How Far East Do You Think the Christian East Goes?

In the hands of some, "the Christian East" and cognate phrases is often used to refer to what later generations might know as "Byzantium." Relatively few, however, remember that at one point Eastern Christianity lived the fullness of that term, stretching all across the easternmost reaches of Asia, and not just as a result of some Jesuit or other having got into China in the post-Reformation period. The Syriac expansion into East Asia in the first millennium is well known to specialists, but probably few others.

A new book out in April will correct that, reminding us of The Luminous Way to the East: Texts and History of the First Encounter of Christianity with China by Matteo Nicolini-Zani (Oxford UP/AAR, 2022), 424pp. 

This book, the publisher tells us,

offers a comprehensive survey of the historical, literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources of the first stage of the Christian mission to China. It explores the complex and multifaceted process of the interaction with the different cultural and religious milieux that the Church of the East experienced in its diffusion throughout Central Asia and into China during the first millennium.

Matteo Nicolini-Zani provides an overview of the Christian presence in China during the Tang dynasty (618-907) by reconstructing the composition and organization of Christian communities, the geographical location of Christian monasteries, and the related historical events attested by the sources. Through a new and richly annotated English translation of the Chinese Christian texts produced in Tang China, the volume provides a documented look at what was the earliest, and perhaps the most extraordinary, encounter of Christianity with Chinese culture and religions (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism). It shows how East Syriac Christianity in its eastward expansion along the Silk Road from Persia to China was open to the adoption of other languages and imagery and was able to enculturate the Christian teaching into new cultural and religious forms without losing its identity.

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court

The expansion of Syriac and other Christian traditions into China and far east Asia has long fascinated me; so, too, has its gradual disappearance. Along comes a recently published book to continue to shed light on these great traditions and their expansion and eventual retraction: R. Todd Godwin, Persian Christians at the Chinese Court: The Xi'an Stele and the Early Medieval Church of the East (I.B. Tauris, 2018), 320pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Xi'an Stele, erected in Tang China's capital in 781, describes in both Syriac and Chinese the existence of Christian communities in northern China. While scholars have considered the Stele exclusively in relation to the Chinese cultural and historical context, Todd Godwin demonstrates that it can only be fully understood by reconstructing the complex connections that existed between the Church of the East, Sasanian aristocratic culture, and the Tang Empire (617–907) between the fall of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225–651) and the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate (762–1258).

Through close textual re-analysis of the Stele and by drawing on ancient sources in Syriac, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese, Godwin demonstrates that Tang China (617–907) was a cosmopolitan milieu where multiple religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, and Christianity, formed zones of elite culture. Syriac Christianity in fact remained powerful in Persia throughout the period, and Christianity―not Zoroastrianism―was officially regarded by the Tang government as "The Persian Religion."

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court uncovers the role played by Syriac Christianity in the economic and cultural integration of late Sasanian Iran and China, and is important reading for all scholars of the Church of the East, China, and the Middle East in the medieval period.

New Books from Brepols

After a sojourn in New England, I returned to a number of catalogues announcing forthcoming fall publications, including several from Brepols: Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone, eds., Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity (Brepols, 2013), 400pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The shift from Late Antiquity to Early Byzantium seen in the light of the mutual relations between personal and institutional religion. This book addresses change and continuity in late antique Eastern Christianity, as perceived through the lens of the categories of institutional religion and personal religion. The interaction between personal devotion and public identity reveals the creative aspects of a vibrant religious culture that altered the experience of Christians on both a spiritual and an institutional level. A close look at the interrelations between the personal and the institutional expressions of religion in this period attests to an ongoing revision of both the patristic literature and the monastic tradition. By approaching the period in terms of ‘revision’, the contributors discuss the mechanism of transformation in Eastern Christianity from a new perspective, discerning social and religious changes while navigating between the dynamics of personal and institutional religion.

