鲍默《东方教会：亚述基督教图史》第四章：基督教普世共同体的瓦解（中英文对照版）

The Loss of Christian Ecumene IV

The Council of Chalcedon

Nestorius and Ibas should burn in the middle of Antioch! The banishment was fruitless. Nestorius and Ibas should be burned at once! Burn Satan and his son right away.’2 Bishops and abbots were not immune to primitive hatred.

The 433 truce within the Church did not last long. The patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria continued to fight for influence, with both leaders of the Alexandrian party displaying a marked recklessness. One was Cyril’s successor Dioskoros (†457), patriarch of Alexandria from 444, and the other was the archimandrite (abbot) Eutyches (378–454) in Constantinople. Eutyches was a fanatical opponent of Nestorius and represented an extreme Monophysitism, in which Christ consisted of a single nature. He also denied that ‘the body of our Lord and God was of the same substance as ours’.1 At the Second Council of Ephesus, in 449, Dioskoros and Eutyches intimidated disagreeable partici- pants or excluded them by violent means. So Dioskoros handed the just deposed bishop of Constantinople, Flavianus, over to the mob, who abused him so severely that he died of his injuries. They also prevented the papal legates from presenting the Christological position paper prepared by Pope Leo, which led Leo to condemn the council as the ‘Robber Synod’. The acts of the synod also reveal the extent to which sentiment was aroused in opposition to Nestorius, who had been deposed 18 years earlier. When the letter of the Antiochene bishop Ibas (†457) was read, those present cried, ‘Nestorius and Ibas should burn together!

The new emperor, Marcian, decided to establish order in the dreadfully estranged Church and summoned a new council, which opened in Chalcedon on 8 October 451 with about 500 participants. For political reasons, the Church of the East was not represented. The council abolished the decisions of the Robber Synod, acquitting the Antiochene bishops condemned there and condemning Dioskoros and Eutyches. It then formulated the Chalcedonian creed, which it based on the Tome of Pope Leo. ‘Christ is acknowledged in two natures which undergo no confusion, no change, no division, no separation; at no point was the difference between the natures taken away through the union, but rather the property of both natures is preserved and comes together into a single person and a single subsistent being; he is not parted or divided into two persons.’3 Although the final clause was clearly directed against Nestorius, the Chalcedonian creed was close to Nestorius’s. The only difference was that the Chalcedonian spoke of the union in the hypostasis – that is, of a single hypostasis – while Nestorius accepted two hypostases and located the union in the prosopon.4 However, the council also confirmed

Cyril’s letters and Nestorius’s condemnation. Put in oversimplified terms, a paradox emerges: Chalcedon nearly confirmed the teachings of Nestorius but condemned his person, while it largely abjured the teachings of Cyril but lauded him as a saint. The Chalcedonian formula has provided until today the basis of the Christology of the Byzantine-Slavic Orthodox as well as the Roman Catholic Churches.5

In the Church of the East the resurrection of Christ, rather than the crucifixion, is emphasized. Mural in the Syrian Orthodox Church of St Mary in Angamali, Kerala, seventeenth century. According to tradition, the church was founded in the fifth or ninth century and was closely tied to the Church of the East. Bishop Abraham, consecrated by the Nestorian patriarch Shimun VIII (in office 1551–1558) for India, reached Angamali after an odyssey of about ten years. After his death in 1597, Archdeacon George of the Cross, whom he had ordained, led the Indian metropolitan see. A Syriac inscription in the Church of St Mary memorializes the archdeacon, who died in 1640.17

Syrians, who love to express themselves in analogies, often use the following circumlocutions for these complex definitions. The Miaphysites compare the nature of Christ to the blending of honey and vinegar into the healing balm oxymel,6 a metaphor the Nestorians strongly rejected on account of the combining of the two natures. Supporters of Chalcedon chose the image of the soul and the body, which make up a single human being.7 This comparison was also unacceptable for the Nestorians, since, when the body suffers, the soul also suffers; but the divine nature of Christ was not affected by the suffering of the body of Jesus. The East Syrians, such as Patriarch Elias II (1111–1134), preferred the image of a ray of light striking a pearl: ‘The light reveals itself in the pearl and the eye of the beholder does not distinguish between them. And, if the pearl cracks, the ray of light remains whole and does not remove itself from the fragments.’8 the third day Jesus Christ rose from the dead as a spiritual body, no longer a human body, for this had in fact died on the cross. The Resurrection was the transformation of the human body into a spiritual body. In other words, the human hypostasis no longer chose an earthly body but rather a spiritual one.’9

