Armenian Spirituality

Readers of my two books in ecclesiology will be aware of my love for the Armenian tradition. So it is an especial delight for me to see that one of the important figures of that tradition has been steadily gaining attention in and translation for anglophone audiences. Just a few weeks ago we had a new publication, From the Depths of the Heart: Annotated Translation of the Prayers of St. Gregory of Narek, trans. Abraham Terian  (Liturgical Press, 2022), 568pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

St. Gregory of Narek (ca. 945–1003), Armenian mystic poet and theologian, was named Doctor of the Church by Pope Francis on April 12, 2015. Not so well known in the West, the saint holds a distinctive place in the Armenian Church by virtue of his prayer book and hymnic odes—among other works. His writings are equally prized as literary masterpieces, with the prayer book as the magnum opus.

With this meticulous translation of the prayers, St. Gregory of Narek enters another millennium of wonderment, now in a wider circle. The prayers resound from their author’s heart—albeit in a different language, rendered by a renowned translator of early Armenian texts and a theologian.

Christianity in Soviet Armenia

Readers of my two books will be aware of how deeply I esteem the Armenian Church for many reasons, and how fascinated I remain by her history. A new book gives us glimpses into one particularly difficult period of that history: Soviet captivity. I look forward to reading Jakub Osiecki, The Armenian Church in Soviet Armenia: The Policies of the Armenian Bolsheviks and the Armenian Church, 1920-1932, trans. Artur Zwolski (Peter Lang, 2020), 272pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book presents the results of comprehensive study on the history of Soviet Armenia and the Armenian Church in the years 1920-32. Through documents uncovered in the Communist Party Archive in Yerevan and the Georgian Historical Archive, press antireligious propaganda, oral testimonies, and biographical interviews conducted by the author, The Armenian Church in Soviet Armenia expands the discussion on the history of the Armenian Church in the 20th century, especially regarding the relations between the spiritual leaders of the Armenian Church and the Bolsheviks. In accordance with stipulations laid out by the Central Committee in consultation with the GPU, Khoren Muradbekian was elected as the Catholicos of All Armenians. His election was the principal reason behind the schism inside the Church– which, especially in the Armenian diaspora, divided not only clergy, but laymen themselves. These divisions, even after hundred years, are still vivid in Armenian society.

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire

When trying to dissuade some of my more gung-ho American students from their romanticized assumptions that political movements for reform always end with what they want, and never in failure or in making things worse, the plight of Ottoman Armenians in the nineteenth century is near to hand offering severe lessons in paradoxical reactions. Those reactions and other developments are on display in a new book: Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire by Richard E. Antaramian (Stanford UP, 2020), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Ottoman Empire enforced imperial rule through its management of diversity. For centuries, non-Muslim religious institutions, such as the Armenian Church, were charged with guaranteeing their flocks' loyalty to the sultan. Rather than being passive subjects, Armenian elites, both the clergy and laity, strategically wove the institutions of the Armenian Church, and thus the Armenian community itself, into the fabric of imperial society. In so doing, Armenian elites became powerful brokers between factions in Ottoman politics―until the politics of nineteenth-century reform changed these relationships.

In Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire, Richard E. Antaramian presents a revisionist account of Ottoman reform, relating the contention within the Armenian community to broader imperial politics. Reform afforded Armenians the opportunity to recast themselves as partners of the state, rather than as brokers among factions. And in the course of pursuing such programs, they transformed the community's role in imperial society. As the Ottoman reform program changed how religious difference could be employed in a Muslim empire, Armenian clergymen found themselves enmeshed in high-stakes political and social contests that would have deadly consequences.

Catching up with the Armenians

If you read my first book on the papacy, or my book last year on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, then you will know (with more detail than you could possibly want!) just how deep my admiration and love for the Armenian Church is. I focus primarily on their utterly unique ecclesial structures, but there is so much to admire in their forbearance in the face of a singular history of suffering and genocide, in their liturgical and theological traditions and, perhaps mundanely, in their hospitality and food which I have been very graced to receive on several occasions.

