Gregory the Illuminator

In the Armenian tradition, the standard version of the life of Gregory the Illuminator derives from the fifth-century hagiographic history attributed to Agathangelos.[7] According to Agathangelos's account, Gregory was the son of the Parthian nobleman Anak; the later Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi identifies Anak as a member of the Parthian noble house of Suren.[8][9] At the incitation of the Sasanian king Ardashir I, who promised to return Anak his domain as a reward, the Parthian nobleman went to Armenia and assassinated the Arsacid king of Armenia Khosrov II after gaining his confidence.[10] Anak was then put to death by the Armenian nobles along with his entire family․[10] Anak's son Gregory narrowly escaped execution with the help of his nurse, whom Khorenatsi calls Sophy, sister of a Cappadocian notable named Euthalius (Ewtʻagh).[11] Gregory was taken to Caesarea in Cappadocia, where he received a Christian upbringing.[12]

According to Khorenatsi, upon coming of age, Gregory married Mariam, daughter of a Christian named David.[13][14] He had two children with Mariam: Aristaces and Vrtanes, who would later succeed Gregory as patriarchs of Armenia.[13][14]

After the birth of their sons, Mariam and Gregory separated, and Gregory went to Armenia to enter the service of King Tiridates III, son of the assassinated king Khosrov II.[14][15][lower-alpha 4] After Gregory refused to sacrifice to the goddess Anahit, the king had Gregory imprisoned and subjected to many tortures.[17] Once Tiridates discovered that Gregory was the son of his father's killer, he had Gregory thrown into a deep pit called Khor Virap near Artaxata, where he remained for thirteen (or fifteen) years.[15][18][19] In Agathangelos's history, Gregory is miraculously saved and brought out from the pit after Tiridates' sister Khosrovidukht sees a vision.[15] Gregory then healed the king, who, Agathangelos writes, had been transformed into a wild boar for his sinful behavior.[15] Tiridates and his court accepted Christianity, making Armenia the first state to adopt Christianity as its official religion.[20][lower-alpha 5]

The Baptism of the Armenian People (1892), by Ivan Aivazovsky

After being released, Gregory preached the Christian faith in Armenia and erected shrines to the martyrs Gayane and Hripsime in Vagharshapat on a spot indicated to him in a vision.[15][lower-alpha 6] Vagharshapat would later become home to the mother church of Armenian Christianity and, by medieval times, called Ejmiatsin ("descent of the only-begotten") in reference to Gregory's vision.[23][lower-alpha 7] Gregory, sometimes accompanied by Tiridates,[22] went around Armenia destroying pagan temples, defeating the armed resistance of the pagan priests.[24] Gregory then went to Caesarea with a retinue of Armenian princes and was consecrated bishop of Armenia by Leontius of Caesarea.[15] Until the death of Nerses I in the late fourth century, Gregory's successors would go to Caesarea to be confirmed as bishops of Armenia, and Armenia remained under the titular authority of the metropolitans of Caesarea.[25]

Returning to Armenia, Gregory raised churches in place of the destroyed pagan temples and seized their estates and wealth for the Armenian Church and his house.[22][lower-alpha 8] On the site of the destroyed temple to Vahagn at Ashtishat, Gregory raised a church which became the original center of the Armenian Church and remained so until after the partition of the country in 387.[27][22] Gregory met King Tiridates near the town of Bagavan and baptized the Armenian king, army and people in the Euphrates.[27] In two non-Armenian versions of Agathangelos's history, Gregory also baptizes together with Tiridates the kings of Caucasian Albania, Georgia and Lazica/Abkhazia.[28] He founded schools for the Christian education of children, where the languages of instruction were Greek and Syriac.[6][29] He established the ecclesiastical structure of Armenia, appointing as bishops some of the children of pagan priests.[6][30] Gregory is also said to have journeyed to Rome with King Tiridates in an embassy to the recently converted Constantine the Great, but scholar Robert W. Thomson views this as fictional.[20]

The conversion of Armenia to Christianity is traditionally dated to 301, but modern scholarship considers a later date, approximately 314, to be a more likely.[21] Additionally, the history of Agathangelos depicts the spread of Christianity of Armenia as having occurred practically entirely within Gregory's lifetime, when, in fact, it was a more gradual process.[31][32]

Some time after converting Armenia to Christianity, Gregory appointed his younger son Aristaces as his successor and went to live an ascetic life in the "cave of Manē" in the district of Daranali in Upper Armenia.[33][lower-alpha 9] The Patriarchate of Armenia would be held as a hereditary office, with some interruptions, by the house of Gregory, called the Gregorids, until the death of Patriarch Isaac in the fifth century.[35][36] According to Movses Khorenatsi, Gregory sometimes came out from his hermitage and traveled around the country until Aristaces returned from the Council of Nicaea (325), after which Gregory never appeared to anyone again.[37] He died in seclusion in the cave of Manē and was buried nearby by shepherds who did not know who he was.[38] All of the sources indicate that Gregory's death occurred not long after the Council of Nicaea; Cyril Toumanoff gives 328 as the year of Gregory's death.[39]

Levon Ter-Petrosyan, philologist and Armenia's first president, postulates that Gregory and Mesrop Mashtots had the most influence on the course of Armenian history.[40] James R. Russell argues that both Gregory and Mashtots were visionaries, found a champion for their program in the king, looked to the West, had very strong pro-Hellenic bias, trained the children of pagan priests and assembled their own disciples to spread the faith through learning.[41]

After his death his corpse was removed to the village of Thodanum (T'ordan, modern Doğanköy, Kemah, near Erzincan).

The Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin and the Holy See of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon each claim to have the right arm of the saint, in an arm-shaped reliquary, which is used for the blessing of the Holy Myron every seven years.

