
des Nestoriens et Jacobites à Jérusalem,”
Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale; Xe-XIIe
Siècles 12 (1969), pp. 113-126; S. P. Cowe,
“An Armenian Job Fragment from Sinai and Its
Implications,” Oriens Christianus 76 (1992), pp.
123-157; Andrew Palmer, “The History of the Syrian
Orthodox in Jerusalem,” Oriens Christianus 75
(1991), pp. 16-43; Andrew Palmer, “The History of the
Syrian Orthodox in Jerusalem, Part Two: Queen Melisende and the
Jacobite Estates,” Oriens Christianus 76 (1992),
pp. 74-94; Johannes Pahlitzsch, “St. Maria Magdalena, St.
Thomas und St. Markus: Tradition und Geschichte dreier
syrisch-orthodoxer Kirchen in Jerusalem,” Oriens
Christianus 18 (1997), pp. 82-106.
Here the adherents of all
the principal confessional allegiances met and often argued
their respective cases.
[8]
Meanwhile, for much of the seventh century, Chalcedonian
Christians living under Muslim rule in Syria/Palestine, writing
in Greek, Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Syriac, became very
much involved in controversy with their own co-religionists
both at home and abroad over the issues of the Byzantine
emperors’ promotion of the doctrines of
‘Monenergism’ and ‘Monotheletism’ among
the Chalcedonians in an effort to heal the doctrinal rift
between them and the so-called ‘Jacobites’ or
‘Monophysites’ in the patriarchates of Alexandria
and Antioch.
See V. Grumel, “Recherches sur
l’histoire du monothélisme,”
Échos d’Orient 27 (1928), pp. 6-16,
257-277; 28 (1929), pp. 19-34, 272-282; 29 (1930), pp. 16-28;
P. Verghese, “The Monothelite Controversy – a
Historical Survey,” Greek Orthodox Theological
Review 13 (1968), pp. 196-211.
The chronology of the promotion of the
doctrine of ‘Monotheletism’ among the Byzantine
Orthodox spanned the years of the consecutive Persian (614-628)
and Islamic (634-640) occupations of the territories of
Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria;
See Bernard Flusin, Saint Anastase le
Perse et l’histoire de la Palestine au debut du VIIe
siècle (2 vols.; Paris: Éditions du Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1992).
it was promoted for
political and strategic reasons during the reign of the emperor
Heraclius (610-641),
See Walter Kaegi, Heraclius, Emperor of
Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
and was finally anathematized only at the
council of Constantinople III (681),
See Leo Donald Davis, The First Seven
Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology
(Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1983), pp. 258-289;
Norman Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (2
vols.; Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. I,
pp. 124-130.
well into the
Umayyad era. In Syria/Palestine, the controversy over this
issue involved all parties, including most notably both
‘Jacobites’ and Chalcedonians, and in due course it
provided the immediate theological and ecclesial context for
the emergence of the ‘Melkites’ as a distinct
denomination of Christians in the world of Islam, among whom
St. John of Damascus was destined to become the principal
theological spokesman, as we shall discuss below.
III
[9] Among
the Greek-speaking theologians of the seventh century who
attacked ‘Monotheletism’, none was more successful
in the long run than St. Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662). It
seems entirely plausible, in spite of an astonishing
unwillingness on the part of some scholars seriously to
consider the pertinent evidence,
See, e.g., the doctrinaire decision of Aidan
Nichols, while all but admitting the plausibility of the
evidence, blithely to discount it without further discussion in
favor of what he calls “its main rival,” i.e., a
much later hagiographical Vita, composed in Greek. See
Aidan Nichols, Byzantine Gospel: Maximus the Confessor in
Modern Scholarship (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), p.
15. For more nuanced views see I. –H. Dalmais, “La
vie de saint Maxime le Confesseur
reconsidérée,” Studia Patristica
17 (1982), pp. 26-30; Andrew Louth, Maximus the
Confessor (The Early Church Fathers; London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 4-7, 199, nn. 10 & 11.
that like his sometime
companion and older contemporary, Patriarch Sophronius of
Jerusalem (c. 560-638), who was born in Damascus,
See Christoph von Schöborn,
Sophrone de Jérusalem: vie monastique et confession
dogmatique (Théologie Historique, 20; Paris:
Beauchesne, 1972).
Maximus was also a Syro-Palestinian by birth and that his early
religious formation was not in Constantinople as his
hagiographical Vita alleges, but in the Chalcedonian
monastery of St. Chariton in the Judean desert.
This monastery, often called the ‘Old
Lavra’, was an important center of Byzantine Orthodox
thought well into Islamic times; its monks were active in the
production of Arabic texts for the ‘Melkite’
community long after St. John of Damascus’ lifetime. See
Sidney H. Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries
of Ninth-Century Palestine (Variorum Reprints; Aldershot,
Hamps.: Ashgate, 1992). See also Yizhar Hirschfeld, The
Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
This much is
claimed by virtually contemporary documents in Syriac composed
by Maximus’ theological adversaries.
See Sebastian P. Brock, “An Early
Syriac Life of Maximus the Confessor,” Analecta
Bollandiana 91 (1973), pp. 299-346; S.P. Brock, “A
Syriac Fragment on the Sixth Council,” Oriens
Christianus 57 (1973), pp. 63-71.
These
adversaries, who were in all likelihood themselves staunchly
‘Chalcedonian’ Maronites,
See Brock, “An Early Syriac
Life,” esp. pp. 332-336, 344-346.
wrote from within
the theological context of the Syriac-speaking churches in
Syria/Palestine which were at the time all under the strong
influence of the ecclesiastical center of Edessa in Syria,
where the ‘Jacobites’ formed the dominant
theological school of thought among the Syriac speakers, with
the redoubtable Jacob of Edessa (c. 640-708) eventually
emerging as their principal spokesman.
See H.J.W. Drijvers, “Jakob von Edessa
(633-708,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie
(vol. 16; Berlin: DeGruyter, 1993), pp. 468-470; Dirk Kruisheer
& Lucas Van Rompay, “A Bibliographical
Clavis to the Works of Jacob of Edessa,”
Hugoye 1 (1998), .
[10] The
attraction of ‘Monotheletism’ for Syriac-speaking
Chalcedonians in the Syro-Palestinian milieu was precisely what
they undoubtedly perceived to be its ecumenical potential for
better relations with the dominant ‘Jacobites’ in
an era of crisis, when religious harmony would be an aid in
defense of the Christian commonweal, not least in Jerusalem and
the Holy Land.
See Milka Levy-Rubin, “The Role of the
Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Monothelite Controversy in
Seventh-Century Palestine,” in Joseph Patrich (ed.),
The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth
Century to the Present (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta,
98; Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies,
2001), pp. 282-300.
