Download PDF | 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).
324 Pages
R. Todd Godwin received his PhD from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London, and now lectures at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge, UK and in the United States at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has published in peer-reviewed journals on the early medieval Church of the East.
‘Ever since its discovery in the seventeenth century, the Xi’an (Nestorian) Monument, the oldest Christian monument in stone to be found in China, has been a source of controversy and fascination. Earlier Catholic scholars had hoped to see in it evidence of Catholic mission to Tang China, but modern scholars now regard it as an important document on the diffusion of the Church of the East along the Silk Road and in pre-Modern China. The present volume — by a scholar who does not shirk the enormous linguistic demands of mastering the bilingual text of the Monument and of the relevant historical sources — is a landmark publication which will benefit both the series study of Eastern Christianity and the general reading public with an interest in an extraordinary but too often neglected testimony to early East— West contact.’ Samuel N.C. Lieu, Emeritus Professor, Macquarie University, Sydney and President, Union Académique Internationale (UAI)
Godwin’s book is a magnificent exploration of one of the most important themes in the new global medieval history: Persian Christians in the empire of Tang China. Not unlike the Silk Road itself, this study brings East and West together in one overarching Eurasian world view. Erudite and subtle, Godwin weaves together all the languages and literatures of Mesopotamia, Iran, Central Asia, and China to create a vivid textile of religion, culture, and political dominion. Godwin places his own bold argument within a history of debate over the incredible Xi’an monument that extends back to the time of Voltaire. Students and scholars interested in the Asian history of Christianity — obscured by unfamiliar languages and historical sources — will find in this book the hidden pearl of a remarkable story. Godwin has uncovered this story with a sincerity of research that is reminiscent of golden age scholarship and the work of Paul Pelliot himself. This is history on a grand scale, invoking the rise and fall of empires, intrepid missions across thousands of inhospitable miles, and the durability of monastic institutions that are still with us.’ Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, Associate Professor of Classics and Letters, University of Oklahoma
‘This is a groundbreaking study that is soundly based on both Chinese and Syriac primary sources. It demonstrates compellingly that the Church of the East in Tang China and in Sasanian Persia saw itself as an active participant in maintaining the Empire and ensuring its very survival through the
blessing of Christ dispensed through its ascetic leaders.’ Steve Eskildsen, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, International Christian University
INTRODUCTION
‘The king that never dies’ here has been replaced by the king that always dies, and suffers death more cruelly than other mortals. Ernst Kantorowcz'
The still sizeable Christian populations of the Middle East and their plight are not part of Western discourse about western Asia in the way that many of us would like. A moment’s reflection on the types of photographic images appearing in Western media in recent years portraying Eastern Christianity indicates, at least partly, how the process of erasure works in actual practice. As relations between Russia and countries to its west have degenerated over recent years, Western media have begun to turn to certain photographic images. This is being done in an attempt to explain the source of these political tensions and offers readers a visual language of interpreting this political tension. For example, in one set of images an Eastern Orthodox priest, with his gold vestments, surrounded by a throng of clergymen similarly clad, sends water from a ritual vessel high into the air before it lands on both soldiers and armaments.” A line of tanks as well as an array of guns and ammunition spread on a nearby table all receive a thorough dousing as throngs of faithful look on. In another set of images the Russian president and Russian police are shown walking side by side with Eastern Orthodox Church leaders, again festooned in their golden vestments and carrying sacred objects (icons, crosses, censors, jewelled bibles), as part of a procession through the streets of Russia’s capital city. “This is what Russian Christianity is’, we are told along with these images. ‘Russia is not like us, for it is a country in which the rituals of state and a culturally embodied form of religion align with traditional values and power.’
But there is intellectual amnesia about Christianity’s long-held connections to political power present here too, along with a representation of whatever might be happening in Russia currently. Relationships between European royal families and elites and the legitimation of their alliances for public consumption took place through a sacramental and culturally embodied form of Christianity well into the twentieth century.* This did not begin with Charlemagne’s well-known coronation by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day in the year 800. It can be traced back beyond Constantine to the Bible, and the tensions created by a Messiah standing in the Davidic line of kings, yet whose ‘kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36).
Shortcomings within the study of Christianity in early medieval China and across the Middle East may be traced here as well. The Tang Chinese Empire (617—907) was one of the most cosmopolitan and expansive periods within all of Chinese history, and its diplomatic and cultural connections across early medieval Central Asia and Persia led to Syriac Christians, known as the Church of the East, being granted an official place at the Tang court from 638 to 845.° A high degree of closeness between the Tang emperors and the church came about as a result, to which the Middle Chinese textual record related to the Church bears ample witness. This closeness was once referred to by Y.P. Saeki (1871-1965), an early pioneer in the study of the Middle Chinese materials related to the Church of the East, as ‘emperor worship’.° For Saeki this ‘emperor worship’ ultimately caused the Church to disappear in China.
Rather than seeing a church on its last legs because of its close relations with political power, this book argues for the existence of agency and mutuality within the East Syrians’ relationship not only with the Tang court but other early medieval courts. The book does this on the one hand by examining the relationships between culture and power obtained between the Tang court and the Church of the East’s elites through a lens not shaped by modernist political discourses. It does this also by highlighting the Church of the East’s elites’ ability to reflect and reconstitute the culture of the Chinese court through its relationships with other courts and what the study refers to as the church’s Jonge durée across Persia and Central Asia.’ The East Syrians’ vaunted roles as interregional arbiters and power holders within the late Sasanian Persian church are held up in this regard, and set next to the church’s known survival in Central Asia after the fall of the Sasanians and with likely close proximity to Sasanian royals eking out an existence in the same region. Sasanian royals’ survival in Central Asia and with Chinese support, the subject of increasingly focused research, has shown that Tocharistan, Kawulistan, and Zawulistan, each Hindukush principalities, were bases for royal Sasanians in exile along with Tang China before leaving the Hindukush for China in the second half of the eighth century. This work deserves to be built upon.
