Gregory the Illuminator

Origins and the blood-feud

Gregory was born about 257, of the Parthian house of the Arsacids — the dynasty that then reigned, in separate branches, over both Persia and Armenia. His father Anak, a Parthian grandee, was induced (the Armenian tradition says by the new Sassanid masters of Persia, who had overthrown the Arsacids there and feared their Armenian kinsmen) to assassinate his own relative the king of Armenia — Khosrov I in the Armenian sources, "Kursar" in the Greek and Slavonic accounts. Anak struck the king down and fled, but was overtaken at a river crossing and killed with his brother; the dying king had ordered the extermination of the assassin's whole family. Two infant sons alone were saved: one was carried into Persia, and Gregory was rescued by kinsfolk — the tradition names his nurse, a Christian woman of Caesarea — and brought up in Caesarea of Cappadocia, where he was instructed in the Christian faith and baptised. The murdered king's son Tiridates (Trdat) was likewise carried to safety, into Roman territory: the two heirs of the blood-feud thus grew up, unknown to each other, in the same empire.

In Caesarea Gregory married Mariam, a Christian of Cappadocia, and had two sons; the marriage was dissolved by mutual consent for the ascetic life after the second son's birth. The elder, Vrtanes (the "Orthanes" of the Greek account), was ordained priest and would himself in time hold his father's see; the younger, Aristakes ("Arostanes"), became a monk and hermit, was later made bishop, and sat among the 318 fathers of the Council of Nicaea in 325.

Service to Tiridates and confession

Learning whose son he was, Gregory resolved to expiate his father's crime by serving the murdered man's heir. He attached himself, without disclosing his parentage, to Tiridates, then an officer in the Roman service, and served him faithfully. The Greek account relates that when the Goths pressed the empire, Tiridates took the emperor's place in single combat against their champion and carried him off captive, and that the grateful emperor — the Roman restoration of Tiridates to his father's throne is dated about 287 — established him as king of Armenia.

Restored to his kingdom, Tiridates offered sacrifice to the gods of Armenia — the national cult of the goddess Anahit above all — and required his faithful servant to join him. Gregory refused, confessing Christ. Enraged, and then further inflamed by the disclosure that his servant was the son of his father's murderer, Tiridates subjected him to a long series of tortures, which the Armenian tradition counts as twelve: he was hung head downward with a stone at his neck, choked with foul smoke, beaten, mocked, and made to walk in iron boots set with nails, and molten tin was poured over him; through all of it, the Lives relate, he sang the Psalms, and his wounds were healed in prison.

The pit of Khor Virap

When torture failed, Tiridates ordered Gregory thrown into the deep pit of the royal fortress-prison at Artashat — a dungeon for the condemned, filled, say the Lives, with serpents, scorpions and the bones of the dead. There he remained some thirteen years (the sources vary between thirteen, fourteen and fifteen), kept alive by a widow of the city who, bidden in a dream, lowered bread to him secretly, and strengthened, the tradition relates, by an angel of God. All this while he was believed dead. The place — Khor Virap, "the deep pit" — later became one of the great monastic shrines of Armenia, standing in the Ararat plain over the dungeon itself.

The virgin-martyrs and the king's affliction

Toward the year 300 the crisis came, through the martyrdom of Ripsimia, Gaiana and the virgin-martyrs of Armenia — consecrated virgins who had fled the emperor Diocletian's attentions to Vagharshapat, whom Tiridates in turn desired, and whom he put to death with atrocious tortures when Ripsimia resisted him. Days after the executions the king was struck with a degrading madness: the sources describe him and his companions in the crime as changed into the likeness of wild boars, after the pattern of Nebuchadnezzar, ranging the woods, tearing their clothing and devouring their own flesh. The king's sister Khosrovidukht saw in repeated dreams that only Gregory, forgotten in the pit, could heal him. Though it seemed impossible that he lived, a cord was let down into Khor Virap, and Gregory was drawn up alive — blackened, the Armenian account says, but whole.

Gregory's first act was to ask after the bodies of the martyred virgins, which had lain unburied for nine days; he buried them with honour, and over their graves the first martyria of Christian Armenia were raised. Then, after a long catechesis — the Armenian tradition tells of sixty-six days of preaching and fasting — he prayed over the king and his company, and Tiridates was healed, repenting before the relics of the women he had slain.

The conversion of Armenia

King, court and army embraced Christ, and the conversion of the nation followed with royal thoroughness: the temples of Anahit, Aramazd, Vahagn and Mihr were pulled down or converted, their estates given to the Church, and the people baptised — the tradition sets the baptism of the king and people in the waters of the Aratsani (Arsanias), the eastern Euphrates. The traditional date of the kingdom's conversion is 301, which Armenian tradition has always held to make Armenia the first Christian nation, preceding Constantine's Edict of Milan; a considerable body of modern scholarship, working back from the regnal years of Tiridates and the date of Gregory's consecration, argues instead for about 314, immediately after the peace of the Church in the Roman empire. Both datings are defended in the literature; the priority of Armenia's national conversion is not in serious dispute on either reckoning (see Disputed questions).