The crisis was first precipitated by the
invading Persians from 614 to 628,
See the studies of Flusin, Saint
Anastase le Perse.
and it was immediately
followed a half dozen years later by the final demise of Roman
rule in the area and the consequent occupation of the Aramean
homelands by the Muslim Arabs. Arab rule then removed all the
restraints which the Byzantine emperors had imposed upon
religious communities who dissented from Chalcedonian
orthodoxy, so from the mid-seventh century onward the
Chalcedonians in the world of Islam faced renewed challenges
from both the ‘Jacobites’ and the
‘Nestorians’, both of which groups far outnumbered
the remaining Chalcedonians among the local Arameans and Arabs,
especially after the flight of so many ‘Romans’
(ar-Rūm)
On the significance of the term
ar-Rūm, ‘Romans’, as it was used by
Arabophone Christians and Muslims in the Islamic world see S.K.
Samir, “Quelques notes sur les termes rūm
et rūmī dans la tradition arabe;
étude de sémantique historique,” in La
Nozione de “Romano” tra Cittadinanza et
Universalità (Atti del il Seminario Internazionale
di Studi Storici, “Da Roma alla Terza Roma,” 21-23
Aprile 1982; Roma, 1984), pp. 461-478.
in the aftermath of the conquest,
an exodus which would reach its apogee in Abbasid times, in the
first decades of the ninth century.
See Sidney H. Griffith, “Byzantium and
the Christians in the World of Islam: Constantinople and the
Church in the Holy Land in the Ninth Century,”
Medieval Encounters 3 (1997), pp. 231-265; S.H.
Griffith, “What has Constantinople to do with Jerusalem?
Palestine in the ninth century: Byzantine Orthodoxy in the
world of Islam,” in Leslie Brubaker (ed.),
Byzantium
in the Ninth Century: Dead or
Alive? (Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies
Publications, 5; Aldershot, Hamps.: Ashgate/Variorum, 1998),
pp. 181-194.
[11] From
the late seventh century onward, Syriac and then
Arabic-speaking ‘Jacobites’ regularly referred to
their Chalcedonian adversaries within the Islamic world with
the polemical terms ‘Maximists’ or
‘Melkites’; ‘Maximists’ because they
accepted the Christology of Maximus the Confessor as
definitive, and ‘Melkites’, or
‘Royalists’/‘Imperialists’, because
they accepted creedal formulae approved by the church council
called by the Roman emperor Constantine IV, the ecumenical
council, Constantinople III (681).
See Sidney H. Griffith, “
‘Melkites’, ‘Jacobites’ and the
Christological Controversies in Arabic in Third/Ninth-Century
Syria,” in David Thomas (ed.), Syrian Christians
under Islam: The First Thousand Years (Leiden: Brill,
2001), pp. 9-55; S.H. Griffith, “Muslims and Church
Councils: The Apology of Theodore Abū Qurrah,” in E.
A. Livingstone (ed.), Studia Patristica (vol. 25;
Louvain: Peeters, 1993), pp. 270-299.
From the time of that
council onward, among the Christians in the world of Islam,
first in Greek and then in Aramaic/Syriac, and eventually in
Arabic,
See Sidney H. Griffith, “From Aramiac
to Arabic: The Languages of the Monasteries of Palestine in the
Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods,” Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 51 (1997), pp. 11-31.
the see of Jerusalem and its associated
monastic communities became the champions of imperial,
Byzantine Orthodoxy throughout Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
Indeed in due course they became a distinct Christian
denomination whom both their Christian adversaries and the
Muslims alike regularly called ‘Melkites’;
Two difficulties beset the use of the term
‘Melkites’. On the one hand, scholars have
regularly used the term anachronistically to refer to the
‘Chalcedonians’ from the fifth century onward,
whereas it did not in fact come into currency until well after
the time of Constantinople III in 681 and its primary reference
was to those Christians in the Islamic world who accepted the
teachings of that council. On the other hand, in modern times
the term has been used almost exclusively to refer to members
of this community who came into union with the see of Rome in
the eighteenth century. See Sidney H. Griffith, “The
Church of Jerusalem and the ‘Melkites’: The Making
of an ‘Arab Orthodox’ Christian Identity in the
World of Islam; 750-1050 CE,” in press.
the
see of Jerusalem remained their ecclesiastical center, and for
centuries Jerusalem, and especially the monastery of Mar Saba,
exerted a strong spiritual and intellectual influence even in
the ‘Melkite’ communities of the patriarchates of
Alexandria and Antioch.
For the extent of Jerusalem’s sway see
Sidney H. Griffith, “The Life of Theodore of
Edessa: History, Hagiography and Religious Apologetics in
Mar Saba Monastery in Early Abbasid Times,” in Patrich,
The Sabaite Heritage, pp. 147-169.
[12] St.
John of Damascus and his Arabic-speaking heirs, like Theodore
Abū Qurrah (c. 755 — c. 830), were the spokesmen who
upheld the ‘Melkite’ tradition. They wrote in
reaction not only to the largely Syriac-speaking
‘Jacobites’ and ‘Nestorians’, but also
against the multiple religious challenges of the era in
Syria/Palestine, including those coming from Muslims and
Manichees, as well as from new movements among the Christians
themselves, such as an enthusiasm for iconophobia which arose
among some Christians living under Muslim rule in the eighth
century. When iconoclasm was then adopted as an imperial policy
in Byzantium in the early eighth century, it exacerbated the
embarrassment of orthodox Christians living under the Muslims,
especially in the Holy Land, as we shall see.
IV
[13] St.
John of Damascus was one of a number of Greek writers in
Syria/Palestine in the seventh and early eighth centuries who
defended the cause of imperial, Byzantine orthodoxy as it was
defined in the first six ecumenical councils. At the time,
although they lived among the Muslims and had a local audience
as their primary frame of reference, these writers were in fact
the most prominent Greek writers of their day. As Cyril Mango
as notably observed, “practically nothing was written at
Constantinople down to the 780’s, not even hagiography...
The most active centre of Greek culture in the 8th
century lay in Palestine, notably in Jerusalem and the
neighbouring monasteries.”
Cyril Mango, “Greek Culture in
Palestine after the Arab Conquest,” in G. Cavallo, G. De
Gregorio, M. Maniaci (eds.), Scritture, Libri e Testi nelle
Aree Provinciali di Bisanzio (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di
Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1988), pp. 149-150. See also R.
P. Blake, “La littérature grecque en Palestine au
VIIIe siècle,” Le Muséon 78
(1965), pp. 367-380.
