Gibbon's The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
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Chapter XLVII: Ecclesiastical Discord.
Part III.
-
Both in his native and his episcopal province, the
heresy of the unfortunate Nestorius was speedily obliterated.
The Oriental bishops, who at Ephesus had resisted to his face the
arrogance of Cyril, were mollified by his tardy concessions. The
same prelates, or their successors, subscribed, not without a
murmur, the decrees of Chalcedon; the power of the Monophysites
reconciled them with the Catholics in the conformity of passion,
of interest, and, insensibly, of belief; and their last reluctant
sigh was breathed in the defence of the three chapters. Their
dissenting brethren, less moderate, or more sincere, were crushed
by the penal laws; and, as early as the reign of Justinian, it
became difficult to find a church of Nestorians within the limits
of the Roman empire. Beyond those limits they had discovered a
new world, in which they might hope for liberty, and aspire to
conquest. In Persia, notwithstanding the resistance of the Magi,
Christianity had struck a deep root, and the nations of the East
reposed under its salutary shade. The catholic, or primate,
resided in the capital: in his synods, and in their dioceses, his
metropolitans, bishops, and clergy, represented the pomp and
order of a regular hierarchy: they rejoiced in the increase of
proselytes, who were converted from the Zendavesta to the gospel,
from the secular to the monastic life; and their zeal was
stimulated by the presence of an artful and formidable enemy.
The Persian church had been founded by the missionaries of Syria;
and their language, discipline, and doctrine, were closely
interwoven with its original frame. The catholics were elected
and ordained by their own suffragans; but their filial dependence
on the patriarchs of Antioch is attested by the canons of the
Oriental church. ^113 In the Persian school of Edessa, ^114 the
rising generations of the faithful imbibed their theological
idiom: they studied in the Syriac version the ten thousand
volumes of Theodore of Mopsuestia; and they revered the apostolic
faith and holy martyrdom of his disciple Nestorius, whose person
and language were equally unknown to the nations beyond the
Tigris. The first indelible lesson of Ibas, bishop of Edessa,
taught them to execrate the Egyptians, who, in the synod of
Ephesus, had impiously confounded the two natures of Christ. The
flight of the masters and scholars, who were twice expelled from
the Athens of Syria, dispersed a crowd of missionaries inflamed
by the double zeal of religion and revenge. And the rigid unity
of the Monophysites, who, under the reigns of Zeno and
Anastasius, had invaded the thrones of the East, provoked their
antagonists, in a land of freedom, to avow a moral, rather than a
physical, union of the two persons of Christ. Since the first
preaching of the gospel, the Sassanian kings beheld with an eye
of suspicion a race of aliens and apostates, who had embraced the
religion, and who might favor the cause, of the hereditary foes
of their country. The royal edicts had often prohibited their
dangerous correspondence with the Syrian clergy: the progress of
the schism was grateful to the jealous pride of Perozes, and he
listened to the eloquence of an artful prelate, who painted
Nestorius as the friend of Persia, and urged him to secure the
fidelity of his Christian subjects, by granting a just preference
to the victims and enemies of the Roman tyrant. The Nestorians
composed a large majority of the clergy and people: they were
encouraged by the smile, and armed with the sword, of despotism;
yet many of their weaker brethren were startled at the thought of
breaking loose from the communion of the Christian world, and the
blood of seven thousand seven hundred Monophysites, or Catholics,
confirmed the uniformity of faith and discipline in the churches
of Persia. ^115 Their ecclesiastical institutions are
distinguished by a liberal principle of reason, or at least of
policy: the austerity of the cloister was relaxed and gradually
forgotten; houses of charity were endowed for the education of
orphans and foundlings; the law of celibacy, so forcibly
recommended to the Greeks and Latins, was disregarded by the
Persian clergy; and the number of the elect was multiplied by the
public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the bishops, and
even the patriarch himself. To this standard of natural and
religious freedom, myriads of fugitives resorted from all the
provinces of the Eastern empire; the narrow bigotry of Justinian
was punished by the emigration of his most industrious subjects;
they transported into Persia the arts both of peace and war: and
those who deserved the favor, were promoted in the service, of a
discerning monarch. The arms of Nushirvan, and his fiercer
grandson, were assisted with advice, and money, and troops, by
the desperate sectaries who still lurked in their native cities
of the East: their zeal was rewarded with the gift of the
Catholic churches; but when those cities and churches were
recovered by Heraclius, their open profession of treason and
heresy compelled them to seek a refuge in the realm of their
foreign ally. But the seeming tranquillity of the Nestorians was
often endangered, and sometimes overthrown. They were involved
in the common evils of Oriental despotism: their enmity to Rome
could not always atone for their attachment to the gospel: and a
colony of three hundred thousand Jacobites, the captives of
Apamea and Antioch, was permitted to erect a hostile altar in the
face of the catholic, and in the sunshine of the court. In his
last treaty, Justinian introduced some conditions which tended to
enlarge and fortify the toleration of Christianity in Persia.
