The Piety of the King

What the sources attest of David IV’s personal devotion: the Gospel-book he is said to have carried and read, his fasting, vigils, and almsgiving, his reverence for the monastic fathers and hermits, his patronage of monasteries at home and across the Christian East, and the humility that found its permanent sign in his tomb at the Gelati gate — the inner life of the warrior-king as his near-contemporary biographer and the tradition present it.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Devotion of a Warrior-King

The near-contemporary Life of the King of Kings David is a royal panegyric, and its portrait of David’s piety must be read as such — as an idealized image meant to display the model Christian king (Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, 2003, on the panegyric character of the biography). But the portrait is detailed and consistent, and it is corroborated by David’s own penitential writing (see The Galobani Sinanulisani) and by the physical witness of his foundations and his tomb. Read with that caution, it gives a coherent picture of a genuinely and demonstratively devout ruler — a man who combined a soldier’s hardness and a statesman’s cunning with real ascetic practice and deep personal religion (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014).

The Gospel He Carried

Among the most enduring images of David’s piety is that of the king who was never without his book. The tradition preserved in the biography and the saint’s Lives holds that David constantly carried a Gospel-book (or a book of the Scriptures) with him, reading it in the intervals of campaign and government, so that the word of God was his companion in war and rule alike (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; and the biography’s account of his study of Scripture, Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014). The image belongs to the ideal of the “philosopher-king” and “scripture-reading king” that the Georgian sources cultivate, and it should be received as such; but it is of a piece with the demonstrable facts of his learning, his foundation of the Gelati Academy (see The Gelati Academy), and his own composition of religious verse. [Disputed: the picturesque detail that David carried a Gospel-book everywhere and read it constantly comes from the royal biography and the hagiographic tradition rather than an external document; it is reported as the tradition’s cherished image of the scripture-loving king, consonant with, though not independently verified by, the harder evidence of his learning and his writings.]

Ascetic Practice and Almsgiving

The sources credit David with the ordinary disciplines of Orthodox lay devotion carried to an unusual degree for a king: fasting, night-vigils and prayer, frequent attendance at the services of the Church, and generous almsgiving to the poor and to the Church (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014). His almsgiving and his endowments were not confined to Georgia: David was a benefactor of monasteries and Christian holy places across the Orthodox world, sending gifts and endowments to the great centers of the Christian East — the tradition includes his benefactions to Mount Athos, to Jerusalem and the monasteries of the Holy Land, to Mount Sinai, and to other centers — as befitted a king who saw himself as a servant and protector of the whole Church, not only of his own realm (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on David’s wide patronage; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). This wide patronage is also an instrument of his standing in the Christian world (see David and the Caucasus), but the sources present it first as piety.

Reverence for the Monastic Fathers

A recurring note in the tradition is David’s humility toward monks and hermits — the king who ruled the Caucasus bowing before poor ascetics as his spiritual superiors. The Lives depict him seeking out holy monks and solitaries, venerating them, submitting himself to their counsel and rebuke, serving them with his own hands, and treating the least ascetic as greater than himself (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; Life of the King of Kings David, in Kartlis Tskhovreba, ed. Metreveli, 2014). Whatever the panegyric heightening, the theme is significant because it is the exact inversion of the worldly king, and because it prepares the supreme gesture of his humility, the gate-tomb. A man who genuinely reverenced the monastic ideal above his own crown is the kind of king who would choose to be buried where all would tread on him.

The Penitent

Above all, David’s piety was penitential. The great witness here is not the panegyric but David’s own pen: the Hymns of Repentance (see The Galobani Sinanulisani), in which the victorious king confesses his sinfulness before God in the voice of the biblical David, are the direct and unimpeachable evidence that David understood his own glory under the sign of repentance (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; en.wikipedia.org, “David IV,” on the Hymns). Here, uniquely, we do not depend on the biographer’s idealization: the king speaks for himself, and what he speaks is contrition. This is the deepest thing the sources let us know of his inner life, and it is his own testimony (cf. the pinning of self-testimony to its author under METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Humility of the Grave

The whole of David’s piety is gathered into the sign of his burial. By his own wish — so the tradition holds — he was buried not in a place of honor but at the main gate of Gelati, in the threshold, so that everyone entering the monastery would step over the king’s grave; and his tombstone bears the Psalm-verse, in the traditional rendering, “This is my rest for ever; here will I dwell, for I have desired it” (cf. Psalm 131:14 LXX / 132:14; the OCA Life renders the inscription “This is My rest for ever and ever; here I will dwell, for I have chosen her,” oca.org, “Blessed David IV”) (see The Monastery of Gelati and His Repose and Canonization). Whether or not every detail of the tradition can be pinned to a contemporary document, the stone is real and ancient, and the gesture it enacts is the perfect emblem of the piety the sources describe: the Builder of Georgia choosing to lie beneath the feet of the faithful at the door of his own greatest work (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

See Also

References

  • The Life of the King of Kings David (Cxovreba mepet-mepisa Davitisi), in Kartlis Tskhovreba: A History of Georgia, ed. Roin Metreveli, trans. Dmitri Gamq’relidze et al. (Tbilisi: Artanuji, 2014). (The portrait of David’s devotion, ascetic practice, and humility — read as royal panegyric.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (David’s piety, the Gospel he carried, his reverence for monks, the humility of his burial.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (David’s wide patronage of monasteries and holy places.)
  • Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The Hymns of Repentance as the witness to his penitence.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The panegyric character of the royal biography.)
  • “Blessed David IV of Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org/saints/lives/2019/01/26/100326-blessed-david-iv-king-of-georgia. (The tombstone inscription; the burial at the Gelati entrance.)