But these monasteries were
not simply outposts of Constantinopolitan faith and culture
left over for a season in a conquered territory, as modern
Byzantinists sometimes have a tendency to portray them.
See, e.g., J. Binns, Ascetics and
Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine,
314-631 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
On the
contrary, from the eighth century to the mid-eleventh century
they composed the inspirational center for a wide-ranging
network of ‘Melkite’ communities in the
Levant.
For more on this topic see Griffith,
“The Church of Jerusalem and the ‘Melkites’.
This much one can glean from a number of
sources, but one of the most instructive is the Life of St.
Stephen the Sabaïte (d. 794) by Leontius of Damascus,
written in Greek around the year 807 but surviving only in
Arabic; from it alone, to name no other source, one can trace
the geographical network of ‘Melkite’ relationships
between Alexandria, Sinai, Jerusalem, Edessa and
Baghdad.
See John C. Lamoreaux (ed. & trans.),
The Life of St. Stephen of Mar Sabas (CSCO, vols. 578
& 579; Lovanii: Peeters, 1999); Bartolomeo Pirone (ed.
& trans.), Leonizio di Damasco; Vita di Santo Stefano
Sabaita (Studia Orientalia Christiana Monographiae, no. 4;
Cairo/Jerusalem: The Franciscan Centre of Christian Oriental
Studies, 1991).
These locations, all in the Islamic world,
name the points on the horizon within which the
‘Melkites’ thought and wrote, first in Greek and
then in Arabic, and these same locations provided the immediate
frame of reference and the cultural context within which the
‘Melkites’ defended their faith against their
Christian, Muslim and Manichaean adversaries. Constantinople
lay beyond this horizon, but it was arguably never completely
out of mind, albeit that the doctrinal and political concerns
of the Roman world would not have been the most pressing issues
for the ‘Melkites’. Until the early decades of the
ninth century ‘Melkites’ seem to have had some
regular contact with Constantinople and even to have exercised
some considerable influence there, largely through the
activities of émigré monks.
See M.-F. Auzepy, “De la Palestine
à Constantinople (VIIIe-IXe siècles):
Étienne le Sabaïte et Jean Damascène,”
Travaux et Mémoires 12 (1994), pp. 183-218. See
also J. Gouillard, “Un ‘quartier’
d’emigrés palestiniens à Constantinople au
IXe siècle?” Revue des Études Sud-Est
Européenes 7 (1969), pp. 73-76.
But from around
the year 825 until well after the mid-tenth century the ties
seem to have been completely broken; they were restored for a
season (969-1085) in the territories of Antioch; they were not
restored in Jerusalem until the reign of the emperor
Constantine IX Monomachos (1042-1055).
See Griffith, “What has Constantinople
to do with Jerusalem?” and “Byzantium and the
Christians in the World of Islam.”
But these
observations take us beyond our immediate concern with the era
of St. John of Damascus.
[14] At
the turn of the seventh and eighth centuries, during the years
immediately following the council of Constantinople III (681),
in Syria/Palestine Anastasius of Sinai (d. after 700) was
arguably the most significant, proto-‘Melkite’
writer.
See John Haldon, “The Works of
Anastasius of Sinai: A Key Source for the History of
Seventh-Century East Mediterranean Society and Belief,”
in Averil Cameron & Lawrence I. Conrad (eds.), The
Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East: I – Problems in
the Literary Source Material (Studies in Late Antiquity
and Early Islam, 1; Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992), pp.
107-147.
In his landmark book, the Hodegos,
written in Greek,
See K. H. Uthemann (ed.), Anastasii
Sinaitae Viae Dux (Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca, 8;
Turnhout & Louvain: Brepols & University Press, 1981).
Anastasius set out Byzantine orthodox
Christology, largely in reaction to doctrines current in the
‘Jacobite’ community, the
‘Monophysites’ as he called them, and against the
‘Monothelites’, in a way that uncannily anticipated
difficulties to come.
See T. Spáčil, “La
teologia di s. Anastasio Sinaita,” Bessarione 26
(1922), pp. 157-178; 27 (1923), pp. 15-44.
For example, his emphasis on the full
humanity of Christ led him graphically to portray Jesus’
tortured and dead body on the cross in an icon which he
included in his text.
See Anna Kartsonis, Anastasis: The
Making of an Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).
In the years to come, this kind of a
portrayal of the crucifixion would become a point of
controversy between Christians, Muslims and Christian
iconophobes, as we shall see below. What is more, in this same
work Anastasius became one of the first Christian writers on
record to take cognizance of the religious ideas of the Muslim
Arabs and even to quote the Qur’ān; he argued that
the heretical notions of the ‘Jacobites’ had misled
the Arabs.
See Sidney H. Griffith, “Anastasios of
Sinai, the Hodegos and the Muslims,” The
Greek Orthodox Theological Review 32 (1987), pp. 341-358.
Another work attributed to Anastasius of Sinai
is usually called Quaestiones et Responsiones,
seemingly also largely excerpted in the pseudo-Athanasian
Quaestiones ad Antiochum Ducem. While modern scholars
have not paid much attention to this widely copied and often
expanded text, early ‘Melkite’ writers were very
fond of it and they frequently quoted from it and referred to
it, not least in Arabic.
See Haldon, “The Works of Anastasius
of Sinai.”
Clearly Anastasius’ was an
important voice in the rising generation of
‘Melkite’ thinkers who in the seventh century and
the first half of the eighth century in Syria/Palestine
articulated the first doctrinal synthesis of what we moderns
are inclined to call ‘Byzantine Orthodoxy’, but
which the locals more aptly defended as simply the
‘Orthodoxy of the Six Councils’. It was the
religious backbone of the cultural transformation which
Byzantinist John Haldon has so evocatively sketched.
See J. F. Haldon, Byzantium
in
the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
[15]
Modern Byzantinists have not been slow to recognize the
accomplishments of the remarkable, Greek-speaking,
Syro/Palestinian scholars of the eighth century, with St. John
of Damascus occupying the first place among them. They included
poets, hagiographers, hymnographers and theologians of the
caliber of Andrew of Crete (c. 669 — c. 740), sometime
‘Monothelite’ but notable poet and preacher,
Leontius of Damascus the hagiographer, whom we have already
mentioned, Cosmas of Maiuma, ‘the Melode’ (c. 675
— c. 752), and of course John of Damascus himself, to
name only those with the most immediate name recognition in
modern times.
See Mango, “Greek Culture in
Palestine;” and Blake, “La littérature en
Palestine.” See also the long discussion of the merits
and accomplishments of these writers in Daniel J. Sahas,
“Cultural Interaction during the Ummayad Period: The
‘Circle’ of John of Damascus,” ARAM
6 (1994), pp. 35-66.
