The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers
664
The Making of the Medieval Middle East: Religion, Society, and Simple Believers
664eBook
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Overview
A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story
In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history.
What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East.
This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691184166 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 664 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Theological Speculation and Theological Literacy
However, it was inevitable that in the great number of people overcome by the Word [sc. by Christianity], because there are many more vulgar and illiterate people than those who have been trained in rational thinking, the former class should far outnumber the more intelligent.
— Origen
[Celsus] says that 'some do not even want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe and use such expressions as 'Do not ask questions; just believe'; and 'Thy faith will save thee'. And he affirms that they say: 'The wisdom in the world is an evil, and foolishness a good thing.' My answer to this is that if every man could abandon the business of life and devote his time to philosophy, no other course ought to be followed but this alone. ... However, if this is impossible, since, partly owing to the necessities of life and partly owing to human weakness, very few people are enthusiastic about rational thought, what better way of helping the multitude could be found other than that given to the nations by Jesus?
— Origen
In the period beginning with the controversy between Cyril and Nestorius in 428 and ending with the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, the Christian community of the Middle East splintered into separate and competing churches as a result of disagreements over theological speculation. There was chronic and irresolvable controversy as to how many natures, persons, energies, and wills there were in the Incarnate Christ.
The failure to reach consensus on these issues was not for a lack of trying. Ecumenical councils were called on at least five occasions — in 431, 449, 451, 553, and 680–681 — with vast distances traveled and large sums of money expended in attempts to broker a resolution of sharp theological conflicts. Apart from such spectacular efforts, for centuries Roman emperors attempted in a variety of ways — always ultimately unsuccessful — to get churchmen to come to agreement about the mechanics of how the human and the divine fit together in the person of Christ. Even Sasanian rulers and, later, Muslim Caliphs and authorities, at times could be drawn into Christian doctrinal wrangling. Churches were seized and plundered. Proponents of this view or that were exiled, mutilated, and even killed. The Roman army might be deployed to attempt to enforce doctrinal consent and unity, and on at least one occasion an Umayyad Caliph sent an army to try to do the same. The various distinct churches that emerged in the Middle East as a result of the theological controversies that took place in the period bookended by the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Constantinople III (680–681) identified themselves and their rivals on the basis of their Christological stances. Neither violence nor persuasion proved capable of bringing about resolution and reconciliation. Stubbornly, the issues resisted concord.
In this region, more so than any other, a variety of distinct and competing churches eventually developed: there were Chalcedonians, who accepted the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) and held that Christ was incarnate in two natures. There were Miaphysites, who rejected Chalcedon (but accepted the Second Council of Ephesus [AD 449], which would be rejected by supporters of Chalcedon) and held that he was incarnate in one. The Church of the East, the largest and most important Christian community in the Sasanian Empire and across the expanse of Asia, also held that Christ was incarnate in two natures but would eventually affirm that he was also incarnate in two hypostases as opposed to the Chalcedonian view that he was only incarnate in one hypostasis. Among Chalcedonians, there would be a split in the seventh century between those who believed that Christ had one will and one energy (Monotheletes) and those who held that he had two wills and two energies (Dyotheletes), with the former developing into the Maronite Church and the latter developing into what are called today the Rum Orthodox.
These divisions are only the best known: among Miaphysites, there were as many as twelve different groups, the most prominent being Severan Miaphysites and the Julianist Miaphysites, called such by scholars on account of their most important thinkers, Severus of Antioch (d. 536) and Julian of Halicarnassus (d. ca. 527). The Church of the East never experienced a split like that of the Chalcedonians or the Miaphysites, but the Christological (and other) teachings of Henana of Adiabene in the late sixth and early seventh centuries led to fierce disputes within the church and dealt the School of Nisibis, its premier theological training institution, a severe blow from which it never recovered.
And yet, for all their apparent importance, the intensity of the controversies puzzles modern readers. How could late ancient Christians get so worked up about what seem, to many people today at least, to be rather rarefied metaphysical concepts and concerns? Was believing that Christ had two wills rather than one will worth losing one's hand and one's tongue over, as Maximus the Confessor did? Why, in the late 620s, did the Emperor Heraclius reportedly order that the nose and ears be cut off anyone who did not accept the Council of Chalcedon, an ecclesiastical gathering that had been held nearly three centuries earlier?