Recognizing the creative aspects inherent to the process of ‘revision’, this volume re-examines several aspects of personal and institutional religion, revealing dogmatic, ascetic, liturgical, and historiographical transformations. Attention is paid to the expression of the self, the role of history and memory in the construction of identity, and the modification of the theological discourse in late antique culture. The book also explores several avenues of Jewish-Christian interaction in the institutional and public sphere.

Students of Maximus the Confessor will be interested in Joshua Loller, "To See Into the Life of Things" the Contemplation of Nature in Maximus the Confessor's "Ambigua to John" (Brepols, 2013), 357pp.

About this book we are told:

This work provides a synthetic treatment of Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua to John, a collection of texts uniquely expressive of the speculative contours of his thought.

Maximus the Confessor (580-662) is one of the great minds of the Christian tradition and his Ambigua to John are a collection of texts uniquely expressive of the speculative contours of his thought. They have not, however, received a synthetic treatment until now. This work provides such a synthetic treatment and argues that Maximus’ central concern in the Ambigua to John is to articulate the nature of philosophy and, more precisely, the scope of the contemplation of nature (θεωρία φυσική) within the philosophical life, where "philosophy," the love of wisdom, is nothing less than the love of the Divine. Part I of this study provides a thorough background in Greek philosophical and patristic philosophies of nature, showing how Maximus’ predecessors understood knowledge of the world in relation to philosophical life, discourse, and praxis. Part II studies the contemplation of nature in the Ambigua and analyzes Maximus’ account of human affectivity in the world, his account of the coherence of philosophical life (praxis and contemplation) as a response to this affectivity, his understanding of the relation between God and the world, and his reconciliation of these various aspects of philosophy in the Christian economy of salvation, which he understands as the renewal of nature and its contemplation.

Finally,  students of the Church of the East, and the complex religious route known as the Silk Road, will be interested in Sam Lieu et al., Medieval Christian and Manichaean Remains from Quanzhou (Zayton) (Brepols, 2012), x+282pp.+ 127b&w ills.

About this book we are told:

Better known to western medieval travelers as Zayton, Quanzhou in Fujian was China’s main port and also the terminus of the Maritime Silk Road. The city was home to a cosmopolitan population especially when China was under Mongol rule (ca. 1280-1368 CE). Italian visitors to and inhabitants of the city included Marco Polo, Odoric of Pordenone and Andrew of Perugia. The city had a significant Christian population, both Catholic and Church of the East (Nestorian), and the nearby town of Jinjiang has to this day in its neighbourhood a Manichaean shrine housing a unique statue of Mani as the Buddha of Light. These religious communities left a wealth of art on stone which first came to light in Mid-Twentieth Century but is still very little known and studied outside China. This volume containing over 200 illustrations (many in full colour) is the work of a team of scholars from Australian universities in collaboration with the major museums in Quanzhou and Jinjiang and is the first major work on this unique material in a western language. The book will be of great interest not only to scholars of Manichaeism and of the Church of the East but also to scholars of East-West contacts under the Mongols.

From the Oxus to China

Lit-Verlag in Berlin tells me of recent publications that continue the welcome expansion, often noted in the past on here, in the world of Syriac Christianity: Li Tang and Dietmar Winkler, eds., From the Oxus River to the Chinese Shores: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (2013, 480pp.).

About this book we are told:

Syriac Christianity spread along the Silk Road together with Aramaic culture and liturgy. The staging posts of Christian merchants along the trade routes grew into first missionary centers. Thus, the mission of the Church of the East stretched from Persia to Arabia and India; and from the Oxus River to the Chinese shores. This volume contains a collection of studies on the Church of the East in its historical setting. Contributors have shed new light on this subject from various perspectives and academic disciplines, providing fresh insights into the rich heritage of Syriac Christianity.

Syriac Christianity in China

We live in a happy time where the venerable traditions of Syriac Christianity are increasingly well studied and well known thanks, not least, to such outstanding scholars as Sidney Griffith, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Sebastian Brock, and others. The Syriac tradition, as I noted before in discussing books treating the so-called Silk Road, once enjoyed an incredibly far-reaching influence throughout Asia.

