Since I owe Hijja an apology,I had better rmake it in public

[fpb]

I charged Hijja with saying that the Catholic Church began in 1521 - that is, with the Lutheran schism; implying that the entity that existed before then was different in essence from the one that exists now. I have now looked it up and realized that she did not in fact say that. Mind you, what she said - that the Church before Luther was "the universal Church," meaning undivided - is pretty nearly as wrong. Three great schisms had sliced the East away from her: the Nestorian schism, which lost Persia and missionary areas as far as China and possibly even Japan; the Monophysite, which lost Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Armenia and a missionary field reaching to India; and the Orthodox, which drove her out of the Greek and Russian lands, much of Eastern Europe, and most of the surviving Catholic communities in the Muslim East. For a long time it cannot even be said that the Catholic Church was necessarily the largest Christian Church. But at least it is not quite as bad as to imagine that the distinctive Catholic identity only began with Luther.

I would still like to see KH writing a love story, however.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Being based in Persia, and later in Baghdad, the Nestorians had roads open to them that the Catholic Church (which then included the future Orthodox areas) did not. Contact between Persia and China was constant and regular, to the extent that Zoroastrian mobeds had temples in China from the seventh century on - barely a century or two after the Todas brought in Buddhism. (Kind of makes you wonder what would have happened if the Todas had not conquered the North.) In point of fact, I seem to remember that the Nestorian entity was protected, by both Zoroastrian Shahs and Muslim Caliphs, exactly in an anti-Catholic - that is, anti-Roman - role.