Gregory the Illuminator

← Encyclopedia

Gregory the Illuminator — Grigor Lusavorich in Armenian — is the figure remembered as the apostle of Armenia: the missionary bishop credited with converting the kingdom to Christianity and founding the church that still bears his lineage. His traditional dates are roughly 257 to 331, and the conversion is conventionally placed around the year 301, which would make Armenia the first state to adopt Christianity as its public religion.

He comes down through tradition as a man born into the wreckage of a feud. The account makes him Parthian by blood, of the Arsacid nobility that ruled both Iran and Armenia in the period, and the son of a man named Anak, who assassinated the Armenian king Khosrov. The murder destroyed Anak’s house; an infant survivor was carried out of the slaughter and raised, far from the land of his birth, as a Christian at Caesarea in Cappadocia. That detail is the hinge of the whole legend. The man who would light Armenia is shaped abroad, in the Greek-speaking ecclesiastical world, and returns to his father’s country carrying a faith his father’s victims will have to learn from him — the son of the regicide becoming the maker of the kingdom’s new God. He enters the service of Tiridates III, the son of the murdered Khosrov, and the story is built on the debt between them.

The single source

Almost everything told of his life comes from a single source: the History attributed to a writer called Agathangelos, compiled in its surviving form considerably later than the events it describes. The name “Agathangelos” is itself a literary mask — the text presents itself as the eyewitness record of a royal secretary at Tiridates’ court, but the received Armenian version is dated by scholars to roughly the middle or second half of the fifth century, a hundred and fifty years and more after the conversion it narrates. It is not a chronicle that happens to contain miracles. It is a foundation legend, organized to explain why Armenia is Christian, why its church holds the doctrine it holds, and why the office of its chief bishop belonged for generations to one bloodline. The modern reader of Gregory is therefore reading a fifth-century church’s account of its own beginning, projected back onto the early fourth.

By that account Gregory, returned from exile, refused to take part in the royal sacrifice — to the goddess the Armenians had inherited from the Iranian pantheon, in a kingdom whose gods were the Mazdean deities under Hellenized names. The refusal was treason as much as impiety: the cult and the crown were one thing, and to withhold the offering was to withhold loyalty. The king had him tortured through a sequence of ordeals and then thrown into a pit at Artashat — the place now called Khor Virap, the “deep dungeon” — where he is said to have survived some thirteen years, kept alive by a widow who lowered bread to him.

The cure and the conversion

The turn in the story comes through blood already spilled. A company of Christian women, refugees from Roman territory, had fled to Armenia — among them the virgin Hripsime and the abbess Gayane. Tiridates desired Hripsime; she refused him; and the king had the whole company martyred at Vagharshapat. It is after this killing that he is struck down. The legend gives his madness a monstrous shape — the king reduced to the form and bristles of a wild boar, his reason gone, his court helpless. His sister is granted a vision: the prisoner in the pit at Artashat, long assumed dead, is the only one who can heal him. Gregory is drawn up, and the king is restored. What follows is the heart of the founding story — the royal house, and through it the nation, baptized together, the gods of the old sacrifice cast down, and a kingdom changing its allegiance in a single movement. To Gregory the tradition then grants his own vision: Christ descending to strike the earth with a hammer of gold at Vagharshapat, marking the ground where the mother cathedral, Etchmiadzin — “the Only-Begotten descended” — would stand. The baptism that seals the conversion is the same rite the church carried everywhere it went, the baptism whose pattern the tradition reads back to the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan; in Armenia it is performed not on one penitent but on a court and, in the telling, a people. The water that washes a single penitent and the water that turns a kingdom are, in the founding scene, the same water — conversion to Jesus Christ staged as a public, national event rather than a private one.

Reading the legend against the record

Historians treat this narrative with care. The History is hagiography shaped by later theological and dynastic concerns, and the famous date of 301 is itself a reconstruction; many scholars place the actual conversion a few years into the fourth century, with the range running from the last years of the third into the 320s and the figure of 314 frequently preferred. The reasoning is concrete. A public adoption of Christianity in 301 sits awkwardly against Tiridates’ dependence on Rome during the years when the empire under Diocletian was persecuting Christians most fiercely; a date after the Edict of Milan in 313, when imperial policy reversed, fits the politics better. On this reading 301 is the year the tradition chose — a clean number, a symbolic priority — rather than a date a contemporary would have recorded. The boar, the thirteen years in the pit, the cure, the baptism of a kingdom in an afternoon: these read as the founding story a church tells about itself, not as documentary report. What is firm beneath the legend is sturdier than any single scene. Armenia did become officially Christian early in the fourth century, ahead of the Roman state’s own conversion. The early Armenian episcopate was genuinely tied to Caesarea in Cappadocia. And the office Gregory is said to have held did become hereditary in his family.

There is a further complication the single-illuminator legend smooths over. Christianity almost certainly reached Armenia by more than one road and earlier than Gregory’s mission. From the south, Aramaic-speaking missionaries out of Mesopotamia — the world of Edessa and Nisibis that fed the East Syrian church — had carried the faith into the southern Armenian provinces before any royal conversion, so that the church which emerged owed as much to Syriac as to the Greek transmission Gregory embodies. The scholarship of the two-route origin treats the legend’s lone luminary as a fifth-century simplification of what was, on the ground, a convergence of Syriac and Greek Christianities — a debt later sealed when Mesrop Mashtots forged the Armenian alphabet and a generation translated scripture from both tongues.

That last fact is where the legend and the institution touch most plainly. Gregory, in the account, traveled to Caesarea to be consecrated bishop — the Armenian church’s chief see drawing its orders, in its first generation, from the Cappadocian metropolis that a few decades later would produce Basil of Caesarea, under whom the tie between the two churches was contested and loosened. Gregory then returned to organize the new church and, in time, passed his office to his son Aristakes, who is recorded among the bishops at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 — placing a member of Gregory’s own house at the gathering that fixed the creed. The catholicate stayed in the line for several generations. The apostle of Armenia was also the founder of a dynasty of patriarchs, and the History that preserves his legend is, among other things, that dynasty’s charter.

The apostolic claim

For the Armenian Apostolic Church he is more than a historical first bishop. He is its patron and a source of its apostolic claim — though the church’s title reaches further back than Gregory, to the apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus, whom tradition sends into Armenia in the first century, so that Gregory illuminates a ground already, in the church’s memory, apostolically sown. His relics are venerated, and his title — the Illuminator, the one who brought light — is read as the literal description of what he did: he lit Armenia, in the tradition’s own phrase, with the knowledge of God. The church he is held to have founded later declined the definition of Christ issued at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, confirming that refusal at the Councils of Dvin in the sixth century, and so holds the miaphysite Christology of the non-Chalcedonian East — the formula of Cyril of Alexandria, the one incarnate nature of the Word. That fault line over the two-natures definition separated Armenia not only from the Latin West but from the Greek Eastern Orthodox communion that held Chalcedon; it set the Armenian church alongside its other partners in the non-Chalcedonian world, while leaving it distinct again from the dyophysite East Syrian church on the far side of the same controversy. It stands among the Oriental Orthodox communions, distinct in doctrine from both the Greek East and the Latin West, a difference that is not heresy within its own frame but the boundary that has defined its separate continuity for fifteen centuries.

Texts and scholarship

The whole study of Gregory is the study of one text and its descendants. The History attributed to Agathangelos survives in an Armenian recension and in secondary versions — Greek, Arabic, Syriac — that descend from earlier forms of the legend and let scholars triangulate what the original looked like before the received Armenian redaction reshaped it. The standard English entry into the tradition is Robert W. Thomson’s translation and commentary, Agathangelos: History of the Armenians (State University of New York Press, 1976), the first full English rendering of the received text with its literary sources traced out. Embedded in the History is a long catechetical block, the Teaching of Saint Gregory, which Thomson issued separately in a revised translation in 2001; it is doctrinal exposition put in Gregory’s mouth, fifth-century theology voiced through the founder. Thomson later set the Armenian, Greek, Arabic, and Syriac versions side by side in The Lives of Saint Gregory (Caravan Books, 2010), the fullest comparison of the recensions. The figure of Agathangelos and the textual problem are treated in the Encyclopædia Iranica, which situates the legend in its Iranian-Armenian setting, and the dating and hagiographic character of the work are cataloged in Oxford’s Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database. For the broader frame — Armenia between Rome and Iran, the conversion in its political setting, the question of the date — the reference work is Nina Garsoïan’s collected studies on Armenia in late antiquity; a clear narrative synthesis of the dating debate and the plural-origin thesis is the World History Encyclopedia overview of the early Christianization of Armenia.

The line between the Gregory of history and the Gregory of the founding story is not sharply drawn, and the tradition has never needed it to be. The pit at Khor Virap is still a place of pilgrimage. What the legend fixes, whatever its date, is the moment a kingdom changed its gods.

→ Related: Heresy · Excommunication · Christianity · Baptism · Baptism Of Jesus · Basil Of Caesarea · Roman Empire · Anointing · Liturgy · Jesus Christ · Eastern Orthodox Christianity · Church Of The East East Syrian Christianity · Neochalcedonian Christology