To put an end to the debate that so troubled the early Christian church in the west, the Emperor Constantine had called a council at Nicaea in 325, where bishops from across the empire were summoned to resolve rival interpretations about the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, one of the topics that had caused the most friction, and to resolve a host of other competing theories. The council dealt with these by agreeing a structure for the church, by settling the issue of calculating the date of Easter, and by codifying a statement of faith that still holds fast in the Christian church: the creed of Nicaea. Constantine was determined to put an end to division and to underline the importance of unity.29
Bishops from Persia and elsewhere outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire had not been invited to attend Nicaea. Councils held in Persia in 410, and again in 420 and 424, were therefore organised to enable bishops to resolve the same issues that had been looked at by their peers in the west. The impulse to meet and discuss was supported by the Shah, described by one source as the ‘victorious king of kings, on whom the churches rely for peace’, who like Constantine was keen to benefit from the support of the Christian communities rather than have to intervene in their squabbles.’30
The account of what was agreed at the meetings is not entirely reliable, reflecting later power struggles between leading sees and clerics. Nevertheless, important decisions clearly were made regarding the organisation of the church. It was purportedly agreed that the archbishopric of Seleucia-Ctesiphon should act as ‘head and regent over us and all our brother-bishops in the whole of the [Persian] empire’ (albeit against a backdrop of considerable argument and ill-feeling).31 The important question about the mechanics of how clerical appointments were made was discussed at length, with the aim of eliminating double hierarchies in locations that contained competing Christian constituencies. Thought was given to the dates of important religious festivals, while it was also determined that the common practice of appealing to ‘western bishops’ for guidance and intervention should be stopped, as this undermined the leadership of the church in the east.32 Finally, the creed and canons of the Council of Nicaea were accepted, alongside agreements that had been reached at subsequent western synods in the intervening period.33
This should have been a seminal moment, the point where the muscle and brains of the Christian religion engaged properly, creating an institution that linked the Atlantic with the foothills of the Himalayas, with two fully functioning arms – centred on Rome and Persia, the two great empires of late antiquity – working in accord with each other. With imperial patronage in the former, and a growing acceptance by the ruler in the latter, an enviable platform had been laid that could have seen Christianity become the dominant religion not only in Europe but in Asia too. Instead, bitter infighting broke out.
Some bishops who felt undermined by the attempts to harmonise the church accused leading figures not only of not being properly educated, but of not even being properly ordained. Then there were the problems caused by an outbreak of Christian militancy, which saw a series of Zoroastrian fire temples vandalised – which in turn put the Shah in a compromising position and forced him to shift his stance away from religious tolerance towards one that championed the belief system of his aristocracy. It was a major setback. Instead of welcoming a golden age, the church found itself facing a new wave of persecution.34
Fiery clerical disputes were endemic in the early church. Gregory of Nazianzus, an archbishop of Constantinople in the fourth century and one of the finest early Christian scholars, recorded being shouted down by detractors. Rivals screamed at him like a giant flock of crows, he wrote. It felt like being in the middle of a huge sandstorm when they attacked him, or being savaged by animals: ‘they were like a swarm of wasps suddenly flying in one’s face’.35
Nevertheless, the timing of this particular breakdown in the middle of the fifth century was unfortunate. A bitter feud had been brewing for some time between two rival clerics in the west, Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, and Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, over the question of the divine and human nature of Jesus. Debates like this were not necessarily settled by fair means. Cyril was a born politician, ruthless in his methods of winning support for his position, as an extensive schedule of bribes he paid out shows: influential figures, and their wives, were treated to luxury goods like fine carpets, chairs made of ivory, expensive tablecloths and cash.36
Some clerics in the east found the dispute – and the nature of its resolution – bewildering. The problem, as they saw it, lay in the sloppy translation into Greek of the Syriac term describing the incarnation – although the argument was as much about jostling for power between two leading lights in the church hierarchy, and the kudos that came from having one’s doctrinal positions accepted and adopted. The clash came to a head over the status of the Virgin, who in Nestorius’ opinion should be termed not Theotokos (the one who bears God) but Christotokos (the one who bears Christ) – in other words, the human nature of Jesus alone.37
Outflanked and outmanoeuvred by Cyril, Nestorius was deposed, a move that destabilised the church as bishops hastily changed their theological positions one way and then another. Decisions made at one council could be challenged at another, as rival factions lobbied fiercely in the background. Much discussion revolved around the question of whether Jesus Christ had two natures – divine and human – inviolably united in one person and how the two were linked. The precise relationship between Jesus and God was also a matter of intense debate, revolving around the issue of whether the former was the creation of the latter, and therefore subordinate, or a manifestation of the Almighty, and hence co-equal and co-eternal. Responses to the questions were set out forcefully at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, with the articulation of a new definition of faith which was supposed to be accepted throughout the Christian world – and was accompanied with the explicit threat that anyone who did not agree with it was to be expelled from the church.38 The church in the east reacted furiously.
