At last August’s Societas Liturgica Congress on Baptism, Walter Knowles’s paper mentioned that Cyril of Jerusalem had been appointed by Acacius of Caesarea, an Arian metropolitan. Startled by an association I had scarcely noticed earlier, I listened throughout Walter’s paper to catch echoes of Arian sympathies in the Jerusalem Holy Week ceremonies we inherit from Cyril’s episcopate—even if he himself was not their author—but the paper did not linger there. Indeed, one discussion member observed that Cyril contradicted his patron during the homoousion/homoiousion debates. Yet Acacius had clearly presumed Cyril was a leading cleric he could work with. I asked whether our Holy Week observance might preserve a shadow inheritance of Arian piety, but we had no time to pursue the topic. So let me flesh out my question to entertain our NAAL seminar.
Gregory Nyssen openly opposed pilgrimages to Jerusalem, arguing that the risen Christ is equally close to us everywhere [On Pilgrimages, Schaff, N&P-N Fathers, vol.5]. John Chrysostom likewise preached that since Christ’s coming, God’s people have had no temple anyplace. Their objections failed to turn that liturgical juggernaut aside, but another simultaneous campaign succeeded: their allied Cappadocian, Egyptian and Syrian anti-Arian war machine triumphed so thoroughly that we seem to know almost nothing about Arian worship in the east, except that like Holy Week pilgrimages it was highly popular. Gabrielle Winkler argues that Christians first started out singing psalmi idiotici like our Phos hilaron and Gloria in excelsis. Then orthodox worshippers switched to biblical psalmody throughout the liturgy—something Jewish synagogues sing more sparely—because the Arians were better hymn-writers, so citizens were marching through the streets singing Arian songs that few orthodox marchers could match. (Winkler concludes the orthodox lyricist Ephrem Syrus was a late ritual holdover, not an innovator of Christian hymnody.) Unfortunately, early Arian service books vanished: Constantine burned all he could, and orthodox writers tell us so little we cannot say whether what we now call “Alexandrian” prayers were familiar to both congregations there.
By contrast with the Arians, we know considerably more about a different contemporary non-orthodox body. The third century seer Mani grew up in a Jewish-Christian sect near Babylonian Ctesiphon, and his followers depicted his death in a Persian jail as a crucifixion like Jesus’ own. They spread across Asia in parallel with the East Syrian body now called the Church of the East, sometimes inaccurately branded “Nestorian.” (That is like branding Roman Catholics “Jesuit,” when only one splendid minority are!) Both churches flourished as far away as China: Mar Yabh-Allaha III, the last East Syrian Catholicos at Baghdad, was a Chinese pilgrim monk from Beijing. Over centuries the two diverged ritually and doctrinally, with East Syrian churches clinging to their Syriac liturgical tongue and theologians, while Manichees adopted vernacular worship for workaday layfolk in communities overseen by radically esoteric clergy ascetics. Ascetic discipline among East Syrians is harder to assess: their bishops were monks, as in most eastern churches; but the thirteenth century Franciscan missionary William of Rubruck complained “Nestorian” lower clergy were corrupt in doctrine and life habits; and yet Franciscan and Dominican reformers said much the same of diocesan clergy in Italy. Indeed, William’s target was larger and more diverse than Italy. Stretching from Beijing to Baghdad and from Siberia to Kerala, the East Syrian was the greatest of all medieval Christian bodies in territory and adherent numbers.
Both these Christian denominations spread and thrived until the fourteenth century thanks to a historical accident. At the very time European churches began pogroms against heretics and Jews, the dread conqueror Jinghis Khan (d. 1227) declared religious freedom throughout his Mongol empire, the largest in world history. The Keraits, one third of his marauding tribal coalition, were East Syrian Christians already. Mongol religious freedom lasted for two generations, until Jinghis’s successors took alarm at Islam’s spreading power. Many Mongol warriors forced Muslims at swordspoint to convert to Buddhism or to Christianity in either church. The Persian Il-Khan Arghun, himself a traditional shamanist, married an East Syrian Christian and in 1287 sent bishop Rabban Bar Sauma to enlist Emperor Andronicus II Paleologos, Pope Nicholas IV, England’s Edward I and other kings in a joint crusade against the Turkish Muslim Mamluks at Cairo. It was Arghun’s second European embassy, and those Greek and Latin potentates gave Bar Sauma a warm ecumenical welcome—but in the end none sent troops. (Had he succeeded, would today’s geo-politics be different?)
