Aged 81, Fr. Gianmaria Gianazza is about to complete the critical edition of the Book of the Tower, a huge ecumenical encyclopedia of the Church of the East which was written in Arabic at the beginning of the eleventh century
Last update: 2024-08-21 11:01:31
Interview by Martino Diez
June 17, 2024
Born in Cerro Maggiore (near Milan) in 1943, Gianmaria Gianazza has devoted numerous studies and editions of texts to the Church of the East, i.e., the branch of Christianity that, from the earliest centuries, developed outside the Roman empire, in Mesopotamia and Persia, before separating from the rest of Christianity in the fifth century. The complex crisis opened in 428 with the decision of Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople to refuse Mary the title of “Mother of God”. In the heated debates that ensued, the school of Antioch, which was the theological reference for the Church of the East, pronounced itself in favor of the formula of “two natures, two persons, and one individual” in Jesus Christ. For this reason, its followers were called “Nestorians”, although this designation does not reflect the school’s theological position in its original formulations.
Today partly united with Rome (Chaldean Church) and partly autocephalous (Assyrian Church of the East and Ancient Church of the East), the Church of the East was in the Middle Ages at the vanguard of mission, reaching as far as India and China. After the Islamic conquest it gradually adopted the Arabic language and many of its members played important roles as cultural mediators. For example, Catholicos Timothy I translated Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac to Arabic for the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdī (d. 775) and was perhaps involved in one of the earliest Islamic-Christian debates, with the caliph himself; the celebrated Hunayn Ibn Ishāq (d. 873), the greatest medieval translator from Greek and Syriac into Arabic, also belonged to its ranks. After the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, the Church of the East retreated to Upper Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia. During World War I it fell victim of the genocidal policies of the Young Turk regime, along with the Armenians and the Western Syriacs; the tragic events in Iraq from the advent of Saddam Hussein onward have further impacted it.
***
Over the last ten years you have been publishing Christian Arabic texts, both critical editions and translations, at an impressive rate. Where does this interest come from? Is it a conversion that took place at an advanced age or is it a passion that has accompanied you throughout your life?
It is a quest that comes from afar. I arrived in Lebanon very young, aged 17, as a Salesian, and a few years later I graduated from Saint-Joseph University in Beirut. Then in 1974 I started my doctorate with the famous French Dominican Maurice Fiey, the great scholar of Mosul and Syriac Christianity. He had just been expelled from Iraq: after so many years in Mosul he had applied for an Iraqi passport, but the authorities, in response, kicked him out of the country, giving him 24 hours to leave.
When I began my doctorate, I spent the first six months looking for a dissertation project and eventually I chose to edit a theological treatise of the Church of the East, the Kitāb Usūl al-Dīn, “Book of the Foundations of Religion” by Patriarch Elijah II. Then life took me elsewhere: as a Salesian I directed several schools, mainly technical institutes, in the Holy Land; I was also responsible for the Salesian Province of the Middle East, which at the time included six nations, Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. I discussed my doctorate in 1984, but amid all my occupations, I always harbored an interest in Christian Arabic literature. So, when my educational and administrative duties came to an end, I devoted myself to it body and soul.
First of all, in 2005 I published the Kitāb Usūl al-Dīn, my doctoral dissertation, within the series of the CEDRAC, the Christian Arabic Documentation Center founded by Father Samir in Beirut. Then, I chose to devote myself to the two most important encyclopedias produced in the Church of the East, with a few diversions into other authors such as Elijah of Nisibi (d. 1046) and Ebedjesu (d. 1328), all of them Eastern-Syriac. The first encyclopedia I dealt with was the Kitāb Afsār al-asrār, “The Book of Mysteries”, by Salībā ibn Yūhannā al-Mawsilī, a fourteenth-century priest from Mosul. By 2010, I had already finished preparing the Arabic text—it consists of more than 2,500 pages— although it has not yet been fully printed in the CEDRAC series: the first volume came out in 2018, the second in 2019, the third a few months ago, two more are still to be printed. In the meantime, however, I have already published its complete Italian translation, in 2017, in the Christian Arabic Cultural Heritage (PCAC) series directed by Fr. Davide Righi of Bologna: it covers 982 pages.
What is the significance of this work?
Since it is an encyclopedic text, it contains many excerpts from earlier authors, but above all a history of the Patriarchs of the East, which is essential to the knowledge of the history of the so-called “Nestorian” church. However, it must also be added that Salībā ibn Yuhannā is rather polemical toward the other Christian denominations. Writing around 1332, a time when the Church of the East had already fallen into crisis, he insists on the fact that the authentic faith is to be found in the East and that the Church of the East is the only one that has faithfully preserved the message of the Gospel; the author emphasizes that his is the only church that has never benefitted from the support of political power, defends its Christology, and declares it superior to that of the “Melkites” and “Jacobites”, although he is sufficiently even-handed to present these competing theologies through the words of their authors. In short, this is a very important text, but my preference goes rather to the second encyclopedia I am working on, The Book of the Tower.
