Lecture One

James R. Russell,Mashtots Professor of Armenian studies,Harvard University.
1. The House of Aram.
In the second millennium B.C., speakers of a group of closely-related Indo-European languages migrated from the Balkan region east across the Bosphorus onto the Anatolian peninsula. Some– the Phrygians– remained in the region that is now northwestern Turkey. The legendary king Midas was one of their rulers. Others moved farther east, devastating the Hittite empire of central Anatolia; and Assyrian records call them by the name Mushki. Some of the latter settled in Cappadocia, whose most important town, Mazaca in Greek, Mazhak in Armenian, perpetuated their name. The city, at the foot of the majestic Mt. Argaeus, received the appellation Caesarea in Roman times. It was to become one of the centers of early Christian theology: there the Cappadocian Fathers wrote and taught, and St. Gregory the Illuminator was ordained a bishop there. A lone Armenian church stands still in Gesaria, Kayseri, the sole remnant of an ancient community. Other cousins of the Mushki and the Phrygians migrated farther east, to Melitene and the highlands around lake Van. The Assyrians called the region Urartu– the Ararat of the Hebrew Bible– and the natives knew it as Biaina, the name that survives as Van. In the late sixth century B.C., Persian and then Greek sources refer first to the Armenians (Old Persian armina), who emerge, with their language, as the ruling ethnic group of Urartu. The Armenian legend of the conflict between Hayk, the eponymous ancestor of the nation, and Bel– an Assyrian god whose name means "lord"– crystallizes in mythological form the distant memory of the struggle between their ancestors and the Assyrians. The latter had settlements in Cappadocia and elsewhere in eastern Anatolia, exporting metals, skins, timber, fruit, and other products of the peninsula south. They were a powerful people whose empire was centered in present-day northern Iraq and Syria: their principal language in early times, Akkadian, which was written in the cuneiform script, belongs to the Semitic family, to which Hebrew and Arabic also belong. The term Assyria refers essentially to the empire and its territory: the Aramaic-speaking Christian communities of the same region claim descent from the Assyrians, whose name they apply to themselves: Athoraye. Syria, though a related word, is a Greek geographical term that broadly designates the land mass north of Egypt and south of the Anatolian highlands, bounded by the Mediterranean on the west and the Euphrates river on the east. To complicate matters a little more, there is a language known in English as Syriac (Armenian asoreren), the Aramaic literary dialect of the ancient city known to the Greeks as Edessa (and to its natives as Orhay, hence Armenian Urhay and the present name Urfa) and its environs. Edessa, a town of cultural and economic importance, became an early Christian kingdom and center of learning; in consequence of which Syriac literature became the core of most Christian tradition in the lands where the faith was born, exerting a tremendous influence upon the development of Armenian Christianity.
Around the eighth century B.C., Akkadian came to be supplanted in daily and literary usage by another Semitic language, Aramaic– of which Syriac is a northeastern dialect. Aramaic is a language very close to Hebrew, and the principal language of the Jewish literature of two millennia ago; it is likely to have been the native tongue of Jesus Christ. Aramaic thus existed in the regions to the south of Armenia, but also in the country itself. In the second century B.C., following a practice particularly common to the Iranian kingdoms, the Armenian rulers Artaxias and Zariadres (Artashes and Zareh) used Aramaic as the official language of their inscriptions. Aramaic is written in the alphabetic script of twenty-two letters invented by the Phoenicians: it was easy to spell out Armenian and Iranian names in Aramaic script, and gradually the practice of heterography evolved. That is, Aramaic words were written but read back out loud in the local language, much as we write the two connected letters of Latin et, &, but read the symbol as the English word "and". In the fifth century, Mashtots reshaped for his own use a number of Aramaic characters that had already been adapted to representing the sounds of non-Semitic languages, adding to these the separate characters invented for the vowels in Greek. One of the early translations into Armenian was a book that is perhaps the oldest living secular work from the Middle East. It is an Assyrian novel, composed in Aramaic around the time of the king Esarhaddon, about a wise vizier, Ahiqar, who adopts his nephew Nadan as an heir and educates him. Ahiqar's precepts, which form the core of the novel, are the prototype of the manuals of good manners and statecraft that came to be known as "mirrors for princes," Machiavelli's Prince thus being a remote recipient of the fruits of Assyrian political science. The Armenian translation of Ahiqar is one of the earliest surviving versions: it was transmitted in manuscripts, and then in printed editions, down to the twentieth century, in anthologies of wisdom literature. The name of the hero became a common adjective in Armenian, khigar, meaning "wise". In the novel, Nadan rises to prominence and betrays and persecutes his uncle. But during a crisis the king realizes Nadan's inferiority and longs for his old vizier, who, it turns out, has been saved from execution and hidden by an officer grateful for an old favor. The Assyrians in their wars might come down "like a wolf on the fold... their cohorts gleaming in purple and gold," and even if Biblical tradition has vengefully exaggerated their reputation for cruelty, the ending of the book of Ahiqar the Wise is unsentimental: the vizier, restored to his old position, offers a few last improving precepts to the young ingrate Nadan as the latter is flogged to death.
Though the core narrative of the Armenian folk epic The Wild Men of Sasun is déja vu all over again– the Armenian liberation struggle against the Arab Caliphate at Baghdad, called Misr ("Egypt"), is a new mythologization of the contest of Hayk and Bel– it is already clear that the interaction of Armenians with their southern neighbors of Semitic speech was culturally enriching, however politically difficult it might remain. It was a close interaction: the Greek historian Poseidonius considers the Armenians to be cousins of the Aramaeans. The ancestor whom the Armenians call Aram, in explanation of the name that almost everyone uses of them except themselves, was most likely the Urartean Aramu, and not a Syrian. (Armenian hay could mean either "Hittite" or "ruler"; Georgian somekhi, meaning "Armenian," may preserve the old name of the Mushki– the proto-Armenians' Cappadocian cousins– and Kurdish fla is Arabic for "peasant," an unflattering evocation of the reality of Armenian relations with the armed, semi-nomadic Kurdish tribes.) Whether or not Armenians saw themselves in ancient times as relatives of the Syrians, the two peoples lived together. Armenians were amongst the pilgrims who thronged the shrine of Atargatis, the Syrian Goddess, at Mabbug/Hierapolis. The ancient Armenian pantheon included Barshamin, that is, the Syrian Ba’al Shamin, the Lord of Heaven; and the pre-Christian priests were known by the Aramaic term k’urm. The loan-word shukay, "market," from Aramaic shuq, c.f. Arabic suq, is one of a number of words attesting to the interaction of Armenians and Syrians in economic life. Ancient Semitic traces are to be found, too, in Armenia's toponyms: several places are called til, that is, from tel, "hill"; and forms like Angegh tun or Palnatun– house of Angl or Paln– reproduce the Aramaic usage beth de, "house of". In later centuries there were Syriac- and Arabic-speaking Christians in many parts of Armenia, notably Malatya, Kharpert, and the Diarbakir area. Armenians lived in Syrian lands, too: an eleventh-century sculptor left his name in Syriac letters on a bronze door at Rome: KTShG, with an accompanying Greek word, Staurakios– that is, Khachig, "Little Cross."
Iranians professing the Zoroastrian faith ruled over all or part of Anatolia from the sixth century B.C. well into the Christian era, settling there and intermingling with the other peoples of the area; and there is evidence of a syncretistic blending of Iranian and local beliefs, including those of Aramaic speakers: near Nevshehir in Cappadocia, for instance, there was found a carved stone in Late Hittite style depicting what seems to be a kind of creation-myth. There is also an inscription in Aramaic describing the betrothal of the goddess personifying the Iranian religion, Daena Mazdayasnish, to the chief divinity of the Aramaeans, Bel.
