A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

What was nevertheless now apparent was that the Catholic Church had become an imperial Church, its fortunes linked to those of emperors who commanded armies, to sustain or extend their power in the ways that armies do. That had implications for Christians who lived beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire in territories where they or their ruler might regard the empire as an enemy. They might well also feel that about the imperial Church.

Here, then, was Arius’s Christ: inferior or subordinate to the Father (as indeed Origen and other earlier writers had been inclined to say), and created by the Father out of nothing. In many respects, Arius was the heir of Origen and should be thought of as among theologians of Alexandrian outlook.

The entanglement of politics, popular passion and theology is even more painfully apparent in a new set of disputes which go under the name of the Miaphysite or Monophysite controversy. In these, the focus of theological debate shifted away from the relationship of Son to Father, as in Arianism, or of Spirit to the Trinity as a whole, as in the views of the Pneumatomachi. Now the argument was about the way in which Christ combined both human and divine natures

in 451 the new regime with Marcian as emperor called a council to a city where the imperial troops could keep an eye on what was going on: Chalcedon, near Constantinople. The main concern at Chalcedon was to persuade as many people as possible to accept a middle-of-the-road settlement. The council accepted as orthodoxy the ‘Tome’ presented to Ephesus by Pope Leo’s envoys two years before, and it constructed a carefully balanced definition of how to view the mystery of Christ: ‘the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and a body; consubstantial with the Father as regards his divinity, and the same consubstantial with us as regards his humanity

All this was thanks to the large number of Eastern Christians who hated the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon and decided to ignore or oppose them. It took a long time for those who felt like this to make a formal break with the Church authorities who had accepted the council’s pronouncements.

A mob who regarded him as a traitor to Dioscorus pursued him into the baptistery of a city church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the mia physis of Jesus Christ.3 The emperor’s authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident: increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as ‘Dyophysites’ and sneered at them as ‘the emperor’s people’ – Melchites.4 The word ‘Melchite’ has had a complicated later history, and now various Churches of Orthodox tradition in communion with the pope in Rome are happy to use it to label themselves, but it thus started life as a term of abuse as poisonous as ‘collaborator’ in the aftermath of Nazi occupation in the Europe of the 1940s. From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic.

For two centuries and more a succession of emperors

would reconcile the Miaphysites to the imperial Church, preferably but not necessarily preserving the essence of the Chalcedonian settlement. In doing so, they constantly imperilled their relations with the Western Latin Church.

The Empress’s protégés even began spreading Miaphysite Christianity beyond the formal boundaries of the empire. To the south of Egypt, the King of Nobatia (a northern kingdom of Nubia) was converted in the 540s, turning what had previously been a small cult into a Court religion. Christianity eventually spread eastwards through much of what is now Sudan, halfway to the Niger as far as Darfur, and remnants of it survived in one Nubian kingdom into the eighteenth century. Archaeology has revealed the ruins of superb churches, some of which have preserved extensive remains of wall paintings in a tradition created over several centuries depicting biblical scenes, saints or leading bishops.10 Like the Copts, Nubian Christians achieved a blend of Greek culture with their own, using both Greek and their vernacular in their worship.

A further triumph for the Miaphysites came on the eastern border of the empire in Syria, where an Arab people known as the Ghassānids had migrated from the south of the Arabian peninsula and set up a formidable independent kingdom. This stretched all the way from southern Syria along the borders of the Holy Land to the Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) at the north-eastern end of the Red Sea, and its military strength made it a crucial buffer state for Byzantium against the Sassanians, though the relationship was troubled and often fractured, because the Ghassānids, on their initial conversion to Christianity, set their faces firmly against the decrees of Chalcedon.

By contrast, the Armenians specifically declared themselves against Chalcedon in the sixth century and have never been reconciled to its formulae since.

There is no good reason to doubt the story that it was also Ezana who made contact with the Church in Alexandria, asking no less a divine than Bishop Athanasius to supply his people with a bishop. Thus from a very early date comes that peculiar Ethiopian arrangement which persisted for sixteen hundred years, as late as 1951: the presiding bishop (abun) in the Church of Ethiopia was never a native Ethiopian, but an import from the Coptic Church hundreds of miles to the north, and there was rarely any other bishop present in the whole country.

Around these leaders are still numerous hereditary dynasties of non-monastic clergy who, over the centuries, might swarm in their thousands to seek ordination on the abun‘s rare visits to their area. The education of these priests, deacons and cantors might not extend far beyond a detailed knowledge of how to perform the liturgy, but that was a formidable intellectual acquisition in itself. They were ordinary folk who thus shaped their religion into that of a whole people rather than simply the property of a royal elite.

