which had been defined at Rome and Constantinople, was uniformly
preached in the remote islands of Britain and Ireland; the same ideas
were entertained, or rather the same words were repeated, by all the
Christians whose liturgy was performed in the Greek or the Latin tongue.
Their numbers, and visible splendor, bestowed an imperfect claim to the
appellation of Catholics: but in the East, they were marked with the
less honorable name of _Melchites_, or Royalists; of men, whose faith,
instead of resting on the basis of Scripture, reason, or tradition, had
been established, and was still maintained, by the arbitrary power of
a temporal monarch. Their adversaries might allege the words of the
fathers of Constantinople, who profess themselves the slaves of the
king; and they might relate, with malicious joy, how the decrees of
Chalcedon had been inspired and reformed by the emperor Marcian and his
virgin bride. The prevailing faction will naturally inculcate the duty
of submission, nor is it less natural that dissenters should feel and
assert the principles of freedom. Under the rod of persecution, the
Nestorians and Monophysites degenerated into rebels and fugitives; and
the most ancient and useful allies of Rome were taught to consider the
emperor not as the chief, but as the enemy of the Christians. Language,
the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind,
soon discriminated the sectaries of the East, by a peculiar and
perpetual badge, which abolished the means of intercourse and the hope
of reconciliation. The long dominion of the Greeks, their colonies, and,
above all, their eloquence, had propagated a language doubtless the most
perfect that has been contrived by the art of man. Yet the body of the
people, both in Syria and Egypt, still persevered in the use of their
national idioms; with this difference, however, that the Coptic was
confined to the rude and illiterate peasants of the Nile, while the
Syriac, from the mountains of Assyria to the Red Sea, was adapted to
the higher topics of poetry and argument. Armenia and Abyssinia were
infected by the speech or learning of the Greeks; and their Barbaric
tongues, which have been revived in the studies of modern Europe, were
unintelligible to the inhabitants of the Roman empire. The Syriac
and the Coptic, the Armenian and the ∆thiopic, are consecrated in the
service of their respective churches: and their theology is enriched
by domestic versions both of the Scriptures and of the most popular
fathers. After a period of thirteen hundred and sixty years, the spark
of controversy, first kindled by a sermon of Nestorius, still burns in
the bosom of the East, and the hostile communions still maintain the
faith and discipline of their founders. In the most abject state of
ignorance, poverty, and servitude, the Nestorians and Monophysites
reject the spiritual supremacy of Rome, and cherish the toleration of
their Turkish masters, which allows them to anathematize, on the one
hand, St. Cyril and the synod of Ephesus: on the other, Pope Leo and the
council of Chalcedon. The weight which they cast into the downfall of
the Eastern empire demands our notice, and the reader may be amused with
the various prospect of, I. The Nestorians; II. The Jacobites; III. The
Maronites; IV. The Armenians; V. The Copts; and, VI. The Abyssinians.
To the three former, the Syriac is common; but of the latter, each is
discriminated by the use of a national idiom. Yet the modern natives
of Armenia and Abyssinia would be incapable of conversing with their
ancestors; and the Christians of Egypt and Syria, who reject the
religion, have adopted the language of the Arabians. The lapse of time
has seconded the sacerdotal arts; and in the East, as well as in the
West, the Deity is addressed in an obsolete tongue, unknown to the
majority of the congregation.
Chapter XLVII: Ecclesiastical Discord.--Part V.
I. Both in his native and his episcopal province, the heresy of the
unfortunate Nestorius was speedily obliterated. The Oriental bishops,
who at Ephesus had resisted to his face the arrogance of Cyril,
were mollified by his tardy concessions. The same prelates, or their
successors, subscribed, not without a murmur, the decrees of Chalcedon;
the power of the Monophysites reconciled them with the Catholics in
the conformity of passion, of interest, and, insensibly, of belief;
and their last reluctant sigh was breathed in the defence of the three
chapters. Their dissenting brethren, less moderate, or more sincere,
were crushed by the penal laws; and, as early as the reign of Justinian,
it became difficult to find a church of Nestorians within the limits of
the Roman empire. Beyond those limits they had discovered a new world,
in which they might hope for liberty, and aspire to conquest. In Persia,
notwithstanding the resistance of the Magi, Christianity had struck a
deep root, and the nations of the East reposed under its salutary shade.