Then a century later Tamerlane (d. 1405), a Turk masquerading as a Mongol, converted to Islam and reversed the Mongol swordspoint policy. Within his lifetime populous Buddhist, “Nestorian,” and Manichee monasteries from Mesopotamia to Siberia were razed, monks, nuns and clergy murdered, and all Central Asia made Muslim. Silk Road Buddhist clergy had already ceased mission work and become purveyors of charms and travelers’ amulets. Now they disappeared, though teaching lamaseries remained active from Tibet eastward, where non-Turkic-speaking peoples proved deaf to Tamerlane’s muezzin call. Armenian, Georgian and Slavic churches with vernacular liturgies survived; but in India only southern kingdoms beyond Mongol (Mughal) borders sheltered Syriac-tongued Thomas Christians until today. Northeast of the Caucasus, the Manichees endured persecution longest. Their vernacular rites and lay ministry continued for two generations before vanishing. This distinction is noteworthy for my question about Arian worship, since it underscores the tenacity of popular lay piety in withstanding a hierarchy’s fate.
From two centuries of Mongol religious peace, Persian, Sogdian and other language manuscripts remain describing medieval Manichee identity, which had evolved so bizarrely that it now seems hard to imagine Manichaeans and “Nestorians” sharing one religious heritage. Exotic dietary metaphysics and other famous Manichee peculiarities actually appear in later Persian and Central Asian sources, and not in the early period when Manichee faith and practice were closer to those we now call Christian, and might indeed have blended with orthodoxy given another ethnic context. Reflecting on the Confessions, Richard Norris has observed that Augustine did not convert to Christianity (he was a Manichaean Christian already) but to neo-Platonism. We may wonder if Augustine served up just such an early Manichee and Neo-Platonist blend to the Latin west, wittingly or not.
Outside tiny Hong Kong today, China recognizes a different denominational pair, Protestant and Roman Catholic, whose official attitudes contrast here. Protestant leaders have begun restoring Syrian Christian ruins as proud evidence of Asian Christianity long before nineteenth century Europeans arrived—although seventh century Tang dynasty converts did remark upon their ancient missionaries’ blond hair. But Roman Catholic leaders have avoided association with “Nestorians;” neither hierarchy has shown interest in Manichee monuments; and eastern worship is a mere wraith of Russian émigré migration. Meanwhile a popular explosion of Christianity has outstripped all official structures.
Unlike late Manichaean piety, concrete evidence about Arian prayer life is probably irretrievably lost to us. I raise the question of a “shadow” Arian inheritance in contrast with the dazzling Christological highway that orthodox prayer life took. Lengthy Byzantine matins chants for Holy Week ruminate on the incarnate juncture between immeasurable, incorruptible divine Light and Jesus’ limited mortal flesh: a metaphysical paradox that also fascinated seventeenth century English poets. But that path can hardly have guided crowds stepping to popular Arian hymns. Those marchers must have trod some less godlike devotional road instead, perhaps a darker one. Anti-Trinitarians among the Reformation radicals cited Arian thought, and eighteenth century British Latitudinarians extolled it in their rationalist trend away from high church mystique. These presumed that Arians preached a simpler kinship with Jesus, a divine messenger plainly like themselves. But from what information we do have, fourth century public debate drowned in metaphysical technicalities instead. Their popularity puzzled Gregory Nyssen, the most creative mind of his age, who mused:
“Everywhere in town people talk about incomprehensible things—the lanes, the markets, the avenues, the streets, the clothiers, the bankers, the grocers. When you ask someone to make change, he will favor you with a discourse about the begotten and the unbegotten. When you ask the price of bread, the baker replies, 'The Father is greater than the Son, and the Son is subordinate.' If you ask, 'Is the bath ready?' the chambermaid declares, 'Nothing existed before the Son was created, and the Son was created from nothing.' I do not know what to call this evil that has come upon the people—frenzy or madness or whatever else. Nobody can possibly understand any of this.”
[Sermon on the divinity of the Son and Holy Spirit, 383 a.d., P.G.46:557f, blending modern translations.]
Gregory Nyssen’s wonderment echoes in our day. Norris labels him the last systematic theologian until Thomas Aquinas, and Gregory’s anthropology grounded orthodox Christian spirituality east and west. He reasoned that Christ shows us the divine image which God has planted in all humankind. Led by the Spirit, we can conform our lives to God’s image restored thus within ourselves, and reflected too in the virtues of those around us. So endlessly purging sin in this life and the next, we progress endlessly into the darkness where God dwells, and there we see God. But by Gregory’s logic, the Arian slogans he cites remove infinite progress toward God outside our human grasp. Then what other values can have drawn ancient Arian Christians? Exemplary heroism perhaps? Faithfulness to duty whatever the cost? Compassion for sufferings like those we know? All those do figure in popular devotion today, in certain places especially.
