Sahdona the Syrian

Sahdona, the Syriac name means roughly the same as the Greek Martyrius, and he is known by both, came from Halmon in the region of Beth Nuhadra, in what is now northern Iraq. His mother had prayed for a child; when he was born she gave him to God, and he entered the monastery of Beth Abhe as a young man. He was an East Syriac Christian, part of the great church of Mesopotamia and Persia that lay outside the Roman Empire altogether.

About 635 he travelled with an embassy to Byzantine territory. That journey appears to have changed how he thought about Christ. When he came back he was made bishop of Beth Garmai, and then he said in public what he had come to believe: that in Christ there is one person and one hypostasis, not the two his own church's formula insisted on.

His church deposed him. He was driven from his see. He recanted enough to be restored, then said it again, and was deposed a second time, and this time for good. He ended his life at a monastery near Edessa, in Byzantine territory, an exile from the church that had raised him. He died around 649. His own tradition condemned him, and for centuries most of what he wrote was allowed to disappear.

What survives is remarkable. The Book of Perfection is one of the longest and warmest works of Syriac spiritual writing that has come down to us. It is not a technical treatise. It is a long, patient book about how an ordinary believer learns to pray, to keep a clean conscience, to bear humiliation without bitterness, to read the Scriptures as if God were speaking now. He writes about tears, about the fear of God as something closer to reverence than terror, and about the astonishing courtesy of God toward weak people.

He also left letters and a set of maxims in the same voice.

The text was lost for a very long time and had to be reassembled in the twentieth century from scattered manuscripts, largely through the work of the Belgian scholar André de Halleux. What emerged was a writer whose warmth had survived his disgrace intact.

The plain fact of his life is that he was punished by his own people for a conviction about the person of Christ, and kept writing about the love of God anyway.

Sources: Sahdona (Martyrius), Book of Perfection, ed. André de Halleux (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium); Sebastian Brock, The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life; William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature; Thomas of Marga, The Book of Governors.