This new teaching of the western church was not just wrong, the eastern bishops argued, but verged on heresy. A reworded creed was therefore issued that set out the distinct and separate natures of Jesus, and threatened damnation for anyone who ‘considers or teaches others that suffering and change have attached to the divinity of our Lord’.39 The Emperor became embroiled in the debate. He closed the school in Edessa which had become the focal point of the Christian east, pumping out texts, saints’ lives and advice not only in Syriac, the Aramaic dialect used in Edessa, but in a range of other languages too such as Persian and Sogdian.40 Unlike in the Mediterranean, where Greek was the language of Christianity, in the east there was a recognition from the outset that if new audiences were to be attracted, there needed to be material available that could be understood by as many different groups as possible.
The closure of the Edessa school deepened the schism between the churches of the west and the east, not least because many scholars were expelled from imperial territory and sought refuge in Persia. Over time, this became increasingly problematic, as emperors based in Constantinople were expected to defend ‘orthodox’ doctrine – and to crack down on teachings deemed deviant and heretical. In 532, when a peace treaty was agreed with Persia following a period of instability and conflict in the Caucasus, one of the key clauses in the agreement was that Persian officials should help track down and take into custody bishops and priests whose views were not in line with the Council of Chalcedon and whose activities were considered dangerous by the Roman authorities.41
Trying to soothe passions between rival religious factions was a thankless task, as the case of the Emperor Justinian shows all too well. Justinian repeatedly tried to get opposing sides to reconcile their views, summoning a major Ecumenical Council in 553 in a bid to draw a line following a period of increasingly bitter recrimination, while also personally attending more low-key meetings of leading clerics to find a way towards a solution.42 An account writte
n after his death shows how his efforts to find common ground were seen by some: ‘after filling absolutely everywhere with confusion and turmoil and collecting the wages for this, at the conclusion to his life, [he] passed over to the lowest places of punishment’ – that is to say, to hell.43 Other emperors took a different approach and, attempting to silence the cacophony and recriminations, simply forbade discussion of religious affairs.44
While the church in the west obsessed about rooting out variant views, the church in the east set about one of the most ambitious and far-reaching missionary programmes in history, one that in terms of scale bears comparison with later evangelism in the Americas and Africa: Christianity expanded rapidly into new regions without the iron fist of political power behind it. A rash of martyrs deep in the southern part of the Arabian peninsula shows how far the religion’s tentacles were spreading, as does the fact that the King of Yemen became Christian.45 A Greek-speaking visitor to Sri Lanka in about 550 found a robust community of Christians, overseen by clergy appointed ‘from Persia’.46
Christianity even reached the nomadic peoples of the steppes, much to the surprise of officials in Constantinople who, when offered hostages as part of a peace agreement, found that some had ‘the symbol of the cross tattooed in black on their foreheads’. Asked how this had happened, they replied that there had been a plague ‘and some Christians among them had suggested doing this [to bring divine protection] and from that time their country had been safe’.47
By the middle of the sixth century there were archbishoprics deep within Asia. Cities including Basra, Mosul and Tikrit had burgeoning Christian populations. The scale of evangelism was such that Kokhe, situated close to Ctesiphon, was served by no fewer than five dependent bishoprics.48 Cities like Merv, Gundesāpūr and even Kashgar, the oasis town that was the entry point to China, had archbishops long before Canterbury did. These were major Christian centres many centuries before the first missionaries reached Poland or Scandinavia. Samarkand and Bukhara (in modern Uzbekistan) were also home to thriving Christian communities a thousand years before Christianity was brought to the Americas.49 Indeed, even in the Middle Ages, there were many more Christians in Asia than there were in Europe.50 After all, Baghdad is closer to Jerusalem than to Athens, while Teheran is nearer the Holy Land than Rome, and Samarkand is closer to it than Paris and London. Christianity’s success in the east has long been forgotten.
Its expansion owed much to the tolerance and deftness of the Sasanian rulers of Persia, who were able to pursue inclusive policies at times when the aristocracy and Zoroastrian priesthood were pacified. Such was the conciliatory way that Khusraw I (531–79) dealt with foreign scholars that he became well known in contemporary Constantinople for being a ‘lover of literature and a profound student of philosophy’, something that had one writer in Constantinople spluttering in disbelief: I find it quite impossible to think, protested the historian Agathias not long afterwards, that he can really have been so brilliant. He spoke in a rough and uncivilised tongue; how could he possibly have understood the nuances of philosophy?51
By the later sixth century, meetings of the church of the east were even beginning with earnest prayers for the health of the Persian ruler. And not long afterwards the Shah could be found organising the election of a new patriarch, urging all the bishops in his realm to ‘come quickly . . . to elect a leader and governor . . . under whose administration and leadership lie every altar and every church of our Lord Jesus Christ in the empire of the Persians’.52 The Sasanian ruler had gone from being the persecutor of Christians in Asia to being their champion.