From the late fourth century B.C., yet another major element enters the complex picture of culture in Anatolia and Syria: after the conquest by Alexander the Great of the Persian Empire, one of his generals, Seleucus, established an empire in the region with its capital at Antioch, a city on the banks of the river Orontes, with the rich coastal plain of the northeastern Mediterranean to its west and the mountain massifs of Silpius and Cassius to its east and west. The Syrian city became a center of Greek culture and learning; and for many centuries it was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. The boastful Sasanian Persian king Shapur built a new city of his own, Weh az Antiok Shapur, "Better-than-Antioch Shapur." It has been said that a lady protesteth too much: here it is an entire town. But then every city of antiquity– and the only great American city of the present day, my native New York– has a lady as its personification, the tutelary spirit of its fortune. Antioch's is a noble goddess in a crenellated crown, with the nude river-god of the Orontes gamely practicing his free-style stroke at the foot of her throne. The tykhe of Antioch thus appears on the reverse of the coins of Tigran II, the Great (reigned 95-56 B.C.) as the symbol of his proudest conquest and possession. For a few decades, a generation or two before the birth of Christ, Syria, down to the northern parts of the land of Israel, was Armenian. And Armenians, for many centuries after Tigran, thronged the schools of law, philosophy and rhetoric of Antioch and Berytus (modern Beirut). Many of them are known by name as the pupils of Libanius, where they rubbed shoulders with Julian, who as Emperor would by reversion to paganism earn the disdainful sobriquet "the Apostate", and with his more pious classmate John, later to be called Chrysostom (Arm. voskeberan), "he of the golden mouth." In Greek-speaking Antioch the term "Christian" was first used to describe the new faith from the south; but it was Abgar, the king of the Syriac-speaking city-state of Edessa, who supposedly invited Christ to come and live with him, free from the fear of persecution. The Lord replied graciously that His destiny needed to happen; but in recognition of Abgar's faith He miraculously imprinted upon a cloth the image of His face and sent it to the king– thus was the first holy icon made.
Armenian tradition has adopted Abgar as an Armenian, and the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew through Syriac tradition have also been regarded as missionaries to the land of Ararat. Reciprocally, Edessa was called "daughter of the Parthians" for her closeness to the Arsacids; and in Syrian churches the prophet Daniel is depicted in the dress common to the Armeno-Iranian world of the time: felt hat, cape, and trousers. The tale of that prophet is essentially a Persian romance, and the three Hebrew children in the fiery furnace, Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, all bear good Anatolian names, with Meshech a variant of the ethnonym Mazhak of the Cappadocians that we saw earlier. Daniel, subduer of lions, the embattled worshipper of the true God, was a particularly popular subject in the earliest Armenian Christian art, as at the Arsacid tombs of Aghts, on the slopes of Mt. Aragats– for a good Iranian hero fought a lion in single combat (and Daniel subdues two!) and the Armenians saw themselves as a new Israel, a new Daniel, new Maccabees, surrounded and outnumbered and fighting for the freedom to worship in their own way. The earliest Armenian translation literature includes the narrative of Lebubna of Edessa on Abgar and the Apostles. Armenians lived at Edessa in ancient times; they ruled and defended it in the Crusades (St. Nerses Shnorhali wrote a vengeful lament on its fall to the Moslems); and in 1915 they rose to protect diutsaznakan Urfa, "heroic Urfa," once more.
The pagan Arabs of Syria worshipped gods mounted on camels or on horseback; and when Christian officers in the Roman army chose martyrdom rather than abjure their faith, they came to be envisioned as mounted warrior-martyrs. One of these was Sergius, Armenian Sargis, whose shrine at Reshafa, on what the Greeks called the Barbarian Plain in north Syria, became a major site of Christian pilgrimage. The Syrian St. Sargis has remained extremely popular to this day amongst Armenians, whose national mythology has always upheld a heroic ethical code. Along with him Armenians venerate the mounted Cappadocian dragon-slayer St. George, whose cult partakes abundantly of that of the mounted Persian god Mithra (thus portrayed in Armenian terracottas from Artashat and other pre-Christian sites), and St. Theodore. The three are shown together on the wall of the 10th-century Church of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar island. But of far greater importance than abundant liturgical and cultic borrowings from Christian Syria was the theological and intellectual wealth the Armenians inherited. Mashtots immediately upon completion of his new alphabet embarked with his pupils on an immense project of translation of the fundamental works of the Classical and Christian tradition, Greek and Syriac, into Armenian. This served two purposes: first, it reoriented the nation westwards and away from Zoroastrian Iran, to whose religious and social institutions Armenia had been allied for centuries; second, it enabled the Armenians to develop an indigenous literary culture of sufficient sophistication and tenacity to withstand any alien attempt at assimilation or co-optation. The kindred Cappadocians, by contrast, invented no script and undertook no translations into their own language, being satisfied with Greek. The result was Hellenization and the virtual disappearance of the Cappadocians as a distinct people.
The first task of Mashtots and his school was the translation of the Bible into Armenian. It appears that there were several working translations made from Syriac before a complete and final version, based primarily on Greek texts, was fixed. Where citations in early Armenian texts of Biblical verses differ significantly from the "official" version, it is most often the case that these are drawn from the early translation. In later centuries, the translation from Greek was preferred for greater accuracy but also because of purely inter-ecclesiastical disputes with the Syrian clergy. The appeal of Syriac, though, is great: this language, in its terminology and its nuances, generally represents a native Near Eastern tradition as close as can be to the speech and ways of Christ Himself, unrefracted through a subsequent Hellenism. And the Armenian style of the early translations– of the period later called the voskedar, the Golden Age– is limpid and clear, without the bewildering preponderance of participial constructions and concatenations of verbal prefixes and other Greek translationese that makes the work of the hunaban, or Hellenophilic, school of the late fifth and sixth centuries so precise and so hard to understand. The Armenian version of the Commentary on Genesis of the fourth-century Syrian theologian Eusebius of Emesa (modern Homs) contains a preface on the art and methods of translation. The treatise has, unfortunately, survived only in fragmentary form. Dr. Levon Ter Petrosyan and other scholars have rightly emphasized its very great importance, for it is practically the only contemporary source that might cast some light on the methods Mashtots and his school consciously employed. Though it is unlikely to strike the modern reader as avant-garde, it stresses the need to render in a translation the sense and meaning, rather than the individual equivalents of words. When one deals with sacred Scripture, where God was believed to be the source of every word and even letter, so that the text is practically an emanation of the divine essence, Eusebius' advice can be seen to allow a great deal of freedom to the individual human literary creator.
Here is some of what Eusebius has to say: "If someone wishes to translate the thought of any language in its words, then he will not be able to convey the meaning of the words employed. For there are many expressions particular to a language, which may be beautiful, plain, expressive, and fitting for their users; but when they are rendered into another language with the very same words, they do not express the content of the thought. We find many and various examples of this in Hebrew and in the Syriac tongue kindred to it. The translators of the Old Testament, who translated literally out of the desire to be literal, end up with many obscurities in their efforts at word for word translation: they did not follow the progression of the meaning, which was corrupted by the words they used. Scholars say Aquilas in particular worked this way, trying to express and translate each word with precision.From the standpoint of reproducing the meaning, of expressing its precise equivalent, he was often considered erroneous by those who set the explanation of individual words aside, trying rather to express the meaning of the text. That is, precisely, the aim of translation. For it is necessary to transcend the particular expressions of a given tongue and to translate and reproduce its sense, rather than to violate the content of the sense by adherence to peculiar expressions... One must be aware that in Hebrew there are expressions that it is impossible to translate literally, because of their special complexity. So the translators have naturally tried to express their sense. Thus, in the Hebrew verse 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth' it does not say 'in the beginning' but 'at the head'. Now, ought we to choose 'head,' from which everything was supposedly created, as those enamored of obscurities would have it, desiring to translate the same word with exactitude? Aquilas obscures the clarity of the thought by saying 'At the head God made the heavens and the earth.' The Greeks do not understand 'at the head' to mean 'in the beginning,' but 'in short...'" And in fact, in Armenian translations of the Bible, Greek sperma, literally "seed," is translated variously, according to context, as seed or offspring; pais, literally 'boy," can be child, servant, or son. So the Armenian translators, whether or not they followed Eusebius of Emesa specifically, adhered to the same principles of translation that he proposed. The overall language of the Armenian translations is of a perfected sophistication unlikely to have been achieved by Mashtots and his school out of a vacuum: J. Weitenberg has shown that the dialect has affinities to those of the two heartlands of Armenia– Van and Ayrarat– but displays features belonging to neither, and seems not to have been a vernacular language. He admits this is a mystery. One possible solution might be to regard the prototype of grabar, of Classical Armenian, as the formal tongue of the oral reciters and minstrels of the royal courts– distinct from the vernacular itself yet pre-literate.
