The Reception and the Debate

The second both-sides flagship: the discussion the 1987 canonization occasioned. Ilia was a largely secular-public figure — a writer, editor, and banker — glorified as “the Righteous”; the act came amid a surging national-religious revival, and it fuses cultural and ecclesial sanctity in a way scholars have studied closely. Per METHODOLOGY §4.2 this file presents the Church’s rationale and the questions the canonization raised, naming positions and adjudicating none.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

A Cultural Saint Made an Ecclesial One

The single most illuminating scholarly frame for Ilia’s canonization is Bela Tsipuria’s study of him as at once a “cultural saint” and a saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church,” in Great Immortality: Studies on European Cultural Sainthood, 2019). Across nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, Tsipuria observes, nations elevated their great national poets and writers into secular “cultural saints” — objects of a quasi-religious veneration, with pilgrimages, monuments, jubilees, and the language of the sacred — and Ilia had been exactly such a figure for Georgia long before 1987: the father of the nation, the object of a secular cult of national devotion (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). What is distinctive about the Georgian case is that this secular cultural sainthood was then, in 1987, converted into literal ecclesial sainthood: the national poet was formally canonized by his Church (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). Ilia is thus a rare and instructive case in which the two kinds of modern “sainthood” — the cultural-national and the religious — visibly meet in one figure.

The National-Religious Revival of the 1980s

The canonization did not happen in a vacuum. It came at the leading edge of a national-religious revival in late-Soviet Georgia that would, within a few years, carry the country to independence. In the 1970s and 1980s the Georgian national movement had increasingly fused national and Orthodox identity, campaigning under the very triad — ena, mamuli, sartsmunoeba (language, homeland, faith) — associated with Ilia, above all in the dissident movement led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia and Merab Kostava (see The Ideas and the Triad; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). The Georgian Orthodox Church, revived under Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II, was at the center of this resurgence. In the same year as the canonization, 1987, the “Ilia Chavchavadze Society” was formed as a vehicle of Georgian national revival and, before long, of the drive to independence (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the 1987 Society and the revival). The glorification of Ilia was thus both an act of the Church and a moment in a national awakening that took him as its patron — the two dimensions, as with the triad, inseparably fused.

The Questions the Canonization Raised

Precisely because Ilia was so public and so worldly a figure, and because the canonization was so entangled with a national movement, the act has been the object of thoughtful discussion. Per §4.2 the collection sets out the questions honestly, as questions, without resolving them:

The secular-figure question. Ilia was not a monk, a bishop, a confessor of the faith under persecution, or a wonderworker in the classic mold. He was a writer, editor, and banker whose fame was overwhelmingly national and cultural. Some observers have asked whether the canonization of such a figure represents a broadening of the category of sanctity toward the national and the cultural — and whether that broadening is a legitimate development or a blurring of the line between holiness and national heroism (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on the discussion). The Church’s answer is embedded in the title it chose: the Righteous — the designation precisely for a holy layperson whose sanctity is worked out in the world (see The Act and the Rationale). The collection reports both the question and the Church’s answer, and adjudicates neither.
The nationalism question. Because the canonization was bound up with a national-independence movement, some have asked whether it risks the ecclesiological error the Orthodox Church herself has condemned — the subordination of the Church to the nation, the confusion of the Gospel with ethnic identity, which the Council of Constantinople named ethnophyletism in 1872 (on this danger in a parallel case, see St. Paisius of Hilendar). From within the Church the answer distinguishes: to honor a man who defended a people’s faith and Church is not to canonize nationalism, and the Church may recognize sanctity in a national servant without endorsing every use later made of his name. But the question is a real one, sharpened by the fervent national-religious atmosphere of 1987, and the collection does not pretend it away (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019).
The Soviet-secular pole. Cutting the other way is the distorting reading the collection explicitly names as an error: the Soviet-era construction of Ilia as a purely secular figure — a “revolutionary democrat,” a progressive national classic, an enlightener stripped of his faith (see Saint and Symbol). Soviet historiography, which claimed Ilia for a secular-progressive pantheon and even reassigned the blame for his murder to the tsarist police (see Who and Why), represents the opposite distortion from an over-pious hagiography: it amputates the religious dimension of a man who named faith one of the three treasures of his nation. The 1987 canonization was, in part, the Church’s reclamation of Ilia from that secularizing reduction.

Holding the Tension

The honest position, and the collection’s, is to hold the tension rather than dissolve it. Ilia Chavchavadze is genuinely both things at once: a national-cultural hero venerated by a secular cult, and a saint glorified by his Church — and the two have been, in the Georgian case, deeply and perhaps inextricably fused (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). From within the Church (§4.1) the collection presents the glorification as a coherent act with a stated and intelligible rationale (see The Act and the Rationale); as a matter of open discussion (§4.2) it reports the questions the act raised — about secular sanctity, about nationalism, about the relation of cultural to ecclesial veneration — and names the Soviet secular reduction as a distorting pole to be corrected. It leaves the weighing of the questions to the reader and to the Church’s continuing reception of a saint glorified within living memory, in the manner the repository reserves for recently and contestably received figures (cf. the treatment of contested reception in St. Paisius of Hilendar and St. Sophrony of Essex).

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. (Ilia as cultural saint and ecclesial saint; the national-religious revival; the 1987 Ilia Chavchavadze Society; the fusion of the two sainthoods and the questions it raises.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The late-Soviet national revival; the Soviet secular construction of Ilia.)
OrthodoxWiki, Ilia the Righteous; OCA, Martyr Ilia Chavchavadze of Georgia; orthochristian.com, Saint Ilia the Righteous (†1907). (The Church’s account and rationale.)
On ethnophyletism (Constantinople, 1872) and the national-awakening-vs-saint question, see the parallel treatment in St. Paisius of Hilendar (this repository).