The Role of Central Asian Peoples in the Spread of World Religions
By Richard C. Foltz
Interactions: Regional Studies, Global Processes, and Historical Analysis (Conference: February 28 through March 3, 2001, at Library of Congress, Washington D.C.)
Introduction: For over a thousand years, up through the tenth century of the Common Era, the prime actors in the transmission of the world’s major religions from West to East were the people of Transoxiana, roughly modern Uzbekistan. Situated halfway between the Mediterranean and Chinese centers of civilization, the natives of this region, Iranian-speakers known as Sogdians, were ideally situated to be middlemen. Sogdian merchants were for centuries among the most successful in Asia, and their trading activities formed the major link connecting East and West.
The Sogdians were purveyors not only of goods, but of culture in general, borrowing ideas and traditions from one civilization and transmitting them to another. Buddhism took hold early on amongst the Bactrians, another Iranian people living to the northwest of India. Sogdians living or trading in Bactria adopted Buddhism and carried its teachings throughout their trading colonies all along the Silk Route as far as China. Later Sogdians became enthusiastic converts to Manichaeism or Nestorian Christianity, and became the representatives of these faiths within their string of communities across the Asian interior.
With their international connections Sogdians knew foreign languages, and many were literate. They were often engaged as interpreters and translators. It was Sogdian scribes who translated most of the religious texts of Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity into the various languages of the Silk Route, from Prakrit, Aramaic, or Parthian into Bactrian, Tokharian, Khotanese, Turkish or Chinese, either via Sogdian or directly. As Central Asia became Islamicized beginning in the eighth century, the Sogdians gradually adopted the Persian language and Iranian Islam. Within two centuries Transoxiana indeed became the center of the Persian cultural world under the Samanid dynasty. Rudaki, Farabi, Khwarazmi, and Avicenna are just a few of the Central Asians who stand out in medieval Islam.
This paper will discuss how and why the Iranian-speaking peoples of Central Asia played such a major role in the transmission of religions from the Near East to the Far East throughout the first millennium of the Common Era.
Archeological evidence suggests that urban-based political structures in the Oxus region began to develop from the early part of the first millennium BCE. To the north, within the vast swath of steppelands reaching across the Asian continent from above the Black Sea all the way to the frontiers of China, the culture was mainly nomadic or semi-nomadic. As urbanization developed, the pastoral peoples of the Eurasian steppe entered into a long, rocky partnership with settled civilization which lasted for well over two thousand five hundred years, a symbiotic relationship often characterized as “the steppe and the sown”. According to this model, Central Asian history is defined largely by the dynamics of nomadic-sedentary relations, often hostile, even violent, but always mutually interdependent.
In most cases the dominant peoples of the Eurasian steppe have belonged to either the Iranian or Turkic language families. Although the Iranian tongues, being Indo-European, are distinct from the Altaic Turkic dialects, the speakers themselves have often been less easy to distinguish, since their shared history has provided them with many shared traits, ideas, and ways of life. This includes the Iranian and Turkic languages themselves, as can be seen in the bilingualism which remains in some parts of Central Asia to this day.
Introduction: Gregory the Great has loomed large over the study of early medieval England, especially the so-called ‘Age of the Bede’ where, amongst other things, the earliest known uita of the pope was authored, and the figure of Bede himself may hold claim to the title of his most fervent disciple. M.L.W. Laistner, in his 1935 inventory of Bede’s library, implied as much when he spoke of Bede’s ‘constant indebtedness to the pope’s writings’. Nearly thirty years later, Paul Meyvaert deemed the point self-evident when he devoted the entirety of his 1964 Jarrow Lecture to the subject of Bede and Gregory. Meyvaert’s inquiry remains the most thorough probing to date of the nature of Bede’s indebtedness to Gregory, making it a requisite starting point for further exploration of the topic. Much of his lecture focused on Bede’s use of the Liber pontificalis and the Libellus responsionum in crafting his account of the Gregorian mission, a topic I shall bypass in what follows. My interests lie rather in a set of questions Meyvaert addressed near the end of his lecture, having to do with the nature of Bede’s debt to Gregory ‘where his exegetical and theological opinions are concerned’. As far as I know, Meyvaert was the first to raise this issue seriously but was himself unable to resolve it, being hampered, as he lamented, by the lack at that time of ‘fully annotated editions of Bede’s works, especially of the Scriptural commentaries, listing all the known sources from which he borrowed, and therefore showing us in what sections Bede is most at his own’. Yet the want of proper resources did not stop him from wondering whether Gregory had influenced Bede ‘on some kind of “deeper level”‘ and, more boldly, from postulating that ‘[s]ome kind of spiritual affinity, not easily discernible, links them together in a subtle way’.
These are shrewd insights, and they are not easily improved upon even with the proper resources to hand. Nevertheless, having the critical editions of Bede’s exegetical works that Meyvaert longed for, we are better positioned to undertake a more searching examination of the impact of Gregory’s writings on them. The pages that follow attempt to take some additional steps towards assessing that impact. If Meyvaert was correct to observe that ‘from the beginning of his literary career the Jarrow monk was already well familiar with the pope’s works and was reading them with an attention to style as well as content’, then it remains a task for present and future scholarship to keep deepening our knowledge of Bede’s Gregorian inheritance. The conclusions offered here, it is hoped, will stimulate others to refine and build upon them. I shall first address the issue of determining how much and in what manner Bede’s commentaries borrow from the writings of Gregory, before turning in the second half of this article to a discussion of the long-term effects of this reliance, especially in terms of Meyvaert’s suggestive postulation of a ’spiritual affinity’.
Introduction: In his 1224 statutes for Winchester diocese, Bishop Peter des Roches set out arrangements for maintaining the parish churches. These statutes required that
Introduction: For anyone familiar with the once traditional characterisation of Archbishop Lanfranc (1070–89) as the arch-critic of English saints’ cults, one of the most intriguing features of his monastic statutes is the role played by the natal feast of St Gregory the Great – the anniversary of his death and rebirth in heaven on 12 March 604.