A recent book continues to document the extent of that influence even well into the second millennium: Li Tang, East Syriac Christianity in Mongol-Yuan China (12th-14th centuries) (Orientalia Biblica Et Christiana) (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011), 169pp.

The Russian Time of Troubles

Northern Illinois University Press, as I have noted before, continues to publish fascinating books in their welcome and acclaimed series on Eastern Orthodoxy. The latest offering is Isaiah Gruber, Orthodox Russia in Crisis: Church and Nation in the Time of Troubles (NILP, 2012), 300pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

A pivotal period in Russian history, the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century has taken on new resonance in the country’s post-Soviet search for new national narratives. The historical role of the Orthodox Church has emerged as a key theme in contemporary remembrances of this time—but what precisely was that role?
The first comprehensive study of the Church during the Troubles, Orthodox Russia in Crisis reconstructs this tumultuous time, offering new interpretations of familiar episodes while delving deep into the archives to uncover a much fuller picture of the era. Analyzing these sources, Isaiah Gruber argues that the business activity of monasteries played a significant role in the origins and course of the Troubles and that frequent changes in power forced Church ideologues to innovate politically, for example inventing new justifications for power to be granted to the people and to royal women. These new ideas, Gruber contends, ultimately helped bring about a new age in Russian spiritual life and a crystallization of the national mentality.

In the coming weeks I hope to interview the author. And I look forward to seeing this book reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, the oldest academic revue of its kind in North America, to which you will want to subscribe here.  

Religion and the State in Russia and China

If I had a kopek for every time that someone lazily referred to pre-revolutionary Russia as guilty of the apparent sin of "caesaro-papism," I would be approaching kulak status at least. Relations between religion and state in Russia, both historic and current, are so often misconstrued by external observers that I am no longer surprised by the lapse into lazy cliché.

Similar problems bedevil those who open their mouths to comments on relations between the Catholic Church and the state in China today. There are many problems, perhaps most important the appointment of bishops, which the government wishes, tendentiously, to control, and which the Holy See, rightly, wishes to decide without government interference. If anyone knows anything about the history of the Catholic Church, especially since the Investiture Controversy, one knows how often and how vigorously the Church has fought for the libertas ecclesiae.

Russia and China, of course, share a border, and in addition to the Catholic Church, the Russian Orthodox Church has long had a presence in China--along with a Catholic presence, and that of other Western Christians. Along comes a new book to look at Christian relations in both countries:

Christoper Marsh, Religion and the State in Russia and China: Suppression, Survival, and Revival (Continuum, 2011), 288pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Religion and the State in Russia and China explores the religious nature of man through  the cases of forced secularization in the Soviet Union and China.

The book provides an in-depth account of the failure and successes of both countries’ secularization policies. Starting with the theological innovations that led to atheistic theorizing, it then looks at the policies that were implemented to speed up the suppression of religious beliefs and what ultimately led to today’s resurgence of religion.

Russia and China are ideal cases for a comparative study as both experimented with the idea of eradication of religion under Marxist-Leninist parties and regimes. However, they differ in their relationship with their states, religious denominations, and societies.

The research for this project includes extensive fieldwork in both Russia and China, including participant-observation at rallies and demonstrations as well as interviews with scholars, religious believers/non-believers, and religious leading figures.

Religion and the State in Russia and China offers original research for an in-depth survey that will interest anyone studying politics and religion, policies, as well as theories of desecularization.Introduction: From Forced Secularization to Desecularization

The publisher also gives us the table of contents: 

1. The Theological Roots of Militant Atheism
2. Evicting God: Forced Secularization in the Soviet Union
3. Faith in Defiance: The Persistence of Religion under Scientific Atheism
4. Russia’s Religious Renaissance
5. China’s Third Opium War: The CCP’s Struggle With Religion
6. Keeping the Faith: The Persistence of Religious Life in Communist China
7. From Religious Anesthesia to Jesus Fever
Conclusion: Man, The State, and God

Christianity in China

As I noted before, in discussing Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization, Christianity has a long history in China, but more recent Christians (e.g., the Jesuits) were, as Foltz nicely put it, rather alarmed when they showed up in the sixteenth century only to discover that "Nestorians" had already spread the gospel there in the previous millennium.