Indeed there has even been the sense among
some Byzantinists, while strangely discounting the immediate
local relevance of their work, nevertheless to recognize the
defining character of the Syro/Palestinian writers’
contributions to Orthodox theology in the larger world,
especially the work of St. John of Damascus,
See, e.g., Andrew Louth, “Palestine
under the Arabs 650-750: The Crucible of Byzantine
Orthodoxy,” in R.N. Swanson (ed.), The Holy Land,
Holy Lands, and Christian History (Studies in Church
History, vol. 36; London: The Boydell Press for The
Ecclesiastical History Society, 2000), pp. 67-77; A. Louth,
“John of Damascus and the Making of the Byzantine
Theological Synthesis,” in Patrich, The Sabaite
Heritage, pp. 301-304.
albeit that his
achievement was only belatedly recognized in Constantinople,
where in the mid-eighth century he was still being
characterized as stubbornly
‘Saracen-minded’.
See the text cited from the proceedings of
the Iconoclast council of 754 in the Acta of the
seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicea II, 784, in Daniel J. Sahas,
Icon and Logos: Sources in Eighth-Century Iconoclasm
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 168.
[16] Two
important, but now anonymous, theological reference works in
Greek of great influence in the promotion of ‘Byzantine
Orthodoxy’ in our period were produced in this
Syro/Palestinian milieu, the Doctrina Patrum and the
ever popular Sacra Parallela, both of which served
Arabic-speaking ‘Melkite’ writers well into the
Middle Ages. The Doctrina Patrum has sometimes,
probably wrongly, been attributed to Anastasius of Sinai; it
seems to be the older compilation of the two, reflecting the
teachings of Maximus the Confessor, and those of both the sixth
century Leontius of Byzantium and Leontius of
Jerusalem.
See F. Diekamp, Doctrina Patrum de
Incarnatione Verbi: ein griechisches Florilegium aus der Wende
des 7. und 8. Jahrhunderts (2nd ed.; Münster:
Aschendorff, 1981). For the two Leontii see Aloys Grillmeier,
Christ in Christian Tradition (vol. II, part 2; trans.
John Cawte & Pauline Allen; London & Louisville, KY:
Mowbray & Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), pp. 181-312.
The compilation of the Sacra
Parallela has often been ascribed to St. John of Damascus,
again probably wrongly, but its doctrinal tenor is certainly
consistent with his allegiances.
See Karl Holl, Die Sacra Parallela des
Johannes Damascenus (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs,1896). It is
interesting that an illustrated MS of this text, possibly of
Palestinian origin, includes numerous marginal portraits of
authors, including biblical writers, whose texts are included
in the compilation. See Kurt Weitzmann, The Miniatures of
the Sacra Parallela (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979).
Both of these
florilegia were of immense significance in shaping the
doctrinal profile of the ‘Melkite’ community.
[17] It
is not unlikely that one impetus for the remarkable
efflorescence of ‘Melkite’ thought in
Syria/Palestine in the first half of the eighth century was the
new stability brought to ecclesiastical affairs in Jerusalem by
the inception of the thirty year reign of Patriarch John V
(705-735) at the beginning of the century, coming in the wake
of the ecclesiastical and civil crises of episcopal succession
in Jerusalem during the almost seventy years which followed the
death of Patriarch Sophronius (d. 638)
For the basic facts of the succession as we
know them, see Giorgio Fedalto, Hierarchia Ecclesiastica
Orientalis: Series Episcoporum Eddlesiarum Christianarum
Orientalium ( 2 vols.; Padova: Messaggero, 1988), vol. II,
pp. 1001-1002.
and the formal
separation of the Orient from Roman government brought about by
inauguration of the new Islamic hegemony in the area. Another
factor which must also have influenced especially the defensive
and reactive intellectual posture of the first
‘Melkite’ theologians and prompted their
summarizing and systematizing efforts, most notably those of
St. John of Damascus, was the contemporary growth and
development not only of the doctrines of their newly socially
empowered Christian adversaries but also of the emergence and
active careers of new Islamic religious thinkers as well.
V
[18] As
was noted at the beginning of this essay, the last years of the
seventh century and the first quarter of the eighth century
witnessed the campaign of the Umayyad caliphs, especially
‘Abd al-Malik and his sons and successors, publicly and
symbolically to claim the Arab occupied territories for Islam,
and especially the cities of Jerusalem and Damascus. This
effort went hand in hand with important steps in the growth and
development of early Islamic religious thought. In the
beginning, more theoretical considerations had been
overshadowed by what moderns would call political concerns. But
concomitant with the elaboration of different ideas about how
the Islamic community should be governed after the death of the
prophet Muhammad, the nascent class of
Muslim ‘scholars’ (ulamā’) in
the caliphate were already devising the methods of transmitting
the authoritative prophetic traditions (
hadīth, pl., a
hādīth) which for the burgeoning
majority of the so-called ‘Sunnī’ Muslims
would go together with the Qur’ān as the principal
sources for determining both the faith and the civil order of
the dominant Islamic community (ummah).
For a good summary of these developments see
Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam; Six
Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004).
At the same
time, the authors of the early biographies of the prophet
Muhammad, such as Muhammad ibn Ishāq (d.
767), a near contemporary of St. John of Damascus, and the
authors of the first Qur’ān commentaries and the
standard accounts of the earliest exploits of the
Muslims,
On the early origins of these materials see
now Gregor Schoeler, Écrire et transmettre dans les
débuts de l’islam (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2002).
were structuring their narratives in an
obviously apologetic and even polemic cast, clearly making
claims for the religious verisimilitude of Islam
vis-à-vis the claims of the Jews and Christians,
following the patterns of the earlier Jewish and Christian
narratives according to a suitably altered, Islamic
perspective. A number of these early scholars and writers lived
in Damascus in St. John of Damascus’ lifetime.
See Ahmad Shboul, “Change and
Continuity in Early Islamic Damascus,” ARAM 6
(1994), pp. 67-102.
So
pronounced was the apologetic penchant in their works that the
modern scholar who has done the most to make the point clear to
latter day readers, John Wansbrough, has characterized the
whole enterprise and the era itself as the Sectarian
Milieu of early Islam.
See John Wansbrough, The Sectarian
Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation
History (London Oriental Series, vol. 34; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1978.
