Antioch, Patriarchate of
JOHN A. MCGUCKIN
Antioch has a glorious Christian past. It was here that one of the most vibrant Christian communities in the apostolic age sprang up, and here that the first tentative workings out of the relation between Jewish and Gentile disciples of Jesus took place. The Apostle Peter was based here as a leader of the church community before he moved towards his martyrdom at Rome, and many scholars believe that it was in this church also that the Gospel of Matthew received its final editing and arrangement in the Greek text. It was one of the main cities of the international Christian world, third-ranking city of the Roman Empire (after Rome and Alexandria), site of great achievements and momentous struggles, with several martyrdoms during the time of the Roman persecutions, that made it feature high in the calendar of the saints. But the advances of Islam from the 7th century onwards left Antioch’s Christian civilization in a state of slow suffocation. It was also vulnerable to sociopolitical changes because of the way its ecclesiastical territories (those churches that looked to Antioch for guidance and which followed its traditions) were so widely scattered and into such impassable mountain territory, which made communication so hard to sustain but so easily disrupted.
Several of Antioch’s greatest theologians have left their mark on the church’s universal patristic tradition: writers such as Mar Theodore the Interpreter (of Mopsuestia), St. John Chrysostom, Mar John of Antioch, Theodoret of Cyr, and numerous ascetics and saints such as Sadhona, or Isaac of Niniveh. The cultural and theological sphere of influence exercised by the Syrian Church in its time of glory was much greater than the (very large) extent of its ancient territories. The Syrian ritual gave the substructure to the Byzantine liturgical rite, for example. It was also the Syrians who perfected the art of setting poetic synopses of Scripture to sung melodies. The church’s greatest poets such as Ephrem and Romanos the Melodist were Syrians who taught this theological style to Byzantium and prepared the way for the glories of medieval Orthodox liturgical chant. The Syrian Church, especially in its Golden
Age between the 4th and 6th centuries, generously organized missions to Ethiopia, Persia, India, and China. Its presence in China historically has tended to be occluded because of the extensive burning of Syriac Christian literature by the later Renaissance missionaries who claimed the origination of Christianity in that continent, but there are stones from ancient times recording the arrival of the Syrian missionaries, and Chinese Christian folk elements show the ancient Syrian traces. The patriarchate of Antioch influenced the whole of ancient Cappadocia in its time, and it in turn influenced Armenia and Georgia. Patristic church leaders such as Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian were mentored by Syrian hierarchs such as Meletios of Antioch or Eusebius of Samosata, the great defenders of the Nicene faith at the time of the Second Council of Constantinople. It was Meletios and Eusebius who summoned Gregory the Theologian to preach the Five Theological Orations at Constantinople, and although Eusebius was assassinated before he could make his presence felt there, Gregory only assumed the presidency of the Second Council of Constantinople in 381 after Meletios, unanimously acclaimed as its first president, had died unexpectedly.
In its time of glory, the Christian orators of Syria spoke and wrote the finest Greek in the Roman world. The schools of Antioch were renowned for the purity of their Greek eloquence. Writers such as Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom have left behind a memorial of work that reaches to the standards of the greatest of all Greek rhetoric. Gregory, for example, has been favorably compared to Demosthenes himself. John gained his epithet “Golden Mouth” because of the limpid quality of his Greek, but he was a Syrian by birth. This outpost, at Antioch, of pure Greek culture on the banks of the Orontes was a bubble that broke before the advance of Islam; and from the 7th century the flourishing of Christianity in the Antiochene patriarchate gave way to a long and slow twilight, with the monasteries holding on the longest, often in inaccessible valleys and rock outcrops: an unknown treasure of the Christian world still, barely, surviving to this day. As the patriarchate of Constantinople flourished and grew in stature in the ambit of the Byzantine Empire, so did Antioch, almost by antithesis, decline in prestige and influence.
