Maronite History is weaved with questions. None of them is answered here. But
certain ones are exposed herein.
The questions, which are asked in this Collection and that touch Maronite
History, come from contemporary historical documents. Those documents are not,
with a few rare exceptions, monuments of science. But they are, on the whole,
works of conscience.
The questions raised by the historical science about Maronites will be treated
in a future bibliographic supplement, to the measure of the Collection
introduced today. In a section entitled " Actual Researches ", we will
approach, God willing, the contemporaries, systematically ignored in the present
set of ancient texts, in principle prior to the First World War. We will then
try to clarify the problems, which they raise in matters of history, as well as
of law, of liturgy or of musicology.
This bibliographic supplement will besides have to fill one of the big
gaps that mar this Collection in spite of its comparatively important size. It
will have to introduce the maronite men and women who left written works since
the early Middle Ages. With a few notable exceptions, they are ignored here to
the benefit of those who made the Church and the Maronite people other than by
writing.
A volume of addenda and corrigenda will double the same supplement. For the
addenda, the author is already spoilt for choice. But when he will have gathered
from his readers and correspondents all critical comments, he will keep what
will be considered by him to be kept and, God willing, he will make the
necessary clarifications
(1). May these very
expected contributors of Antiochian Pentalogy / Maronite Domain in its future
complements, be thanked in advance. All will have understood from the starting
point the purpose of this Collection conceived by its author in the liberty,
which goes with any work that is not commissioned by a publisher, but is the fruit
of a personal initiative and researches. Also they will accept that he did not
wait to deliver its results that he meets the requests of some and answers
the objections of others, which however he does not disregard.
This Collection refrains from being an Encyclopedia. It comes as an anthology
with freely chosen acts classified in five sections, hence its title of
Pentalogy
*. It follows another collection of the
same profile, the Islamic-Christian Pentalogy and offers to contribute, at a time
when they are severely tested, to found the conscience, which Maronites made for
themselves, and to strengthen the vocation that they recognized for themselves
in the Church and in the world since the Modern Times. It is then, in effect,
that Maronites were concerned to revive, to collect and to explain their legacy
since its origins, in the light of the methods and with the help of the tools,
which they had acquired in Europe.
I am part of the last generation of Maronites who acquired their basic
instruction in the East, but completed it in Europe and settled there. I tried
to echo back as faithfully as possible, not to science, but to the conscience
that my precursors made for themselves between Rome and Paris, on three points
of the highest importance. They did not make it, whatever they say about it, at
the service of the Papacy or of France, no more than that of science. But with
the help of the most enlightened Catholics of France and of Europe, those
well-read Maronites applied themselves with an obstinacy, which often made them
unbearable except for those who had understood the considerable stake, over the
three following designs:
1. Defend the integrity, the Catholicity and the unity of the Church of Antioch
and of the entire East;
2. Promote the liberty of the people of the East by giving it an impregnable
refuge in Lebanon;
3. Make illustrious, against any partisan, ideological or linguistic
apprehension, the common legacy of the civilization that flourished around the
Mediterranean Basin.
Such is therefore the triple purpose, ecumenical, political and cultural, of the
Antiochian Pentalogy / Maronite Domain, corresponding to the triple purpose of
the maronite intelligentsia since the XVth century. I am going to explain it
further in this introduction. The reader will want to agree meanwhile to the
particular motivations of this Collection in the times of misfortune that we
live
(2).
Particular Motivations
It is from my nephews and nieces of the Lebanese Diaspora that the idea of this
new Pentalogy came to me. Even those of them who were born in Lebanon became in
America and in Australia strangers to their uncle, as to their grandmother. I
did not want to upset their natural evolution, nor to prevent them from becoming
what they have to be where they are now established, with or without hope of
return, that is to say full citizens and Christians entirely engaged in the
Church of their country of adoption, and not assumed Lebanese or second-rate
Maronites. In the sense of a natural and necessary evolution, because opposed to
the double loyalty of the Zionist type, I thought I should help my family to
qualify for a better service of the countries and the Churches, which are now
theirs. I thought, by giving them an expression of their legacy likely to be
assimilated by those who acquired a university training, that this political,
cultural and ecclesiastical legacy of their forefathers, could, if they want to,
promote their participation in the political, cultural and ecclesiastical future
which is theirs now. Also it was obvious that this participation could aspire to
a double result and that far from alienating the persons concerned in regard to
their origins or put them in the uncomfortableness of the double loyalty, it was
able to establish between their origins and their future a communication of
creative crossbreeding.
