Arsenius of Ninotsminda
Our Father among the Saints Arsenius, Bishop of Ninotsminda
Bishop · Venerable · d. c. 1018, on Mount Athos
Commemorated 31 July — Repose at the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos
Arsenius was a Georgian bishop who resigned his see to become a monk, and one of the greatest scholars of the golden age of Georgian letters — a translator, writer, calligrapher and theologian. Tonsured at Jerusalem, he returned to Georgia and was consecrated bishop of Ninotsminda in Kakheti, but the office was a burden to a contemplative, and he obtained leave from David III Kuropalates to lay it down. With his friend John Grdzelidze he was invited to the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos, where the two of them joined Euthymius the Iberian in the enormous labour of translating the Scriptures and the Fathers into Georgian. He died there in great old age and was buried at the monastery's church of Saint Symeon the Stylite; George the Hagiorite afterwards moved his bones into the main ossuary.
Ninotsminda
Arsenius takes his name from Ninotsminda — "Saint Nino's" — an ancient see of Kakheti in eastern Georgia, whose sixth-century cathedral, one of the oldest domed churches in the country, still stands in ruin at Sagarejo. Of his family and birth nothing is transmitted.
He went as a young man to Jerusalem and was tonsured a monk there, in the Georgian community that had been settled around the Holy Places since the fifth century and which was, with Sinai, one of the two great schools of Georgian monastic learning outside the kingdom. He returned to Georgia and was consecrated bishop of Ninotsminda.
The resignation
The Georgian sources are unusually frank about what happened next: he found the episcopate incompatible with the life he wanted, and asked to be released from it. The request went to David III Kuropalates of Tao (†1000/1001), the great prince of the Georgian south-west and the patron of the Georgian foundation on Athos, whose permission such a step required. David granted it.
A bishop laying down his see for the sake of prayer is rare enough in any tradition to be worth noting; the Georgian tradition records it without embarrassment and honours him for it. He kept the name of the see, and the calendars know him by it still.
Iviron, and the Georgian translation school
Arsenius left with John Grdzelidze ("John the Long"), himself a scholar and a churchman of weight, and the two were invited to Mount Athos by John the Iberian and his son Euthymius the Iberian, the founders of the Iviron monastery. They arrived at the Holy Mountain and joined the community.
There Arsenius gave the rest of his life to what the Georgians remember him for. Euthymius was at the centre of the greatest translation enterprise in the history of the Georgian language, turning the Scriptures and a vast body of patristic, ascetic and liturgical literature out of Greek into Georgian and, in the other direction, giving the Greek world the Barlaam and Ioasaph romance. Arsenius and John Grdzelidze assisted him in it — as translators in their own right, as revisers, and, in Arsenius's case, as a calligrapher, which in that age was not a decorative skill but the means by which a translation became a book and reached the churches of Georgia. The Georgian tradition calls him "one of the greatest churchmen of his time" and ranks him with the translators rather than with the hierarchs.
He lived many years at Iviron and died in advanced old age, traditionally about 1018, and was buried in the monastery's church of Saint Symeon the Stylite. Later, when George the Hagiorite was rebuilding and re-ordering the Georgian house on Athos in the mid-eleventh century, he translated Arsenius's remains into the ossuary of the main monastery, which is the ordinary Athonite honour paid to a father of the community.
Feast and commemoration
July 31 (church date; New Calendar civil July 31, Old Calendar civil August 13). His memory is kept by the Georgian Orthodox Church and printed on this day by the Orthodox Church in America, which has carried a substantial series of Georgian commemorations since the 1990s; the Greek and Slavonic Menaia do not have him. He has no proper office, and the common of a venerable hierarch is used. He belongs to the Athonite-Georgian company kept through the year in this collection with John the Iberian, Euthymius the Iberian and George the Hagiorite. The day is the last before the Dormition Fast.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a venerable hierarch)
Thou didst lay down the throne of the hierarch for the yoke of Christ, and in the quiet of the Holy Mountain didst labour at the words of the Fathers, giving them to thy people in their own tongue, O father Arsenius; intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Arsenius is painted in the modern Georgian manner as a monk-bishop: the koukoulion or the monastic mantle rather than the phelonion, since he died a simple monk, with the omophorion sometimes added over it to show the rank he had laid down — an iconographic compromise the Georgians use for resigned hierarchs. He is grey-bearded and aged, and his attribute is a book or a scroll and a pen, marking the translator and the calligrapher; he appears most often not alone but in the group of the Georgian fathers of the Holy Mountain, beside John, Euthymius, George the Hagiorite and John Grdzelidze, with the Iviron katholikon behind them.
No pre-1900 icon of him was located for this collection; a search of Wikimedia Commons under the Georgian and Russian forms of his name returned nothing but a nineteenth-century Caucasian periodical. Georgian saints of this period are in general poorly served by digitised public-domain images.
Disputed questions
- The dates are soft. He must have been at Ninotsminda before David Kuropalates's death in 1000/1001, and at Iviron in the lifetime of Euthymius (†1028); a repose about 1018 is the usual reckoning, and the Georgian and OCA notices place him simply "in the eleventh century." This entry follows the eleventh-century placing for indexing while recording the uncertainty.
- Which Arsen? Georgian letters of the tenth to twelfth centuries have several notable Arsens — Arsen Iqaltoeli, the philosopher and translator of the age of David the Builder, and Arsen I of Georgia, the ninth-century catholicos among them. This Arsenius is distinguished by his see, by the resignation, and by his connection with Iviron; the Wikidata entity Arsen Ninotsmindeli, described as a Georgian calligrapher, is his.