An Arab Saint of Georgia

The patron saint of the Georgian capital is an Arab. That paradox is the key to Abo’s meaning: his story asserts Georgian Christian identity under Islamic domination, and at the same time roots that identity in faith rather than in blood — for the Church took as its own a man of the ruling nation, on the ground of his confession of Christ. Handled soberly and both-sides (METHODOLOGY §4), the national and the universal readings belong together.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Paradox Stated

At the center of Abo’s significance stands a paradox that no amount of familiarity dulls: the patron saint of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, is not a Georgian but an Arab — a man of Baghdad, of the very people who ruled Georgia in his lifetime, and a former Muslim, of the very religion imposed from above (see Abo the Arab Perfumer; The Patron of Tbilisi). A Christian nation under foreign, Muslim domination took as the heavenly protector of its chief city a convert from the ruling nation and the ruling faith. This is not the ordinary pattern of national sainthood, in which a people venerates its own; it is something stranger and, on reflection, more profound.

The paradox is not an accident of history but was, in a sense, seized upon deliberately from the first. Sabanisdze’s Life, written to strengthen the Georgian Church under Arab pressure, made Abo’s Arab origin central to its argument: the convert from the ruling people is held up as an example to the ruled (see Sabanisdze and the Georgian Church Under Pressure; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, CSCO 601, Peeters, 2003). The Georgian Church did not venerate Abo despite his being an Arab; in a real sense it venerated him because of it — because his choice of Christ, against every incentive of birth and power, was the more striking and the more instructive for coming from where it came.

Identity Asserted Under Domination

On one side, Abo’s cult is unmistakably an assertion of Georgian Christian identity under Islamic rule, and the collection reports this plainly. In the eighth century, to be a faithful Christian in Kartli was, increasingly, bound up with being Georgian and with resisting the assimilating pressure of the Arab overlord’s religion and culture (see Sabanisdze and the Georgian Church Under Pressure; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003). A martyr who died rather than return to Islam, whose story was written to fortify the Georgian Christians, and who became the patron of the Georgian capital, plainly served — and still serves — as a rallying point for that identity. In the long Georgian experience of holding the faith against a succession of non-Christian overlords, from the Arabs to the Persians to others, Abo stands early in a line of witnesses to the resolve of a Christian nation not to be assimilated (cf. the later witness of St. Ketevan of Georgia under Safavid Persia).

This national reading is true, and the collection does not minimize it. Abo is a Georgian national saint in function, whatever his origin, and his cult has carried real weight in the Georgian Christian sense of self under foreign rule.

Identity Rooted in Faith, Not Blood

On the other side — and this is the deeper meaning, held together with the first — the very fact that the Georgian national saint is an Arab roots Georgian Christian identity in something other than ethnicity. What unites Abo the Arab with his Georgian venerators is not blood but faith: the confession of Christ. By taking a man of the ruling nation as its own, on the sole ground of his Christianity, the Georgian Church defined its identity in a way that is, at its core, not ethnic but confessional. The nation is constituted by the faith, and the faith is open even to an Arab of Baghdad (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the confessional basis of the identity the Life promotes; and see A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People).

This is what keeps Abo’s story from collapsing into ethnic nationalism, and it is essential to reading him rightly and soberly (METHODOLOGY §4). A cult of a national saint who happened to be an enemy defeated would be one thing; a cult of a national saint who was a member of the ruling nation received as a brother in the faith is another thing entirely. Abo’s Arabness, far from being an embarrassment to be explained away, is the very thing that universalizes the Georgian Christian identity his cult expresses: it says that what matters is not being Georgian by blood but being Christian by confession — and that this door stands open even to the ruling people. The particular (a Georgian national saint) and the universal (the faith open to all peoples) are held together in the single figure of the Arab patron of Tbilisi.

Both Sides, Held Together

[Disputed: how far Abo’s cult should be read as a vehicle of Georgian national identity versus a witness to a faith that transcends nation. (a) The national-identity reading, prominent in the scholarship on the Life’s purpose, stresses that Sabanisdze wrote to consolidate the Georgian Christians under Arab domination and that Abo has functioned as a national saint (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003). (b) The universalist reading stresses that the national saint’s foreign origin roots the identity in confession rather than ethnicity, and that Abo is venerated across Orthodoxy, not only in Georgia, as a martyr for Christ (the wider Orthodox commemoration; and see A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People). The collection does not treat these as rivals to be decided between but as two true dimensions of a single figure: Abo is at once a Georgian national saint and a universal martyr, and the peculiar power of his cult lies exactly in his being both.]

The sober conclusion, per the repository’s methodology, is to hold the two readings together and to resist collapsing Abo into either a mere nationalist emblem or a deracinated universal type. He is the Arab patron of the Georgian capital — a figure in whom the assertion of a Christian nation’s identity and the openness of the Christian faith to all nations are, remarkably, the same thing. That is the meaning of an Arab saint of Georgia (see Abo in Georgian Memory and Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Ioane Sabanisdze. The Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790. Trans. David Marshall Lang, in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., pp. 115–133. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1976.
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The confessional basis of Georgian identity and the Life’s national purpose.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Introduction to the Passion of Abo.
  • METHODOLOGY.md §4 (handling of disputed and sensitive topics), this repository.