The Pantheon and the Royal Saints

Ilia Chavchavadze’s resting place on the Holy Mountain of Tbilisi — the Mtatsminda Pantheon at the church of St. David — and his distinctive place among the saints of Georgia: the one modern layman, a writer and public man, now numbered beside the ancient royal and monastic saints — David the Builder, Tamar, Vakhtang, Nina, and the modern confessor Gabriel.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Holy Mountain

Ilia Chavchavadze is buried on Mtatsminda — the name means “Holy Mountain” — the height above Tbilisi crowned by the ancient church of St. David, the Mamadaviti (“Father David”), named for one of the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers who brought monasticism to Georgia in the sixth century (see The Thirteen Assyrian Fathers). Around that church grew the Mtatsminda Pantheon of Writers and Public Figures, the national burial-place of the great men and women of modern Georgia, and there, after his vast public funeral in 1907, Ilia was laid to rest (Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed., 1994, ch. 5; Ilia Chavchavadze, Wikipedia, on the burial at the Mtatsminda Pantheon). The geography is resonant: the father of the modern nation lies on the Holy Mountain, at the feet of one of the fathers of Georgian monasticism, beneath the church that gives the mountain its sanctity. For a saint whose whole life bound the national and the religious together, the resting-place is fitting almost to the point of parable.

That Ilia was buried, before his canonization, in a national pantheon rather than in a church as a saint is itself a mark of the double character this collection has traced throughout: he entered his tomb in 1907 as the father of the nation and the object of a secular national cult, and it was only eighty years later, in 1987, that the Church numbered the man in that national tomb among her saints (see The Reception and the Debate; Saint and Symbol). His grave on Mtatsminda is thus a place where the national symbol and the ecclesial saint literally coincide.

The One Modern Layman Among the Saints

Ilia’s place in the calendar of Georgian saints is distinctive, and worth stating precisely. The great saints of Georgia are, overwhelmingly, of two kinds: the ancient royal saints — sovereigns whose kingship the Church sanctified — and the ancient monastic and missionary saints. The royal saints include St. Vakhtang Gorgasali, the fifth-century warrior-king and founder of Tbilisi; St. David the Builder (David IV), the architect of the medieval Golden Age; and St. Tamar the Great, the queen who reigned as “king” at the Golden Age’s zenith (see St. Vakhtang Gorgasali; St. David the Builder; St. Tamar of Georgia). The missionary and monastic saints include St. Nina, the equal-to-the-apostles who converted Georgia in the fourth century, and the Thirteen Assyrian Fathers (see St. Nina of Georgia; The Thirteen Assyrian Fathers). Against this ancient and largely royal-monastic company, Ilia stands out: a modern layman, neither king nor monk nor bishop, a writer and public man of the nineteenth century, numbered among the righteous (see The Act and the Rationale).

There is a deep logic in this. Where the medieval Church sanctified the kingship that defended and embodied the Christian nation — the holy sovereign who was the nation’s head — the modern Church, in a Georgia that had no king, recognized holiness in the layman who had done for the stateless nation what the holy kings had done for the kingdom: defended its faith, its language, and its freedom (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019, on Ilia’s national-religious role). Ilia is, in a real sense, the modern successor of the royal saints — the “uncrowned king,” as Georgians called him — the one who bore the burden of the nation’s Christian identity in an age when there was no crown to sanctify. His glorification places a nineteenth-century editor and banker in the line of David and Tamar, and the placement is not incongruous but theologically pointed: the form of holy service to a Christian nation changed with the times, and the Church recognized the new form.

The Modern Company: St. Gabriel

Ilia is not, in the end, quite alone among the moderns. The Georgian Church of the national-religious revival that glorified him also glorified other modern figures, most notably St. Gabriel (Urgebadze) of Georgia (1929–1995), the fool-for-Christ and confessor who defied the Soviet state and was canonized in 2012 (see St. Gabriel of Georgia). Ilia and Gabriel are very different saints — the one a nineteenth-century public reformer, the other a twentieth-century holy fool and ascetic — but they belong to the same movement of the Georgian Church’s modern self-recovery, in which a nation reasserting its Christian identity against imperial and Soviet pressure reached back to name its righteous ones (Tsipuria, “Ilia Chavchavadze,” in Great Immortality, 2019; on the modern Georgian glorifications, see St. Gabriel of Georgia). Between the ancient royal saints and the modern confessor Gabriel, Ilia the Righteous occupies his own place: the layman of the national awakening, the father of the nation whom the Church received as a saint.

The Last Word

The collection’s last word returns to its governing discipline. Ilia Chavchavadze was a great and consequential man whose real greatness — as writer, reformer, and father of a nation — is beyond serious dispute; whose death is a genuinely open question; whose interior faith is honestly under-documented; and whose meaning has been contested by Church, nation, and Soviet state alike. His Church has numbered him among the saints as Ilia the Righteous, and this collection has presented that glorification from within, in the Church’s own terms, while keeping open the questions the repository’s methodology requires to be kept open. He lies on the Holy Mountain of his people’s capital, a modern layman among the ancient kings and monks of the Georgian calendar — the father of the nation, received by his Church as one of the righteous, and honored best, saint and man alike, by the truth.

See Also

References

  • Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The funeral and burial; the national veneration.)
  • 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. (Ilia’s national-religious role; his place among the Georgian saints; the modern Georgian glorifications.)
  • Ilia Chavchavadze. Wikipedia. (The burial at the Mtatsminda Pantheon on Mtatsminda / the Holy Mountain — used to locate the fact, cross-checked against Suny.)
  • On the Georgian saints in whose line Ilia stands, see the sibling collections St. David the Builder, St. Tamar of Georgia, St. Vakhtang Gorgasali, St. Nina of Georgia, St. Gabriel of Georgia, and The Thirteen Assyrian Fathers (this repository).