The vision of Etchmiadzin

At Vagharshapat Gregory beheld the vision from which the mother church of Armenia takes its name: Christ descending from heaven in light, striking the ground with a golden hammer at the place where the cathedral was to rise. The church there — Etchmiadzin, "the Only-Begotten descended" — was founded by Gregory and Tiridates together, and remains the see of the Catholicos of All Armenians. The vision, recounted at length in Agathangelos, fixed the sacred topography of the new Christian kingdom: the cathedral at the place of the descent, and the martyria of Ripsimia, Gaiana and their companions at the places of their deaths around it.

Consecration at Caesarea and the ordering of the Church

To receive episcopal orders Gregory travelled in state to Caesarea in Cappadocia, where he was consecrated bishop of Armenia by Archbishop Leontius with a synod of bishops — the mother-church relationship with Caesarea remained a mark of the Armenian hierarchy for generations, its chief bishops long travelling there for consecration. Returning, he baptised, built, ordained and organised on a national scale: the Lives credit him with ordaining bishops and priests throughout the land, founding schools for the children of the pagan priestly families so that the old cult's hereditary clergy became the seedbed of the new Church's, establishing monasteries, and carrying the mission beyond Armenia proper into the Caucasus — the enlightenment of Georgia by Nina and of Caucasian Albania belongs to the same generation, and the sources link the missions.

As first Catholicos of the Armenians Gregory also founded a line: the catholicate remained for several generations effectively hereditary in his family — his son Aristakes succeeded him, then Vrtanes, then Vrtanes's son Husik, and later his great-great-grandson Nerses the Great, down to Sahak the Great (†439), the last catholicos of the Illuminator's male line. This hereditary succession, without parallel in the Greek churches, the Armenian historians themselves record plainly.

Repose

His work established, Gregory consecrated his son Aristakes to the active government of the Church and withdrew from public life into ascetic solitude — the tradition places his last years in the cave of Mane on Mount Sepuh in the province of Daranali. There he reposed in peace about 331 (the sources range between about 325 and 337; the Russian calendar prints c. 335). The Lives relate that shepherds found the hermit's body, not knowing whose it was, and buried it; his relics were later recognised and enshrined at Thordan.

Relics and translations

The relics of the Illuminator were distributed widely and their history is long. The right hand, the most venerated relic, is kept at Holy Etchmiadzin, where the Catholicos of All Armenians uses it in the consecration of the holy myron (chrism) to this day; a left hand is kept by the Catholicosate of Cilicia at Antelias, so that both branches of the Armenian hierarchy trace their sanctification physically to the Illuminator's hand. Portions of the relics travelled to Constantinople, and a major portion — with a tradition of translation during the iconoclast troubles — came to rest at Naples, where it was kept for centuries in the convent of San Gregorio Armeno; in the year 2000 relics from Naples were solemnly given to the Armenian Church for the newly built cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator in Yerevan. The Byzantine sources also record relics of the saint venerated in Constantinople.

Veneration and later cultus

Gregory's veneration is universal across the Christian East and West. The Armenian Apostolic Church, which honours him as its patron and "our Holy Father," keeps several feasts in his honour in its movable cycle — commemorating separately his entry into the pit, his deliverance from it, and the discovery of his relics. The Byzantine rite keeps September 30, with a full Menaion service; the canon of the day, ascribed to Joseph the Hymnographer, plays throughout on the saint's name (γρηγορέω, "to watch"): "the watchful shepherd" is its refrain. The Roman church commemorates him on October 1 in the older martyrologies. In Russia his veneration was early and his September feast entered the calendar with the Byzantine inheritance; the cathedral of the Intercession on Red Square (Saint Basil's) includes a chapel dedicated to him, since the capture of Kazan in 1552 fell on his feast.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

The primary account of Gregory is the History of the Armenians of Agathangelos, written in the fifth century in the name of a secretary of King Tiridates: it contains the narrative of the blood-feud, the tortures, the pit, the martyrdoms, the king's affliction and healing, the vision of Etchmiadzin, and the long catechetical discourse known as the Teaching of Saint Gregory. The work was translated early into Greek, and thence the saint's Life passed to the Byzantine synaxaria and the Greek Menaion; Symeon Metaphrastes included a redaction in his menologion. Movses Khorenatsi and the other classical Armenian historians supplement the record. A body of homilies (the Hachakhapatum) is transmitted under Gregory's name, though its attribution is debated; the Teaching embedded in Agathangelos is the foundational document of Armenian catechesis.