Eikon

Christodoulos the Philosopher

Our Venerable Father Christodoulos the Philosopher, of Georgia

Venerable

Commemorated 18 August — Commemoration in the Georgian calendar

Christodoulos was a Georgian scholar-monk from the village of Sakara in Imereti, remembered in his own Church as a philosopher and a controversialist. He was learned in the Scriptures and in languages, and — in order to argue with Muslims on their own ground — committed the Koran to memory. Summoned to a public disputation staged by a Persian king whose name the Georgian sources give as Iamame, he answered the king's own objections, outmatched the court astrologer, and defeated the Muslim scholar set against him, arguing from Scripture and from logic. Church tradition places his monastic labours successively in Georgia, at the Georgian monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, and on the island of Patmos. The Georgian calendar keeps him on August 18.

Sakara, and a scholar's formation

Christodoulos came from Sakara, a village of the Imereti province in western Georgia, in the country between Kutaisi and the Kvirila. The tradition emphasises two things about his learning: an exceptional command of the Holy Scriptures, and an unusual facility in languages — which in a mediaeval Georgian churchman means Greek certainly, and very probably Armenian, Persian and Arabic, the languages of the neighbours with whom Georgia's theological arguments were conducted.

His distinguishing decision was to study the opposing case at first hand. To defend the Christian faith he made himself thoroughly acquainted with other religions, and to that end he learned the Koran by heart. In a Georgian context this is not merely a feat of memory: it is the deliberate adoption of the method of the Muslim mutakallim, who argues from a text he can quote entire. Christodoulos meant to be able to do the same.

The disputation at the Persian court

A Persian king, called Iamame in the Georgian sources, arranged a formal debate between Muslim and Christian scholars and had Christodoulos invited. Public inter-religious disputation of this kind was a real institution of the mediaeval Islamic courts — the majlis — with rules, an audience and a presiding judge, and Georgian and Armenian churchmen were regularly drawn into it.

The Georgian account of what followed has three stages. The elder first answered the king's own objections; then he defeated the court astrologer; and finally he overcame the Muslim scholar appointed as his opponent, arguing from the text of Scripture and by logical demonstration. No text of the disputation survives, and the account is a summary written long afterwards for the honour of a Georgian saint; its value is as evidence that the Georgian Church remembered him as a man whose particular sanctity was intellectual courage exercised in the presence of a hostile power.

Iviron, and Patmos

The Georgian hierarch and traveller Timote Gabashvili, in his account of his own journey to the Holy Mountain — the Mimosvla ("Pilgrimage") — records that Christodoulos had laboured among the monks of Iviron, the Georgian monastery of Mount Athos. Iviron was, from its foundation at the end of the tenth century by John and Euthymius the Athonite and the general Tornike, the great workshop of Georgian translation and the point at which Georgian and Byzantine learning met; a Georgian scholar-monk of Christodoulos's kind belongs there naturally.

Church historians add that he laboured afterwards on the island of Patmos. The Georgian tradition thus traces a career running from Imereti to Athos to the Aegean — the ordinary itinerary of a learned Georgian monk of the mediaeval centuries, and one that would have carried him through Constantinople.

Feast and commemoration

August 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 31), within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. His commemoration belongs to the Georgian Church and travels with it into the OCA's calendar; the Greek synaxaria do not carry him, and there is no service in the printed Menaion. Where he is commemorated liturgically the common of a venerable father is used.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness: for taking up the cross thou didst follow after Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to despise the flesh, which passes away, and to care for the soul, which is immortal. Wherefore thy spirit, O venerable Christodoulos, rejoices with the angels.

Original translation from the Georgian

Iconography

Christodoulos would be painted in the Georgian manner as a monastic elder — schema and mantle, bearded, holding an open scroll or a book, the book being the proper attribute of the teaching and disputing saints, as it is for Maximus the Confessor and for the Georgian fathers of Iviron. Where a Georgian iconographer wishes to name the disputation, the scene would be set as a court audience: the ruler enthroned, the astrologer and the Muslim scholar on one side, the monk standing with his book on the other — the composition used in the East for every confessor who argued before a king, from Daniel onwards.

No image of him, of any period, has been located for this collection. He is one of the Georgian saints whose eventual portrait, if one is found, is most likely to come from a composite Synaxis of the Saints of Georgia rather than from an individual panel.

Disputed questions

  • His century is not transmitted. Neither the Georgian notice nor the OCA's rendering of it gives a year of birth, a year of repose, or a reign against which to fix him, and this repository accordingly records no century and indexes him under unknown. The one loose chronological handle is the king Iamame, who has not been identified with any Persian or Iranian ruler known under that name; the form may be a Georgian corruption of a name or a title, or may stand for a Muslim ruler who was not a Persian at all.
  • Timote Gabashvili's date. The notice that transmits the Athos reference calls the author a nineteenth-century historian; Timote Gabashvili was in fact an eighteenth-century hierarch (c. 1703–1764), and the Mimosvla records his travels to Athos and Jerusalem in the 1750s. The reference itself is not affected, but the error should be noted by anyone tracing the citation.
  • Patmos, and a possible confusion. The Patmos leg of the career rests on a general statement of "Church historians" and on no cited document. It is worth flagging that the great monastic name attached to Patmos is Christodoulos of Patmos (†1093), the Bithynian founder of the Monastery of St John the Theologian — an entirely different man, of a different country, with a full and well-attested Life. Whether the Georgian tradition has preserved a genuine memory of its own Christodoulos on Patmos, or has drawn the island in by the attraction of the famous homonym, cannot be settled on the evidence available here, and the possibility is recorded rather than resolved.
  • Not to be confused, further, with the Christodouloi of the Greek new-martyr calendars.

Sources

  1. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, August 18 — Venerable Christodoulos the Philosopher (drawn from the Georgian synaxaristic tradition; the whole of the transmitted notice, including Sakara in Imereti, the memorisation of the Koran, the disputation before the king Iamame, and the labours at Iviron and Patmos).
  2. Timote Gabashvili, Mimosvla ("Pilgrimage"), the eighteenth-century Georgian account of travel to Mount Athos and the Holy Land, cited in the Georgian tradition for Christodoulos's presence among the monks of Iviron.
  3. For the setting: the Georgian monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos and its role as the centre of Georgian translation and learning; the institution of the court majlis or inter-religious disputation in the mediaeval Islamic world.