Download PDF | Nikoloz Aleksidze - Sanctity, Gender and Authority in Medieval Caucasia (Edinburgh Byzantine Studies)-Edinburgh University Press (2024).
361 Pages
Introduction
The Cult of Saints and Body Politic
The Lot of the Mother of God’ In 2002, the Katholikos-Patriarch of All Georgia, Ilia II inaugurated a foundation that he named the ‘Society of Iveria’. The society had one purpose: to fundraise for the building of a gigantic church on one of the several hills surrounding Tbilisi. Ten years later, in 2012, the church was officially opened and dedicated to the icon of the Mother of God of Iveria, that is the Theotokos of the Gate (Portaitissa), a medieval icon housed at the Iveron Monastery on Mt Athos. The committee of the church’s ktetors (founders), as they called it, included some of the most influential members of Georgian elites. In 2011, President Saakashvili chaired the opening of the church. The declared purpose of the church was to prepare a seat for the miraculous appearance of the Icon of the Mother of God Portaitissa housed on Mt Athos.
The church, which is as of now still unfinished, now stands as a hetoimasia of sorts, a Marian ‘empty throne’, expecting the miraculous return of ‘Georgia’s main woman’ to Georgia. The home page of the society website reads, The allotment to the All-Holy Mother of God has been since antiquity bequeathed to the Georgian nation as a great responsibility to remain true to the Orthodox faith. The history of the Georgian nation is that of love of the truth and its heroic defence. As per Church tradition, following Christ’s ascension, the apostles threw dice to determine who would preach in which land. The celestial queen was allotted the land of Iveria, that is Georgia. But, on the Lord’s order, the Mother of God stayed in Jerusalem, whereas instead Apostle Andrew was sent to Georgia with the Theotokos’s icon ‘not-made-by-hand’, which later became known as the Mother of God of Acquri. The Lord also said that the icon would act on the Theotokos’s behalf as a protector of our nation until the end of times. Over time, the Mother of God, as proof of her benevolence, gifted the Iverians with yet another great holy relic – the icon of the Mother of God, which miraculously escaped the persecution of icons in the Byzantine Empire and arrived at Mt Athos, at the Monastery of the Iverians.
The icon was called the Mother of God of Iveria and was assigned the same mission as the acheiropoieton Icon of Acquri – to protect Orthodoxy, this time however, on Mt Athos, until the end of times. The honour to retrieve the icon from the sea was given by the Theotokos to a pious monk called Gabriel who lived in the Monastery of the Iverians.1 The website then narrates the role of the Iveron Monastery in the history of Georgian identity, scholarship, and statehood, and is called a symbol of Georgia’s ‘civilisational choice’, that is the Byzantine commonwealth. Unfortunately, continues the website, over time, the Greeks snatched the monastery away from the Georgians. The Patriarch’s initiative was, therefore, to make a new abode for the Mother of God, which would symbolise the responsibility that the nation allotted to the Mother of God has taken. There was a sequence of rather surreal events leading to the selection of this particular spot for the church: For several years, a certain woman had experienced visions in which she was visited by the Mother of God Portaitissa. Being aware that the Western world would soon be engulfed in a doomsday war, the Portaitissa looked for a safe place to live. According to this person, the Portaitissa had chosen Georgia, and specifically this hill, as her last station to make sure that the Georgian nation remained immune to imminent disasters.
This person’s claim might have been one of many apocalyptic fears experienced near the millennium’s edge, but the Patriarch took an interest in her words and often met and conversed with her. With this foundation, the patriarch wished to erect a lasting monument to the oldest and most persistent myths of Georgian Christianity, that Georgia is the lot or the portion of the Mother of God, infinitely reproduced in early and late medieval Georgian chronicles, hagiographies, early modern letters, documents and all genres of literature and public discourses. As a result of the Patriarch’s efforts, instead of being confined to the obscurity of mediaeval annals, nowadays the concept of the Lot of the Mother of God remains a central trope of Georgian political and religious discourses which may be encountered in unexpected contexts. The political implications of the ‘Lot of the Mother of God’, although constantly changing, remain remarkably stable. ‘Martyrs for Faith and the Fatherland’ On 23 April 2015, as part of the commemoration of the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian Apostolic Church proclaimed the victims of the Ottoman atrocities as saints of the church. To celebrate the occasion, the Katholikos of All Armenians Karekin II commissioned an icon depicting the multitudes slaughtered by the Ottomans. The icon conveys a collective and abstract image of Armenia. It illustrates the social diversity of the Armenian victims by highlighting the individual features of the men, women and children. A description on an official poster copy of the icon reads, It is a unique work of iconography, depicting the first ‘new’ saints to be recognised by the Armenian Church in several centuries: the martyrs who (in the words of the official prayer of intercession) gave ‘their lives during the Armenian Genocide for faith and the homeland’.
The Holy Martyrs are portrayed in the dress typical of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, and represent all ranks of Western Armenian society: . . . all of whom perished in the brutal crime of 1915.2 The canonisation of the Genocide victims was the first such act in Armenia in centuries. The Armenian Church has long lost the tradition of beatification together with a sound theology of sainthood. By representing an imagined community of saints, this icon simultaneously addresses the modern concept of nationhood and its ethno-symbolism, meanwhile reaching out to the foundations of Armenian Christianity and identity. It covers all central components of Armenian national identity – its history, the monuments destroyed in historic Armenia, the social diversity of the victims, as well as other nuances of Armenian identity in the Ottoman Empire. Thus, the object of veneration on the icon is double: individual saints (as since canonisation every victim has become a saint of the Armenian Church) and the mystical body of the nation, as symbolised by the static host of the saints engulfed in the dynamics of history.
