Adrian Henry Timothy Knottesford Fortescue

“ Heresy is wrong because it causes schism. The schism which results is the root evil of heresy. If there were no schism it would be not heresy but a harmless theological mistake. And the schism is what lasts and is deplorable for centuries. No one now gets hot over prosopon and hypostasis; but the Nestorians suffer still from their tragic isolation, their schism from the rest of Christendom. A convert gives up his heresy because it involves schism: he wants not to be in schism, and for that reason he accepts all that is a condition of communion with the Catholic Church. ”

“ So our Lord's divinity and humanity both would cease to be, forming some new impossible thing that is neither divinity nor humanity. Instead of having both, he would have neither; he would be neither God nor man. The Monophysite rather conceived one as absorbed, not both. The divinity in this idea remained unchanged, but the humanity was absorbed into it, the human nature was, so to speak, swamped, lost in the infinite ocean of divinity. Then our Lord would have no true humanity; he would not be really man. ”

“ Even infallibility can be no great stumbling-block to people who have a very definite idea of an infallible Church, of which Patriarchs are the authentic mouthpiece. They do not admit the Immaculate Conception of our Lady, because the Pope has defined it. If he had not done so, they probably would. Nestorians, of course, will not call her Mother of God. But they have unbounded veneration for the all-holy, most pure and sinless Virgin; they keep her feasts, and their liturgies surpass ours in glowing praise of her. If they do not all go to confession, they all know they ought to. ”

“ It is strange that anyone can forget the Persian martyrs. Not in the worst time of Roman persecution was there so cruel a time for Christians as under Shapur II of Persia. In proportion to its extent and the time the persecution lasted, Persia has more martyrs than any other part of the Christian world. The cause of the persecution may easily be understood. As long as the Roman Empire was pagan the Persian king had no particular prejudice against Christians. Indeed, while Rome persecuted them, Christians found an asylum under the protection of her enemy. ”

“ The Orthodox Church is considerably the largest in the East. But it is by no means the only Eastern Church. The idea, which one still sometimes finds among Protestants, of one vast "Eastern Church," united in the same primitive faith, knowing nothing, never having known anything, of the Papacy, is the crudest fiction. There neither is nor ever has been such a body. Eastern Christendom is riddled with sects, heresies and schisms, almost as much as the West. ”

“ And if you insist very much on his manhood as complete and perfect, if you are specially on your guard against Docetism or Apollinarism, you will perhaps insist that in him, besides the divinity, there was a second human hypostasis, meaning a complete and perfect individual (not merely abstract or theoretical) human nature. So many orthodox Fathers speak of two hypostases in our Lord; this was particularly the language of Antioch; Nestorius might have said that, if that had been all, without offence. Eventually, it is true, hypostasis was considered the equivalent of the Latin persona ”

“ We think of the Nestorians as a wretched heretical sect, cut off from the Catholic Church and so gradually withering. They are that. But there is another side too. For a time, as long as they could, they did their share in the common Christian cause heroically. While they were cut off from the West, denounced by Catholics, Orthodox and Jacobites, while we thought of them as a dying sect in Persia, they were sending missions all over Asia. Those forgotten Nestorian missionaries, they were not Catholics but they were Christians. ”

“ From our point of view, we should say that, short of becoming Chaldees, the Nestorians can do no better than profit by the instruction, accept the guidance, follow the edifying example of their generous Anglican guests. We, too, may wish the Anglican mission God-speed in its noble work, with the additional wish that their instructions may open Nestorian eyes even more than they themselves intend; so that their pupils may at last seek reunion, not with the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, but with a greater Patriarch, whose authority reaches further and is more firmly based. ”

“ No; both divinity and humanity remain real, essentially different, though joined so closely in one Jesus Christ. We come, then, exactly to the faith of Chalcedon: "one and the same Christ, the only-begotten Lord, in two natures unconfused, unchanged, undivided, inseparable ... keeping the property of each nature in one person." [10] In other words, if our Lord is really God and man, he is one person (one single individual) in two natures, that of God and that of man. Is this the prejudice of a modern person who is anxious to avoid the pitfalls of Nestorius and Eutyches? ”