Although there is a tradition of Western academic research arguing that the Church of the East in the Sasanian Persian Empire (225—651) was an integral part of the Persian state, the Xi’an stele, set in place in 781, allows the church’s connections to the Persian state even after its fall to be seen in bold relief, quite literally.” The stele provides a means of studying the cultural basis and long durational continuity of the church’s Persian formation and makes visible how this was augmented and mediated within the church’s relationship with the Tang Chinese state and court through the seventh and eighth centuries, the church’s connection to the Persian state having been established in 410 and at the Synod of Isaac. The study is directed both towards generalists and specialists in Eastern Christian studies, the study of early Islam, and the study of the early medieval Silk Road, for whom the J/ongue durée of the Persian formation and trajectory of the East Syrians ought to be better known. The Xi’an stele’s phrases gong zhen xuanwang {together [we have} repaired the Imperial Net’}, and the donor section of the stele where the Syriac word mdabranoutha {r¢wasisxm, Divine Leadership/ Economy} is found, along with the multiple references to the East Syrians in China as ‘Persian Monks’ [Bosi seng}, are argued to be keys to this trajectory as these elements reflect both the East Syriac church in Tang China’s leaders’ Christian ascetic tradition as well as their ongoing reflections on the church’s Sasanian Persian and courtly-centred past. Looking at the combined heritage of these elements and by reading across the Syriac and Chinese primary sources, something heretofore unattempted within the scholarship, makes possible a history of the church’s elites’ manipulation and reflection of the courtly spaces and courtly culture open to them between the fifth and ninth centuries, something that will be of service to scholars and students of Middle Eastern Christianity for whom the Chinese sources are inaccessible yet for whom such themes are relevant. As such the book opens avenues for others to further explore ways in which the East Syrian church’s Middle Eastern and Christian identity held together with its identity as an elite religious body not just in Tang China and vis-a-vis its courts and emperors, but across a series of empires and as part of a church able to stand apart from, yet also integrate itself with, a range of cultures in the period. One of the key services the study provides is a methodology, empirically grounded, for studying the multicultural nature of the Church of the East in this period, which also seeks to come to terms with its fundamentally imperial nature. One result of these investigations is an understanding of the seemingly audacious statement made in the Xi'an stele that, through its asceticism and rituals, the church and its elites could save the Tang Empire from annihilation. Another result, more far reaching, is a presentation of Eastern Christianity during the first two centuries of Arab rule over the Middle East, which is neither characterised by passivity and a lack of agency, a presentation at odds with aspects of contemporary historiography, nor a presentation of Eastern Christianity that is deracinated and homogenised for modern Western consumption.
Between Dhimmitude and Emperor Worship: East Syrian Agency and Its Historiography
In order to better understand why such a reassessment is needed it is important to look more deeply into the work of one of the early pioneers in the study of East Syrians in the Tang dynasty, Peter Yoshiro Saeki (1871—1965).'° Christian and Manichaean documents in Chinese were discovered during his lifetime in Dunhuang, a city set within a corridor along the last leg of the Silk Roads leading into China. Dunhuang held a series of caves that had been used for centuries by China’s multicultural elites for various purposes: as ancestral veneration grottoes, as sites of Buddhist pilgrimage and art, etc.'' The Dunhuang cave containing the Christian and Manichaean documents is thought to have been a text graveyard of sorts, sealed off in the ninth century possibly to protect its contents from the growth of intolerance towards Central Asia’s and China’s multi-religious early medieval past.'*
Saeki’s translations into English from their Middle Chinese made these texts widely accessible for the first time; and his efforts in contextualising these documents in relation to one another, to the standard Tang historical sources, and to early medieval Syriac Christianity as then understood, were simply remarkable for their time.'? The most important Middle Chinese Christian document, the Xi’an stele, set in place in 781 (which was rediscovered in 1625 having probably been covered and concealed in the late Tang period), had its interpretation shaped by Saeki and among this corpus of documents and historical setting as well.!4 Although the view emerging within the scholarship on Eastern Christianity during the first two centuries of Arab rule over the Middle East is steadily maturing, it still often characterises it as passive and lacking agency.’ A different view emerges, however, when we investigate and hold together the Tang Chinese, Sasanian, and early PostSasanian period and context of Syriac Christianity, and attempt to develop a binocular vision for these interrelated contexts, and do so around certain key themes. The Xi’an stele as a key document, but other Chinese primary sources as well, bear traces of the East Syrians’ Persian past and its continuation in the period of early Arab rule, and contain an as-yet-untold story. One useful interpretive point of entry is found by returning to Saeki. There is a non-sacramental and antiroyalist component surfacing in his interpretations that leads to unfounded conclusions. This component obscures the Persian and courtly nature of the Church of the East’s presence in Tang China, and the degree of agency the East Syrians held in relation not just to the Tang court, but in relation to a range of non-Christian courtly and imperial contexts. It obfuscates as well what will be called in this study the Late Antique and early medieval East Syrian church’s Persian Jongue durée.'°
Saeki on occasion referred to the existence of ‘emperor worship’ in the corpus of Tang Christian documents, and held the understanding that this was unwise and hasty on the part of the East Syrians in Tang China. It not only made them vulnerable but caused them to disappear in China altogether. Though he placed the term ‘emperor worship’ within quotation marks, suggesting he knew the term was imprecise and only a working concept, this was for him part of the church’s Greco-Roman Christian heritage — brought to China, not discovered there (in Saeki’s view).!” Not only was the ‘emperor worship’ thesis part of Saeki’s general characterisation of the political nature Church of the East in China, it was also part of his (erroneous) understanding that the church disappeared in China because of its being killed by ‘too much imperial favour’.'® For Saeki, the East Syrians in Tang China not only lacked sufficient connections to other regional courts (also erroneous), which made their situation precarious, but gave away their political will. Saeki’s perception that the Church of the East in the Tang Empire was ultimately bureaucratic, top-heavy, and unconnected to the populace outside the court and to the courts of the surrounding region, thus leading to its disappearance in China, persists within the scholarship today, and needs re-examination if the study of the political nature of the East Syrians in and across early medieval China, Central Asia, and the Middle East is to be seen holistically. ‘? As Saeki wrote in 1916:
That the Nestorians who were driven from Edessa to Persia, and thence to Central Asia, and finally to the Middle Kingdom — sometimes sheltered by Arabs and sometimes by Hindoos {sic} — should have performed this great work of leavening Chinese thought with Theistic conceptions, reminds us of that ‘Stone which the builders rejected but which became the chief Cornerstone! But what lessons can we learn from the history of the Syriac Church in China? This depends on how we study this Inscription. If we mention the failures of the Nestorian*” mission in China, we should say first of all, that they did not raise up native workers. The foreign missionaries relied on themselves too much. We see hardly any native Chinese priests amongst the seventy-five names inscribed on the sides of the Nestorian Stone.*’ Again, it appears to us [also} that the missionaries relied too much upon Imperial Favour. They died or were smothered under too much favour from principalities and powers as a State Religion so often is. “Too much kindness’, in this case’, killed the cat!’ A State Church is a national confession of God, and the nation which disowns or ignores God is doomed; but the state protection of religion is apt to lead to state
é Aste 2 corruption of religion too.
In Saeki’s The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China, published in 1951, and as part of his discussion of the Jesus Messiah Sitra, a text in which the Chinese sovereign is clearly attributed with sacred and numinous qualities, Saeki puts forth the view that the church’s elites made the unwise move towards emperor worship in an attempt to win favour with the Chinese court:
‘Emperor Worship’, as well as the worship of other distinguished persons, was an old institution both in the East and in the West... It is therefore no wonder that our Nestorian author should declare here {in the Jesus Messiah Sutra] ‘all the sacred superiors [i.e. rulers} are no other than the gods born into this world’.*?