The questions become even more pressing if we think about the population of the late antique and early medieval Middle East and eastern Mediterranean. It was overwhelmingly agrarian with higher-level religious instruction and sophisticated theological literature likely not in great supply (or any supply) in most areas. Though scholars have typically focused on works written by learned churchmen, Christian communities included everything from mountain tribes to suburban peasants, most of whom would not have had access to the training or the books needed to understand the debates that separated the churches to which they ostensibly belonged. What did most Christians make of these disputes? Did the society of the late antique Middle East resemble something like an advanced seminar in patristic theology and Christology run amok?
THE QUESTION OF LITERACY
The question of literacy complicates things further. To be sure, measuring literacy, however understood, in the ancient world is a notoriously tricky business, and in the end all attempts at measurement must remain little more than conjectures based on anecdotes and an evidentiary foundation that is, to put it generously, incomplete and fragmentary. But scholars have found the urge to estimate, even on wobbly bases, irresistible. One famous study suggested the upper limits of literacy in the western provinces of the Roman world in the late Republic and the later Roman period at between 5 and 10 percent. Another estimate of literacy among Christians in the first several centuries AD suggested that no more than 10 percent were able to 'read, criticize, and interpret' Christian literature in this time.
Looking at the Middle East in more recent periods provides additional suggestive numbers. Adult literacy in Egypt may have been 1% in 1830 and may have risen to 3% by 1850 as a result of the educational reforms of Mu?ammad 'Ali. In the early twentieth century, 25% of Muslim men and at most 5% of Muslim women were literate in Syrian Tripoli, despite decades of Ottoman attempts at improving education. The village of Qilqilya had a literacy rate of 10% in 1915, and in 1931 a British survey found that only 20% of the male population of Palestine was literate, even after 10 years of attempts at improving education in the Mandate. There are ways, of course, of complicating such figures, but even optimistic assessments — whether based on educated conjecture about what the ancient world may have been like or on the grounds of more recent evidence from the region — leave literacy rates in our world depressingly low, even if some will nevertheless classify it as a 'literate society.' In the fifth-century Teaching of Addai, in fact, universal literacy was seen as something that would only be realized in the eschaton. 'At that time,' Addai the Apostle is reported to have preached to the nobles and people of Edessa and its environs:
Their manner of life will be represented in their own persons and their bodies will become parchment skins for the books of justice. There will be no one there who cannot read, because in that day everyone will read the writings of his own book. He will hold a reckoning of his deeds in the fingers of his hands. Moreover, the unlearned (hedyo?e) will know the new writing of the new language. No one will say to his companion, 'read this for me,' because teaching and instruction will rule over all people.
But late Roman Christians were not living in the Last Day, and our picture is further complicated if we pause to ask where it was that that they did actually live. Scholars have debated the nature of the audience for late antique homilies and the ability of these audiences to understand the content of sermons, but we should never forget that most late antique Christians did not live in cities — they lived in rural areas. And however low urban literacy would have been, rural literacy rates were likely even lower. What is more, literacy rates among women, who would have been a significant percentage of the Christian population, will almost certainly have been lower than those of men.
The lack of learning outside the cities would have had consequences for the nature, quality, and availability of Christian teaching in nonurban areas. When we use homilies to understand late ancient Christianity, we also often forget that they were an 'urban phenomenon,' while the world we are dealing with was primarily rural. Those who live in the cities, John Chrysostom wrote, enjoy constant teaching, but those who live in the countryside do not benefit from such bounty: 'They do not hear the tongue of teachers regularly.' Chrysostom would even rebuke landowners for providing a variety of buildings for the villages and estates they owned — baths and markets, for instance — but building no churches on them. To be sure, there was preaching to be found in the countryside — in North Africa, Augustine preached in both rural areas and urban contexts, as did other urban bishops, as well as rural bishops and apparently even rural clergy — but instruction in rural areas cannot have been of the same standard, quantity, or quality as that available in urban centers. The practice of preachers reading out or reusing edited versions of sermons written by their bishops or by some great authority also points to situations where clergy needed help in fulfilling teaching expectations or lacked confidence in their own knowledge.