Such was my purpose, when the War of Lebanon got the dimensions of the
disaster we know and that I saw in the media the participation of the
Maronites in this War generating the most unreliable views on our history, when
those views were not apparently inspired by contempt and slander. It is then
that a new purpose of the Pentalogy overtook the previous one and somehow outdistanced it
. Is it necessary to regret it? I can only record the fact and confess
that the elaboration of my Collection for the Diaspora took then a more definite
turn according to the War. It was necessary not to reply to the slanderers, but
to demonstrate the tradition of the resistance in solidarity. It was necessary,
faced with reducing and leveling proposals of cheap harmony, to insist on a
value encounter and a personalizing union of the " right to the difference
". It was necessary, above all, to demonstrate that the passionate research
of the maronite identity had always succeeded only in meeting and recognizing
the other, and that when the Maronites would lose their role of mediation
between religions, civilizations and people, they would lose, with the best of
their legacy, their raison d'être.
Of this legacy therefore, certain expressions are gathered here in a large
diversity and I do not think that I have subjected them to a preconception when
I presented them for a reading in three registers, as it will be explained hereafter.
It is only that the War made urgent the personal design which I had conceived
and that this work of wartime led me to consider the maronite time, not with the
acuteness that suits the monuments of science, but the writings of combat. Also
I should say in what manner this situation marked the writing and the
edition of this work. Here is how it marked its contents.
THREE REGISTERS OF THE MARONITE HISTORY
The overall presentation that I offer to the reader is not a summary of this
Collection, or a key that opens all its doors. It is rather presented under a
light, which reflects the reading I make myself, and the intentions that I
acknowledge deeply afterwards, my personal designs merging into the maronite
project that runs over centuries.
1. In general, Maronites are blamed for having
served " the return of the Christians of the East into the Roman unity
", by contributing to the creation of the Uniat Churches. And indeed, there
are still Maronites of the generation of my masters, or even of mine, to pride
themselves on this role, asserting always their " perpetual
Orthodoxy " and attachment without fault to Saint Peter's See, in the first
as well as in the second millennium.
I will not offend my ecumenical friends by considering that such is
the main vein of this Collection in its ecumenical purpose. But I shall not
spare them the trouble, to them as to myself, to follow this typically maronite progression
and, as we do not redo history with ideas, so generous as
they may be, but that we accept it such as the men made it, to consider this
progression such as it was, to try to understand it and, after all, to make it
carry its fruits.
Certainly, this "ecumenism" of my fathers has nothing in common with
today's ecumenism. It is however with that ecumenism that the Syrian East shook
its Ottoman lethargy and that, willing or unwilling, the problem of the
Christian unity of Antioch is not any more a question to be solved between Latin
and Greeks, but between Antiochians, that is to say in most cases between
Melkites, Orthodoxs and Maronites. Some of them are partly Latinized and others
absolutely Byzantinized. But neither of them lost their common identity in the
Syrian East and still less their common future. They are not going to meet
"ecumenically" by conciliating two imperial Churches, may they be
considered as sisters, but by being together in the middle of the Church a
requirement and pioneers of the unity.
Do I need to say that this ecumenism that I call "Antiochian" or
" from the Syrian East " and by which I intend to converge with the
Church of the Arabs of P. Jean Corbon and to make common cause with the proposal
of an " Antiochian Concile " of the Patriarch Ignatius IV Hazim, is
not more in agreement with the current ecumenism than with that of the traditional
Maronites? Also I am not going to develop it further in order to stick to the
subject offered in the texts of the present Collection. But it was necessary to
formulate it, to show that the project of unity of the Churches that Maronites
served since the Counter-Reformation and in its line, if it is very outmoded,
did not end up questioning the ecumenism that predominates in the present
times.
