A Saint of the Undivided Caucasus

Shushanik belongs to both the Georgian Orthodox and the Armenian Apostolic churches because she belonged to the one church of the Caucasus that preceded them both: she died c. 475, the division came c. 607–610. This file draws the consequences — for her cult, for this repository’s confessional standpoint, and for the honest writing of Caucasian church history — and states why Orthodox veneration of her neither requires nor permits polemic against the Armenian memory of the same saint.

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

The Fact of the Double Veneration

Both churches keep her. The Georgian Orthodox Church venerates the holy martyr queen Shushanik with a fixed feast and a shrine tradition at Metekhi (Machitadze, The Lives of the Georgian Saints, 2006; see The Relics and Metekhi); the Armenian Apostolic Church venerates Surb Shushanik, daughter of St. Vardan, with her own recension of the passion and her place in the menologia (The Passion of Saint Shushanik, Armenian version with menologion notice, trans. Maksoudian, 1997; see Manuscripts, Recensions, Translations). This is not a case — common enough elsewhere — of one church borrowing an attractive saint from another’s calendar. Both venerations descend in unbroken succession from the original cult at Tsurtavi, a cult that was Armenian and Georgian at once because the community that kept it was (Jakob Tsurtaveli, Martyrdom, trans. Lang, 1976, for the bicultural march; see Veneration and the Political Sequel). When the churches divided at Dvin (c. 607–610; Garsoïan, L’Église arménienne, 1999; Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 63–64), each carried the whole inheritance of the undivided centuries with it — Shushanik included. She is, in the precise sense, a saint of the undivided Caucasus.

Her own biography seals the point with something close to irony: she was an Armenian princess, of the most Armenian of houses, martyred in Kartli, buried in Georgian ground, and written into history in the Georgian language by a priest who served a mixed flock. Any attempt to sort her into one national-ecclesial box does violence to every element of the case (on the biculturalism of Gugark, Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014; Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History, 1963).

The Analogy: the Pre-Schism West, Mutatis Mutandis

This repository already possesses the frame for such a saint. Its collections venerate saints of the pre-1054 West — St. Genevieve of Paris (Shushanik’s near-exact contemporary), St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Bede — as Orthodox saints of an undivided communion, without pretending the later division did not happen and without surrendering them to it (see The Pre-Schism Church). Shushanik stands to the Armenian–Georgian schism as those saints stand to the Great Schism: prior to it, and therefore common ground rather than contested territory.

The mutatis mutandis must be stated as carefully as the analogy. The Chalcedonian question is not, for the Orthodox Church, an open question: the Fourth Ecumenical Council’s definition is the Church’s dogma, and this repository writes from within that confession (§4.1; see The Ecumenical Councils). The Armenian Apostolic Church’s non-reception of Chalcedon is, from the Orthodox side, a real and grave division of long standing — not a misunderstanding to be relativized, though modern Orthodox–Oriental dialogue has examined how much of it is terminological (a live and disputed assessment that belongs to the ecumenism debate, not to this file; see The Ecumenism Debate). Nothing in Shushanik’s case requires a judgment on any of that — and that is precisely the point. She confessed Christ against Zoroastrianism, under no Christian confessional flag, before the division existed; her sanctity was received by the whole undivided church of her world. The Orthodox Christian venerates her as the Orthodox Church received her — and observes, without embarrassment, that the Armenian Church received her the same way at the same time, because it was then the same reception.

What Exclusive Claiming Would Falsify

It is worth spelling out what would be historically false in either exclusive claim, because both have been made in the national scholarships (on the politicization of early Caucasian hagiography generally, Loosley Leeming, Medieval Worlds 10, 2019, 65 n. 14, on the contemporary Georgian entanglement of Orthodoxy and national identity; the Armenian literature has its own counterpart).

A Georgian-exclusive Shushanik must minimize that she was Vardan Mamikonian’s daughter, that her name, family, and formation were Armenian, that the Armenian recension and cult are ancient, and that the church of fifth-century Kartli itself stood under the Armenian catholicos’s jurisdiction in the century after her death (Loosley Leeming, 2019, 61, 63–64). An Armenian-exclusive Shushanik must minimize that her passion, cult, and burial belong to Kartli, that the earliest and fullest text is Georgian and names its Georgian-writing author, and that the Georgian Church has kept her shrine and feast without interruption (Rayfield, The Literature of Georgia, 2010, 42–44; Machitadze, Lives, 2006). Each exclusion amputates half the evidence. The historian’s Shushanik — like the Church’s — is irreducibly double: an Armenian saint of the Georgian Church, an Armenian church’s saint written in Georgian, the shared crown of a once-shared communion (per §4.2, this paragraph adjudicates nothing between the churches; it reports what the sources jointly compel).

The Standpoint of This Collection, Stated Once More

Per §4.1, this collection’s standpoint is the Georgian Orthodox Church’s: Chalcedonian, in communion with the Orthodox world whose reference guide this repository is (see The Orthodox Church of Georgia). From that standpoint the collection says plainly: the Orthodox venerator of St. Shushanik venerates her within the Church’s full dogmatic faith, and the seventh-century Georgian embrace of Chalcedon is, for Orthodoxy, the church of Kartli’s fidelity to the truth. But §4.1’s own terms forbid triumphalism, and the case forbids it doubly: the Church does not strengthen her claim to a pre-division martyr by disparaging the other heirs of the communion that first venerated her. The Armenian Christian who keeps the feast of Surb Shushanik and the Georgian Christian who keeps the feast of cminda Šušaniki are both doing what their common ancestors at Tsurtavi did in the first years after 475 — and a repository built on attestation can only note that this, the oldest attested fact about her cult, is the one fact the two churches have never divided.

She has functioned accordingly in modern times: in Georgian–Armenian church relations — not free of friction, particularly over church properties and the shared borderlands — Shushanik (with the other shared pre-division saints) is standing evidence of the common patrimony, invoked as such in the scholarship of both traditions [Disputed: the modern ecumenical uses of her figure vary with the season of Georgian–Armenian relations and are reported here only at this level of generality; for the historical substrate see Garsoïan, L’Église arménienne, 1999, and Loosley Leeming, 2019].

References

Garsoïan, Nina. L’Église arménienne et le grand schisme d’Orient. Louvain: Peeters, 1999. (The Armenian–Georgian division and its dossier; the pre-division communion.)
Loosley Leeming, Emma. “Creating an ‘Orthodox’ Past: Georgian Hagiography and the Construction of a Denominational Identity.” Medieval Worlds 10 (2019): 61–71. (Kartli under the Armenian catholicos before c. 610; the break’s date; the modern politics of the hagiography.)
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 bicultural cult community.)
The Passion of Saint Shushanik (Armenian version), trans. Krikor Maksoudian, 1997; online at attalus.org/armenian. (The Armenian recension and menologion.)
Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. The Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006. (The Georgian veneration.)
Rayfield, Donald. The Literature of Georgia: A History. 3rd ed. London: Garnett Press, 2010. (42–44.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. — Toumanoff, Cyril. Studies in Christian Caucasian History. Georgetown, 1963. (Gugark’s biculturalism.)
METHODOLOGY.md §4.1–4.2, this repository. (Standpoint and both-sides scope — the governing rules of this file.)