Syria was an important source of Christian ideas and writings for Armenia, but some of those ideas strayed very far indeed from what was even by the fourth century regarded as orthodox. The river that runs through Edessa is called the Daitsan, that is, the stream that leaps and splashes; and the philosopher, scholar, and poet Bardaisan (Greek Bardesanes, Armenian Bardedzan), literally "son of the Daitsan," who died around A.D. 222, is reported by Movses Khorenatsi, who used as his source the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea, to have travelled to Armenia, where he preached against the belief in Fate and the worship of idols. Drijvers, the principal expert on Bardaisan, has stressed the idea of freedom as the essential aspect of his theories: the soul, bound to earth, longs to be free in its primordial home of light and truth. The human mind does not depend upon outside revelation, but achieves recognition of true knowledge freely, through its own labor. Drijvers perceives in this something of the mind-set of the Parthian Edessene nobleman, the azat. Bardaisan evolved a Christian system of his own that is strongly tinged by the ideas of the Gnostics. The latter believed God and the spiritual world to be alien to the material universe, which is inferior or even evil. Human beings have a divine component, a separated spark of the heavenly light: the demons wish to keep it imprisoned here, but despite the temptations of earthly existence, it yearns instinctively to be free and to be released from its state of suffering to return to its origin. It accomplishes this process of full recollection, of self-realization, and of escape and return through the acquisition of secret wisdom, of Gnosis (the Greek word for knowledge). There is a poem in Syriac called the Hymn of the Pearl or of the Soul, of unknown authorship, that was added at some point to the Acts of Thomas, an apocryphal book of the Bible that deals with the mission of the Apostle, described as Christ's twin brother, to India, where he meets martyrdom. The poem is sometimes ascribed to Bardaisan, for its affinity to his way of thinking and for its sheer literary brilliance, though the attribution is fraught with problems. The poem describes the soul's fortunes by means of an allegory: the king of Parthia sends his son, the Prince, to recover the Pearl that is kept by the Dragon in the sea near Egypt. The Prince takes provision for his journey but leaves his royal robe, which is like his animate double, at home. Travelling down through Mesopotamia to the head of the Persian Gulf, he eventually reaches Egypt but is recognized as a stranger and is drugged by the people in the Dragon's inn there. His royal parents hear of his predicament and send him a letter reminding him of his true nature and his mission and commanding him to wake and return. The letter comes in the form of an eagle; he arises, enchants the Dragon and frees the Pearl, follows the Eagle home, dons his Robe, and is received by his parents and inscribed in the Book of Heroes.
The poem, which skillfully combines Biblical, Iranian, and probably native Syro-Mesopotamian imagery and themes, essentially employs the epic motif of the hero's combat with a dragon to deliver the Gnostic doctrine; it could thus have been a powerful tool in the hands of missionaries in Armenia, where the dragon-story was a particularly prominent theme of oral literature. It is likely that the followers of the third-century religious innovator Mani, whose teachings found many adherents in Armenia (we know of two Epistles he wrote to the Armenians, and one legend concerning his Apostles is set in the country), used the Hymn of the Pearl as a part of their own literature, even though sectarian Christians might claim it as well as an allegory of salvation according to their teachings. Some of the elements of the ideology of the Hymn of the Pearl still exist amongst Moslem and Kurdish sectarian and mystical sects of the Armenian region; and I have attempted to demonstrate in an article that the mediaeval Armenian poet Kostandin of Erznka, who wrote of a vision of a sunlike being who gave him his poetic gifts, evidently in the form of a robe, inherited many aspects of the imaginal world to which the Hymn and its author belonged. It is important to stress that in the ancient world there were fewer strictly defined boundaries in religion than are generally accepted to exist today, so that a given sect may display at once diverse features from quite distinct traditions, whilst sharing striking affinities over a very wide area with other philosophies animated by similar sentiments. Pre-Christian and early Christian Armenia teemed with such religious groupings– Manichaeans, Christian sectarians, Gnostics and Manichaeans, Syrian and Greek pagans, Jews. Armenia was also the home of a fraternal-mystical order based upon Zoroastrianism, analogous functionally to Freemasonry within Western Christianity or to the Yaresan and Ahl-e Haqq sects in the context of Islam. This was Mithraism, which found great favor with the Roman legions, even as Freemasonry was to do with the British Army, and spread far and wide. In Armenia today it survives within the secular scripture of the national heroic epic of Sasun, two of whose heroes bear the name Mithra– Mher. In antiquity, it is a Syrian writer who lived in Armenia, Iamblichus, who has left for us in his Babylonian Tales a Mithraic allegory couched, not so much in the genre of a dragon-slaying tale this time, but in the equally potent form of a romance. This is the story of Rhodanes and Sinonis. Both are Persian epic heroes– Faredun and Shahnaz– and what is telling is that the form of their names is Armenian. Rhodanes is a hellenized form of Armenian Hruden, which is what Faredun becomes through regular sound changes. So, just as one Syrian poet sang of the Gnostic drama in a heroic poem, another, at about the same time, veils Mithraic initiation, in the same period, as a romance.
There is only one Gnostic community that survives to this day, that of the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran. Called Subbi, Sabaeans, by the Arabs– for the Qur'an accords toleration to a sect of this name, as People of the Book– they speak an Aramaic dialect of their own, utilizing a distinctive script. Aramaic manda means simply "knowledge, gnosis." The Mandaeans claim descent from 360 Jewish sectarians who fled Jerusalem because of priestly persecution and settled at Harran– a few miles south of Edessa– and in Media, the Iranian region south and east of Armenia corresponding roughly to Azerbaijan. (Armenians have long called Kurdish, an Iranian language of the area, simply mareren, "Median.") Now they live far to the south; but the early Mandaeans would have been in contact with Armenians. Like the Armenians, they tell stories about the Saka epic hero Rostam, whose heroic deeds they interpret metaphorically– as one is of course expected to do with the exploits of the Prince in the Hymn of the Pearl. Still more tellingly, their magic seal ring, the skandola, is composed entirely of symbols potent to Mithraism: the snake, bee, lion, and scorpion. (The Mithraist receives full initiation at the fourth grade, called that of the lion, which represents the force of death and time– the latter signified by a coiling serpent. Death in the Mithraic bull-slaying scene is personified by a scorpion attacking the fruits of life released by the bull. The bee, born of the dying bull, produces honey, which the Mithraists believed to be a liquid containing fire: the initiate was baptized in it. In the Armenian epic, one of the two heroes named Mher bears the epithet ariutsatsev, "lion-form.") The Mandaeans call their priests by the Iranian title ganzibra, "treasurer," Armenian loan-word gandzavor. Their dualistic cosmology is a curious mixture of Gnostic, Greek, Biblical, and other elements: Heaven is the alme de nhura, the worlds of light, where the celestial rivers take their source. All rivers are called Yardna, that is, the Jordan– where John baptised Our Lord. There dwells the Mara de rabuta, the Lord of Greatness, also called the Hayye rba, the Great Life, who is also called Mana, the Mind (cf. Platonic Nous). All the prototypes of beings, the dmauata– cf. the Platonic doctrine of the Forms!– are here as well. God is surrounded by a host of angelic emanations called Uthras, literally, "Riches." One of the latter is a being named Ptahil, a word combining the name of the ancient Egyptian creator-god Ptah (in Greek, Phtha) with the Hebrew suffix El, "God." Ptahil is attracted to the separate and inferior world of darkness, which is populated by demons (called either devin, in Iranian, or sheddin, using a native Semitic term), so he creates Tibil, the world (cf. Hebrew tevel).