Thus, on the one hand, the icon depicts an imagined community of saints, and on the other, a singular image of the sacred body of the nation. A formula has been coined to describe the icon: ‘Commemoration of the Holy Martyrs, who were killed during the Armenian Genocide for their faith and their fatherland.’3 Here, the preposition ‘for’ carries a double meaning – it can be understood both as an active participation – for example ‘for the sake of their faith’, or as a passive victimhood of being killed ‘on account of their faith’. While in its latter meaning, the formula reinforces the post-Genocide victimised identity, in its former sense, it reaches deeper into history, reminding modern Armenians of the first such collective martyrdom that took place in the fifth century in the wars against the Sasanians. Since the romantic nationalist reimagination of Vardan Mamikonean’s anti-Persian war as a ‘War of Liberation’, the deeds of Vardan, the Vardanank’ have become a prototype of Armenia’s eternal struggle for selfdefinition in an eternally hostile surrounding.4 Back in the fifth century, the historians of Vardan had applied the earlier Hebrew Maccabean brothers’ narrative template to interpret the Armenian resistance and sacrifice, just like fifteen hundred years later, these fifth-century metaphors of martyrdom were applied to the narrative of the Armenian Genocide. If the pattern set by the Maccabees is followed faithfully, being killed for one’s ethnic or religious identity, even without active martyrdom, becomes a sufficient cause for canonisation. Therefore, on the one hand, the medieval religious concepts of sanctity are adapted to novel, ‘national’ requirements, while on the other, the modern image of the nation is retrojected to medieval history, as an interpretive schema, through which the medieval narratives of sanctity are to be read and interpreted.
The icon, while canonically problematic, effectively encapsulates two dimensions of victimhood: the implicit formula of ‘martyrdom for faith and the fatherland’ ascribed to Late Antique historians is merged with the legal definition of Genocide – ‘the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’.5 Through this profound and, arguably, conscious theological ambiguity, this icon reaches the foundation era of Armenian identity, and depicts the Armenian nation in its totality, as a historically fluid, yet remarkably stable religious and political subject.
Indeed, not everyone was happy with the icon. The canonicity of the icon was doubted and worries were expressed that the beatification of the victims could shift the Armenian identity discourse from victim-centred to, as it were, triumphant, which could theoretically undermine the Armenian post-Genocide identity narrative. Abel Manoukian’s justification of the canonisation illustrates the resulting tension between the theology of sainthood and the urgent requirements of a modern nation: ‘In these instances, we see the scriptural principle of “necessity abolishes the law” in operation. Contrary to the defined rules of the Catholic Church, oikonomia, the well-known principle embedded in the Church’s tradition, is used when the Church administers or responds to the needs of the faithful.’6 Such a temporary suspension of the law is facilitated by the existing paradigm of the Armenian martyrs of Avarayr and by the medieval concept of ‘Baptism in Blood’. Although ‘necessity abolishes the law’ is a misinterpretation of Hebrews 7:12, the resulting Latin maxim, necessitas legem non habet, here comes into operation also in matters of sainthood. In this sense, the necessity, or rather emergency, is the immediate requirement of the nation state. In other words, while the canonisation of the genocide victims may be problematic from the canonical point of view, the necessities of the nation allow a temporary suspension of the law.7 These two vignettes from recent Georgian and Armenian history are certainly different.
They, however, share a common feature: the medieval conceptions of sanctity and cults of saints are embedded in modern ethno-religious and political discourses. And on the other hand, medieval conceptual networks are interpreted through the lens of the modern nation state. Even in utterly secular contexts, the old tropes of sanctity can be and are injected, and exhibit surprising longevity in many areas of public discourses and policies. It is essentially this continuous adaptation of the cult of saints, and the rereadings of earlier cult-related narratives in changing political circumstances, rhetoric and discourses that constitute the core interest of the present book. Saints, their lives and their representations found extraordinary vitality in the lives of the modern Georgian people. The fascination with the cult of the saints and its inclusion in national narratives was ignited well before de-Sovietisation, due to the tremendous effort of Patriarch Ilia II and his personal obsessions with saints. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a virtual archaeology of saints has been launched by the church, with a zeal to uncover Georgia’s holy men and women hidden under the debris of time, or whose memory was suppressed by the atheistic Soviet regime. Almost every year, on the decree of the Holy Synod, an individual joins the ranks of the saints. Some of them are historic figures whose sanctity has only now been acknowledged by the Church, whereas others are recently deceased men and women. While many of these recovered saints have been confined to ecclesiastic commemorations, never leaving the church’s horizon, others became included in national commemorative practices. Along with officially sanctioned cults, other influential cults have also emerged, celebrated illicitly but widely, and flourishing under the selectively blind eye of the Church. Every once in a while, national broadcasts feature relics of saints that are paraded, stolen, gifted, loaned and commodified in ways that are not too dissimilar to the ways they were used during the middle ages.
The endurance and perpetual ‘rediscovery’ of the cult of saints in Armenian and especially Georgian public discourses is largely determined by the centrality that the medieval literary canon occupies in education. Late antique and early medieval saintly stories, hagiographies or historical accounts centred around the lives and deeds of holy men and women, constitute the axis of elementary and secondary education in Georgia. The earliest samples of Georgian writing that emerged in the fifth century are all Martyrdoms, and some of the finest samples of medieval literary Georgian language are the lives of the saints. These early hagiographies are taught to ninth-graders in the original old Georgian. Only after a proper induction to hagiography are the students introduced to secular literature. The first and only medieval non-hagiographic compulsory reading for pupils is the twelfth-century Knight in the Panther Skin. In other words, since the establishment and standardisation of school curricula in the nineteenth century, which have not experienced significant changes throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet years, Georgian children follow a similar path as the history of Georgian literature, internalising saints’ lives as the foundation of national identity. The fifth-century Martyrdom of Queen Shushanik is taught as the earliest and finest piece of Georgian literature, while the Conversion of Kartli and the Life of Nino are often referenced as trustworthy accounts of Georgia’s Christianisation in the early fourth century; the eighth-century Martyrdom of Abo of Tbilisi is taught as a parable of Georgia as the last refuge of Orthodoxy in the Christian East under the Arabs. Whereas since the discovery and edition of the ninth-century Life of Grigol of Xanc’t’a, the life of this powerful abbot has been generally interpreted as a testament to a very modern understanding of Georgian national unity. Therefore, the characters, tropes, symbols and linguistic idiosyncrasies cherry-picked from these texts remain engrained in cultural memory, national narrative, political thinking, both domestic and foreign, and public discourse in general.