The _catholic_, or primate, resided in the capital: in _his_ synods, and
in _their_ dioceses, his metropolitans, bishops, and clergy, represented
the pomp and order of a regular hierarchy: they rejoiced in the increase
of proselytes, who were converted from the Zendavesta to the gospel,
from the secular to the monastic life; and their zeal was stimulated by
the presence of an artful and formidable enemy. The Persian church
had been founded by the missionaries of Syria; and their language,
discipline, and doctrine, were closely interwoven with its original
frame. The _catholics_ were elected and ordained by their own suffragans;
but their filial dependence on the patriarchs of Antioch is attested by
the canons of the Oriental church. In the Persian school of Edessa, the
rising generations of the faithful imbibed their theological idiom: they
studied in the Syriac version the ten thousand volumes of Theodore of
Mopsuestia; and they revered the apostolic faith and holy martyrdom of
his disciple Nestorius, whose person and language were equally unknown
to the nations beyond the Tigris. The first indelible lesson of Ibas,
bishop of Edessa, taught them to execrate the _Egyptians_, who, in the
synod of Ephesus, had impiously confounded the two natures of Christ.
The flight of the masters and scholars, who were twice expelled from
the Athens of Syria, dispersed a crowd of missionaries inflamed by
the double zeal of religion and revenge. And the rigid unity of the
Monophysites, who, under the reigns of Zeno and Anastasius, had invaded
the thrones of the East, provoked their antagonists, in a land of
freedom, to avow a moral, rather than a physical, union of the two
persons of Christ. Since the first preaching of the gospel, the
Sassanian kings beheld with an eye of suspicion a race of aliens and
apostates, who had embraced the religion, and who might favor the cause,
of the hereditary foes of their country. The royal edicts had often
prohibited their dangerous correspondence with the Syrian clergy: the
progress of the schism was grateful to the jealous pride of Perozes, and
he listened to the eloquence of an artful prelate, who painted Nestorius
as the friend of Persia, and urged him to secure the fidelity of his
Christian subjects, by granting a just preference to the victims and
enemies of the Roman tyrant. The Nestorians composed a large majority of
the clergy and people: they were encouraged by the smile, and armed with
the sword, of despotism; yet many of their weaker brethren were startled
at the thought of breaking loose from the communion of the Christian
world, and the blood of seven thousand seven hundred Monophysites,
or Catholics, confirmed the uniformity of faith and discipline in the
churches of Persia. Their ecclesiastical institutions are distinguished
by a liberal principle of reason, or at least of policy: the austerity
of the cloister was relaxed and gradually forgotten; houses of charity
were endowed for the education of orphans and foundlings; the law
of celibacy, so forcibly recommended to the Greeks and Latins, was
disregarded by the Persian clergy; and the number of the elect was
multiplied by the public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the
bishops, and even the patriarch himself. To this standard of natural and
religious freedom, myriads of fugitives resorted from all the provinces
of the Eastern empire; the narrow bigotry of Justinian was punished by
the emigration of his most industrious subjects; they transported into
Persia the arts both of peace and war: and those who deserved the favor,
were promoted in the service, of a discerning monarch. The arms of
Nushirvan, and his fiercer grandson, were assisted with advice, and
money, and troops, by the desperate sectaries who still lurked in their
native cities of the East: their zeal was rewarded with the gift of the
Catholic churches; but when those cities and churches were recovered by
Heraclius, their open profession of treason and heresy compelled them
to seek a refuge in the realm of their foreign ally. But the seeming
tranquillity of the Nestorians was often endangered, and sometimes
overthrown. They were involved in the common evils of Oriental
despotism: their enmity to Rome could not always atone for their
attachment to the gospel: and a colony of three hundred thousand
Jacobites, the captives of Apamea and Antioch, was permitted to erect a
hostile altar in the face of the _catholic_, and in the sunshine of the
court. In his last treaty, Justinian introduced some conditions which
tended to enlarge and fortify the toleration of Christianity in Persia.
