The Nestorian Epistles

There are many things that bother me in alternate histories. Three of them come to mind right off the bat, like so:

• The humanities tend to be plot-significant-only. Presumably there's an enormous amount of art and writing and architecture that's going on in any timeline, but nobody ever takes a break to discuss what the hell it is unless it's directly related to the overarching story.
• Directly related to the above, the mental landscape of the world is assumed to never significantly deviate from the IRL norm unless it's plot-significant. (Even then, there's relatively little exploration of how it deviates, or the consequences of doing so.)
• Eurocentrism.

So, for variety, today I'm gonna blog about a fictional work of writing, loosely inspired by the Persian Letters of our world.

Background to the Nestorian Epistles

At least after the Wars of Religion (and much earlier, from a Moorish perspective), Andalusada's France fills the recognizable niche of Habsburg Spain: the world-spanning Ultramontane dystopia. This is exaggerated, but not unduly so: not quite so vast, perhaps, but the Gallican Church is almost as independent as Spain's was IRL - and Guisard* France is brutally heavy-handed when its piety gets offended. Its only (and best) claim to not being a dystopia is that it isn't explicitly one, and no functional dystopia ever is.

That said, however, France is an authoritarian imperial state that takes its faith seriously, and the Malabar church drama is going on well into the age of print. This is the age of growing world consciousness, and as France increasingly loses the Caribbean to the Moors, its success in the Orient (hinted at earlier, and going to be elaborated on later) is going to be a source of much pride.

There's a certain kind of missionary travelogues that are adorably imperialist. The exotic locales, the strange foods, the barbaric cultures in equal parts splendid and squalid, our tears of sorrow for the benightedness of the heathen and our tears of exultation at his conversion and conforming to Holy Mother Church. (You know exactly what I'm talking about here.) I imagine that sort of literature is going to sell very well in France, ca. 1600-1800.

At the beginning of the end of the Guisard* golden age, somebody (not sure whom yet) writes the Nestorian Epistles, which goes on to become a runaway bestseller.

The Nestorian Epistles in outline

There's a certain kind of missionary travelogues that are adorably imperialist. The Nestorian Epistles stand that entire genre on its head.

• The core two writers of the Epistles are an archbishop and a young priest, sent as a missionary to a faraway foreign land across the ocean. Aside from some initial hints about the ethnicities of the sailors and a stop or two en route, the first few exchanges are unremarkable.
• After the first few exchanges, the missionary writes to announce his successful arrival in the field, proclaiming (in wonderfully purple prose) his heartfelt desire to liberate from the sorrows of superstition and idolatry the unlettered peoples of the West - in this case specifically France. (The response from the archbishop leaves it perfectly clear, if anybody was still wondering, that both of the key correspondents are "Nestorian," i.e. Syrian Christians from the Malabar Coast.)
• That kind of purple prose crops up from time to time throughout the rest of the Epistles, usually to lampoon the same sort of rhetoric used by actual missionaries. (Concerns about martyrdom, about the ferocious military of the unsaved peoples, and various pastoral concerns come up.)
• The "paganism" described by the missionary throughout the Epistles is, as a rule, French folk Catholicism subjected to various degrees of caricature. The missionary is apparently unaware of the Roman Catholic Church; various letters between the missionary and the archbishop marvel at the apparent similarities between the theologies of the priests, and wonder at how despite those theologies "the pagans" could still wind up being utterly unrecognizable.

Appendiced to the Nestorian Epistles was a glossary of Syriac jargon used in the work. (It wasn't very good; the author compiled it from a few sources without being aware of the dialectal differences within Syriac itself. Later editions of the Nestorian Epistles would by turns substantially expand it, drop it entirely, or correct it, usually by wild mass guessing about the church of the characters.)

Reception of the Nestorian Epistles

The Nestorian Epistles was the first book to portray non-Chalcedonian Christianity with much regard for detail or accuracy. More than that, it was also the first work to portray it sympathetically.

• The awful appendix of the Epistles inspired a short wave of Syrophilia in France.
• It also revived and redefined the Heretical Hero, a trope that had fallen from use since the Middle Ages. Previously, the Heretical Hero had been at best a sympathetic villain; the Nestorian Epistles opened the possibility that such a character could be heroic in his own right. Because of its Indian connection, the first wave of Heretical Heroes were much better traveled than any before them, a quality that's remained even to the present (when Monophysitism in the Mediterranean makes it much easier to become one.)