Saeki’s consistently placing quotations around the words ‘Emperor Worship’ suggests of course that he can be forgiven, and even thanked, for bringing an important scholarly problem before us. Though his assumptions stem from his lack of knowledge of the Chinese East Syrians’ connections to Central Asia and Persia, there is a shortcoming within his interpretations as well. For Saeki the elites of the East Syrian church could not, and did not, share in and reflect the charisma of the Tang China court without violating itself and its God.** There is no sense of an ‘open courtly charisma’ within Saeki’s interpretations, or any sense of the long-range political constitution of the church — how it, the church’s elites, and their culture might have reflected political relations with neighbouring courts and carried what will be termed here as its own divine agency with ie
Saeki’s interpretations have a parallel in the scholarship on Syriac Christianity in late Sasanian Persia and early Arab rule; and it is here one begins truly to understand why an empirically-based reassessment of Saeki’s emperor worship and imperial favour thesis is needed, and what can result from a robust re-assessment of the source and constitution of East Syrian agency in and across its multiple early medieval imperial contexts. The concept of ‘dhimmitude’, or legal subjugation under Islamic law, for example can be found within areas of the scholarship and popular writing on Christians under early Arab rule.*° One important early twentiethcentury scholar of Syriac Christianity in the Persian Empire, Jerome Labourt, quipped famously that ‘it does not matter to the slave what particular master it serves’.7’ Stephen Gero, more recently, has argued for greater freedom in the church than Labourt saw, but dismissed the notion that the church was part of the Sasanian state by the time of its demise, writing that in its connections to the state ‘the way was being prepared for the imposition and supine acceptance of inferior, marginal dhimmi status in the Abbasid period’.** Michael Morony, in his important work Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, suggested that the way in which the Church of the East fell into this state of servility was through the disunited nature of its monastic faction and scientific factions (a suggestion that is questioned later in this study), and the church’s resultant inability to sustain a culture which could stand independently from the legal shadow cast upon it by the non-Christian courts who ruled over it through the later part of Sasanian Empire (225-651) and the early period of Arab rule.*? Even more recently Samuel Moffett has written:
a better metaphor than the ‘sword’, as far as Muslim-Christian relationships were concerned, would be a net, for after the conquest Christians found themselves caught in a the web of Islam but not usually under its sword; the net, if not always comfortable, was at least safer than the sword.*”
One reason these and other scholars have failed to develop a more nuanced understanding of East Syrian Christianity’s ability to reflect imperial power and stand flexibly in relation to it, both before and after the Arab conquests, is that these scholars are not reading the Sasanian Persian, Tang Chinese, and early Arab rule period historical materials together and through an integrating hermeneutic of the courtly space. The early Arab imperial setting is a period of world history with enduring contemporary relevance, and an important source for probing and reconceptualising relationships between religion and power in general, but particularly those that stem directly from and exist in connection with the region currently. Given the difficulty of developing expertise in each of its sub-domains, it is perfectly natural that this documentary record is not read holistically and with an eye to the Chinese context more often. The same limitation occurs on the Chinese side of the scholarship. Lin Wushu, for example, has directed attention to Saeki’s assertions about why Christianity disappeared in China and countered them by showing that it was the 845 rescript from Emperor Tang Wuzong [2 EVAR} (r.840—46) that ended the Christians’ first phase of official status in China, not its culturally embodied character or its closeness to the Chinese emperor or court.” But Lin’s treatment of the issue is far too localised, and leaves the impression that the political character and long durational identity of the Syriac church in China was simply an artefact of its being granted position by the Chinese court.
Samuel Moffett has offered the field a helpful metaphor in his characterisation of Christian—Muslim relations as a ‘net’ in his important volume on the history of Christianity in Asia. Arguably an articulation of political realities present within both sets of sources as well, this metaphor can serve as one among several combined beginning points for reorienting the discussion towards the necessary binocular vision. The Dunhuang document commonly called the Sara of the Hearing of the Messiah {Xuting mishisuo jing, FR PRU PTE, for example, contains language in which the Tang emperors, church elites, and the Christian God are shown to be part of a common familial fabric and a shared imperial charisma, one suggesting that the culture of the church was a conduit for the power of the empire, could be an extension of the Tang court, and could be unproblematic as such:*”
One who serves the Heavenly Lord®? wrote this book in order to explain the doctrine [of the church} ... All beings have fear®* of the Heavenly Lord who controls the life and death of all beings, and guides and controls the stupid gods. If all human beings fear the Heavenly Lord, then they should also fear the emperor. The fortune of the predecessors of the emperor was immense. The Heavenly Lord helped them take office.
This understanding, one in which the culture of the East Syrians, meaning the ascetic practices of their leaders, their standing before the Tang emperors having been granted office both by God and the emperor at once, and the way in which the church, its families, the empire, the emperor and the church’s elites all constituted a family, borrowing an imperial Confucian trope, went unnoticed in Saeki’s interpretations.’” They are present, however, in the most important document concerning Christianity in the Tang Empire, and the document that can best serve to reorient scholarship on Eastern Christianity under early Arab rule by the inclusion of Chinese sources. This document is the Xi’an stele.*°
The Xi’an Stele’s Sasanian Persian Longue Durée
The Xi’an stele was set in place in 781 by the Church of the East and the Tang court in what was then China’s capital city of Chang’an.*’ Uncovered in 1625 by workmen digging just outside the ancient capital, modern Xi’an, the Xi’an stele, as it is known, dazzles the eye today as it surely did in the short seven-year period that it stood in place during the reign of emperor Tang Dezong [ER (t.780—805).°* The text of the stele was written by Adam/Jingjing, the son of a priest, a chorepiscopus, of the Church of the East who had most likely come to the Tang Empire as part of a fighting unit after being invited there by the court in order to help quell the An Lushan rebellion (755—62).°? Adam's father, Yisi [{# HT} (Middle Persian, Jazbozédh), is presented as a key historical actor within the historical narrative presented in the stele, whose service to the Tang Empire during the rebellion and after (the stele can be understood to say) is shown representative of the church and its elites’ long history of good relations with the Tang court and emperors.“° Written in or before the year it was set in place, 781, in 1,900 Chinese characters and 50 words of Syriac, the stele is presented as a commemoration of the establishment and official recognition of the Chinese diocese of the Church of the East by the Tang court beginning in 638 and continuing to 780. The stele is commonly thought of as containing a beginning (doxological) section, a middle section, and a final, donor section, wherein the names of those responsible for the stele are mentioned."!