So mankind comes into being through a deceitful temptation, a weakness, a fall of light, a primordial catastrophe– and there is Adam, thinking he belongs here. But fortunately he is animated by a secret Adam from above, and this luminous part is called his soul, nishimta (cf. Hebrew neshama) or mana, "vessel." (The name Mani is the same, with the full form Mani (de) hayye, meaning "Vessel of life" or "Living Vessel," hence the Manichaeans– Kostandin the visionary says to his angelic interlocutor that he is an earthen vessel, hogheghen aman, wishing to be filled.) The anxious God sends messengers of the light to inform men of Gnosis; and these are called by the Parthian term parwanqa– the same word is used of the Prince's guides in the Hymn of the Pearl– or another Middle Iranian term, adyaura, literally "helper," from which come the modern Persian words ayyar, a kind of half-brigand, half-hero, and yar, "friend, lover." There are two main collections of Mandadan texts: the Ginza, of Treasure, which is divided into Left and Right parts as though it were a human prototype; and the book of Qolasta, or Praises– a hymnal. The principal liturgical rites of the Manadaeans deal, accordingly, with the purificatory illumination of the soul during life, accomplished, John-like, through baptism (masbuta), and the masiqta, literally "ascension," a mass said for the departed soul as it makes its way past the Cerberus-like dogs at the guard-houses (matarata) of the planetary demons who keep the world prisoner. The body is buried facing north.
The baptismal rite is performed in a pool in front of a temple called a manda: the pool is connected to a river (all rivers being outflows of celestial Yardnas) by two channels. What is striking about the arrangement is that it recapitulates the imaginal geography of the soul's ascent and descent in the writings of the Neoplatonists, notably Numenius of Apamea (a Syrian) and Porphyry. Neoplatonists were a school of philosophers, of whom Plotinus is the principal exponent, who reinterpreted the philosophy of Plato as a religious and mystical doctrine about the soul's nature, descent, self-realization, and ascent. Though the Neoplatonists disagreed with the Gnostics' rejection of the material world as alien and evil– they considered it, rather, an inferior emanation one must graduate from, as it were– they shared a great deal in common with them, and were not averse to borrowing from the mysteries of Mithras, either, even as the Gnostic Mandaeans seem to have done. Both Numenius and Porphyry considered the Cave of the Nymphs described in the Odyssey of Homer to be an allegorical symbol of the world. It faces the sea, with a pool within fed by two channels, north and south: the north faces the zodiacal sign Cancer; the south, Capricorn. These are the solstitial points where the Milky Way, seen as a column of souls, and the plane of the equator intersect, forming gates. The souls descend into the world through Cancer and ascend at Capricorn. If the Mandaeans in their ritual re-enact all this, then at the far end of Europe, millennia after the Gnostic Baptists set out from the Jerusalem of the Second Temple to seek a new home in the plains of northern Mesopotamia and the Iranian mountains, a Christian dissident visionary, a free-thinking new sort of Bardaisan, a neo-Gnostic heroic poet and philosopher paints it. William Blake's watercolour, "The Sea of Time and Space," is an evocation of the cosmic cave of the nymphs. And oh, yes. The Mithraists always worshipped in spelaea, caves– as the Neoplatonists noted– and all the action of the Epic of Sasun spirals into the final scene, where Little Mithra, Pokr Mher, enters his cave at Van, in the very heart of Armenia, where he is to remain till time ends and he emerges to save souls and destroy the world.
This was not the only sort of ascension to emerge from the rich religious imagination of Syria in fusion with Greek Neoplatonism and Armenian Mithraism. Syria was the source, also, of a powerful stream of Christian mystical practice, theory, and prayer of inestimable importance to the development of Armenian spirituality. The mystic Isaac of Nineveh, for instance, spoke of massaqta de teoria, which Widengren rendered as "ascension of mind in spiritual contemplation," a task accomplished through prayer involving an intense focus upon the Holy Cross, which is called a gate of the raze, "mysteries" (an Iranian loan found in Daniel, and cf. the Armenian loan eraz, "dream") into the next world out of this fallen one, which one transcends through an imaginative process of self-crucifixion and immolation, a symbolic death. The Syrian Fathers proposed the stages of mystical enlightenment, beginning with hezwa, vision, and demuta, imagination– this might involve the perception of luminous beings, pure light, and fire– accompanied by a feeling of intense love (hubba). In the higher stage of teoria, the "object is said to be neither seen nor heard, but... there is an intense feeling of a presence or communication." This stage of pure mind is followed by unification (hadiuta) and the commingling (hebiquta), where the individual vanishes or expands into God, in an absolute stage of being where there is neither distinction nor addition. Shorn of mythological elements save for the concrete symbol of the Cross itself, the Christian philosophy of mystical ascent, massaqta, of Syrian tradition still displays many of the philosophical concerns, the passions of experience, and the sense of a cosmic dualism, that we find closer to the everyday cultural ground of Irano-Armeno-Syrian life in the more cluttered and detailed schemata of the Mandaeans.
In conclusion I wish to speak very briefly of St. Ephrem, Armenian Yeprem Khuri, the Syrian Christian theologian whose hymns and commentaries, translated into Armenian in the fifth century and later, have been of central importance to Armenian Christianity. He is known also for his contemplative prayers, whose purpose is to induce in the worshipper tears of repentance, an emotional catharsis opening his soul to the energy of divine grace. In the profound and clear language of these prayers one can perceive directly the inspiration that animated the titans of the Armenian Church, St. Grigor Narekatsi and St. Nerses Shnorhali:
"See what I suffer Lord, the pains of my soul so full of many sins! Turn me, pardon me, lead me to you, as you have said: Turn to me, and I will turn to you. Have mercy on me when I am cast out, and help me when I am scorned. Shine a light on me when I am in the dark, guide me when I am lost. For I am full of sin and transgressions beyond number, flailing and carried off in the vortices of iniquity, so I cling to you– stretch your hand out to me as you did to Peter. I call upon you to justify me, as the tax collector did; grant me pardon for my misdeeds as you did for the thief. Open to me the gate that leads onto the road of life, and take me into the bedchamber of the King. O depths of greatness and of wisdom, save me for I am encompassed in the abyss of sin in this sea where I have fallen. Spare me, make me strong to do your will, to lament and shed tears ceaselessly by day and night for all my impiety and sloth. Spring of life and fountain of immortality, let my thirsty soul drink from your abundantly welling stream, for I am parched and burnt by my many iniquities. Break on through into my petrified heart, and extract tears of repentance for me from there. You who are the treasure (gandz) of all that is good, grant me an obol's worth (dang) of your abundant good, because I have become cruelly poor and hungry. Clothe and feed me with the tears of atonement." Vortices of the turbulent sea of the world, the cry of the lost soul for his heavenly parents to rescue him, the mention of a Treasure, the obols placed by Greeks and Iranians upon a dead man's eyes to enable him to pay Charon as he moves from this world into the next, gates, roads, the terminus of a mystical union described as a marriage: yes, there is the Biblical imagery also, and each image contracts into the straining of penitential tears. Yet here too, if we look closely, we are still in the multi-ethnic world of Late Antiquity, of travellers and merchants and Gnostic poets and imaginary masiqtas and Platonic paths– in a prayer printed and recited in Armenian to this very day, as part of the gift of the house of Aram, of the Syrians.
Philosophers, Mystics, and, Poets; or

