The High Medieval Era · consolidating by this era · Mount Lebanon
Maronite Christianity
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About This Movement
The Maronites take their name from a Syriac monk, Maron, and from the monastery built around his memory. By the medieval period they were a distinct church of the West Syriac liturgical family, concentrated in the mountains and gorges of Lebanon, where their monasteries and hermitages were cut straight into the cliffs. Their early history is unusually hard to recover, because much of what is told about it was written down later and under argument. Specifically over whether the community had once held that Christ had only one will, a position the wider church had rejected. What is clear is that when the crusaders arrived, the Maronites entered into communion with Rome: William of Tyre describes the union around 1182, and in 1215 the Maronite patriarch Jeremiah al-Amshitti travelled to Rome for the Fourth Lateran Council, after which a papal bull set out the terms of the union.
Sources
- Kitab al-Huda (Book of Guidance; Syriac-to-Arabic trans. by Bishop David, 1059; ed. Fahed, 1935) (primary) — The community's own law-liturgy-theology compendium - the lived internal rulebook. Available only in Arabic and French; no English translation exists.
- Thomas of Kaphartab, Ten Chapters (11th c.) (primary) — Pre-union Maronite apologetics defending the one-will christology - inside evidence bearing on the contested monothelete question, which concerns the historical record rather than the church's present confession. No English translation exists.
- William of Tyre on the Maronite union with Rome (1180s), in A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea (trans. Babcock & Krey, 1943) (primary) — An outside view: the union described through Latin crusader eyes. William frames it with hostility, calling the Maronites' prior teaching heresy.
- Kamal Salibi, Maronite Historians of Mediaeval Lebanon (Beirut, 1959) (secondary) — Available on archive.org. A classic dissection of how later Maronite historians rebuilt the early record under polemical pressure.
- Matti Moosa, The Maronites in History (Syracuse, 1986; repr. Gorgias 2005) (secondary) — Critical counter-history; itself contested by Maronite traditionalists - the historiography is a live confessional argument on both sides.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 5, Part III 'East Christianities (eleventh to fourteenth century): Copts, Melkites, Nestorians and Jacobites' (reference) — Maronites are not named in the chapter title, though they fall within its scope of medieval Eastern Christianity.