The reception history of the Xi’an stele being now four centuries long, it is impossible to summarise succinctly. Paul Pelliot’s study notes on the stele, published posthumously by Antonino Forte, present a précis for key studies arranged chronologically until the early twentieth century and as such remains highly valuable.** The stele’s seventeenth-century reception history dealt with the Tang Christians’ relationship to the Chinese court and emperor only in so far is it could celebrate them and make them part of Roman Catholic evangelisation efforts in China.*? If Christianity had been welcomed by previous Chinese courts and emperors, Jesuit missionaries could now say Christianity was not a colonial European imposition on China. Though the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the beginnings of both Syriac studies and Syriac printing in Europe, as well as Rome’s rediscovery of Oriental Christianity in both India and the Middle East, the Syrian and Persian background of the Tang period Christians, and certainly the community’s basis in Syriac monasticism, all went unnoticed.
As modern scholarship on the Xi’an stele could not and did not begin until the early twentieth century, with the discovery of the Dunhuang Christian and Manichaean documents, nineteenthcentury studies of the stele are crucial documents in development of European Sinology, but are not crucial for understanding what the stele can tell about Syriac Christianity under early Islam or the Persian and courtly formation of East Syrian Christianity. It is only in the last two decades that the study of Christianity in Late Antiquity has come to include Iran.“ Though much important work has been done on Syriac Christianity in medieval Central Asia, the Peter Brown school of Late Antique historiography and its sophisticated analyses of asceticism and the social functions of monasticism and its ability to transmit imperial power has not yet arrived in Central Asia along with it.
In directing attention to the all-important issue of what prompted the writing and setting in place of the stele in 781 in the first place, Max Deeg has drawn attention to changes having just taken place in the Tang Empire’s tax structure initiated by Emperor Dezong, known as the Liangshui fa {PA Bk] ot ‘Double Tax System’. Having ascended the throne only shortly before this, at the relatively late age of 38, Dezong came to the throne able to draw upon experience accumulated over a long period and a succession of Tang courts. One main feature of these earlier reigns was an inability to deal with the long term effects of the disastrous An Lushan rebellion (755—62), the string of rebellions and connected border incursions that followed, and the general chaos the Chinese empire was in during the period, without which no understanding of what a foreign religious body with an Iranian and ascetic formation was doing and could do can be ascertained.*°
That the Xi’an stele community thought of itself as a monastic unit whose spiritual support and prayers (and, as explored below, fighting power) had aided the Tang emperor and court in the past and should be relied upon again is abundantly clear from the text of the stele.’ The spiritual bond they thought to exist between emperor, court and the church’s monastic élites is expressed in concrete terms in the text of the stele. The stele speaks for example of the church as having at one point gong zhen xuanwang {HEP ZHA, ie. ‘together repairing the Imperial Net’, and jawei jueniu ((. HE #8, reconnecting the threads which have been broken}, asserting both that the group was indispensable and that the emperor had himself worked with the group to ensure the Tang empire and court’s survival. The phrase zhen xuanwang {Hk AHA] has received differing translations. Daoist Wu Yun [RB] (d.778) composed a text called the Xuangang lun (ZX Hai] at the beginning of the An Lushan rebellion, which he submitted to the court and emperor, a title translated by Jan De Meyer in his excellent study as ‘maintaining the mystic mainstay’.** James Legge, in his classic study of the stele, translates the stele’s expanded sense of the phrase as they ‘joined together restoring the mysterious net’. Pelliot translates this ‘ensemble ils soulevérent la corde mystérieuse’ as ‘together they elevated the mysterious chord’.”” Deeg translates it as ‘richteten gemeinsam das geheimnisvolle Band’, ‘together they directed the mysterious band’.”'
There are imperial Chinese, Central Asian, and Persian trajectories within the phrase that Pelliot and Deeg, authors of the two most important commentaries on the stele, overlook, as they focus on the phrase’s connections to the Dhita Inscription [the Toutuo sibei Wen’, SABE 18 SC], a sixth-century Buddhist temple inscription in which the phrase is used in connection with the important Mahayana figure Nagarjuna (c.150—250) and his having ‘repaired the net of the Dharma’.”* The Xi’an stele’s author, Adam, was drawing upon pre-Buddhist classical Chinese sources outlining the metaphysics of Chinese imperial ideology, though not excluding contemporary Buddhist dimensions as well.’® One motivator for this translation is that non-Han individuals residing in the Tang Empire had constantly to negotiate their relationships with the court, as the primary sources for the Church of the East clearly show, their connections to Central Asian and Iranian commercial, military and cultural resources sometimes being a boon and sometimes not.” Moffett’s insightful characterisation of early Muslim—Christian relations as a ‘net’ and the timely need to re-evaluate the place of Christians living under early Islamic rule on the basis of material provided in Chinese sources is another motivating factor.
The choice to translate gong zhen xuangang as ‘together we have repaired the Imperial Net’ also focuses attention directly on Saeki’s anxiety over ‘emperor worship’ in the Tang East Syrians’ Middle Chinese materials and provides direction as to how to probe and resolve it. This effort is aided by turning to the sophisticated analyses of early Christian asceticism appearing in recent decades and the way in which this has been brought into the study of Christianity in the Sasanian Empire more recently.”? The donor section of the Xi’an stele, written in Syriac, and its reference to the term mdabranoutha {~wasinxal, often translated as Divine Economy, is crucial in this regard. This section reads:
In the year 1092 of the Greeks [780/81 cE}, Mar Jazbozédh [i.e. Yisi} the priest and chor-bishop of Kumdan, the royal city, son of the late {lit. resting soul} Milis the priest, who was from Balkh, a city of Tocharistan, set up this tablet of stone on which is written the {divine} leadership [mdabranoutha Sasinxm} of our Saviour and the preaching [pl.} of the fathers to the kings of the Chinese.*°
Visible here is an imputation of the power of Christ to the leaders of the Church of the East and an understanding that this transmission of power gave them agency in relation to the Tang court and the ‘kings of the Chinese’. The writing and setting in place of the stele itself appears as an evangelical proclamation. The Persian Christian monastic tradition and the ascetic nature of leadership in the East Syrian church is referred to in the stele’s use of the term mdabranoutha. The term has the root d-b-r, denoting leading/ directing.’’ The term is a translation of the New Testament Greek term oikonomia, translated often as ‘divine dispensation’, or ‘divine economy’, and stands syntagmatically in relation to the Greek term for ‘house/household’, oikos.”* In the Greek-speaking church of the later Roman period the term oikonomia came to be related to monastic discipline too, to monastic leadership and monastic administration, through semantic links to the verb otKovop£w, ‘to maintain a household’.”’ As the monk in charge of monastic discipline came to be known as an otKolpos (administrator), and through the largely shared Greek-Syriac speaking monastic culture of Late Antiquity, the groundwork was laid for notions of leadership within the Syriac churches to be articulated through the term mdabranoutha. Erica Hunter has asserted that the term mdabranutha be translated ‘monastic way’, a helpful suggestion given that the Church of the East in the late Sasanian Empire, and during early Arab rule, as well as in the Tang Empire, was led by ascetic elites.°°
The monastics of the Xi’an stele are also identified as ‘Persian monks’ here and in other Tang sources.°' Pride in the Sasanian Persian past and its connection to Sasanian emperors can be found in the Syriac primary sources from this period of the church’s history. Astronomer families working within the Tang court alongside the Church of the East’s elites clearly identify themselves with Sasanian Persian royal lineages two centuries after the Sasanians’ demise.°? Tang historical sources show Persian monks accompanying Persian kings to the Tang court well into the eighth century and working as intercourtly liaisons.°? The Xi'an stele, for example, tells readers that it was ‘Persian monastics’ [Bosz seng, ET {3} who came to the Tang Empire in the period of emperor Tang Xuanzong [HAR (r.712—56) and ‘repaired the Imperial Net’. An individual named Aluoben {Pl HAS] (Syr. Rabban, ~*¥5%, ‘teacher’) is a major figure in the narrative of the Xi’an stele and can be characterised as a Late Antique ‘holy man’ in the manner of historian Peter Brown and the school of research into Christian asceticism following him.”