[19] By
St. John of Damascus’ day certain more theoretical
religious concerns were already emerging among Muslim
intellectuals which would have interesting analogues in
John’s own work. Some of the thinkers whose names are
prominent in the early intellectual history of Islam and who
were St. John’s contemporaries include Ma‛bad
al-Juhanī (d. 704), al-Hasan
al-Basrī (642-728), Ghaylān
ad-Dimashqī (d.c. 743), Jahm ibn Safwān (d. 745), Wāsil ibn ‛A ta’
(d. 748) and ʿAmr ibn
ʿUbayd (d. 762). These were the thinkers of
record who were raising questions and taking positions on the
controversial issues of the day among Muslims such as the
freedom of the will, the proper understanding of God’s
attributes, the status of the Qur’ān as the Word of
God and the rightful stance to be taken toward governmental
authority.
See W. Montgomery Watt, The Formative
Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1973); Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im
2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des
religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam (6 vols.;
Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1991-1995), esp. vol.
II, pp. 1-343.
Most of these men were associated in one way
or another with the rising ‘Mu‛tazilite’
movement among the early practitioners of the Islamic
‛ilm al-kalām, the dialogic science of
discussing and understanding points of religious doctrine
according to the principles of theoretical Arabic grammar,
itself in the early stages of development at the time.
See Shlomo Pines, “A Note on an Early
Meaning of the Term Mutakallimūn,”
Israel
Oriental Studies 1 (1971), pp.
224-240; J. Van Ess, “Disputationspraxis in der
islamischen Theologie, eine vorläufige Skizze,”
Revue des Études Islamiques 44 (1976), pp.
23-60; M. A. Cook, “The Origins of Kalām,”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
43 (1980), pp. 32-43; R. M. Frank, “The Science of
Kalām,” Arabic Science and Philosophy 2
(1992), pp. 9-37.
The
names of all of these thinkers and their ideas were well known
in Umayyad Damascus and much discussed at the caliphal court;
there is every reason to think that St. John of Damascus would
therefore have been thoroughly familiar with them, especially
since many of their issues mutatis mutandis were of
much concern to him in his own Christian thought.
[20]
Muslims and ‘Melkites’ had some doctrinal
adversaries in common in the eighth century and the scholars of
both communities devoted considerable attention to refuting
them. The most prominent and persistent of these adversaries
were the Manichees, whom the Arabic-speaking Muslims classed
among the dualist freethinkers, a category they designated by
an originally Persian term taken over into Arabic as
zindīq (pl. zanādiqah).
See Melhem Chokr, Zandaqa et
zindīqs en islam au second siècle de
l’Hégire (Damas: Institut Français de
Damas, 1993); Van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft,
vol. I, pp. 416-426.
Greek,
Syriac, and even Latin-speaking Christians had long been
composing tracts against the Manichees; in Syriac Christian
texts they were classed among the
‘gentiles’,
For this understanding of the sense of the
term
„anpê
see François DeBlois, “Nasrānī
(Ναζωραιος)
and
hanīf
(εθνικος): Studies
on the Religious Vocabulary of Christianity and Islam,”
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
65 (2002), pp. 1-30.
called
hanpê (sing.
hanpâ) in Syriac, those who were neither
Jews nor Christians and who worshipped gods considered to be
strange.
See Moshe Gil, “The Creed of Abū
‛Amīr,” Israel Oriental Studies 12
(1992), pp. 9-57.
In Syria/Palestine in the eighth and ninth
centuries, Manichaean doctrines proved to be very attractive to
many intellectuals in both the Christian and the Islamic
communities. It was for this reason that a considerable number
of both Christian and Muslim polemicists paid close attention
to the refutation of Manichaean doctrines and composed a good
number of texts against them, including St. John of Damascus,
who addressed the problem in a number of his works.
On St. John and the Manichees see the
discussion in Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition
and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford Early
Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.
61-71.
[21]
Modern scholars, and even some Medieval Muslim ones, have made
efforts to find connections and influences between contemporary
Christian thinkers of the east, and particularly St. John of
Damascus, and some of the early Muslim scholars whom we have
named above.
See, e.g., the discussion of Roger Arnaldez,
A la croisée des trois monotheisms: Une
communauté de pensée au Moyen-Age (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1993), pp. 63-83.
This has been especially the case in regard to
the debate which arose among the Muslims in the early eighth
century between the upholders of the doctrine of the freedom of
human will, the so-called ‘Qadarites’
(al-qadariyyah), and the advocates of predestination,
the so-called ‘Mujbirites’
(al-mujbirah/al-jabriyyah), as their adversaries
called them, or, as they would have referred to themselves,
‘the people of determination’ (ahl
al-ithbāt), meaning those who maintain that the
determination of human actions belongs to God alone.
See the discussion of the terms in Watt,
The Formative Period, pp. 116-118.
[22]
Modern scholars such as Morris Seale and Harry Austryn Wolfson
have argued that the ‘Qadarites’ were influenced by
contemporary Christian ideas and terms about the freedom of the
will of the sort that can be found in the works of St. John of
Damascus.
See Morris S. Seale, Muslim Theology: A
Study of Origins with Reference to the Church Fathers
(London: Luzac, 1964), esp. pp. 74 ff.; Harry Austryn Wolfson,
The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 613-624.
Meanwhile, Michael Cook has proposed that at
the same time there was a widespread determinist mood abroad in
Umayyad times, even in Christian circles and especially among
Syriac-speaking thinkers such as Jacob of Edessa, which could
have had an influence on the Muslim determinists.
See Michael Cook, Early Muslim Dogma: A
Source Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), pp. 151 ff.
In the
same vein, Shlomo Pines suggested that there are parallels to
be observed in the methodological composition of the works of
the early Muslim mutakallimūn, the practitioners
of the apologetic ‛ilm al-kalām, especially
among the ‘Mu‛tazilites’, and the
compositional procedures at work in St. John of Damascus’
largely apologetic De Fide Orthodoxa; he argued that
the parallels may disclose influence or dependence.
See Shlomo Pines, “Some Traits of
Christian Theological Writing in Relation to Moslem
Kalām and to Jewish Thought,”
Proceedings of the Israel Academy of the Sciences and the
Humanities 5 (1976), esp. pp. 112-115.
Contrariwise, Carl Becker thought that it was St. John of
Damascus who reacted to the Muslim thinkers, all of whom he
took to be determinists, rather than the other way around,
especially in the discussion about the freedom of the
will.
See Carl H. Becker, “Christliche
Polemik und islamische Dogmenbildung,” Zeitschrift
für Assyriologie 25 (1911), pp. 175-195, reprinted in
the author’s Vom Werden und Wesen der islamischen
Welt: Islamstudien von C.H. Becker (2 vols.; Leipzig:
Quelle und Meyer, 1924-1932), vol. I, pp. 439 ff.
While none of these allegations can be pressed
with any confidence, they do nevertheless all call attention to
the fact that some of the intellectual concerns both of St.
