Saint and Symbol

The three Ilias: the ecclesial saint glorified in 1987, the national symbol venerated by a secular cult since his death, and the Soviet secular enlightener constructed by seventy years of Marxist historiography. The collection keeps the three distinct, presents the saint from within the Church that glorified him (§4.1), and names the Soviet secularization as one distorting pole to be corrected.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

Three Portraits of One Man

Few figures in this repository have been claimed by so many, and so differently, as Ilia Chavchavadze. Three distinct portraits of him have competed, and the collection’s task — following the repository’s discipline of separating the saint from the symbol (compare the model in St. Paisius of Hilendar and St. Tamar of Georgia) — is to hold them apart and see what each gets right and wrong.

The national symbol

From the moment of his death Ilia was a national symbol — the “father of the Georgian nation” (mamamtavari), the object of a secular cult of national veneration that predated his canonization by eighty years and continues alongside it (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5). This is the “cultural saint” of Tsipuria’s analysis: the great national writer elevated to quasi-sacred status, honored with monuments, place-names, jubilees, and the language of national devotion (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see Father of the Nation). The national portrait is true as far as it goes — Ilia genuinely was the maker of the modern nation — but it is capacious enough to be claimed by mutually hostile political projects, from liberal nationalism to, at times, chauvinism, and it tends to absorb the man into the symbol.

The Soviet secular enlightener

The second portrait is the Soviet one, and the collection names it plainly as a distorting pole. Soviet historiography constructed Ilia as a purely secular figure — a “revolutionary democrat,” a progressive realist writer, a critic of feudal and tsarist oppression, an enlightener of the people in the line of the Russian radical critics (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 1994, ch. 5; Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019). This portrait was built by amputation. It cut away the religious dimension of a man who named faith one of the three treasures of his nation; it recast his liberal, anti-revolutionary politics as proto-progressive; and it reassigned the blame for his murder from the Bolsheviks’ forerunners to the tsarist police (see Who and Why: The Live Dispute). It is the mirror-image distortion of an over-pious hagiography: where bad hagiography invents devotion the record does not show, Soviet scholarship erased the faith the record plainly does show. The 1987 canonization was, among other things, the Church’s reclamation of Ilia from this secularizing reduction (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; see The Reception and the Debate).

The ecclesial saint

The third portrait is the one the collection presents from within (§4.1): St. Ilia the Righteous, the holy layman glorified by the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1987 for a life spent in the service of his people’s language, faith, and freedom, sealed by a violent death (see The Act and the Rationale). This portrait, too, must be handled with discipline. It is true — the Church’s recognition of holiness in a righteous public servant of an Orthodox people is coherent and grounded (§4.1) — but it must not be inflated into claims the record does not support, above all about the depth of his private devotion (see Personal Faith and the Thin Record). The saint the collection honors is the documented one: the layman whose righteousness took the form of forty years of labor for a Christian nation’s survival, not a retrospectively constructed mystic.

Keeping the Three Distinct

The discipline is to keep the three portraits from collapsing into one another, because each collapse produces a falsehood:

To collapse the saint into the national symbol is to risk ethnophyletism — to make holiness a function of nationalism and to baptize every political use of Ilia’s name (on the danger, see St. Paisius of Hilendar; the Council of Constantinople condemned ethnophyletism in 1872). The Church glorified a righteous man, not a national ideology.
To collapse the saint into the Soviet enlightener — or rather, to let the Soviet portrait stand — is to lose the faith that was central to the man, and to accept an ideologically motivated amputation as the truth about him.
To collapse the national symbol or the Soviet icon into the saint — reading the whole of Ilia’s secular and political career as though it were straightforwardly religious — is to over-sacralize a genuinely worldly life and to lose the real, complex man in a haze of piety.

The truer Ilia is the one who holds all three in tension: a great national writer and reformer (the symbol’s truth), a secular public man of liberal politics and modern formation (the Soviet portrait’s kernel of truth, stripped of its distortions), and a righteous Orthodox layman who defended his people’s faith and Church and died for his moderation (the ecclesial saint’s truth). The collection presents this whole man, honoring the saint his Church has given her people while refusing to let any single portrait devour the others.

The Value of the Case

Ilia is instructive for the repository precisely because he is the inverse of its thin-source saints. Where a Xenia teaches how to honor a saint of whom almost nothing is documentable (see St. Xenia of Petersburg: Methodology), Ilia teaches the opposite lesson: how to honor a saint of whom almost everything is documented, but whose meaning has been fought over by rival ideologies. The temptation with Xenia is to invent facts; the temptation with Ilia is to impose a frame — to let the national, the Soviet, or an inflated pious portrait decide in advance what the abundant facts mean. The discipline that answers both temptations is the same: pin claims to their sources, mark the interests that shaped each portrait, refuse to collapse distinct things, and present from within the Church a saint whose real greatness needs no exaggeration.

References

Tsipuria, Bela. “Ilia Chavchavadze: Georgia’s Cultural Saint and a Saint of the Georgian Orthodox Church.” In Great Immortality, ed. Marijan Dović and Jón Karl Helgason. Leiden: Brill, 2019. (The national/cultural saint; the Soviet secular construction; the 1987 ecclesial canonization as reclamation.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The national symbol; the Soviet “revolutionary democrat” construction and its distortions.)
On ethnophyletism (Constantinople, 1872) and the saint-versus-symbol discipline, see the parallel treatments in St. Paisius of Hilendar and St. Tamar of Georgia (this repository).
METHODOLOGY.md §4.1 and §4.2, this repository. (The confessional standpoint and the both-sides scope.)