“ A curious point about these orders of the hierarchy is that each is attained by a special ordination form, with laying-on of hands. A priest who becomes a chorepiscopus, a deacon who becomes an archdeacon, is ordained, just as a priest who becomes a bishop. We should, of course, say that the making of a deacon, a priest, a bishop is the Sacrament of Holy Orders; that the other ceremonies are only sacramentals, blessings at the appointment, like our minor orders. But this distinction does not appear to be very clear to Nestorians. ”

“ The modern Nestorians have kept the faith of their fathers (since they first accepted their heresy) amid Moslems, Kurds, Yazīdīs loyally. For this they deserve all honour. We should wonder at it the more, were it not the common phenomenon among all these smaller Eastern Churches. Their conservatism, their fidelity to their traditions in all things, is their most remarkable characteristic.
Of the Nestorian faith, then, not much need be said. We have little against it, save the one point of their heresy as to our Lord's person. ”

“ Then anyone who knows the language can put the word back into its own letters. He who does not will be puzzled as to how it should be pronounced; but this is the case always when we do not know the language in question. Now, the first principle of exact transliteration is to use one Roman letter for one letter of the original alphabet. The reason of this is plain. In English we use combinations of letters to represent one sound, such as sh, th, ph. In Semitic languages (and Coptic and Armenian) these sounds have each one letter. ”

“ A fashion is growing up among their Anglican friends of avoiding the word because (it is alleged) they do not really hold the heresy associated with Nestorius's name, nor were they founded by him. As for the heresy, it is now urged that Nestorius himself did not teach it; so the name need not in any case connote any theory about our Lord's personality. They do not admit that they were founded by Nestorius. Of course not. They claim that their religion was founded by Jesus Christ. So do all Christians. We can hardly call them Christians as a special name. ”

“ During the 5th century, when the Persian Church was in its lowest state and all celibacy was abolished among the clergy (p. 81) , a synod ordained contemptuously that anyone who wanted not to marry had better go to a monastery. [87] But about this time we hear of even monks and nuns marrying. [88] Now, monasticism without celibacy is no monasticism at all. Always the "angelic" life has been the essence of what we called religious orders. So, in the 5th century, the religious life was nearly extinct in Persia. In the 6th century came a great reform and a new beginning of monasticism. ”

“ Since Aramaic in various dialects became the common language of Western Asia (roughly since the second Babylonian Empire) they have talked one of its many dialects. We now call Aramaic by the Greek name Syriac. If we class people by the inaccurate but convenient test of the language they use, we shall count these as Syrians, more nearly as East Syrians. In the period with which we have to deal the classical language of Mesopotamia and Syria was the dialect of the city of Edessa, from, which are derived those of the Eastern and Western Syrians. ”

“ We must go on to our proper subject, the history of the Nestorian sect. This rather long dogmatic excursus is inserted because of the discussion now going on as to whether after all Ephesus and the Catholic Church did not make a mistake from the beginning in excluding that sect. We have said perhaps enough to show that it is not so. Nestorius (one feels no animus against a respectable man whose cause, to us, is buried since fifteen centuries) , in spite of the harsh treatment he received and his good qualities, taught a doctrine which cut away the very root of Christianity ”

“ We have seen that the beginning of persecution in Persia was that the State feared co-religionists and friends of the Romans in its territory. As soon as it discovered that Bar Ṣaumâ and the Nestorians held a form of Christianity which was not that of the enemy, that they had been expelled from the empire just because of this new teaching of theirs, that they were bitterly hostile to Cæsar and Cæsar's religion, naturally, it welcomed the spread of this anti-Roman doctrine among its subject Christians. ”

“ There are, besides the Orthodox Church, other Eastern Churches, which are no more in communion with her than they are with us. To the Orthodox Christian an Armenian, a Copt, a Jacobite is just as much a heretic and a schismatic as a Latin or a Protestant. Though no other Eastern Church can be compared to the Orthodox for size, nevertheless at least some of them (that of the Armenians, for instance) are large and important bodies. ”