In the calendar of the Armenian Church, the discovery of the relics of St. Gregory is an important feast and is commemorated on the Saturday before the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.[42] Two other feast days in the Armenian Apostolic Church are devoted to St. Gregory: the feast of his entry into Khor Virap, the 'deep pit or dungeon' (commemorated on the last Saturday of Lent) and his deliverance from Khor Virap (commemorated on the Saturday before the second Sunday after Pentecost).[43]

• Armenian depictions of Gregory
• 
  16th century manuscript
• 
  Etchmiadzin Cathedral, 17th century
• 
  An 18th century painting by an unknown author
• 
  The Baptism of the Armenian People. Gregory the Illuminator by Ivan Aivazovsky (1892)
• 
  A painting by Vardges Sureniants

Italy and the Catholic world

A statue of St. Gregory in Vatican's St. Peter's Basilica inaugurated in 2005.

In the 8th century, the iconoclast decrees in Greece caused a number of religious orders to flee the Byzantine Empire and seek refuge elsewhere. San Gregorio Armeno in Naples was built in that century over the remains of a Roman temple dedicated to Ceres, by a group of nuns escaping from the Byzantine Empire with the relics of Gregory,[55] including his skull, a femur bone, his staff, the leather straps used in his torture and the manacles that held the saint.[56] The femur and manacles were returned by Pope John Paul II to Catholicos Karekin II and are now enshrined at Saint Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral in Yerevan.[57]

On 20 February, 1743, Nardò, Italy was hit by a devastating earthquake that destroyed almost the entire city. The only structure to survive intact after the quake was the city's statue of St. Gregory the Illuminator. According to the city's registers, only 350 out of the city's 10,000 inhabitants died in the earthquake, leading the inhabitants to believe that St. Gregory saved the city. Every year, they mark the anniversary of the earthquake by holding three days of celebrations in his honor. Relics of the saint are kept at Nardò Cathedral.

He is listed on September 30 in the Roman Martyrology of the Ordinary Form of the Catholic Church; his feast day is listed as October 1 in the Extraordinary Form. He is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on March 23.[58]

A 5.7 m (19 ft) tall statue of Gregory in the Carrara marble was installed in the north courtyard of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City in January 2005. Sculpted by France-based Lebanese-Armenian sculptor Khatchik Kazandjian, the statue was inaugurated by Pope John Paul II. Gregory is depicted holding a cross in one hand and the Bible in the other.[59][60][61][62] Pope Benedict XVI inaugurated the area as St. Gregory the Illuminator Courtyard in February 2008.[63]

• 
  14th-century Byzantine icon of St. Gregory
• 
  The Right Arm of Gregory in the museum of the Holy See of Cilicia in Antelias, Lebanon
• 
  Saint Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral, Yerevan, completed in 2001, contains the remains of Gregory

• Eastern Christianity
• Gregorids
• Vardapet, Armenian preaching monks

• Conybeare, Frederick Cornwallis (1911). "Gregory the Illuminator" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). pp. 565–566.
• Garsoïan, Nina (1997). "The Aršakuni Dynasty". In Hovannisian, Richard G. (ed.). The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. Vol. 1. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-10169-4.
• Garsoïan, Nina G. (1989). The Epic Histories Attributed to Pʻawstos Buzand (Buzandaran Patmutʻiwnkʻ). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-25865-7.
• "Grigor I Lusavorichʻ". Haykakan sovetakan hanragitaran (in Armenian). Vol. 3. Yerevan. 1977. p. 212.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Lang, David Marshall (1970). Armenia, Cradle of Civilization. London: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0049560077.
• Russell, James R. (2004). Armenian and Iranian Studies. Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. p. 358. ISBN 9780935411195.
• Terian, Abraham (2005). Patriotism and Piety in Armenian Christianity: The Early Panegyrics On Saint Gregory. St Vladimir's Seminary Press. ISBN 978-0-88141-293-2.
• Thomson, R. W. (1984). "Agathangelos". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). Encyclopædia Iranica, Volume I/6: Afghanistan–Ahriman. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 607–608. ISBN 978-0-71009-095-9.
• Thomson, Robert W. (1994). "Agathangelos". In Greppin, John A. C. (ed.). Studies in Classical Armenian Literature. Delmar, New York: Caravan Books. pp. 15–26.
• Thomson, Robert W. (1976). Agathangelos, History of the Armenians. Albany: SUNY. ISBN 0-87395-323-1.
• Thomson, Robert W. (1978). Moses Khorenatsʻi, History of the Armenians. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-39571-9.
• Toumanoff, Cyril (1969). "The Third-Century Armenian Arsacids: A Chronological and Genealogical Commentary". Revue des études arméniennes. 6: 233–281.
• Der Nersessian, Sirarpie (1966). "Les portraits de Grégoire l'Illuminateur dans l'art byzantin [Portraits of Gregory the Illuminator in Byzantine Art]". Byzantion (in French). 36 (2): 386–395. JSTOR 44169213.
• Mango, Cyril; Hawkins, Ernest J. W. (1972). "The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul. The Church Fathers in the North Tympanum". Dumbarton Oaks Papers. 26: 1–41. doi:10.2307/1291315. JSTOR 1291315.
• Ayvazyan, Gh. V. (1984). "Գրիգոր Լուսավորչի պաշտամունքը Բյուզանդական կայսրությունում [The Cult of Gregory the Illuminator in the Byzantine Empire]". Etchmiadzin (in Armenian). 41 (6): 40–47.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gregory the Illuminator.

• "St Gregory the Illuminator" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. XI (9th ed.). 1880. p. 179.
• Agathangelos: History of St. Gregory and the Conversion of Armenia
• "Gregory, St." . Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.
• Gandzasar Monastery, Nagorno Karabakh