Here is a lecture and question-and answer session with Fr. Sidney Griffith about the history of Arab Christianity that was given at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Cicero, Illinois.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Fr. Sidney Griffith on Arab Orthodoxy
The following is taken from the book The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam by Sidney Griffith, a professor at the Catholic University of America and a Roman Catholic priest. The book itself is definitelythe best (and nearly the only in English) history of Christianity under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages. Fr. Griffith is a deeply learned man when it comes to Arabic and Syriac Christianity whose career has mostly taken the form of piles and piles of scholarly articles, rather than books that would be more accessible to non-specialists. Some of his most interesting work has been on the development of the monasteries in Palestine after the Muslim conquest and his insights into the Arabic-Islamic milieu that St. John of Damascus was writing in need to be more thoroughly taken into account by those studying the Damascene. The book itself is on the whole quite readable, if you can manage a book that is still thoroughly foot-noted. While certainly not the definitive history of Arab Christians that has still yet to be written, the book does an eccellent job of explaining the cultural identifies of Arab Christians, how they defined themselves relative to each other, to other Christians, and especially to Muslims. In doing so, it gives the non-specialist a good idea of the flavor of Arab Christian discourse in the classical Islamic period. In its view of Muslim-Christian relations during this period, it is neither polemic against Islam nor given to the rosy glasses of, say, María Rosa Menocal. Instead, it problematizes the concept of convivencia and gives a picture of a much more complicated interreligious world of conflict, cooperation, and varying degrees of tolerance.
From pages 137-139, on the self-understanding of what for the purposes of this blog are the Arab Orthodox:
Melkites
While the Nestorian and Jacobite churches were already in the process of formation prior to the rise of Islam, albeit that they achieved the full expression of their enduring ecclesiastical identities only in the first centuries of the caliphate, the Melkite community as a sociologically distinct community of Christians came into existence only in Islamic times and in the world of Islam. They professed the faith of Byzantine orthodoxy, but very much in the Arabic-speaking milieu of the Islamic challenge to Christian faith. The name Melkite seems first to have been used by Syriac-speaking Jacobites, and perhaps even by Maronites, to designate those Christians in the caliphate who accepted the teachings of the sixth ecumenical council of the Byzantine imperial church, Constantinople III (681). Their more authoritative spokesperson was John of Damascus (d. ca. 749), who wrote in Greek. But they were also the first of the Christian denominations to adopt Arabic as an ecclesiastical language. The process of Arabicization began already in the second half of the eighth century, and the earliest Christian writer regularly to write in Arabic whose name we know was the Melkite Theodore Abu Qurrah (ca. 755-830), who wrote not only to respond to the religious challenge of Islam but also very much to state the claims of the Melkites over against those of the Jacobites and the Nestorians. The Melkites, like the others, argued with both Muslims and their fellow Christians that they were in their own view the only truly orthodox Christians. The see of Jeruslem and the monasteries of the Judean desert, particularly Mar Sabas, would remain the intellectual center of the Melkites, but members of their community were to be found throughout the Arabic-speaking world, from Alexandria in Egypt to Antioch in Syria and even in Baghdad. Spokesmen for the Arabic-speaking Melkites in addition to Abu Qurrah included writers such as the now anonymous ninth-century author of the popular Disputation of the Monk Abraham of Tiberias with an Emir in Jerusalem, Qusta ibn Luqa (ca. 830-912), the historian Sa’id ibn Bitriq (877-933) also known as the patriarch Eutychius of Alexandria, Abu l-Fath ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki (fl. Ca. 1050), and Paul of Antioch (ca. 1180). These major writers, among many others, presented the profile of the Melkite church in what would be its enduring form in the Arabic-speaking world.
