- Aug 27, 2014
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Hi everybody,
I woke up early this morning so I've been doing some reading from Severus Al Ashmunein's The Lamp of the Intellect (what little of it I can actually read; due to a binding error, most of the pages of Ebeid and Young's 1975 English translation are fused together). It brought up some interesting questions for me of a historical and ecclesiastical nature, so I thought I'd start a thread on them.
In the section on food, HG Severus writes the following:
It is for every nation and people to follow their own customs in regard to their food, according to the nature of their countries, except for what we have said concerning carrion, blood and what has been torn by wild beasts, for this is forbidden, and to eat it is not allowable for any of the believers, Arab, non-Arab, Greek, Byzantine, Ethiopian, Dailamite, Persian, or Turk.
I know of most of the peoples mentioned (although what specific ethnic division is to be made between 'Greek' and 'Byzantine' is not clear), but had to look up the Dailamites, as that one wasn't ringing a bell immediately. These are, or were, the Daylamites, a northern Iranian people who inhabited the shores of the Caspian from the pre-Islamic period til sometime after the rise of the Seljuq Turks, when they at some point apparently stopped being an identifiable people group. There were Christians among them since at least the 8th century thanks to the missionary efforts of St. John of Dailam (of the disused and sadly lately ISIS-plagued monastery of the same name in Bakhdida, Iraq; the saint himself was apparently originally from Hdatta), though from what I read on Wikipedia it seems to be something of an open question as to whether or not they would have been communicants of the Church of the East or of the Syriac Orthodox Church (both of which had dioceses in Persia, e.g., at Gurgan/Abaskun).
So I wonder what we're supposed to make of this mention of these long-gone Iranian people. As I understand it, the OO have not had the problem of phyletism that has sadly infected our EO brethren, so I guess I don't see any reason why a Coptic bishop shouldn't write about what is allowed or disallowed to people who from all appearances would be under the more immediate jurisdiction of whoever the local Syriac Orthodox bishop would've been (heck, for a period around HG's own time a few of the 'Coptic' Popes were ethnic Syriac people). And yet, being as how Iran's association with OO has been mainly an Armenian phenomenon for centuries (the diocese of Gurgan/Abaskun being not attested to after the tenth century, apparently), it is a bit surprising to consider how it would have been that a Coptic bishop would include that specific people group in his list of those who are among the believers to be governed by this rule, given their geographic and imperial distance from one another.
Is there any way to know the true geographical boundaries of the OO world prior the modern era? It seems like there are clues like this one and in some of the writings of patriarchs like HH Michael the Syrian or even modern historically-minded patriarchs like HH Aphram I Barsoum (who writes of India in his History of the Syriac Dioceses like the emergence of the Syriac Orthodox dioceses in India were in some sense a reestablishment of an earlier relationship; but there too it is obscure), but nothing concrete enough to say one way or another what they 'mean' in an ecclesiatical sense. On a personal level, I tire so much of reading Western (i.e., people from the Greek and Latin Chalcedonian churches and those in that sphere of influence) historians referring to our communion as a 'movement' (e.g., Frend, O'Leary, etc. -- and these are some of the better ones I can think of!), to be contrasted with whatever the imperial Church was doing (despite the fact that neither party which emerged in the wake of Chalcedon ever had the geographical spread of the East Syrian party which left well before it in the wake of Ephesus, and Rome only gained that later as a result of European colonialism), that I find this question to be of importance -- not because catholicity is the same as geographical spread (with due respect to our Roman Catholic friends, that is mistaking a semantic extension from the original sense of the term to be the definition of it), but because the idea that this Church, the OO Church which embraces and has embraced so many cultures and peoples throughout time (and without either the Byzantinization that sadly robbed the modern EO of much of their earlier diversity, nor the liturgical tokenism/smorgasboard mentality of the RCC), being thought of as 'lesser' than that of others precisely due to its supposedly limited geographical boundaries on the eastern edge of the Empire is inherently offensive.
Far more important than that, it seems it may be historically inaccurate.
