SB 16
On Idolatry
In
656 AD, Chosroes Chrysorhine, now 89, is putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus,
On Idolatry. After his stay in Antioch, he had gone back to Mar Qardagh, the monastery on the outskirts of Arbela where he had his religious training. In 612, he had become the abbot of another monastery neat Tikrit and then, in 623, had been elected bishop of that city. During this period, one of his most prolific, he wrote a number of treatises on matters of faith and church discipline which were to become reference works for the Church of the East. Large collections of his sermons were also collected from this period and widely disseminated. But it is also during his time in Tikrit that his relationship with king Hamazasp had started to become strained. Hamazasp was in many ways a successful ruler but he was definitely a king in the Persian model. By the mid-VIIth century, the Armenian dynasties ruling both the kingdom and the duchies had become thoroughly Persianized and their lifestyle was little different from their Sassanid predecessors. Under Hamzasp, in particular, the practice of the so called "Persian marriages" had reached new heights and the king himself had "wed" more than 700 noble girls by the early 630s. Bishop Chosroes decided it was time the Church reacted to the excesses and during the lent season of 633 AD had delivered a scathing series of sermons on the practice from the pulpit of his cathedral in Tikrit. Not surprisingly, the king had not taken the onslaught lying down and the bishop had been sent packing to a remote monastery in the Hindu Kush, near Kapisa[1]. The 66 year old Chosroes had reacted to his exile with characteristic docility and good humor. Monastic life agreed with him and he needed time to embark on a writing project he had been mulling over for several decades, a theological and moral treatise on the multifarious forms of idolatry since Adam to the present. In the mid 650s, the voluminous work was for all intents and purposes complete but when Chosroes learned of the events that had taken place within the ERE during the past few years, he decided to add a postface dedicated to their analysis in the light of the doctrines he had developed in the rest of his book.
This is how the postface began:
Over the past three years, all of Christendom has been troubled by news of the terrible events that have occurred within the Empire of the Romans. Moshe l-ḥajara, the false Jewish messiah was bad enough, but the current heretic emperor is worse. Many will express surprise and even dismay at my judgment of Gerodynamos. But this is because most men, alas, are blind to the tricks of Belial.
But let us focus our gaze on the first of these two evil men for a moment. Our wonderment at his deeds should not be small. Why were so many Arabs and Jews willing to follow such an obscure warlord from far away Yemen in a dangerous trek through thousands of stadia of treacherous desert sands and rock utterly deprived of water or shade ? Why were desert Arab tribes, usually capable of no more than plunder on a paltry scale, now able to unite under a single leader ? Why were Yemeni Arabs and Jews, bitter enemies for decades, suddenly transformed into allies in the pursuit of the most remote and uncertain of goals ?
As we have argued many times over in this treatise, the worst outcome of the Devil's devices is that they have the power to make men lose sight even of their own worldly interests. Too often we complain that men are solely motivated by self-interest. Alas, this is not true. If it were, the world would be far less hellish than it is. Are we to advocate greed over generosity and love ? God forbid. Simply we wish to make it apparent how deeply men can become disoriented by the seductive snares of the Devil; so deeply indeed that they lose sight of their most immediate best interest.
Had Arabs and Jews from Arabia Felix been led by the mere wisdom of this world, they would have mounted an invasion of Axum, not of the Empire of the Romans. Axum was nearer, and weaker, and it had plenty of well-watered and beautiful land. Furthermore, it would not have been the first time that a kingdom founded in southern Arabia would have held sway over the African shores of the Erythrean sea[2]. Instead, they headed north, ready to endure God's wrath in the desert and then fight the largest and wealthiest Empire in the whole world.
But I can hear the reader object already: "When they headed north, the Arabs and the Jews were following God, or at least they thought so". Were they ? Were they following God or were they following Moshe l-ḥajara the black-clad and his blasphemous banners ? Had they been following God, the Arabs and the Jews of Yemen would have been digging canals and building cisterns instead of fighting each other. If they had done so, there would have been arable land for everyone in no time and war would have been unnecessary. But they were proud and therefore preferred to wield the sword rather than the shovel. And as we all know, no proud man can follow God since access to God is granted only through the cross of Christ. No pride can survive the cross.