But a further word must be said about the epithet Melkite. In its first and most appropriate usage it was not synonymous with the Greek Orthodox denomination; they were often called ar-Rum, that is, the Romans, or the Byzantines, by Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alike, meaning the Greek Orthodox church of Byzantium. Rather, by contrast with the Greek Orthodox, the Melkites were Arabic-speaking Christians in the world of Islam who were nevertheless in communion with the Greek Orthodox whose faith they shared. If they were to be designated by an ethnic or linguistic label at all, which historically was never the case, they might well have been called the Arab Orthodox. The Crusaders called the Melkites Syri in Latin, for reasons that need not detain us now, but the fact that they used a distinctive name for them indicates that at that time they were still perceived to be a different community from the Greeks. After the time of the Crusades, and especially in Ottoman times, when the Greek Orthodox Church gained the upper hand over the their coreligionists in the old Oriental Patriarchates, the Melkites were for all practical purposes subsumed into the Greek Orthodox Church. In modern times, adding to the terminological confusion, the old designation Melkite was co-opted after 1729 by the largely Arabic-speaking Melkite Greek Catholic Church, a community that in the eighteenth century came from the Orthodox Church into union with Rome.
From pages 137-139, on the self-understanding of what for the purposes of this blog are the Arab Orthodox:
Melkites
While the Nestorian and Jacobite churches were already in the process of formation prior to the rise of Islam, albeit that they achieved the full expression of their enduring ecclesiastical identities only in the first centuries of the caliphate, the Melkite community as a sociologically distinct community of Christians came into existence only in Islamic times and in the world of Islam. They professed the faith of Byzantine orthodoxy, but very much in the Arabic-speaking milieu of the Islamic challenge to Christian faith. The name Melkite seems first to have been used by Syriac-speaking Jacobites, and perhaps even by Maronites, to designate those Christians in the caliphate who accepted the teachings of the sixth ecumenical council of the Byzantine imperial church, Constantinople III (681). Their more authoritative spokesperson was John of Damascus (d. ca. 749), who wrote in Greek. But they were also the first of the Christian denominations to adopt Arabic as an ecclesiastical language. The process of Arabicization began already in the second half of the eighth century, and the earliest Christian writer regularly to write in Arabic whose name we know was the Melkite Theodore Abu Qurrah (ca. 755-830), who wrote not only to respond to the religious challenge of Islam but also very much to state the claims of the Melkites over against those of the Jacobites and the Nestorians. The Melkites, like the others, argued with both Muslims and their fellow Christians that they were in their own view the only truly orthodox Christians. The see of Jeruslem and the monasteries of the Judean desert, particularly Mar Sabas, would remain the intellectual center of the Melkites, but members of their community were to be found throughout the Arabic-speaking world, from Alexandria in Egypt to Antioch in Syria and even in Baghdad. Spokesmen for the Arabic-speaking Melkites in addition to Abu Qurrah included writers such as the now anonymous ninth-century author of the popular Disputation of the Monk Abraham of Tiberias with an Emir in Jerusalem, Qusta ibn Luqa (ca. 830-912), the historian Sa’id ibn Bitriq (877-933) also known as the patriarch Eutychius of Alexandria, Abu l-Fath ‘Abd Allah ibn al-Fadl al-Antaki (fl. Ca. 1050), and Paul of Antioch (ca. 1180). These major writers, among many others, presented the profile of the Melkite church in what would be its enduring form in the Arabic-speaking world.
But a further word must be said about the epithet Melkite. In its first and most appropriate usage it was not synonymous with the Greek Orthodox denomination; they were often called ar-Rum, that is, the Romans, or the Byzantines, by Arabic-speaking Muslims and Christians alike, meaning the Greek Orthodox church of Byzantium. Rather, by contrast with the Greek Orthodox, the Melkites were Arabic-speaking Christians in the world of Islam who were nevertheless in communion with the Greek Orthodox whose faith they shared. If they were to be designated by an ethnic or linguistic label at all, which historically was never the case, they might well have been called the Arab Orthodox. The Crusaders called the Melkites Syri in Latin, for reasons that need not detain us now, but the fact that they used a distinctive name for them indicates that at that time they were still perceived to be a different community from the Greeks. After the time of the Crusades, and especially in Ottoman times, when the Greek Orthodox Church gained the upper hand over the their coreligionists in the old Oriental Patriarchates, the Melkites were for all practical purposes subsumed into the Greek Orthodox Church. In modern times, adding to the terminological confusion, the old designation Melkite was co-opted after 1729 by the largely Arabic-speaking Melkite Greek Catholic Church, a community that in the eighteenth century came from the Orthodox Church into union with Rome.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
A new link
Sorry to all that I've been neglecting this blog for the past couple weeks... I should be back with some new translations and a book review soon.
