he travelled about his Patriarchate, put down abuses, notably that of incest, which the Christians had begun to copy from Mazdæans, and held reforming Synods. But for his doubtful attitude about the heresy, he was in every way an excellent prelate. During his reign there was another persecution, result of a war against the empire in 540–545, but less fierce than that of Shapur II. Mârabâ himself was arrested, imprisoned a long time, and finally died of the treatment he had received (552). Labourt describes him as a "glorious confessor of the Faith, the light of the Persian Church, to which he left the double treasure of blameless doctrine and a model life."[1]
In order to finish this account of the introduction of Nestorianism in Persia let us go at once to the 7th century. It was the time when Islam overturned the old Persian kingdom, when also Persian Christianity definitely received the form it has kept down to our own time. Mâr Babai, called the Great, was abbot of the monastery of Izla (569–628) . During one of the constant vacancies of the Patriarchate especially, he had enormous influence, most of all in the North. Already the Persian Church had long been troubled by various heresies (p. 89); the condemnation of the Three Chapters in the empire (202) was to Persians an unpardonable attack on their heroes, Theodore and Ibas. Babai was a theologian and a writer. Against Monophysites and other heretics he wrote treatises which his countrymen have accepted ever since as representing faithfully their doctrine. His Book of the Union (namely, the union of Godhead and manhood in Christ)[2] represents the teaching of this Church as it was fixed finally in the early 7th century, as it is still. It is Nestorian. Babai admits a certain communicatio idiomatum,[3] but only because of the "prosopon of union." He will not admit one united (συνθετός) hypostasis. The hypostasis of the Logos cannot assume another
- ↑ Le Christianisme dans l'empire perse, p. 191. For Mârabâ's life and reign, see ib. 163–191.
- ↑ It will be published in Chabot's Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium. Meanwhile it is resumed in Labourt: op. cit. 280–287.
- ↑ The communicatio idiomatum, admitted by the Catholic Church, means ascribing to the one person, Christ our Lord, the properties of both natures, as when we say that God the Son was born of Mary, died on the cross, the immortal became mortal, a man is Almighty God, and so on. To deny such language was always, obviously, a test of Nestorianism.