Another complication arises from the very basic problem ecclesiastical leaders faced of simply making sure each church had a priest. Among the canons attributed to Marutha of Maipherqat and claiming to have their origin at the East Syrian Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon of 410, are a series that describes the duties of the chorepiscopus. The job of these rural bishops included circulating through the countryside and visiting churches and monasteries, as well as appointing qualified visitors who would look after these same churches and monasteries. One of their responsibilities was to make sure that there were clergy supplied everywhere they were needed. 'Let him see,' one canon instructed,
if perhaps there are villages that are lacking and in need of priests. Let him work in them and not leave the villages to conduct themselves according to disgraceful customs. There are villages in which there are no Sons of the Covenant [i.e., ascetics] from whom they can make priests, [so] let him bring brothers out from the monasteries or the churches under his authority and make [them priests]. Let him not leave churches or monasteries without priests so that the altars are not treated shamefully and the holy sanctuaries do not remain without a service and especially so that they do not have Christians in name but [who] in deeds are like pagans because they do not have pastors.
If the chorepiscopus found, in the course of his visitation, that the churches and monasteries of a certain place were lacking monks and nuns, one of his assigned tasks was to persuade parents to set some of their sons and daughters aside as 'children of the covenant' (bnay qyama). These were to be dedicated to churches and monasteries and educated in doctrine and instruction so that 'at their hands, the churches and monasteries will be strengthened.'
But finding properly trained clergy in rural areas was no doubt a challenge: also, in the fifth century, Rabbula of Edessa forbade periodeutes (the rural representatives of bishops) from advancing to the priesthood 'a man of ill fame, [or] those who are under the yoke of slavery and have not been liberated.' The Canons of Marutha forbade villagers from selecting 'whomever they want to be priest for themselves.' Another canon attributed to Marutha stipulated that 'churches of cities' should not lack female monastics. No such requirement was made, however, for churches outside of cities. Indeed, shortfalls in the supply and quality of clergy in rural churches would be a constant problem: centuries later, the Nomocanon of the medieval East Syrian bishop 'Abdisho' bar Brikha (d. 1318) suggested that church leaders expected different abilities from a person who was a deacon in a city and a person who was a deacon in a village. If a person did not have a knowledge of the Scriptures, 'Abidsho' wrote — specifying by this the lectionary readings, the New Testament (?datta), and the letters of Paul — he could not be appointed a deacon in a city. But if necessity required it, a person could be appointed deacon in a village merely because he was able to recite the Psalms.
The consequences of poor religious instruction in rural areas can be seen in Augustine's work On Catechizing the Uninstructed, in which he discussed how a teacher should take into account the makeup of his audience when giving instruction: The nature of one's listeners, Augustine noted, determined the manner in which one should speak as a teacher. 'It likewise makes a great difference,' he wrote,
... whether there are few present or many; whether learned or unlearned, or a mixed audience made up of both classes; whether they are townsfolk or countryfolk, or both together; or a gathering in which all sorts and conditions of men are represented.
The evidence of Augustine's sermons themselves indicates that he followed his own advice: careful study suggests that he typically pitched his messages to a wealthier, propertied audience, but on special feast days, when there would have been a broader swath of society present, he may have modified his way of speaking. In the handful of his surviving rural sermons, in fact, we can see Augustine employing language and metaphors that would be especially suitable for an agrarian audience.
Even if we were to assume that there were well-trained, highly literate and informed clergy in urban and rural areas alike throughout the Middle East, we would nevertheless have to consider the question of whether people actually went to church and what, if anything, they got out of their attendance. But levels of church attendance in our period are impossible to gauge. And, if we suppose they were high, frequent complaints about congregants' misbehavior — doing everything from making business transactions, to talking during the service, to gawking at women, to shoving and kicking as they lined up to take the Eucharist — should give us pause before assuming any kind of correlation between church attendance and levels of Christian knowledge or seriousness of engagement with Christianity.
The social ramifications of disagreement over theological speculation are therefore amplified by several factors — the rural and agrarian nature of much of the Christian population of the Roman world, the character and (non-) availability of clergy, and the question of literacy. What is more, the sort of literacy I am interested in is not the ability to slowly scrawl one's name at the bottom of a papyrus legal document: I am interested in theological literacy and the ability of ordinary, everyday believers and nonspecialists to understand the Christological issues that led to the formation of separate and distinct Christian churches. However we want to define literacy and whatever percentage of late Roman society we want to say was literate, the level of theological literacy will have been much lower.