It was not surprising that during the controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, this Church, which derived its fragile link to the wider episcopal succession via Alexandria, followed the Egyptian Church into the Miaphysite camp. One of the concepts which remain central in Ethiopian theology is täwahedo, ‘union’ of humanity and divinity in the Saviour who took flesh. Nevertheless, despite the crucial role of the abun, the Ethiopian Church did not become Coptic in character. Far more all-pervasive were its links with the Semitic world, already evident before the coming of Christianity in Ethiopian language and even place names in the coastal regions of Tigray and Eritrea.30 It was one of those Semitic languages, Ge’ez, which became the liturgical and theological language of the Ethiopian Church, and remains so, even though it is not otherwise in current use.

The arrival of Miaphysite faith is also connected to the Semitic world, because in legend it is associated with ‘Nine Saints’ of mostly Syriac background, who are said to have arrived as refugees from Chalcedonian persecution in the late fifth century and to have been instrumental in establishing the Ethiopian monastic system.

Ethiopia’s Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity. This is reminiscent of the distinctively close relationship with Judaism in early Syriac Christianity (see pp. 178–9), but over a much longer period the character has become much more pronounced in Ethiopia. This may not originally have arisen so much from direct contacts with Jews as from Ethiopian pride in that foundation episode in the Book of Acts, in which Christianity’s Jewish heritage already lies at the heart of the story of Philip and the eunuch. Meditation on this during the passing of centuries in the isolation of Africa has made that seed grow into a major theme in a Church which honours the Jewish Sabbath, practises circumcision (female as well as male, unlike the Jews), and makes its members obey Jewish dietary laws. External sources as early as the thirteenth century record the Church as treasuring an object which was claimed to be the Ark of the Covenant once housed in the Temple in Jerusalem. The report that the Ark was decorated with crosses does present problems for this provenance, given that, if genuine, it had been constructed a millenn...

What was significant about this dual character of Christian activity in Arabia was how little Arabian Christians were inclined to identify with the imperial Church of Chalcedon: they set their sights on Semitic versions of the faith. The trade routes to Syria, southwards to Arabia and the Red Sea, which Ghassānid power kept open and secure, brought Syrian theology and worship into the peninsula. One paradoxical trace of that is the presence of a substantial number of Syriac loanwords in the text of Arabian Christianity’s nemesis, the Qur’an; these probably derive from Muhammad’s knowledge of Jewish and Christian sacred texts in that language.

During the fourth and fifth centuries the east Syrians reached out beyond the Sassanian Empire and established Christian outposts among the peoples of Central Asia, and over the next centuries they moved steadily onwards in their activities, which means that in such unexpected places as the mountains and plains around Samarqand, so long the territory of Islam, it is possible to have the shock of encountering the sight of carved medieval crosses or inscriptions in Syriac.41 One of the Syrians’ earliest extensions of the Christian faith was to India.

By the fourth century there was a sufficiently organized Church in the Malabar Coast in south-west India (what is now Kerala) that arrangements were made to put it under the authority of the bishop in one of the main trading ports in the Sassanian Empire, Rew Ardashir (now Bushehr on the Persian Gulf).

One of the most remarkable contacts may have been with ninth-century England, where several versions of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle report that a prominent Anglo-Saxon courtier called Sigehelm was sent by the great King Alfred of Wessex on a pilgrimage to the tomb of St Thomas in India.

The new reign proved to be brief, as Shah Kavad died only a few months after his coup, but significant goodwill gestures to Christians and their advance into the centre of action in the empire continued. Kavad had quickly ordered that a new Catholicos should be chosen for the Church, ending a hiatus of twenty years in which Shah Khusrau had prevented the office being filled. The man singled out, Ishoyahb II, proved an outstanding diplomat of wide vision who gave official encouragement to those taking Christianity into China. He sent a delegation to the Chinese Tang emperor led by a bishop whom the Chinese called Alopen. Alopen was well received on his arrival in 635. The occasion was long remembered and celebrated by Chinese Christians, for it led to the foundation of the first of several monasteries in China, with official encouragement, and in no less a setting than the then Chinese imperial capital, Chang’an (now Xi’an).

The arrival of the Muslims proved terminal for the Sassanians. Within a decade in the 640s, the three-centuries-old empire was in ruins. Yazdgerd III, last ruling Sassanian shah, defeated and murdered, was buried not with Zoroastrian rites but by a bishop of the Church of the East; his son and heir fled all the way to China. There he was treated with respect, and one of his acts was to found the second monastery for Dyophysite Christianity to be sited in the capital, Chang’an.53 Yet this royal favour had all come all too late for the Church of the East. Now Christianity everywhere faced the consequences of the new prophecy from Arabia – consequences which are still unravelling in our own time.

