Tears for the Cross: Evidence for Passion Piety in the Early Arabic Church Since Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages, Passion piety—that is devotion to the emotionally suffering Christ and lamenting Mary—has been understood as a specifically medieval phenomenon. With few exceptions the belief persists that Passion piety was developed in Western Europe in the eleventh century, especially with Anselm of Canterbury. Byzantinists like Niki Tsironis have already shown that this is false given similar devotions in Byzantium in the ninth century, though this research has not had sufficient impact on the work of scholars focused on Western Christianity. Yet, even this scholarship has not identified the earliest strata of Passion piety. To really arrive at the earliest strata of such devotion we would need to look at the evidence of popular devotion to the emotionally suffering Christ in the fourth and fifth century East. Here, however, I want to look at one of the intermediate strata of Passion piety—the evidence from the early Melkite Church, that is, the post-conquest Arabic Church: it is here, for the first time, that theologians developed a defense and explanation of Passion piety. Many scholars simply assume that Christians have always maintained a devotion to the emotionally suffering Christ, since Christians have always expressed devotion to the crucified Christ. Yet, those scholars who have actively sought out the evidence for such devotion in the early church have gone away empty handed. The early Christian elite—bishops and theologians—were effectively universally opposed to such devotion; they believed in a Messiah who had suffered physically, but not emotionally. A Stoic-influenced theology of emotion prevailed and, according to this theology, Christ—the greatest possible ethical exemplar—suffered beatings, bruising, and piercing, but he did not suffer emotionally. Physical suffering was ethically neutral; negative emotions—grief, sorrow, or fear—were a moral failure. Thus, no late antique theologian taught that Christ emotionally suffered on the Cross, and many—including Basil and Cyril—taught that Mary’s one sin was to weep at her son’s death. Over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, popular devotion to the suffering Christ and lamenting Mary became increasingly intense through the Eastern Roman Empire. Though no Orthodox theologian endorsed this form of piety. It was, as the theological elite understood it, simply the application of the hysteria of pagan women’s funerary rituals to devotion to Christ. As theologians rejected the emotional intensity of such funerary ritual, so they rejected any hint of that emotion to Christian ritual. The one plausible exception—Romanos’ kontakion, “Mary beside the Cross,” a hymn that describes Mary’s extravagant grief on Good Friday—is barely an exception; its late date already places it within the period when this consensus was breaking down and, as Christ tells Mary in that text, unless she ceases to grieve, she may not follow him to Golgotha. After the Fall: The Symbolism of Captivity In and around Jerusalem and Antioch, starting in the late-fourth century, an alternative model of emotional thought began to develop. It emerged first among the laity—to the great consternation of the theological elite. Egeria testifies to this, as does the intractable popular defense of devotion to the suffering God-man in Antioch that led to the successive deposition of John II, Stephen II and Calendion in quick succession. Miaphysite Christians, especially in the interconnected circles of the Gazan monks and the Antiochenes around Peter Fuller, Philoxenus, and Severus were compelled to endorse a theology of Christ’s suffering in order to maintain popular support. For centuries, Good Friday and Holy Saturday—now the darkest days in the Church’s calendar, were understood otherwise. The three days—Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter— were celebrated together, as a joint unit, as the three, great days of Christ’s victory. These were the days when Christ defeated the devil, beat down the doors of hell, and defeated death itself. They were not days of mourning. As theologians so often reminded their congregations, the lay people who understood Good Friday and Holy Saturday as days of mourning were doing it wrong. These were days of celebration. It is in Jerusalem, from around 550, that we have the first evidence that this was definitively changing, and not just in lay piety but in official practice. It is then when, for the first time, the socalled Idiomela, (hymns on Christ’s suffering) were inserted into the liturgy. Probably composed by Miaphysite monks in Gaza between 451 and 500, these texts were among the last to be incorporated into the Old Jerusalem Hymnal before the corpus was closed around 560. To give a sense of what some of these hymns for Good Friday were, I will read one of these short hymns. At the hour of your cross, when the soldiers were mocking you, Lord, the noetic powers were terrified, for you wore the crown of shame, who crowned the earth with flowers, and, being mocked, they wrapped you in a cloak, who wraps the firmament in clouds, and thus in your care [oikonomia], may your compassion be known, Savior, and your great mercy. These texts represent the start of an important shift. They show that the Chalcedonians had admitted defeat after a century of trying to oppose devotion to Christ’s suffering, and they begin to open up a space for an “Orthodox” contemplation of Christ’s emotional affliction on the Cross. This brings us back, finally, to the time of the conquests: events which were decisive for the development and legitimation of Passion piety. As the clerics and monks of Jerusalem reflected on the catastrophes, they had now two distinct symbolic traditions on which to draw—the celebratory, triumphal tradition of late antiquity, and an emergent tradition of