RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Maronites
and openly professed his teaching." Benassalus distinguishes Maronites from Melchites (orthodox Greeks) and from Franks (Latins), and reports that the Maronites went over to the religion of the Franks. William of Tyre (q.v.) states that a people dwelling in the neighborhood of Byblos, who for 500 years had followed the teaching of the heresiarch Maron, had in 1182 come into relations with the Patriarch Aimerich of Antioch, forsworn their heresy, accepted the orthodox faith, and received bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. These writers show a bias against the Maronites, and William of Tyre is in this matter dependent upon Eutychius, and, further, he does not seem to intend to imply that all Maronites went over to the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, that Maronites were not regarded as orthodox appears from efforts continuing into the eighteenth century to make their teaching conform to the Roman system. The Maronites, in asserting their early and continuous orthodoxy, appeal to the fact that in the acts of the sixth synod (680), which condemned the Monothelites, the Maronites are not mentioned. But other testimony which they adduce for their orthodoxy is taken from later writers whose productions are more or less suspicious both because of their late date and because of an admixture of legend in their accounts of Johannes Maron, which are derived from an Arabic source not earlier than the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
The account given of Johannes Maron, whom the Maronites acknowledge as their first patriarch, is that he was born at Sirum, near Antioch, was educated in Antioch and the monastery 3. The First of St. Maron. Later he studied in
Patriarch, Constantinople, became monk in St.
Johannes Maron, was ordained priest, and wrote Maron. against the heretics. He was introduced to the papal legate in Antioch, and by him made bishop of Botrus in 676. He then converted all the Monophysites and Monothelites in the Lebanon region to the Roman faith, ordained priests and consecrated bishops, and gave the Maronites their political and military constitution. When Theophanes, patriarch of Antioch, died, in the second year of the reign of Justinian II., Johannes happened, it is said, to be present in the city, and was unanimously elected patriarch. It is also reported that he journeyed to Rome, and was consecrated by Pope Honorius; that he built a new monastery near Botrus after the Greeks destroyed the old one, and that he died there in 707. But this story contains anachronistic elements, since Honorius lived nearly a century before that time. As no one but the biographer of Maro knows about a patriarch of Antioch of that name, the story of his patriarchate seems to be a fabrication. Renaudot even goes so far as to deny the very existence of Maron; but there is no reason to doubt that he really was elected bishop of Lebanon, and exercised great influence there in steady opposition to the Greeks. The Maronites celebrate him on Mar. 2. A singular characteristic of this history of Johannes Maron is that it erroneously identifies the Mardaites and the Maronites and ascribes to the latter the doughty deeds narrated of the former —
a matter which has given rise to variant explanations of no historic value.
Early reports give no insight into religious and ecclesiastical conditions prior to the seventh century. If in that century Maronites were Monothelites, they may have received the Monophysite doctrine spread by Jacobus Baradseus (see Jacobites) in Syria. And if, as is reported, the monks of the monastery of Maron were made mar-
4. Relation tyrs because of their agreement with to Mono- the deliverances of the Council of thelitism Chalcedon, they could not have been
and Mono- supported by their countrymen. The physitism. Maronites confess that heretical passages have gotten into their literature, but they assert that these were smuggled in by Monophysites and Monothelites. In their zeal for Rome they have burned many books of this character, and they boast of the correctness of their later literature, especially that printed in Rome! Their historians declare that at the beginning of the twelfth century a certain Thomas, archbishop of KafarTab, near Aleppo, preached among the Maronites the doctrine of the Monothelites and in consequence had a controversy with the Greek patriarch of Antioch. This may have been the schism referred to by William of Tyre, ended by the agreement of Maronites and the Roman Church in 1182, and may have furnished the pretext for preaching the doctrine to the Maronites who lived in Cyprus, where the heresy lingered till the time of Pope Eugenius IV
The great conversion to Romanism in 1182 was
not complete. An anti-Roman reaction set in and
was punished by a papal interdict, from which the
country was not absolved until 1215. Rome took
great pains to maintain the union,
5. Relations as, for example, in 1445, in con- , with Rome, sequence of the Council of Florence.
A national synod was held at the command of Clement VIII. in 1596, in the monastery of Kanobin, to which Girolamo Dandini, a Jesuit, went as papal legate, charged with the revision of all Maronite affairs. According to his report (Missione apostolica al patriarca e Maroniti del Monte Libano, Cesena, 1656; Fr. transl. by Richard Simon, Voyage du Mont Liban, Paris, 1685), the council resulted in submission to the Roman see, and an agreement with respect to doctrines. The differences, however, were neither few nor unimportant. The Maronites retained the celebration of the Lord's Supper under both kinds, the Syriac liturgy, the marriage of the priests, their own fast-days, and their own saints. A new council was held in 1736 in the monastery of Mary, at Luweiza, in the district of Kesrawan. The celebrated Maronite scholar J. S. Assemani was sent from Rome as papal legate; and the object was to secure among the Maronites acceptance of the canons of the Council of Trent. How incomplete the success of this mission was is shown by the remark of a Maronite monk : " (The Maronites) recognize the pope as head (of the Church); outside of that they have nothing essentially Catholic." The principal concessions by the Maronites were that they accepted the filioque and kneeling at the consecration, and acknowledged the
Maronites Marquette