The Near East in the Mind of Armenia.



Lecture Two



James R. Russell,

Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies,

Harvard University.





2. Hellas.



Aristotle defined man as a politikon logikon zoon, an animal capable of reasoning, who lives in cities. By this definition the Armenians of his time, at least most of them, were not fully human, since Armenia had no cities. And even when some were built, about two centuries later, they were trading entrepots inhabited mainly by foreigners. The Artaxiad kings of Armenia, from the early second century B.C. down to the time of Christ, resided sometimes in the cities that bore their names– Artashat "the Joy of Artashes," Tigranakert "the Place Tigran Built." They called themselves philhellen, "lover of things Greek" on their coins. Artavazd II, Plutarch informs us, composed plays in Greek; and the same writer records the now famous scene of a royal wedding at Artashat, the Armenian capital. Parthia was fighting Rome, and a great battle had ended a few days before at Carrhae– that is, Harran, just south of Urfa. A messenger arrived during the festivities, bearing as a token of victory the severed head of the Roman commander Crassus. The Greek actor Jason, who had been entertaining the Parthian Arsacid and Armenian guests with dramatic recitations in Greek, seized moment– and the head– and recited the monologue of Agave from The Bacchae of Euripides. Let's freeze the action (Parthian and Armenian noblemen reclining pie-eyed on their couches, drinking bowls halfway to their faces, their minds just beginning to register the scale of the victory) and look at the play for a moment. In the drama, Pentheus, a young king of exemplary rationality and the strictest chastity, refuses to join the people of his city, Thebes, in performance of the newly introduced ecstatic rites of the Asiatic god Dionysus. But he is then lured by the god– who is, as it happens, his cousin and thus has no difficulty either in assuming human form or in driving his mortal relative mad– to eavesdrop on the mysteries. Prurient curiosity gets the better of Pentheus. But the female celebrants, the Bacchantes, amongst whom is Pentheus' own mother, Agave, find him in the tree where he has been hiding (Dionysus assists their search), trap him like a hunted beast, and dismember him. It is Agave, still possessed by Dionysian frenzy, who bears her son's head triumphantly back to their city, Thebes, and exults "Happy was the hunting!"– the lines Jason was to repeat with Crassus' head. But when she comes to her senses– returns to the polis, and, as it were, to being a logikon zoon, to the degree Greeks might concede women can be logika zoa at all– she is dismayed, as well she might be. The Asiatic religion of Dionysus brings an ecstatic joy, a joy human nature demands. (For who can be a logikon politikon zoon all the time? As Woody Allen has observed, sagely, "Man must kill for food, but sometimes there must be a beverage.") But what a price!



Euripides assigns to Pentheus a tragic flaw so natural, even inevitable, that it would be hard for any viewer of the play not to identify with the character, even while recognizing his blindness. Psychological repression of the Dionysian, of that which is sexual and spontaneous and non-rational, is a reaction common amongst adolescents afraid of new and unfamiliar, uncontrollable urges. Greek drama is full of this archetypal problem of human growth: young Hippolytus worships Artemis, the chaste goddess of the hunt, denying Aphrodite. So the latter makes the boy's stepmother, Phaedra, fall in love with him. He refuses her advances, she slanders him to her husband and his father, Theseus, king of Athens, reversing the situation and claiming he has made advances on her. So he is banished, and a great bull from the sea attacks his chariot. His horses, so powerful and submissive hitherto, take fright, and rear. He falls, they trample him, he dies, and sure enough his name was Hippolytus, meaning, "destroyed by horses." (When I was a sophomore at Columbia, I asked in Greek class what horses had to do with it. A student a few years older sneered, "You mean you really don't feel the connection of horses and sex?" I blushed as only an adolescent can, and have never, or almost never, been a lying hypocrite since– I guess I was just lucky to be living in New York City then, rather than at the court of Theseus, among Greek gods coldly impatient with human weakness. Who knows what the consequences might have been!)



Now this story about Hippolytus (and that of Pentheus is related to it) is an old mythologem– an irreducible, atomic, individual mythological theme– and it occurs in various forms. In the case of the legend of the Biblical Joseph and Zuleikha, the wife of the Egyptian Potiphar, the noble youth who refuses the advances of an older woman becomes the exemplar of God-fearing chastity in Islamic tradition, as well as, somewhat less piously, the paragon of beauty. (It is also the beauty that coquettishly refuses advances and causes sweet torment to the lover: Sufism makes of this a metaphor of the soul's longing to be reunited with God. This metaphorical interpretation is sometimes applied, with a puritanical disingenuousness, to all Persian love poetry.) This is an example, perhaps, of how monotheism co-opts mythology and makes it dull. It has to: the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob makes impossible the kind of freedom and madness that define the Greek perception of human tragedy. In Iranian epic, the Hippolytus figure is young Siyavakhsh, "He of the Black Stallion," and the stepfather (this time) is a non-Iranian, in fact, Afrasiyab, the king of the absolutely archetypal Turanian enemy. (If the Shah-nameh, the "Book of Kings" of the early mediaeval Persian poet Ferdousi, which enshrines the heroic legends of Iran for posterity, were Star Trek, Turan would be the Klingons.) Armenians loved and absorbed the tales of Iranian heroic epic, reciting them from ancient times down to recent days: the name Siyavakhsh was adopted in pre-Christian times, as Shavarsh; and as for the prince's persecutor, the Armenian form of his name, *Hrasyak, from a form attested in the Middle Persian variant Frasyag, appears in a toponym, Hrasekaberd, "Afrasiyab's fortress." In the epic reflex of the mythologem, the innocent Siyavakhsh is not so much a sexually-conflicted stepson as an Iranian martyr in the hands of the enemy. And that is the symbolism this Persian Hippolytus has retained: at a conference on Ferdousi at Tehran in the late summer of 2000, Mr. Mohajerani, the Iranian Minister of Culture, offered a paper suggesting Siyavakhsh is the metaphorical embodiment of Iran itself, of its fate: to be a guileless, pure victim.



All of which is very well, but meanwhile Jason has finished his monologue and put down Crassus' head. Everybody is shouting about the victory over the mighty Romans. No one is thinking about the context of the recital from Euripides. The Armenian king is glad of the victory at Carrhae, but he is probably also recalibrating the balance of power very fast. The Roman historian Tacitus lived in the same era, when Rome and Parthia were the superpowers of the age. He wrote that the Araxes, the river symbolizing Armenia, the country perhaps most affected by shifting Roman and Parthian spheres of influence, suffers no bridges. That is, it is never going to be permanently Roman. He observed also that the Armenians and Parthians quarrel incessantly, but with them it's a family quarrel– with us, with Rome, it's implacable enmity. Still, it helped sometimes for Armenians to have a choice between the two empires. The noise at the feast continues. The Parthian king is probably wanting the head for himself, to festoon the walls of a temple. This attractive style of dedication survives in the disembodied heads in bas-relief that adorn mediaeval Armenian churches. The Arsacid probably got his doorprize. What might Jason have been thinking, though, when he recited his monologue? Was he secretly on Crassus' and Rome's side, suggesting that the Parthians and Armenians, equivalent to the barbarian worshippers of an Asiatic god in the wild, bereft of reason, had won the day this time. The Bacchantes were women; and Plutarch makes a point of mentioning how the Parthian commander, Surenas (a royal name, surviving as Armenian Suren), wore his hair long and pomaded himself with makeup and perfume. So the barbarians bested the logika politika zoa. Or maybe he was just carried away by the Oriental opulence of the occasion, something like Belshazzar's feast, one supposes, and added the monologue, which is tasteless out of context, to ornament the proceedings with an additional dramatic dash of kitsch. Or maybe he was a misorhomaios, a hater of the Romans, like some other Greeks who sought refuge in Armenia in ancient days, and he meant what he was saying, hatred blinding him, not only to taste, but to the irony with which he, a Hellene, ought to have regarded these political upheavals.



The modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy imagined, in little-known verses, a young Greek actor trying to make it in the new town of Tigranocerta: a whorish, scheming boy working the nouveaux riches, the Oriental hicks. Jason perhaps recited his set piece at Artaxata with the simple expectation of a bonus. Artaxias I, the ancestor of his host, had been a strategos of the Seleucids. Alexander the Great conquered the Near East and northern India in the fourth century B.C., intending that his Macedonian officers should marry Persian noble women and create a cosmopolitan empire after him: Greek cosmopolis means the whole universe a single city. Such a state would fuse the methods of Alexander's teacher, Aristotle, with the discourses of the Hindu ascetic sages, gymnosophistai, the "naked philosophers" of India and the ancient wisdom of Egypt. The Jews were greatly impressed by Alexander and decided he had been impressed with them as well: the Hebrew version of the biography as fantastic novel of Alexander, The Alexander Romance, presents him as a respectful tourist, marvelling at the Temple of Jerusalem and listening gravely to the high priest's sagacious teachings. But then the Persian version of the Alexander Romance makes the Macedonian conqueror a kinsman of the Achaemenid kings whose dynasty he overthrows, thereby relieving the embarrassment of Iran's subjugation by a man popular legend endowed with every virtue. (Not every legend did: the Zoroastrian Magi stubbornly call Alexander "the Accursed" in religious books, and with good reason, for in Sogdian, centuries later, he was still to bear the damning epithet moghzat, "Magi-slayer.") Anyway there is no reason to imagine Alexander even noticed Jerusalem, which would have seemed to him an insignificant hill town; nor was he half-Iranian. As for Armenia, we know from the Anabasis of Xenophon, an account of a retreat by Greek mercenaries across Armenia to the Black Sea some sixty years before, that the country is mountainous and wild, with good beer but a harsh climate. Alexander simply bypassed it. He was in a hurry to conquer Persia: he fought Darius at Issos, then Gaugamela, almost in the shadow of the ramparts of the Armenian highland, as he proceeded east; then he veered south, to Babylon. So Alexander never bothered to conquer Armenia.



When he died, his generals split up the East amongst them: Ptolemy got Egypt; Seleucus, most of the rest. The rulers of Armenia, like those of Cappadocia, accepted nominal Seleucid control as strategoi, "generals" of the Macedonian forces of occupation that administered barbarian lands. When the Romans destroyed Seleucid rule in Anatolia, the local strategoi declared themselves kings: in Cappadocia and Commagene, they claimed a dual genealogy, from Darius on one side and Alexander on the other. The Armenian kings married noble Greek ladies, but they did not claim Macedonian ancestry. In this respect they shared, perhaps, the fundamental antipathy of the Iranians to Alexander's conquest. Other Oriental peoples, such as the Jews and Egyptians, became dissatisfied only later on with the inequities or impositions of Seleucid and Ptolemaic rule– witness the spate of anti-Western apocalyptic writings, and the Maccabean revolt (and, in the Roman period, the uprisings of the Zealots and Bar Kokhba). Armenians did take to Greek culture: there are Greek inscriptions of the Arsacid period from Armavir, Aparan, and Garni. The colonnaded building in the fortress at the latter, of uncertain date and disputed function, is entirely Greek in style. Greek was used, exclusively, on Armenian coins. As we have seen, Greek was widely understood at court; and this was not just because Seleucid officials and itinerant players passed through, but also in part because Armenians did travel to places where Greek was a common tongue. This does not mean it was the only language spoken: there was Aramaic, and a host of lesser languages. But the language of high culture– of philosophy and letters– was Greek.



They fanned out as students, soldiers, pilgrims, traders, and tourists, over the Hellenistic world. Thirty years before Christ an Armenian named Khosrov left an appreciative graffitto in Greek after a visit to the Sphinx. By the seventh century A.D., there is scarcely a province of the Greek-speaking Byzantine empire for which we do not have some record of an Armenian presence or established community. In the same century, in Egypt again, an Armenian soldier wrote a letter in Greek, using Armenian letters. It never reached its destination: the sands have preserved it, but they have not, of course, preserved its context. It would seem, at least, that, beginning in Hellenistic times, Armenians formed a significant part of the multiethnic, Mediterranean society of the Greek world. They were frequently the first nation encountered as one moved decisively out of that world and into the Iranian one– often, by crossing the Euphrates. As such an interface-nation, Armenia bore the weight of its differentness, its Iranian-ness: Greek writers erroneously declared Zoroaster himself to have been an Armenian. But Armenia, as the closest alien entity, was not truly foreign, either. It was the near other. We can see how this played out in the social and political life of Constantinople: the Armenians were the one identified ethnic group without a quarter of their own to reside in. That is, they were Byzantine but still not Greek, in a way no other group was. They were numerically the second most populous Christian community of the Anatolian core of the Empire, too; but of course the Armenian Christian confession was Monophysite, and that distanced them from the Greeks, too.



I approached some of these issues in a study of the source in a Byzantine demonological treatise attributed to Psellus, of the vengeful spirit who pursues the murderer of the albatross, in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" of the great English Romantic poet and scholar Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the Byzantine text, a Greek woman is possessed by an evil spirit who speaks Armenian– a language she has never learnt– through her. An Armenian (it is not specified whether he is a priest) is secured to exorcise the Armenophone intruder. In modern Greece, there persists a belief in evil spirits called armenides, "Armenian women." This lasting antipathy is of a very specific kind: in analogous cases of demonic possession from black Africa, it has been observed that the afflicted person may speak the language of the nearest, most intimate yet identifiably alien group, just as here. The faraway foreigner may be exotic, but the one closest to you stands a good chance of being hated– as the Jews in the Christian and Moslem worlds have come to know all too well. Indeed, the Ottomans, who appropriated to themselves the lands and institutions of the conquered Byzantine empire, were eventually to mete out to the Armenians the same kind of extreme violence that was to bring an end, a generation later, to the millennial history of Jewish life and culture in Europe. But these dark conclusions were still unimaginably far in the future from the actor Jason and his audience in Artaxata.



And I doubt very much whether Hellenistic civilization, had it survived, would have produced such evils. For with all their disdain for and fear of the other: the barbarian, the woman– the Greeks before anybody else in recorded history tried to see things, systematically and sympathetically, from that other's point of view. This kind of perception makes it impossible radically to dehumanize others. This makes genocide unthinkable, but it means much more besides. The ability to see both– or many– sides of a matter is a prerequisite for the kind of analytical thinking that makes philosophical investigation possible, and such a tendency, since it is inherently flexible and constantly in motion also counteracts the ossification of any idea or point of view into dogma. This perception, this multiple vision, is necessary also to the artist who takes the simple mythologem of an adolescent destroyed by his refusal to grow into a sexual being, and makes of it the many-faceted, multi-visioned tragedy of a play like The Bacchae, which acquires its power from the energy released in the confrontation of two inevitable and incompatible points of view. How did the Greeks acquire this unusual level of perception, so self evidently superior to that of almost any other culture, in any historical age? Dialectic is one factor; so one can point to the question-and-answer structure of some old Indo-European religious texts (the Upanishads, the Gathas) as one source for this remarkable development; the Presocratic teachers pondered a plethora of cosmological ideas from Phoenicia and debated their own; there is the anthropomorphism of Greek religion and the consequent focus upon the human mind as what matters and decides; there is the unique situation of Athenian democracy.



All of which would have probably amounted to little without the imaginative genius of individual men: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and, later, such thinkers as Epicurus and Plotinus. So Greek drama is Greek precisely in its meditation upon the inner workings of the soul and mind of a barbarian and a woman– Medea– in its critical examination of the rational polis under assault by Asiatic forces of the irrational, in The Bacchae. Even as early as Homer, we find Odysseus testing the Cyclops Polyphemus to see whether this archaic creature, whose kin have no courts or marketplaces, knows what rules of reciprocal hospitality (philoxenia) are. The other ancient peoples are admirable, perhaps, but they and their descendants seem to be interested mainly in themselves. None of them has produced a Herodotus, for instance. I have wondered whether this Hellenism left any imprint upon Armenians. There is an Armenian version of the Cyclops legend, told from the point of view of the put-upon, native Anatolian Cyclops. But it is a folktale grown of a myth, with no profundity of reflection– and no reciprocal curiosity about the raider from the sea, the Odysseus of the piece. In the fifth-century Aristotelian treatises of the Armenian scholar David the Invincible (Davit anhaght), the name Hektor, used of a hypothetical character, is translated as Tigran. Hektor, whose name means "Defender," was the champion who led the Trojans against the invading Mycenaean Greeks, who fought and was killed by Achilles. It is with some shock that the reader of Homer perceives that the poet, a Greek, is reciting his epic from the standpoint, at times, of the enemy. So, what was the Armenian translator thinking? Did he perceive Hektor simply as a recognizable fellow Anatolian? This is a strong possibility, since the Trojans in Roman art are invariably clothed as Armenians and Parthians. Or did he see Tigran as a tragic figure analogous to Hektor, as well? It is impossible to say; and in any case it is plain Armenian culture remained self-bounded. Maybe to transcend yourself, you need to rule an empire, or create a great world-religion.



