The Galobani Sinanulisani (Hymns of Repentance)

David IV’s own Galobani Sinanulisani (Hymns of Repentance), composed near the end of his life (c. 1120): a sequence of penitential hymns in which the victorious king lays bare his sins before God in the voice of his namesake, the biblical King David — one of the treasures of medieval Georgian literature, and a rare window into the inner life of a warrior-saint. This file treats their form, themes, and stature, and the care required in dating, attributing, and quoting them.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A King Who Wrote

It is among the most remarkable facts about David the Builder that the conqueror of Didgori and the founder of Gelati was also a poet — and that the poetry he left is not triumph but penitence. The Galobani Sinanulisani (გალობანი სინანულისანი), the Hymns of Repentance, are David’s own composition, a sequence of penitential religious poems written, by the usual reckoning, near the end of his reign, about 1120 (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” dating the Hymns to c. 1120; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the Galobani Sinanulisani). That a reigning king should sit down to write, in his own hand and voice, a confession of his sinfulness before God is itself extraordinary, and it is one of the strongest reasons the Georgian Church venerates David not merely as a great ruler but as a holy man (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; OCA, “Blessed David IV of Georgia,” oca.org, noting that the Hymns merit comparison with the works of the greatest writers of the Church).

Form

The Hymns of Repentance are a cycle of penitential hymns — commonly described as a sequence of eight — cast in the manner of the Psalms and the liturgical hymnography of the Church. They are written in a free, non-syllabic verse, and each hymn is given its own intricate and carefully wrought stanza-form, so that the sequence is a work of considerable formal artistry as well as of devotion (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” describing the Hymns as a sequence of eight free-verse hymns each with its own intricate stanza-form; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on their form and artistry). They stand within the long Georgian tradition of ecclesiastical hymnography — the tradition of the iadgari hymn-books and of the hymnographers of the Georgian monastic schools — but they are personal and confessional in a way that liturgical hymnody generally is not: the “I” of the poems is David himself (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010).

Theme: The King as the Biblical David

The governing conceit of the Hymns is David’s identification of himself with his biblical namesake, King David of Israel, the psalmist and penitent. Just as the biblical David was at once the Lord’s anointed warrior-king, the singer of the Psalms, and the great penitent who sinned gravely (in the matter of Bathsheba and Uriah) and repented deeply, so the Georgian David casts his own kingship in that mold: the anointed king who has been given victory by God, who has sinned and stands in need of mercy, and who pours out his repentance in psalm-like song. Modern scholarship notes that, for all their Christian and Marian devotion, the Hymns present David as, in a sense, reliving or reincarnating the biblical David, with a like relationship to God and to his people (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” on David’s self-identification with the biblical David; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). This is the same typology that frames the providential reading of Didgori (see The Battle of Didgori (1121)): David as the new David, the little anointed one whom God raises up against the nations.

The self-identification is theologically serious, not merely flattering. It allows David to hold together the two things hardest to reconcile in a warrior-king: the God-given victories and the sinner’s need of repentance. The biblical David is precisely the model of a king who is both — glorious and guilty, victorious and penitent — and by taking that model as his own the Georgian David submits his own greatness to the judgment of God and confesses that the conqueror is a sinner like any other (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

Themes: Sin, Mercy, and the Mother of God

The substance of the Hymns is penitential: a sustained confession of sinfulness, an appeal to the mercy of God, a meditation on mortality and judgment, and a plea for forgiveness and salvation. Interwoven with the penitence is a strong devotion to the Theotokos, the Mother of God — the cult of the Virgin that David’s whole reign expressed in stone at Gelati, whose great church is dedicated to her (see The Monastery of Gelati) — to whom the penitent king turns as intercessor (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” noting the cult of the Mother of God in the Hymns; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010). The poems thus draw together the great devotional currents of David’s piety: repentance, the Psalms, and the Virgin.

Stature in Georgian Literature

The Galobani Sinanulisani are counted among the finest works of medieval Georgian literature and among the high points of Georgian religious poetry. They belong to the same literary flowering that David’s academies seeded (see The Gelati Academy) and that would culminate, two generations later under Queen Tamar, in Shota Rustaveli’s epic; but where Rustaveli’s poem is secular and chivalric, David’s Hymns are the intimate devotional voice of the age (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, on the place of the Hymns in Georgian literary history). That the two greatest literary monuments framing the Golden Age are a king’s penitential hymns and a poet’s romance of knightly love says much about the breadth of the civilization David founded.

A Note on Attribution, Dating, and Quotation

Three cautions belong to any honest treatment of the Hymns.

First, attribution: the ascription of the Galobani Sinanulisani to David himself is the received tradition of Georgian literary history and is generally accepted; but as with much medieval royal authorship, the degree of the king’s personal composition versus the assistance of learned clerics of his court cannot be established with certainty, and the attribution rests on tradition and internal evidence rather than an external contemporary attestation of authorship. [Disputed: the Hymns of Repentance are traditionally and generally attributed to David IV’s own hand, and this attribution is accepted in the standard literary histories (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010); the extent of any clerical assistance, as with medieval royal authorship generally, cannot be independently verified.]

Second, dating: the c. 1120 date is the conventional placing (late in the reign, in the years of victory and approaching death), but it is an estimate, not a documented date of composition (en.wikipedia.org, “David IV”).

Third, quotation: this file deliberately refrains from presenting purported verbatim English lines of the Hymns, because their sense and beauty depend heavily on the translation, and unverified renderings circulate widely. Readers wishing to quote the Hymns should do so from a named published translation (English versions and discussions exist in the scholarly literature on Georgian poetry, including in Rayfield’s The Literature of Georgia), and should cite the translator, per the repository methodology on quotation and provenance (METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.4). What can be said without a translation is that the Hymns are penitential, psalmic, Marian, and cast in the voice of the biblical David — and that is the substance this file reports.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The Galobani Sinanulisani: form, themes, attribution, and place in Georgian literary history.)
  • “David IV.” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV. (The c. 1120 dating; the sequence of eight free-verse hymns with intricate stanza-forms; the cult of the Mother of God; David’s self-identification with the biblical David.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (David as penitent king.)
  • “Blessed David IV of Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org/saints/lives/2019/01/26/100326-blessed-david-iv-king-of-georgia. (The high estimate of the Hymns.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §2.4 and §3.4, this repository. (On the citation and provenance of compiled and translated texts, and the apocryphal-quotation rule.)