In this respect, the Antiochian Pentalogy / Maronite Domain is only reviving and
developing a work conceived and accomplished as part of Vatican II under the
title of Antiochena. This Pentalogy could be considered as a kind of Antiochena
Bis, i.e. an advocacy of the encounter and the unity of the Churches in the
Church, different from another project of reconciliation between Churches. This
other project notably recommends conciliating the Church of the East and the
Church of the West, the East claiming inalienable privileges facing the Church
of Rome and the Uniats having only to join back the ranks of the Orthodoxy.
To have never served such a project, that of bygone Maronites has nevertheless
the merit of demonstrating a certain anachronism with the reconciling ecumenists
of today, who go back all in all to the good days of Lyons and Florence, with
the difference that this time, it is the See of Rome that is making all
concessions.
Thank God! The Antiochians have better to do and in the meantime, to offer.
Independently of any debate, the present Collection adds a part of its most
precious treasure, its canonical and Eucharistic prayer, not to the polemic between
Churches but to the bosom of the Church. Volumes III and IV of this Pentalogy
are entirely dedicated to that treasure. And they are offered as a pooling of
our life in the Holy Spirit. The properly ecumenical purpose of this Collection
is thus to convey the prayer of Antioch of the first millennium in its original
simplicity and fervour, independent of Latins and Byzantines, and given in
confidence to every believer. Made of doxologies and of trisagions, of sédré,
mazmours and of bo"outs, this prayer that culminates in Eucharistical
anaphoras, still represents the unanimous expression of our creed and our cult,
when, notwithstanding heresies and schisms, Antioch was one, with all the
Church.
2. Also, Maronites are blamed for having served
since the time of the Crusades and especially, since the XVIth century, the
European interventionist project, especially the French one, in the East, and to
have served there as a kind of bridgehead that allowed some to speak in the
XIXth century of a " Maronite France ".
Many pages of the Pentalogy are dedicated to this subject. For that matter,
I recommend to the reader who is tackling the Maronites for the first time to
begin with what the Frenchmen said about the subject. I recommend particularly,
in the 1st volume, section 2, the treatise of Jean de Roque, at the time of
Louis XIV, then in the anthology gathered in section 7 of the same volume, what
wrote Lamartine and Poujoulat after 1860, and Barrès before and after the First
World War.
But for the definite purpose of the relations between the Maronites and France, I
refer the reader more particularly to the report addressed by the ambassador
Savary de Brèves to Louis XIII. We will see there that the policy of France in
the East, exposed in this report with an exemplary loftiness and frankness, is
a Muslim policy and that the Christians of the East, and above all the
Maronites, are subordinated to this policy. It is not the matter of a French
policy of the Christians of the East that determines the relations of France
with the Sublime Porte. It is exactly the opposite.
It is precisely with such policy that the Maronites achieved their work and,
notwithstanding the intentions of some and the interests or the treasons of
others, it is with this policy that they were able to realize and to establish
in the XXth century what would have been possibly accomplished and established
since the time of Henri IV. It is not however with the king of France and
Navarre that the Maronites worked at that time, but for the emir Facardin, with
the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Thanks to the military, economic and cultural help of
the re-emergent Europe, the Emirate termed as "Druze" had then
obtained satisfaction from the Ottomans and established a "Lebanese"
self-government, from Antioch to Jerusalem.
We know what happened and how the plan was drowned in the blood of the Emir and
the waters of the Bosphorus. But between the history and a more eloquent legend
than the history in the hearts of its promoters, this episode shows well a permanent feature
of the political struggle of the Maronites. Obliged tributary of a
non-Christian partner, the Maronites ally with Europe only to better establish
in the East a self-government not maronite, but national. It is even the first
project of national self-government in the East of the Modern Times. It was
necessary to wait two centuries for the Egypt
of the Khedives to wake up and shake the yoke in its turn, after the attack of Bonaparte.
But in one and the
other case, it is definitely the same struggle and it ended up triumphing over
the Ottoman empire: against any kind of power of califat or sultanat type, to
establish the independence of the Nation-States in the free context of the Arab unity
and solidarity.
