ASIA/CHINA - In Xi'an academics and scholars turn the spotlight back on the history of the ancient Church of the East in China

by Gianni Valente

Xi'an (Agenzia Fides) - The pagoda in Daqin, although in quite a state and unusable, still stands out in the mountains of Zhouzhi county, a few dozen kilometres from Xi'an. That pagoda – say a growing number of Chinese researchers and academics – was a church, before being acquired and used by Buddhists, the oldest church now present in the People's Republic of China. Built by assimilating local architectural canons by the first Christians who arrived in the Chinese Empire along the ancient Silk Road: the monks of the ancient Syriac Church of the East, who had settled in China already in late antiquity, and who had also built their monastery next to the Christian church-pagoda.
It was precisely in the area currently included in the diocese of Zhouzhi that the ‘Nestorian Stele’ was found in 1625, today kept in the Stele Forest Museum in Xi'an: the archaeological relic/testimony which attests to the arrival of the first Christian proclamation in China by the missionary monks of the Church of the East as early as 635 AD. A copy of the Stele was placed right next to the ‘Christian Pagoda’ in Daqin. And it is striking that in recent years hundreds of vocations of Catholic priests and nuns have flourished precisely in the towns and mountain villages of the Zhouzhi diocese, places linked to the arrival and beginnings of Christianity in China.
The stele, built in 781, represents (as its heading states - the ‘Memorial of the Propagation in China of the Luminous Religion from Daqin in China’. In the Chinese language, the term Daqin originally referred only to the Roman Empire. Then the expression was used to refer precisely to the communities of the Syriac Church that had settled permanently in China.
More than a thousand years later, scholars and academics in mainland China are keeping the spotlight on those beginnings of the Christian history in China that are often forgotten, removed and unknown in the academies of the West. This was seen at the 2024 Xi'an International Jingjiao Forum on the Syriac Church of the East (Jingjiao in Chinese) held from 5 to 7 July at the Shaanxi Hotel in Xi'an.

A Conference on Christian studies

The 2024 Jingjiao Forum, titled “New Directions, New Historical Materials and New Discoveries,” was organized by the Institute of Silk Road Studies of NorthWest China University, and brought together more than 20 speakers from institutions across Continental China, Macao and Italy. Priests from various Chinese dioceses (Xi'an, Shanghai, Beijing) also took part in the conference.
Some reports took stock of the recent acquisitions of the archaeological campaigns carried out in the places where important strongholds of the Eastern Church stood on Chinese soil. Research that allows us to reconstruct the rhythms and practices of the daily life of those Christian communities gathered around the monasteries. The discovery in the sites of objects belonging to different eras - underlined Liu Wensuo of the Sun Yatsen University in his report dedicated to the excavations in the archaeological site of Turfan - attests that the presence of seats and communities of the ancient Eastern Church in China has continued for hundreds of years.
Other contributions of a historical, historiographical and theological-doctrinal nature have offered valuable data and insights to grasp the scope of that experience and the ways in which the fruitful encounter between that Christianity and China took place during the Tang (618-907 A.D.) and Yuan (1272-1368 A.D.) dynasties.

The monks of the Church of the East, who arrived from Persia along the Silk Road - underlined Professor Roberto Catalano, of the Sophia University Institute in Loppiano (Italy), “were few in number, they did not follow a political agenda or a ‘project’ to convert the Chinese Empire. Especially at the beginning, they practiced an ‘itinerant’ style of proclamation similar to that of the first Apostles, presenting Christianity not as a ‘religion to be imposed’ but as a ‘humble proposal’, a gift to be offered in a plural and interreligious context. Their presence did not pose as an ‘antagonistic’ force with respect to the social and political order: they asked for and awaited the consent of the emperor, whose portrait was displayed in the churches to show everyone that they had received imperial authorization.