This last passage means that the divine nature did not leave the dead body of Jesus in the tomb. The present patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Dinkha IV, explains this as follows: ‘According to our Christology, God did not die on the cross, but rather the human body did. Jesus the man died of free will for the salvation of humanity. This aspect requires as a consequence that we respect the human aspects of Christ. The divine did not suffer on the cross, but stayed united with him, even in the tomb. When Jesus cried, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”, that did not mean that the divine had left the dying man; the cry expressed Jesus’s desperation. On

Although the Chalcedonian creed brought to an end the creative phase of the Christological discussion, the mystery of the nature of Christ remained. The Nestorian theologian Mar Odisho acknowledged this fact in 1298: ‘If we say of God that he is invisible, not composite, immovable, and unchangeable, we describe not what He is but rather what He is not.’10 The fact that the creed of Chalcedon was repeatedly reworked in the West had little to do with theological debates and much more to do with the political power situation in the Byzantine Empire.

Intra-Byzantine debates over belief and their effects on the Church of the East was under serious threat. Since Egypt and Syria were much more important for imperial unity than were the scattered Antiochenes, the pope or the powerless Western Roman emperor – this last was deposed by the barbarian Odoacer in 476 – the emperor decided to accommodate the outraged Miaphysites, even at the price of a schism with Rome. In this spirit, in 482 Emperor Zeno (ruled 474–491) issued a new Christological formula of union, the so-called Henoticon, which again condemned Nestorius and confirmed Cyril’s anathemas instead of the Tome of Pope Leo. The reaction from Pope Felix III was not long in coming; in 484 he excommunicated Zeno and the patriarch of Constantinople, Acacius, who excommunicated him in turn. The schism persisted until 519.

The Council of Chalcedon intended to safeguard the Christian ecumene, but the consequences of its decisions brought about precisely the opposite effect, namely the disintegration of the ecumene into three independent Churches with their own hierarchies. For the Miaphysite party of Alexandria, the Chalcedonian creed was unacceptable because they saw in it – not entirely without justification – a victory for the Antiochene theology and thus for Nestorius. For the Miaphysites, who rejected the extreme monotheism of Eutyches, a single nature resulted in Christ from the union of the divine with the human nature in the Incarnation. They appealed to the Council of Nicea, which had declared that the Father and the Son were of the same substance.

The ones who suffered on account of the Henoticon were the remaining Antiochenes, who were now persecuted by the state and either sought refuge in the neighbouring Sassanian Empire or joined the Melkites. The closing of the School of the Persians in Edessa in 489 banished the Antiochene theology from the empire once and for all, and bolted the doorway to theological communication between East and West. The policy of conciliation towards the Miaphysites also resulted in many dioceses of Syria and Asia Minor being held by Miaphysite bishops. In the larger cities, two bishops – one Melkite and one Miaphysite – were in residence, so that two parallel patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria were created.

The mood in the patriarchate of Alexandria was marked by nationalistic indignation against the domineering capital of Byzantium and increasing rejection of imperial authority. Since the emperor had supported the Chalcedonian position with his powers, popular anger was directed against this as well. Now supporters of the council were derided by the Miaphysites as Melkites – that is, as royalists.11 The anti- Byzantine reflex also occurred in Palestine and Syria; here rejection of the council expressed the Syrian-Oriental opposition to the despised central authority. The fundamental rejection of Byzantine sovereignty was made all too obvious 200 years later, when Egypt and Syria welcomed the Arab conquerors as liberators.

But the political winds changed again with the accession to the throne of Emperor Justin (ruled 518–527), who had as his goal the re- establishment of the unity of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. To this end, he required the support of the pope, so he revoked the Henoticon and recognized the Council of Chalcedon. He sacrificed the Miaphysites to the goal of a resurrected Roman Empire. At Easter 519 he was able to celebrate this new

A first tragic highpoint was reached in 457 in Alexandria, when a rampaging mob murdered the pro-Chalcedonian patriarch Proterios in his church,12 and severe unrest broke out in Egypt and Syria. The emperor recognized the danger that the stability of the Eastern Roman Empire

West facade of the Byzantine basilica of Baqirha, Syria, built in 546. Byzantium tried, through the construction of numerous great basilicas in the patriarchate of Antioch, to reinforce its hegemony, which was threatened by the Miaphysites. ecumene with Rome and end the 35-year schism. The Miaphysites paid the price for the ecumene with the deposing of their patriarch of Antioch, Severus, as well as 55 other bishops. Justin’s nephew and successor, Justinian (ruled 527–565), continued his uncle’s policies and in 533 elevated to law a new Chalcedonian creed, which the synod of 536 correspondingly ratified. At the same time, persecution of the Miaphysites intensified in the years 521–526, 536–543 and 555–567,13 provoking a massive wave of immigration to Sassanian Mesopotamia and plunging the Church of the East there into a serious crisis.14

