Church of the East

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The Church of the East is the East Syriac Christian church that grew up outside the Roman Empire, in the Persian lands east of the imperial frontier, and from there reached farther east than any other branch of ancient Christianity. Its liturgical and theological language was Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic; its heartland lay in Mesopotamia under Sasanian and later Islamic rule. The common older name for it, the Nestorian Church, is a label fixed on it by outsiders, and modern historians use it warily.

What distinguishes this church is partly an accident of geography. The other ancient churches grew up inside the Mediterranean world, under emperors who convened the great councils and ratified their creeds. This one took root in the rival empire — the realm of the Sasanian kings, in the Persian intellectual and political milieu of late antiquity (the Sasanian wisdom-world) — where to confess the faith of Rome’s bishops was, in the eyes of the Persian crown, to swear allegiance to the enemy. Periods of toleration alternated with persecutions severe enough that the church kept its own roll of martyrs, the Persian martyr-acts; and the great fourth-century persecution under Shapur II fell on Christians in part because Constantine’s conversion had made Christianity, for the Persian state, the religion of the foe. A church under that pressure had every reason to make itself unmistakably Persian, answerable to no see across the border. The road its theology took and the road its independence took run together, and neither can be read apart from the frontier.

The synod of 410 and the catholicate

The church organized itself early under its own head, the catholicos at Seleucia-Ctesiphon — the twin cities on the Tigris that served as the Sasanian capital. A synod gathered there in 410, convoked with the blessing of King Yazdegerd I and brokered by Marutha of Maiperqat, a bishop from the Roman side sent partly to repair relations between the two empires. The assembled Persian bishops accepted the creed of the council of Nicaea of 325, organized their dioceses into Roman-style metropolitan provinces, and recognized the bishop of the capital, Isaac, as their grand metropolitan and primate. A later synod in 424 pressed the logic further, declaring that the catholicos of the East answered to no earthly authority above himself — no patriarch of Antioch, no council in Roman territory. The separation was as much political as doctrinal: a church inside Persia could not, and would not be permitted to, answer to bishops inside the empire Persia fought. By the end of the fifth century its primates bore the title of catholicos-patriarch in their own right, heads of an autonomous church older than the frontier it sat behind.

The Christological quarrel

The doctrinal mark that set this church apart turned on how the divine and the human are joined in Christ. The Council of Ephesus in 431 condemned Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, for teaching — as his accusers framed it — that the two natures remained so distinct that Mary could not properly be called Theotokos, the God-bearer. Against him stood Cyril of Alexandria, whose insistence on the single incarnate nature carried the council. The Church of the East never accepted that condemnation. It kept to the theological tradition of Antioch, which guarded the full reality of Christ’s humanity against any sense that the human had been swallowed by the divine, and it honored as a master the Antiochene exegete Theodore of Mopsuestia — the teacher whose works the Greek world later anathematized and whose vast output survives chiefly because this church preserved it in Syriac translation.

The fifth-century quarrel had set two instincts against each other. The school of Alexandria, building on the Greek theology shaped in the fourth century by the Cappadocian fathers and Cyril after them, pressed toward the unity of the one incarnate Word, lest the Savior be divided into two sons. The school of Antioch pressed toward the integrity of the two natures, lest the divine appear to suffer and die or the humanity dissolve into a mere appearance. The council of Chalcedon in 451 sought a middle formula — one person in two natures — and most of the Mediterranean world eventually rallied to it; that Chalcedonian settlement is the faith of the Greek and Latin churches and of the later Eastern Orthodox communion. But Chalcedon was a council of the Roman empire, and the Church of the East, outside that empire and committed to the Antiochene reading Chalcedon had only half satisfied, went its own way. It is not a wing of the Byzantine church and never was; it is a separate apostolic communion that the great imperial councils after Nicaea did not gather and could not bind.

