Ethiopian Church

Christianity came to Aksum from Egypt. When in the middle of the 4th century King Ezana baptized the country, the new faith became the spiritual support of the ancient Ethiopian kingdom. The common religion helped Aksum fortify its relations with Byzantium that were also supported by trade partnership.

The appearance of Islam upset the game in the Near East politics. Ethiopian Christianity survived, but for many centuries it remained isolated from the rest of the Christian world. A thin thread connected it only with the Coptic patriarchy in Alexandria, to which the Ethiopian church submitted, and from which it received its metropolitans until 1950. However, this dependence was quite tangible. Sometimes, a new metropolitan, who was meant to replace the deceased one, was sent by the Egyptians with a great delay, and then the whole of the Ethiopian Christian world suffered. Without a metropolitan no priest could be consecrated, and without a priest people could not get married, or baptize a child, or have a burial service.

Being surrounded by Muslim territories, Aksum soon lost its leading position in sea trade and declined quickly. To preserve itself, the Christian civilization had to turn away from the sea and move southwards, and the church played the most important role in this advancement. Monks came to the pagan lands before the king’s warriors, they built monasteries, baptized the locals, and then a submission of the authority of a Christian king, a descendant of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was a solved case. Of course, the kings were generous and favorable to the church.

The Ethiopian Church produced and supported fine arts and literature. Until the 19th century literature was written in the sacred language of Ge’ez, inherited from the Axumite Empire. The Church resisted the attacks of Muslim troops of Imam Ahmed Ibrahim the Left-Handed in the 16th century. It did not yield to the temptations of Jesuits in the 16th – 17th centuries and did not give up Monophysitism, a belief that Christ has only one nature: human that evolved into divine. It survived through revolts, dissidences and the heresy of the 18th – 19th centuries and has remained the support of the Ethiopian civilization.

One foreigner, looking at the magnificent new cathedral in Addis Ababa built on the donations of ordinary people, said to the taxi driver, “They had better spent the money on something useful!” In reply he heard an angry reproof, “If you cannot comprehend the soul of our people, you better never come here again!” A church for an Ethiopian is an absolute value that cannot be measured with money.

Priest with a cross. Covenant of Mercy.    Madhane Alam Church. Ethiopia. The Amhara.   M. Grevers.		Priests bearing processional crosses in a church on Lake Tana.    Ethiopia. The Amhara.  M. Grevers.
An Ethiopian church. Addis-Abeba, 2006 Semenova V.		A holiday. Priest makes a tour of the ward with songs and dances. Addis-Abeba, 2006 Semenova V.