The emperor, ignorant of the rights of conscience, was incapable of pity
or esteem for the heretics who denied the authority of the holy synods:
but he flattered himself that they would gradually perceive the temporal
benefits of union with the empire and the church of Rome; and if
he failed in exciting their gratitude, he might hope to provoke the
jealousy of their sovereign. In a later age the Lutherans have been
burnt at Paris, and protected in Germany, by the superstition and policy
of the most Christian king.
The desire of gaining souls for God and subjects for the church, has
excited in every age the diligence of the Christian priests. From the
conquest of Persia they carried their spiritual arms to the north, the
east, and the south; and the simplicity of the gospel was fashioned and
painted with the colors of the Syriac theology. In the sixth century,
according to the report of a Nestorian traveller, Christianity was
successfully preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians, the
Indians, the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites: the Barbaric
churches, from the Gulf of Persia to the Caspian Sea, were almost
infinite; and their recent faith was conspicuous in the number and
sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper coast of Malabar,
and the isles of the ocean, Socotora and Ceylon, were peopled with an
increasing multitude of Christians; and the bishops and clergy of
those sequestered regions derived their ordination from the Catholic of
Babylon. In a subsequent age the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the
limits which had confined the ambition and curiosity both of the Greeks
and Persians. The missionaries of Balch and Samarcand pursued without
fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar, and insinuated themselves into
the camps of the valleys of Imaus and the banks of the Selinga. They
exposed a metaphysical creed to those illiterate shepherds: to those
sanguinary warriors, they recommended humanity and repose. Yet a khan,
whose power they vainly magnified, is said to have received at their
hands the rites of baptism, and even of ordination; and the fame of
_Prester_ or _Presbyter_ John has long amused the credulity of Europe.
The royal convert was indulged in the use of a portable altar; but he
despatched an embassy to the patriarch, to inquire how, in the season of
Lent, he should abstain from animal food, and how he might celebrate
the Eucharist in a desert that produced neither corn nor wine. In their
progress by sea and land, the Nestorians entered China by the port of
Canton and the northern residence of Sigan. Unlike the senators of
Rome, who assumed with a smile the characters of priests and augurs, the
mandarins, who affect in public the reason of philosophers, are devoted
in private to every mode of popular superstition. They cherished and
they confounded the gods of Palestine and of India; but the propagation
of Christianity awakened the jealousy of the state, and, after a short
vicissitude of favor and persecution, the foreign sect expired in
ignorance and oblivion. Under the reign of the caliphs, the Nestorian
church was diffused from China to Jerusalem and Cyrus; and their
numbers, with those of the Jacobites, were computed to surpass the Greek
and Latin communions. Twenty-five metropolitans or archbishops composed
their hierarchy; but several of these were dispensed, by the distance
and danger of the way, from the duty of personal attendance, on the
easy condition that every six years they should testify their faith and
obedience to the catholic or patriarch of Babylon, a vague appellation
which has been successively applied to the royal seats of Seleucia,
Ctesiphon, and Bagdad. These remote branches are long since withered;
and the old patriarchal trunk is now divided by the _Elijahs_ of
Mosul, the representatives almost on lineal descent of the genuine and
primitive succession; the _Josephs_ of Amida, who are reconciled to the
church of Rome: and the _Simeons_ of Van or Ormia, whose revolt, at the
head of forty thousand families, was promoted in the sixteenth century
by the Sophis of Persia. The number of three hundred thousand is allowed
for the whole body of the Nestorians, who, under the name of Chaldeans
or Assyrians, are confounded with the most learned or the most powerful
nation of Eastern antiquity.
