The essays in this collection were presented at the panel “Ethiopian Christianity: Global Interconnections and Local Identities” within the 20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies that took place on October 1–5, 2018, in Mäqälä, Ethiopia. The aim of the collection is to promote a discussion about the ways in which Ethiopian Orthodoxy has a very significant contribution to make in reaching “a non-Eurocentric reading of the global Christian past” (1). To do this, the essays demonstrate how Ethiopia has global entanglements, while also experiencing disruption to such entanglements. A notable feature of the volume is the superlative bibliographies that accompany each essay; these will enable a wide audience to follow up on the authors’ illuminating insights.
Some of the “entanglements” it describes occurred in the past, some in recent times. As an example of the former category, the Abunä was the Egyptian appointed by the Egyptian Coptic patriarch to head the Ethiopian church, until the practice was ended only in the twentieth century. Each Abunä was dependent on the Ethiopian king but might also be critical of him (in relation to polygamy, for example). Bernadette McNary-Zak's essay (Chapter 2, 17–28) discusses how a homily from the period 1336–1340 on the role of St. Frumentius in the conversion of Ethiopia, including his relationship with the Ethiopian queen and consecration as bishop by Athanasius, redacted the ancient tradition to adapt it to the situation of the Abunä. In the sixteenth century, Ethiopia was thought to be the seat of Prester John, an important Christian bulwark against the Muslim threat. Konstantin Winters, Katharina Ritter, and Philipp Stenzig (Chapter 5, 62–78) discuss an early-sixteenth-century Italian account of a visit to Rome by a small group of Ethiopian priests in 1481. The priests explored bringing Ethiopian Orthodoxy under Rome, but the idea was not destined to work. Whereas the political threat brought the two sides together, religious differences, especially perceived heretical tendencies of the Ethiopians in relation to Christology and Judaism, kept them apart.
Perhaps most remarkable in potential, but not in outcome, was a train of events in the Reformation. Stanislau Paulau describes (in Chapter 6, 81–109) how an Ethiopian priest, Abba Mika'el, probably from the Ethiopian establishment in Rome, turned up in Wittenberg in late May 1534 (staying until July 4, 1534) and thereafter had a number of conversations with Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. During these discussions they reached broad agreement on the trinity, the mass (especially as to its being necessarily public), and on the unity of the church. When he left, he took with him a letter of recommendation from Luther. Although these meetings and this letter were largely forgotten thereafter, Paulau uses them to make the important point that Protestantism did not just encounter eastern Christianity in the nineteenth century, nor was the initiative solely on the Protestant side, nor was it just Roman Catholics who interacted with Ethiopian Orthodoxy at quite an early date. Still, nothing abiding seems to have come from this encounter.
More recent entanglements include a discussion of solidarity shown between Ethiopian Christians and a small group of German missionaries at the German Hermannsburg Mission in Addis Ababa during the Italian occupation, especially in relation to the attempted assassination of Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani on February 19, 1937 (Chapter 9, 143–168, by Jürgen Klein). Relationships among the Orthodox churches is the subject of Andre Macar's discussion (Chapter 10, 169–192) of a process initiated by Emperor Ḫaylä Śǝllase in Abbis in the 1970s for dialogue between the Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches. There was much activity up to the 1990s, with talk of the lifting of mutual anathemas on saints in each grouping going back to the period after Chalcedon. But the whole process collapsed in the 1990s, with Abuna Pawlos leading the Ethiopian Church in 1996 to state, after noting that the Christological formula of the Chalcedonians was felt not to be the same as that of the Oriental Churches, that “To lift the anathemas imposed upon those Chalcedonian Fathers and to accept them as saints would dishonour those Oriental Orthodox Church Fathers who condemned the Chalcedonians” (188). Relations between the Christian churches within Ethiopia are covered by Eunhye Chang (Chapter 11, 193–209), who discusses, relying on her survey of thirty-two young Orthodox adults in Addis Ababa, how deeply engrained are negative perceptions of Protestantism (often styled “Pente” in Ethiopia) as foreign and unscrupulous. On a more optimistic note, her chapter concludes with the numerous recent efforts to bring Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic traditions together in relation to practical activities in Ethiopia and abroad. The two final chapters concern the status of the oral practice of qǝne in Ethiopian Orthodoxy, short poems composed having a surface (“wax”) meaning and a hidden (“gold”) meaning, which is dangerously at risk of dying out under Western influence (Chapter 11, 210–226, by Christine Chaillot) and the burial of Emperor Ḫaylä Śǝllase and the refusal by Rastafarians to believe he is dead (Chapter 12, 227–237, by Verena Böll).
This collection constitutes an invaluable corrective to any notion that Ethiopia and Ethiopian Orthodoxy have existed in splendid isolation, in spite of the close and successful alliance of the state and the church in fending off outside forces from the fourth century CE until the late twentieth century, barring the brief Italian occupation of 1936–1941. The present reviewer is not aware of any other work that provides evidence of so many discrete interactions between Ethiopia and Western Christianity, or perhaps more accurately for this volume, Western Protestantism. The phenomena selected for examination by the contributors are fascinating in themselves, largely unknown outside a tiny circle of Ethiopia specialists and richly revelatory of the manifold ways in which the interactions occurred, or failed to occur.
Sometimes, however, it appears that these finely detailed studies of significant but small-scale phenomena are not matched by essays that address some of the larger entanglements. An account of the Pontifical Ethiopian College in Rome, founded in 1481 by Pope Sixtus IV to cater for Ethiopian pilgrims to Rome, would have been a worthy addition. How many Ethiopians came, and what mutual influences resulted? As noted above, one of them was probably Abba Mika'el, who visited Luther and Melanchthon. Interactions of the sort covered by Matteo Salvadore in The African Prester John and the Birth of Ethiopian-European Relations, 1402–1555 (London: Routledge, 2016) might have been touched upon. Francisco Alvares, the chaplain to the Portuguese embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, published a rich account of the country in 1540 that was widely read in Europe. One of its readers was Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, who also knew an Ethiopian monk in Rome, one Pedro. Loyola directed that any Jesuits going to Ethiopia should respect the distinctive nature of the Ethiopian church. This direction was observed by Jesuit Pedro Paez, who arrived in 1603, and was very influential, but disastrously ignored by his replacement in 1625, Alfonso Mendes, who started a course of events culminating in the expulsion of the Jesuits. But moving on from these Catholic examples, curiously absent from the book is any account of the notable successes achieved by the earliest Protestant missionaries in Ethiopia, such as Peter Heyling, who arrived in 1634, and the British and Swedish missionaries in the nineteenth century. Also noteworthy was the arrival of Pentecostal Christianity, beginning in 1934 with three women who had come from the Elim Bible Institute and the Assembly of God Church in New York (Bertha Dommemuth, Ellen French, and Ruth Shippey). Particular details of any of these phenomena, examined with the scrupulous detail that is such a strong feature of this book, would have enriched its contents.
Still, you cannot do everything in one book, and the editors are to be congratulated for having assembled and insightfully introduced such a collection of essays as this. That one can think of things to add really testifies to the validity and force of the idea underlying the collection—the value of exploring the interconnections and disconnections between Ethiopian Orthodoxy and the wider world. It is likely their work will prompt further discoveries of the sort we find here, and they and their contributors are to be commended for it.