Whether the mature doctrine of the East Syrians is in fact the heresy named after Nestorius is a question scholarship now treats with care. The very label Nestorian was a weapon of heresiology — a name imposed from outside to fix a condemned man’s identity on a whole communion (on the machinery of such labeling). The church’s own teachers spoke not of Nestorius’s person but of two qnome (roughly, two concrete realities, divine and human) united in one parsopa, one presented person — a formula that aims at the same mystery the Greek and Latin churches confessed, by a different grammar. Recent dialogue has read the difference as largely one of vocabulary. In a Common Christological Declaration signed at the Vatican on 11 November 1994 by Pope John Paul II and the Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, the two churches affirmed a common faith in the incarnation and acknowledged that each may rightly pray to Mary — the Assyrian church as Mother of Christ our God and Savior, the Catholic as Mother of God — the controversies of the fifth century read, fifteen centuries on, as more a failure of shared language than of shared faith.

The school of Nisibis and the eastward turn

Doctrine traveled on the back of a school. When the emperor Zeno closed the theological school of Edessa in 489, on the Roman side of the border, its displaced masters crossed into Persia, and under Narsai the school of Nisibis became the intellectual engine of the church. There the Antiochene method — Theodore read line by line, scripture taken first in its plain historical sense — was handed down, and from there trained clergy fanned out along the trade roads. Alongside the school stood the monastic reform of Abraham of Kashkar in the sixth century, which gave the Persian church a network of disciplined houses; from those houses came the contemplative writers of Syriac Christian mysticism — Isaac of Nineveh foremost among them — whose prayer-theology of stillness and wonder would be read far past the borders of the church that produced it.

The reach was unmatched in the ancient world. Merchants and missionaries carried the faith east along the Silk Road into the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and beyond. A stone monument raised at Xi’an in 781, buried during the anti-foreign religious persecution of the 840s and rediscovered in 1625, records in Chinese and Syriac the arrival of Jingjiao, the luminous religion, at the Tang court a century and a half earlier, naming the missionary Alopen, who reached the capital in 635 and won the favor of the emperor Taizong. The stele’s Chinese calls the faith the teaching of Daqin, the Chinese name for the Roman East — the firmest single piece of evidence that this church reached China. It planted communities among the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, where wall-paintings from the oasis city of Qocho still show East Syriac clergy in procession; and the Saint Thomas Christians of southern India — who hold that the apostle Thomas himself founded their churches — long looked to its hierarchy for their bishops, receiving from Mesopotamia the metropolitans who governed the Malabar coast across more than a thousand years of sea-borne contact. This eastward Christianity ran in parallel, along the same caravan routes, with the eastward diffusion of Manichaeism, the rival religion of light that also remade its vocabulary at each frontier; the two faiths shared a Mesopotamian birthplace and a Syriac mother tongue, and competed for the same converts across Asia. The adaptability was deliberate. The Tang-era Christian texts found at Dunhuang render the gospel in Buddhist and Daoist diction, much as the Manichaean missionaries did, so that the same Syriac liturgy could be heard as one teaching in Persia, another in the Turkic steppe, and a third on the Chinese frontier — the doctrine held constant while the language bent to meet each people it reached.

Rite, structure, and texture

The church’s worship is its own. The East Syriac rite centers on one of the oldest eucharistic prayers in continuous use, the Anaphora of Addai and Mari — named for two figures the tradition counts among the seventy disciples and the first evangelists of Mesopotamia — a prayer so archaic that, in one form, it carries no explicit words of institution, a feature that has drawn the attention of liturgical scholars across the divided churches. Its calendar, its chant, and its austere church interiors mark it off from the icon-filled worship of the Greek East: where the Byzantine tradition fills the sanctuary with painted faces, the East Syrians have historically honored the bare cross above the image. Governance ran from the catholicos-patriarch down through metropolitans to bishops, with the great monasteries — the legacy of Abraham of Kashkar’s reform — serving as the seedbeds from which bishops and missionaries were drawn. The whole edifice rested on Syriac: not only a liturgical tongue but the medium of an entire literature of exegesis, hymnody, canon law, history, and science, the language in which the church thought.