Tbilisi’s Saintly Topography
Saints also prosper outside of narratives, being ubiquitously present in the daily lives of the Georgian people. While representations of saints and their monuments are common in all European cities, in Georgia’s capital they seem to enjoy intense political lives, nurtured by current religious and political anxieties. Here, the ‘sites of memory’, even if not directly saintly, are often in one way or another, connected with or interpreted through the lens of historical saintly discourses. If one strolls down Rustaveli Avenue towards Freedom Square, one shall first stop in front of the Parliament building at a monument dedicated to the massacres of 9 April 1989, when the Soviet troops killed twenty-one peaceful protesters. In Georgian nation-building, 9 April was a momentous day, and, as argued near the end of this book, the imagery cast by this event and the interpretive prism through which the events of April 1989 were interpreted were deeply rooted in the textual imagery of the Late Antique Conversion of Kartli. It was this Late Antique narrative that forged the imagery from which the tropes of ‘beginnings’ and ‘transitions’ were adopted in national narratives, by often placing (holy) women at the core of these transitional events. Further down the avenue, the nineteenth-century square is topped by an imposing statue of St George, erected there in 2004 as a commemoration of the Rose Revolution, which culminated on 23 November 2003, on St George’s day. According to its commissioner, President Saakashvili, the golden statue symbolised Georgia’s inevitable vanquishing of its foe, the empire of evil, that is Russia. The problem, however, as many have pointed out, is that the replica of the statue designed by a Russian-Georgian artist could be found in several cities across Russia. Since 2003, Saakashvili has often brought up St George as Georgia’s protector against Russia – the implicit dragon. Less than a year after the Rose Revolution, on another feast of St George, although the one in Spring, Saakashvili’s government took control over the separatist Achara region ousting its long-time quasi-feudal ruler. In subsequent Rose Revolution mythology, therefore, both of these events were associated with St George and his feast, and the quintessential warrior saint’s statue in Tbilisi’s centre served as a material commemoration of these two transitional events in Georgia’s recent history. This political valence of the cult of St George was both Saakashvili’s invention, but also rooted in history. The spurious phonetic association of George with Georgia, the emergence of this cult in the middle of Byzantine-Georgian warfare in the eleventh century, its appropriation by the ruling Bagratid Dynasty during Georgia’s unification, and finally George’s discovery as a hyper-masculine counterpart to the feminine members of Georgia’s saintly pantheon – many of these medieval tropes that we shall encounter below have been embedded in the innumerable ancient and modern representations of this warrior saint. From atop a cliff, St George is overlooked by a tall and serene statue of K’art’vlis Deda (Mother of a Georgian). The statue was erected in 1958 to celebrate the 1,500-year anniversary of the foundation of Tbilisi and was replaced by a new version in the early 1990s. While similar monuments with identical names can be found across former Eastern Bloc states (‘Mother of the Nation’ stands in Kyiv, ‘Motherland Calls’ overlooks Volgograd, ‘Mother Albania’ stands in Tirana and ‘Mother Armenia’ towers over Yerevan), most of them were dedicated to the victory in World War II, except the one in Yerevan. The Georgian ‘Mother’ shares common features with these monuments, yet is also unique in that it was intentionally designed to project ambiguity. The ‘Mother’ holds an unsheathed sword in her right hand and a bowl of wine in her left hand. The statue was supposed to symbolise Georgia’s history par excellence – the centuries-old balance of war and hospitality, and crucially, to celebrate the striking prevalence of female figures in its religious history such as St Nino, St Shushanik, Queen Tamar, Queen Ketevan and many other women who have become principal protagonists of the grand narrative of Georgia’s religious history. Yet, as we shall see below, throughout history, many of these figures, in various guises, just as the monument itself, have projected ambivalence, with their cults also being engulfed with uncertainties. In this, the K’art’vlis Deda monument encapsulates what Mary Douglas calls ‘purity and danger’, in that it simultaneously articulates two exclusive yet complimentary features – menace and hospitality.8 This ambiguity, as it shall be argued below, became a hallmark of medieval and modern Georgian representations of female sanctity, women who are both holy and unholy, pure and impure, feminine and masculine, whose sanctity was both legal and dissident, who both acted as charismatic founders of the realm and were challenged as the reasons for its downfall – in other words, stuck in the grey zone of adulation and misogyny. If one takes a sharp left towards Pushkin Square, one will arrive at Georgia’s Museum of Fine Arts, a nineteenth-century pseudo-classical building with a porch and a colonnade. To the left, a curious bricolage of icons, lit candles and other church inventory can be observed. The porch has been redesigned as a temporary chapel where a group of people regularly gather with a single aim: to pray for the miraculous delivery of two of Georgia’s holiest icons from the museum and their translation to the Church: the icon of Anč’i of the Saviour and the Acquri Icon of the Mother of God. Monk Gabriel, a recently deceased ascetic (and eccentric) monk and saint, is depicted on a large banner on the left, with his quote: ‘If the nation does not deliver the Anč’i icon from the Museum, if the Acquri icon of the Mother of God does not reveal itself, and if the Icon of Iveria [the Portaitissa] does not arrive [in Georgia], how shall Georgia prosper [gabrcqindeba]?!’9 Tbilisi’s saintly topography is, therefore, more than a mere commemoration of the holy men and women. It embodies the very modern anxieties over identity, national belonging, international aspirations and domestic policies. Aspects of modern identity discourses, such as Euro-Atlanticism vs Eurasianism, Georgia’s European integration and its challenge by Soviet legacy, liberal and conservative worldviews, all of these dilemmas of a contemporary nation state can be identified and deciphered as encapsulated in the memory and physical presence of saints and their relics.