Moshe l-ḥajara was the opposite of the cross. He pretended to be a winning messiah, a messiah who promised bliss through victory in war. But what he promised was also apparently impossible: a journey through thousands of miles in the desert and then a victory against the Empire of the Romans. And yet people believed in him because what seems impossible also seems superhuman, that is, divine. To the eyes of his followers, a messiah who promises victory is a god. That was indeed the great blasphemy of the Jews at the time our savior was born. They had been waiting for a messaiah that they were prepared, indeed eager, to worship as a god. They had been secretly tired of the Father that they pretended to worship with their lips and they wanted to replace Him with another god, a younger god, just like the Greeks had replaced Cronos with Zeus or the Babylonians had replaced Enlil with Marduk. Of course, they could not say so. They were as stiff-necked as ever, but their tribulations had at least taught them hypocrisy.
Then Moshe the false messiah was crushed, with the help of the True Cross. His early victories had been too easy and his downfall was swift. But his poisonous influence did not die with him and a second false messiah, more monstrous than the first, arose like a phoenix from the ashes of the latter. Again here, the reader will be puzzled, wondering where I see a second messiah in these terrible events. This is because, like the Jews at the time of our savior's birth, this second messiah is craftier than the first was and is clever enough not to declare himself such. I speak of course of Gerodynamos, the so called "Emperor of Jerusalem".
The Devil's tricks are like a contagious disease. It kills men and then spreads to more men from the decaying corpse of its first victims. Once many men had seen Moshe l-ḥajara leading his bewitched followers, they became bewitched themselves and were ready to follow anyone who would defeat the Jewish-Arab false messiah. This is exactly what happened after Gerodynamos became victorious at Damascus. The Devil was able to use even the power of the True Cross to further his own schemes. And of course, he had prepared the ground with heresy. The goal of all heresy is to deflect and blunt the impact of the Cross of Christ. Despite appearances to the contrary, this is exactly what Monophysite doctrine does. If Christ's nature is fully and only divine, then what is left of the Passion ? It becomes a vacuous magic trick performed by the deity to supposedly destroy sin. But it does nothing of the sort since, Christ being only divine, we are not involved in his death. His death is no longer our death also. His death is no longer the death of our pride. If Christ is only God and not man, we can be spectators of his death and then go about our sinful business as if nothing had happened. We can even turn in prayer to Him and earnestly, but foolishly, ask him for the goods of this world in support of our own self-aggrandizement. Monophysite doctrines make us ripe for the worship of a new messiah, a new god on earth, a warlike hero similar to the Alexanders and the Caesars of old, which we are only too eager to follow in the hope that through their own quest for worldly power, they will hand us down some spoils; some earthly goods that we will be able to feed our fleshly pride with.
But pride, and the worldly success that stems from it, breed envy. And envy is what we are going to witness in the coming years all over the Empire of the Romans. As Gerodynamos flaunts his wealth and his concubines and his glory in Jerusalem, he will drive all men around him mad with envy. It is no doubt not by chance that God has allowed him to do all this in the Holy City, O blasphemy of blasphemies. Where Christ suffered his Passion for the salvation of those who believe, a type of the Antichrist is now displaying the very opposite of what Christ, the true Messiah, is. Gerodynamos, may his name perish, gives us a spectacle of exactly what Christ would have been like if he had succumbed to the Devil's third and last temptation in the desert[3].
The Apostle Paul rightly speaks of "envy, which is idolatry"[4] Among the ten commandments brought down from mount Horeb by Moses, the one forbidding idolatry is the first, while the one about envy is the tenth and last. It is as if God had designed these ordinances in a circle, the last one bringing us back to the first, so that we may understand that there is no point in trying to obey them separately. Either through faith we submit to God entirely and He will grant us to be justified according to the whole Law or we rebel and we will fall foul of all its decrees.
As Christ says, "Consider the lilies of the fields, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass, which is alive in the field today, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!"[5] Why does the Lord speak of faith here ? Because if our faith is truly in God, and in God only, we know that only He can feed us and clothe us. We do not expect our sustenance and our raiment from anyone but He. There is therefore no reason for us to feel envy while we wait patiently for what we have prayed God to give us. But if we do envy, it must be that we assume that there is another power besides God from whom we expect some benefit. And indeed, the very feeling of envy soon turns the one we envy into a sort of evil god in our diseased eyes. As we see every day that fortunate person possessing the thing we desire, our imagination becomes caught up in ever more fantastic assumptions regarding the value of this thing and the power of that person. As we mull over these dark speculations in our mind, we develop a habit which becomes ever closer to worship. As we speculate endlessly on all the deeds we imagine the person we envy to have done in order to own the thing we desire, we involuntary praise him in our mind. And praise, as we know, is what worship is made of. As the image of the envied person comes back into our mind over and over again, a little more ornamented each time with all the qualities we assume this person must possess in order to be as fortunate as we imagine him or her to be, our wretched soul, nourished by the devil, slowly transforms the person we envy into a god. A god we love, because he possess powers that apparently we do not. And a god we hate because he refuses to share those supposed powers with us.
When the descendants of Adam first roamed the earth, men were liable to turn any human being, and indeed any beast, into a god through such a diseased train of thought. Thus Cain killed Abel, and men turned crocodiles into gods because they had many teeth and bulls because they had strong muscles. Then, by the grace of God, the number of gods was reduced. Instead of thousands of gods, most civilized men only had a few dozen, as the Greeks did, or the Romans and the Persians. This was an improvement, no doubt engineered by God to prepare men to accept that there is in fact only one true God, but it was not enough. Since there was still several gods in people's minds, it was still possible that one's next door neighbor or one's king might be a god in disguise. Therefore the seed of envy was not rooted out and men still strangled each other under the impulse of the Devil's madness. When God's word became firmly established in the world, the seed of idolatry should have been eradicated entirely. But it was not. As long as this world will exist, the Devil will always find another way to lead men to their destruction. Since it was no longer possible to lure men towards idols openly, the deceiver seized on God's promise of the Messiah in order to transform it into the most monstrous instrument of rebellion he had ever devised. Through his filthy industry, the Devil turned the suffering servant of God who labors and dies for the sins of men into its exact opposite, a warlike victorious earthly ruler.
But this was of course all according to God's plan. As the Devil feverishly built the stature of his anti-messiah, he unwittingly concentrated all our idolatrous cravings, and therefore all our sins, into this inverted image of the real Messiah. Once this had been done, all that was left for God to do was to let the true Messiah be killed in order for all our sins to be swallowed up with Him. All our idolatry, and therefore all our envy, all our murderous and adulterous urges, all our lying and all our pride had been tied up into this leviathan of an idol that the devil's messiah had become to us. When Jesus died, this image died within us and we were freed. We were forever manumitted from the bonds of sin.
Of course, only those who put their faith, that is to say all their trust, in Christ Jesus, the true Messiah, are thus saved. For those who withhold their trust, no benefit accrues and the Devil is still their master. This is why God, in his unending mercy, still instructs us through the display of false messiahs. Moshe l-ḥajara and Gerodynamos are puppets of the Devil but behind the puppeteer is another all-powerful puppeteer whose puppet is the puppeteer. God exposes the Devil's scheme by allowing him to display them in front of us. With the help of the Spirit, if by God's grace we have faith, let us pray that we benefit from the lesson.
This postface, which grew to become almost a fifth of the total work, was to prove one of the most influential texts within the Church of the East's tradition. Its echo was to reverberate throughout its later history shaping its missionary activities to the East and the North-East and grounding its approach both to political power and to individual morality for centuries hence. Chosroes Chrysorhine, for his part, died in
661 AD, aged 94. He was immediately hailed as a saint and his fame spread throughout Christendom.
[1] modern Bagram in Afghanistan.
[2] Ancient name of the Red Sea ("Erythrean" means "red" in Greek).
[3] Matt. 4:8-9 "Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”"
[4] Col. 3:4 "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and envy, which is idolatry."
[5] Luke 12:27-28
