Following eastern Syria’s growing integration with the empire to its west, the late fourth century saw the birth of additional politicized theological controversies that would eventually etch a new fault-line between eastern Syria and the politically dominant forces of the early Byzantine Empire. Seventh-century military invasions from Persia and then from the Arabian Peninsula formalized this growing divide by severing Syria politically from the remainder of the Byzantine Empire. Thus, Late Antiquity begins and ends for Syria with a distinct political separation from the Greek-speaking empire to its west. Nonetheless, the intervening period itself is one in which Syria was deeply engaged with this empire, and to erase these centuries of connection or to fail to distinguish the different contours of its seventh-century separation from that of the third century would be to misrepresent radically the history of Syria as well as the history of the Roman Empire. Later Syriac Christian history can be understood only in conversation with Roman-Byzantine history. While late antique Syria was by no means exclusively Christian, and religious interactions are not the only components of Syrian history, the politics and society of Late Antiquity are radically intertwined with the history of Christianity, and a brief investigation of some of the empire’s theological politics, brought to a head first at Ephesus and then at Chalcedon, offers an opportunity to demonstrate Syria’s significant role in this history.
1 The Council of Ephesus and Syriac Christianity
The connection with imperial orthodoxy so persistently stressed in Ephrem’s Syriac rhetoric was continued in the voice of Rabbula, bishop of Edessa (ad 411-35). By Rabbula’s time, the controversy between pro-Nicene and Homoian theologies had waned, and attention had quickly centered on the arguments between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius, the deposed bishop of Constantinople, over the theological implications of calling Mary theotokos (the God-bearer). Nestorius’ rejection of this term for Mary was grounded in his conviction that she could bear only the human and not the divine aspect of the Son. Nestorius was condemned at the ecumenical Council of Ephesus in ad 431, but the controversy was far from settled. Although the theology of the Greek-speaking Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. ad 428), formulated before the Council of Ephesus, differed from that of Nestorius, both emphasized the distinction of the human and divine aspects of the Son. That similarity allowed Rabbula, a strong supporter of Cyril’s teachings and of the imperial orthodoxy of ad 431, to conflate the theologies of Nestorius and Theodore, thus condemning the latter after his death by association with the officially condemned Nestorius. Under Rabbula’s influence, Syriac Christianity became sharply divided between those who followed Theodore’s teachings and those who, like Rabbula, followed the Council of Ephesus in supporting Cyril. As under Ephrem, many Syriac Christians under Rabbula thus had a strong connection with imperial orthodoxy. Even though this association would not remain dominant in the coming decades, the fifth-century schism within Syriac Christianity between those who supported Theodore of Mopsuestia and those who with imperial sanction followed Cyril’s teachings would never be healed.
In the later fifth century, the Persian Syriac Christian Narsai studied and then taught in Edessa and strongly supported Theodore’s teachings. In the face of political opposition, Narsai and his followers moved in the late fifth century to teach in Nisibis. (For a broad discussion of the educational traditions thus established, see Becker 2006.) Once removed from the political pressure of Byzantine orthodoxy, Narsai’s pro-Theodore Syriac Christianity flourished as orthodoxy within the Persian Empire. Inaccurately labeled ‘‘Nestorian’’ Christianity, due to the improper polemical conflation of Theodore’s teachings with those of Nestorius, this form of Syriac Christianity survives to this day as the (Assyrian) Church of the East. Given its fifth-century displacement from the Byzantine Empire, it is small wonder that this form of Syriac Christianity has stood outside the purview of western scholarship. Within Late Antiquity, however, it remained a significant component of imperial political and theological history.
