This Lent, CNEWA created a special book of prayers drawn from the “Book of Lamentations,” composed by the Armenian poet St. Gregory of Narek. Learn more about St. Gregory of Narek in this excerpt from an article written by Michael J. La Civita, director of communications and marketing for CNEWA, originally published in February 2021.
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The pontificate of Francis could be summed up as one of symbolic surprises, employing pastoral gestures with far-reaching consequences. In February 2015, the bishop of Rome declared as a doctor of the church the sainted Armenian monk and poet, Gregory of Narek. In raising the medieval mystic to the vaulted halls of the universal church — one of just 36 men and women recognized by the church — the Roman pontiff honors a man and his church once regarded by Catholics as dissident or even heretical. Last month, Francis instructed that the feast of Gregory of Narek, observed on 27 February, be added to the general Roman calendar.
The timing of the pope’s initial declaration was also important. Later in 2015, the pope joined with millions of Armenians worldwide in commemorations mourning the deaths of more than 1.5 million Armenians (and Assyro-Chaldean Christians) in Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915, which many Middle East Christians remember as the “Year of the Sword.”
Key to understanding St. Gregory of Narek, and his role in the universal church, is reflecting on the precarious position of Armenian Christianity, of which he is inextricably linked.
Armenian Christianity. In the shadow of Mount Ararat — where Jews, Christians and Muslims believe humanity regenerated after the great flood — a small church stands above a crevice in the rock: Khor Virap. For more than 13 years this pit, some 23 feet deep, interned a Christian nobleman named Gregory. The future “illuminator of the Armenians” would later heal the king and baptize a nation into Christ in the year 301.
Squeezed between Asia and Europe, Persia and Rome, Armenian Christians digested the philosophical positions and theological vocabularies of the great learning centers of the early church and began the development of an alphabet for the Armenian vernacular. These rich cultural advances occurred even as an independent Armenian nation expired at the hands of their non-Christian Persian neighbors. …
In 448, the Persian emperor demanded his Armenian subjects renounce Christianity, which he identified as a symbol of their loyalty to his Eastern Roman (Byzantine) rival. Appeasing Persian oppression, the Armenian bishops called for a national council. Gathering near the very dungeon that had once imprisoned St. Gregory the Illuminator, the council declared the Armenian people’s fealty to the Persian emperor, but their steadfast spiritual loyalty to Christ:
“Nobody can move us away from this faith, neither angels, nor people, nor sword, nor fire, nor water, nor any severe ordeal. For we have a covenant of faith, not with human beings…but an indissoluble vow with God, from whom it is impossible to stay away neither now, nor tomorrow, nor for ever and ever.”
A century after the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, the Armenian bishops denounced the Christological decrees of the council, reaffirmed their adherence to a more conservative understanding of Jesus’ nature, and asserted their independence from the churches of Constantinople and Rome. While the Armenian bishops underscored their autonomy, they did not sever relationships with the Byzantine Empire, including the imperial church of Constantinople.
For more than 400 years, trade between Armenians and Byzantines flourished. Byzantine emperors employed Armenian monks and scribes, who flocked to Constantinople. Byzantine subjects served Armenian prelates and members of the nobility. Armenians engineered Byzantine defense systems and restored the dome of Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of Eastern Christendom. Armenians even ascended the Byzantine throne, establishing dynasties of emperors who supported the redevelopment of an independent Armenian kingdom, which cushioned the barrier between the Byzantine Christian and ascendant Arab Muslim worlds. …
Gregory of Narek. Into this golden age of the Armenian civilization Gregory of Narek — priest and poet, theologian and philosopher, monk and mystic — was born in the year 950.
His father served as a bishop and theologian. After his wife’s death, the bishop entrusted the boy to the care of an uncle, Anania. A respected scholar and monk, Anania founded the Narek Monastery (known as Narekavank) on the shores of Lake Van in what is today eastern Turkey. He reared Gregory as one of the monastic community, to which his pupil remained attached for the rest of his short life.
Few details of Gregory’s life are known, but hints of the man’s years of pain and suffering suffuse his writings, particularly his “Book of Lamentations.” Written in the waning years of the first Christian millennium, “Lamentations” is a work of prayer considered by scholars as a metaphor for the celebration of the Badarak — an “edifice of faith.”
The 95 lamentations mirror the different stages of the liturgy, from the dismissal of the catechumens, the profession of faith and Communion to the final prayers in preparation of death and judgment.
The work of St. Gregory of Narek encouraged the development of Classical Armenian as a literary language, even as his work has been translated into many languages and adapted for music. His writings adorn much of the liturgical life of the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic churches, including the eucharistic liturgy, which Gregory’s father described as “the great medicine”:
“We beseech you,” the priest prays silently as he ascends the sanctuary, “with outstretched arms, with tears and sobbing prayers.”