Melkites by Ignatius Dick

It’s a shame, though a very understandable one, that most books on the history of Arab Christianity were written by Catholics, and often Eastern Catholics. This is especially true, of course, in western languages. Such works range widely in quality from the indespensible Histoire du Mouvement Litteraire dans l’Eglise Melkite by Fr. Joseph Nasrallah to the unbelievably shoddy and polemical History of the Melkite Patriarchates by Fr. Cyril Charon Korolevsky. Given that there is no book on the history of Arab Orthodoxy in a western language from an Orthodox source, probably the best book in English on the history of the Patriarchate of Antioch during the Arab period is Melkites: Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics of the Patriarchates of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem by Fr. Ignatius Dick, a Greek Catholic priest based in Aleppo. This English edition is a translation and update of a French edition and is published by the Melkite Greek Catholic eparchy in the US.

The 200-page book is divided into seven chapters—History, Doctrine, an Anthology of Melkite Literature, Sacred Art, Spiritual Life, Community Profile, and Ecclesial Organization. It is followed by statistical tables for the Orthdox and Greek Catholic populations of various Middle Eastern countries and a bibliography of related works in English. The original French edition had a much more extensive bibliography covering most modern languages, so it’s a serious loss that the English edition’s bibliography is so needlessly impoverished.

Fr. Dick is a competent scholar of Arab Christianity in the pre-modern period, and so his history, while brief, is generally quite accurate and informative given the current state of research in the field. The Orthodox reader, however, should be warned that because it was written specifically for a Catholic audience, it does write about events immediately before and after the schism of 1724 with a strongly Catholic bias. Also, its attempts at bolstering the Greek Catholic foundational myth by portraying Antioch as having always been pro-Roman to some degree are not as well-supported as the author imagines. However, non-polemical research on the Orthodox community in greater Syria in the Arab and Ottoman periods is still at best still in its infancy.

What makes this book really worthwhile, however, is the fifty-page anthology of Melkite* literature from St. Romanos the Melodist through the modern period. While the selections from Antiochene Greek literature can be found elsewhere, many of the selections from Arabic works are not available in English, sometimes not in any western language at all, and in a few cases were translated from unedited manuscripts unavailable to anyone except a few specialists. Thus, the translation from Ibrahim ibn Yuhanna the Protospatharos’s (fl. in the second half of the 10th century) life of the martyred Patriarch Christopher of Antioch (d. May 23, 967) is to my knowledge not available in English. His translation of the deacon Abdallah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki’s (fl. ca. 1050) Kitab Bahjat al-Mu’min is a translation from an unedited manuscript. The extract from Nikon of the Black Mountain’s (d. very early 12th century) Pandektes is from an unedited Greek manuscript (the fact that this very influential work, originally written in Greek and immediately translated into Arabic, hasn’t been edited in any language save Slavonic is a travesty!). The translation from Paul of Antioch/Sidon’s (mid 12th century?) Letter to a Muslim Friend had previously only been translated into French, but I’m hoping a full English translation will come out in about a year and a half. The translations of Ottoman-era and early modern texts focus entirely on Orthodox-Catholic relations, from a strongly ecumenical Greek Catholic perspective and are only of marginal interest except to hobbyists of ecumenism.

The other chapters of the book, while well-informed, are all written from the perspective of Greek Catholics as ‘Orthodox in Communion with Rome’ and are only somewhat informative to those uninterested in that particular problematique. All that said, while this book has some serious drawbacks for an Orthodox readership, it contains the best presentation available in English of the History of Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians and also presents an extremely valuable contribution in the form of the translated anthology. We can hope that in the not-terribly-distant future the groundwork laid by scholars such as Fr. Dick can be built upon in a way accessible to a broader audience.


*As discussed before on this blog, the term ‘Melkite’ was the term most often used in Arabic in the pre-modern period by Orthodox Christians to distinguish themselves from other Christian sects, who also all call themselves ‘Orthodox’. After the schism of 1724, this term fell out of favor with the Orthodox, but was kept by the Greek Catholics of Syria. Fr. Dick, in searching for an accurate term to use in his book, attempts to revive the broader application of ‘Melkite’.