Recent scholarship on Tang Christianity has drawn a great deal of attention to the official names given by the Tang government to Christianity and the change that occurred in this in 745, and as such it is a way of relating these two areas of inquiry.° The name change of 745 has been studied extensively, but the original name for Christianity given by the Tang court has not. Chinese sources indicate this name to have been “The Persian Religion’, Bost jiao (2 BA] (lit. Persia{n} Teaching/Religion).©” Antonino Forte (1940-2006), the most important scholar working on the Tang Christian materials in the later twentieth century, cautiously asserted that the reason for this name was not simply because ‘Christianity comes from Persia’, as the extant Tang sources containing and reproducing the edict state, but rather because Christianity was both an important institution in Sasanian Iran and within its court, and one that continued among Iranians residing in the early Tang Empire well after 651.°°
parts of his work, he has written, with seeming surprise, that ‘it is
Though Forte showed less surprise at this in other
curious that the term “Persian” is applied to Christianity, which originated outside Persia, and not to Mazdaism (Zoroastrianism) or Manichaeism; it’s as if when Christianity was introduced in China, it was the ‘Persian’ religion par excellence’.°? Characterising Aluoben as a Late Antique holy man supports Forte’s views on the title ‘Persian teaching’ for Christianity in the early Tang sources and in the Xi’an stele as having derived from Christianity’s importance within the Sasanian court and its continuance in the Tang context. It also supports the translation of gong zhen xuangang as ‘together we {i.e. the church’s elites and the Chinese emperor} repaired the Imperial Net’ because it highlights the leverage and mutuality the church’s elites understood themselves to have had and their ability to transmit what theoretical work in the history of courts leads one to refer to as ‘the imperial charisma’ of the Tang Empire.’° This undercuts Saeki’s ‘emperor worship’ thesis and certain Syriac scholars’ assertions of dhimmitude within the church in this period, along with Moffet’s understanding that the mesh in which the Church of the East was drawn, not just to the Tang court but a series of imperial courts in this period, was one in which the church’s elite agency and leverage was negated.
In the late eighth-century Tang context, the terms xwangang would have had great rhetorical impact within Dezong’s court and within a Tang Empire reeling from two decades of instability stemming from the An Lushan rebellion and the continued border incursions, which were intrinsically connected.’ Wu Yun, in the first year of the An Lushan Rebellion, had used the term in the title of his manual for support for the empire’s spiritual elites, should the case arise.’* Wu Yun expressed the understanding, arguably in line with Adam’s thinking, that imperial monastics, through their asceticism and spiritual support for the Tang Empire, could participate in the personal charisma of the emperor himself, and even share in the emperor’s bodily health and be an extension of his wardrobe.”*
Wu Yun’s and Adam’s suggestion that the Tang Empire’s ascetics could act as extensions of the emperor’s person and sustain the court’s charismatic constitution may also be deemed mere rhetoric.” But comparisons with ways in which religious elites participated in imperial political structures in other parts of the ancient and medieval world and the language used to represent them suggest otherwise. In ancient Rome, imperial priests distributed approved imperial portraits and statues, inaugurated public works, games, and calendars, and were said to act as extensions of the geniz of Roman emperors.’” The Hebraic conception of divine anointing, signified through the verbal root NWN [masah, to anoint} and its permutation mwn {mastah, ‘anointed one’}, resulted in configurations in which divine power and charisma were shown to rest on individuals in a concrete and material fashion, and political and sacerdotal power were mutually implicative. This material embodiment of divine power could also rest upon individuals who were not Jewish, as long as God was thought to have acted through them.”° This tradition of representing the interaction of earthly and divine power through material transference and contagion, signified by oil, was one in which kingship and those who shared in the charismatic constitution of the king’s court stood in symbiosis. When the psalmist writes that ‘the Lord is King; He is robed in Majesty’, this symbiosis and sharing are seen in connection to clothing, and were indicative of perduring ways of thought among ancient and medieval peoples about the way in which political power and sacerdotal power rested on individuals, their clothing, and objects of courtly patronage. This is a way of thinking that may be akin to that pre-Early Modern European world described by Ernst Kantorowcz, in which a mystical continuity existed between kingship, the person who happened to hold the office, and the Christian clerical establishment, termed by him the king’s two bodies’.’’ Saeki and other interpreters’ failure to understand this and early medieval Syriac Christianity’s long durational nature accounts for Saeki’s consternation over ‘emperor worship’ in the Tang East Syrian materials.
In the Christian Roman Empire of the fourth century and after, the charisma of emperors is also shown to have been open to participation by the scholarly and ideological elite; Eusebius is an exemplar of this in both his panegyric to Constantine and his biography of the emperor. ® By the fifth century, Christian ascetics had come to be part of this tradition and through it had come to stand on equal footing with emperors. A conception of open imperial charisma appears in the Syriac hagiographical tradition of the sixth century, as represented by the Syriac Life of Joshua the Stylite, where ascetics stood on equal footing with emperors when not perched on columns and performing acts of extreme asceticism and commandeering large groups of lay followers as a result.’” The Life of John of Tella, like the Life of John, written by John of Ephesus, shows an early sixth-century Christian culture having emerged in the borderlands of Rome and 8° As N.J. Andrade writes, imperial charisma was held and transmitted by ascetics within this culture and ‘as part of a clerical
Persia.
hierarchy and a network of priests and monks that cut across the frontier of the Roman and Persian empires’.*' This culture’s vision of an open imperial charisma, shared by emperors, courts, ascetics, and holy objects alike, was the ground from which sprang John of Ephesus’ styling of John of Tella as a figure of resistance against both the imperial mandates of the Eastern Roman and Sasanian Persian empires. The term politeia, a Greek loan word in Syriac, is at the centre of the articulation of the political vision of the openness and transferability of imperial charisma found in the texts of this culture. When Persian Emperor Xosrd II (r.590—628) acquiesced to the Eastern Roman demand to involve Church of the East leaders in negotiating the end of a long period of war between the two powers and returned the pieces of the True Cross taken from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as a sign of renewed peace, the field of operation of this imperial charisma and as part of a trans-imperially placed Christian culture commandeered by ascetic elites was being made visible.
