Nino and the Georgian Nation: Faith Fused with Identity

The fusion, almost unique in its completeness, of the Christian faith with Georgian national identity — a fusion in which St. Nino stands at the very center. To be Georgian, in the long self-understanding the Nino tradition expresses, is to belong to the people the captive woman won for Christ; the grapevine cross is at once the sign of the Church and of the nation, and Nino’s name is among the most common borne by Georgian women. This file traces how the figure of the enlightener became inseparable from Georgian peoplehood, and reads that fusion with the care the repository brings to claims that bind a faith to a nation.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox / Pan-Orthodox

A Conversion That Made a People

Few Christian nations identify their faith and their nationhood as completely as Georgia, and at the root of that identification stands St. Nino. The conversion of Iberia in the fourth century (see Christianity as State Religion) was not merely the adoption of a religion by a kingdom; in the long memory of the Georgian people it became a founding event of Georgian peoplehood itself. The Georgian Church that grew from Nino’s mission (see Georgian Christianity After Nino) became, through centuries of foreign domination — Persian, Arab, Mongol, Ottoman, and Russian — the chief carrier of Georgian language, letters, and identity, so that to be Georgian and to be Orthodox came to be felt as nearly the same thing. Nino, the agent of the conversion, stands at the center of that fusion as the nation’s enlightener and, in a real sense, its mother.

The Symbols of the Fusion

The fusion is legible in the nation’s symbols. The grapevine cross of St. Nino is at once the emblem of the Georgian Church and a sign of the Georgian nation, appearing in the heraldry and flags of the Georgian state across its history (see Symbol of Georgian Christianity). The mother cathedral of the nation, Svetitskhoveli at Mtskheta, is built on the miracle that crowned Nino’s mission (see The Living Pillar), and the old capital Mtskheta is venerated as a holy city. The relics and shrines of Nino — the cross at Sioni, the tomb at Bodbe (see Bodbe and the Relics) — are national as well as ecclesial monuments. And the very name Nino is among the most common given to Georgian girls, a quiet daily testimony to how completely the saint has entered the life of the people.

The Language and the Letters

One concrete instance shows how deeply the fusion runs: the Georgian alphabet and literature are bound up with the Christianization that Nino began. The earliest surviving Georgian writing is Christian, and the development of Georgian as a written literary language proceeded hand in hand with the needs of the Church — the translation of Scripture and liturgy, the writing of saints’ Lives and chronicles, the copying of manuscripts in monasteries like Shatberdi, where the oldest manuscript of the Conversion of Kartli was made in 973 (see The Developed Hagiography). The Georgian literary tradition is, in its origins and for much of its history, a Christian tradition, and the Church was its patron and preserver. To this day the connection is felt: the Georgian language, the Georgian Church, and Georgian nationhood form a single inheritance, and St. Nino, who in the tradition learned the Georgian tongue at Urbnisi on her way to Mtskheta in order to preach (see Miracles and the Mission), stands at the head of it as the one who first brought the Word to the land in its own words.

The Carrier Through Adversity

The binding of faith and nation was forged above all in adversity. Through the long centuries in which Georgia had no secure independent state, the Church — the church Nino founded — was the institution that preserved the Georgian language as a literary and liturgical tongue, that maintained the historical memory in chronicles like the Kartlis Tskhoveba, and that gave the scattered Georgian principalities a common identity. The Nino tradition itself, in its developed form, was part of this work: The Conversion of Kartli and the Life of St. Nino, in the recensions of the ninth century and after, are documents of national as well as religious self-definition, and modern scholarship reads them partly as assertions of a distinct Kartvelian Christian identity (S. H. Rapp Jr., Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, Peeters, 2003; see The Developed Hagiography). To tell the story of Nino was, for medieval Georgians, partly to assert who they were.

Reading the Fusion with Care

The repository treats the fusion of faith and nationhood as a real and powerful historical phenomenon, and at the same time with the care due to any claim that identifies a religion with a people. Two points keep the treatment honest. First, the historical core — that the Church was the chief carrier of Georgian identity through centuries of foreign rule — is well attested and is the firm ground of the discussion. Second, the developed Nino tradition through which much of the fusion is expressed is the later layer, written in part as national self-definition, and is reported as such rather than as documentary history (see Origins and the Sources). The veneration of Nino as mother of the nation is genuine and ancient; the biography it rests on is the developed Georgian Life, and the collection keeps the two distinct. Nor does the fusion make the faith merely ethnic: the Georgian Church holds the one Orthodox faith of the universal Church, and Nino is venerated across the Orthodox world as Equal-to-the-Apostles (see Equal-to-the-Apostles), not as a saint of Georgians only.

A Comparison and a Caution

The Georgian fusion of faith and nation invites comparison with other Orthodox nations whose Christianity is bound up with their identity — Russia with its baptism under St. Vladimir, Serbia with St. Sava, Armenia with St. Gregory the Illuminator — and the comparison is illuminating in both directions. Like these, Georgia traces its Christian identity to a founding figure and a founding conversion, and treats the Church as the bearer of national continuity through adversity. Yet the Georgian case has a distinctive feature: its founding apostle is a woman, a captive, a foreigner — not a prince like Vladimir, not a native nobleman like Sava, but a powerless outsider. The fusion of Georgian faith and nationhood thus rests, at its origin, on the conversion of a kingdom by one who had no claim on it but holiness. This guards the Georgian national-religious identity, at least in its founding memory, against the temptation to which such fusions are prone — the identification of the faith with the power and pride of the nation — by rooting it instead in the prayer of the powerless.

The caution the repository keeps is the one METHODOLOGY §4 prescribes for any claim that binds a faith to a people: the historical fusion is real and is treated as such, but the developed Nino tradition through which it is largely expressed is the later layer and is reported as tradition, not as documentary history, and the faith Georgia holds is the universal Orthodox faith, not a merely ethnic possession. With those distinctions kept, the fusion of Nino, her church, and the Georgian nation is one of the most remarkable in Christian history — and one of the most instructive.

The Enlightener as Mother

In the end the relation of Nino to the Georgian nation is best caught in the title the tradition gives her: enlightener of Georgia, the one through whom the light of Christ first reached the land. A captive foreign woman, with no rank and no power, became the spiritual mother of a people and the founder of its church — and the people have repaid the debt by binding her, her cross, and her faith into the very substance of what it means to be Georgian. That a nation should trace its identity to the prayer of a captive is the deepest paradox of the Nino tradition, and its abiding glory.

See Also

References

  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (On the Nino texts as Kartvelian self-definition.)
  • The Conversion of Kʻartʻli and The Life of St. Nino, in Constantine B. Lerner, The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography. London: Bennett & Bloom, 2004.
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956.
  • Eastmond, Antony. Royal Imagery in Medieval Georgia. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. (On Nino in the national-royal imagery.)