Sarmean of Kartli
Our Father among the Saints Sarmean, Catholicos of Kartli
Bishop · d. 774
Commemorated 21 August — Repose of the Catholicos of Kartli
Sarmean was Catholicos of Kartli — primate of the Church of Georgia — from about 767 to 774, in the hardest years of the Arab domination, when the emirate of Tbilisi pressed the Georgians toward Islam and the Church held its people by little more than persistence. He is remembered less for the government of his see than for a single incident of conscience: having unknowingly given the Holy Gifts to Jacobite visitors at the Monastery of Shio-Mgvime, he learned of his error, summoned his bishops, confessed it before them, burnt the presents the strangers had made him, and withdrew into a cave to weep over it — until the bishops came to tell him that St Shio had appeared to each of them in the same night with the word that the Lord had remitted his sin. He shepherded his flock in humility to the end and died in peace in 774.
Catholicos under the Arabs
The eighth century was the low point of the Georgian Church's fortunes. Kartli — eastern Georgia, the old kingdom of Iberia — had passed under Arab rule; the emirate seated at Tbilisi collected the tax on unbelievers and pressed conversion; and the martyrdom of Abo of Tiflis a few years after Sarmean's death, in 786, shows how sharp the pressure had become. The Catholicos in those years had no political protection and no wealth; what he had was the monasteries, and above all the great houses of the Syrian Fathers who had planted Georgian monasticism two centuries before — Shio-Mgvime, Zedazeni, Davit-Gareji.
Sarmean held the see from about 767 to his death, and the sources agree in describing him as a man of humility, of firm faith, and of wisdom in the ordering of his Church under a hostile power. He is not credited with any political achievement. He kept the faith of his people Chalcedonian and their communion Orthodox, which under the circumstances was the whole of the task.
The Jacobites at Shio-Mgvime
The one episode transmitted at length is a small one and is preserved precisely because of what the Catholicos did with it.
He was at the Monastery of Shio-Mgvime, the house of Shio — one of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers, and among the most venerated places in Georgia — on the Thursday of Cheesefare week. Visitors were there, and Sarmean communed them; only afterwards did he learn that they were Jacobites, that is Syrian non-Chalcedonians, out of communion with his Church. The knowledge came to him, the account says, through a dream.
The Georgian Church, whose whole ecclesiastical identity since the Council of Dvin had turned on its refusal to follow Armenia into the rejection of Chalcedon, treated the integrity of the chalice as a matter of the first order; and Sarmean treated his mistake accordingly. He summoned the bishops, told them plainly what he had done, burnt before their eyes the gifts the strangers had given him, and went away into an isolated cave, where he wept over the sin.
He was not left there long. The bishops came to him with a message: St Shio had appeared to each of them — to every one of them separately, in the same night — and had said that the Lord had remitted his sin. Sarmean returned to his see and governed it as before.
The episode is characteristic of the Georgian hagiographical tradition in three ways at once: the founder-saint of a monastery intervening from beyond death in the affairs of the living Church; the absolution given not by a superior but by a consensus of witnesses; and the reckoning of an unwitting act of intercommunion as a sin requiring public confession by the primate himself.
Repose
He died peacefully in 774, having held the catholicate about seven years. No account of his burial or of any translation of his relics has come down. The Georgian Church numbers him among its saints and keeps his memory on August 21.
Feast and commemoration
August 21 (church date; New Calendar civil August 21, Old Calendar civil September 3), within the afterfeast of the Dormition. The commemoration is Georgian, kept by the Church of Georgia and carried into the calendar of the Orthodox Church in America; it is not in the Greek, Slavonic or Antiochian books, whose day belongs to the Apostle Thaddaeus.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to thy gentleness: take not thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of thy hierarch Sarmean direct our life in peace.
Iconography
Sarmean is painted as a Georgian hierarch of the early medieval type: a bearded elder in the phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel-book in the left, the head bare, with the inscription in Georgian asomtavruli or mkhedruli letters. Where he appears in the modern composite icons of the Saints of Georgia he stands in the rank of the Catholicoi, between the hierarchs of the Arab period. No narrative scene of his life is traditional, though the natural subject — the Catholicos weeping in the cave while St Shio appears to the assembled bishops — is occasionally attempted in modern Georgian work. No pre-1900 icon of him has been located for this collection, and it is doubtful that any pre-modern portrait of him survives.
Disputed questions
- The dates. "About 767 to 774" is the reckoning of the Georgian lists; the catalogues of the Catholicoi of Kartli for this period are not everywhere consistent, and neighbouring entries in them shift by a year or two between recensions. Nothing turns on the precise figures.
- The identity of the visitors. "Jacobite" in a Georgian source of this period means Syrian miaphysite, and in practice the term was applied loosely to any of the non-Chalcedonian communions of the region, Armenian included. Which is meant here cannot be determined; the point of the story is the breach of communion, not the nationality of those who caused it.