The emperor, ignorant of the rights of conscience, was incapable
of pity or esteem for the heretics who denied the authority of
the holy synods: but he flattered himself that they would
gradually perceive the temporal benefits of union with the empire
and the church of Rome; and if he failed in exciting their
gratitude, he might hope to provoke the jealousy of their
sovereign. In a later age the Lutherans have been burnt at
Paris, and protected in Germany, by the superstition and policy
of the most Christian king.
[Footnote 113: See the Arabic canons of Nice in the translation
of Abraham Ecchelensis, No. 37, 38, 39, 40. Concil. tom. ii. p.
335, 336, edit. Venet. These vulgar titles, Nicene and Arabic,
are both apocryphal. The council of Nice enacted no more than
twenty canons, (Theodoret. Hist. Eccles. l. i. c. 8;) and the
remainder, seventy or eighty, were collected from the synods of
the Greek church. The Syriac edition of Maruthas is no longer
extant, (Asseman. Bibliot. Oriental. tom. i. p. 195, tom. iii. p.
74,) and the Arabic version is marked with many recent
interpolations. Yet this Code contains many curious relics of
ecclesiastical discipline; and since it is equally revered by all
the Eastern communions, it was probably finished before the
schism of the Nestorians and Jacobites, (Fabric. Bibliot. Graec.
tom. xi. p. 363 - 367.)]
[Footnote 114: Theodore the Reader (l. ii. c. 5, 49, ad calcem
Hist. Eccles.) has noticed this Persian school of Edessa. Its
ancient splendor, and the two aeras of its downfall, (A.D. 431
and 489) are clearly discussed by Assemanni, (Biblioth. Orient.
tom. ii. p. 402, iii. p. 376, 378, iv. p. 70, 924.)]
[Footnote 115: A dissertation on the state of the Nestorians has
swelled in the bands of Assemanni to a folio volume of 950 pages,
and his learned researches are digested in the most lucid order.
Besides this ivth volume of the Bibliotheca Orientalis, the
extracts in the three preceding tomes (tom. i. p. 203, ii. p. 321
- 463, iii. 64 - 70, 378 - 395, &c., 405 - 408, 580 - 589) may be
usefully consulted.]
The desire of gaining souls for God and subjects for the
church, has excited in every age the diligence of the Christian
priests. From the conquest of Persia they carried their
spiritual arms to the north, the east, and the south; and the
simplicity of the gospel was fashioned and painted with the
colors of the Syriac theology. In the sixth century, according
to the report of a Nestorian traveller, ^116 Christianity was
successfully preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians,
the Indians, the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites: the
Barbaric churches, from the Gulf of Persia to the Caspian Sea,
were almost infinite; and their recent faith was conspicuous in
the number and sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper
coast of Malabar, and the isles of the ocean, Socotora and
Ceylon, were peopled with an increasing multitude of Christians;
and the bishops and clergy of those sequestered regions derived
their ordination from the Catholic of Babylon. In a subsequent
age the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the limits which had
confined the ambition and curiosity both of the Greeks and
Persians. The missionaries of Balch and Samarcand pursued
without fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar, and insinuated
themselves into the camps of the valleys of Imaus and the banks
of the Selinga. They exposed a metaphysical creed to those
illiterate shepherds: to those sanguinary warriors, they
recommended humanity and repose. Yet a khan, whose power they
vainly magnified, is said to have received at their hands the
rites of baptism, and even of ordination; and the fame of Prester
or Presbyter John ^117 has long amused the credulity of Europe.