Passion piety. At no time was the former tradition extirpated or forgotten, but the conquests led to the substantial enlargement of the later. We could draw on several texts to illustrate this, but the most extensive of these is Strategos’ Capture of Jerusalem. It opens, “I speak mournful words and with tears, I tell you of weeping.”1 The text is, simply put, an extended, written, threnos.2 The text’s central motifs are the Crucifixion and the Babylonian Captivity. The text equates the capture of Jerusalem with the day of the Crucifixion, and then equates Zacharias, the captured Patriarch, with the humiliated Christ.3 He writes, “The Jerusalem of Heaven grieved for the earthly Jerusalem, And the truth of this, brothers, can be seen in this—darkness and gloom were diffused over the earth on that day, just as they were on the day when the sun did not give its light on the day of the great Crucifixion of the Lord.”4 We are accustomed to rhetoric of the Cross like that of Chrysostom, as he writes, “Christ went forth bearing the Cross as a trophy over the tyranny of death, and as conquerors do, so he bare upon his shoulders the symbol of victory.”5 But, this is precisely not the sort of symbolism that Strategos has in mind. He continues, “And they struck down infant children into the dirt, and their parents wailed with a great crying, and their parents, with great groaning and lamentation, mourned for their 1 1.11. Flusin and Stermberger both argue that the theme of the text largely centers on “divine paideia” or the correction of sin. This is, undoubtedly, a theme. Yet, Antiochus is clear that his primary theme is the tragedy of the captivity. See also, Ioanns Papadogiannakis, “Lamenting for the Fall of Jerusalem in the Seventh Century CE,” Greek Laughter and Tears XXXX, 189. XXX, has, as its central them, ‘divine paideia’ as the educational correction of sin (138) COMMENTS ON THIS Günter Stermberger, “Jerusalem in the Early Seventh Century,” Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Lee I. Irvine (New York: Continuum, 1999),261-3 STERMBERGER ALSO ARGUES THEME IS SIN AND JEWS. 3 Olster, Roman Defeat, XXX 4 Antiochus, 8.9-10. 5 Chrysostom, Hom. in Matt. 84 CHECK TRANS. 2 children, and then were killed alongside them.”6 The Christians of the city even perform the traditional rites of mourning, largely associated with women and critiqued intensely by late antique theologians. He writes: “They all began to lament and weep together with a great voice. Some struck their faces, and others put ashes on their head, and some smeared their faces with dust, and others tore their hair when the saw the Holy Anastasis burning and Sion in flames and the destruction of Jerusalem. Some struck their breast, and others raised their hands to heaven.”7 As Strategios recounts, the people of the city burst out into a collective threnos. As Christ grieved on Calvary, so now Jerusalem below grieves. As Jerusalem below once grieved for the death of God, so today the Jerusalem above grieves for the worldly city. To speak the language of the idiomelā, the Cross employed in the text is the dolorous Cross of Good Friday, with its longing for a still unfulfilled redemption. The text recounts the captivity and exile of Jerusalem’s Christians, and Zacharias in particular. After narrating the story of Jerusalem’s fall, Antiochus describes Zacharias’ arrest. He writes, “After all of the evil, they arrested the good pastor, Zacharias, the patriarch, and they led him to Sion through the gate through which our Lord, Jesus Christ, entered.”8 He laments the evils that Jerusalem has seen, the crucifixion of Christ and now “the same Cross departs with the pastor, with Patriarch Zachariah.”9 The rampaging Persians “led out the good shepherd, just as Christ, when he went from Sion to the Cross.”10 After being led from the city to the Mount of Olives, Zacharias turns and gives a long speech to the gathered congregation. As he gives the speech he is caught, paradoxically, between two Christian emotions. He speaks with “sadness and groaning” 11 yet he encourages the assembled people that triumph will come. As he was about to be led away from the Mount of Olives: “He spoke to all his congregation the words that Christ said to his disciples at the time of his passion, ‘O my sons, rise and go, because the time approaches and the day of sadness is at hand.’ […] And then, turning to Sion, now like a widow, the husband Zacharias, the 6 Strategios, 8.13. Strategios 13 (trans. Shoemaker, no pg #). 8 Antiochus, 13.1 9 Anriochus, 13.6. 10 Antiochus, 13.7. 11 Antiochus, 13.12. 7 patriarch, mourned with great tears, and he raised his hands to her, and spoke words of grief and misery.”12 Grief, Passion Piety, and Early Melkite Theology I am going to skip past Anastasios—given time constraints—and look now at John of Damascus’ writings. It was John of Damascus who first integrated this emotional suffering into a theological system. In Book 2 of his Fount of Knowledge, John describes the nature of “man” and in Book 3, he discusses Christ. For an understanding of John’s Passion piety, we need to look to both of these. First, John—who quotes the whole chapter directly from Nemesius—describes four kinds of grief (λύπη), writing, “there are four varieties of pain, viz. anguish, grief, envy, pity. Anguish is pain without utterance: grief is pain that is heavy to hear like a burden: envy is pain over the good fortune of others: pity is pain over the evil fortune of others.”13 John, notably, however, excises the rest of Nemesius discussion of grief, where he denounces grief as an evil. For John, it is apparently a natural and blameless passion. Shortly thereafter he explains this new attitude to grief. John describes Providence, or God’s care for all things. He writes, “we ought to be filled with wonder at all the works of Providence, and praise them all.”14 In a sense, this initially sounds deeply influenced by the Stoics; the