It's been brought to my attention by a reader that I hadn't added the link for the Archdiocese of Tripoli. This has now been corrected in the list of links to your right... For those of you interested in more information about Metropolitan Elias Kurban who fell asleep in the Lord just about forty days ago, there's a number of tributes to him there written by a variety of folks in Arabic, English and French. Also, if you scroll further down, there's about a score of links to Youtube videos of his renowned chanting. So go, look at it here.
It's been brought to my attention by a reader that I hadn't added the link for the Archdiocese of Tripoli. This has now been corrected in the list of links to your right... For those of you interested in more information about Metropolitan Elias Kurban who fell asleep in the Lord just about forty days ago, there's a number of tributes to him there written by a variety of folks in Arabic, English and French. Also, if you scroll further down, there's about a score of links to Youtube videos of his renowned chanting. So go, look at it here.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
NOCTOC on Orthodoxy in Lebanon
So, I've gone through the archives of the NOCTOC blog and I've made an index of its articles about Orthodoxy in Lebanon... There's some really great material here and especially some wonderful pictures, so do go and browse through it!
Arab Icons
The Lebanese Orthodox
St. Jacob of Hamatoura
The Town of Safita and the Valley of the Christians
Downloadable Paraclisis to St. Jacob of Hamatoura
Monasticism:
A biography of Fr. Ephrem Kyriakos.
Hamatoura.
The Monastery of St. George in Amioun.
Dayr al-Natour in Enfeh.
St. Memas in South Lebanon.
The Monasteries of Douma.
Monastery of St. Elias in Dhour al-Shoueir.
Deir el-Harf.
Monastery of St. Demetrios in Kousba.
Dayr al-Nourieh.
St. George al-Humayrah in Syria.
Kaftoun.
Fr. Pandeleimon of Hamatoura.
The Rum of Syria and the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saidnaya
The Monastery of St. Jacob the Persian in Deddeh, Lebanon
Churches
Church of St. John in Amioun
Saint George and his Churches in Lebanon
Even more links can be found here!
Arab Icons
The Lebanese Orthodox
St. Jacob of Hamatoura
The Town of Safita and the Valley of the Christians
Downloadable Paraclisis to St. Jacob of Hamatoura
Monasticism:
A biography of Fr. Ephrem Kyriakos.
Hamatoura.
The Monastery of St. George in Amioun.
Dayr al-Natour in Enfeh.
St. Memas in South Lebanon.
The Monasteries of Douma.
Monastery of St. Elias in Dhour al-Shoueir.
Deir el-Harf.
Monastery of St. Demetrios in Kousba.
Dayr al-Nourieh.
St. George al-Humayrah in Syria.
Kaftoun.
Fr. Pandeleimon of Hamatoura.
The Rum of Syria and the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Saidnaya
The Monastery of St. Jacob the Persian in Deddeh, Lebanon
Churches
Church of St. John in Amioun
Saint George and his Churches in Lebanon
Even more links can be found here!
Kaftoun
Also from the NOCTOC blog, an article about the women's monastery in Kaftoun and it's wonderworking 13th century icon of the Theotokos..... (I'm going to comb the archives of this blog to see what more I can find... it seems the author takes a strong interest in the Church in Lebanon, and he has a lot of good pictures!)
The link: http://noctoc-noctoc.blogspot.com/2009/03/greek-orthodox-monastery-of-theotokos.html
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Fr. Pandeleimon of Hamtoura and Isaac the Athonite
Here is a wonderful article in Greek and English about Fr. Pandeleimon, abbot of the monastery of Hamtoura. It has several pictures of him and of the brothers of the monastery, as well. Scroll halfway down to find the English....!
http://noctoc-noctoc.blogspot.com/2008/08/elder-panteleimon-of-hamatouraa-hidden.html
Also, to hear Fr. Pandeleimon's excellent voice click here.