Grim futures and all, the real relationship of Armenians and Greeks had not even begun yet, in the lifetime of Jason or Artavazd or Tigran. The great change was the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Empire, and of the Armenian Arsacids, early in the fourth century. By the end of that century it was probably clear to at least one secretary of the royal court, a former soldier of free but modest origins who had taken holy orders, that the policy of Christianization of Armenia had become a catastrophic failure. The faith, though not new to the country, was preached in foreign languages– Syriac and Greek– thereby alienating many of the people. As a result, what little Christian learning had been introduced was fast disappearing; and many Armenians rejected the new religion or were leaving it and reverting to their older ways. The centrifugal tendencies of the nakharar system were exacerbated by the change, too: Christianity weakened the Arsacids by encouraging the imperialism of the nearby Romans, who saw it only as one more way to absorb Armenia, and by kindling doubt and hostility in Sasanian Iran, much closer to home. The Persians, who had overthrown Parthian Arsacid rule in their home province, might have tolerated local, limited Arsacid autonomy in Armenia, as they seem to have done elsewhere in northwestern Iran; but they had every reason to regard Christians as a Roman fifth column. Arsacid Christianity was for them a toxic proposition. So the secretary might have seen the doom of the Arsacid house in Persian Armenia approaching. He had seen how Mani, the son of a Parthian civil servant named Patteg and one Mariam Kamsarakan– maybe a Christian, definitely a member of a Partho-Armenian nakharadom, had invented a new Gnostic religion a century and a half before, assisting its diffusion across the East through the invention of a fairly simple, phonetic script suited to the Parthian and Persian languages. The Zoroastrians of Iran by this time had probably begun experimenting with a simple alphabetic system for the written preservation of their Scripture, the Avesta. It is likely that the presence of Manichaean writings and the propagation of Christianity in books alarmed the Magi, whose teachings had hitherto been transmitted in the main orally.



With the support of king and patriarch, Mashtots set out to invent an Armenian alphabet. His name could mean "good news;" the only other explanation is "hide scraper," which is a fine working class moniker, but less emblematic than one would expect, on the basis of similar legends of the time. He took a large number of Aramaic letters, including one already adapted to use in Iranian, and another from Coptic likewise adapted by Mani's followers, and several Greek ones. On the model of Greek he devised seven distinct letters for vowels, short and long; and combinations of these served, as in Greek, for diphthongs and the sound -u-. Like Greek, the new script was written from left to right and without connection of the letters. A calligrapher named Rufinus refined the shapes of the characters, so that the vertical lines of the letters were made thick; the horizontal ones, thin– as in Greek. Mashtots was thinking a lot like the Armenian king at that wedding nigh on half a millennium before: balance the western and eastern components to preserve oneself in between. The Greek model of writing was much easier than ideogrammatic Pahlavi or even the not fully phonetic Manichaean script, but Mashtots made sure the alphabet itself was not Greek– and of course it was meant for Armenian, an eastern tongue. This is an important choice, and it is only in hindsight that it may seem intuitive. The Cappadocians, Armenia's immediate neighbors to the west, were a kindred Anatolian people, likewise Iranized in their religion and institutions of old. But they had come under the direct and mostly uninterrupted rule of Rome in the first century A.D.; so there was no countervailing influence, cultural or political, against complete Hellenization. The Cappadocian language continued to be spoke, to be a vehicle of prayer, even, till about the sixth century A.D., but nobody ever devised a plan to write it. The great Church Fathers of Cappadocia– St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory of Nazianzen– composed all their works in Greek. Christian Armenia, but for the counterweight of Iran and, I think, an ornery spirit of independence that Mashtots just happened to inherit, might have gone the way of Cappadocia, Phrygia, and the other old Christianized lands of the Anatolian peninsula. It is interesting that, although the school of Mashtots focussed on a translation project that, reasonably enough, turned Armenia's intellectual orientation decisively westwards, towards the Christian culture founded upon the Classical civilizations of the Mediterranean basin, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet made no effort to create writing systems for the indigenous peoples to the west of Armenia, only for those to the north and east– Georgia and Caucasian Albania– so strong was the Euphrates frontier.



The early Armenian translations are primarily from Greek; secondarily, from Syriac. The final version of the translation of the Bible is based upon the Greek Septuagint and New Testament; the Divine Liturgy, too, follows essentially Greek models, with some conspicuous, practical loan words such as ort'i, from orthoi, "Everybody stand up!" and proskhume, from proskhomen, "Now let's hear this!" The exegetical and homiletical works of the Fathers of the Church were translated: prominent among these are Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures, St. Basil of Caesarea's Hexaemeron, the Exegetical Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, and the Classical and Mythological Scholia to the latter by St. Gregory of Nazianzen. The Chronicon and Church History of Eusebius provided Armenians with a conspectus of the history of the ancient world. Philo of Alexandria was a contemporary of Christ whose highly philosophical and metaphorical explanations of the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek are very nearly all the testimony we have of the larger world of Hellenistic Jewish thought at the time to which the primeval Church belonged; and without the Armenian translations, half of what survives of Philo would be lost.



There is also an early Armenian translation of the Alexander Romance, mentioned above, which served Classical Armenian writers such as Movses Khorenats'i as a mine of literary style and imagery: in later centuries, writers such as Grigoris of Aght'amar embellished the text with brief poetic restatements of different passages, generally with the purpose of underscoring some moralizing or fatalistic sentiment. These poems, called kafas from an Arabic term, might have been chanted in the course of readings of the book, much as some parts of the Epic of Sasun were sung to break the monotony of recital. They are of little literary and less thematic value; but they testify to the continuing importance of the Romance in Armenian culture. It is interesting to note that a manuscript of the book at Venice contains very numerous miniature paintings, which suggests a very wealthy patron. Moreover, the illustrations are without square boundaries, their subjects seeming to move freely up or across the page, as the text flows around them. This is characteristic of Persian books, not of most Armenian ones; and it means that in the production of works of secular culture the boundaries that defined Christian Armenian were open in a way that religious works literally and figuratively were not. In the realm of secular culture one might mention also the sciences, in which Anania of Shirak stands out: he acquired his learning at the feet of a Greek scholar, Teukhikos, at Trebizond in Pontus. Teukhikos was reputed to have mastered Armenian; but it is certain that Anania studied mathematics, astronomy, and the occult sciences with him in Greek.



Early Christian Armenia did not quickly adopt the coenobitic orders (that is, monastic communities in which the religious lived together as a collective) of which St. Basil of Caesarea may be said to be the Anatolian originator. The earliest religious were itinerant holy men and ascetic hermits. But over the succeeding centuries the Armenians translated from Greek the Lives of the Desert Fathers, the treatises on the angelic orders and other matters of Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Ladder of Mystical Ascent of St. John Climacus. By the tenth to eleventh century Armenia had evolved a sophisticated monastic culture with developed systems of mystical contemplative prayer similar to those of St. Symeon the New Theologian at Byzantium, and with some roots in the work of the Syrians– St. Ephrem, St. Isaac of Niniveh, and others.