Before showing, third part of the purpose of this Pentalogy, in what manner this
political project at which Maronites worked before all the others, corresponds
to a cultural project, and how their "Libanism" is the cornerstone of
the Arabity, can I mention that the purpose of this Collection found a definite
intention in the War? In the conflict opposing the Blocs that replaced in the
Arab East the relations between the European Powers and the Sublime Porte, this
Collection in French is in keeping with the maronite project as an instrument of
historical continuity. It is in opposition to an obvious hegemonic will, the one
that wants to destroy the alliance Beirut-Paris and to satellize Lebanon in the
Anglo-Saxon orbit.
In a more definite way still, this Collection intends to demonstrate in what the
maronite tradition, relentlessly autonomist, but nonetheless assiduous in its
effort of obliged solidarity with the population of Lebanon and the people of
the East, is in contrast to the Zionist project in the exacerbated form which it
took since the proclamation of the State of Israel. By the same token, this project joins
the best of the religious, of the intellectuals and of the Jewish activists who
until 1948 and even afterwards, with Martin Buber and the founder of the Hebrew
University, Judah Magnes, wanted an active and mutually profitable coexistence
between Jews, Christians and Muslims in Palestine, in the same way of the
Islamic-Christian conviviality in Lebanon.
Because of this, there is no opposition, but logical continuity and fervent
promotion of the same project, when Maronites take up the cause of the peace in
the justice made to the Palestinians in their fatherland. Besides, it is the
most famous Maronites who took charge of this question, as they go from Négib
Azoury who was the first to put the Palestinian problem in the heart of the
" awakening of the Arab Nation ", to Soleiman Frangié who is the only
Arab head of state to have carried the Palestinian cause to the United
Nations.
3. We can think that the political enterprise of
the Maronites and their ecumenical design had only partly succeeded. Not only
the Christian unity of Antioch as a nuclear melting pot of the universal unity
of the Church is still a wish, but also the project of Nation-States, pluralist,
democratic and convivial within the Arab unity, is more and more flouted in
Lebanon, in Palestine and " from the Gulf to the Ocean ".
It is not the same with the cultural project, third and main part of the
maronite enterprise between the East and Europe. I think that in this regard,
the Maronites entirely succeeded, at least up to the last hitches, it is true,
serious. We can say in some way, that the entire East became culturally maronite,
as much as it ended up adopting the intellectual and living position that
Maronites were the first to adopt between the East and Europe.
We commemorate this year the 4th centenary of the foundation by the Pope Gregory
XIII of the Maronite College of Rome and I was able to follow professionally the
elaboration at Sorbonne of a thesis by Fr. Nasser Gemayel devoted to this
subject. The purpose of this Collection - which is not dedicated to a subject,
so key as it may be, but to the whole maronite itinerary - intends to
demonstrate the same thing as the work of Fr. Nasser, who besides extended his
investigation up to foundation in 1789 of the College of "Ayn Warqa, exact
replica in Lebanon of what was the Maronite College in Rome.
There also, we were accused of serving an enterprise of colonial type, even more
dangerous on the cultural plan than on the political one, due to the fact that
it would have more permanently established our economic dependency on the
industrialized West.
I acknowledge that there more than elsewhere, Maronites and Orthodox who declare
the political maronitism enthusiastically, sometimes fall into the trap, either
by recommending the bilingualism, national and institutional, or by advocating a
" Lebanese language ". But the debate on languages comes only in the
third position in the cultural enterprise of the Maronites that I consider
exemplary for the East, due to the fact that the East really approved it.
First of all, there is the adoption of the means of scientific and technical
research elaborated in Western Europe since the Quattrocento. In this regard,
the printing is the technical instrument favoured for the broadcasting of data
collected through the scientific research.
In the second place, the research is applied to inventory the historical,
philosophical, scientific and artistic heritage of the humanity. The return to
Antiquity is only one aspect of this inventory, but it is essential as much as it
protects any recognition of identity against an arbitrary choice in time and
links any national recognition of the same order to the entirety of the
legacy.
Heretofore, it is not a matter of languages, but humanism, and it is definitely
this humanism of the re-emergent Europe, long before that of the Europe of
Enlightenments, that Maronites adopted and served and that became the common
property of all the Arab East.