John of Damascus and of his Muslim contemporaries were in a
kind of sympathetic vibration, even if he and the Muslims were
not in direct dialogue with one another.
VI
[23]
Everything we know about the life and works of St. John of
Damascus shows how well he and his concerns fit within the
intellectual and cultural world of Syria/Palestine in Umayyad
times, from the perspective of both its Christian and its
Islamic frames of reference.
See the present author’s earlier
effort to make this case in Griffith,
“‘Melkites’, ‘Jacobites’ and the
Christological Controversies,” in Thomas, Syrian
Christians under Islam, esp. pp. 19-38.
In this context, one can readily
see that John wrote with a pastoral concern for the whole
‘Melkite’ church and not just for monks,
Pace Andrew Louth, St John
Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine
Theology (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), p. 37.
albeit
that the monks of Jerusalem and of the monasteries of the
Judean desert, especially the monastery of Mar Saba, were the
principal teachers of the ‘Melkites’.
See Griffith, “The Church of Jerusalem
and the ‘Melkites’.
Concomitantly, John shows little or no concern in his works for
Constantinople or Byzantium,
Again, pace Andrew Louth who speaks
of Byzantium as “that empire in which he [i.e. John of
Damascus] never set foot, though he seems to have felt he
belonged there.” Louth, St John Damascene, p.
27.
where what he wrote came to be
appreciated only long after his death and where in his lifetime
he was despised. It is especially important to make this point
because the prevailing view among modern scholars to the
contrary is still strongly upheld. In fact it is a thoroughly
anachronistic view, based on a reading of John’s works
through lenses crafted long after his time in Byzantium and
long after the final triumph of ‘Orthodoxy’ in
Constantinople in the ninth century. This approach co-opts John
of Damascus out of his own milieu and into a Byzantine frame of
reference which was never his own, often discounting the issues
which were in fact most important to him and highlighting
others which reflect more the concerns of latter day scholars
of Byzantine theology.
[24] In
all likelihood, given the evidence of his name and what we know
of the history of his family, John was of Aramaean, maybe even
Arab stock. It is notable that in ‘Melkite’ Arabic
sources neither he nor his ancestors are ever listed among the
Romans (ar-Rūm), or the
‘Byzantines’,
In this connection one thinks in particular
of the ‘Melkite’ historian, Eutychius of Alexandria
(877-940), and of his account of how St. John’s ancestor
handed Damascus over to the invading Muslims at the time of the
conquest; Eutychius clearly distinguishes the local Christians
and the Mansūr family from
‘the Romans’ (ar-Rūm). See L. Cheikho
et al. (eds.), Eutychii Patriarchae Alexandrini
Annales (CSCO vols. 50 & 51; Paris: Carolus
Poussielgue, 1906 & 1909), vol. 51, pp. 15-16.
as modern historians prefer to
call them. Rather, he came from an indigenous family whose
members enjoyed a high civil status, both under Roman rule and
under the early caliphs.
What we know of St. John’s biography
comes from hagiographical tradition; for the traditional
account see J. Nasrallah, Saint Jean
de Damas: son
époque, sa vie, son oeuvre (Harissa: Imprimerie
Grecque Melchite de Saint Paul, 1950). The earliest extant
Arabic account seems to come from the eleventh century. See
Rocio Daga Portillo, “The Arabic Life of St. John of
Damascus,” Parole de l’Orient 21 (1996),
pp. 157-188. For recent scholarly reviews and reassessments of
what we know about the biography see Le Coz, Jean
Damascène: Écrits sur l’islam;
Auzépy, “De la Palestine à
Constantinople.”
The fact that John wrote only in
Greek and not, so far as we know, in Aramaic or Arabic is no
indication of Greek ancestry; Greek was the liturgical and
scholarly language of choice for all the members of his church
during his lifetime. Greek inscriptions are to be found in
Arabian churches built or restored in the eighth century, well
beyond the date of St. John of Damascus’ demise.
See in particular Michele Piccirillo,
Arabia
Christiana dalla Provincia Imperiale al
Primo Periodo Islamico (Milano: Jaca Book, 2002).
Only
in the next generation, did the ‘Melkites’ adopt
Arabic as an ecclesiastical language, but even then they did
not simply drop Greek or Christian Palestinian Aramaic, albeit
that the cultivation of Greek letters underwent an eclipse in
their communities thereafter.
See Griffith, “From Aramaic to
Arabic.”
By the tenth century the
‘Melkites’ were already translating the most
important of St. John of Damascus’ works into
Arabic.
See A.S. Atiya, “St. John Damascene:
Survey of the Unpublished Arabic Versions of His Works in
Sinai,” in George Makdisi (ed.), Arabic and Islamic
Studies in Honor of Hamilton A.R. Gibb (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1965, distributed by Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA), pp. 73-83: Georg Graf, Geschichte der
christlichen arabischen Literatur (5 vols.; Città
del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944-1953), vol.
I, pp. 377-379.
[25] Here
is not the place to delve into the biography of St. John of
Damascus in any detail, or to study his works closely; these
considerations are among the topics assigned to other scholars
participating in the conference. Suffice it now to call
attention to certain aspects of St. John’s second career,
his entrance into the monastic life in the Holy Land and his
pastorally motivated apostolate of the pen in the service of
the Patriarch of Jerusalem, John V (705-735). This was the
patriarch who finally consolidated ecclesiastical affairs in
Jerusalem after the disruptions and vacancies caused by the
Islamic conquest just over sixty years earlier.
On the desperate situation of the
‘Melkite’ hierarchy in the period after the
conquest see Hugh Kennedy, “The Melkite Church from the
Islamic Conquest to the Crusades: Continuity and Adaptation in
the Byzantine Legacy,” in The 17th
International Byzantine Congress: Major Papers (New
Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1986), pp. 325-343.
Once again,
albeit in reduced circumstances, and due in large part to the
efforts of Patriarch John V, Jerusalem would become in fact as
well as in name, ‘the mother of churches’, as Cyril
of Scythopolis had called her in the sixth century,
Cyril of Scythopolis (c. 525 — c. 558)
used this epithet a number of times in his Lives of the
Monks of Palestine. Presumably he borrowed it from
Jerusalem’s liturgy of St. James. See Robert L. Wilken,
The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and
Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 171.
a
title which in later Islamic times ‘Melkite’
writers loved to apply to her in their efforts to counter
Muslim claims to the Holy City,
See Andreas Feldtkeller, Die
‘Mutter der Kirchen’ im ‘Haus des
Islam’: Gegenseitige Wahrnehmungen von
arabischen Christen und Muslimen im West-und Ostjordanland
(Erlangen: Erlanger Verlag für Mission und Ökumene,
1998).
when Jerusalem had become
the de facto if not the de jure center of
Orthodox life in the caliphate.