The Persian church and the house of learning

Under the early caliphate the catholicos moved his seat to Baghdad, and the church entered the most intellectually fertile phase of its history. Its physicians attended the Abbasid court; its scholars carried the Greek learning preserved in Syriac into Arabic. The most celebrated of them, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, a son of the Church of the East, presided over the translation of Greek medicine and philosophy in ninth-century Baghdad — the bilingual Syriac-and-Greek competence of the East Syrian clergy becoming a hinge on which Aristotle and Galen turned into Arabic, and so the inheritance later philosophers of Islam such as al-Farabi would build on. The Christology that had cost the church its standing in the Roman world left it, in the Islamic world, a learned and useful minority. Under the patriarch Timothy I, who corresponded with the caliph and governed a church spanning a continent, the catholicate at Baghdad was arguably the most far-flung Christian jurisdiction on earth.

Height and contraction

At its medieval peak, in the years around the patriarchate of Yahballaha III (1281–1317) — himself a Turkic-born monk from near the Chinese frontier, raised to the catholicate at the moment the Mongol khans ruled from the Mediterranean to the Pacific — the church counted some two dozen metropolitan provinces and well over a hundred bishoprics, stretching from Cyprus and the Mediterranean coast across Persia and Central Asia to the ports of India and the cities of China. It was, for a moment, the most geographically extensive church in the world: a single communion praying one Syriac liturgy under skies that Greek and Latin Christendom never saw.

That breadth contracted sharply, and fast. The collapse of the Mongol order, the turn of its successor states to Islam, and above all the campaigns of Timur at the end of the fourteenth century — which sacked the cities of Central Asia and Persia and scattered or destroyed the Christian communities of Samarkand, Merv, and the Silk Road oases — reduced the church to its Mesopotamian core and the Malabar coast of India. The provinces of the exterior, as its own historians called the far missions, simply vanished from the record. In 1552 a dispute over the patriarchate, which had become hereditary within a single family, split the church: one party sought union with Rome, and its line grew into the Chaldean Catholic Church, which keeps the East Syriac rite in communion with the pope. The surviving body that held to the old independence, the Assyrian Church of the East, remains small, its faithful scattered by the upheavals of the twentieth century from their Mesopotamian homeland across the world.

The textual and scholarly record

Much of what is known of this church comes from documents it kept and others nearly lost. The acts of its synods survive in the Synodicon Orientale, a Syriac collection edited by Jean-Baptiste Chabot in 1902; its theologians and martyrs are cataloged in the great surveys of Syriac literature, of which the most used in English is the reference work of Sebastian Brock and his collaborators, The Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage. The standard narrative history in English is Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar Winkler’s account of the church from its origins to the present. The Xi’an monument has its own long scholarly afterlife, from the seventeenth-century Jesuits who first read it to the modern critical study of its bilingual text. And the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia, struck from the books of the Greek church, are recovered today largely from the Syriac versions the East Syrians made and guarded — a body of fifth-century theology that exists because a church the councils condemned refused to burn it.

The spread of Christianity was never only westward. While the Greek and Latin churches were still arguing the wording of one Christ, a catholicos on the Tigris was ordaining bishops for Samarkand and the Chinese coast, and a Syriac liturgy was being sung in languages the councils of the empire had never heard.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) — translated into Syriac within a generation of the corpus's appearance

→ Related: Cappadocian Patristics · Central Asian Chinese Manichaeism · Christianity · Mesopotamia · Eastern Orthodox Christianity · Syriac Christian Mysticism · Theodore Of Mopsuestia · Patristic Heresiology · Thomas The Apostle · Sasanian Iranian Wisdom Tradition · Monasticism · China · Roman Empire