Why?
Because it is a book which is really addressed to all Christians. We could say, if we did not fear anachronism, that it is an ecumenical encyclopedia, which aims to present the beauty of the Christian faith in the Arabic language, always emphasizing what unites more than what divides. It is for this reason that the work became popular among all Arabic-speaking Christians, even in the other churches. In Egypt, for example, the Coptic theologian Ibn Kabar (d. 1324) mentions it in his catalog of Christian books that were available in Arabic. The most remarkable aspect for me is that the Book of the Tower is written in sajʿ, that is, in rhymed prose. Unlike other Christian Arabic works, the author pays much attention to form; he wants the beauty of the content to also translate into a beautiful style, of course according to the cultural standards of his time.
What does the tower in the title stand for?
It’s an image. The various themes are presented as the parts of a tower: the building, the pillars, the candelabra that illuminate it from inside, the columns, the streams that supply it with water, the enclosed garden that lies inside it... There is a deliberate numerical symbolism, in keeping with the biblical tradition: one, three, four, and seven are the figures that recur most frequently in the numbering of the chapters along the seven sections. The book begins with the exposition of the Christian faith, in a single chapter, perhaps to indicate its uniqueness. Then it is the turn of the demonstrations, in three chapters, which form the building proper: on the Unity of God, the Incarnation, and the Trinity. They are followed by the exposition of the pillars (Baptism and the Eucharist, the importance of the Gospel, and the cross), and the candelabra, which correspond to the seven virtues: piety, charity, prayer, fasting, mercy, humility, and purity. The pillars are seven in number: creation, judgment, prophecies, the coming of the Messiah, the laws and canons of the Apostles (followed by the history of the Patriarchs of the Church of the East, to indicate that the rules issued by some of its Patriarchs are in line with the Apostolic canons), the councils, which for the Church of the East are only those of Nicaea and Constantinople, and the canon of the books of the Old and New Testament. The four streams that bring water to the tower are what we would today call spirituality: the sanctification of Sunday, the cord, the incense lamps, and penance. And finally, the reader is introduced in the four gardens, that is the abolition of the Mosaic law on circumcision, the Sabbath, and the interdiction of certain meats, followed, as is often the case in works of that time, by a rebuke of the Jews. The Summa as a whole is gigantic, and most manuscripts preserve only parts of it. For my edition I collected fifteen witnesses, but only three are complete. The Paris manuscript, which is the most important, consists of 538 folios, that is more than 1,000 pages. Unfortunately, some of the manuscripts described in the older catalogs were destroyed, particularly during the genocide perpetrated by the Young Turks during World War I.
Anyway, by now I am almost at the end of my work, I am missing just 5% of the Arabic, two weeks and I will be done! Within a year I should also be able to complete the Italian translation, of which five volumes have already been published, again in the Christian Arabic Cultural Heritage series, the last one just in these days. I chose to translate into Italian and not English to proceed more speedily and see the end of my work. For me it is a great joy; I also live it as a service to the Church.
What is known about the author of the Book of the Tower? There seems to be some confusion about his identity.
Yes, it all started with an oversight by the great Joseph Simon Assemani, the Maronite bishop who in the eighteenth century, working at the Vatican Apostolic Library, gave an extraordinary impetus to Syriac and Christian Arabic studies in Europe. Assemani described three manuscripts of Eastern provenance which he had brought to Rome. They corresponded to numbers 25, 41, and 109 in the Vatican Library’s Christian Arabic collection—today they are numbered 108, 110, and 109, respectively. In doing so, however, he made two mistakes. First, in summarizing the contents of manuscript 41 in the second volume of his Bibliotheca orientalis, he identified it with the Book of the Tower and attributed it to ʿAmr Ibn Mattā al-Tirhānī, while in fact it preserves Salībā’s Book of the Mysteries. Later on, in the third volume of his Bibliotheca orientalis, he attributed the Book of the Tower to Mārī ibn Sulaymān, who lived in the twelfth century, adding that ʿAmr ibn Mattā al-Tirhānī had subsequently made a summary of it, contained in the Vatican manuscript 41. In short, quite a confusion, which was first clarified by Bénédicte Landron in her 1978 thesis.