In the Hellenistic world of Alexandria, Syria and Constantinople the Arian hierarchy gave way before their Christological foes fighting under many banners, and eastern councils moved on to other battles. But among western Germanic tribes Arian missionaries continued to win Christian converts, while Roman military policy consolidated the faith allegiance of tribal troops posted from province to province. Local conciliar resolutions indicate the Arians achieved their longest institutional success in remote Hispania. There orthodox bishops, unable to remove popular Arian clergy or suppress large Arian congregations, began repeating the confirmation—that is, the sealing, not the water bath—of baptized Arians who joined orthodox bodies, and so launched the distinctive western custom of episcopal confirmation apart from baptism. (Once again, I follow Gabrielle Winkler’s argument.) During our modern struggle to consolidate baptismal practice based on ancient, largely eastern documents, we may blame the Spanish Arians for leaving us an unintended negative inheritance to settle, like an old compounded tax debt on our estate. But some positive inheritance may linger there too.
Holy Week holds liturgists’ admiration like a diadem, linking golden eastern and western worship strands to crown highbrow Christian renewal, and shining so long now that we may not notice how oddly it rests atop our other reforms. Of course consistent liturgy is a modern goal, rather than a re-discovery. Paul Bradshaw argues for ancient ritual diversity and doctrinal variety, in place of the unitary early Christianity sought by researchers a century back; and other seminar members align with his approach. Nevertheless, Gregory Dix distinguished two ways of ritual remembering which most reformers have adopted since: Dix extolled anamnesis, recalling without re-enacting, above mimesis or physical re-enactment, as proper to Christian worship. In patristic Greek those may not have been opposites, but they have become technical terms today, and modern reformers like to replace each medieval mimetic gesture or explanation with an anamnetic alternative. Yet unlike the Sunday eucharist, where easterners and westerners alike favor anamnesis, Holy Week demonstrates mimesis everywhere. Indeed by eastern Christian measures western Holy Week looks all too mimetic: I recall Alexander Schmemann’s protest in class, “Footwashing is NOT LITURGY!!”
Christian reformers hunt reflexively for a background in Hebrew cult, but that has not laid our foundation here. Levitical texts may command an occasional symbolic reminder: for example, building booths on the annual Sukkoth feast to recall wandering forebears’ tents. Yet no mimetic re-enactment happens in those booths, just celebratory harvest banqueting. Today’s Passover haggadah does explain each dinner dish as a mimetic memorial of the Exodus: but this is a modern text edited after long awareness of Christianity, during which both communities influenced each other’s worship. Elsewhere Jews preserve such a firm tradition of ritual anamnesis as Dix would love. For an exact contrast with Christian Holy Week rites, compare synagogue salvation memorials at Purim. Raucous ratchets drown out monstrous Haman’s name every time the reader speaks it; and afterwards all munch tasty three-corner cookies representing his hat; but only schoolchildren re-enact the bible story.
Alas for Dix’s Christian fans, Egeria’s enthusiastic account of Jerusalem Holy Week shows popular mimesis from the start: crowds tracking Jesus’ footsteps from place to place on the very days a conflated Passion story would dictate, and meditating with deep emotion on actions they hear recounted at every station. Pace Schmemann, mimesis flowered in Eastern Holy Week services as dramatically as in the west, if more slowly, until late Byzantine Good Friday worshippers began processing beneath the prone kouvouklion icon of a dead Christ before burying him at the altar table. Likewise today at North American “Non-Denominational” mega-church conventions, evangelicals talk of introducing some ritual to “disciple” their converts’ loyalty, and so stanch the three-year turnover that currently bleeds members away. Their worship planners propose to start—not with an anamnetic Sunday eucharist or Easter vigil—but with Stations of the Cross.