Why This Book?
It is perhaps one of the paradoxes of modernity that despite a general decline of religiousness across the Western world, a reverse surge can be observed in the academic interest in the cult of saints. Many books, articles, book series and several important research projects investigating one or another aspect of sainthood have appeared over the last few decades. Since the seminal studies by Peter Brown on holy men, sainthood and the body in Late Antiquity, almost no aspect of the cult of saints has been left without scrutiny, be it the complicated history of the origin and development of the cult of saints, the geographic and cultural peculiarities of cultic practices, the intricate interplay of sanctity and power discourse, sanctity and gender, sanctity and economy, and many others. The study of the cult of saints, if initially rooted in research into hagiography, has long left the boundaries of saintly narratives, and the varieties of cult practices are now identified in archaeological evidence, and in the analyses of cult-related objects in line with the general ‘materiality turn’ in social sciences and the humanities.10 Many other interpretive theories have been applied to the cult of saints, from Marxism to critical theory, anarchism, phenomenology, deconstruction, modern hermeneutics and many others that scrutinise the cult of saints as a means for a better understanding of the human condition. Since Simone de Beauvoir’s interest in the cult of the Theotokos, and the internal contradiction that Beauvoir has observed in the ‘supreme victory of masculinity’ in the cult of Christianity’s ‘most important’ woman, the gendered and power-related aspect of the cult of saints has also been widely addressed. Indeed, this modern intellectual fascination with sainthood can be explained perhaps precisely by the general spiritual detachment from this curious aspect of our cultural history and human experience. In the study of sainthood, the Caucasian, that is Georgian, Armenian and Caucasian Albanian sources, remain peripheral due to their relative linguistic inaccessibility. Despite the wealth of sources related to the cult of saints, as of now there exists no monographic study of the history of the cult of saints in Georgia, or even Caucasia, apart from research in hagiography or the representations of sainthood in visual art.11 The first systematic interest in the early cult of saints in Caucasia was expressed by the European Research Council-funded project the Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity, based at the Faculty of History at Oxford and supervised by Brian Ward-Perkins. The project mapped the cult of saints as a system of beliefs and practices in its earliest and most fluid form, from its origins until around ad 700 (by which date most cult practices were firmly established): the evolution from honouring the memory of martyrs, to their veneration as intercessors and miracle-workers; the different ways that saints were honoured and their help solicited; the devotion for relics, sacred sites, and images; the miracles expected from the saints.12 My responsibility within the project was to analyse Late Antique Armenian and Georgian sources related to the cult of saints. I had a somewhat tangential interest in the cult of saints before the project, but in time, and as a result of our weekly conversations at Trinity College, Bryan Ward-Perkins’s office, I became fascinated by the cult of saints and its ability to absorb and transform other cultural phenomena.13 We have come to realise that the cult of saints in Late Antique Caucasia had a distinct word to say in the history of Christianity, perhaps contrary to original expectations. This conceptual uniqueness was the thoroughly political nature of the earliest Caucasian cult-related narratives, and the deep embeddedness of the cult of saints in identity and political rhetoric in early medieval Armenians, Georgian and also Caucasian Albanian sources, whose trace is faint, yet important in the history of Christendom. Arguably, this trait was largely determined by the diversity of cultural and religious practices in Caucasia. Located on a virtual crossroad of civilisations, the Late Antique Caucasian kingdoms and cultures were exposed to and have internalised religious traditions and conceptual systems from across Eurasia: from Christianity to Islam and Judaism, and from local mountainous religious practices to Zoroastrianism. As such, writers of the period often had to manoeuvre between various and often competing understandings of sacredness, the materiality of religion or commemorative practices. All these tendencies, whether in their symbolic form, rhetorical or political manifestation, contributed to the creation of the extraordinary cultural landscape of Late Antique and medieval Caucasia, reflected also in the nature and relevance of the cult of saints.14 Among many shades of sanctity, the present book focuses on its one aspect, and its manifestations in changing political contexts. What follows below can be read as an exercise in a hermeneutical unfolding of a conceptual system created at the intersection of three phenomena – sanctity, gender and politics – and the transformations that this conceptual system has experienced in changing political circumstances.