According to the legend of antiquity, the gospel was preached in India
by St. Thomas. At the end of the ninth century, his shrine, perhaps in
the neighborhood of Madras, was devoutly visited by the ambassadors of
Alfred; and their return with a cargo of pearls and spices rewarded the
zeal of the English monarch, who entertained the largest projects of
trade and discovery. When the Portuguese first opened the navigation
of India, the Christians of St. Thomas had been seated for ages on
the coast of Malabar, and the difference of their character and color
attested the mixture of a foreign race. In arms, in arts, and possibly
in virtue, they excelled the natives of Hindostan; the husbandmen
cultivated the palm-tree, the merchants were enriched by the pepper
trade, the soldiers preceded the _nairs_ or nobles of Malabar, and their
hereditary privileges were respected by the gratitude or the fear of the
king of Cochin and the Zamorin himself. They acknowledged a Gentoo of
sovereign, but they were governed, even in temporal concerns, by the
bishop of Angamala. He still asserted his ancient title of metropolitan
of India, but his real jurisdiction was exercised in fourteen hundred
churches, and he was intrusted with the care of two hundred thousand
souls. Their religion would have rendered them the firmest and most
cordial allies of the Portuguese; but the inquisitors soon discerned
in the Christians of St. Thomas the unpardonable guilt of heresy and
schism. Instead of owning themselves the subjects of the Roman pontiff,
the spiritual and temporal monarch of the globe, they adhered, like
their ancestors, to the communion of the Nestorian patriarch; and the
bishops whom he ordained at Mosul, traversed the dangers of the sea and
land to reach their diocese on the coast of Malabar. In their Syriac
liturgy the names of Theodore and Nestorius were piously commemorated:
they united their adoration of the two persons of Christ; the title
of Mother of God was offensive to their ear, and they measured with
scrupulous avarice the honors of the Virgin Mary, whom the superstition
of the Latins had almost exalted to the rank of a goddess. When
her image was first presented to the disciples of St. Thomas, they
indignantly exclaimed, "We are Christians, not idolaters!" and their
simple devotion was content with the veneration of the cross. Their
separation from the Western world had left them in ignorance of the
improvements, or corruptions, of a thousand years; and their conformity
with the faith and practice of the fifth century would equally
disappoint the prejudices of a Papist or a Protestant. It was the first
care of the ministers of Rome to intercept all correspondence with the
Nestorian patriarch, and several of his bishops expired in the prisons
of the holy office. The flock, without a shepherd, was assaulted by the
power of the Portuguese, the arts of the Jesuits, and the zeal of Alexis
de Menezes, archbishop of Goa, in his personal visitation of the coast
of Malabar. The synod of Diamper, at which he presided, consummated
the pious work of the reunion; and rigorously imposed the doctrine and
discipline of the Roman church, without forgetting auricular confession,
the strongest engine of ecclesiastical torture. The memory of Theodore
and Nestorius was condemned, and Malabar was reduced under the dominion
of the pope, of the primate, and of the Jesuits who invaded the see
of Angamala or Cranganor. Sixty years of servitude and hypocrisy were
patiently endured; but as soon as the Portuguese empire was shaken by
the courage and industry of the Dutch, the Nestorians asserted, with
vigor and effect, the religion of their fathers. The Jesuits were
incapable of defending the power which they had abused; the arms of
forty thousand Christians were pointed against their falling tyrants;
and the Indian archdeacon assumed the character of bishop till a fresh
supply of episcopal gifts and Syriac missionaries could be obtained from
the patriarch of Babylon. Since the expulsion of the Portuguese, the
Nestorian creed is freely professed on the coast of Malabar. The trading
companies of Holland and England are the friends of toleration; but
if oppression be less mortifying than contempt, the Christians of St.
Thomas have reason to complain of the cold and silent indifference of
their brethren of Europe.