virtuous person is the one who responds to events with joy and thankfulness, in Stoic parlance, with eudaimonia. Yet, John is clear that there is an exception to this. He writes, “The origin of all things is from God, but their destruction has been introduced by our wickedness for our punishment or benefit. For God did not create death, neither does He take delight in the destruction of living things. But death is the work of man.”15 Whereas in Stoicism, the mark of virtue par excellence is the ability to be impassive even in face of death, for John, death is the exception to the call to joy and thankfulness. Death is an evil, created by man, and thus is sensibly and right grieved and lamented. In book 3, John’s description of the Passion bears this out. John believes that Christ endured all the “natural and innocent passions.” He suffered all those emotions which “which have entered into the life of man owing to the condemnation by reason of the transgression.”16 Thus, Christ felt 12 Antiochus, 14.2-5. John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 2.14. 14 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 2.29. 15 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 2.28. 16 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 3.20. FINISH CITATIONS (I.E. EDITION) 13 emotions “such as hunger, thirst, weariness, labor, the tears, the corruption, the shrinking from death, the fear, the agony with the bloody sweat, the succor at the hands of angels because of the weakness of the nature, and other such like passions which belong by nature to every man.”17 Christ was afraid of dying, and asked the Father that he be permitted to escape the Cross. In doing so, he spoke “words of natural timidity.”18 John is always clear that he does not attribute any passion to the divinity qua divinity,19 yet he shows no embarrassment in attributing genuine emotional suffering to Christ. He is, I believe, the first theologian to establish the logic of this changed theory of emotion. According to John, given the goodness of God’s creation, the goodness of being itself, it is proper for human beings to fear and grieve death. Fear, he writes, “is the force whereby we cling to being with shrinking. For if all things were brought by the Creator out of nothing into being, they all have by nature a longing after being and not after non-being.”20 Since Christ too, as a human being, naturally desired to cling to the goodness which is being, and since Christ hated all the sinful works of mankind, he must have feared and grieved death. For the first time, it is the failure to grieve and fear that it is deviant. Theodore Abū Qurrah, the next of the great Melkite theologians, also takes up this theme, encouraging devotion to Christ’s emotional suffering, even suggesting it is proof of the truth of Christianity. As he writes, in a short treatise called, On the Confirmation of the Gospel: “That fear came on him, so that he sweated sweat that was clotted like blood; his enemies seized him, and insulted and disgraced him when they spat in his face; that they beat him about the head, flogged him, and crowned him with thorns; that they mocked him, nailed his hands and feet, and hung him on a piece of wood; that they gave him vinegar and gall to drink; that they pierced him with a lance; that blood and water flowed out from him; and that, while this was happening, he cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” All this the gospel says of Christ. There is no one whose mind could be persuaded that God is thus descried or that such things could happen to him. Accordingly, the persuasion of the vulgar mind is wholly excluded 17 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 3.20 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 3.18. 19 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 3.26 20 John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, 3.23. 18 from this religion,…it has thus been confirmed that the gospel is divine, pure, correct, and unadulterated.”21 Theodore’s description of the crucifixion takes at face value the brutality of Christ’s crucifixion. He admits the humiliating and grievous nature of such a death. He admits as well that Christ, on the Cross, cried out “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Earlier theologians agreed that these words cannot be taken at face value and they do not speak of Christ’s own feeling of dereliction. Theodore simply takes these words for what they seem to mean and he argues that the very humiliation and suffering of this death shows that Christianity must come from God. Conclusion The Life of Mary, which I have not discussed, is the longest and most intense of such Melkite texts; scholars have been reluctant to accept its early date because they believe it does not fit into the context of the early Melkite Church. Yet, even without the evidence of the Life of Mary, we can say that Arabic Christians had developed and legitimized a full-fledged Passion piety at these early dates. For the first time, we find evidence that the commemoration of Good Friday had taken on its now common character—the darkest day of the Christian calendar. In their emotional suffering, Christ mirrored the Church and the Church mirrored Christ. In this context, there is nothing surprising about the Life of Mary; it is early evidence of Passion piety, but it stands, by no means, alone. If we want to understand the history of Passion piety, we need to turn our gaze away from the Latin West and, even, away from Byzantium. We need to recognize and investigate the important contributions of the little studied Melkite Church. Theodore Abū Qurrah, “On the Confirmation of the Gospel,” 51. See also Theodore Abū Qurrah, Against the Jews, 37-8. In this text makes the same argument, though here directed specifically against the Jews. He uses long quotes from Isaiah regarding the humiliation of the Messiah to prove Christ’s divinity. 21