2020 is promising to be a banner year for further scholarly studies about the Armenian Church. We started off in January with Monastic Life in the Armenian Church: Glorious Past - Ecumenical Reconsideration edited by Jasmine Dum-Tragut and Dietmar W. Winkler (Lit Verlag, 2020), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Monasticism is a vital feature of Christian spiritual life and has its origins in the Oriens Christianus. The present volume contains studies on Armenian Monasticism from various perspectives. The task is not only to produce historical studies. The aim is also to contribute to and reflect on monasticism today. Authors come from the Armenian Apostolic Catholicosate of Ejmiacin, the Holy See of Cilicia, the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and the  Armenian-Catholic Church, as well as from the Benedictine and  Franciscan Orders of the Catholic Church. The experts reflected on the glorious past of Armenian monasticism and agreed to evaluate future challenges ecumenically to give more insight into both past and present Armenian monasticism.

In early June, Stanford University Press is bringing out Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire by Richard E. Antaramian (SUP, 2020), 224pp.

About this book the publisher offers us this précis:

The Ottoman Empire enforced imperial rule through its management of diversity. For centuries, non-Muslim religious institutions, such as the Armenian Church, were charged with guaranteeing their flocks' loyalty to the sultan. Rather than being passive subjects, Armenian elites, both the clergy and laity, strategically wove the institutions of the Armenian Church, and thus the Armenian community itself, into the fabric of imperial society. In so doing, Armenian elites became powerful brokers between factions in Ottoman politics—until the politics of nineteenth-century reform changed these relationships. In Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire, Richard E. Antaramian presents a revisionist account of Ottoman reform, relating the contention within the Armenian community to broader imperial politics. Reform afforded Armenians the opportunity to recast themselves as partners of the state, rather than as brokers among factions. And in the course of pursuing such programs, they transformed the community's role in imperial society. As the Ottoman reform program changed how religious difference could be employed in a Muslim empire, Armenian clergymen found themselves enmeshed in high-stakes political and social contests that would have deadly consequences.

Finally in mid-July we will have the publication of Russia's Entangled Embrace: The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801-1914 by Stephen Badalyan Riegg (Cornell University Press, 2020), 328pp.

About this book the publisher provides this blurb:

Russia's Entangled Embrace traces the relationship between the Romanov state and the Armenian diaspora that populated Russia's territorial fringes and navigated the tsarist empire's metropolitan centers.

By engaging the ongoing debates about imperial structures that were simultaneously symbiotic and hierarchically ordered, Stephen Badalyan Riegg helps us to understand how, for Armenians and some other subjects, imperial rule represented not hypothetical, clear-cut alternatives but simultaneous, messy realities. He examines why, and how, Russian architects of empire imagined Armenians as being politically desirable. These circumstances included the familiarity of their faith, perceived degree of social, political, or cultural integration, and their actual or potential contributions to the state's varied priorities.

Based on extensive research in the archives of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yerevan, Russia's Entangled Embrace reveals that the Russian government relied on Armenians to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. Analyzing the complexities of this imperial relationship―beyond the reductive question of whether Russia was a friend or foe to Armenians―allows us to study the methods of tsarist imperialism in the context of diasporic distribution, interimperial conflict and alliance, nationalism, and religious and economic identity.

Transgenerational Trauma: The Armenian Genocide Considered

To my mind one of the most important and far-reaching insights Freud first helped us to understand, and many analysts--as well as other psychologists, sociologists, historians, and churchmen--have deepened in the years after Freud (and in particular after the Holocaust) is the long-lasting nature of major trauma, and the very real ways in which something of those traumatic memories will shape later generations who did not experience the trauma directly.

In this instance, Eastern Christians have first-hand experience, starting in 1915 (though, of course, actually much earlier, given a centuries-long trail of blood and tears among Armenian Christians, subject to periodic mass slaughters under the Ottomans) with the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides. The first of these was the largest, and has attracted a good deal of attention in the last two decades. Now that a century and more has passed, and all survivors are dead, the memories and effects of the genocide are not, as a new book reminds us: Anthonie Holslag, The Transgenerational Consequences of the Armenian Genocide: Near the Foot of Mount Ararat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 291pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book brings together the Armenian Genocide process and its transgenerational outcome, which are often juxtaposed in existing scholarship, to ask how the Armenian Genocide is conceptualized and placed within diasporic communities. Taking a dual approach to answer this question, Anthonie Holslag studies the cultural expression of violence during the genocidal process itself, and in the aftermath for the victims. By using this approach, this book allows us to see comparatively how genocide in diasporic communities in the Netherlands, London and the US is encapsulated in an historic narrative. It paints a picture of the complexity of genocidal violence itself, but also in its transgenerational and non-spatial consequences, raising new questions of how violence can be perpetuated or interlocked with the discourse and narratives of the victims, and how the violence can be relived.