http://noctoc-noctoc.blogspot.com/2008/08/elder-panteleimon-of-hamatouraa-hidden.html
Also, to hear Fr. Pandeleimon's excellent voice click here.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
'The Lost History of Christianity'
While I’ve been limiting myself on this blog to translations of materials otherwise unavailable in English, I thought for a change I might try writing a couple book reviews. So, what’s written below is just my thoughts. Don’t take them too seriously…
The Lost History of Christianity by Phillip Jenkins
HarperOne 2008
When I first saw that this book was coming out, I was pretty happy that a book on such a topic of Near Eastern Christianity was being released by a major publisher, though I was pretty doubtful that the book would accurately portray its subject matter. Jenkins, a professor at Penn State, has a background mostly in criminology, of all things, rather than religious studies or oriental languages, though his most successful books, such as The Next Christendom, have been on the topic of ‘global Christianity’. The book at hand seems to be a continuation of the thesis of The Next Christendom, which argues that Christianity’s center of gravity is moving towards Asia. (As with anything Spengler quotes too heavily from, take with a grain of salt!) Lost Christianities, in turn, tries to argue that at one point Christianity’s center of gravity was in fact in Asia, mostly in the form of the (Nestorian) Church of the East- the modern-day Assyrians. The book then goes on to try and explain some of the character of Asian (and, sometimes randomly African or just non-Western) Christianity- a task at which the author miserably fails- and to document just how it declined and in many places disappeared-- a task at which the author does a very good and clear job. The startling impermanence of a given religion in a given place or culture is the overriding thesis of the book.
So first, a bit about the author’s failures. While reading, one can’t shake the strong suspicion that the author is an Episcopalian, which actually turns out to be the case- a convert from Catholicism to Episcopalianism, it seems. This type of background manifests itself in Jenkins’ constant use of the shopworn device of contrasting rigid, dogmatic western Christianity to whatever else is at hand that could be portrayed as flexible, open, vibrant, or whatever. Karen Armstrong, being part-stupid, uses Islam for this; Jenkins, it seems, has latched on to the Nestorians as a similar foil for the Western Church. This is a problematic device because it emphasizes the colorful aspects of the Nestorian missionary endeavor to a degree that it probably doesn’t deserve-- we have no real way of telling to what degree things like the ‘Jesus Sutras’ really played a serious role in Nestorian missionary activity, for example.
The exposition of church life in the oriental churches additionally suffers from the problem of not really defining what it means by oriental churches. Sometimes Jenkins seems to want to talk about all non-western churches as being representative of what he’s talking about and other times he seems to want to focus only on the Nestorians and Jacobites (that is, the Syriac Orthodox Church). This leads to contradictory attitudes towards the Orthodox Church in the Near East, as sometimes he associates it with Byzantine or even Papal oppression of ‘native’ Christians and sometimes he does recognize that the Orthodox Church in the region was just as native and Semitic as any the other churches (nowhere, however does he recognize the presence of Orthodox in Central Asia).
The strangely piecemeal details that Jenkins uses to try and give a picture for church life in the region is due, it seems, to the fact that he only reads English, at least only English-language sources are quoted from. Not knowing Syriac or Arabic is unfortunate but forgivable in a popular writer but not knowing French or German basically means that he shouldn’t have attempted the book; the vast majority of research on oriental Christianity has been done in French (especially in the period of Catholic missionary activity in the region from the XVIIth century to World War I) and so an inability to read French means an inability to utilize basic and very readable reference works like, well, basically anything written by the late Jean-Maurice Fiey.
All that said, the good-- in the second half of the book, Jenkins does an excellent job of concisely and clearly explaining why Christianity declined in Asia from the XIIIth century on. Of course, it’s a very easy explanation-- Islam. Well… and the Mongols… but only after the Mongols became Muslim. Jenkins shows an admirable lack of shyness about documenting just how relentlessly violent and oppressive Muslims have been to the native Christian population of the Near East. He is especially good when he talks about the Armenian Genocide / Sayfo and the genocide of Greeks in Asia Minor, events well covered by sources accessible to one with Jenkins’ training.