The royal convert was indulged in the use of a portable altar;
but he despatched an embassy to the patriarch, to inquire how, in
the season of Lent, he should abstain from animal food, and how
he might celebrate the Eucharist in a desert that produced
neither corn nor wine. In their progress by sea and land, the
Nestorians entered China by the port of Canton and the northern
residence of Sigan. Unlike the senators of Rome, who assumed
with a smile the characters of priests and augurs, the mandarins,
who affect in public the reason of philosophers, are devoted in
private to every mode of popular superstition. They cherished
and they confounded the gods of Palestine and of India; but the
propagation of Christianity awakened the jealousy of the state,
and, after a short vicissitude of favor and persecution, the
foreign sect expired in ignorance and oblivion. ^118 Under the
reign of the caliphs, the Nestorian church was diffused from
China to Jerusalem and Cyrus; and their numbers, with those of
the Jacobites, were computed to surpass the Greek and Latin
communions. ^119 Twenty-five metropolitans or archbishops
composed their hierarchy; but several of these were dispensed, by
the distance and danger of the way, from the duty of personal
attendance, on the easy condition that every six years they
should testify their faith and obedience to the catholic or
patriarch of Babylon, a vague appellation which has been
successively applied to the royal seats of Seleucia, Ctesiphon,
and Bagdad. These remote branches are long since withered; and
the old patriarchal trunk ^120 is now divided by the Elijahs of
Mosul, the representatives almost on lineal descent of the
genuine and primitive succession; the Josephs of Amida, who are
reconciled to the church of Rome: ^121 and the Simeons of Van or
Ormia, whose revolt, at the head of forty thousand families, was
promoted in the sixteenth century by the Sophis of Persia. The
number of three hundred thousand is allowed for the whole body of
the Nestorians, who, under the name of Chaldeans or Assyrians,
are confounded with the most learned or the most powerful nation
of Eastern antiquity.
[Footnote 116: See the Topographia Christiana of Cosmas, surnamed
Indicopleustes, or the Indian navigator, l. iii. p. 178, 179, l.
-
p. 337. The entire work, of which some curious extracts may
be found in Photius, (cod. xxxvi. p. 9, 10, edit. Hoeschel,)
Thevenot, (in the 1st part of his Relation des Voyages, &c.,) and
Fabricius, (Bibliot. Graec. l. iii. c. 25, tom. ii. p. 603 -
617,) has been published by Father Montfaucon at Paris, 1707, in
the Nova Collectio Patrum, (tom. ii. p. 113 - 346.) It was the
design of the author to confute the impious heresy of those who
maintained that the earth is a globe, and not a flat, oblong
table, as it is represented in the Scriptures, (l. ii. p. 138.)
But the nonsense of the monk is mingled with the practical
knowledge of the traveller, who performed his voyage A.D. 522,
and published his book at Alexandria, A.D. 547, (l. ii. p. 140,
141. Montfaucon, Praefat. c. 2.) The Nestorianism of Cosmas,
unknown to his learned editor, was detected by La Croze,
(Christianisme des Indes, tom. i. p. 40 - 55,) and is confirmed
by Assemanni, (Bibliot. Orient. tom. iv. p. 605, 606.)]
[Footnote 117: In its long progress to Mosul, Jerusalem, Rome,
&c., the story of Prester John evaporated in a monstrous fable,
of which some features have been borrowed from the Lama of
Thibet, (Hist. Genealogique des Tartares, P. ii. p. 42. Hist. de
Gengiscan, p. 31, &c.,) and were ignorantly transferred by the
Portuguese to the emperor of Abyssinia, (Ludolph. Hist. Aethiop.
Comment. l. ii. c. 1.) Yet it is probable that in the xith and
xiith centuries, Nestorian Christianity was professed in the
horde of the Keraites, (D'Herbelot, p. 256, 915, 959. Assemanni,
tom. iv. p. 468 - 504.)