By contrast, there is one silence in the Qur’an which is startling once it is noticed: the name of Paul of Tarsus. Such naming and silence may have been the emphases of the Jewish ‘Ebionite’ Christians long before (see p. 107); and that provokes interesting reflection.

The Dome of the Rock bears the earliest datable set of texts from the Qur’an, including the famous rebuke to those who worship the Trinity, and it exhibits the earliest datable use of the word ‘Muslim’. Even though it reversed Christian mistreatment of the Temple, it was probably built by Christian craftsmen, and its architectural forms are derived from those of Byzantium.12 Really this was logical. What the Dome of the Rock proclaimed was the arrival of a new empire which would replace the surviving Christian empire of the Byzantines; the city of Constantinople was now the goal of what seemed an unstoppable programme of conquest.

The two Christian victories at Constantinople and in France between them preserved a Europe in which Christianity remained dominant, and as a result the centre of energy and unfettered development and change in the Christian world decisively shifted west from its old Eastern centres. By contrast, a crushing Islamic victory over Chinese armies in what is now Kyrgyzstan in 751 laid open Central Asia to Islam, bringing eventual ruin to the Church of the East.

It was natural that many Christians should assume that the Arab conquests signalled the end of the world, and there was much excited writing to that effect, but, as has so far proved the case in Christian history, apocalypse was postponed and everyday life took over.

Most famous of these translators was the ninth-century Christian Court physician Hunayn ibn ‘Ishāq, director of the caliphate’s library and nicknamed ‘prince of translators’. It was these texts, translated yet again into Latin, which were the source of the reimport of swathes of lost Classical knowledge into Latin Europe in later centuries.

The scale of this feverish acquisition of knowledge, the huge size of Islamic libraries compared with collections in the Christian West and the general sophistication of Abbasid administration were such that, from the eighth century, the mass of texts encouraged a new copying technology imported from China along the trade routes which the Eastern Christians dominated: instead of papyrus or expensive parchment, cloth rags were transformed into paper, durable and comparatively easy to make and cheap as a writing material to cope with the demand.24

Patriarch Timothy is known to have consecrated a bishop for Tibet, at a time when its Buddhist identity was still in flux, and he could look much further east than that, to the Christian Church which had flourished there for more than a century.

Taoism, after all, had a vision of the original goodness of human nature which was congenial to Dyophysites emphasizing the whole humanity of Christ’s separate human nature alongside his divinity.

This was a moment when the immense conquests of Genghis and his successors might have promoted an official Dyophysite Christianity throughout Asia from the Black Sea to the China Sea. During the thirteenth century, the Turkic people in Inner Mongolia known as the Önggüds mostly became Christian, including their royal family, and they remained so for more than a century. As a result of Genghis’s carefully planned set of alliances with Christian Kerait Mongol princesses, a series of Great Khans had Christian mothers, including Kublai Khan, who in the years up to 1279 fought his way to become the first Yuan emperor of China.

By the time that a new wave of Western Latin Christians arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century, Christian faith and practice had once more virtually disappeared – at least in public. What has become evident in recent years in the countryside beyond the former imperial capital Xi’an, around that extraordinary survival the Ta Qin monastery pagoda, is the likelihood that a consciousness of the Christian tradition and even a Christianity disguised as Taoism did persist. After the Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this small area became and remains a stronghold of rural Chinese Catholicism, Catholic parish churches now peppering the skyline as they might do in southern Europe. Maybe this was not the only place in China which was home to such a survival. Maybe secret Christians remained to welcome the first Western missionaries, as they did in later centuries after later persecutions, and there are many remarkable possibilities still to be investigated in the history of Chinese Christianity.33

The Mongols’ conquests turned west as well. They finally shattered the power of the already declining Abbasid dynasty; their leader in this was Il-Khan (‘Subordinate Khan’) Hülagü, whose principal wife belonged to the Church of the East. That was a happy circumstance for the Christians of Baghdad, who were the only community whom the Mongols spared massacre when the city fell in 1258; indeed the Mongols gave the Catholicos one of the caliphs’ palaces in which to establish his headquarters and cathedral complex.

One result was the erection in the 1290s of a Gothic-style cathedral of the Western Latin rite in the improbable setting of Inner Mongolia, where its foundations have been excavated at the site of the city of Olon Sume. The Franciscan friar responsible travelled on to China, where he spent most of his time pestering Dyophysite Christians to become Chalcedonians.37 By that time, optimism on either side was running out.

Timur’s orgies of destruction hit Christian populations in Central Asia which had already been terribly reduced by the advance of the plague which western Europe would come to know in 1348–9 as the Black Death. From now on, outside the comparative safety of India, the story of the Church of the East recedes to the efforts by disparate enclaves to cling on to existence in the face of Islamic dominance, usually in remote upland areas out of sight of the authorities.

