One Church before the Division

In Shushanik’s lifetime the churches of Armenia and Kartli were one communion: Chalcedon (451) had not yet become a dividing line anywhere in the East, Armenia’s formal rejection of the council came only at Dvin in 506 and 554/555, and the Armenian–Georgian schism itself belongs to the early seventh century (the Third Council of Dvin, variously dated 607–610). This file establishes the ecclesial chronology on which Shushanik’s double veneration rests — and why claiming her for one church against the other is an anachronism.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox (shared pre-division veneration with the Armenian Apostolic Church)

The Church Shushanik Died In

When Shushanik died at Tsurtavi in the 470s, the church that buried her was neither “Georgian Orthodox” nor “Armenian Apostolic” in the later, mutually exclusive senses. The Christians of Gugark belonged to a single Caucasian communion: the church of Kartli stood in the closest relation to the Armenian catholicosate, the clergy of the march were of both tongues, and the Martyrdom itself — a Georgian text by a priest of Tsurtavi — moves without any consciousness of confessional boundary between Armenian and Georgian churchmen (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, trans. Lang, 1976; Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the ecclesial texture of the march). Emma Loosley Leeming states the later institutional shape plainly: “Until the early seventh century Kartli was under the religious jurisdiction of the Armenian Catholicos and officially non-Chalcedonian (miaphysite), but at the Council of Dvin in 610 the Kartvelians rejected Armenian ecclesiastical authority and declared an autocephalous Georgian Church,” joining “the Chalcedonian fold” (Loosley Leeming, “Creating an ‘Orthodox’ Past,” Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 61) — while herself cautioning, with Tamila Mgaloblishvili, that the hierarchy’s official alignment is no sure guide to what the wider population believed at any given date (ibid., 64). Whatever the exact confessional temperature of Kartli in 475, the operative fact for this collection is unity: one communion, not two.

Chalcedon in 475: Not Yet a Dividing Line

It is essential to see that in Shushanik’s lifetime the Council of Chalcedon (451) had not yet hardened into a line of division even within the Roman Empire, let alone beyond it. The council’s definition — Christ one person in two natures — was contested from the moment of its promulgation; Alexandria and much of the East resisted it; and in 482, seven years after Shushanik’s death, the emperor Zeno issued the Henotikon precisely to paper over the dispute, an accommodation that itself produced the Acacian schism with Rome (484–519) (on the post-Chalcedonian turmoil, see the treatments in The Pre-Schism Church and The Ecumenical Councils; Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 62, summarizing the Ephesus–Chalcedon divisions and their Caucasian consequences). Shushanik died, that is, in the Henotikon generation — an age in which the whole East, Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian, was still one canonical communion struggling over the council’s reception.

Armenia, for its part, had been absent from Chalcedon for the most concrete of reasons: in 451 the Armenian nobility and church were fighting for their existence in the Avarayr war (Ełishē, trans. Thomson, 1982). The Armenian Church’s formal position on Chalcedon was defined only decades after Shushanik’s death: the First Council of Dvin (506) aligned the Armenian, Georgian, and Albanian churches with the Henotikon‘s non-Chalcedonian reading, and the Second Council of Dvin (554/555) made the rejection of Chalcedon explicit (Garsoïan, L’Église arménienne et le grand schisme d’Orient, 1999, the standard study of the Armenian church’s separation from the imperial church; the 506 council notably included Georgian bishops — evidence of the continuing single communion). Note what this chronology means for Shushanik: she cannot be enrolled retrospectively as a partisan of either Christology. No source gives her any position on Chalcedon; the Martyrdom is entirely innocent of the controversy [Confirmed by silence: the text’s concerns are apostasy and fidelity, not intra-Christian dogmatics — Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik, trans. Lang, 1976; cf. Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 64, on the impossibility of extracting confessional identity from the fifth-century hagiographies]. Mgaloblishvili’s remark about Peter the Iberian applies to Shushanik’s whole generation: living in the mid-fifth century, “it is unclear if he realised how cataclysmic the long-term effects of the Council of Chalcedon would become” (Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 67).

The Parting of the Ways: Dvin, c. 607–610

The division that later generations read back into Shushanik’s world came a century and a half after her death. Around the turn of the seventh century, the catholicos of Kartli, Kyrion (Kirion) I, moved his church toward Chalcedon and communion with Constantinople; the Armenian catholicos Abraham I resisted, and the rupture was formalized at the Third Council of Dvin. [Disputed: the date of the definitive Armenian–Georgian schism. The Third Council of Dvin and Abraham’s encyclical against Kyrion are conventionally placed in 607, 608, or 609 in the scholarship (the range reflects the sources’ regnal-year reckonings; Garsoïan, L’Église arménienne, 1999, for the documentary dossier); Loosley Leeming gives “609–610,” writing that “in 610 Kartli officially changed from a non-Chalcedonian position in union with the Armenian Orthodox Church, and embraced Chalcedonian Orthodoxy and Constantinopolitan religious authority” (Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 63–64). This collection gives the range c. 607–610 and does not adjudicate.] From that parting the two national churches of the Caucasus took their enduring shapes: the Georgian Church within Chalcedonian Orthodoxy — the communion of this repository (METHODOLOGY §4.1) — and the Armenian Apostolic Church within the family of non-Chalcedonian (Oriental Orthodox) churches (Garsoïan, 1999; Loosley Leeming, 2019; see The Orthodox Church of Georgia).

