George the Recluse of the Black Mountain
Our Venerable Father George the God-bearer, the Recluse of the Black Mountain
Venerable · d. 1068, on the Black Mountain above Antioch
Commemorated 3 July — Repose on the Black Mountain (1068)
George the God-bearer (died 1068) was a Georgian ascetic of the Black Mountain above Antioch, the great cosmopolitan monastic massif of the eleventh century, who withdrew from the quarrels of its many nations into a cleft of an inaccessible cliff — whence his other name, George the Recluse. He is remembered chiefly for what he made of another man: it was he who received the young George the Hagiorite, clothed him in the great schema, and sent him to Iviron on Athos with the charge to take up the unfinished translating work of Euthymius the Iberian — and who, when his disciple spent seven years on other obediences instead, sent a monk across the Mediterranean to rebuke him and remind him what he had been sent for. He was himself a copyist and a man of letters, and the Georgian books of Athos owe their existence to his insistence.
The Black Mountain
The Black Mountain (Georgian Shavi Mta, Greek Mavron Oros) is the range that rises north-east of Antioch on the Orontes. In the eleventh century, after the Byzantine reconquest of northern Syria, it carried one of the densest concentrations of monastic settlement in the Christian world: Greek, Syrian, Armenian, Georgian and Latin houses within a few hours' walk of each other, and the great Georgian foundations of Kalipos and the Monastery of the Holy Symeon among them. The Antiochian patriarchate, in whose territory all this lay, presided over an ascetic republic of many tongues.
The proximity had a price. The lives are frank that tensions arose constantly between monks of different nationalities — over jurisdiction, over precedence, over the language of the offices. It was to keep clear of them that George withdrew: he found refuge in an impregnable cleft of a very high mountain, and lived there, which is why he is called the Recluse.
The elder
The withdrawal did not make him unknown. The monks of the Black Mountain were well aware of the manner of life led by George the Recluse, and it was as a spiritual guide that he was sought out.
The young Georgian who came looking for a director — the future George the Hagiorite, then newly arrived from Jerusalem — prayed, according to his own biographer, in every monastery of the Black Mountain in turn before asking George the Recluse, "a man innocent as a dove," to take him. The recluse received him, found him a place in a monastery, and kept him three years under the strictest ascetic discipline; at the end of it he clothed him in the great schema and, in the biographer's phrase, "perfected him in the monastic life."
The commission, and the rebuke
What the elder did next shaped the whole later history of Georgian letters. Euthymius the Iberian had died in 1028 with the translation of the Greek fathers into Georgian unfinished; the Georgian books were few and corrupt. The recluse sent his disciple first on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then blessed him to settle at the Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos and to continue the work of Euthymius.
George went, about 1040 — and did not translate. For seven years he performed other obediences in the monastery. When word of this reached the Black Mountain, the old man did not write a letter: he sent his disciple Theodore across to the Holy Mountain to rebuke George to his face and remind him that he had been sent there to render the theological texts out of Greek into Georgian. This time George obeyed, and the great body of Georgian patristic translation that came out of Iviron in the following twenty years is the result.
His own labours
When he was not occupied with his disciple, George the Recluse kept strict solitude and, like his spiritual son, gave much of his time to literary work. He was in close touch with the writers of Iviron and of the other Georgian monasteries, and he pressed his disciple continually to keep at the translation of Orthodox theological literature.
He is known to have copied out the translations made by Davit Mtbevari of the Life of Martha — the mother of Symeon of the Wonderful Mountain — and of the Life of St Barlaam; and, on hearing that no copies of those Lives existed on Athos, he transcribed the texts himself and sent them to the Athonites. It is a small act, and characteristic: the recluse in his cleft of rock, copying manuscripts to post across the sea to a mountain he never saw.
He reposed in 1068, three years after the death of his disciple George the Hagiorite in 1065.
Feast and commemoration
July 3 (church date; New Calendar civil July 3, Old Calendar civil July 16). Georgian usage; carried in English by the OCA calendar as "Saint George the God-Bearer." The Georgian Orthodox Church keeps the Julian calendar, so the commemoration falls on the civil 16 July there. He belongs liturgically to the Antiochian sphere as much as to the Georgian: his whole life was lived in the mountains of the patriarchate of Antioch, and the Black Mountain community in which he was a father was a constituent part of that Church's ascetic life in the century of its Byzantine restoration — a point worth making, since his memory has been transmitted almost entirely through Georgian channels.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8
Fleeing the strife of tongues thou didst hide thyself in the rock of the Black Mountain, and there, made innocent as a dove, thou didst rear up a teacher for thy people and send him out to the Holy Mountain; O father George the God-bearer, entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Georgian
Iconography
He is painted as an aged Georgian ascetic: a monk of the great schema, thin and long-bearded, in the analavos and koukoulion, with a scroll in the hand — the attribute of the teacher and the copyist rather than of the hermit — and sometimes with the rock-face of his cleft indicated behind him. Where he appears in narrative cycles it is in the scenes of the Life of George the Hagiorite: the clothing of the young monk in the schema, and the sending of him away to Athos.
He is very rarely painted alone, and no pre-1900 image identifiable as his has been located; none is stored here.
Disputed questions
- How many Georges? Four men of the name belong to this one story and are regularly confused: George the Hagiorite (†1065), abbot of Iviron and translator; George the Recluse, his elder, this saint; George the Lesser, the Hagiorite's disciple and biographer; and George the Blessed/Iberian of the earlier generation. The Georgian tradition keeps them apart; English lists frequently do not.
- "The God-bearer." The epithet θεοφόρος is attached to him in the Georgian and in the OCA calendar; it is not a title of any office and appears to be simply a description of the character his disciple's biographer gives him.
- His feast. The commemoration on July 3 comes from the Georgian calendar and is carried by the OCA; the Greek and Slavonic Menaia do not have him. The day is not the day of any recorded event in his life and is presumably the day of his repose.
- Not to be confused with George the Hagiorite (June 27), his disciple, in whose entry the fuller history of Iviron and of the Georgian translations is given; nor with George the Great-Martyr (April 23); nor with George the Chozebite (January 8), the other Palestinian-Syrian ascetic of the name.