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Syria and the Culture of Dissidence
Syria is an excellent case in point, because the region harbored multiple latent
discontents that regularly burst forth over the centuries. The invasion of Muslim
armies was merely the latest spark to help foment rebellion, not only against
Constantinople but also against Rome. Syria’s long-standing dissident character,
embedded in its geopolitical culture, goes a long way toward explaining the
endless problems the Byzantine Empire faced in trying to defend these territories
against early Islamic conquest.
What conditioned Syria for this rebellious role? Syria is one of those great
crossroads of culture where ideology and power regularly come together in
history, conferring upon Damascus a vibrant role in the unfolding of Middle
Eastern politics. “Syria” in its time, of course, encompassed what are today the
modern states of Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, and western Iraq.
Throughout history it has contained many diverse forces that stamped it with a
distinct and fractious character. From 312 BCE it was the heart of the large
Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, successor to part of the empire of Alexander the
Great that held sway from Anatolia to India for over 250 years. But it was at
least as much part of the East as it was of the West, particularly touched by
Persia and cultures to the East. It had been the shaky outpost for the eastward
projection of Greek culture against the other powerful Semitic and Persian
cultures in the region.
The city of Edessa in northern Syria provides a particularly dramatic example
of strong local identities hostile to Western control. Edessa had been a Greek
military garrison town for the Eastern Roman Empire. But the dominant Greek
language of its rulers gradually came to be displaced by Syriac, a Semitic
language akin to Aramaic, and Syriac culture began to undermine the Hellenic
outposts. Despite its inclusion within the Eastern Christian Roman Empire,
Edessa’s sympathies often lay to the east, with Parthian/Zoroastrian Iran, rather
than with the Byzantines.
Nor can we make the case that Edessa was anti-Christian, hence anti-
Byzantine. It had actually been the first Christian state in the world under the
Abgar Dynasty, which was founded by Arab, or Nabatean, tribes in 132 BCE. It
was Christian missionaries from Edessa who carried the word of Nestorian
Christianity east into Mesopotamia and Persia, where the Nestorian Church
would establish a strong foothold. This region, then, was one of the earliest of
Christian communities, but its Syriac-speaking Nestorian Church was clearly
Eastern in a cultural sense, lying beyond the sway of the Greek-speaking parts of

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the empire. In 410 CE, the Nestorian Church made its move: it rejected any
affiliation or subordination to Western bishops. And “Western bishops” was a
reference not to Rome, but to the Byzantine authorities themselves, whom the
Nestorians very much perceived as a Western force. This Nestorian move toward
religious independence was an unmistakable political statement even if couched
in theological terms.
Not content with embracing one heretical faith, Edessa later fell under the
sway of the equally “heretical” and highly monotheistic Christian Monophysite
beliefs. This doctrine spread rapidly throughout Syria in later centuries, in spite
of fierce opposition from Constantinople that insisted on the two separate and
distinct natures of Jesus. Religious doctrine becomes a litmus test of political
loyalty. The consistently heretical character of Syrian Christianity reflected its
own fiercely independent character. As the German scholar Arthur Vööbus
points out, “The earliest extant sources of Syrian Christianity reveal a powerful
spirit of self-consciousness for independence. This desire is imprinted on every
page of the historical records.” In the writings of an early Syrian Christian leader
we find “hatred, for everything bearing a Greek or Roman label…. Autonomy is
the hallmark of the early Syrian conception of the church.” These events again
precede Islam; Islam will easily adopt the regional and anti-Western culture—
even anti-Byzantine—of so much of the Fertile Crescent.
And it wasn’t just Edessa. Look at what happened in Palmyra, another
prominent Syrian city, which actually brought the Roman Empire to its knees in
a major revolt in the mid-third century CE, before the East-West division;
Palmyra threatened to reshape the entire structure of power in the Eastern
Mediterranean. As a major commercial hub of Syria, it had long been a
crossroads of trade between Persia, India, China, and Rome. It, too, had adopted
Syriac as its language, reflecting the powerful Semitic culture of Edessa and
equally influenced by Persian culture as much as by Rome or Greece. In 269 CE,
its legendary Queen Zenobia launched a powerful military campaign against
Roman rule. And who was Zenobia? Tellingly, she was descended from nobility
in Carthage (today’s Tunisia)—another city that famously nurtured historical
hatred of its chief Mediterranean rival, Rome, which had laid waste to Carthage
several centuries earlier.
Within a few years, the forces of Palmyra had conquered a huge area: all of
Syria, Egypt, and half of Anatolia. Indeed, this “Palmyran Empire” for a few
years made up the entire eastern third of a Roman Empire that had fallen apart
into three distinct regions. Palmyra was poised to succeed the Roman Empire in
the East, an event that, if successful, would have perpetuated a Syriac-Semitic
Christian rule of the Eastern Mediterranean instead of the Byzantine Greek one.