The Saintly and the Feminine
Apart from a tendency to politicise the cult of the saints in identity and political rhetoric, medieval Georgian religious rhetoric has another additional characteristic commonly spotted by anyone with even a superficial knowledge of its religious history – a dramatic prominence of female saintly figures. The introducer of Christianity in Georgia, St Nino, was a woman, and so were the pseudo-epigraphic authors of her mission. The first piece of original Georgian writing is a martyrdom account of a holy queen, St Shushanik. Meanwhile, the cults of Armenia’s great virgin-martyrs, Hṙip’simē and Gayanē, enjoyed a considerable influence in Georgia. The late twelfth-century holy queen Tamar (1184–1213) was established as a figure of unmatched centrality in Georgian historiography, religious traditions and folklore. Since the seventeenth century, Saint Ketevan (1560–1624), mother of King Teimuraz I, has been hailed as the last of the great Georgian martyrs, brutally killed by the Safavids on account of her Christianity, thus ending this long and turbulent chapter of history. Due to the continuous readings and rereadings of the foundational texts that constituted the core of the medieval corpus, some of the influential medieval, early modern and indeed modern authors perceived the entanglement of sanctity, gender and politics as an essentially Georgian conundrum.15 Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, no other medieval Christian literary tradition has been as concerned with the interrelation of the feminine, the sacred and the political, as the Georgian. Apart from several medieval discourses that directly address this question, it will be demonstrated below that this conceptual problem implicitly transpires in much of Georgian writing. While this fixation on the feminine was originally determined by the gender of Georgia’s illuminatrix, the reflections on the interaction of the feminine, the political and the religious became particularly passionate during and after the reign of Queen Tamar. The disproportionately strong veneration of female saints was further reinforced by the extraordinary cult of the Mother of God and by the persistence of the political concept of Georgia as the Theotokos’s allotment. Surely, female saints show no quantitative dominance, and the sheer number of male martyr saints in Georgian liturgical calendars is overwhelming. Nevertheless, male saint names of Georgian origin make an extremely rare appearance in the onomasticon. Eustathios (the name of the great sixth-century saint) has never become even remotely popular (although, admittedly, my great-grandfather was Eustathios), and no Abos, Razhdens or any other names have become widely disseminated. While names such as Giorgi, David, Demetre and Alexander constitute the core of the Georgian male onomasticon, they have little to do with the cult of saints in Georgia. Conversely, three of women’s most popular names, Nino, Tamar and Ketevan with their innumerable variations (Nini, Ninutsa, Keti, Keta, Keto, Ketato, Tamta, Tamuna, Tako and many more), are all those of the three great female saints. Recently, even the names of many female characters of the Conversion of Kartli have started to appear, and even the somewhat peripheral Shushanik (a markedly Armenian name) has become more common than the names of the above-listed male saints. The fact that Georgia’s foundational narrative focuses on Nino and her all-female companions, that the first original Georgian hagiographic account and also the last great one, narrate the martyrdom of holy queens, and that the greatest monarch in Georgian cultural memory was a woman, contributed to a strong intertwining of holy female bodies and body politic.
Sources
The chapters below trace the readings and rereadings of the foundational cult narratives throughout several consecutive periods of Georgian history, and identify recurrent political conceptualisations of sainthood in some of the following rhetorical contexts: the foundations of orthodoxies (and heterodoxies) in the Caucasian region in the Late Antique and early medieval era (roughly from the fifth to the seventh centuries); the formation and consolidation of the Bagratid powers and rhetoric in the eleventh-century Byzantine commonwealth, followed by the era of Queen Tamar and the subsequent formation of her living memory and cult (tenth–thirteenth centuries); the establishment of first Muscovite–Georgian diplomatic ties in the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries; nineteenth-century Russian Imperialist and opposing nationalist rhetoric; followed by a brief sketch of the Soviet and post-Soviet rediscoveries of the cult of saints and its political implications. The sources discussed throughout the book are, therefore, chosen by the degree of their dissemination, rewritings and rereadings in each of these drastically different contexts. Of all the earliest primary sources quoted, none are unproblematic from the point of view of dating, attribution and authenticity. Although a consensus exists over the dating of some of the early Armenian and Georgian narratives, nevertheless, the expediency of the cult of saints in political and identity rhetoric was far too crucial for these texts to have remained sterile from severe ideological interpolations. This is particularly true of narratives related to the founding saints of the Christian Caucasian cultures, such as St Gregory in Armenia and St Nino in Georgia. While, for example, the Life of Gregory the Illuminator is dated to the fifth century, individual parts of the narrative, especially related to the various aspects of St Gregory’s cult, are far less convincingly assigned to the same early period. This is even truer for the cult of St Nino, whose numerous vitae reveal stronger divergence and ambiguities. While the earliest account of her life may be a seventh-century or earlier composition, the evidence for such dating is more circumstantial than secure. The cult of a saint was a living, breathing phenomenon and subject to constant revision and adaptation. With the development of established monasticism, and court and dynastic rhetoric, such texts were rewritten and adapted to urgent rhetorical necessities. This and the previous century have seen volumes arguing for and against the virtual existence of, for example, St Nino, the ethnic identity of St Shushanik’s original Martyrdom, or the validity of Armenian claims regarding the work of Gregory the Illuminator and the founder of Armenian literacy, St Maštoc’. None of these questions is addressed in this book. Instead, a certain phenomenological perspective shall be adopted, whereby I shall focus on the readers’ and interpreters’ experiences and interpretations rather than on source criticism of these early medieval compositions. The principal argument of the book is that due to the nature of the medieval Georgian experience with the cult of saints, a unique relationship among the religious, the political and the feminine representations of sanctity has been formed. Consequently, some of the questions asked are: What was the nature of this relationship? How are the material remains and memories of a saint politicised? What kind of phenomena are generated with the politicisation of specifically female saintly remains and their memories? It is my hope that this conceptual crossroad explored in a small area of the Christian world can potentially serve as a theoretical interpretive tool, and will open research avenues also in other geographic as well as cultural milieux.
Value
I intend to make use of and enrich some of the well-established theoretical concepts from historiography, anthropology and political science as I read and interpret sources to answer some of the questions outlined above, some of which will remain grounded within their traditional framework, while others may be modified to better explain our sources.