Note: The extent to which Nestorian Christianity prevailed
among the Tartar tribes is one of the most curious questions in
Oriental history. M. Schmidt (Geschichte der Ost Mongolen, notes,
-
383) appears to question the Christianity of Ong Chaghan, and
his Keraite subjects. - M.]
[Footnote 118: The Christianity of China, between the seventh and
the thirteenth century, is invincibly proved by the consent of
Chinese, Arabian, Syriac, and Latin evidence, (Assemanni,
Biblioth. Orient. tom. iv. p. 502 - 552. Mem. de l'Academie des
Inscript. tom. xxx. p. 802 - 819.) The inscription of Siganfu
which describes the fortunes of the Nestorian church, from the
first mission, A.D. 636, to the current year 781, is accused of
forgery by La Croze, Voltaire, &c., who become the dupes of their
own cunning, while they are afraid of a Jesuitical fraud.
Note: This famous monument, the authenticity of which many
have attempted to impeach, rather from hatred to the Jesuits, by
whom it was made known, than by a candid examination of its
contents, is now generally considered above all suspicion. The
Chinese text and the facts which it relates are equally strong
proofs of its authenticity. This monument was raised as a
memorial of the establishment of Christianity in China. It is
dated the year 1092 of the era of the Greeks, or the Seleucidae,
A.D. 781, in the time of the Nestorian patriarch Anan-jesu. It
was raised by Iezdbouzid, priest and chorepiscopus of Chumdan,
that is, of the capital of the Chinese empire, and the son of a
priest who came from Balkh in Tokharistan. Among the various
arguments which may be urged in favor of the authenticity of this
monument, and which has not yet been advanced, may be reckoned
the name of the priest by whom it was raised. The name is
Persian, and at the time the monument was discovered, it would
have been impossible to have imagined it; for there was no work
extant from whence the knowledge of it could be derived. I do
not believe that ever since this period, any book has been
published in which it can be found a second time. It is very
celebrated amongst the Armenians, and is derived from a martyr, a
Persian by birth, of the royal race, who perished towards the
middle of the seventh century, and rendered his name celebrated
among the Christian nations of the East. St. Martin, vol. i. p.
-
M. Remusat has also strongly expressed his conviction of the
authenticity of this monument. Melanges Asiatiques, P. i. p. 33.
Yet M. Schmidt (Geschichte der Ost Mongolen, p. 384) denies that
there is any satisfactory proof that much a monument was ever
found in China, or that it was not manufactured in Europe. But if
the Jesuits had attempted such a forgery, would it not have been
more adapted to further their peculiar views? - M.]
[Footnote 119: Jacobitae et Nestorianae plures quam Graeci et
Latini Jacob a Vitriaco, Hist. Hierosol. l. ii. c. 76, p. 1093,
in the Gesta Dei per Francos. The numbers are given by Thomassin,
Discipline de l'Eglise, tom. i. p. 172.]
[Footnote 120: The division of the patriarchate may be traced in
the Bibliotheca Orient. of Assemanni, tom. i. p. 523 - 549, tom.
-
p. 457, &c., tom. iii. p. 603, p. 621 - 623, tom. iv. p. 164
- 169, p. 423, p. 622 - 629, &c.]
[Footnote 121: The pompous language of Rome on the submission of
a Nestorian patriarch, is elegantly represented in the viith book
of Fra Paola, Babylon, Nineveh, Arbela, and the trophies of
Alexander, Tauris, and Ecbatana, the Tigris and Indus.]