2 The Council of Chalcedon and Syriac Christianity
In the decades that followed the Council of Ephesus, political and ecclesiastical leaders struggled to articulate a clearer description of the human and divine aspects of the Son. In response to the condemnation of Nestorius, Eutyches, a monk in Constantinople, argued that in the act of the incarnation the Son’s human and divine natures were so fully fused that they formed a single new nature. Those who supported Eutyches argued that this emphasis on one nature was the logical result of the condemnation of Nestorius’ emphasis on two distinct aspects, one human and the other divine. Those who opposed Eutyches, however, argued that a fused new nature compromised the Son’s full humanity, thus threatening the possibility of salvation. The one-nature teachings of Eutyches were condemned in ad 448 at a synod summoned by the bishop of Constantinople, then approved at the so-called ‘‘Robber Council’’ that met in Ephesus in ad 449 (the label ‘‘robber,’’ latrocinium, was coined by Pope Leo), and then condemned again at the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in ad 451. While this ecumenical council marked one more step in the formation of an imperial orthodoxy, it also resulted in a second theological schism within Syriac Christianity that would never be resolved. While few claimed the extreme (and condemned) one-nature teachings of Eutyches, the Syrian Orthodox Church of today is one of several (including the Coptic Church, the Armenian Church, and the Ethiopic Church) that reject the outcome of the Council of Chal-cedon and maintain that a miaphysite (single nature) understanding of the Son is true Christian orthodoxy, consistent with earlier doctrine. (The once common term ‘‘monophysite’’ was coined as an insult against ‘‘one-nature’’ parties, and is for that reason now less favored.) Other Syriac Christians, known as Melkite (or Byzantine) Christians, because of their association with the Byzantine emperor, accepted the Council of Chalcedon’s authority; a majority, however, sharply rejected the compromise that they thought the council represented.
This theological controversy, and the politics surrounding it, continued unabated in the eastern empire in the century that followed the Council of Chalcedon. Subsequent emperors alternately supported either side of the schism. The emperor Zeno, by his Henotikon of ad 482, made a further attempt to reconcile the two sides, and his successor Anastasius also offered support for the miaphysite Christians. As a result, miaphysite Christians in the late fifth and early sixth centuries were able to establish their own churches, monasteries, and episcopal structure, even though the majority of fifth - and sixth-century emperors supported the Council of Chalcedon. While in the end the emperor Justinian’s attempts at compromise failed, the sporadic support granted to miaphysite leaders, including that attributed to the empress Theodora (d. ad 548), allowed the survival of a competing episcopacy in some of the major cities of the east, including Edessa. During the reign of Justinian and Theodora, Theodosius, the exiled miaphysite bishop of Alexandria, ordained Theodore as bishop of Bostra, the center of the miaphysite Ghassanid Arabs, and ordained Jacob Baradaeus bishop of Edessa. Even though the views of pro-Chalcedon Christians eventually triumphed as the imperial orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire, this century of struggle allowed miaphysite Christians to survive as a minority within the empire until, in the seventh century, Persian and Arabian invasions divided the region politically from the Greek-speaking world. Although the surviving miaphysites have often been called ‘‘Jacobite’’ (after Jacob Baradaeus) as well as ‘‘monophysite,’’ in most cases they reject both titles today in favor of ‘‘Syrian Orthodoxy.’’
When the Persians, under Khusro II, invaded the Byzantine Empire in the first decades of the seventh century, eastern Syria temporarily fell under Persian control. Although the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reclaimed this territory for Byzantium, much of the same territory was, within the decade following Khusro’s deposition in AD 628, once again severed from Constantinople’s control, this time by invading Muslim Arab armies. With Byzantium’s loss of Damascus, Antioch, and Edessa in the late AD 630s, Syriac miaphysite Christians found themselves no longer ‘‘heretics’’ under a hostile Christian government, but a tolerated ‘‘people of the book’’ under Muslim rule. This historical happenstance had the dual result that miaphysite Syriac Christianity survived with less struggle in the following centuries than it might have faced had it remained within the Byzantine Empire, and that (like the Church of the East in Persia) it became in some significant ways non-Byzantine. That is not to suggest that the centuries of Greek influence disappeared, or that Syria became utterly cut off from the Greek-speaking world. As with the Church of the East, however, it does explain why Syriac language and history were not well preserved in the west.
World History