The first major land mass to go from Antioch’s ecclesiastical territories of supervision was Asia Minor, which was assigned to the purview of the rising capital of Constantinople in the early 5th century. Then the Church of Cyprus successfully asserted its independence from Antioch between 431 and 488, using the cause of the christological tensions between Alexandria and Antioch to press its claims on the wider Christian churches. The vast territory of Persia asserted its independence in 424, after which point it refused its assent to the Council of Ephesus of 431 and fell away from communion with the Byzantine Orthodox. The theological divisions, represented in the Syrian territories first by pro-Nestorian theologians, then by (diametrically opposed) radical Cyrilline theologians, not only weakened Syrian Christianity by cutting it off from the Byzantine world, but heavily disrupted it internally, even to the extent of dividing the Syrian language itself (always a predominantly Christian affair) into two distinct groups of Serta and Estrangela. The continuing energy of the Persian anti-Cyrilline communities for many centuries afterwards drew away the allegiance of many Assyrian Christians from the patriarchate of Antioch. The continuing prevalence of the Miaphysite resistance to the Council of
Chalcedon after the 6th century also drew away many other Syrians from the communion of the patriarch. Jerusalem became a separate patriarchate in 451 and took with it, out of the purview of Christian Antioch, the territory of Palestine. In later times the scattered state of the Syrian Christian communities and their appalling vulnerability to the forces of an increasingly hostile Islamic majority led to large numbers of the Syrian Christian communities fleeing for protection to the arms of a strong and missionary active Rome. Between 1600 and 1720 six patriarchs of Antioch made professions of allegiance to the pope. The result is that there are now large communities of Syrian Eastern Catholics. At the beginning of the 20th century there were no fewer than seven distinct Eastern Catholic communities in the Syrian Church, all representing another historic fragmentation of the ancient patriarchate of Antioch, and seven senior hierarchs, all claiming the right to be, and be designated as, the Antiochene patriarch. The Orthodox patriarch chose to reside at Damascus, the newer capital, the Latin patriarch of Antioch used to reside at Rome, the anti- Chalcedonian patriarch at Mardin, and in addition there were the four Eastern Catholic Syrian communities: those of the Greek Melkites, the Armenians at Antioch, the Maronites, and the Syrians. The Latin patriarch was created and installed as the incumbent hierarch by the Crusaders in 1098, and the office lasted at Rome until the mid-20th century although it had become merely an honorific title from the 14th century onwards. The various residences of the hierarchs are now more disparate. The Orthodox patriarch of Antioch has traditionally been the one ancient see among the Orthodox to have sustained the closest and oldest ecumenical ties with Rome since the era of the Great Schism, even though in recent times the patriarchate of Constantinople has had the most publicized dealings with Rome.
The Orthodox recognize only one “patriarch of Antioch,” who is in communion with the other ancient patriarchates and autocephalous churches of the Orthodox Church, and who still resides at Damascus. The ancient city of Antioch is now Antakya, a small, provincial, and overwhelmingly Islamic town. The remaining jurisdictional territory presided over by the Orthodox patriarch is Syria and the Asiatic Roman provinces of Cilicia, Mesopotamia, and Isauria. Most of his faithful today are Arabic-speaking Christians. From 1724 to 1899 the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch was always a Phanariot Greek. Since that time Arabs have generally occupied the office. Today, there are just over a million Syriac-speaking Christians in the world and half a million Arabic speakers, who belong to the Antiochene patriarchate. The Orthodox patriarch’s flock currently consists of fewer than half a million faithful, centered largely in Syria, the Lebanon, and Iraq, with the rest, a considerable diaspora, largely in America. The patriarch’s title is “His Blessedness the Patriarch of Antioch the City of God, of Cilicia, Iberia, Syria, Arabia and All the East”: in short, the Roman Imperial Province of the Oriens.
In America the hierarchs of the Antiochene patriarchate have proved to be immensely creative and open to the new situations presented by life in the New World. The Antiochene Orthodox there throughout the 20th century had a large degree of autonomy afforded to them by the patriarch and proved particularly ready to engage in evangelical mission. As well as being important pillars of support for their suffering church in the homelands, they have sponsored several highly valuable translations of the liturgical texts and prayer books in English, and in recent times have encouraged numbers of Evangelical Christians who have made their way into the Orthodox Church, both in America and England, and established them within their jurisdictional care.
SEE ALSO: Africa, Orthodoxy in; Assyrian Apostolic Church of the East; China, Autonomous Orthodox Church of
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Atiya, A. S. (1991) A History of Eastern Christianity.
Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprints.
Wallace-Hadrill, D. A. (1982) Christian Antioch: A Study of Early Christian Thought in the East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.