“ We must understand this, because most of all in the East political divisions are no clue to race. The people we have to study are not Assyrians, nor Greeks, nor Persians, Egyptians, Romans. They have been bandied about between all these powers. All the time they remain just the same Semitic Syriac-speaking native population of Mesopotamia and Eastern Syria. ”

“ Their line goes back to those wonderful missions which carried the name of Christ across Asia, to the great army of martyrs whose blood hallowed the soil of Persia, when Shapur II was the Eastern Diocletian, and back behind that to the mythic dawn when Addai and Mari brought the good news from the plains of Galilee, when Abgar sent letters to Jesus the good Physician, and Ḥannân the notary painted a picture of the holy face. These people are the oldest schismatical Church in the world. Thay have stood in their pathetic isolation for fifteen centuries. ”

“ Among the unhappy non-Moslem population of these parts he will find families who have nothing to do with either Catholics or Orthodox, but who honour the lifegiving Cross, who have priests and bishops, who are baptized and go to Communion, who in a word are Christians. Who are these people? Some new sect planted in these wilds by Protestant missionaries? No, indeed! Long centuries before Luther nailed up his theses these people worshipped God and Christ as they still do. They were once a mighty and widespread Church. ”

“ The remote beginning of our story is to be found not far from where the last remnant still lingers—in Mesopotamia, along the frontier of the Roman Empire and the land of the Persian King of Kings; just as they are now again a frontier people, where the abominations of Turkish governors meet the vileness of their Persian colleagues. The background of the Nestorian Church is the political history of Mesopotamia and the lands around, till they become the national Christian Church of Persia. ”

“ Among Protestant writers there is often a tendency to rehabilitate people whom the Church has condemned, to declare that an alleged heretic was grossly misrepresented, was really a person of irreproachable views falsely accused of heresy because of some political intrigue. Of no one has this been said so persistently as of Nestorius. His defence is not a new idea. For many years it has been the fashion either to ridicule the whole controversy or to say that he and Cyril really agreed entirely—the question was only one of words ”

“ The name Armenian Church presents no difficulty: it is the National Church of that race. Uniate Armenian is clear enough too. But in this case the faulty classification is less innocent than that of the Copts. The Uniate Copts are a very small body. The Uniate Armenians are a large, flourishing and important part of the nation. Can we hand over the title "Armenian Church," without qualification, to their adversaries? Certainly the Uniate would protest that his Church is at least also an Armenian Church; he would point out that one can be a good Armenian without being a Monophysite. ”

“ Nearer than that one cannot go in defining their race. Practically a real bond is their language; another equally real one all over the East is religion. It seems an odd criterion by which to measure races; yet, for practical purposes, the bond of Church membership is perhaps the nearest thing they have to our idea of race or nation. The Turk is not altogether wrong in considering each sect as a "nation." [3]
After Alexander, then, we have outposts of Greek civilization and language thinly scattered among the native population. ”

“ The Epiklesis of the liturgy of the Apostles is vague: "And may there come, O my Lord, thine Holy Spirit and rest upon this offering of thy servants and bless it and hallow it, that it be to us, O my Lord, for the pardon of offences and the remission of sins, and for the great hope of resurrection from the dead, and for new life in the kingdom of heaven, with all those who have been well-pleasing in thy sight." Certainly, if we look for a categorical "form" of the Sacrament, we shall have difficulty in finding it in this liturgy. ”

“ VII: "If anyone say that the man who was created from the Virgin is himself the Only-begotten who was born of the Father before the day-star, instead of confessing that he has a share in this name of Only-begotten only because of his being united to him who is by nature the Only-begotten of the Father ... let him be anathema." [57] At the beginning of the Council of Ephesus, during the preliminary discussions, Nestorius said: "Never will I call a child two or three months old God; because of this I will not communicate with you (Cyril) ." ”

“ So, almost as soon as the Nestorians made Edessa their centre, the effect of their teaching reached over the border to the daughter Church. Already the Persian bishops had learned to sympathize with Nestorius and hate Cyril. When, therefore, the empire became impossible for Nestorians, they found a fertile soil waiting for them across the frontier. Bar Ṣaumâ was the man who made Christian Persia Nestorian. He and the other exiles from Edessa poured into the country, hot with indignation against the Roman Government and the Council of Ephesus. ”