According to the legend of antiquity, the gospel was
preached in India by St. Thomas. ^122 At the end of the ninth
century, his shrine, perhaps in the neighborhood of Madras, was
devoutly visited by the ambassadors of Alfred; and their return
with a cargo of pearls and spices rewarded the zeal of the
English monarch, who entertained the largest projects of trade
and discovery. ^123 When the Portuguese first opened the
navigation of India, the Christians of St. Thomas had been seated
for ages on the coast of Malabar, and the difference of their
character and color attested the mixture of a foreign race. In
arms, in arts, and possibly in virtue, they excelled the natives
of Hindostan; the husbandmen cultivated the palm-tree, the
merchants were enriched by the pepper trade, the soldiers
preceded the nairs or nobles of Malabar, and their hereditary
privileges were respected by the gratitude or the fear of the
king of Cochin and the Zamorin himself. They acknowledged a
Gentoo of sovereign, but they were governed, even in temporal
concerns, by the bishop of Angamala. He still asserted his
ancient title of metropolitan of India, but his real jurisdiction
was exercised in fourteen hundred churches, and he was intrusted
with the care of two hundred thousand souls. Their religion would
have rendered them the firmest and most cordial allies of the
Portuguese; but the inquisitors soon discerned in the Christians
of St. Thomas the unpardonable guilt of heresy and schism.
Instead of owning themselves the subjects of the Roman pontiff,
the spiritual and temporal monarch of the globe, they adhered,
like their ancestors, to the communion of the Nestorian
patriarch; and the bishops whom he ordained at Mosul, traversed
the dangers of the sea and land to reach their diocese on the
coast of Malabar. In their Syriac liturgy the names of Theodore
and Nestorius were piously commemorated: they united their
adoration of the two persons of Christ; the title of Mother of
God was offensive to their ear, and they measured with scrupulous
avarice the honors of the Virgin Mary, whom the superstition of
the Latins had almost exalted to the rank of a goddess. When her
image was first presented to the disciples of St. Thomas, they
indignantly exclaimed, "We are Christians, not idolaters!" and
their simple devotion was content with the veneration of the
cross. Their separation from the Western world had left them in
ignorance of the improvements, or corruptions, of a thousand
years; and their conformity with the faith and practice of the
fifth century would equally disappoint the prejudices of a Papist
or a Protestant. It was the first care of the ministers of Rome
to intercept all correspondence with the Nestorian patriarch, and
several of his bishops expired in the prisons of the holy office.
The flock, without a shepherd, was assaulted by the power of the
Portuguese, the arts of the Jesuits, and the zeal of Alexis de
Menezes, archbishop of Goa, in his personal visitation of the
coast of Malabar. The synod of Diamper, at which he presided,
consummated the pious work of the reunion; and rigorously imposed
the doctrine and discipline of the Roman church, without
forgetting auricular confession, the strongest engine of
ecclesiastical torture. The memory of Theodore and Nestorius was
condemned, and Malabar was reduced under the dominion of the
pope, of the primate, and of the Jesuits who invaded the see of
Angamala or Cranganor. Sixty years of servitude and hypocrisy
were patiently endured; but as soon as the Portuguese empire was
shaken by the courage and industry of the Dutch, the Nestorians
asserted, with vigor and effect, the religion of their fathers.
The Jesuits were incapable of defending the power which they had
abused; the arms of forty thousand Christians were pointed
against their falling tyrants; and the Indian archdeacon assumed
the character of bishop till a fresh supply of episcopal gifts
and Syriac missionaries could be obtained from the patriarch of
Babylon. Since the expulsion of the Portuguese, the Nestorian
creed is freely professed on the coast of Malabar. The trading
companies of Holland and England are the friends of toleration;
but if oppression be less mortifying than contempt, the
Christians of St. Thomas have reason to complain of the cold and
silent indifference of their brethren of Europe. ^124
[Footnote 122: The Indian missionary, St. Thomas, an apostle, a
Manichaean, or an Armenian merchant, (La Croze, Christianisme des
Indes, tom. i. p. 57 - 70,) was famous, however, as early as the
time of Jerom, (ad Marcellam, epist. 148.) Marco-Polo was
informed on the spot that he suffered martyrdom in the city of
Malabar, or Meliapour, a league only from Madras, (D'Anville,
Eclaircissemens sur l'Inde, p. 125,) where the Portuguese founded
an episcopal church under the name of St. Thome, and where the
saint performed an annual miracle, till he was silenced by the
profane neighborhood of the English, (La Croze, tom. ii. p. 7 -
-
]
[Footnote 123: Neither the author of the Saxon Chronicle (A.D.
833) not William of Malmesbury (de Gestis Regum Angliae, l. ii.