Since relics and the politicisation of saintly remains will be a recurring theme, it is the theory of value that will often be addressed, along with associated concepts, such as gift-giving, exchange, commodity, ‘inalienable possessions’ and so on.16 My interpretation of ‘value’ is mostly informed by anthropological theory and the more recent materiality turn in the humanities. Here I have adopted Georg Simmel’s and Arjun Appadurai’s theories of value as something that arises from exchange. Appadurai has famously coined the term ‘regimes of value’ to describe the convertibility of the value of things among different cultures.17 In other words, as Patrick Geary writes, ‘the value of the relics rests on the communal acceptance of a set of shared beliefs that determine its authenticity and efficacy in a particular social and cultural environment’.18 My interest lies in the transformation and transitivity of value and the strategies by which the relics and memories of the saints are endowed with political value. In the case studies below, the sacred remains and objects associated with saints travel precisely among these ‘regimes of value’. Roman, Byzantine and Russian Imperial rhetoric generated their own ‘regimes of value’ within which these sacred objects and cult narratives moved and operated. Valences of the cults also changed as ‘regimes of value’ changed, while at the same time maintaining striking constancy. When it comes to the discovery and ownership of relics, they often indeed ‘resist their ownership’, to paraphrase Simmel’s famously laconic definition of value, with their value resting in their distribution or investment in body politic.19 Therefore, the relics of saints, often conceptualised as the treasure in early medieval narratives, have the power to create a discursive tension between private and political, and herald a transition from the former to the latter. When endowed with political value, the relics become inalienable to the charismatic person who has discovered or inherited them, while being given away and invested into body politic. In exchange, this person assumes a political body, as demonstrated early in the book with several examples. Relics can also act as symbols of political sovereignty. In the early modern period, for example, the relics as material confirmations of Georgia’s religious and political sovereignty were perceived as Georgia’s inalienable possessions, yet they were both taken by the Russian Empire and gifted back, ‘in exchange’ for political annexation. Therefore, some of the aspects of the commodification of the sacred explored below will be those of ‘giving, while retaining’, or inversely, taking while giving. As summarised by Annette Weiner, the paradox inherent in the processes of keeping-while-giving creates an illusion of conservatism, of refashioning the same things, of status quo. Although possessions, through their iconographies and histories, are the material expressions of ‘keeping’, the most that such possessions accomplish is to bring a vision of permanence into a social world that is always in the process of change. The effort to make memory persist, as irrational as the combat against loss can be, is fundamental to change. The problems inherent in ‘keeping’ nurture the seeds of change.20 The additional question of the present book is, therefore, how is this value transformed with the gender of the relics of a saint? Does the femininity of a saint affect the value as endowed in her memory or material presence? The preliminary answer is indeed, the value of a material or mnemonic relic is often transformed when the gender aspect is introduced into them. More often than not, this value becomes that of mediation, of situatedness in the ambiguous zone of in-between, whether of two realms, two times or two existential conditions. Therefore, the second major interpretive framework of the present study is that of ambiguity.
Ambiguity
The Late Antique Georgian corpus that can be conventionally titled the Conversion of Kartli, although the narrative of Georgia’s conversion has appeared in many other shapes and forms, introduced a specific method of conceptualising female sanctity. Nino, the protagonist of the narrative, while in subsequent centuries celebrated and praised in all possible ways, was, as a woman, also a conceptual problem. The fluctuation of Nino’s cult continued further in subsequent centuries: if, for example, during the rise of the military Bagratids, some resentment transpires towards her, Nino then becomes central to Queen Tamar’s living and posthumous cult. It is argued below that the ambiguity generated by Nino’s cult was translated into her liminality. Nino and other female saints, especially the martyred queen Shushanik, became liminal figures of sorts, as they were closely and strongly associated with temporal and geographic inbetweenness. In medieval Georgian historical and religious thinking, Nino, together with the objects associated with her, was the marker of the end of the old and the beginning of the new, thus standing in the centre of the ambiguous space in-between. A similarly liminal nature was inherited by her cross, which marks the North–South divide of the Caucasian mountain range, or the political boundaries in the middle of the kingdom.21 Similarly, St Shushanik became a symbol of the fuzzy space between the Armenian and Georgian realms, as well as between the past and the present in the shared history of these two peoples. The Conversion of Kartli is also the first text that elaborates on political and religious geography by problematising the idea of the ‘North’, and the movement between the northern and southern realms, which has become an enduring metaphysical and political concept in medieval and modern Georgian identity discourses. Even the holy queen Tamar and the martyred queen Ketevan were conceptualised by the authors of their cults as metaphors of temporal and existential transitions. Over time, all these religious and political ideas – the past and the present, the north and south, power and sanctity, the political and the natural – have become embedded in the ambiguous bodies of the female saints. The central interpretive framework for the reading of these sources is the concept of ambiguity of the feminine. In Purity and Danger, a classic study of ambiguity in animate and inanimate objects, Mary Douglas studies creatures that fall in between the categories we use to structure our world.22 These creatures, things or, in our case, people, are seen in traditional societies as particularly powerful, sacred and dangerous. Douglas’s original thesis has been adopted in religious history as well. Mary Beard, for example, points to the gender ambiguity of Vestal Virgins exactly from the vantage point espoused in the present book: thus the ambiguity of their sexual status, the way they share the characteristics of virgins, matrons and even men need be regarded no longer as an awkward aspect somehow to be accommodated in any explanation of their position, but as a crucial element in designating their sacredness . . . just as the perception of the pangolin as interstitial (falling between mammal and fish) must be closely related to its sacred role, so the highly ambiguous status of the Vestal Virgins must be seen as playing an important part in their symbolic position. The fact that, through various aspects of their dress, their cult obligations and their privileges, they may be perceived as falling between several categories of sexuality, marks them out as sacred.