[26] We
do not know just when St. John left his civil servant career in
Damascus to come to Jerusalem to enter the monastic life. The
common opinion seems to be that the move coincided with the
beginning of the reign of the caliph al-Walīd
(705-715),
See Portillo, “The Arabic Life,”
p. 164.
when this Umayyad prince mandated the change
from Greek to Arabic in the chancery
(ad-dīwān) of the caliphate and began the
construction of the Umayyad Mosque on the site of
Damascus’ earlier Church of St. John the Baptist. (In
this connection one notices in passing that the reigns of
Caliph al-Walīd and Patriarch John V began in the same
year, 705.) Neither do we know for sure to which of the Holy
Land monasteries John of Damascus repaired. Hagiographical
tradition claims him for a monk of Mar Saba monastery in the
Judean desert, but recent scholarly inquiry has cast some doubt
on the historicity of this claim.
See Auzépy, “De la Palestine
à Constantinople,” pp. 183-218; Auzépy,
“Les Sabaïtes et l’iconoclasme,” in
Patrich, The Sabaite Heritage, pp. 305-314, esp. p.
305, n. 4, where the author propses that given his close
association with Patriarch John V, it is more likely that John
of Damascus “était un Spoudaios,
c’est-à-dire un moine de l’Anastasis.”
See also Andrew Louth, “St. John Damascene: Preacher and
Poet,” in Mary B. Cunningham & Pauline Allen (eds.),
Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and
Byzantine Homiletics (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 249, where
the author acknowledges the uncertainty about which monastery
John inhabited.
What seems to be settled is
that Patriarch John V ordained John of Damascus a priest in
Jerusalem not too long after the beginning of the
patriarch’s reign and that St. John spent his remaining
years composing both theological tracts and religious poetry
and hymnody in Greek to meet the needs of the local church of
Jerusalem as well as the wider network of
‘Melkites’ in the caliphate who looked to Jerusalem
and her monastic communities for guidance.
[27] The
years of St. John of Damascus’ monastic career correspond
both with the years of the culminating development of the
definitive ‘Melkite’ Christological and canonical
self-definition over against the ‘Nestorian’ and
‘Jacobite’ challenges, largely accomplished in
John’s own works, and the period of the burgeoning of the
new Islamic sciences and the campaign of the Umayyad caliphs to
claim the public domain for Islam. It is also the era in which
the first Christian responses in Greek and Syriac to the
religious challenge of Islam appeared, and to this enterprise
St. John also made a major contribution as is well known.
[28] It
is striking how readily the topical profile of St. John of
Damascus’ works corresponds both sociologically and
theologically with the church-defining concerns of the
Christian communities in Syria/Palestine in the days of his
Jerusalem ministry. In particular, the refutation of
Mesallians, Monotheletes, Jacobites, Nestorians and Manichees,
all active in his immediate milieu, pressingly concerned him.
Nowhere else in the world of Chalcedonian Orthodoxy at the time
was the press of these challenges, in the ensemble and in just
this particular topical array, so acutely a problem. There
seems to have been a special urgency on St. John’s part,
both definitively and summarily to present systematically
coherent resolutions to these issues in a hostile environment,
largely in terms borrowed from what he consistently represented
as the teaching of the fathers.
See Griffith, “‘Melkites’,
‘Jacobites’ and the Christological
Controversies.”
Even his signature topic as
far as many modern scholars are concerned, the theology of the
holy icons, had a local as well as a broader, even
Constantinopolitan, point of reference, as we shall see.
[29] St.
John of Damascus’ response to the religious challenge of
the Muslims was not limited to the few works in which he
explicitly addressed Islam, such as Chapter 100 of the De
Haeresibus and the Disputation between a Saracen and a
Christian.
See Le Coz, Jean Damascène:
Écrits sur l’islam. See also Igor
Pochoshajew, “Johannes von Damaskos: De Heresibus
100,” Islamochristiana 30 (2004), pp. 65-75.
Rather, one must consider that the full range
of the developing Islamic sciences in the first half of the
eighth century presented an almost unprecedented, comprehensive
challenge both to Christianity’s principal articles of
faith and to the Christian way of life. In response, the
challenge called for a comprehensive, summary exposition of the
truths of Christian faith, along with a compendium of
definitions of the philosophical terms in which the Christian
doctrines were expressed, and a catalog of the errors in
refutation of which many of the doctrines were first
articulated. John of Damascus’ Pēgē
Gnoseos answered this need for the ‘Melkites’
and Theodore Bar Kônî’s Scholion
served the same purpose for the ‘Nestorians’. Among
the ‘Jacobites’, the works of Jacob of Edessa (d.
708)
See the references in n. 35 above.
and George, Bishop of the Arabs, (d.
724)
See the introductory study and bibliography
in Kathleen E. McVey (ed. & trans.), George, Bishop of
the Arabs: A Homily on Blessed Mar Severus, Patriarch of
Antioch (CSCO, vols. 530 & 531; Louvain: Peeters,
1993).
met this challenge, together with the
remarkable promotion of Aristotelian logic in this community,
in translations, commentaries and lexicons,
For an orientation to studies of this
important phenomenon see Henri Hugonnard-Roche, La logique
d’Aristote du grec au syriaque: Études sur la
transmission des texts de l’Organon et leur
interpretation philosophique (Textes et Traditions, 9;
Paris: Vrin, 2004).
geared
principally to the precise definition and deployment of the
philosophical terms used in Christology, the issue which most
poignantly both divided the Christians and aroused the obloquy
of the Muslims. In the Islamic milieu, the hostile intellectual
circumstances required the Christian controversialists of each
denomination summarily to address not only the challenges of
Islam but in virtually the same process also to provide
responses to their own intra-Christian adversaries. In later
times Muslim writers would focus their anti-Christian polemic
on precisely these church-dividing differences in Christian
thought and allegiance.
For two prominent early Muslims’
approaches to Christian denominationalism see David Thomas,
Anti-Christian Polemic in Early Islam: Abū
‛Īsā al-Warrāq’s “Against the
Trinity” (University of Cambridge Oriental
Publications, 45; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992);
David Thomas, Early Muslim Polemic against Christianity:
Abū ‛Īsā al-Warrāq’s
‘Against the Incarnation’ (University of
Cambridge Oriental Publications, 59; Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002); Gabriel Said Reynolds, A Muslim
Theologian in the Sectarian Milieu: ‛Abd al-Jabbār
and the Critique of Christian Origins (Leiden: Brill,
2004).