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The beautiful Queen Zenobia was finally defeated by Roman forces, reportedly
wrapped in golden chains, and sent to Rome, where she was eventually pardoned
and became an exotic leading figure in Roman society, even after her empire had
long been crushed. But the spirit of revolt across great parts of Syria remained
strong—against Rome, and against Constantinople. The Persian Empire took
strategic advantage of this dispute within the Byzantine Empire to publicly
support the Nestorian Christians and offer them refuge in Persia. Religion was
the ideology of the period, working in support of conflicting geopolitical
interests.
Political, ideological, and theological dissidence against Rome and Greece
was thus embodied in the predisposition of Syrian religious culture toward a
more monotheistic view of Jesus—as having a single nature (either purely divine
or purely human)—and a rejection of Constantinople’s complex doctrines of the
Trinitarian three-in-one. The simplified Monophysite doctrine soon spread
across a vast area: Anatolia, Syria, the Levant, and Egypt, where it enjoyed
strong popular support and, of course, lasts to this day.
The drama of the later Monophysite heresy was no less vivid. It had its seat
in Alexandria, Egypt, another city that was one of the leading competitors for
church power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria had also thrown its
weight behind the proposition of the “one divine nature” of Christ—a simple,
direct, accessible doctrine highly popular across Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia.
Constantinople repudiated the doctrine at the first Council of Ephesus in 431 CE.
But church politics and personalities move in strange ways, and only eighteen
years later, at the second Council of Ephesus, a theological about-face took place
on political grounds, and the Monophysite doctrine was officially embraced.
With each major shift in doctrine, key church figures rose and fell, intensifying
the struggle. In the ensuing political turmoil four years later, the church reversed
itself yet again at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE and now declared the
Monophysite doctrine to be heresy again. New winners and losers emerged; key
bishops and church leaders were swept from office, affecting the power and
influence of the cities in which they were based. Nor was the story over. This
time, despite artful efforts at theological rewording to accommodate both sides,
large numbers of Monophysites flatly refused to accept Constantinople’s ruling.
In the end, they broke outright with Constantinople and reestablished their
various independent churches to be known as Oriental Orthodox, primarily in the
eastern regions of the empire.
As striking as the Council’s about-face was on the Monophysite doctrine, the
Council of Chalcedon took yet another fateful step vis-à-vis Rome: it declared
Constantinople to be the “New Rome,” equal to the old original Rome. Indeed, it

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was to be the “sole Rome” as the paltry remnants of the Roman Empire in the
West foundered before barbarian assaults. The concept of a New Rome would
never lose its powerful resonance: one thousand years later, with the fall of the
Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire itself, Moscow would arrogate to itself the
title of “Third Rome,” suggesting a further extension of the continuing legacy of
Christian authority.
These powerful figures—the pope, the Roman emperor of the East, and
sundry bishops and patriarchs with their own constituencies and interests—had
much more at stake in these fine theological debates than mere theology. The
doctrinal struggle over Jesus’s nature, for example, also lay at the very
foundation of the pope’s claim to power. If Jesus was solely Divine in nature,
then how could the pope legitimately claim to be the “vicar of Christ”? There
can be no vicar of divinity itself—whereas if Christ had a human nature as well,
a succession could appropriately follow from Peter down to the church fathers
and then to the pope as the vicar of the human Christ.
In effect, we are witnessing here a massive power struggle operating at three
different levels: first, between Rome and Constantinople over who was the real
Roman Empire and who would lead it; second, a struggle within the Eastern
Church over doctrine inside the Eastern Empire; and finally, the struggle of
heretical and rebellious Christian forces in the East entirely opposed to the
power of Constantinople’s political writ in the eastern provinces. This was the
scene onto which Islam made its appearance—into a severely riven political
region with all its various historical, cultural, and political predispositions. Islam
would only add to—and inherit—this already complex equation of power and
ideology.

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