Upon their arrival in China, in their work of explaining faith in Christ to other peoples, the monks assimilated terms taken from Buddhism, Taoism and classical Chinese sources. In this way - remarked Father Andrea Toniolo, Dean of the Triveneto Theological Faculty, in his speech, they attempted “a theological synthesis in Chinese with language that was culturally different from that of Semitic or Roman Greek origin”. Along these lines - confirmed Professor Liu Guopeng, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences - a certain integration between the Christian faith and the language of Taoist thought was achieved in the field. Even the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus - Ding Ruizhong of the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences documented in his speech - was proposed in forms and accents familiar to the ancestral traditions of Chinese culture.

The adventure of the ancient Church of the East in China, recounted in the Xi'an stele, was well known to the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Dias and his Italian confreres Giulio Aleni and Martino Martini, who in the 17th century sought new ways to proclaim the Gospel in Chinese society and culture. The speakers Teresa Hou Xin (Zhejiang Wanli University) and Yang Hongfan (Fujian Normal University) documented how the story of the Church of the East on Chinese soil has remained a point of reference, a historical experience perceived as a ‘divine miracle’ to be reconnected to for every authentic ‘new beginning’ of Christianity in Middle-Earth.
Even an authoritative group of Chinese scholars and academics have valorized the missionary adventure of Jingjiao as a historical experience in which the Christian communities, bearers of a message of salvation that came from the Middle East, in the land of Confucius were no longer perceived as expressions of a ‘foreign religion’. A recognition - Professor Yin Xiaoping of the South China Agricultural University made clear in her report - in which the scholars and researchers of Lingnan University in particular have deservedly distinguished themselves, diligent in attesting that those communities had travelled fruitful paths of adaptation to the Chinese context.
Instead, the reading applied to Jingjiao by historiography and journalism outside China has appeared ambivalent on several occasions. Starting in the mid-19th century - as Paolo De Giovanni, lecturer at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, reported in his speech - Western academic circles even questioned the authenticity and very existence of the Xi'an Stele. There was distrust for that historical find that shattered "the myth of a refractory and closed China", since it attested to the work of Chinese emperors who had become protectors of Christians. In the reinterpretations prevailing in missionary circles, especially evangelical and Protestant ones, the subsequent disappearance of that network of monasteries and episcopal seats was branded as a historical failure, and the whole long history of the Church of the East in China was traced back to the sole figure of that failure, attributed by those circles precisely to the excessive mimetic attitude of that Church, which appeared to modern western missionaries hesitant in proposing its own ‘identity’ to the point of not differentiating itself from the followers of Buddhism or Taoism. Only a few Oriental scholars offered even in those years a different and innovative point of view on the missionary adventure of the ancient Church of the East: the Japanese Yoshiro Seki, in his book The Nestorian Monument in China, described that presence of bishops, monks and baptized people that lasted for centuries in the territories of Persia, Mongolia and China as a ‘Christian civilisation’ in some ways similar to the one that was taking shape in Europe in those same centuries.

The ‘disappeared’ Church of the East and ‘Sinicization’

The Xi'an Conference concluded by confirming the opportunity to deepen studies and cultural exchanges around the historical vicissitude of the Church of the East in China. Chinese academics explicitly manifested the intention to study and enhance that encounter between Christianity and Chinese civilization that took place long before the beginning of Western modernity.
In that encounter, a community bearing the Christian message arrived in China not to impose itself as an ‘imported product’. Through long and patient processes, the Christian experience was able to flourish by adapting to the cultural and socio-political context of China's Tang and Yuan imperial dynasties.
Today, the interest of Chinese scholars and academics in the vicissitudes of the Church of the East in China could also offer interesting insights into the theme of the so-called ‘sinicization’ that the Chinese apparatuses demand from communities of believers. A comparison with the real dynamics of historical processes can always help to clear the field of misunderstandings, rigorisms, mechanisms and ideological misrepresentation. (Agenzia Fides, 17/7/2024)

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mission

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monasticism

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inculturation

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