The Ideas and the Triad

The national and moral ideas that run through Ilia’s corpus — the constitution of a nation by language, homeland, and faith rather than by class or dynasty — and the careful handling of the famous triad Ena, Mamuli, Sartsmunoeba (Language, Fatherland, Faith): what Ilia actually formulated, and how the fixed three-word slogan crystallized into its later form, above all in the Georgian national-religious movement of the 1970s–80s.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Nation Beyond Class and Dynasty

The governing idea of Ilia’s whole body of thought is that a nation is constituted not by a state, a dynasty, or a social class — all of which Georgia had lost or was losing — but by the shared possession of a language, a homeland, and a faith, held in common across the divisions of rank (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). This was a genuinely modern and, for its time, liberal conception. Ilia’s satire of the idle nobleman in Is That a Man?! and his compassion for the peasant widow in Otar’s Widow are two faces of a single conviction: that the nation is the whole people, noble and peasant together, and that the nobility earns its place only by service to that whole (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 3rd ed., 2010; see The Poetry and Prose). It is why, elected by the nobility to the State Council in 1906, he insisted he would represent the entire nation and not one class (see The Society for Literacy and the Bank).

Because the nation was constituted by culture rather than by a state, its preservation was a cultural task — the defense of the language, the writing of the literature, the founding of the schools, the keeping of the faith and the memory. This is the thread that binds Ilia’s writing to his institution-building: the journals, the Society for Literacy, and the bank are the practical outworking of the idea that a stateless people lives or dies by whether it keeps its language, its land, and its faith (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019).

The Primacy of Language

Within the triad, language held for Ilia a special and almost sacred primacy, because it was the most immediately threatened and the most nearly definitive of the three. A people that lost its language would cease, in a generation, to be a nation at all, whatever its blood or its borders. The saying most often attributed to him puts it starkly: “A nation whose language is corrupted [or lost] can no longer exist as a nation” — the axiom behind the whole labor of the Society for Literacy and the defense of Georgian in the schools (OCA, Martyr Ilia Chavchavadze of Georgia, and orthochristian.com, Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), attributing this conviction to Ilia; Manning, Strangers in a Strange Land, 2012, on the centrality of language in Ilia’s thought). Whether or not the exact wording is his, the conviction demonstrably is: the standardization and defense of the Georgian literary language was the first and most sustained of all his causes (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010; see Russification and the Georgian Predicament).

The Triad: Fatherland, Language, Faith

The idea for which Ilia is most popularly remembered is the triad Mamuli, Ena, Sartsmunoeba — Fatherland (or Homeland), Language, Faith — the three “divine gifts” or “treasures” a Georgian inherits and must keep, the formula that fuses national and religious identity into one (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the triad; the Georgian national tradition). In the Church’s account of him the triad is given in the first person: “We, the Georgian people, have inherited three divine gifts from our ancestors: our motherland, our language, and our faith” (Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), orthochristian.com, giving the triad in this form). The inclusion of faith as one of the three pillars is precisely what makes the triad the bridge between Ilia the national reformer and Ilia the saint: on this formulation, to be Georgian is inseparably to be Orthodox, and the defense of the nation is inseparable from the defense of the Church (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see Ilia and the Church).

The status of the triad must, however, be treated with care, and the collection does not overstate it. Two cautions are in order, both grounded in the scholarship.

First, on origin and wording. The triad expresses ideas genuinely central to Ilia’s thought — the three appear, together and separately, across his journalism and verse — and Georgian tradition credits him with formulating it, some accounts dating the germ of the idea to around 1860, at the outset of his public life (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; Georgian biographical tradition). But the crisp three-word slogan in its now-canonical form and order (ena, mamuli, sartsmunoeba) is, as scholars note, in significant part a later crystallization — a distillation of Ilia’s ideas into a fixed motto rather than a verbatim citation from a single dated text (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the shaping and reception of the triad). [Disputed: the precise wording, order, and dating of the triad as a fixed slogan. That the three elements — language, homeland, faith — are central to Ilia’s thought is firmly attested across his corpus (Manning, 2012; Rayfield, 2010). That Ilia coined the exact three-word motto in its familiar form is asserted by Georgian tradition but is better understood, per Tsipuria (Great Immortality, 2019), as a later distillation of his thought; the order itself varies between sources (mamuli, ena, sartsmunoeba and ena, mamuli, sartsmunoeba). This collection treats the triad as a genuine expression of Ilia’s ideas whose fixed sloganic form crystallized later.]

Second, on later use. The triad became a mass political slogan not in Ilia’s own lifetime but in the Georgian national-religious dissident movement of the Soviet era — above all under Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava in the 1970s and 1980s — who campaigned under the banner “ena, mamuli, sartsmunoeba” and made it the watchword of the movement that culminated in Georgian independence (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; scholarship on the Georgian national movement, e.g. the studies of late-Soviet Georgian nationalism). It is in this later movement — the same movement whose religious-national fervor formed the immediate backdrop of the 1987 canonization — that the triad received its charged, sacralized, sloganic meaning (see The Reception and the Debate). The collection therefore reports the triad as Ilia’s in substance and as the later movement’s in its fixed sloganic form, keeping the two layers distinct per the repository methodology.

The Moral Vision

Beneath the national ideas lies a moral vision that the Church’s later reading fastened upon. Ilia’s writing is pervaded by an ethic of service, self-sacrifice for the nation, care for the poor and the exploited, and — in his later years and in the tradition about him — forgiveness of enemies (OCA, Martyr Ilia Chavchavadze of Georgia; orthochristian.com, Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), on his spirit of forgiveness). His opposition to capital punishment, his insistence on representing the whole nation, and the widely reported words of his widow that he would have forgiven his murderers as “unlucky brothers gone astray” all belong to this ethical portrait (OCA, Martyr Ilia Chavchavadze of Georgia, on the widow’s plea; treated further under The Assassination). Whether this ethic is best read as Christian in an explicit sense, or as the humane liberalism of a nineteenth-century reformer formed within a Christian culture, is exactly the interpretive question the Church’s canonization would later answer in one direction and secular readers in another (see The Reception and the Debate; Saint and Symbol). The collection sets out the ideas and leaves that weighing where §4.2 places it: open.

References

Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (The triad of Fatherland, Language, Faith; its shaping, sacralization, and reception; the later national-religious movement and the 1987 canonization.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The nation constituted by culture; the liberal-national idea.)
Manning, Paul. Strangers in a Strange Land. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012. (The centrality of language in Ilia’s thought.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (The ideas across the corpus; the language-reform cause.)
OCA, Martyr Ilia Chavchavadze of Georgia (oca.org); Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907), orthochristian.com / pravoslavie.ru. (The triad in first-person form; the language axiom; the ethic of forgiveness — the Church’s account.)