RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESI:Ienanish6' was in retirement at the monastery of Mar Yiinan across
the Tigris from Mawsil from 693 until 701, three excessively ascetic
monks at the monastery of Rabban Selibha were accused of being
Me~allyane.l71 As late as 790 the fourth canon of the Synod of Timothy
required that a bishop, monk, or layman who was accused of being
one of the Me~allyane should not be allowed to participate in the mass
until he had anathematized their beliefs in writing.^172
ASTRAL FATALISM
The belief that divine spirits and demons caused or encouraged
people to be good or evil tended to reduce a person's responsibility
for his or her own deeds almost as much as the astral fatalism to
which it was closely related. In its most straightforward form, the
central ethical premise of contemporary chaldiotii was that a person's
character was determined by his horoscope at birth and throughout
his life, that people were destined to be good or evil. This kind of
fatalism was popular with the upper classes in the late Sasanian period.
Successful, powerful people used it to justify their status. Wretched
people sought a way to escape fate through magic or gnosis. In general,
fatalism favored the status quo and the social and political power
structure by justifying success and excusing failure. But it also raised
the issue of human responsibility and historical causation. Because of
the reactions it provoked, it is impossible to overestimate the impact
of astral fatalism on contemporary thought.
Among the Magians this issue took the form of a controversy be-
tween Zurvanites and Mazdaeans. The former were close to contem-
porary Chaldaean fatalism and emphasized the impersonal, blind jus-
tice of the God of Time. There was almost certainly a connection
between the submission to fate favored by Zurvanites and royal ab-
solutism at the end of the Sasanian period. In opposition to them,
Mazdaeans stressed the goodness of Ohrmazd and the responsibility
of individuals to choose between good and evil, as well as the appro-
priate reward or punishment. They would admit only that fate deter-
mined the vicissitudes of material existence and insisted that a person's
spiritual fate was in his own hands.
Gnostics provided the same sort of dualist explanation for good
and evil and tended to accept the stars' control over material existence.
171 Thomas of Margha, Governors, I, 53-54, 59; 11, 95-97, 122.
172 Chabot, Synodicon, pp. 602, 607-8.