LITERACY AND THEOLOGICAL LITERACY
Here it is important to make several further distinctions: a person could have been deeply acquainted with traditional paideia, having an ability to read and write more than one language, and yet still lack awareness of the contents of the Christian tradition. Such a person could have been very literate and yet, theologically, at least in terms of Christian theology, illiterate. Gregory the Elder, the father of Gregory Nazianzen is a case in point. Not long after his conversion to Christianity, he was made a priest. According to his son's funeral oration, it was only after becoming a priest that Gregory began to study the scriptures seriously: 'though a late student of such matters,' Gregory Nazianzen stated, [his father] 'gathered together so much wisdom within a short time that he was in no wise excelled by those who had spent the greatest toil upon them.' Being made bishop with such little background in Christian ministry was not necessarily an exceptional event: the New Testament in fact had warned against making recent converts into bishops (1 Timothy 3:6), and the Council of Nicaea sought to stop the practice of elevating those who had only just been baptized to the priesthood or the episcopacy. We nonetheless know the names of a number of bishops who were elevated to the episcopacy very shortly after their baptism, or even while still catechumens. In other cases, people who sought ordination in order to obtain some sort of financial or personal gain undoubtedly will have come to their position of authority without a great knowledge of the Christian tradition. Such were the priests whom Gregory Nazianzen derisively referred to as those 'who only begin to study religion when appointed to teach it.'
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Maps xi
Preface xiii
Introduction 1
Part I Simple Belief
Chapter 1 Theological Speculation and Theological Literacy 11
Chapter 2 The Simple and the Learned 46
Part II Consequences of Chalcedon
Chapter 3 'Confusion in the Land' 85
Chapter 4 Contested Truths 111
Chapter 5 Power in Heaven and on Earth 134
Chapter 6 Competition, Schools, and Qenneshre 160
Chapter 7 Education and Community Formation 181
Interlude: The Question of Continuity
Chapter 8 Continuities-Personal and Institutional 201
Part III Christians and Muslims
Chapter 9 A House with Many Mansions 225
Chapter 10 A Religion with a Thousand Faces 260
Chapter 11 Joining (and Leaving) a Muslim Minority 310
Chapter 12 Conversion and the Simple-The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same 353
Chapter 13 Finding Their Way-The Mosque in the Shadow of the Church 400
Part IV The Making of the Medieval Middle East
Chapter 14 Rubbing Shoulders-A Shared World 431
Conclusion: Dark Matter and the History of the Middle East 491
Appendix I Approaching the Sources 505
Appendix II The Arab' Conquests 525
Abbreviations 537
Works Cited 541
Manuscripts Cited 541
Primary Sources I In Manuscript 541
Primary Sources II Texts and Translations 543
Primary Sources III Collections and Other 569
Secondary Sources 572
Permissions 621
Index 623
What People are Saying About This
“In this strikingly original book, Jack Tannous has delivered a frontal assault on traditional assumptions about early Islam. His absorbing and persuasive exercise in microhistory focuses on the lived experience of ordinary people and presents us with a continuing Christian Middle East until at least the eleventh century.”—Averil Cameron, University of Oxford “This is a marvelous book, dizzying in its detail, dazzling in its discipline. Tannous sees through the eyes not of intellectuals and professional theologians but of the vast mass of believers, whether Christian or Muslim. Meticulous, generous, evocative, and persuasive, The Making of the Medieval Middle East paints a neglected world in full color.”—Margaret Mullett, professor emerita, Queen’s University Belfast“This is undoubtedly a work of major importance. By shifting the focus from intellectual elites to everyday Christian believers, Tannous provides a more illuminating understanding of the gradual transition to the majority Islamic world of the medieval Middle East.”—Sebastian Brock, author of An Introduction to Syriac Studies“The Making of the Medieval Middle East is no less than a marvelous achievement—there isn’t a stone Tannous has left unturned in his path of inquiry. Future scholars will have to reconsider their methods and theses in light of this bold and exceptional book.”—Uriel I. Simonsohn, author of A Common Justice: The Legal Allegiances of Christians and Jews under Early Islam“Tannous draws on a rich and fascinating selection of primary source material to paint a fresh picture of the early medieval Middle East.”—Robert G. Hoyland, author of In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire“This book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand the world the Arabs found in the seventh century and how they interacted with the Christian majority. Tannous brilliantly weaves complex religious and social questions to shed an entirely new light on a period that is still pivotal for us today.”—Muriel Debié, École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL