Legacy

The monastic civilization the Thirteen Fathers founded, traced down the centuries: the great houses that grew from their foundations, the flowering of monastic learning and art, and the line that runs from the sixth-century founding through the medieval golden age toward Gelati and St. David the Builder. This file follows the long historical fruit of the Fathers’ work — the Georgia they made into a monastic land.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

From a Founding Generation to a Civilization

The Fathers’ importance is measured less by the sixth century than by the fourteen centuries that followed it. What they are remembered as planting in one generation — the lavras and the deserts, the sees and the schools, the whole self-propagating monastic culture (see Coenobitic and Eremitic Monasticism) — became the matrix within which Georgian Christian civilization grew. The monasteries were the workshops of that civilization: the places where the Georgian language was made a vehicle of Scripture, liturgy, and theology; where manuscripts were copied and translated; where monks and bishops were formed; where the ascetic and intellectual life of the nation was carried on across the centuries of invasion and domination (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, Reaktion, 2012; Matitashvili, “The Monasteries Founded by the Thirteen Syrian Fathers in Iberia,” Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]: 4–39). The Fathers did not merely found monasteries; they founded the institution through which Georgia would be Christian.

Several of their houses became centers of learning of the first rank. St. Zenon’s Iqalto grew, in the golden age, into a famous monastic academy — a seat of philosophical and theological education associated with the intellectual flowering of medieval Georgia (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on Iqalto’s academy; see The Remaining Fathers). St. Ioseb’s Alaverdi became one of the great cathedral-monasteries of Kakheti. And the Gareji desert became not only a monastic landscape but a school of Georgian religious art, its cave-churches frescoed with wall-paintings that are among the treasures of the medieval Georgian achievement (Loosley Leeming, Architecture and Asceticism, Brill, 2018, on Gareji’s art; see The Gareji Monastic Desert). The founding generation’s monasteries became, over time, the universities, cathedrals, and art-schools of a Christian nation.

The Line to the Golden Age

The Fathers stand at the head of a line that runs to the summit of Georgian Christian civilization in the eleventh and twelfth centuries — the golden age of the unified Georgian kingdom. That age was, among other things, a monastic age, and its greatest monument, the monastery and academy of Gelati founded by King David IV “the Builder” (r. 1089–1125), is the crown of the tradition the Fathers began (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on David the Builder and Gelati; see St. David the Builder). David’s reign combined the reconquest and unification of Georgia with a deliberate reform and renewal of monastic and ecclesiastical life — the convening of the Church council of Ruisi-Urbnisi, the foundation of Gelati as a house of monks and scholars — and in this he was continuing, at the height of the kingdom’s power, the work the Fathers had begun at its beginning: the making of Georgia into a land of monasteries and learning (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012).

The continuity is real and not merely rhetorical. The golden age did not invent Georgian monasticism; it flowered a tradition already six centuries old, whose roots were the foundations of the Thirteen Fathers. Gelati and the golden-age academies stand to the Fathers’ sixth-century houses as the harvest to the seed — a later, richer, royally-endowed flowering of the same monastic culture the Fathers had planted (Matitashvili, Studies in Late Antiquity 2.1 [2018]; Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012). To read the golden age is to read the maturity of what the Fathers founded; to read the Fathers is to read the origin of what the golden age brought to perfection.

Endurance Through the Centuries of Trial

The Fathers’ legacy was not a smooth ascent. The monasteries they founded stood in a land repeatedly overrun — by Persians, Mongols, Timur, Ottomans, and Persians again — and their houses were sacked, their monks killed, their communities scattered and reformed across the medieval and early-modern centuries. Gareji in particular suffered massacres of its monks; the eastern monasteries lay exposed on the frontier toward the steppe and Persia (Rayfield, Edge of Empires, 2012, on the vicissitudes of the Georgian monasteries). That the tradition survived at all through such a history — that Shiomgvime and Gareji and Alaverdi still stand and pray — is the deepest testimony to the depth of the monasticism the Fathers are remembered as founding. A shallow institution would have died; a civilization was harder to kill.

The trial continued into the modern era. Under Russian imperial and then Soviet rule the Georgian Church lost its autocephaly and, under the Soviets, suffered closure of its monasteries and persecution of its faithful. And yet here too the Fathers’ foundations proved a point of return: the late- and post-Soviet monastic revival was consciously a reopening of the ancient houses — Shiomgvime, Gareji, Zedazeni — a reclaiming of the monastic Georgia the Fathers had planted (on the modern Georgian Church, cf. St. Gabriel of Georgia). The legacy is thus not a closed chapter of the sixth century but a living inheritance: the monasteries the Fathers founded are, many of them, praying still.

The Shape of the Legacy

Seen whole, the legacy of the Thirteen Fathers has a simple shape. They took the mature monasticism of the Christian Orient and planted it, in both its forms, across a newly-Christian land; that monasticism became the institution through which Georgia was made a Christian civilization; that civilization reached its summit in the golden age of David the Builder and Tamar; and it endured, through every trial, down to the living Church of today. Whatever the source-critical status of the individual Lives (see Assessment), this legacy is not in doubt: it is written in the monasteries on the ground, in the manuscripts and frescoes, in the golden age, and in the continuous monastic life of the Georgian Church. The Fathers are the beginning of the story of monastic Georgia, and the story is still being told.

See Also

References

  • Rayfield, Donald. Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia. London: Reaktion Books, 2012. (The great monasteries; Iqalto’s academy; the golden age and David the Builder’s Gelati; the invasions and the endurance of the monastic tradition.)
  • 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 Fathers’ foundations as the enduring institutions of Georgian Christianity.)
  • Loosley Leeming, Emma. Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural Interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity. Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 13. Leiden: Brill, 2018. (The monasteries and their art across the centuries.)