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Georgia is called Mother of the Saints, some of these
have been inhabitants of this land, while others came among us from Time to
time from foreign parts to testify to the revelation of our Lord Jesus
Christ."
(from “The Passion of St. Abo”).
INTRODUCTION
Anyone who has glanced at
the old chronicles which tell the story of the Crusades will have met
references to the Georgians or Iberians, described as a Christian nation living
in the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, close to the Saracens
and the Tartars, and near the land
of Gog
and Magog. About the year 1180, the Latin Patriarch
of Jerusalem, Jacques de Vitry, wrote:
"There is also in the East another Christian people, who are very
warlike and valiant in battle, being strong in body and powerful in the
countless numbers of their warriors. They are much dreaded by the Saracens
and have often by their invasions done great damage to the Persians, Medes
and Assyrians on whose borders they dwell, being entirely surrounded by
infidel nations. These men are called Georgians, because they especially
revere and worship St. George, whom they make their patron and
standard-bearer in their fight with the infidels, and they honor him above
all other saints. Whenever they come on pilgrimage to the Lord's Sepulchre, they march into the Holy City
with banners displayed, without paying tribute to anyone, for the Saracens
dare in no wise molest them. They wear their hair and beards about a cubit
long and have hats on their heads."
A similar
tribute is paid to the Georgians by the medieval Arab writer al-'Umari, who describes the army of the Georgians as"the kernel of the religion of the Cross,"adding that the Mameluke
Sultans of Egypt used to address the Georgian king as"the
great monarch, the hero, the bold, just to his subjects, the successor of the
Greek kings, protector of the homeland of the knights, supporter of the faith
of Jesus, the anointed leader of Christian heroes, the best of close
companions, and the friend of kings and sultans."
This should
surely be enough to fire our interest in this valiant people of the Christian
East, whose patron saint is our own St. George of England.
The Georgian Church traces its history through
sixteen centuries to the time of Constantine the Great. During all this time,
it has been a bastion of Christianity in the Orient. Indeed, the Church in Georgia
was not only the center of religious faith, but of national life itself. It
was in the lives of its saints that the aspirations of the Georgian nation
found their earliest literary expression.
The Georgian Church has many points of affinity
with that of our own country. It cleaves to the doctrine formulated at Nicaea and Chalcedon.
The liturgy is celebrated in the national tongue. Its spiritual and
devotional ideals differ little from our own. Even under the present
Communist regime, Georgia
retains its own Catholicos-Patriarch as spiritual
head, and enjoys autocephaly or independent status within the Orthodox
communion.
Our aim here
is to give readers in the West an impression of the history and ideals of the
Georgian Church as revealed in the lives of its
saints. The wording of the original texts has been respected throughout, except
that in many cases a measure of condensation has been unavoidable to bring
this volume into the range of the present series.
ST. NINO
AND THE CONVERSTON OF GEORGIA
The story of St. Nino, for all its fabulous
embellishments, is built on a solid foundation of fact. History, archaeology
and national tradition are unanimous in affirming that Iberia, as Eastern
Georgia was then called, adopted Christianity as its state
religion about A.D.330, in the time of Constantine the Great.
At this period, the Roman Empire exercised suzerainty over the neighbouring state of Armenia, where Christianity had
lately triumphed as a result of the mission of St. Gregory the Illuminator.
We Should also recall that by St. Nino's time Western Georgia, comprising the
provinces of Colchis, Abkhazia and Lazica, had
already been evangelized by missionaries active in the Greek colonies along
the Black Sea coast. The Council of Nicaea
ill the year 325 was attended by bishops from Trebizond, the principal
sea-port of Lazica, an l from Bichvinta,
the strategic port and Metropolitan See situated on the borders of Colchis
and Abkhazia. It thus becomes clear that political conditions strongly favoured the Conversion of Eastern Georgia to
Christianity, the new official creed of the Romans.
The biography of St. Nino as we have it today is made up of a number of
elements of varying authenticity. The basis of our knowledge of the saint's
personality and mission is contained in a chapter of the church history by Rufinus, Composed about the year A.D. 403. This chapter
is based on oral information given to Rufinus by a
Georgian prince named Bakur whom he met in Palestine about the year
395. This Bakur was a member of the royal house of Iberia,
and was telling of events which had occurred little more than half a century
earlier, during the lifetime of his own parents or at least his grandparents.
When due allowance is made for the pious raptures of Rufinus
and his informant, there is no reason to challenge the essential accuracy of
their joint account.
This is more than can be said for the other legends which gathered
round the saint in the course of ages. About the 8th-9th centuries, the
Armenian writer known as the pseudo-Moses of Khorene
combined the story of St. Nino according to Rufinus
(as known to him through the Armenian version of the church history of
Socrates of Constantinople) with the story of the conversion of Armenia by Ripsime and Gregory the Illuminator, as related by Agathangelos. This artificial fusion of the stories of
St. Nino and of Ripsime defies chronology and
represents, to use uncanonical language, a red
herring trailed across the path of historical analysis.
Once the process of elaboration and embroidering had begun, there was
no limit to the fantasy of Nino’s later pious biographers. This saintly
woman, originally described as a simple slave girl, is now transformed into a
niece of the Patriarch Juvenal of Jerusalem (who lived a full century after
Nino's time), or, in other variants, into a Roman princess. Incidents belonging
to the reign of Diocletian are transposed into that of Constantine
to permit of Nino being portrayed as one of the virgins accompanying Ripsime to Armenia; there Nino is supposed
to have been miraculously preserved from the martyrdom which overtook her companions
at the hands of King Tiridates. Special interest
attaches to the references to the True Cross and to the Coat of our Savior,
which was supposed to have been rescued by the Jews of Georgia and preserved
there after the Crucifixion. It is possible that this legend has a basis in
the ancient traditions of the Jewish community in Georgia, and that the Christian faith had its adepts within this
colony even before Nino's mission.
In the pages which follow, the passage from Rufinus
which forms the nucleus of all later accounts of St. Nino's mission is given
first in its entirety. This is succeeded by episodes from the later Georgian
biographies of St. Nino, which assumed their definitive shape in the
10th-11th centuries. For the complete cycle of lives of St.Nino,
reference should be made to the classic work,"The
Life of Saint Nino" by Marjory and Oliver Wardrop,
which appeared in I900 as volume 5 of the Clarendon Press series "Studia Biblica et Ecclesiastica”
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