The Miaphysite Church of Armenia suffered like the Dyophysites from the calamities of the fourteenth century. The last independent Armenian kingdom, in Cilicia in south-west Turkey, fell to Mamluk forces in 1375 and more than two centuries of struggle for Christian survival followed.

There was a great sensation in Europe when a delegation of two monks from the Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem arrived in 1441 at the Pope’s council at Florence (see pp. 492–3) and uttered the name of their far-distant monarch – this was the same council which also received representations from the beleaguered Copts.

Nevertheless, in cold practical results, Prester John turned out to be a disappointing myth, and what it chiefly revealed was just how little Western Chalcedonian Christians knew about centuries of Christian struggle, scholarship, sanctity and heroism in another world. Western Christianity, heir to Chalcedon, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still has a long way to go before the balance is fully righted.

Augustine of Hippo, whom we will meet as the prime theologian of this new era in the Western Church, made an adroit appeal to aristocratic psychology in one of his sermons when he said that the poor who benefited could act as heavenly porters to the wealthy, using their gratitude to carry spiritual riches for their benefactors into the next life.

Augustine was a Latin-speaking theologian who had little interest in Greek literature, only came to the Greek language late in life, read virtually nothing of Plato or Aristotle, and had very little influence on the Greek Church, which in fact came to look with profound disapproval on one aspect of his theological legacy, a modification of the Nicene Creed (see pp. 310–11).28 By contrast, his impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated; only his beloved example, Paul of Tarsus, has been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine’s eyes.

What was the source of evil and suffering in this world? This was the ancient religious question which the gnostics had tried to answer by picturing existence as an eternally dualistic struggle, and it was the gnostic religion of Augustine’s day, Manichaeism, which first won his allegiance and held it for nine years. Yet increasingly he was dissatisfied by Manichaean belief, and as he pursued academic success in Rome and Milan he was haunted by doubts and anxieties about the nature of truth, reality and wisdom. As he ceased to find Manichaeism of use, he turned to Neoplatonist belief, but in Milan he also became fascinated by Bishop Ambrose.

When, in later years, Augustine came to discuss the concept of original sin, that fatal flaw which in his theology all humans have inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve, he saw it as inseparable from the sexual act, which transmits sin from one generation to another. It was a view momentous in its consequences for the Western Church’s attitude to sexuality.

By 412 Augustine had lost patience and he backed harsh new government measures against the Donatists. He even provided theological reasons for the repression: he pointed out to one of his Donatist friends that Jesus had told a parable in which a host had filled up places at his banquet with an order, ‘Compel them to come in’.37 That meant that a Christian government had the duty to support the Church by punishing heresy and schism, and the unwilling adherence which this produced might be the start of a living faith.

Naturally, traditionalists in religion were inclined to say that Rome’s flirtation with the Christian Church was at the root of the problem, but even Christians could not understand how a heretical Arian like the Goth Alaric had been allowed to plunder Catholic Rome.

For Augustine, evil is simply non-existence, ‘the loss of good’, since God and no other has given everything existence; all sin is a deliberate falling away from God towards nothingness, though to understand why this should happen is ‘like trying to see darkness or hear silence’.38 It was understandable that the ex-Manichee should thus distance himself from the notion previously at the centre of his belief, that evil was a positive force constantly struggling for mastery with the force of light, but as a definition of evil it has often been criticized.

Augustine and other like-minded contemporaries followed thoughts of Tertullian two centuries before and talked of humankind being wholly soiled by a guilt inherited from Adam which they termed ‘original sin’. This likewise seemed to Pelagius to provide a false excuse for Christians passively to avoid making any moral effort.

As the controversy developed, Pelagius’s followers pushed the implications of this further, to insist that although Adam sinned, this sin did not transmit itself through every generation as original sin, but was merely a bad example, which we can ignore if we choose. We can choose to turn to God. We have free will. Pelagius’s views have often been presented as rather amiable, in contrast to the fierce pessimism in Augustine’s view of our fallen state. This misses the point that Pelagius was a stern Puritan, whose teaching placed a terrifying responsibility on the shoulders of every human being to act according to the highest standards demanded by God.

Eventually he could say not simply that all human impulses to do good are a result of God’s grace, but that it is an entirely arbitrary decision on the part of God as to who receives this grace. God has made the decision before all time, so some are foreordained to be saved through grace – a predestined group of the elect. The arbitrariness is fully justified by the monstrousness of Adam’s original fall, in which we all have a part through original sin:

Eastern theologians, so influenced by the Eastern monastic tradition of spiritual endeavour which encompasses both Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, have never found Augustine’s approach to grace congenial.

Augustine himself died in 430 during a siege of his beloved Hippo by the Arian Vandals, who captured all North Africa and bitterly persecuted the Catholic Church there for sixty years.