A Warrior King as Saint

How the Church venerates a warrior-king: the union — and the tension — of hard fifth-century statecraft and Christian kingship in a saint who was a fighting sovereign and died in battle. This file treats the question soberly and both-sides, sets Vakhtang within the Orthodox category of the holy king and warrior-saint, and marks his feast on 30 November.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Question

The Orthodox Church numbers among its saints men whose sanctity is inseparable from their exercise of hard, worldly power: kings who waged war, mastered rebellious nobles, and did the violent work that fifth- and sixth- and twelfth-century kingship required. Vakhtang Gorgasali is one of them, and his case, like that of St. David the Builder after him, raises a genuine question that the collection’s methodology asks to be faced rather than smoothed away: how does the Church hold up as holy a man whose life was spent in war and in the hard governance of a nobility, and who died sword in hand (see St. David the Builder; METHODOLOGY §4)? The question is not a modern embarrassment to be explained away; it is a real feature of a certain kind of sanctity, and the honest course is to name it.

The tension is concrete. The historical Vakhtang, even stripped of the epic, mastered a fractious aristocracy — which meant punishing defection and imposing the crown’s will by force (see Warrior and Statesman); he waged war throughout his reign, against nomads, neighbors, and Persia; and he killed the apostate Varsken, an act at once of Christian justice and of a king’s hard power (see The Defense of Christian Iberia). None of this is the gentle sanctity of a monk or a confessor. It is the sanctity — if it is sanctity — of a Christian sovereign doing a sovereign’s work, and the Church’s veneration of him is a judgment that such work can be done in a holy way and for a holy end.

The Orthodox Category of the Holy King

Vakhtang belongs to a recognizable and ancient category. The Orthodox Church venerates a line of holy rulers whose sanctity lies precisely in their Christian kingship — from the equal-to-the-apostles emperors and the holy kings and princes who defended and extended the faith, to the warrior-saints who fell in its defense (the category is treated across the tradition; for the Georgian instance see Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). Within this category the Church weighs a ruler’s holiness not by the absence of war and hard governance — which no real king could achieve — but by the ends to which he bent his power and the faith in which he exercised it: the defense of the Christian people, the protection and building of the Church, the confession of Christ, and, at the limit, the laying-down of life for the faith (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; the theology of holy kingship in the Orthodox tradition).

By these measures Vakhtang qualifies on the tradition’s own terms. His power, as the tradition presents it, was bent to the defense of Christian Kartli against the Zoroastrian empire; he protected and reordered the Church; he confessed Christ and died in a war for the faith (see The Confession and the Martyric Death). The Church’s veneration of him is thus not a canonization of war as such but a recognition that this king used the hard instruments of his office for the faith and gave his life in its cause — the same judgment it makes of David the Builder, whose reign also included hard measures and long wars and who is nonetheless venerated as a saint (see St. David the Builder).

Both Sides, Soberly

The collection presents the warrior-king’s sanctity even-handedly, per its methodology, without either hagiographic panegyric or debunking. [Disputed: how to weigh the sanctity of a warrior-king. (a) The venerating reading holds that Vakhtang’s kingship was itself the field of his holiness — that in defending the Christian people, reordering the Church, and dying for the faith he exercised a genuine Christian sanctity proper to a sovereign, and that the Church’s ancient veneration of holy kings and warrior-saints rightly includes him (Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976; the Georgian liturgical tradition). (b) The cautionary reading notes that the hard measures of any real fifth-century reign — the coercion of nobles, the waging of war, the killing of enemies — sit uneasily with the Gospel’s counsels, and that the veneration of warrior-kings has always required the Church to distinguish the holiness of the man and his cause from the violence of his means; it asks that the tension be acknowledged, not dissolved (a general caution in the reception of warrior-saints; cf. the parallel discussion for David the Builder). This collection reports both readings and does not adjudicate; it presents Vakhtang as the tradition venerates him while keeping the tension honestly in view.]

The point of holding both sides is not indecision but truthfulness. The Church has, in fact, venerated Vakhtang for centuries as a holy king and martyr; that is a datum. It is also true that his was a hard reign of war and rule, and that the veneration of such figures raises real questions about the relation of sanctity to power; that too is a datum. The collection’s task is to report both without pretending either away — to present a saint who was a warrior-king, and to let the reader and the Church’s continuing reflection weigh what that means (METHODOLOGY §4; see Assessment).

The Sanctity Rests on the Core, Not the Epic

One clarification the source-criticism supplies is important here: the Church’s veneration rests on the historical core of Vakhtang’s life, not on the epic elaboration (see The King and the Epic). What is venerated is a Christian king who defended the faith and died in its cause — a core that survives the source-criticism intact, anchored by the external evidence of his part in the anti-Sasanian revolt and by the Martyrdom of Shushanik‘s witness to the world he defended (Thomson, The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi, 1991; Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 1976). The wolf-head duels and the far campaigns are the tradition’s praise, not the ground of the cult. This matters because it means the sanctity does not stand or fall with the epic: even the most sober reconstruction of Vakhtang leaves a Christian king who gave his life for the faith, and that is what the Church commemorates.

The Feast

The Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates St. Vakhtang I Gorgasali, holy king and martyr, on 30 November (Old Style) — the feast he shares with the Apostle Andrew the First-Called, the traditional first preacher of the Gospel in the Georgian lands, a fitting companion for the king who defended the faith Andrew’s preaching and Nina’s mission had planted (the 30 November commemoration is standard in the Georgian and wider Orthodox calendars; the Orthodox Church in America commemorates “Holy King Vakhtang Gorgasali of Georgia” on that date). His memory is kept in the mother-church of Georgian Christianity: the tradition holds that he was buried at Svetitskhoveli in Mtskheta, the cathedral his own patronage had helped to raise (see The Reorganization of the Georgian Church). In the person of Vakhtang the Church venerates the whole of what he was — the warrior, the statesman, the founder of the capital, the reorderer of the Church, and above all the martyr-king who died for the faith of Christ — a sanctity proper to a sovereign, held honestly together with the hard reality of a sovereign’s life.

References

Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. London: Mowbrays, 1976. (The Georgian holy kings; the veneration of Vakhtang as king and martyr.)
Thomson, Robert W., trans. The History of Łazar Pʿarpecʿi. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. (The external anchor for the defense of the faith.)
Suny, Ronald Grigor. The Making of the Georgian Nation. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. (The hard realities of the reign.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion, 2012. (The warrior-king’s governance.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. (The core beneath the epic.)