The synodal decisions of 536 marked a deep break in the history of Christianity. Since the Miaphysites had been deprived of all their bishops, they had to build a new organization, independent of Byzantium. And so there emerged in Egypt the Coptic Church and in Syria the Syrian Orthodox Church, organized secretly by Jacob Baradaeus beginning in 542.15 The renewed ecumene with Rome was bought at the price of the schism with the Miaphysite Churches.

And matters got still worse. In 544 Emperor Justinian undertook a dubious attempt to win back the Miaphysites by means of the edict of the so-called Three Chapters. The Three Chapters encompassed the condemnation of the person and doctrine of Theodore of Mopsuestia, the writings of the Antiochene bishop Theodoret and the letter of Ibas, the last Antiochene bishop of Edessa, to the Pesian Mari. Pope Vigilius agreed to the corresponding conciliar declaration of 553 only under massive pressure from Justinian. With the condemnation of Theodore, the most significant Church Father of the Church of the East, the entire Church of the East was eo ipso condemned as heretical. This condemnation was all the more tragic since the Nestorian patriarch at the time, Mar Aba the Great (540– 552), was working towards reconciliation with

Byzantium and Rome.16 Justinian’s council also accommodated the Miaphysites with regard to the definition of the hypostatic union in Christ, in that it gave the divine nature precedence over the human. In the so-called enhypostasis, the human nature, which is no longer understood as an independent hypostasis but merely as an enhypostasis that does not exist in itself, is incorporated into the divine nature.17

The reaction of the Church of the East against the concept of a composite hypostasis appeared clearly on the occasion of the 585 synod of Patriarch Ishoyahb I (in office 582–596): ‘The heretics [of the council of 553] dared in their foolishness to attribute to the nature and qnoma of his divinity the qualities and sufferings of the humanity of Christ.’18 The posthumous

Central octagonal court of the large, quadruple cruciform basilica of St Simeon in Syria. The Byzantine emperor Zeno (ruled 474–491) opposed both Dyophysites and Miaphysites and, by closing the theological university of Edessa, banished the Church of the East to the Sassanian Empire. He built the church, which in its architectonic concept anticipated the Hagia Sophia of Justinian, in order to appropriate for the imperial Church Simeon the Stylite, who was highly venerated by the local Miaphysite population. The ascetic, who died in 459, spent the last 30 years of his life atop a 16-metre-high column. The monastery quickly became the most important pilgrimage site in Syria and played a significant role in the Christianization of the Arab tribes; Simeon’s column, however, was chiselled down by pilgrims to the stump that remains today. denunciation of the Church Father Theodore of Mopsuestia, considered orthodox during his lifetime, is also problematic in principle. In polemical terms, one might ask: ‘Were Luke and Mark not orthodox, since they were not familiar with the Trinity?’ The lone result of the council of 553 was that a second schism occurred and the first persisted, since the Miaphysites were not impressed by the Three Chapters. And so the Christian ecumene split into three independentChurches: first, the state Church of Rome, Constantinople and Jerusalem, as well as that half of the Syrians of Antioch who subscribed to the creed of Chalcedon; second, the anti-Chalcedonian Churches of the Copts and the Syrian Orthod ox; and, third, the Church of the East, lying to the east of the Euphrates.

According to the majority of interpreters, the breakdown of the Christian ecumene can be explained by two factors. For one, with its elevation to state Church, the Church lost to some degree its independence. Now a certain creed could be accepted not on theological grounds but because it conformed to the ideas of the civil authority. As a consequence of this amalgamation of Church and state, it was inevitable that political opposition directed against the state would eo ipso also turn against the Church and support dissenting religious factions. For another, there arose the tendency to permit only one interpretation of a mystery, such as the nature of Christ, and to condemn representatives of other positions as heretics – the epitome of the spirit of monotheism. If

there is only one God, whom one believes can be precisely defined, then there can be but one truth about him, or else one must speak of several gods or several truths regarding the same facts. History shows that the clergy of mono- theistic religions incline towards allowing only a single, universal definition of ‘their’ god and his message. impressions of it, however, the diamond remains one and the same.

The three-naved basilica of Mushabbaq was built at the same time as the Monastery of St Simeon and likewise served as a pilgrimage site. As at other ancient churches seen by the author in 2002, here vandals have tried, by smashing cornerstones, to knock down entire walls.

