Long before the East–West split and the Great Schism, and certainly long before Joachim of Fiore’s prophecies on the Age of the Spirit began filling the ecclesiastical loggia with predilections for change, the youngest of the Abrahamic faiths had begun to nip away at some of the cherished assumptions and basic structures of its siblings. What had begun as a series of revelations to an orphan-turned-merchant in Mecca had morphed, first, into a nomadic, desert-based sect throughout Arabia and then, quickly thereafter, into a world empire that was completely misunderstood by the dominant Christian world.
When Muhammad began his public ministry, there were five episcopal centers, or sees, in Christendom: Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Rome. By the year 700, only one generation after Islam was firmly established, only Constantinople and Rome remained. The others had been overrun by the religious not-so-close cousins of Christianity from the east.
We still today judge the religion of the Prophet in terms of that bloody history as well as on the basis of its most extreme contemporary adherents. What Christians and Jews rarely accept about the original rise of Islam, however, is that Muhammad truly respected both faiths. He was equally possessed, though, by a sincere desire to “fix” what he saw as their errors about the nature of God. This, in fact, was why he had heard those revelations from the Divine in the first place, or so he thought.
Restorers of faith. Revealers of the true God. This is how, by their own admission, the first Muslims viewed their role in the religious world. Historically speaking, we know that they did not believe that they had founded a new religion. Rather, they thought they were reviving the religious contract that had first been inaugurated between God and Abraham. Islam was meant to be a corrective of rabbinic Judaism, which was known to Muhammad firsthand (a sizeable Jewish population existed in Medina in those days), and to Christianity, already the world’s most dominant faith. The Prophet believed that both faiths had wandered away from monotheism. He believed this, in no small part, because of the filioque controversy.
Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah began his prophetic activities in Mecca, where his fellow citizens almost killed him for his religious troublemaking and then, instead, forced him to move some two hundred miles away to Yathrib (today’s Medina), where he lived in the Sasanian Persian Empire, beyond the reaches of the Byzantine or Later Roman Empire to the west.
In Persia, there was certainly a multiplicity of gods and pagan practices, most of them existing under the rubrics and umbrellas of Zoroastrianism, but the adherents, texts, and beliefs of Judaism and Christianity were also well known to Muhammad. Of these, he seems to have been troubled most by what he knew of the beliefs and practices of Christians. It was at about this time—roughly 610 CE—that a Christian theologian known as Maximus the Confessor, or Maximus of Constantinople, was beginning to speak of God as “identically a monad and a triad.” Surely this sort of language confused Christians themselves, let alone Muhammad.1
Contemporary American historian Lesley Hazleton recently summarized this period in the seventh century by saying that seemingly abstruse questions as to whether Jesus was both God and man, or God in human form—whether he had one nature or two—had become highly politicized, creating such deep rifts that the Byzantine Empire was essentially at war with itself as various provinces sided with one theopolitical entity or another.2
Since the Council of Constantinople in 381, Christians had felt confident in talking about God as Trinity. Or at least they felt inclined to try to articulate what that word or concept could mean. The truth of the thing, however, was that the statements of the Christian theologians of the time were all over the map. It’s no wonder that other monotheists found them to be, well, contradictory.3
Working from outside the Christian communion (or from within it, for that matter) it would be difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile Christian claims of worshipping a monotheistic God together with statements such as those of Maximus the Confessor’s or the promulgations of Chalcedon. There are, in other words, very credible and understandable reasons why Muhammad heard in his revelations, recorded as the Qur’an, that he was restoring the “religion of Abraham.” How can God be unique if God is three-in-one? This new faith called Islam was polemical, aimed not only at Arabian paganism but also at what its prophet believed were the errors of straying from monotheism. Even the Arabic word for God, al-ilah, subsequently abbreviated as Allah, literally means “the God” and was designed “to proclaim a new unity of religion.”4 How ironic, Muhammad seems to have thought, that a religion—Christianity—that stamped out polytheism in the Roman Empire should have itself now wandered dangerously into those same waters.
Christians did not invent monotheism; they adopted and adapted it from Judaism, the world’s first monotheistic religion. Christians likewise have always identified themselves as “children of Abraham.” Even as the Christian Scriptures were being written down, Christians were also finding themselves inspired by Hellenistic philosophy, particularly that of Plato, who had believed in a universe with only one God. Early Christian theologian Justin Martyr put Plato’s work to extensive use, remarking that it was Plato who showed him the wings of his soul, taking Justin to a place where he might contemplate the Godhead.5 But there is this thorny matter of what Christians call the second and third persons of the Godhead. And then, of course, there was the matter of the West subjugating one of these God-persons to the other two.
Everything was up for grabs. Charges of polytheism would soon follow, and the cacophony of confusion that first called the Prophet to attempt the renewal of pure monotheism would only grow.6 A millennium and a half later, that confusion and that cacophony are still abroad in the world. The difference now is that ours is indeed a glocalized world, and one that, because of its inherent immediacy, is increasingly intolerant of confusion. Part of the work of living into the Age of the Spirit will, for Christians, have to be the business of learning to think of that Spirit and of the Trinity itself in more theological and less biological terms. Such is not an easy assignment, but neither is it an optional one.
Notes
1. Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 85.
2. Lesley Hazleton, The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (New York: Riverhead, 2013), 58.
3. After 451 CE and as a result of the work of the Council of Chalcedon, Christianity—both East and West—was officially dyophysite. That Greek term literally means “two natures.” Theologians had settled, at Chalcedon, on dyophysite for the Church’s Christology in order to explain how Jesus Christ might be both man and God, having two natures: both human and divine, separate, distinct, but combined in one person. Thus, when Christ died on the cross it was the human nature of Christ that died, not the divine. By assuming Christ as dyophysite, or having two natures, the fathers at Chalcedon had also meant to stamp out forever the use of the heretical terms of monophysite, meaning that Christ possessed only one nature of pure divinity, and miaphysite, meaning that Christ was both divine and human in one single nature.
4. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 257.
5. See, for instance, the First Apology and Dialogue with Trypho of Justin Martyr. These were written between 150 and 160 CE.
6. Obviously, there are more detailed Muslim objections to the Christian Trinity than just those concerning the Spirit. Some of the more pressing ones center on the person of Christ. How, for instance, could the Divine come under human control, as Christ did during his passion? How could any part (and just the notion of parts is a problem) of the Divine have a beginning, as in a human birth?