The imperial charisma-wielding ascetics of the Eastern Church can be found in the Sasanian Persian Empire and shaped its trans-regional courtly culture just as they did in the eastern Roman Empire. The East Syrian church moved with the fallen Sasanian royal house into Central Asia and China after the Arab conquests and carried the Sasanian royal house and its legitimacy with it.°? The courtly asceticism of the Tang East Syrians is more properly understood, however, by looking to the development of East Syriac Christianity in the sixth and seventh centuries in the heart of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225—651). Such a move builds upon some of the theoretical foundations of the study of Christian asceticism and power within the Late Antiquity paradigm, and its notion of the ‘rise of the Holy Man’, in the context of the official Christianity of the later Roman Empire.™* This work can be built upon too by turning to the best theoretical tools available from the field of Cultural History, to which the Late Antiquity paradigm owes much.””
This study will translate the Syriac term mdabranoutha as ‘Divine Economy and Divine Leadership’ and use them interchangeably in order to highlight both the vaunting of individual leadership and ascetic prowess within the church denoted by the term, as well as the collective and shared agency within the church and its forward movement within history, as seen in the sources. The Xi'an stele’s monastic and ascetically-led community stands, for example, in a tradition stemming from the Syriac Acts of Thomas, the Syriac letters of Patriarch Mar Aba I, the travel narrative surviving from Cosmas the India Traveller,®° the letters of Patriarch Isho’yahb II and ascetic literature of his period,®’ Isho’dad of Merv and his Book of Chastity, the letters of Patriarch Timothy I, and Thomas of Marga’s Book of Governors,* among other works, in which the long-range, social cohesion and adaptability, and historical mandate (to use the language of Persian, Turkic and Chinese courts) of the church is shown to have had intrinsic connections to its asceticism and its ascetic leaders. This understanding of the church as a house traversing and encompassing large swaths of space and time, led by ascetic athletes, comes from literary images found in the East Syrian ascetic tradition, having emerged from the church’s commercial roots in the Silk Roads and sea trade spanning the globe from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and to China.®’ Elizabeth Fowden, Scott McDonough, Richard Payne, Cynthia Villagomez, and Joel Walker, among others, have opened new avenues for analysis of the ways in which the culture of Christian ascetic power transcended borders and was tied to Christianisation during the final phase of the Sasanian Empire and the two centuries following.”” Sebastian Brock, Matteo Comparetti, Touraj Daryaee, Antonino Forte, Janos Harmatta, Anonino Painano, and Richard Payne have done important work on the closeness of relations between the Church of the East and the Sasanian court, providing building blocks for understanding how the two became part of Tang hegemony in Central Asia after the fall of the Sasanians, and building on the previous generation of work done by Arthur Christensen and William Young.’' Sam Lieu has explored the re-opening of the Silk Roads in the late sixth century and the twilight years of the Sasanians.”” This historiography can be set next to work on the spread of Christianity into Sogdiana at the same time, > The result
suggests the ‘repairing {together} of the Imperial Net’ that would
and more generally on Sasanian—Tang relations.
occur in the period of the Xi’an stele, and where the long-range social positioning and interimperial culture of the Syro-Persian church was seen by the church as binding China and Central Asia together (captured in the phrase and explaining its origins), was one of only several acts of binding which would take place between the church and imperial courts between 410 and 780 and as centred in the church’s ascetic and long durational culture.“
The term Divine Leadership/Economy (Syr. mdabranoutha, Grk economia) of the Xi’an stele also offers an empirical foundation for understanding the East Syrians of the Tang, their encounter with the Chinese empire and court, the political character of the church as seen in the late Sasanian empire and afterwards, and for understanding their view that their asceticism could sustain the Tang court and emperor. The demise of the Sasanian Empire and the simultaneous rise of the Tang, which created an opportunity for the Church of the East to use its ascetic resources in the Tang courts (honed in the late Sasanian Persian setting) constitutes a fruitful area of research not yet fully appreciated. Glen Thompson suggests that there was a Christian presence already in the western area of China and between the two Tang capitals, Xi’an/Chang’an and Luoyang, before Aluoben’s arrival facilitated developments.” Local Tang Christians, consisting of Sogdian, Persian, and Turkic migrants and immigrants, likely asked the Catholicos (head of the Church of the East) in Persia to send a bishop for them as he did for the Christian Hephthalites, who were also missionised by Sasanian Church of the East members.”° This builds upon the hard evidence that exists for the eastward spread of Christianity towards and into China before the seventh century. The granting of official status to the Church of the East in 635, which likely came under imperial and intercourtly auspices, is better understood in relation to this evidence. The Synodicon Orientale, a collection of East Syrian synods and their canons between 410 and 790, records that by 424, four of the cities of Khurasan, i.e. Viz, Nisapur, Merv and Herat, were represented by bishops.”” By the time of the Synod of Mar Aba in 544, Merv had become a metropolitanate, ranking seventh in seniority after Beth Lapat, Nisibis, Basra, Arbil, Kirkuk, and Rev Ardashir. The city’s fortifications, its proximity to the Merv river, its links to Turkic tribes, and its placement on the trade route to Herat and Balkh in one direction, and to the great Khurasan trunk road eastward to Seleucia-Ctesiphon in the other, were likely responsible for its elevation to metropolitan status.”® Its bishops appear to have been placed in the city in order to negotiate within the city’s and region’s intercultural and political relations.
Though studies are now emerging that place emphasis on the church’s monastic and ascetic culture as its sustainer in multiple settings following the fall of the Sasanian Empire, termed here the church’s Persian Jongue durée — this is an area of research that can be expanded.” Michael Morony points to an increase in mission activity and the establishment of monasteries and schools among both Syrian Orthodox and the Church of the East in the final years of the Persian
100 fg It can be argued that the development of missions and
Empire. educational institutions gave the Church of the East capacity to operate outside imperial constraints, occurring both in the late Sasanian setting and in the period of early Arab rule, but less emphasised in the Chinese setting. Scholarly work has long recognised that it was the church’s cultivation of Hellenistic learning and other long-range cultural and intercultural competencies that aided its survival in the Abbasid context.'°' This needs to be further understood in connection to the monastic-ascetic bases of the Church of the East and be seen as part of what connected its Sasanian Persian and Tang Chinese settings.