Armenia Christiana: Between Old Rome and New

I have long been fascinated by the Armenian Church. In my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, I spent no little time on her because her structures are utterly unique amongst all the apostolic churches of East and West. There is much else that is unique and admirable in her liturgical traditions--and food! The best vegetarian meal I ever had was at an Armenian parish in Cleveland last fall when I was giving a lecture there.

Armenia has often been a point of contact between old and new Romes. Its history is a complex one, as a new book will allow us to see more fully: Krzysztof Stopka, Armenia Christiana: Armenian Religious Identity and the Churches of Constantinople and Rome (4th – 15th century) (Jagiellonian University Press, 2018), 400pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

This book presents the dramatic and complex story of Armenia's ecclesiastical relations with Byzantine and subsequently Roman Christendom in the Middle Ages. It is built on a broad foundation of sources – Armenian, Greek, Latin, and Syrian chronicles and documents, especially the abundant correspondence between the Holy See and the Armenian Church. Krzysztof Stopka examines problems straddling the disciplines of history and theology and pertinent to a critical, though not widely known, episode in the story of the struggle for Christian unity.

Gregory of Narek's Festal Works

Pope Francis, the pope of surprises, last year declared the Armenian saint Gregory of Narek a "doctor of the Church," a unique category in the Western Church, as I was trying to explain to my students only last week, that elevates certain saints and Fathers to an even more exalted rank. Now Gregory's works are getting some attention thanks to an English translation that Liturgical Press has just alerted me to. Forthcoming later this month is Abraham Terian, trans., The Festal Works of St. Gregory of Narek (Liturgical Press, 2016), 464pp.

About this book we are told:

This is the first translation in any language of the surviving corpus of the festal works of St. Gregory of Narek, a tenth-century Armenian mystic theologian and poet par excellence (d. 1003). Composed as liturgical works for the various Dominical and related feasts, these poetic writings are literary masterpieces in both lyrical verse and narrative. Unlike Gregory’s better-known penitential prayers, these show a jubilant author in a celebratory mood. In this volume Abraham Terian, an eminent scholar of medieval Armenian literature, provides the nonspecialist reader with an illuminating translation of St. Gregory of Narek’s festal works. Introducing each composition with an explanatory note, Terian places the works under consideration in their author’s thought-world and in their tenth-century landscape.

Anatolian Christians and Muslims in the Twilight of the Ottoman Empire

Just before Christmas I mentioned the impending publication of a book I have since received and been reading: Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford UP, 2012). 

This is a completely fascinating work. It is cogently written and smartly overturns a lot of received stereotypes by and about both Muslims and Christians in the area at that time. His approach is neither to romanticize the past nor to demonize it. It is a remarkably open examination of what the sources reveal in all their messiness and complexity. If you have any interest at all in these issues, I heartily recommend this book to you.

Doumanis, through careful research into various archives and other often overlooked sources, has demonstrated the extent to which Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Anatolia, at the end of the Ottoman Empire, lived side-by-side in often amicable and co-operative ways. Often times Muslims and Christians in the same area would attend each other's weddings and communal festivals, pray at each other's shrines, trade with each other, and have very similar general political worldviews conditioned, however, by different religious ones at the same time--people had, in other words, multiple "identities" and these were not always tightly cordoned off but in fact overlapped within the same people and communities, and between communities.

He is at pains to stress the complexity of these relationships, noting that while we have many examples of considerable co-operation and friendship, often motivated by shared economic concerns, there was as well a good deal of often bloody antagonism, especially (as we know) towards Armenians from the 1890s until  the 1915 genocide--during, that is, the most acute years of Ottoman turmoil and collapse when Armenian and other Christians often became scapegoats for the declining imperial fortunes and for their desire for "national" independence, free from the millet system and the rules of dhimmitude--a system, let it be noted, that he says was very restrictive in law, but often very loose in practice and very inconsistently applied. Ottoman governance, he says, has often been viewed as "one of exceptions."