In what nevertheless can the humanism of the Maronites differ still from this
humanism of the intelligentsia, otherwise from the common of the Arabs, and in
what the languages have an importance in the matter?
The difference is for me based on two points:
a. When we take globally, not the humanist
attitude, but the material contents of the legacy, we observe that the Maronites
arabized themselves at least since the XIth century, because the first monument
of their law and their spirituality, with which the reader can familiarize
himself in booklet 3 of the 1st volume, does not exist any more than in Arabic.
It is Kitâb al-Huda or Book of Direction. On the other hand, this arabization
is quasi complete since the XVIIIth century. At that time, in effect, the
Maronites in Aleppo are one century ahead of the Syrian-Lebanese Renaissance,
which is going to find in Egypt its ground of election and expansion. But
throughout the second millennium of our time, the arabization of the Maronites
never took over the Syriac, not only in the liturgy, but also as a background
and a deep source of the culture.
In realizing this, the maronite tradition does not build a distinctive identity,
so legitimate as it may have been: it presents a request that all the
Arab men anxious about the completion of their culture and about its worldwide
role should appreciate. An Arabity worthy of this name cannot remain stranger to
the Syriac as a sister language of the Arabic in a common Semitism. It can be
even less stranger, considering the unique privilege of the Syriac on all the
Semitic languages, that of spreading the Greek concepts, categories and culture.
The Syriac is therefore in the heart of the Arabity, not only the reminder of
its common Semitic origins, but the obliged channel adopted freely by the
Arabity during its golden age, when the Arabity drew on the Greek source.
b. Concerning the modern languages, I observe that
the Maronites took on the practice of French, or anyway wrote in French, only
since the last century. However, when they felt the need to communicate with
Europe, the Maronites felt the opposite need to teach Europe the languages of
the East and for that, to learn themselves the languages of Europe. It is an
essential requirement of dialogue, when it entirely wants to respect the laws of
hospitality. It is still more essential when the man of dialogue does not want
to remain a simple receiver and all in all a consumer, when he does not want to
play a mercenary's role, but that he requests that of a partner. Some colonial
powers have never cared to teach their language to the colonized people. They
were satisfied in speaking to them a "BASIC", as Charles-Quint once
said that he spoke German to his horse. The Maronites who never have the
complexes of people colonized by Europe never accepted it. They remind therefore
the Arabs of what the Arabs had learnt themselves when they were creators and
not consumers. The command of a foreign language, a salutary means of an
intellectual catharsis, is also the obliged instrument of creation in the
modernity.
I use this word of modernity for the first time in this introduction. It could
consequently cover my whole purpose as the author of the Antiochian Pentalogy /
Maronite Domain. For that matter, I refer the reader to the end of the last volume where
I do not hesitate to characterize our Church itself as being " a Church of
the cultural modernity ".
It remains nonetheless true that it is above all and always, " a Church of
asceticism and of divine praise ", as it is also illustrated in its place
and that's how it formed a " people passionate about freedom, though always
in lack of conviviality " (cf. t. V, 3rd Part, Mémoire d'espoir). Then
whatever are the problems that he will face with the author of this Collection,
may the reader enter this legacy with a free mind and an open heart. All what
was said to him heretofore and that seems very controversial was only to clear
the ground and as if to dispel the clouds. Besides, if he prefers pictures to
texts, May he do so and start with pictures.
But pictures will bring him back to the text and I have no doubt that here and
there, he becomes, in the acquaintance of the maronite soul, more peaceful and
more human. However afflicted with tests are Maronites throughout their history,
with all what it imprints of coarseness on people, of mistrust and of hurt
pride, the recognition of their legacy should give the one who approaches it
what it over-abundantly gave the author of this Collection: a joy beyond any
resentment or bitterness, a confidence measured to the only immensity of perils,
and on top of everything, an uninterrupted action of grace.
At the end of this introduction, I am going to say with whom and like whom I
live this attitude.
