In Egypt Land

Through the cloisters of Cairo's Cathedral of St. Mark filed an excited swarm of sweating, portly pashas to elect a new patriarch, the 114th successor to St. Mark as Pope of Egyptian Christianity. Among the electors, for the first time, were both Egyptian laymen and swarthy delegates of the Ethiopian Coptic Church. The choice: Archbishop Anba Yussab, 63, whose flowing white beard gives him a proper patriarchal dignity. Ordained 40 years ago in a desert monastery founded by St. Anthony, he later studied theology in Athens,* was an abbot in Jerusalem during World War I, when he showed great diplomacy in dealing with the successive rulers of the Holy City.

His supporters looked to Yussab as the only man who could 1) salvage Coptic education and finances after centuries of ruinous monopoly by ignorant monks; 2) bring the schismatic subjects of Haile Selassie back to the Coptic fold. Yussab who has crowned Haile Selassie, planned soon to make an almost unprecedented journey to Addis Ababa to placate the Copts' only foreign ally. The 1,500,000 Copts pray that Yussab's diplomacy may avert the wave of persecution which they foresee as an outcome of a resurgent Islam.

Trinity Saved. Persecution was the normal expectation of the Copts for over a thousand years. When St. Mark first brought his gospel to Egypt, Christianity spread rapidly among the Egyptian fellahin, downtrodden descendants of the pyramid builders who took readily to a clear-cut doctrine of life-after-death. At first they had to flee into fortress-like monasteries to escape the persecutions of Hellenic Alexandria and the desert barbarians. Later pagan Alexandria too was converted, rivaled Rome as a Christian capital.

Hero of this brief golden age was St. Athanasius, who almost singlehanded swung the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) against the Arians* and made the doctrine of the Trinity the belief of all orthodox Christianity. In the 17th Century the Copts became prisoners of Islam. Millions of Copts were persecuted and driven from their faith by ridicule, taxes, restrictions. The Coptic language all but disappeared; the tongue of the Pharaohs survives today only in the long Coptic Mass, where it is chanted to the sound of cymbals and triangles. Coptic churches tried to escape attention by being outwardly drab, tucked into back alleys, though gorgeous within.

Hard-pressed even to survive, the Copts could develop no great religious art or thought. Sneered the great German theologian Ernst Troeltsch: "Christianity is what it has come to be only through its alliance with antiquity; while with the Copts and Ethiopians it is but a kind of buffoonery." But the very backwardness of the Coptic Church has made it an archeological repository of beliefs and practices more like those of apostolic Christianity than those of Western churches.

* Coptic theology is much like Greek Orthodox. Exception: the nature of Christ's divinity. Copts hold that Christ does not have a "double nature" (human and divine), but a "single nature" in which human and divine are blended. The Council of Chalcedon (A.D 451) condemned the doctrine as heresy, and thus cut the Copts from the main body of early Christians.

*Who believed that the persons of the Trinity were not equal.

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