If evangelicals want to see such piety powerfully expressed, Spain— Egeria’s Hispania, once a thriving Arian domain—makes a fine place to start. Spaniards have cultivated Holy Week with public fervor that amazes visitors from northern Europe, Greece, Syria or Russia, whose worship back home may be equally devout. For comparison: in 1988, I attended the one-thousandth Russian Easter at Zagorsk, the Muscovite answer to Rome’s Vatican. Liberalized political Glasnost’ had only just begun. We had to arrive incognito by subway, and after a generous Russian tea we entered the little cathedral jam-packed with young Orthodox—and with one-half of the United States Senate, on a diplomatic tour! The five-hour Zagorsk liturgy flourished restored znamenny chants and early Russian vestments and rituals (including vestigial solemn clergy dancing, though no Eastern Orthodox outside Ethiopia will now call it so) and was even more exuberant than I had experienced in religiously free Athens two decades before. Yet with all its historic significance that year, for popular drama no Russian Easter can outdo every year’s Semana Santa in Seville. –Boulevard processions of penitents in colorful hooded cloaks, flagellants imitating Jesus’ scourging, bloody cross-carriers, acolytes swinging incense in clouds along every street, throngs of all ages and classes! Egeria’s fourth century Jerusalem Holy Week has no more enthusiastic heirs than in her native Roman province today.
Similar popular drama fills the streets far abroad, if mixed with some pre-Christian native symbols, because Portuguese and Spanish missions spread Hispanic piety over the western hemisphere and eastern Asia. New Mexico’s Roman Catholic mountain churches have nearby Penitente moradas where adepts volunteer for crucifixion every Holy Week. After over a century of official Catholic condemnation, peace was only recently made when the current Archbishop of Santa Fe became himself a Penitente—whereas in the Philippines a half-schism continues today. New Mexican wooden santos emphasize the crimson wounds of Christ and the martyrs, inviting the faithful to savor those salvific pains. Bloody knees are often added, linking Jesus’ original sufferings with the Penitentes’ own processions on their knees over rough roads. Historians may class Penitente devotions as a late offshoot of Franciscan preaching, but they sprang up and bore fruit far from Italy, grafted perhaps from a much older Hispanic stock. To be sure, crucified figures of a naked, dead Jesus did fill European art after the fourteenth century Black Death, replacing earlier robed figures with their eyes open. Yet even the famously gruesome sixteenth century Isenheim altarpiece (this was Paul Tillich’s favorite!) shows a beaming heroic risen God on its reverse. By contrast, New Mexican resurrection figurines display hideous mortuary-like wounds.
Art is hard direct evidence, harder than writings that bear official editing and re-interpretation. Can this sturdy but grim Passion and Resurrection art have no devotional background besides a Spanish relish for gore and bullfights? Would not Arian popular piety make a worthy rival candidate? After all, the masters of high baroque Spanish Realism—El Greco, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Murillo—omit grotesque details: their paintings of St Francis’ stigmata never bleed. Official Spanish Good Friday processions likewise build upon public participation more than gore. My goddaughter took part in Córdoba, and reports life-sized clothed images of Mary in mourning, and life-sized Jesus’ corpuses with hinged shoulders that can be taken down from the cross, laid out on a bier and carried in a funeral cortège. Mourners’ hoods are colored alike in each company, rather like Mardi Gras krewes, while fraternities that have made the enormous processional floats for those clothed images also march in time, blindly, beneath the same many-legged floats. (Eat your hearts out, Athens and Zagorsk! But is there a possible historical connection after the Crusades brought Latin worship eastward, with the late Byzantine procession beneath the kouvouklion lifted overhead as on a bier?)
I do not theorize that mimetic popular cult supremely suits Arianism, or the other way round. Without Arian liturgical documents we can but wonder. The Cappadocian party opposed both Arian teaching and mimetic Holy Week pilgrimages, but that co-incidence may be circumstantial. Popular worship has well served both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy, after all. Devout Jews by the thousands make pilgrimage to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall each year, virtually overruling archaeological evidence that Herod’s Temple rose elsewhere on the Mount. Ethiopian liturgy is also overwhelmingly popular: Patriarch Abba Paulos told me his church was unprepared for the young folks thronging every service after the collapse of the Communist Derg, before his church had any plan to meet their pastoral needs. And each February, 200,000 Thomas Christians blanket southern India’s Pamba River banks for a week’s Maramon Convention, the world’s largest church or synagogue encampment. All three gatherings are practicing anamnetic popular prayer. Yet mimetic Holy Week memorials endure as well in Ethiopian and Keralan church calendars, and all the more distinctively for that.
Seminar members may ask why I raise this question among us, since positive historical evidence such as we normally discuss may be forever lost. Yet ignoring or dismissing any likelihood would be implausible. Tamerlane wiped out Buddhist, East Syrian and Manichaean faith communities by a half century of slaughter that left pyramids of skulls towering outside every Central Asian capital and desert monastic city. But such thorough religious eradication is rare: witness the staunch persistence of Aztec, Mayan and Yoruba cult among New Spain’s Roman Catholics, or of Bogomil, Old Believer and Molokan customs in Slavic villages, all despite centuries of official church repression. Arianism was once vigorously popular, and had no Tamerlane to scour it away. How can it have vanished without a trace?