Further Beard elaborates, the greater number of strictly defined physical stages in the life of a woman, compared with those in a man’s career, itself encourages the kind of subtle play of ambiguity that we see in the case of the Vestals. One need only think of the barriers crossed by a woman in the course of her life (menarche, first intercourse, first parturition, menopause) and the way these, in many societies, are visibly signalled by costume or involve different forms of title and address, to understand the greater versatility in the figure of the woman for the creation of a sacred status through a confusion of standard categories.24 The perception of holy women as transgressors was particularly persistent in early Christianity, as observed in female saintly accounts. In her study of the Martyrdom of Vibia Perpetua, Elisabeth Castelli argues that Christian women, through rigorous bodily pieties, constructed their special relationship to holiness, relationships that came to be described as the transformation of gender. These women’s refusal to participate in conventional sexual roles ascribed to them by late antique culture (not as an attempt to undercut the patriarchal social order, but in order to achieve spiritual perfection) was perceived ambivalently. On the one hand, their holiness was marked by the abandonment of socially sanctioned gender roles; on the other hand, the same abandonment was seen as dangerous to the natural and hierarchical order of social relations.25 These ambiguous figures often assume the function of mediation between two structures, and, while situated in between these structures, are sacralised further. By drawing on Claude Levi-Strauss’s classic studies, Edmund Leach writes, In every myth system we will find a persistent sequence of binary discriminations as between human/superhuman, mortal/immortal, male/ female, legitimate/ illegitimate, good/bad . . . followed by a ‘mediation’ of the paired categories thus distinguished. ‘Mediation’ (in this sense) is always achieved by introducing a third category which is ‘abnormal’ or ‘anomalous’ in terms of ordinary, rational categories. Thus, myths are full of fabulous monsters, incarnate gods, virgin mothers. This middle ground is abnormal, non-natural, holy. It is typically the focus of all taboo and ritual observance.26 The ambiguity of the feminine was a hallmark of the earliest of Christian discourses. The greatest of such ‘ambiguous’ figures was the Theotokos who, as a mother and a virgin, as the bearer of God, and as the link between humanity and divinity, was perceived as the ultimate mediatrix. Yet, in all her exceptionality, in certain traditions, especially the Gnostic Gospels, Mary too had to ‘shed’ her femininity and ‘become male’. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Christ’s disciples wish to cast Mary (probably Magdalene) away due to her gender. Christ, however, objected: ‘Behold, I myself shall lead her so as to make her male, that she too may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’27 Transgressing one’s feminine self, was, therefore, a crucial step towards holiness. In her study of the cult of the holy women, Maria Galatariotou discusses the ambiguity and exceptionality as the essence of the cult of the Mother of God. Galatariotou argues that It was precisely Mary’s sex – and the ambiguities with which it had been endowed – that was the most decisively important ingredient in her makeup as ‘The Great Mediator’. Mary partakes of more than one of the categories with which the Christian mind had structured its universe: on a sexual level, she is-both a virgin (a sexually unspecified creature, a less-than-female woman) and a mother (a sexually unambiguous, fertile woman); on the level of social kinship, she is both the mother of a son and the bride of that same son: both, further, a bride of the son and of the father. The creation of not only one ambiguity but of an entire structure of such; the tension caused by any attempt to understand Mary’s persona according to any accepted social categories, . . . all combine to make Mary an extremely powerful symbol. . . . Power acting through culture, Church and State control and ideology, ruled out the first possibility and forced the second: Mary was declared the Panagia, the All-Holy.28 The female protagonists of the present book are such liminal characters who, through their perpetual ambiguity, project ‘purity and danger’. By virtue of their ambiguous femininity, they act as intermediaries between two times, two realms, between sacred and the profane, between civilisation and wilderness, the Golden Age and the catastrophe. It is the ambiguity conceived in a female saint’s body and its political manifestations that are the primary interest of the present book.
Exception
Finally, the most commonly used theoretical concept throughout the book is that of exception. ‘The state of exception’, as coined by Karl Schmitt, was reworked by Giorgio Agamben as a ‘no-man’s-land between public law and political fact’.29 My usage of exception or ‘state of exception’ is perhaps the least similar to Karl Schmitt’s original concept of political theology. However, it can still help us interpret some of the sources as well as understand how the theology of sainthood is readapted in changing structures, from medieval ideas of kingship to the modern nation state. Exception, as a concept, warrants three questions: Who decides on the exception? How is an exception justified? And what are the implications of an exception for whatever is left beyond the exceptional? There are two contexts in which ‘exception’ is used below. The first refers to the unique and irreplicable merging of the political and the feminine, especially in the sacred image of Queen Tamar that became a central interpretive framework of female sanctity in medieval and early modern narratives and surviving folklore. As the creators of Tamar’s cult argued, this unique suspension of the order of things, in this case of gender roles, occurred first in the event of the Conversion – in Nino’s mandate to preach and convert, and second in Tamar’s exclusive and inalienable mandate to rule in her name. In these two extraordinary instances of history, the advantages of the feminine nature in religion and politics were conceptualised as a total and inimitable exception. Such conceptualisation of the exception allowed a simultaneous retaining of the traditional association of femininity with destruction and catastrophe, retained in the stories of other non-exceptional women of history. My second reading of the ‘state of exception’ is tied with the modern theology of sainthood and nationhood. As in the case of the Martyrs of the Genocide, in modern Armenian and Georgian discourses of sanctity, we often encounter justifications for canonisation that acknowledge the noncanonical nature of such canonisations, yet justify them by the (urgent) requirements of the nation state. It was arguably this idea of emergency that shaped the twentieth-century and contemporary political theology of sainthood and nationhood of Georgian and Armenian ecclesiastic and political elites. This situation of exception was utilised as a principal argument by the initiators of the canonisation of the victims of the Genocide in Armenia, as well as of a range of figures of importance yet dubious saintly careers in Georgia by Patriarch Ilia II.