-
4, p. 44) were capable, in the twelfth century, of inventing
this extraordinary fact; they are incapable of explaining the
motives and measures of Alfred; and their hasty notice serves
only to provoke our curiosity. William of Malmesbury feels the
difficulty of the enterprise, quod quivis in hoc saeculo miretur;
and I almost suspect that the English ambassadors collected their
cargo and legend in Egypt. The royal author has not enriched his
Orosius (see Barrington's Miscellanies) with an Indian, as well
as a Scandinavian, voyage.]
[Footnote 124: Concerning the Christians of St. Thomas, see
Assemann. Bibliot Orient. tom. iv. p. 391 - 407, 435 - 451;
Geddes's Church History of Malabar; and, above all, La Croze,
Histoire du Christianisme des Indes, in 2 vols. 12mo., La Haye,
1758, a learned and agreeable work. They have drawn from the
same source, the Portuguese and Italian narratives; and the
prejudices of the Jesuits are sufficiently corrected by those of
the Protestants.
Note: The St. Thome Christians had excited great interest in
the ancient mind of the admirable Bishop Heber. See his curious
and, to his friends, highly characteristic letter to Mar
Athanasius, Appendix to Journal. The arguments of his friend and
coadjutor, Mr. Robinson, (Last Days of Bishop Heber,) have not
convinced me that the Christianity of India is older than the
Nestorian dispersion. - M]
-
The history of the Monophysites is less copious and
interesting than that of the Nestorians. Under the reigns of
Zeno and Anastasius, their artful leaders surprised the ear of
the prince, usurped the thrones of the East, and crushed on its
native soil the school of the Syrians. The rule of the
Monophysite faith was defined with exquisite discretion by
Severus, patriarch of Antioch: he condemned, in the style of the
Henoticon, the adverse heresies of Nestorius; and Eutyches
maintained against the latter the reality of the body of Christ,
and constrained the Greeks to allow that he was a liar who spoke
truth. ^125 But the approximation of ideas could not abate the
vehemence of passion; each party was the more astonished that
their blind antagonist could dispute on so trifling a difference;
the tyrant of Syria enforced the belief of his creed, and his
reign was polluted with the blood of three hundred and fifty
monks, who were slain, not perhaps without provocation or
resistance, under the walls of Apamea. ^126 The successor of
Anastasius replanted the orthodox standard in the East; Severus
fled into Egypt; and his friend, the eloquent Xenaias, ^127 who
had escaped from the Nestorians of Persia, was suffocated in his
exile by the Melchites of Paphlagonia. Fifty-four bishops were
swept from their thrones, eight hundred ecclesiastics were cast
into prison, ^128 and notwithstanding the ambiguous favor of
Theodora, the Oriental flocks, deprived of their shepherds, must
insensibly have been either famished or poisoned. In this
spiritual distress, the expiring faction was revived, and united,
and perpetuated, by the labors of a monk; and the name of James
Baradaeus ^129 has been preserved in the appellation of
Jacobites, a familiar sound, which may startle the ear of an
English reader. From the holy confessors in their prison of
Constantinople, he received the powers of bishop of Edessa and
apostle of the East, and the ordination of fourscore thousand
bishops, priests, and deacons, is derived from the same
inexhaustible source. The speed of the zealous missionary was
promoted by the fleetest dromedaries of a devout chief of the
Arabs; the doctrine and discipline of the Jacobites were secretly
established in the dominions of Justinian; and each Jacobite was
compelled to violate the laws and to hate the Roman legislator.