Commentators have used the term ‘cultural mediator’ to refer to the Church of the East within these settings and as it performed this function in terms of its monastic and scholarly activities. Dimitri Gutas makes a distinction between the church and the court (i.e. the Abbasid court and the late eighth and early ninth-century church), and asks whether the church or the court led the movement. Gutas overemphasises the Abbasid court’s influence, paints the Church of the East as a passive player and without agency, and excludes the expressions of ascetic agency and elitism found in the letters of Patriarch Timothy i
Adam Becker has recently shown how the monastic culture of the Persian church allowed it to traverse the transition between Sasanian and early Arab rule.’°* This, in turn, allowed the church to become part of the Chinese imperial setting and was part of its mobile, Persian, and agency-holding identity in the church’s second major imperial and
104 For example, the School of Nisibis was a major
courtly setting. component in the Persian church’s self-conception in its use of the ‘the divine garment of names’, a conception first seen in Ephrem the Syrian and a notion that had spread widely in Syriac Christianity. The ‘divine garment’ was thought present in scripture and nature, and was a metaphysical and hermeneutical stance toward the world which gave the Syriac churches a trans-regional mobility, since it stressed reading and placed texts and the creation of textual universes at the centre of its mobile identity. ~° Jacob of Serug would refer to God as a ‘divine scribe’.!°° The Persian martyr books show new converts to Christianity not being called Christians, but rather, ‘students’, building on a conception seen in Greco-Roman Christianity in which conversion to the right way of life came through choosing the right philosophical school. '°”
The Aristotelianism of the school of Nisibis, something that made the school well known even in the West, was an important part of this concept and something that enabled the Persian church to manoeuvre adroitly within the Sasanian Persian court, a practice it arguably carried into imperial China.'°* The medical faculty that was part of the School of Nisibis aided in these connections as well, by making the church mobile and adept within courts. That logic and science were cultivated at Nisibis contributed to the church’s ability to debate in imperial courts.'°? These components surfaced within the Persian church’s monasticism and in its courtly relations. While Isho’yahb II clashed with the Persian church’s monks because of the division between coenobitic and anchoritic factions, he himself being more closely tied to the former and their interest in Greek learning and connections to the Persian aristocracy, these two branches of the Persian church’s monks should not be seen as separated. Ishodoneh’s Book of Chastity shows Evagrius’s views on learning and prayer, though his Origenist and semi-Gnostic tendencies were condemned in the West, had flourished in the Persian church and became part of its trans-imperial and trans-regional culture.''? The Book of Chastity, like Thomas of Marga’s Book of Governors, stemming from the same period and context, is replete with a Sasanian Persian memory, one in which Christian ascetic elites hold agency in relation to imperial power through their thaumaturgical abilities and their Persian lineages.''’ Babai the Great (¢.551—628) would join together the ascetic and scholarly sides of the Persian Church of the East’s monasticism and make it a trans-imperial, and specifically Persian, form of monasticism. This is found again in the Church of the East’s Xi’an stele and its language of imperial nets and extendable imperial bodies, their repair and sustaining, and the binding of the church to the court and the emperor’s charisma.
The understanding of the Persian /ongue durée of the Tang East Syrians developed here holds these threads together and builds upon them. It is offered as a response to Saeki’s hypothesis of ‘emperor worship’ and meant to reorient the discussion of the nature of Syriac political agency held under early Arab rule by starting with a key document within the Middle Chinese East Syrian corpus: the Xi’an stele. While Saeki indeed did not understand the extent to which the elites of the Church of the East did not merely represent Persian imperial power during and after the Persian Empire’s fall, but also ‘re-presented’ it, the significance of the way in which this study can reorient the study of Eastern Christianity under early Arab rule is of significance far beyond Saeki and what might result from expanding the scholarship on Syriac Christianity in the Persian empire and early Arab rule period. If we begin to take seriously the seemingly absurd notion, presented in the Xi’an stele, that the East Syrian church’s ascetic elites could ‘repair courtly/Imperial Nets’, and could represent and sustain the emperor’s own flesh and family, his imperial court, charisma, and imperial mandate, an edifice of Western humanitarian thinking that fails to understand that there is or ever was a Christian presence in the Middle East and across Asia, and continues to think of Christianity as an essentially Western phenomenon, is also issued a needed challenge. As much as Western secularist thought in its postcolonial moment longs to dissociate itself from its colonialist past, its assertion that non-Western peoples can have their religions and traditional culture, but it itself cannot and has outgrown the need for such things (unbeknownst to Russia), simply reifies the same teleology of progress found in Hegel, Spengler, and other architects of colonialism’s intellectual edifice.
The culturally denuded and antiseptically cleansed subjectivity of postcolonial historiography can also be said to contain a shadow in so far as it is extremely interested in the complexities of interactions between coloniser and colonised, subject and sovereign, and the notion that culture and power not only interpenetrate one another but allow the subaltern to collaborate both with and against its own interests and that of the power holder. The window upon Eastern Christianity this book opens also involves a call for a more robust engagement with this shadow element within postcolonial historiography. The approach to the Persian and courtly longue durée of the Tang East Syrians developed here has been informed by the work of, for example, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1934-2006), and Bourdieu’s conceptions of Aabitus, field, and dispositions.''* Christopher Beckwith’s empirical but theoretical work centring on what he and others have called the comitatus is an essential synthetic component. A German historiography of courts stemming back to Max Weber and his notion of charisma, along with Weber’s conception of ‘worldly asceticism’ [Innerweltliche Askese}, despite seeming to share roots with the matrix of Western historiography the study attempts to critique, has also been employed as an interpretive tool.''*? As the book is first and foremost an empirical study of documents, these theoretical excursions have been relegated to an appendix.
It is indeed important to keep in mind that an investigation of the Persian royal dispositions and Persian /ongue durée of the East Syrians s ultimately an empirical venture. Joseph Wiesh6fer indicates that during the late Sasanian period a tension arose during the period of Khosrow I’s reforms between social grandeur and courtly pomp and social lineage.''* In times of crisis, as occurred through the sixth and into the seventh century, the higher nobility could force a ruler to put lineage before courtly ritual and regalia usage. This changed with Khosrow I:
The rank of a Parthian or Persian nobleman remained mote or less independent of royal favour until the end of the fifth century. Until that time, the unruly heads of great noble houses [Suren, Karin, lords of Andegan, etc.} admitted only nominal allegiance to the central power. In their hereditary territorial domains they were virtually independent of the king. This changed in late Sasanian times. Symptomatic is the way in which the wearing of belts, rings, clasps, and other sartorial distinctions now required royal
approval.'!?
These sartorial distinctions, signifying numinous and imperial courtly power at once, and becoming connected to the Church of the East’s Persian /ongue durée and Divine Leadership tradition, were carried not just beyond the temporal and geographical confines of the Sasanian Empire (ending in 651), but were carried into Tang period China, the elucidation of which has far reaching implications and is relevant to a range of readerships.