Moreover, my question affects the impact we hope historical critique can have on congregational worship today. Let me finish here with a recent scientific simile, probably well known to you. Biologists decoding the human genome have proposed that Neanderthals had sex with modern humans outside Africa, leaving their traces everywhere in European, Asian and Pacific moderns’ genes, but not in Africans’. This hypothesis quickly raised more than scientists’ eyebrows, because upon very spare archaeological evidence the mental abilities of Neanderthal and Homo erectus humans are hotly debated, and so are the properties that enabled Homo sapiens sapiens to murder or crowd out those species thirty thousand years ago. New Yorker science writer Elizabeth Kolbert interviewed the eminent geneticist Svante Pääbo, who first made and published this new finding, and reports:
As they moved north and east [from Africa], modern humans encountered Neanderthals and other so-called “archaic humans” who already inhabited those regions. The modern humans “replaced” the archaic humans, which is a nice way of saying they drove them into extinction…. When [Pääbo] finally came around to the idea that Neanderthals bequeathed some of their genes to modern humans, he told me, “I thought it was very cool. It means that they are not totally extinct—that they live on a little bit in us.”
[“Sleeping with the Enemy,” August 15, 2011.]
Moreover, even if European and Asian genomes contain only 4% Neanderthal DNA, that percentage may be powerful, since active DNA and RNA use up only a portion of our genomes, leaving the rest as genetic “junk.”
By contrast with my Neanderthal example, whether or not Augustine blended early Manichaean Christianity with his new neo-Platonist faith, the eradication of later Manichee communities ensured that their more exotic evolution touches us nowhere today. Even so, vernacular lay-led Manichaeism endured two generations of official proscription, which had swiftly killed off the clerical-run Syriac Christian worship we recognize. And more successfully yet, some popular Arian shadow we can only guess at may now fall wherever orthodox Christians keep Holy Week, in the same way that Neanderthal genes we scarcely think about survive in all our modern human bodies (unless of course your forebears were all Africans). Then no ritualist Christians, east or west, would be exempt. Indeed, thanks to the progress of modern liturgists renewing popular Holy Week celebration during the past century, our Arian DNA must be redoubling now. To paraphrase Pääbo, this means that the ancient Arians are “not totally extinct—that they live on a little bit in us.” Put more provocatively, the ancient Arians may have become us.
And even if Arian piety could prove to spring up alive in our yearly Holy Week ceremonies—a proof currently beyond reach—that would hardly give cause for a purist purge after 1500 years! On the contrary, the bare likelihood should encourage us to fit those received rites flexibly to contemporary faith and pastoral circumstance. Renaissance reformers opposed medieval “superstition” reasonably enough, but they purged some practices they judged medieval corruptions which were truly ancient, and over the past century our liturgical movement has restored many of those. The very longevity of popular Holy Week offers modern believers a chance to share with centuries of faithful people in widely different places, and to worship like them as our religious peers, whatever their doctrinal focus. Differences of taste will endure of course: I find red-blooded New Mexican santos aesthetically strong and yet devotionally disquieting; whereas strict Calvinists might say the same about Hellenistic Eastern Orthodox icons I admire. Nevertheless, far from idealizing a sanitized chosen past, critical historical study provides the most reliable guide today for popular worship to take its own proper shape within our broad Jewish and Christian tradition. And popular worship has always counted most. As the Roman poet Horace wrote:
“Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry
scorns common things.”
----Richard Fabian
Holy Ejmiatzin, Armenia, September 2011
PUBLISHED RESOURCES:
Instead of endnotes, here are recent titles I have enjoyed that touch upon non-orthodox Christianity:
Wilhelm Baum & Dietmar Winkler, The Church of the East: a concise history, Klagenfurt 2000 and London 2003.
Wolfgang Hage, Syriac Christianity in the East, Kottayam 1997.
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, New York 2004.
Susan Whitfield, Life along the Silk Road, Univ. California 2001.
Ray John de Aragón, The Penitentes of New Mexico, Santa Fe 2006. (Formerly published as Hermanos de la Luz, 1998.)
James Griffith & Francisco Javier Manzo Taylor, The face of Christ in Sonora, Tucson 2007.
Laurie Beth Kalb, Crafting Devotion: Tradition in New Mexico Santos, Univ. New Mexico 1995.
©Richard Fabian for the “Early History of Liturgy” Seminar, NAAL Montréal, 2012