What do you think, reader(s)?
I woke up early this morning so I've been doing some reading from Severus Al Ashmunein's The Lamp of the Intellect (what little of it I can actually read; due to a binding error, most of the pages of Ebeid and Young's 1975 English translation are fused together). It brought up some interesting questions for me of a historical and ecclesiastical nature, so I thought I'd start a thread on them.
In the section on food, HG Severus writes the following:
It is for every nation and people to follow their own customs in regard to their food, according to the nature of their countries, except for what we have said concerning carrion, blood and what has been torn by wild beasts, for this is forbidden, and to eat it is not allowable for any of the believers, Arab, non-Arab, Greek, Byzantine, Ethiopian, Dailamite, Persian, or Turk.
I know of most of the peoples mentioned (although what specific ethnic division is to be made between 'Greek' and 'Byzantine' is not clear), but had to look up the Dailamites, as that one wasn't ringing a bell immediately. These are, or were, the Daylamites, a northern Iranian people who inhabited the shores of the Caspian from the pre-Islamic period til sometime after the rise of the Seljuq Turks, when they at some point apparently stopped being an identifiable people group. There were Christians among them since at least the 8th century thanks to the missionary efforts of St. John of Dailam (of the disused and sadly lately ISIS-plagued monastery of the same name in Bakhdida, Iraq; the saint himself was apparently originally from Hdatta), though from what I read on Wikipedia it seems to be something of an open question as to whether or not they would have been communicants of the Church of the East or of the Syriac Orthodox Church (both of which had dioceses in Persia, e.g., at Gurgan/Abaskun).
So I wonder what we're supposed to make of this mention of these long-gone Iranian people. As I understand it, the OO have not had the problem of phyletism that has sadly infected our EO brethren, so I guess I don't see any reason why a Coptic bishop shouldn't write about what is allowed or disallowed to people who from all appearances would be under the more immediate jurisdiction of whoever the local Syriac Orthodox bishop would've been (heck, for a period around HG's own time a few of the 'Coptic' Popes were ethnic Syriac people). And yet, being as how Iran's association with OO has been mainly an Armenian phenomenon for centuries (the diocese of Gurgan/Abaskun being not attested to after the tenth century, apparently), it is a bit surprising to consider how it would have been that a Coptic bishop would include that specific people group in his list of those who are among the believers to be governed by this rule, given their geographic and imperial distance from one another.
Is there any way to know the true geographical boundaries of the OO world prior the modern era? It seems like there are clues like this one and in some of the writings of patriarchs like HH Michael the Syrian or even modern historically-minded patriarchs like HH Aphram I Barsoum (who writes of India in his History of the Syriac Dioceses like the emergence of the Syriac Orthodox dioceses in India were in some sense a reestablishment of an earlier relationship; but there too it is obscure), but nothing concrete enough to say one way or another what they 'mean' in an ecclesiatical sense. On a personal level, I tire so much of reading Western (i.e., people from the Greek and Latin Chalcedonian churches and those in that sphere of influence) historians referring to our communion as a 'movement' (e.g., Frend, O'Leary, etc. -- and these are some of the better ones I can think of!), to be contrasted with whatever the imperial Church was doing (despite the fact that neither party which emerged in the wake of Chalcedon ever had the geographical spread of the East Syrian party which left well before it in the wake of Ephesus, and Rome only gained that later as a result of European colonialism), that I find this question to be of importance -- not because catholicity is the same as geographical spread (with due respect to our Roman Catholic friends, that is mistaking a semantic extension from the original sense of the term to be the definition of it), but because the idea that this Church, the OO Church which embraces and has embraced so many cultures and peoples throughout time (and without either the Byzantinization that sadly robbed the modern EO of much of their earlier diversity, nor the liturgical tokenism/smorgasboard mentality of the RCC), being thought of as 'lesser' than that of others precisely due to its supposedly limited geographical boundaries on the eastern edge of the Empire is inherently offensive.
Far more important than that, it seems it may be historically inaccurate.
What do you think, reader(s)?
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