Today we know for certain, because various manuscripts tell us so, that the author of the Book of the Tower is ʿAmr ibn Mattā al-Tirhānī. The last part of his name informs us that he was a native of the region of Tirhān, that is, the part of Mesopotamia around Tikrit, in present-day Iraq. Nothing we know about him, except that some internal references allow us to date his work to the late tenth century or early eleventh. In fact, ʿAmr states that the Christian faith has been widespread among the nations for about a thousand years, and he counts around 1,000 years since the dispersion of the Jews. Moreover, the author states that Christians since the Diaspora have been inhabiting Palestine without resorting to violence, a detail that suggests a period before the Crusades. Finally, he mentions some authors by referring to them simply as “our contemporaries”. I have personally identified one of these anonymous contemporaries; he is the philosopher Yahyā ibn ʿAdī, and this takes us back to the tenth century, since Yahyā died in 974. All this is sufficient to rule out the attribution of the Book of the Tower made by Assemani—and other authors who followed him, such as Graf—to Mārī ibn Sulaymān.
We are then around the year 1000. It strikes me that the same spirit of openness can be found in another treatise by a mysterious author, The Book of the Unanimity of the Faith of Christians published by Gérard Troupeau in 1969 and probably belonging to the same period.
Yes, absolutely. Again, the author is mysterious, the most likely attribution being the one proposed by Troupeau on the basis of some manuscripts which ascribed the work to a certain ʿAlī ibn Dāwūd al-Arfādī. Again, the only certain thing we can say about the author is that he was from northern Syria, based on his name. And exactly like The Book of the Tower, this work manifests an obvious ecumenical concern. This seems important to me because it shows us that ecumenism is not a modern invention. There have always been Christians who have questioned the existing divisions and tried to overcome them, especially when confronted with the challenge posed by another religion, in this case Islam.
Returning to ʿAmr ibn Mattā what else can we say about him?
In the introduction that precedes the first section of his work, the author offers, perhaps in stereotypical form, some details about his person: having “passed the bloom of life” and moved by the thought of death, he gave himself to repentance. Wishing to draw closer to God, he turned to the pursuit of science and good deeds. He then decided, despite his inability and inadequacy, to “compose a book”, titling it The Book of the Tower (Kitāb al-Miǧdal) in thirty chapters combined into seven sections. After asking the reader’s indulgence, the author clarifies the limits of his work, declaring himself a mere compiler and concludes by invoking God’s help. Indeed, this “compiler” must have been a sheer genius. In his lifetime he had cultivated completely different subjects, perhaps science because The Book of the Tower contains a very elaborate section on the systems of time computation and the various calendars that were in use in the Middle East. Then, as mentioned, the approach of death prompted him to take a more pronounced interest in religion.
In Lebanon and the Holy Land, where you lived, there are virtually no faithful of the Church of the East. Didn’t your work risk being purely bookish?
Yes, but to avoid that peril, since 1996 I started a pastoral experience in Baghdad and Mosul with my brother Pier Giorgio, also a Salesian. We used to work with Fr. Louis Sako, who became Bishop of Kirkuk in 2003 and has been Patriarch of the Chaldeans since 2013. Every morning and every afternoon, 300 to 400 boys and young people would gather with us: Chaldeans, Syriacs, Armenians; we had also bought a house in Baghdad in the Christian quarter, jokingly called “the Vatican of Baghdad” where there were several religious houses, in addition to the seminary. Unfortunately, in 2003 there was the American invasion, and we had to abandon that experience. In recent years, the Church of the East has suffered a great deal: it has been attacked directly by ISIS, and even lately Patriarch Sako was forced to repair to Kurdistan because of a clash with a leader of a pro-Iranian Christian militia, a self-proclaimed “defender” of church properties and Christians.
In the face of this tragic situation, what is the value of a work such as the one whose edition you are about to conclude?
The Book of the Tower speaks to all Christian Arabs. For me, as I said, the stylistic aspect is very important. As a young man I studied the poems of al-Mutanabbī.
Another common interest...
Yes, I had also prepared an essay on his life, based on his dīwān, with excerpts from his poems rendered in loose hendecasyllables, to which I appended a hendecasyllabic translation of eleven odes. All this has remained unpublished. However, even though I did not continue my literary studies, I was left with a taste for the Arabic language. Another remarkable aspect in The Book of the Tower is how it speaks to non-Christians. For example, a Turkish scholar, Ayşe İçöz, currently research assistant at Marmara University, devoted her doctorate to discussing the ethical doctrines contained in the candelabra section of The Book of the Tower and showed how its terminology is deeply influenced by the Islamic context. These semantic analyses seem very promising to me, although personally I would have insisted more on the weight of the Syriac tradition. At any rate, for me the first step is always the critical edition. In this I am following in the footsteps of Father Samir, whom I consider as one of my masters. Establishing a reliable text, which reflects the author’s intended articulation of themes, and dissolving the ambiguities of the Arabic script through a complete vocalization, is for me preliminary to any other discourse. Incidentally, in the case of the Book of the Tower this is not a piece of cake because the main witness, the Paris manuscript, is almost devoid of diacritical points, so that many words can be read in very different ways. In this sense, I hope to have offered a solid basis for the study of the Church of the East in its relation to the Arab-Islamic context.