The East Syrian’s presence in Tang dynasty China has long been subject to the projections of under-informed interpreters, thus revealing as much about the tenor of the times of the interpreter as about the lived identity of those who produced the middle Chinese corpus of texts stemming from the Luminous Religion and their history across a range of early medieval world empires. While the Sasanians’ connections to the Tang Chinese empire in Central Asia have been treated in a small number of articles, the East Syrian church’s connections to this history have been left untouched. As the field of Late Antiquity extends itself eastward and the spread and deep-rootedness of Syriac Christianity in central Asia becomes better understood, a more extensive and integrative treatment is in order — and especially one that draws upon Peter Brown’s and his followers’ discovery of the social function of early Christian monasticism and asceticism. Saeki’s unfounded intuition that the East Syrian church’s elites interacted with the Tang court and emperor on an asymmetrical footing, such that it caused the church eventually to disappear, is an intuition that many modern people do share and might share. The recovery of connections the East Syrian church might have had to the indigenous cultures on the edge of China’s vast empire, and which helps better understand the way in which their Middle Eastern identity related to their Chinese enculturation during the Tang period, has vast implications that extend well beyond academia. The same can be said for a deeper investigation of the question of whether the church’s vaunted place within the Sasanian Empire continued and had a place in the early Tang Empire, as it supported Sasanian royals up to the mid eighth century and referred to Christianity as “The Persian Religion’. Let us be clear, however, that the history of the Persian agency argued visibly in the Xi’an stele and to be delineated in the following pages is part of a scholarly endeavour, and that being careless about what is in historical sources will ensure that these possibly wider effects never materialise. In that regard the book targets three specific elements in the Xi’an stele, then moving out from then in both time and space. These are the mdabranoutha / ‘divine economist’ and ‘Persian monk’ designations, and the claim made by church’s ascetic elites to have ‘repaired’ the ‘imperial net’. The study moves out in time and space from these elements and makes visible the agency they bequeathed to the church’s leaders and within its monasticism within four phases or chapters, and which are focused on in the following ways as part of the book’s larger thesis.
Chapter Summaries
The book is divided into two parts. Part I is entitled “What’s in a Name?’. The first chapter, “The Late Sasanian Court and Divine Economy’, treats the East Syrians’ agency within the Sasanian setting and court through the cultural strength of the church’s asceticism and monasticism, showing that this allowed the Sasanian court to be carried, quite literally in one instance, into the early Tang imperial setting.''° To make this argument, the chapter looks to Tabari’s description of the burial of Yazdegird HII by Christians, to the travelogue of Cosmas the India Traveller, and to developments in the late Sasanian period in which Sasanian courts and emperors played roles in the affairs of the church. It also looks to Church of the East elites taking on roles in Sasanian interimperial diplomacy, and Persian Christian queens and their patronage objects. By examining the way in which these elements appeared and were sustained within the interimperial and ascetic culture of the East Syrians on the eve of the Arab conquests and surface in the Divine Economy tradition of Patriarch Isho’yahb IH, an understanding can be gleaned of why the early Tang court named Christianity ‘the Persian religion’, an important background ultimately for understanding the rhetorical assertions of the Xi’an stele under focus in the entire study, and allowing the degree to which East Syrians were autonomous during early Arab rule to come better into focus.
The second chapter, ““Repairing the Imperial Net” before the An Lushan Rebellion’, examines further the early Tang imperial setting in which the Church of the East was given the official title by the Tang court of ‘the Persian religion’. It has long been known that Sasanian royals fled to Central Asia following the fall of the Persian Empire, entered Tang imperial social space, and were aided by the Chinese. What has not been examined within the secondary scholarship is the Church of the East’s place within this. This chapter and the next one argue that that the East Syrians and Sasanian royals in exile conferred agency and leverage upon one another and in relation to the Tang court. The church’s diplomatic and cultural contacts with Central Asia and the Eastern Roman Empire, examined in Chapter 1, surface within the Chinese primary sources and can be shown to have continued after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, showing that East Syrians very likely played a role in strengthening Sasanian restoration hopes and were known to have remained alive up to at least the 740s. Though the scene changed after the An Lushan Rebellion (755—62) and Battle of Talas 751, we are able to know much more about the content of the Chinese designation ‘the Persian religion’ and about Persian royal continuity even within the name ‘Dagqin religion’ (as the church came to be called in 745) than we had previously, which has important implications for both Syriacists interested in Sasanian Persia and Persian historians interested in the role of Syriac in early medieval Iranian history. It allows us to reassess Saeki’s emperor worship thesis and the Xi’an stele’s notion that Syriac Christians were a ‘sacred net’ around the Tang court in connection to their asceticism as well.
Part II, ‘The Lord is King: He is Robed in Majesty’ begins with the third chapter, “The Habitus of Patriarch Timothy I’, which examines the early Abbasid setting of the church and how its social leveraging capabilities changed, were ‘repaired’, from the early Tang (pre-An Lushan and pre-Abbasid) setting of the previous chapter, and in relation to the imperialised articulation of ascetic leadership found within the extant writings of Patriarch Timothy I (1.780—823). The chapter centres upon another challenge to Saeki’s views, his dictum that the study of Christianity in the Tang period begins and ends with the Xi’an monument, arguing that an understanding of the Abbasid setting and the social leverage the church’s elites gained within the early Abbasid court and a sequence of courts across Central Asia simultaneously is crucial for understanding the rhetorical assertions the Church of the East’s elites were making in the late Tang setting, and the degree of agency they possessed there.
The fourth and final chapter is entitled “The Court of Emperor Tang Dezong as Imperial Net, and the Church of the East’s Persian Longue Durée’. This chapter examines the consolidation of relations between the East Syrian church and the court of Tang Dezong (r.780—805), which took place after the An Lushan Rebellion. After the earliest part of Dezong’s reign, one in which the church’s connections to the Tang court were jeopardised and curtailed, the imperial charisma of the Tang court can be argued to have been extended once again to the Church of the East and its long range, Persian, ascetical constitution — its /ongue durée thus being once again fully operational and ‘repaired’ (in the language of the stele). The chapter examines the church’s connections to the eunuchs of the late Tang court in this regard, as well as to esoteric-imperial Buddhism. It was this set of connections that led to the Church of the East Metropolitan Jingjing/Adam and the Esoteric school master Prajfia working together on the translation of a Buddhist stitra for Emperor Dezong in the year 787, something that shows with specificity how agency and imperial charisma transmission occurred between the church’s elites and the Tang court. The effects upon the church of the rise of Chancellor Li Mi (722—89) and the success of his programmes for integrating the foreign fighters in the Tang who had come 30 years earlier to help put down the An Lushan rebels, as well as Li Mi’s changes in border policy, are also examined in this regard. Both were a boon to the Church of the East. By looking ten years beyond the Xi’an stele and into the late 780s, when Li Mi and the connections noted above occurred, the Church of the East’s understanding of itself as a group whose asceticism could foster and sustain the Tang court is shown to be prescient, and Saeki’s understanding of a church in which agency and imperial involvement with the Tang court were antithetical, is again shown to have been unwarranted.
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