1 East and West
A Connected History of Eastern Christianity
In: Arabic Christianity between the Ottoman Levant and Eastern EuropeSearch for other papers by Bernard Heyberger in
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Abstract
“East” vs. “West,” “Orthodox” vs. “Catholic”: this article does not aim to define borders and identities. It approaches the issue of contacts and influence by examining the context and by scrutinizing the entanglement of actors at different levels during a precise and brief episode of the history of the Church of Antioch. At the onset of the 17th century, Rome played a central role in the production of scholarship on the Christian East. It did not only concentrate a big part of the sources and specialists of Eastern Christianity. It also published books in Eastern languages and trained many future leaders of the Eastern Churches, even future adversaries of Catholicism. It is in this context that Meletios Karma, the archbishop of Aleppo, came in contact with the head of the Roman Church, through Latin missionaries. His ideas on printing and clergy education perfectly matched the concerns and agenda of the Catholic Church in that moment. Yet, they also overlapped those of certain hierarchs in the Greek Orthodox Church. On the other hand, as opposed to the Patriarch of Antioch, supported by the anti-Latin ecumenical patriarch Cyril Lukaris, Karma belonged at the same time to the pro-Latin local network. By crossing information and establishing a precise chronology of the events, we can reveal the location of a single actor in different networks and his logic of action on a local and more global level. At the beginning of the 17th century, “Orthodoxy” did not have the same meaning as a century later, when the Orthodox consciousness became deeper in the Church of Antioch.