When debating a technical liturgical question, he drew support from the practice of the wider churches of the sprawling Christian world he knew: the Persians and Assyrians don’t do this, he argued, and nor do the churches of “the countries of the sunrise—that is to say, among the Indians, the Chinese, the Tibetans, the Turks.” The church operated in multiple languages: in Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, and Chinese, but not Latin, which scarcely mattered outside western Europe.11