In August of this year, Wiley-Blackwell will be bringing out a major new study by Daniel H. Bays: A New History of Christianity in China (Blackwell Guides to Global Christianity) (2011), 248pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

A New History of Christianity in China, written by one of the world's the leading writers on Christianity in China, looks at Christianity's long history in China, its extraordinarily rapid rise in the last half of the twentieth century, and charts its future direction. 

• Provides the first comprehensive  history of Christianity in China, an important, understudied area in both Asian studies and religious history
• Traces the transformation of Christianity from an imported, Western religion to a thoroughly Chinese religion
• Contextualizes the growth of Christianity in China within national and local politics
• Offers a portrait of the complex religious scene in China today
• Contrasts China with other non-Western societies where Christianity is surging

While the whole book looks to be fascinating, two sections will have particular appeal to Eastern Christians: the first chapter ("1. The Nestorian Age and the Mongol Mission, 635-1368") and the appendix ("The Russian Orthodox Church and Ecclesiastical Mission to China").

Church-State Relations in Russia, China, and the West

Church-state relations in Russia continue to be the object much scholarly attention. Recently we've seen a number of books, including Wallace L. Daniel, The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in  Russia; John and Carol Garrard, Russian Orthodoxy Resurgent: Faith and Power in the New Russia; and Benjamin Forest et al, eds., Religion And Identity In Modern Russia: The Revival Of Orthodoxy And Islam.

Now Cambridge University Press has recently brought out an edited collection that treats such relations in a wider context:

James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow, eds., Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West (Studies in Comparative Early Modern History) (CUP, 2010), 436pp.

About this book the publisher tells us;

How did state power impinge on the religion of the ordinary person? This perennial issue has been sharpened as historians uncover the process of 'confessionalization' or 'acculturation', by which officials of state and Church collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform, intended to change the religious consciousness and the behaviour of ordinary men and women. In the belief that specialists in one area of the globe can learn from the questions posed by colleagues working in the same period in other regions, this 2005 volume sets the topic in a wider framework. Thirteen essays, grouped in themes affording parallel views of England and Europe, Tsarist Russia, and Ming China, show a spectrum of possibilities for what early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life, and for how religious communities evolved in new directions, either in keeping with or in spite of official injunctions.

 Three chapters in particular treat East-Slavic realities:

• 2. Ecclesiastical elites and popular belief and practice in seventeenth-century Russia by Robert O. Crummey
• 6. Orthodoxy and revolt: the role of religion in the seventeenth-century Ukrainian Uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Frank E. Sysyn, author of other important works on Ukrainian history in particular.
• 9. False miracles and unattested dead bodies: investigations into popular cults in Early Modern Russia by Eve Levin, author of a fascinating 1995 study Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900-1700

In addition, the volume contains a chapter by the Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy:

• 12. The disenchantment of space: Salle church and the Reformation

Duffy is the author of not only what I regard as the best one-volume study of the popes, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Third Edition but also several other very important works that have dramatically corrected and revised our understanding of the English reformation, starting with a "micro" history,  The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (2003) and then expanded in his widely discussed The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. More recently we've had from him a re-examination of so-called Bloody Queen Mary: Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor.

I look forward to seeing Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West  reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Down the Silk Road

Few today remember how far into Asia Eastern Christianity first penetrated. Several recent books should help us recall that, including:

Dietmar Winkler and Li Tang, eds., Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (Lit Verlag, 2009), 400pp.

The above is an edited collection  featuring articles by scholars from around the world, looking at inscriptions, manuscripts, texts, and liturgy of Syriac Christianity as far into Asia as not only China but also Korea, with stops along the way in other places like Iran.

Another recent publication also travels down this Silk Road but takes a more expansive look:

Richard Folz, Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 208pp. 

Folz looks at the variety of religious expressions found down the Silk Road, including such Eastern Christians as those once called "Nestorian."