Final Evocation
I had been resolved for this initial exprogramme to name none of the living on
whom I am dependent, and to keep to the dead. I thought that it would be easier
for me, owing to the large number of correspondents still living which I should
thank and at the risk of forgetting some of them. We are going to see that I
fulfilled this duty, after all, and that I am far from thinking I am quits, in
spite of the size of the memorandum that one can read farther. On the other hand,
I abandoned the idea of opening the register of eternity as it casts its rays on
all the pages of this Collection.
I want to take for a simple example that of my great-grandfather by my mother.
In one of my first memories of childhood, I still see him mounting his gray mare
at 90 years old
(3), to go to participate in
the unveiling of a statue dedicated to the memory of Youssef bey Karam. He had
been in effect, one of the men of the hero of Lebanon, died exiled in 1889.
In other words, this chapter of the dead is unique and includes all those who
between my generation who are not any more and that of the first followers of
Maron, priest and monk at the time of John Chrysostome, form one and same family
which I commemorate. The chapter of dead is not therefore opened here, because
it embraces the entirety of this Collection.
The reader will not miss the appearance from the middle of the big cloud of all the
mentioned witnesses, those whose stature inspired in me so much humility as
admiring fervour. I count the hours which I spent reading and translating the
works of the Patriarch Estéphane Douayhi as one of the big blessings of my
life. But I was there, at the beginning of the retirement age, only coming back
to the reading of my young years in the books of my father and of my
grandfathers, parish priests.
In this passionate return in the bosom of my mother that represent the
elaboration and the writing of the Antiochian Pentalogy / Maronite Domain, I
wish of course that the reader be carried towards the summits where the most
noble of the people of Beth Maroun were held because of the asperity of the fate
which had been theirs. But in these conditions, the most obscure of the
witnesses of the maronity whom I cared to discover are at the same altitude,
stony and bare. They are not therefore offered to the curiosity of the reader,
but regardless of everything sensational, to his search of wisdom.
Because of this, he will look at all turns of the way, to the one that we invoke
as the Throne of Wisdom and that all mine blessed from generation to generation,
because God had deigned to differentiate the humility of his maidservant. In the
old battle, which makes the history of the Maronite people an uninterrupted
chain of trials and tribulations and pain, the reader will find a secret of joy
and pride and he will know why the mother of a crucified is our mother and our
sovereign.
It is at her feet that I lay, before other occasions on this route give me again
the opportunity, the humble homage of this Collection. I only expect at the end
a greater love of her name and notwithstanding the sadness of the present times,
some exaltation to the limits of exhilaration, when thinking of the glory that
only for her honour, God threw, such a veil of splendour, on the Mount-Lebanon.
Note of the author : · I want to note in
this respect the big difference between my Collection and the diplomatic and
consular Documents, relating to Lebanon, the colossal and consequently
necessary publication of which my friend the ambassador Ismail undertook. If
it was reproached to him for not giving the entirety of the texts, I believe I
could avoid the reproach, which could be made because of the deletions that I
did in certain texts. They are always noted by suspension points placed
between brackets. If there was whatever of embarrassing in these cuts, it is
all the text, which I shall have given up, since nothing made me keep it. It
is besides in a big number of cases concerning texts already published but of
difficult access. The one, who wants absolutely to know what I deleted, has
only to go to see the original as I did. As for the unpublished manuscripts,
which I translated, my deletions that do not exceed few lines in all the
Collection represent expressions and sometimes sentences, which resisted to my
investigations, but that, in any manner, do not touch the substance of the
text. In the case notably of Hindiyé, the patriarch Jean de Lehfed and Kamal
Joumblat, these are in most cases, because of redundancies or of pedantries.
Finally, I shall say at the end of this introduction, why, at the school of
Léon Bloy and Louis Massignon, I neither deleted nor annotated passages where
historical errors are apparently obvious.
Notes of the Translator
(1) Large parts of this complementary work remain today
unpublished, 10 years after the sudden death of our author in 1995.
(2) This work was achieved in 1984, at the height of Lebanese
Civil War.
(3) Lahoud
Jabbour Samyia from Kfarsghab (1838 - 1933)
Copyright © 2005 [ Edition Cenacle Libanais / Labans.com ] - All reproductions or adaptations of any extract of this
information by any process, reserved to the authors for all countries.