When the World Went Mad
Are we doomed to repeat history? How might a look at the tumultuous 1300s inform our current craziness?
Phillip Jenkins’ book The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died is a great read, especially for Western Christians unfamiliar with the long missional history of the Church of the East and its thriving even after the advent of Islam (7th century) all the way through the 1300’s. Much of this history took place in modern day Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey which remain contested conflict zones today.
This history is also extremely important for understanding what happens to human social structures and religious affiliation when global crises, climate changes, pandemics, war, human greed, tribalism and warmongering combine. The history of the 1300s especially is eerie to read in light of modern globalization, COVID-19, climate change and the common ethno-religious nationalisms of today. The quote goes: “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” but I am not so sure looking around at current trends.
The idea of the Middle East today conjures images of Islam and declining populations of persecuted Christians for moderns, but for centuries it was the epicenter of Christianity and the global source of philosophical and theological thought, church authority and missionary sending. The other important reason this history and the history of the early church in general is so important is that many of the things modern Western Christians reject as foreign and threatening have their source in ancient Christianity.
For example, pacifism, refusal of military service, social programs that provide for the poor, and collective ownership which many Christians (in their individualistic, capitalist, democratic contexts) would label as ‘socialist’ or ‘marxist’ today have their source in the early church (see Acts 2 or the writings of Tertullian for example). The ideas of contextualization in mission and inter-faith dialogue also find advanced examples and roots in the Nestorian and Jacobite traditions. And, what we think of as Islamic spiritual practices (strict fasting, bowing in prayer multiple times a day, calls to prayer, chanting in minor keys etc.) originated with monasticism and mysticism in the Eastern church in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Persia.
Here are some key quotes form the book:
many aspects of Christianity that we conceive as thoroughly modern were in fact the norm in the distant past: globalization, the encounter with other faiths, and the dilemmas of living under hostile regimes.
In terms of the number and splendor of its churches and monasteries, its vast scholarship and dazzling spirituality, Iraq was through the late Middle Ages at least as much a cultural and spiritual heartland of Christianity as was France or Germany, or indeed Ireland.
For centuries these churches were at their most dynamic in the Middle East. Eastern cities like Antioch (Anatakya, Turkey) Edessa (Urfa, Turkey), and Nisibis (Nusabyn, Turkey) [and Diyarbakir (once Amida), Mardin, Malatya) were the glories of the Christian world. Still in the eighth century, Rome itself was a remote outpost…
Iraq and Syria were the bases for two great transnational churches deemed heretical by the Catholic and Orthodox—namely, the Nestorians and Jacobites. Well into the Middle Ages, the Christian strongholds of the Middle East included such currently newsworthy Iraqi cities as Basra, Mosul, and Kirkuk, while Tikrit—hometown of Saddam Hussein—was a thriving Christian center several centuries after the coming of Islam.
Nestorians were simply, and properly, “the Church of the East.” Both faithfully accepted the Council of Nicea, both clung to a faith that had been handed down to them from the apostles via the Great Church, and indeed both had an even more conservative approach to the canon of scripture than did the European-based churches.
In scholarship, classical learning and science, the Eastern churches in 800 were at a level that Latin Europe would not reach at least until the thirteenth century.
As late as the thirteenth century, they still called themselves Nasraye, “Nazarenes,” a form that preserves the Aramaic term used by the apostles; and they knew Jesus as Yeshua.
Before Saint Benedict formed his first monastery, before the probable date of the British king Arthur, Nestorian sees existed at Nishapur and Tus in Khurasan, in northeastern Persia, and at Rai. Before England had its first archbishop of Canterbury—possibly before Canterbury had a Christian church—the Nestorian church already had metropolitans at Merv and Herat, in the modern nations of (respectively) Turkmenistan and Afghanistan,The Eastern church operated in multiple languages: in Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, and Chinese, but not Latin, this was simply not important enough.
Europeans derived much of their scholarship from the Arab world; yet in the early centuries, this cultural achievement was usually Christian and Jewish rather than Muslim.
Christians—Nestorian, Jacobite, Orthodox, and others - preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world— Bishop Timothy himself translated Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac into Arabic, at the behest of the caliph.
Christian Arab Hunayn, who began the massive project of translating the Greek classics into Arabic: the works of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists, as well as medical authorities like Hippocrates and Galen. Reputedly, the caliph paid Hunayn for these books by quite literally giving him their weight in gold. Such were the Christian roots of the Arabic golden age.
It is of interest that Christianity in this age of flourishing in the East would have looked to the modern observer much like Islam. Calls to prayer, chanting worship and prayer chanting, month long strict fasts, women who dressed in full coverings and were separated in worship services, bowing in ritual prayer several times a day... The Eastern Church was the source for many of the spiritual practices and rhythms of Islam. Jenkins says:
Often, when faithful Christians complain about aspects of that alien religion, they are in fact denouncing customs or beliefs that are deeply rooted within the most ancient forms of their own Christian faith.
Despite this long-lived history and expansion things took a turn in the 1300s.
the years around 1300 produced an appalling trend toward religious and ethnic intolerance, a movement that must be explained in terms of global factors, rather than merely local. The world entered a period of rapid cooling, precipitating bad harvests and shrinking trade routes: a frightened and impoverished world looked for scapegoats.
Through a combination of food scarcity, shifting boundaries and political affiliations, natural disasters and atrocious massacres by conquering armies, the air shifted to fear and destruction. The years 1300-1400 witnessed the rapid decline of Christianity and a decent into chaos.
Everyone got in on the action, from Islamic fanatics, ethnic cleansing by Byzantines, Egyptian pogroms and the Christian influenced Mongols who in 1258,
under Hulegu, Genghis’s grandson, perpetrated a historic massacre in Baghdad itself, ending the caliphate and conceivably killing eight hundred thousand residents.
Some estimates place the death toll at the hands of the Mongols upwards of 2 million, and mark this date as the end of the Islamic Golden Age. Helegu was married to a Christian and influenced by Christian thought though he converted to Buddhism later in his life. So modern assumptions that Islam is to blame for all the violence are naive. The whole world was going mad. Jenkins says this
was in fact the common currency of medieval or early modern warfare, whatever the religious coloring of the participants.
The lines clearly drawn with religious adherents on the wrong side of a border seen as infiltrators, gradual homogenization came about through migration, fear, social pressure and tax incentives.
For the first time, Middle Eastern Christians looked to European powers for protection, a linkage that would often prove treacherous.
Christians were painted as spies and serial arsonists. Muslims and Jews were branded devil worshippers, heretics and Messiah-murderers. The Crusades featured centrally in global violence around this time as the Western church tried to reclaim the Holy Land. But in the 13-1400s everyone was circling wagons and the Turkish Muslims, Egyptians, Syrians and Mongols (who in later centuries converted to Islam for the most part), participated in cycles of ethno-religious violence. Jenkins says
intolerance was becoming a marked feature of widely separated cultures around the world.
I can’t help wondering about the parallels today and if we might be at the beginning of a similar phase. And I venture to hope that the modern church might play a role in deescalating conflict, rather than justifying it.