Loosley Leeming adds a caution this collection adopts: whether the break was “a sudden break or, more plausibly, the formal announcement of a parting of the ways that had occurred sometime previously” remains unclear, and “all the Georgian written evidence of the split with the Armenian Church was written at least a hundred years after the events,” from a Chalcedonian standpoint (Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 63–64). The historian must therefore hold two truths together: the seventh-century division was real and enduring; and the fifth-century unity was equally real, and Shushanik belongs to it.

Why This Matters for Her Cult

Three consequences follow, and they govern Section 07 of this collection.

First, the double veneration is original, not a later concession. Shushanik was venerated at Tsurtavi and throughout the march from immediately after her death — the Martyrdom is itself the liturgical monument of that veneration — by a community that was Armenian and Georgian at once (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom of Shushanik; Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44). Both later churches inherited her; neither adopted her from the other. The Armenian recension of her passion and the Armenian menologia carry her memory on that side of the divide exactly as the Georgian manuscripts carry it on this one (Maksoudian, trans., The Passion of Saint Shushanik, Armenian version, 1997; see Manuscripts, Recensions, Translations).

Second, she is structurally analogous to the pre-Schism saints of the West. This repository venerates saints of the undivided pre-1054 West — a Patrick, a Genevieve, a Bede — without anachronistically enlisting them in later divisions (see St. Genevieve of Paris, her near-exact contemporary, c. 420–502). Shushanik stands to the Armenian–Georgian schism as those saints stand to the Great Schism: prior to it, and therefore common ground. The analogy is mutatis mutandis — the Chalcedonian question is a dogmatic one on which this repository stands with the Orthodox Church (§4.1) — but the hagiological logic is the same: sanctity attested and received before a division is not retroactively divided by it.

Third, the historical questions remain evidential. Which church’s later tradition preserves the better text of her passion, when her relics moved and where, which calendar preserves the older feast — these are source-critical questions governed by §4.2, argued from manuscripts and attestations, not from confessional loyalty. The files of Sections 05–07 treat them accordingly.

The Confessional Standpoint, Stated Soberly

Per the repository’s methodology (§4.1), this collection is written from within the Orthodox Church, which receives the Council of Chalcedon as the Fourth Ecumenical Council and its definition as the Church’s dogma (see The Ecumenical Councils). The Georgian Church’s seventh-century embrace of Chalcedon is, from this standpoint, a homecoming to the Church’s faith, and the collection does not present the two Christologies as equivalent options. But the standpoint imposes its own discipline here: Shushanik confessed Christ against Zoroastrianism, not against any Christian confession; the Armenian Church that venerates her does so as the church of her father’s people, with every historical right; and nothing in Orthodox veneration of her requires, or is served by, polemic against that shared memory. The Church honors in Shushanik a martyr of the undivided Caucasian church — and honest history keeps her there.

References

Loosley Leeming, Emma. “Creating an ‘Orthodox’ Past: Georgian Hagiography and the Construction of a Denominational Identity.” Medieval Worlds 10 (2019): 61–71. (Kartli under Armenian jurisdiction until the early seventh century; the Third Council of Dvin 609–610 and the 610 change; the caution about hierarchy vs. populace and the late, Chalcedonian-authored Georgian evidence.)
Garsoïan, Nina. L’Église arménienne et le grand schisme d’Orient. Louvain: Peeters, 1999. (The standard study: Dvin 506 and 554/555; the Armenian church’s separation from the imperial church; the Kyrion–Abraham rupture and its dossier.)
Ełishē. History of Vardan and the Armenian War. Trans. Robert W. Thomson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. (Armenia’s absence from Chalcedon; the 451 war.)
Jakob Tsurtaveli. The Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik (c. 476–483). Condensed English trans. in D. M. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956; 2nd rev. ed. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The undivided Armeno-Georgian church life of Tsurtavi; the text’s silence on Chalcedon.)
Maksoudian, Krikor, trans. The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), preliminary version published in Sion (1997); online in Robert Bedrosian’s collection, attalus.org/armenian. (The Armenian textual tradition of her cult.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The ecclesial texture of fifth-century Kartli and the march.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44: the Martyrdom and its milieu.)
METHODOLOGY.md §4.1–4.2, this repository. (Confessional standpoint; both-sides scope for factual questions.)