II. The history of the Monophysites is less copious and interesting than
that of the Nestorians. Under the reigns of Zeno and Anastasius, their
artful leaders surprised the ear of the prince, usurped the thrones of
the East, and crushed on its native soil the school of the Syrians. The
rule of the Monophysite faith was defined with exquisite discretion
by Severus, patriarch of Antioch: he condemned, in the style of the
Henoticon, the adverse heresies of Nestorius; and Eutyches maintained
against the latter the reality of the body of Christ, and constrained
the Greeks to allow that he was a liar who spoke truth. But the
approximation of ideas could not abate the vehemence of passion; each
party was the more astonished that their blind antagonist could dispute
on so trifling a difference; the tyrant of Syria enforced the belief of
his creed, and his reign was polluted with the blood of three hundred
and fifty monks, who were slain, not perhaps without provocation or
resistance, under the walls of Apamea. The successor of Anastasius
replanted the orthodox standard in the East; Severus fled into
Egypt; and his friend, the eloquent Xenaias, who had escaped from the
Nestorians of Persia, was suffocated in his exile by the Melchites of
Paphlagonia. Fifty-four bishops were swept from their thrones, eight
hundred ecclesiastics were cast into prison, and notwithstanding the
ambiguous favor of Theodora, the Oriental flocks, deprived of their
shepherds, must insensibly have been either famished or poisoned. In
this spiritual distress, the expiring faction was revived, and united,
and perpetuated, by the labors of a monk; and the name of James BaradÊus
has been preserved in the appellation of _Jacobites_, a familiar sound,
which may startle the ear of an English reader. From the holy confessors
in their prison of Constantinople, he received the powers of bishop of
Edessa and apostle of the East, and the ordination of fourscore thousand
bishops, priests, and deacons, is derived from the same inexhaustible
source. The speed of the zealous missionary was promoted by the fleetest
dromedaries of a devout chief of the Arabs; the doctrine and discipline
of the Jacobites were secretly established in the dominions of
Justinian; and each Jacobite was compelled to violate the laws and to
hate the Roman legislator. The successors of Severus, while they lurked
in convents or villages, while they sheltered their proscribed heads in
the caverns of hermits, or the tents of the Saracens, still asserted,
as they now assert, their indefeasible right to the title, the rank, and
the prerogatives of patriarch of Antioch: under the milder yoke of
the infidels, they reside about a league from Merdin, in the pleasant
monastery of Zapharan, which they have embellished with cells,
aqueducts, and plantations. The secondary, though honorable, place is
filled by the _maphrian_, who, in his station at Mosul itself, defies
the Nestorian _catholic_ with whom he contests the primacy of the East.
Under the patriarch and the maphrian, one hundred and fifty archbishops
and bishops have been counted in the different ages of the Jacobite
church; but the order of the hierarchy is relaxed or dissolved, and the
greater part of their dioceses is confined to the neighborhood of the
Euphrates and the Tigris. The cities of Aleppo and Amida, which are
often visited by the patriarch, contain some wealthy merchants and
industrious mechanics, but the multitude derive their scanty sustenance
from their daily labor: and poverty, as well as superstition, may impose
their excessive fasts: five annual lents, during which both the clergy
and laity abstain not only from flesh or eggs, but even from the taste
of wine, of oil, and of fish. Their present numbers are esteemed from
fifty to fourscore thousand souls, the remnant of a populous church,
which was gradually decreased under the impression of twelve centuries.
Yet in that long period, some strangers of merit have been converted
to the Monophysite faith, and a Jew was the father of Abulpharagius,
primate of the East, so truly eminent both in his life and death. In his
life he was an elegant writer of the Syriac and Arabic tongues, a poet,
physician, and historian, a subtile philosopher, and a moderate divine.
In his death, his funeral was attended by his rival the Nestorian
patriarch, with a train of Greeks and Armenians, who forgot their
disputes, and mingled their tears over the grave of an enemy. The sect
which was honored by the virtues of Abulpharagius appears, however, to
sink below the level of their Nestorian brethren. The superstition of
the Jacobites is more abject, their fasts more rigid, their intestine
divisions are more numerous, and their doctors (as far as I can measure
the degrees of nonsense) are more remote from the precincts of reason.
Something may possibly be allowed for the rigor of the Monophysite
theology; much more for the superior influence of the monastic order.
In Syria, in Egypt, in Ethiopia, the Jacobite monks have ever been
distinguished by the austerity of their penance and the absurdity of
their legends. Alive or dead, they are worshipped as the favorites of
the Deity; the crosier of bishop and patriarch is reserved for their
venerable hands; and they assume the government of men, while they are
yet reeking with the habits and prejudices of the cloister.