The successors of Severus, while they lurked in convents or
villages, while they sheltered their proscribed heads in the
caverns of hermits, or the tents of the Saracens, still asserted,
as they now assert, their indefeasible right to the title, the
rank, and the prerogatives of patriarch of Antioch: under the
milder yoke of the infidels, they reside about a league from
Merdin, in the pleasant monastery of Zapharan, which they have
embellished with cells, aqueducts, and plantations. The
secondary, though honorable, place is filled by the maphrian,
who, in his station at Mosul itself, defies the Nestorian
catholic with whom he contests the primacy of the East. Under
the patriarch and the maphrian, one hundred and fifty archbishops
and bishops have been counted in the different ages of the
Jacobite church; but the order of the hierarchy is relaxed or
dissolved, and the greater part of their dioceses is confined to
the neighborhood of the Euphrates and the Tigris. The cities of
Aleppo and Amida, which are often visited by the patriarch,
contain some wealthy merchants and industrious mechanics, but the
multitude derive their scanty sustenance from their daily labor:
and poverty, as well as superstition, may impose their excessive
fasts: five annual lents, during which both the clergy and laity
abstain not only from flesh or eggs, but even from the taste of
wine, of oil, and of fish. Their present numbers are esteemed
from fifty to fourscore thousand souls, the remnant of a populous
church, which was gradually decreased under the impression of
twelve centuries. Yet in that long period, some strangers of
merit have been converted to the Monophysite faith, and a Jew was
the father of Abulpharagius, ^130 primate of the East, so truly
eminent both in his life and death. In his life he was an
elegant writer of the Syriac and Arabic tongues, a poet,
physician, and historian, a subtile philosopher, and a moderate
divine. In his death, his funeral was attended by his rival the
Nestorian patriarch, with a train of Greeks and Armenians, who
forgot their disputes, and mingled their tears over the grave of
an enemy. The sect which was honored by the virtues of
Abulpharagius appears, however, to sink below the level of their
Nestorian brethren. The superstition of the Jacobites is more
abject, their fasts more rigid, ^131 their intestine divisions
are more numerous, and their doctors (as far as I can measure the
degrees of nonsense) are more remote from the precincts of
reason. Something may possibly be allowed for the rigor of the
Monophysite theology; much more for the superior influence of the
monastic order. In Syria, in Egypt, in Ethiopia, the Jacobite
monks have ever been distinguished by the austerity of their
penance and the absurdity of their legends. Alive or dead, they
are worshipped as the favorites of the Deity; the crosier of
bishop and patriarch is reserved for their venerable hands; and
they assume the government of men, while they are yet reeking
with the habits and prejudices of the cloister. ^132
[Footnote 125: Is the expression of Theodore, in his Treatise of
the Incarnation, p. 245, 247, as he is quoted by La Croze, (Hist.
du Christianisme d'Ethiopie et d'Armenie, p. 35,) who exclaims,
perhaps too hastily, "Quel pitoyable raisonnement!" Renaudot has
touched (Hist. Patriarch. Alex. p. 127 - 138) the Oriental
accounts of Severus; and his authentic creed may be found in the
epistle of John the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, in the xth
century, to his brother Mannas of Alexandria, (Asseman. Bibliot.
Orient. tom. ii. p. 132 - 141.)]
[Footnote 126: Epist. Archimandritarum et Monachorum Syriae
Secundae ad Papam Hormisdam, Concil. tom. v. p. 598 - 602. The
courage of St. Sabas, ut leo animosus, will justify the suspicion
that the arms of these monks were not always spiritual or
defensive, (Baronius, A.D. 513, No. 7, &c.)]
[Footnote 127: Assemanni (Bibliot. Orient. tom. ii. p. 10 - 46)
and La Croze (Christianisme d'Ethiopie, p. 36 - 40) will supply
the history of Xenaias, or Philoxenus, bishop of Mabug, or
Hierapolis, in Syria. He was a perfect master of the Syriac
language, and the author or editor of a version of the New
Testament.]
[Footnote 128: The names and titles of fifty-four bishops who
were exiled by Justin, are preserved in the Chronicle of
Dionysius, (apud Asseman. tom. ii. p. 54.) Severus was personally
summoned to Constantinople - for his trial, says Liberatus (Brev.
-
19) - that his tongue might be cut out, says Evagrius, (l. iv.
-
iv.) The prudent patriarch did not stay to examine the
difference. This ecclesiastical revolution is fixed by Pagi to
the month of September of the year 518, (Critica, tom. ii. p.
506.)]
[Footnote 129: The obscure history of James or Jacobus Baradaeus,
or Zanzalust may be gathered from Eutychius, (Annal. tom. ii. p.
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