VII
[30]
Throughout most of the seventh century and for the better part
of the eighth century, the Orthodox monks of Syria/Palestine
found themselves perennially in opposition to the religious and
civil authorities in Byzantine Constantinople
On the earlier phase of this estrangement
see F. Thomas Noonan, Political Thought in Greek
Palestinian Hagiography (ca. 526-ca.630) (Unpublished,
Ph.D. dissertation; Chicago: University of Chicago, 1975). See
also the remarks of John Moorhead, “The Monophysite
Response to the Arab Invasions,” Byzantion 51
(1981), pp. 579-581.
who promoted
doctrines and ecclesiastical policies which would finally be
condemned as heretical in Ecumenical Councils in 681
(Monotheletism) and 787 (Iconoclasm) respectively, but which
were left behind completely only with the ‘Triumph of
Orthodoxy’ in the ninth century (843),
See J.M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church
in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1986), pp. 62-68.
well into
the classical period of Islamic culture, in which the churches
of the Orient were by then thoroughly immersed. St. John of
Damascus vigorously combated both of these heresies which had
arisen in the Chalcedonian community, but in the instance of
his defense of the veneration of the holy icons he wrote in the
context of opposition both from a significant number Christians
in Syria/Palestine, who in the face of Jewish and Islamic
polemic were becoming iconophobic and abandoning the practice
of publicly venerating the cross and the icons,
See the discussions in Robert Schick,
The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to
Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study
(Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 2; Princeton: The
Darwin Press, 1995), esp. pp. 180-224; Susanna Ognibene,
Umm al-Rasas: La Chiesa di Santo Stefano ed il
«Problema Iconofobico» (Roma:
«L’Erma» di Bretschneider, 2002), esp. pp.
95-147.
as well as
from reports of the imperial policy of iconoclasm promoted by
the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople.
[31] In
light of this double frame of reference, it seems not
unreasonable to suppose that the impetus for St. John of
Damascus’ composition of his Orations against the
Calumniators of the Icons was supplied by news reaching
Jerusalem of the iconoclastic policies dramatically inaugurated
in Constantinople by the emperor Leo III (717-741) in the year
726.
The present writer attempted to make this
case in an earlier publication; see Sidney H. Griffith,
“‘Melkites’, ‘Jacobites’ and the
Christological Controversies,” esp. pp. 26-34.
In Jerusalem and its environs, the pastoral
problem of how to deal with iconophobic Christians in the
Islamic milieu seems already to have arisen somewhat earlier in
the century.
See Ognibene, La Chiesa di Santo
Stefano, pp. 143-147.
The arrival of the news of
Constantinople’s iconoclastic policies could only have
exacerbated the already existing local problem. From this
perspective, one might reasonably conclude that even St.
John’s Orations against the Calumniators of the
Icons, like his other works, were written with an audience
of ‘Melkites’ in Syria/Palestine primarily in mind.
They seem to have found an audience in Byzantium only in the
next century.
See Auzépy, “Les
Sabaïtes et l’iconoclasme.”
And even in Syria/Palestine among the
‘Melkites’, John’s was perhaps only a
minority voice on this issue in his lifetime;
See Auzépy, “De la Palestine
à Constantinople.”
it was
taken up again with vigor in the next generation by Theodore
Abū Qurrah (c. 755 — c. 830) in his Arabic tract on
the duty of Christians in the caliphate to make prostration to
the cross and to the holy icons of Christ and his saints, in
spite of opposition and obloquy from “anti-Christians,
especially ones claiming to have in hand a scripture sent down
from God.”
Sidney H. Griffith (trans.), A
Treatise on the Veneration of the Holy Icons Written in Arabic
by Theodore Abū Qurrah, Bishop of Harrān (c. 755 — c. 830 A.D.) (Early
Christian Texts in Translation, 1; Louvain: Peeters, 1997), p.
29.
In this manner the teaching of St. John
of Damascus on the holy icons came to inform
‘Melkite’ Orthodoxy for generations to come,
without any reference at all until the tenth century,
especially in Arabic sources, to the teaching of
Byzantium’s seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicea II, in
787.
It was the practice among the
‘Melkites’ for a long time to speak of the
orthodoxy of the ‘six councils’. See J. B.
Darblade, La collection canonique arabe des Melkites
(XIIIe-XVIIe siècles (S. Congregazione per la
Chiesa Orientale, Codificazione Canonica Orientale, Fonti,
serie II, Fascicolo XIII; Harissa: Imprimerie Grecque Melchite
de Saint Paul, 1946), pp. 154-155. The earliest reference to
Nicea II in an Arabic source which the present writer has found
is in a ‘Melkite’ creed of the tenth century. See
Sidney H. Griffith, “Theology and the Arab Christian: The
Case of the ‘Melkite’ Creed,” in David Thomas
(ed.), A Faithful Presence: Essays for Kenneth Cragg
(London: Melisende, 2003), pp. 184-200.
[32] It
has been the thesis of the present communication that the
interests of the emerging community of ‘Melkite’,
Orthodox Christians in the Umayyad era in Syria/Palestine
furnish the most immediate frame of reference for appreciating
the significance of the works of St. John of Damascus in his
lifetime. The fact that in later times his works achieved a
defining status in the Greek Orthodox Church of Byzantium
should not prevent modern scholars from looking beyond that
nearer horizon to our own times for the more distant one within
which St. John actually produced his works in his own Islamic
homeland in the first half of the eighth century.
Anachronistically to consider John and his works only from the
perspective of the later synthesis of Orthodox theology, of
which his works eventually came to form an important part, is
to obscure their crucial role in providing the basic principles
for the self-definition of ‘Melkite’ Orthodoxy in
his own immediate environment, in the world of Islam. When we
read his works with a heightened understanding of their own
immediate context, they present us in the ensemble with a
theological and ecclesial profile in which we can recognize the
emerging contours of the Orthodox Church in Syria in the
Umayyad era. In later years, in Abbasid times (750-1258),
Arabic-speaking, ‘Melkite’ theologians in the
caliphate continued St. John of Damascus’ theological
work, developing it to respond more pointedly to the challenges
of Muslims.
See the early history of this development
presented in Sidney H. Griffith, “The View of Islam from
the Monasteries of Palestine in the Early ‛Abbasid
Period: Theodore Abū Qurrah and the Summa Theologiae
Arabica,” Islam and Christian-Muslim
Relations 7 (1996), pp. 9-28; S.H. Griffith, “Arab
Christian Culture in the Early Abbasid Period,”
Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith
Studies 1 (1999), pp. 23-44.
But that is a story for another
venue._______
Notes