The Peshitta Bible, the common tie between the Syrian Churches

The erstwhile Syrian Christian community was now split into three mutually antagonistic Churches. But the common language, Aramaic, offered the foundation for a significant shared possession, the Bible known as the Peshitta.20 After the issuing of Tatian’s Diatessaron around 170 the search for a unifying and binding canon of New Testament writings continued in both East and West.21 Bishop Irenaeus (142–c.200) outlined the kernel of the contents of the Latin Vulgate Bible, confirmed in the West at the Council of Trent in 1546, which consisted of the four Gospels and Pauline epistles, and this was followed shortly, around the year 200, by the

That other approaches are also possible is shown by, for instance, the Mongol Great Khan Möngke (ruled 1251–1259). When, in 1254, the Franciscan Rubruk wanted him to convert to Catholicism, he replied, ‘We Mongols believe that there is only one God, in whom we live and die, and we direct our whole hearts to him. However, just as God has given the hand several fingers, so did he give human beings several ways to attain salvation.’19 The wisdom of this Mongol prince lay in the recognition that a diamond has many facets and that the human eye can perceive only one facet at a time; despite the various

so-called Canon Muratori.22 Then, in his Easter letter of 367, the Church Father Athanasius enumerated those 27 books that define the New Testament portion of the Vulgate. In 384 St Jerome (c.342–420) produced the Latin translation of the Greek texts.23 They included the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, 14 letters attributed to Paul, 7 so-called ‘catholic’ letters and the long-disputed Revelation of John. mentioned in a letter from the bishop of Edessa Aitallaha (in office 324–346), it must have appeared around the first quarter of the fourth century. Despite the rapid spread of the Peshitta, the Vetus Syra remained in use in the Church of the East, especially among monks, for a few centuries.26

East Syrian Gospel book based on the Peshitta, written in Estrangela script, from Khuzistan, Iran, ninth to thirteenth century. The pages shown are from the Gospel of John, chapter 3. The Gospel book contains about 225 leaves, measuring 16.5 x 23 cm, or 450 pages of text. It is a parchment manuscript, with the exception of the first and the last four sets of pages, a total of 40 leaves, which are made of paper and represent a later restoration. The colophon is missing. (National Library of Tabriz, Iran.) 18

The Syrian Peshitta Bible was the counterpart of the Latin Vulgate. Its name means ‘the simple’. It is one of the many revisions of the Vetus Syra and must have appeared before the Council of Ephesus in 431, since it would otherwise be incomprehensible that it served as the norm for both Miaphysites and Nestorians. Today a few fragmentary Peshitta manuscripts from the fifth century are extant as well as another thirty from the sixth century. The oldest Peshitta manuscript is from 459/460 for the Old Testament and 510 for the Gospels. The oldest extant Syriac manuscript, dated to 411, is non-biblical.27 In comparison to the Vulgate, the New Testament of Peshitta is

It is debated which gospel writing was in circulation east of the Euphrates before the Diatessaron. Vööbus and Kawerau cite the Aramaic Gospel of the Hebrews, which displays certain similarities to the Gospel of Matthew,24 while Henneke assigns it to the Jewish Christian circle of Egypt.25 The Diatessaron was followed by the Vetus Syra, written in the Syriac language and Estrangela script, that includes the four Gospels separate from one another. Since its use is evident in the sermons of the Persian Church Father Aphrahat from 337–345, and it is

The church of the Miaphysite Monastery of St Daniel of Deir Breij in northern Syria, late sixth century. Although the Miaphysites were considered heretics by the Byzantine imperial Church, they were also able to head their own monasteries in Syria in the second half of the sixth century. missing the Second Letter of Peter, the Second and Third Letters of John, the Letter of Jude, and Revelation. Thus the New Testament of the Syrian churches numbers 22 books instead of the 27 books of the Vulgate. At the beginning of the sixth century, the Miaphysites undertook the attempt to conform the Peshitta to their requirements. Bishop Philoxenos of Mabbug (c.440–523) ordered the creation of a more polemically formulated Bible, which was, however, never accepted by the Miaphysites and disappeared during the slackening of the Christological controversy in the seventh/ eighth centuries. From another Bible from the Miaphysite bishop Heraclius of Mabbug appearing around 616/ 617, the Acts and Epistles were quickly abandoned, but the Gospels remained popular.28 The Peshitta has remained to this day the bond linking the West and East Syrians together.

Cross on a door lintel of the St Daniel Church of Deir Breij, northern Syria.