Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in Christian Middle East

Notes

241  Notes 1. Introduction 1. ASCPF, CP Maroniti, vol. 136, 437–38. 2. The two main Catholic communities which I will be focusing on in this book are the Maronites and the Melkites. Later, we will explore at length the eighteenth-century historical narrative of the Maronites, so here it will suffice to note that most Maronites trace their religious origin to Mar Yuhanna Maroun, a fifth-century ascetic monk living around the Orontes River between Emesa and Apamea. “Originally, most of these Maronites had inhabited the valley of the Orontes, but they had always been on poor terms with the Byzantine Church and its Syrian followers, the Melchites [sic] . . . The available evidence indicates that the final exodus of the Maronites to Mount Lebanon occurred at some point between the tenth and eleventh centuries.” Kamal Salibi, A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 13. Their Christian and Muslim contemporaries considered them to be Monothelites; that is, they believed that Jesus Christ had two natures but only one will—a charge which Maronite historians and clerics, since the fifteenth century, have consistently denied as they affirmed their perpetual orthodoxy and adherence to the Chalcedonian creed of two natures and two wills (human and divine). For example, a chronicler during the Crusades, William of Tyre, related the conversion of 40,000 Maronites in 1182 from Monothelitism after they “had for five hundred years adhered to the false teaching of an heresiarch named Maro.” William of Tyre, De Bello Sacro, XX, viii. Maronite apologists argue that either William of Tyre uncritically copied the Annals of Eutychius, an Egyptian Melkite who calumniated the Maronites, or those 40,000 had gone astray from the body of the Maronite community. Similarly, the very existence and identity of Saint John Maro, the purported founder of the Maronites, is deeply contested. While Maronite chroniclers like Monsignor Yusuf al-Dibs insist on his existence and central role in the foundation of the Maronite sect sometime between 685 and 707, his name is not to be found in the Episcopal records of Antioch from that time period. 242 | Notes to Pages 3–4 But regardless of the veracity of Maronite hagiographies for this early period, the Maronites entered into permanent and uninterrupted communion with the Catholic Church in Rome after the Lateran Council of 1516. By that time their population center was definitely in the northern parts of Mount Lebanon, with scattered smaller communities in Syria, Cyprus, and Palestine. For a more detailed history of the Maronites, see Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1986). You can also refer to the encyclopedic work of Butrus Daw, Tarikh al-Mawarinah al-dini wa-alsiyasi wa-al-h ˙ ad ˙ ari, 5 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1970–76) The term Melkite refers to Middle Eastern Christians who accepted the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon. The word comes from the Syriac word malko, meaning imperial or “king’s men,” and it was coined pejoratively by non-Chalcedonians (Jacobites and Nestorians). The Melkite Church was organized into three historic patriarchates— Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—in union with the patriarch of Constantinople. In 1724, after the death of the Antiochan patriarch Cyril V (who had submitted to the authority of the Roman Holy See in 1718), the community splintered into two parts. In Damascus one group elected Seraphim Tānās as patriarch, who took the name Cyril and ultimately had to flee to Mount Lebanon because of his affiliation with the Vatican. The second patriarch was the Greek candidate Silvester the Cypriot. See Robert Haddad, “The Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and the Origins of the Melkite Schism” (PhD diss., Harvard Univ., 1965), for details about this split. The focus of this book will be on the Greek Catholic wing of the Melkite Church, which by the 1740s had become the larger part of the community. 3. I am using the term Bilad al-Sham as a shorthand for the geographical territory encompassing modern-day Lebanon and Syria. I will also use the term Levant for the same area for no other reason but variety. 4. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (San Francisco, Harper, 1978), 38. 5. Here, I am thinking of the pioneering scholarly works of anthropologists Elizabeth Fernea and Cynthia Nelson; historians Beth Baron, Marilyn Booth, Nikki Keddie, and Judith Tucker; and Arabic literature scholars like miriam cooke, who brought women and gender studies in...