The Confession and the Martyric Death

The tradition of Vakhtang’s dying confession of Christ and his final exhortation to his people, and his veneration by the Georgian Church as a martyr-king. This file follows the death from the battlefield into the Church’s memory, showing how a king’s death of a battle-wound became, in the tradition, a martyrdom for the faith — pinned to its source and honest about the hagiographic character of the confession-scene.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Dying King

The Life of Vakhtang Gorgasali does not let its hero die in silence. In the tradition, the mortally wounded king, lingering from the arrow that struck him in his last Persian war, gathers his household and his nobles about him and dies with a confession of Christ and an exhortation on his lips: he professes his faith, commends his people to God and to the defense of the Christian faith, gives his charge to his son and successor Dachi — including, in the tradition, the completion of Tbilisi — and so passes as a Christian king, dying in the faith he had defended all his life (Thomson, Rewriting Caucasian History, 1996; the dying speech is a set-piece of the Life and the hagiography; on Dachi and Tbilisi see The City and the Kingdom). The death-bed confession is the interpretive climax of the whole narrative: it declares, in the king’s own dying words, that his life of war was a life for Christ, and it hands that cause on to the next reign.

The confession-scene is, in form, hagiography — a deathbed profession and testament, shaped by the conventions of the genre to make explicit the Christian meaning of the life (Rapp, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes, 2014, on the Life‘s literary character; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976, on the hagiographic tradition). The collection reports it as such: the actual dying words of a fifth-century king are beyond recovery, and what survives is the tradition’s account of how he died and what his death meant. But the form does not empty the substance. That Vakhtang died a Christian king, in war against the Zoroastrian empire, professing his faith — this is the coherent meaning the tradition drew from a life whose Christian commitment is, in its broad lines, historically real (see The Defense of Christian Iberia).

From Death in Battle to Martyrdom

The step from a king’s death of a battle-wound to a martyrdom is the crucial one, and it is worth marking precisely, because Vakhtang’s martyr-status is of a particular kind. He was not a martyr in the classic sense of one seized, tried, and executed for refusing to renounce Christ — the death of a St. Shushanik, tortured to death by an apostate husband for her faith, or of a St. Abo, beheaded for refusing to return to Islam (see St. Abo of Tbilisi). Vakhtang died a soldier’s death in war. His martyrdom, in the tradition, is that of the Christian king who lays down his life in defense of the faith and the Christian people against their persecutors — a death for Christ in the sense that the war itself was a war for Christ, and the king’s fall in it a giving of his life for the faith he defended (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; the tradition of Vakhtang as martyr-king is standard in the Georgian veneration).

[Disputed: the precise sense in which Vakhtang is a “martyr.” The Georgian Church venerates him as a holy king and martyr, on the ground that he died of a wound taken in war against the Zoroastrian Sasanians in defense of Christian Iberia and its faith (the tradition, in Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; the liturgical veneration). This is martyrdom in the broadened sense of dying in defense of the faith in battle against its persecutors, not in the strict sense of execution for confession under trial; the distinction is one of category, and the tradition and the liturgical books nonetheless title him martyr. The collection reports the veneration as the Church gives it and notes the character of the “martyrdom.”]

This broadened martyrdom is not peculiar to Vakhtang; it belongs to a recognizable class of Christian warrior-saints and holy kings who fell in defense of the faith — a class to which the Church has long extended the honor of martyrdom or of holy kingship, weighing the cause and the confession rather than only the mode of death (see A Warrior King as Saint for the wider category). Vakhtang’s death in a Persian war, interpreted through his lifelong resistance to Zoroastrian pressure and sealed by the tradition’s confession-scene, placed him squarely within it.

The Veneration as Martyr-King

The Georgian Orthodox Church venerates Vakhtang I Gorgasali as a holy king and martyr, with his feast fixed on 30 November (Old Style; observed on that date in the Georgian calendar, corresponding to 13 December on the Gregorian reckoning in some diaspora usage) — a commemoration he shares, in the Church’s calendar, with the Apostle Andrew, the first-called, who is honored as the first preacher of the Gospel in the Georgian lands (the 30 November commemoration is standard in the Georgian and wider Orthodox calendars; the Orthodox Church in America likewise commemorates “Holy King Vakhtang Gorgasali of Georgia” on 30 November). The veneration is old and firmly established: Vakhtang is among the most honored of the Georgian holy kings, the warrior-founder of the capital numbered among the martyrs of the nation’s faith (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976).

His burial belongs to the tradition of the mother-see: Vakhtang was laid to rest, the tradition holds, at Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta, the cathedral his own patronage had helped to build — the king buried in the mother-church of the Church he had served (see The Reorganization of the Georgian Church). The place of burial binds the two great strands of his memory: the founder of Tbilisi and reorderer of the Church, laid in the sacred heart of Christian Kartli, honored as a martyr for the faith he had defended from his childhood to his last battle.

The Meaning of the Martyric Death

The martyric death completes the figure of Vakhtang and grounds his cult. A life that the tradition had built into an epic of war for the faith reaches its proper end in a death for the faith, confessed on the king’s own lips and honored by the Church as a martyrdom. The historian will insist on the qualifications — the death was a soldier’s, the confession-scene is hagiography, the date is uncertain — and the collection insists on them too. But the qualifications do not dissolve the core the Church venerates: a Christian king who spent his life defending the faith St. Nina had planted, and who died of a wound taken in that defense. Whether one calls that a martyrdom in the strict or the broadened sense, it is the death of a man who gave his life for the cause of Christ in his land — and that is what the Church commemorates each 30 November in the holy king Vakhtang Gorgasali (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; see A Warrior King as Saint).

See Also

References

  • Thomson, Robert W. Rewriting Caucasian History: The Medieval Armenian Adaptation of the Georgian Chronicles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. (The Life’s deathbed confession and testament to Dachi.)
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The tradition of Vakhtang as martyr-king; the Georgian veneration.)
  • Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The literary and hagiographic character of the Life.)
  • Toumanoff, Cyril. “Chronology of the Early Kings of Iberia.” Traditio 25 (1969): 1–33. (The date of the death.)