Also, one can hope that this book will, well, remind people about the continuing existence of Christians in the Middle East and the precariousness of their situation. The bibliography, though I criticized it above, is pretty good for listing the more accessible English-language works that one might want to go to as a non-specialist who wants to look deeper into the subject.
The Lost History of Christianity by Phillip Jenkins
HarperOne 2008
When I first saw that this book was coming out, I was pretty happy that a book on such a topic of Near Eastern Christianity was being released by a major publisher, though I was pretty doubtful that the book would accurately portray its subject matter. Jenkins, a professor at Penn State, has a background mostly in criminology, of all things, rather than religious studies or oriental languages, though his most successful books, such as The Next Christendom, have been on the topic of ‘global Christianity’. The book at hand seems to be a continuation of the thesis of The Next Christendom, which argues that Christianity’s center of gravity is moving towards Asia. (As with anything Spengler quotes too heavily from, take with a grain of salt!) Lost Christianities, in turn, tries to argue that at one point Christianity’s center of gravity was in fact in Asia, mostly in the form of the (Nestorian) Church of the East- the modern-day Assyrians. The book then goes on to try and explain some of the character of Asian (and, sometimes randomly African or just non-Western) Christianity- a task at which the author miserably fails- and to document just how it declined and in many places disappeared-- a task at which the author does a very good and clear job. The startling impermanence of a given religion in a given place or culture is the overriding thesis of the book.
So first, a bit about the author’s failures. While reading, one can’t shake the strong suspicion that the author is an Episcopalian, which actually turns out to be the case- a convert from Catholicism to Episcopalianism, it seems. This type of background manifests itself in Jenkins’ constant use of the shopworn device of contrasting rigid, dogmatic western Christianity to whatever else is at hand that could be portrayed as flexible, open, vibrant, or whatever. Karen Armstrong, being part-stupid, uses Islam for this; Jenkins, it seems, has latched on to the Nestorians as a similar foil for the Western Church. This is a problematic device because it emphasizes the colorful aspects of the Nestorian missionary endeavor to a degree that it probably doesn’t deserve-- we have no real way of telling to what degree things like the ‘Jesus Sutras’ really played a serious role in Nestorian missionary activity, for example.
The exposition of church life in the oriental churches additionally suffers from the problem of not really defining what it means by oriental churches. Sometimes Jenkins seems to want to talk about all non-western churches as being representative of what he’s talking about and other times he seems to want to focus only on the Nestorians and Jacobites (that is, the Syriac Orthodox Church). This leads to contradictory attitudes towards the Orthodox Church in the Near East, as sometimes he associates it with Byzantine or even Papal oppression of ‘native’ Christians and sometimes he does recognize that the Orthodox Church in the region was just as native and Semitic as any the other churches (nowhere, however does he recognize the presence of Orthodox in Central Asia).
The strangely piecemeal details that Jenkins uses to try and give a picture for church life in the region is due, it seems, to the fact that he only reads English, at least only English-language sources are quoted from. Not knowing Syriac or Arabic is unfortunate but forgivable in a popular writer but not knowing French or German basically means that he shouldn’t have attempted the book; the vast majority of research on oriental Christianity has been done in French (especially in the period of Catholic missionary activity in the region from the XVIIth century to World War I) and so an inability to read French means an inability to utilize basic and very readable reference works like, well, basically anything written by the late Jean-Maurice Fiey.
All that said, the good-- in the second half of the book, Jenkins does an excellent job of concisely and clearly explaining why Christianity declined in Asia from the XIIIth century on. Of course, it’s a very easy explanation-- Islam. Well… and the Mongols… but only after the Mongols became Muslim. Jenkins shows an admirable lack of shyness about documenting just how relentlessly violent and oppressive Muslims have been to the native Christian population of the Near East. He is especially good when he talks about the Armenian Genocide / Sayfo and the genocide of Greeks in Asia Minor, events well covered by sources accessible to one with Jenkins’ training.
Also, one can hope that this book will, well, remind people about the continuing existence of Christians in the Middle East and the precariousness of their situation. The bibliography, though I criticized it above, is pretty good for listing the more accessible English-language works that one might want to go to as a non-specialist who wants to look deeper into the subject.
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