Text Structure
The book is conventionally divided into three parts and nine chapters that analyse the conceptual entanglement of the holy, the feminine and the political. Each subsequent chapter illustrates cascading readings and recycling of earlier texts in new historical realities. The first chapter, in a sense, sets the tone for the remainder of the study. Earliest Caucasian cult-related narratives are introduced with a focus on their relevance for political and identity discourses. It focuses on how the relics of the saints were incorporated into the rhetoric of royal legitimation in Armenia, Georgia and Caucasian Albania, and how the political value of these relics was generated and propagated. In this opening chapter, the Armenian sources have some predominance, since, arguably, the early Armenian rhetoric of cult-related narratives exercised influence also beyond Armenia, in Georgian and Caucasian Albanian writing and their conceptualisations of sainthood. The second chapter carries on the discussion of Georgian foundational narratives with a focus on the Conversion of Kartli. It was in this Late Antique composition where, for the first time in Georgian writing, the feminine identity of a saint was problematised, and gave rise to the ambiguous cult of St Nino. After a certain gap, in the middle ages, the Life of Nino became the most influential narrative in medieval and modern Georgian corpora and affected the interpretation of other cults and political discourses. While the Life has been edited and rewritten numerous times since its creation, the living cult of St Nino enjoyed much less popularity than her narrative, resurfacing only in isolated instances. Arguably, the Conversion corpus crafted the image of Nino as an absolute exception, whose centrality, despite her gender, was determined by the extraordinary and transitional times in the universal history of salvation, an aspect of Nino’s cult that was also retained in the folk reimaginations of this person. Nino was seen as a great mediator between historical times and Kartli’s geo-political loci. Her vita conceptualises her both as the mediator between the past and the present, paganism and Christianity, and between the enlightened South and the obscure North, by spearheading Iberia’s transition between these structures and anti-structures. The third chapter offers a case study of the cult-related traditions of the fifth-century martyr, Queen Shushanik. The chapter draws on Claude Levi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss’s classical structuralist anthropological theories of ‘gift-giving’ and ‘women as gifts’. Shushanik’s cult was discovered during the religious controversies that began in the seventhcentury Caucasus between the Armenians and the Georgians, with much of the rhetoric of these debates unfolding around the commemoration of Shushanik and the site of her relics. It is argued that the political value of the memory and the relics of the holy queen were determined by the gender role of this person, and by her conceptualisation as a gift and a bride given by the Armenians to the Georgians, a gift that was ‘unreciprocated’. Meanwhile, while St Shushanik’s femininity played a crucial role in the political value of her relics, as a female saint who marked the fuzzy space between the Georgian and the Armenian physical and mnemonic realms, she symbolised the strategically liminal region in Caucasia, a crucial military target of all major regional powers. Part II is entirely dedicated to the formation of the Bagratid royal ideology in their dealings with the Byzantines, and the effect of their new religious and political aspirations on the political conceptualisations of sainthood and sanctity. In the eleventh century, along with the creation of a sizable religious and hagiographic corpus, the compilation of K’art’lis C’xovreba (The Georgian Chronicles) was initiated – a historiographic project that was supposed to create a new standard narrative of Georgia’s history as seen from the era of Georgia’s political unification. This period was marked by the relative abandonment of old saints and a marked masculinisation of the Georgian saintly pantheon, a topic addressed in Chapter 4. In this period, warrior saints saturated the Georgian saintly landscape, among whom St George was certainly the most prominent. The abandonment of the ancient Jerusalemite rite and the adoption of the Constantinopolitan tradition, along with the political and ideological unification of Georgia under the Bagratids and their opposition to the Byzantines, led to the quest for the ‘new’ definitions of Georgia and Georgianness, a project centered around the cult of old and new saints. Chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to the most enduring concept of the medieval and indeed modern Georgian political theologies, the tradition of Georgia as the ‘Lot of the Mother of God’. This belief emerged in the Middle Byzantine period first as a Bagratid claim and as a part of the identity discourses of the Georgian Athonite Fathers. In both instances, the cult of the Theotokos was forged as the marker of Georgian linguistic, ethnic and political identity as opposed to the Byzantines. The Lot of the Mother of God also became the galvanising concept of Georgia’s political and cultural unity, while, in time, and since Georgia’s disintegration, the same concept also became part of the separatist rhetorical arsenal of Georgia’s former constituent regions and later independent kingdoms and principalities. The sixth chapter is entirely focused on the making of the cult of Queen Tamar, whose reign, as I argue, was transitional in the gender and political discourses of sanctity. The zeal of Tamar’s writers to legitimise her inalienable and personal mandate to kingship created tropes and metaphors which contributed to the eventual sacralisation of this person of history and lore. Tamar’s emerging cult also absorbed earlier cults, especially of St Nino and the Theotokos, and the three cults were merged as the justifiers of the ‘exceptionality’ of Tamar and her mandate. Yet, Tamar’s as well as the cults of other female saints, remained ambiguous, caught between adulation and the traditional misogyny of the premodern societies. The third section of the present book is mostly dedicated to the reception of the classical texts discussed in the two previous chapters – the Conversion cycle and the K’art’lis C’xovreba corpus. Chapter 7 takes the reader to the post-Byzantine and post-unity eras of Georgia’s history. Georgia was disunited into four political entities and all four were caught among the three large geopolitical players – the Safavid Iran, the Ottomans and the emerging Muscovy/Russia. The central figure of this chapter and section is Queen Ketevan, the last great martyr-saint of Georgian tradition, brutally executed by the Safavids on account of her Christianity and her son’s political activism. In the seventeenth century, Russians ‘discovered’ Georgia as a holy land of sorts, and were increasingly interested and focused on the holy relics that the Georgian principalities possessed. The Russian travellers, diplomats and ruling elites also noticed and internalised what they saw as the femininity of Georgia’s religious tradition, having incorporated this vision in their imperialist and colonial representations of Georgia as a feminine ‘other’. In Chapter 8 the nineteenth-century nationalist responses to the imperial rhetoric are explored with a focus on the rediscovery of the medieval Georgian saintly narratives, cults and tropes. Georgia’s national elites attempted to nationalise Georgia’s saintly imagery, especially that of St Nino, which they saw as hijacked by imperial rhetoric. With the new nationalist rereading of the Conversion of Kartli, the early medieval trope of the menacing North was reapplied to the Russian Empire, as an alien and uncivilised land. In this process of crafting a new national symbolism of sovereignty, while deconstructing the imperial rhetoric of Georgia, the old Nino tropes were a crucial discovery. The ninth and final chapter is a brief study of contemporary religious and political discourse and its entanglement with the notions of the feminine and the sacred. It focuses on how the readings of medieval texts and reinterpretations of the nineteenth-century constructions contributed to a unique ethno-religious discourse formed during the pontificate of the Katholikos-Patriarch Ilia II in Georgia, which involved the politics and gender of saints. Arguably, the interpretations of the foundational narratives and medieval political theologies were subsumed in contemporary opposition between the liberal pro-Western and (latent) pro-Russian rhetoric, and other issues constituting the core of modern national anxieties.
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