This was at least in part a result of a growing self-confidence in Persia, fuelled by regular payments of money by the authorities in Constantinople whose military and political priorities shifted to resolving problems elsewhere. With the steppes becalmed and Rome’s attention often focused on stabilising and recovering provinces in the Mediterranean that had fallen, the fifth and sixth centuries were a time of rising prosperity in Persia: religious tolerance went hand in glove with economic growth. Countless new cities were founded across Persia as the central government spent increasing tax revenues on infrastructure.53 Massive irrigation programmes, above all in Khuzistan and Iraq, boosted agricultural production, while water-supply systems were built, or in some cases extended for several miles. An extensive bureaucratic machine ensured smooth administration from the Levant deep into Central Asia.54 This was a period that saw major centralisation of the Sasanian state.55
The level of control went as far as setting out the layout of individual stalls in Persian markets and bazaars. One text records how trades were organised into regulated guilds, and notes that inspectors were on hand to ensure quality controls and assess the takings due to the treasury.56 As wealth grew, so long-distance trade in luxury, high-value items rose too: thousands of seals used to mark packages as approved for sale or for export survive, as does a considerable corpus of written material attesting to contracts being sealed and kept at registry offices in this period.57 Goods were carried from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian, and were taken to and from India by sea and by land. Levels of exchange with Sri Lanka and China rose sharply, as they also did with the eastern Mediterranean.58 All the while, the Sasanian authorities retained a close interest in what was going on within their borders and beyond.
A considerable part of this long-range commerce was handled by Sogdian traders famous for their caravans, financial acumen and close family ties that enabled them to trade goods along the main arteries running across Central Asia into Xinjiang and western China. A remarkable cache of letters discovered by Auriel Stein in a watchtower near Dunhuang at the start of the twentieth century attest to trading patterns and sophisticated credit facilities, as well as to the goods and products that the Sogdians transported and sold. Among the many items they traded were gold and silver ornaments, such as hair clasps and finely crafted vessels, hemp, linen, woollen cloth, saffron, pepper and camphor; but they specialised in trading silk.59 Sogdians were the glue that connected towns, oases and regions together. They played a major role in Chinese silk reaching the eastern Mediterranean, where it was highly prized by the Roman emperors and the elite. Likewise, they brought goods back in the other direction: coins minted in Constantinople have been found across Central Asia, including deep in China itself – as have prestige objects like a silver ewer depicting scenes from the Trojan War that was buried in the mid-sixth century alongside its powerful owner, Li Xian.60
As religions came into contact with each other, they inevitably borrowed from each other. Although it is difficult to trace this accurately, it is striking that the halo became a common visual symbol across Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Christian art, as a link between the earthly and the divine, and as a marker of radiance and illumination that was important in all these faiths. A magnificent monument at Tāq-i Bustān in modern Iran depicts one ruler on horseback, surrounded by winged angels and with a ring of light around his head in a scene that would have been recognisable to followers of any of the great faiths of this region. Likewise, even poses – like the Buddhist vitarka mudra, formed from the right thumb and index finger of one hand touching, often with the other fingers outstretched – were adopted to illustrate connections with the divine, favoured particularly by Christian artists.61
Christianity flowed along trade routes, but its progress did not go unchallenged. The centre of the world had always been noisy, a place where faiths, ideas and religions borrowed from one another – but they also clashed. Competition for spiritual authority became increasingly intense. Such tension had long marked the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, where religious leaders on both sides strove to draw lines between the two: in the case of the former, intermarriage was repeatedly legislated against, while the date of Easter was deliberately moved so as not to coincide with the feast of Passover.62 This was not far enough for some. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople at the turn of the fourth century, urged
that the liturgy should be more exciting, complaining that it was difficult for Christians to compete with the theatricality of the synagogue where drums, lyres, harps and other musical instruments made for entertainment during worship – as did actors and dancers brought in to enliven proceedings.63
Senior Jewish figures, for their part, were no more enthusiastic about receiving new converts. ‘Do not have faith in a proselyte,’ declared one famous rabbi, iyya the Great, ‘until twenty-four generations have passed because the inherent evil is still within him.’ Converts are as irritating and difficult as scabs, noted elbo, another influential rabbi.64 Jewish attitudes to Christianity hardened in Persia as a result of the inroads being made by the latter. This can be seen clearly from the Babylonian Talmud, the collection of texts centred on the rabbinic interpretation of Jewish law. Unlike the Palestinian Talmud, which refers to Jesus lightly and in passing, the Babylonian edition takes a violent and scathing position on Christianity, attacking doctrines, specific events and figures from the Gospels. The Virgin birth, for example, is lampooned and mocked as being as likely as a mule having offspring, while the story of the Resurrection is mercilessly ridiculed. Detailed and sophisticated counter-narratives of Jesus’ life, including parodies of scenes from the New Testament and above all from the Gospel of St John, show how threatening Christian advances had become. There was a systematic effort to assert that Jesus was a false prophet, and that his crucifixion was justifiable – in other words, deflecting blame and responsibility away from the Jews. These violent reactions were an attempt to counter the steady gains that were being made at Judaism’s expense.65
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Page 8