The Shaping of Georgian Christianity

The Thirteen Fathers’ role in consolidating the faith after St. Nino: the turning of a fourth-century court-conversion into a monastic Church with deep institutions, the building of the sees, monasteries, and schools of Georgian Christianity, and the frontier mission against surviving paganism and the Zoroastrian fire-cult. This file treats the Fathers as the second founding moment of the Georgian Church — the moment at which the faith became a civilization.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

From Court-Conversion to Monastic Church

The Georgian Church counts two great foundings, and the Fathers are the second. The first was the fourth-century enlightenment of St. Nino, whose mission brought the faith to the Iberian court and made Christianity the kingdom’s religion (see St. Nino of Georgia). But the conversion of a court is a beginning, not a completion. Through the fifth and sixth centuries, Iberia remained a land where the faith was thin outside the court and the towns — the countryside and the mountains still holding to the old cults, the east under Zoroastrian pressure, and the Church still lacking the monastic and educational institutions that had made Christianity a civilization in Syria, Egypt, and Cappadocia (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, Reaktion, 2012, chs. 2–3; Rapp, Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography, CSCO 601, Louvain: Peeters, 2003). The tradition places the Fathers precisely here: where St. Nino planted the faith, the Fathers planted the monasticism that would deepen, carry, and defend it.

This is the Fathers’ distinctive historical role, and it is a real one whatever the details of the legend. The rise of monasticism in sixth-century Iberia — settlement at Zedazeni, dispersal across Kartli and Kakheti, the founding of the great houses — is the moment at which Georgian Christianity acquired the institutions that make a religion self-sustaining: communities where Scripture and the liturgy were copied and translated into Georgian, where monks and future bishops were formed, where the ascetic and intellectual life of the Church was carried on (Matitashvili, “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia,” Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]: 4–39). The Church of St. Nino was a faith received; the Church of the Fathers was a faith institutionalized.

Building the Institutions

The Fathers’ foundations became the load-bearing structures of Georgian Christianity for a thousand years. Several of the Fathers were themselves bishops — Abibos at Nekresi, Isé at Tsilkani — so that the monastic mission was bound to the episcopal structure of the Church from the start (see The Remaining Fathers). Their monasteries became more than houses of prayer: Alaverdi grew into one of the great cathedral-centers of Kakheti; Iqalto became, in the golden age, a famous monastic academy; Shiomgvime and Gareji became centers of monastic formation, manuscript production, and, at Gareji, of a whole tradition of religious art (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the later importance of these houses; on Iqalto’s academy and Gareji’s art, see Legacy). The monastic founding was thus, at the same time, the founding of Georgian religious culture — the network of institutions within which the Georgian language became a vehicle of Scripture and liturgy, and the Georgian Church became a literate, learned, and self-reproducing body.

It matters that this founding was accomplished within, and under the authority of, the existing Georgian Church. The Fathers came, in the tradition, at the blessing of the Catholicos and were received by the king (see The Mission to Iberia); their foundations were integrated into the sees and the hierarchy of Kartli, not set up in rivalry to them. The monasticism they planted was therefore a strengthening of the Church, not a movement alongside it — a point that bears on the disputed question of their theological allegiance, since a monasticism blessed by the Catholicos and woven into the episcopal fabric is a monasticism of the Church of the land (on the allegiance debate, see History and Hagiography).

The Frontier Mission

The Fathers’ work was not only institutional but missionary, carried out at a contested religious frontier. The dispersal sent them “to oppose paganism and Zoroastrianism,” and the tradition remembers them planting their houses in a landscape still divided between the Christian faith of the court and the surviving cults of the countryside and the fire-religion of the Persian-dominated east (Matitashvili, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, chs. 2–3). St. John’s settlement on the ruined temple of the idol Zaden at Zedazeni is the pattern in miniature — the monastic life founded on the overthrow of the old cult (see The Leader of the Thirteen). And the martyrdom of St. Abibos of Nekresi, who died for dousing a Zoroastrian fire-altar with the confession that “fire is not a god, but a part of nature, which is created by God,” is the mission at its sharpest — a Christian bishop dying in resistance to the fire-cult at the Persian frontier, and evangelizing the mountain tribes of the eastern Caucasus in the process (Machitadze, Lives of the Georgian Saints, “Abibos of Nekresi”; see The Remaining Fathers).

The frontier character of the mission gives the Fathers’ founding its historical weight. This was not the quiet cultivation of an already-Christian society but the extension of the faith into a landscape where it was still contested — and where, in the east, it was under the political domination of a Zoroastrian empire. The monasteries were the strong-points of that extension: fixed centers of Christian life from which the christianization of eastern Georgia was carried into the mountains and held against the fire-cult (Matitashvili, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]; on the wider context, Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

The Second Founding

Taken together, these three achievements — the deepening of the court-conversion into a monastic Church, the building of the institutions of Georgian Christian culture, and the frontier mission against paganism and the fire-cult — make the Fathers the second founding moment of the Georgian Church, and arguably the one that turned a Christian kingdom into a Christian civilization. St. Nino gave Georgia the faith; the Fathers gave it the monasticism, and with the monasticism the institutions, the learning, and the ascetic depth that would carry the faith through the invasions and dominations of the coming centuries (on the trajectory toward the golden age, see Legacy). Held to its sources, the sixth-century narrative is hagiography attested centuries later; but the fact that Georgian Christianity became a monastic civilization in and after the sixth century is not in doubt, and the tradition’s memory of the Fathers is the memory of how that happened.

References

Matitashvili, Shota. “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia: The Rise of Monasticism in Sixth-Century Georgia.” Studies in Late Antiquity 2, no. 1 (2018): 4–39. (The rise of monasticism and its institutional and missionary dimensions; the opposition to paganism and Zoroastrianism.)
Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (Sixth-century Iberia; the Persian-Zoroastrian frontier; the later importance of the Fathers’ foundations.)
Rapp, Stephen H., Jr. Studies in Medieval Georgian Historiography: Early Texts and Eurasian Contexts. CSCO 601, Subsidia 113. Louvain: Peeters, 2003. (The state of the sixth-century Georgian Church and its sources.)
Machitadze, Archpriest Zakaria. Lives of the Georgian Saints. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2006. (Abibos and the fire-cult; the missionary dimension of the Fathers’ work.)