I will have more to say as I finish the book, and I hope also to arrange an interview with the author, who teaches history at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Armenians in the Islamic World

Though a great deal of attention has rightly been focused on modern Muslim-Christian relations in Armenia, above all in the genocide of 1915, wider studies, reaching farther back into history, are not nearly as plentiful. A new projected three-volume series will help fill some of the lacuna: Seta Dadoyan, The Armenians in the Medieval Islamic World: Paradigms of Interaction Seventh to Fourteenth Centuries (Volume 1) (Transaction Publishers, 2011), 214pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

In this first of a massive three-volume work, Seta B. Dadoyan studies the Armenian experience in the medieval Islamic world and takes the reader through hitherto undiscovered paradigmatic cases of interaction with other populations in the region. Being an Armenian, Dadoyan argues, means having an ethnic ancestry laden with narratives drawn from the vast historic Armenian habitat. Contradictory trends went into the making of Armenian history, yet most narratives fail to reflect this rich texture. Linking Armenian-Islamic history is one way of dealing with the problem. Dadoyan’s concern is also to outline revolutionary elements in the making of Armenian ideologies and politics. This extensive work captures the multidimensional nature of the Armenian experience in the medieval Islamic world.

The author holds that every piece of literature, including historical writing, is an artefact. It is a composition of many elements arranged in certain forms: order, sequence, proportion, detail, intensity, etc. The author has composed and arranged the larger subjects and their sub-themes in such a way as to create an open, dynamic continuity to Armenian history that is intellectually intriguing, aesthetically appealing, and close to lived experiences.

Ottoman Genocides

The Armenian genocide continues to generate scholarly attention, often in an increasingly wider context of other genocides, then and since. Now a new book from Oxford continues to expand our understanding:  R.G. Suny et al, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (OUP, 2011), 448pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian Genocide remains a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and the deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here the most accurate reconstruction of what happened and why. This book is the product of a decade of scholarly encounters that launched intense investigations by historians and other social scientists dedicated to honest exploration of one of history's greatest tragedies.
While the word "genocide" still divides communities, there is no longer any serious doubt that the Young Turk government ordered and carried out in 1915-1916 mass deportations and massacres targeted toward designated ethnoreligious groups. This volume includes reviews of the historical debates surrounding these events, portraits of the perpetrators, detailed accounts of the massacres themselves, and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then on what might happen now. Here history is not only the stories that we tell about the past but the foundation on which might be built new understandings of the present and possible futures.

Byzantines and Armenians in Dialogue

Though, alas, the term "Byzantine" has entered English as a pejorative denoting extraordinary complexity and duplicity, the Byzantines were not (pace the slanders of those caricaturists Gibbon, Montesquieu, and Voltaire) always defamed for their wily diplomacy or supposed trickery. In some cases, their treatment of fellow Christians is much less than we would expect today--chiefly among the so-called non-Chalcedonians. A new volume explores the relationship between the Byzantine and the Armenian churches in particular in the latter part of the twelfth century:

I. Augé, Églises en dialogue: Arméniens et Byzantins dans la seconde moitié du XIIe siècle (Peeters, 2011), xxx+317pp.

About this new book, the publisher tells us:

Dans les années 1165-1178, les autorités religieuses et politiques byzantines et arméniennes entrent en contact de manière soutenue, dans le but de trouver un accord entre les deux Églises. De nombreuses missives sont alors échangées, missives qui ont été conservées pour partie en langue arménienne et compilées dans un recueil par Nerses Lambronac'i. Le présent ouvrage est une traduction commentée de ces textes, dix-neuf lettres au total, qui envisagent les questions théologiques débattues, mais apportent également des informations importantes sur le plan historique. À cet élément central s'ajoutent, en annexes, les traductions de trois documents importants pour l'étude de la controverse arméno-byzantine au XIIe siècle, un opuscule de Nerses Lambronac'i, le récit anonyme de la visite de ce même Nerses à Constantinople en 1197, et une Vie du catholicos Nerses Snorhali, l'un des principaux protagonistes, avec l'empereur Manuel Comnène, du rapprochement religieux arméno-grec.