It took about half a century for the Armenian translators to realize that it would take more than the fluent selection of fair equivalents to Greek terms to enable Armenians to develop a philosophical and academic medium of their own. They rendered the Grammar of Dionysius of Thrax and the Book of Chries, which deal analytically with language and rhetoric, into Armenian; and began to create new Armenian words by fixing equivalents for the parts– preverbs, prefixes, etc.– of Greek words and then reconstructing the whole in calques, that is, literal renderings. Thus, Armenian shar- renders the Greek prefix syn-, "with," so from syn-thesis, literally "putting together," we get Armenian shara-drut'iun, "composition;" syn-ekho, literally, "keep on having together," becomes shar-unakem, "continue." The word "Greek" is Latin. Armenians use yoyn, now pronounced huyn, from an Old Iranian form *yauna, that is, "Ionian." The hunaban, "Hellenological," that is, Hellenophile, school created masses of such new words, facilitating the translation of treatises such as Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle, but in the sixth century it evolved– or, perhaps, degenerated– into a kind of impenetrable Greco-Armenian translationese unrelated to any living language and of less and less utility. The pedantic scholar Gregory Magistros delighted in using it to impress and perplex his correspondents as late as the eleventh century. But many of the words created by hunaban scholarship did survive in the Armenian literary mainstream; and the principles established by the Hellenophilic school are still employed to form compounds and neologisms utilizing Armenian roots and eschewing loans from foreign languages. We have Mashtots to thank for the existence of Armenian, and, probably, for the survival of the Armenians as a distinct culture therefore; but we can thank the Hellenophiles for making Armenian a language capable of scholarship and impervious to floods of foreign loan words that would have diluted and vulgarized it, and perhaps hastened its demise– from Arabic and Turkish in the mediaeval period, or from French and Russian in recent centuries. In general, Greece gave Armenia both the products of intellect and the linguistic and theoretical means to use and develop them on its own: the mind, the life of the mind, and the inclination to live it.



In her important study The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Prof. Martha Nussbaum notes that the philosopher of the Hellenistic age considered himself a physician treating painful human problems of the mind and soul in a manner analogous to the way a doctor ministers to the needs of the body when it is afflicted by illness. He regarded philosophy as an art committed to the truth, possession of which secures freedom from the tyranny of custom, creating "a community of beings who can take charge of their own life story." The health of the human, who is a creature of intrinsic dignity, is eudaimonia, that is, well being, and eleutheria, freedom. People are shaken by anger, the yearning and possessiveness of love, the storm of passion, the grief of loss and disillusionment. In the outer affairs of the world, they suffer from mistreatment and injustice. The philosophers tried to teach the mind to achieve a detachment from the passions that would bring it freedom from disturbance (ataraxia). Happy and calm, the mind is unclouded by transient and illusory desires and attachments, the disappointment of which would produce suffering. Moreover, the person when subjected to injustice refuses to accept that it can ultimately affect that which is true, eternal, and real in him, and, instead of reacting by suffering, is simply indifferent. The philosophers of course stressed the importance of education, for none of this, even if it is intuitively realized, can be inculcated effectively without effort, hard thought, and careful and diligent practice. This philosophical position is of pre-Christian origin, but in many respects it is compatible with Christian ethics, though the grounds of the latter are different. Christ rejected the principle of retaliation laid down in the Hebrew Bible, the expression of an eye for an eye, and insisted instead upon non-violence, non-resistance to evil, turning the other cheek. In the specific, social case of response to injustice, Christ again seems to be in agreement with the Stoic philosophers: one should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's. This doctrine of political quietism would have enraged many of Jesus' Jewish compatriots, who regarded Roman rule as an oppressive abomination and saw no reason that one should render anything unto Caesar at all, save perhaps the business end of a Zealot dagger.



The Stoic view is compatible also with much Indian thinking: the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha on the nature and cessation of suffering, and the Buddhist doctrine of non-violence, come immediately to mind. It is worth mentioning that a version of the life of the Buddha made its westward way across Iran to Greece as a Manichaean parable, then a Christian one. The tale of Barlaam and Ioasaph was translated from Greek into Armenian, as Baralam ev Yovasap': the latter name comes originally from Sanskrit Bodhisattva, a word referring to a being who has achieved the state of consciousness of the Buddha but who, out of a concomitant compassion for those who have not, elects not to leave the wheel of rebirth but to endure reincarnation and its attendanr sorrows, for the sake of bringing to enlightenment other sentient beings. Buddhists would regard Jesus Himself as a kind of Bodhisattva– and maybe He was. The Stoic view would seem to preclude any sort of political activity of the kind defined by Aristotle as intrinsic to the fully realized human life: far from actively participating in the life of the polis, one is enjoined indifferently to regard the world as extrinsic to one's true self, and to refrain from retaliation against injustice. One of the three terms of Aristotle's definition drops away: man is no longer a politikon logikon zoon. To a degree the new attitude was a response to real conditions: though many speakers of Greek and practitioners of philosophy lived in cities much bigger than Athens of the fifth century B.C., they lived under undemocratic systems of government. At most, they might attempt to ensure that their rulers received the sort of education, called paideia in Greek, that taught a man to behave with justice and restraint and to heed and understand reasoned speech. Paideia in its ideal application allowed those without power to speak freely and effectively to others who wielded it, and created a foundation for civil society. That goes a long way to explaining the enormous popularity and importance of schools of rhetoric and law to the various peoples of the Hellenistic cosmos, including the Armenians who crowded the benches of the classroom of Libanius.



The Hellenistic and Buddhist approaches to life do not, in fact, preclude a kind of effective political action, then: it is reasoned, non-violent resistance, with the aim of persuading a civilized, if oppressive, government to desist from injustice by recognizing its intrinsic human wrongfulness. Non-violence seems in the modern era to have been effective primarily in English-speaking societies: the Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha movement in British India, the great struggle for racial equality led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our own country. These are in the main civil societies, founded on the rule of law. But suppose that a ruler was innocent of Greek philosophical learning or its equivalent, and of a vicious disposition besides, immune to persuasion and inclined only to anger and the exercise of tyrannical oppression. What is one to do then, particularly in response to lethal injustice on a global scale– to an existential threat, not so much to one's person, which would simply be forfeit in such a case, but to the existence of one's entire community, to civil society itself? The answer cannot be more non-violence. Some years ago at Columbia I attended a class at which Father Daniel Berrigan, an antiwar activist of the Vietnam era, was speaking of the importance of non-violence. When he was asked whether it would have been an appropriate response to the Nazis, his reply was that it had not been tried early enough. This could be true, but it is so hypothetical as to be, in the end, an evasion. Nobody can travel into the past to undo the chain of cause and effect that leads to a present evil. One must deal with things as they are and also act in such a way as to preclude, to the best of one's ability, future evils– to try, as physicians vow, first to do no harm. But how does a philosopher committed to non-violence deal with tyranny when non-violence would itself be an evil?



One good answer (there may be others, of course) can be sought in Armenian history. In the mid-fifth century A.D., the Sasanian king Yazdagerd II demanded the Armenians abjure Christianity and began a campaign to convert them by force to Zoroastrianism. This is where Greek philosophy came to the aid of the newly-formed Armenian Christian polity and rescued it. The Soviet Armenian scholar Professor Hakob Manandyan published four decades ago the Classical Armenian version of a Greek philosophical treatise, "The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistos to Asklepios, " in which we read (X.6): "The immortals are in accord with each other, but the mortals here act against each other in jealousy and malice. For evil envy arises out of the foreknowledge of death. The immortal keeps on acting as he always does, but the mortal does that which he has never done before. Death understood is immortality. If it is not understood, it is death. We mortals are actually subject to the immortals, but the immortals elect to act as our servants." What the text means is that the soul is immortal. The mind, in attachment to the body, sees death ahead and thinks itself mortal. This causes fear and sorrow and leads to other illusions that in their turn occasion envy and enmity. But the soul, placid, acts virtuously, calmly, and without fear; as will the mind, guiding the body, if it attains realization. Then, confident of its innate superiority and infinite, eternal security, it will help those who have not yet attained realization– serving those who are really its own servants. This passage is quoted by Elishe vardapet at the beginning of the second chapter of his History of the War of Vardan: "Those whose spirits are weak, lacking heavenly virtue, have fallen under the rule of fear and into the nature of the body. Every wind moves them, every word agitates them, and every matter makes them tremble. A man like this is like a dreamer during his own life; and when he dies, he is sent off to a perdition from which there is no rescue. As a certain man said of old, Death that is not understood is death; death understood is immortality. He who does not know what death really is, fears it; but he who does know death, does not fear it. And all these evils enter the human mind through a lack of learning. A blind man is deprived of the sun's rays, and ignorance is deprived of perfect life. It is better to be blind physically, than mentally. For to the same degree that the soul is superior to the body, so is the mind's capacity to see more important than the body's. If a man enjoy an excess of earthly greatness but remain a mental pauper, such a one is more to be pitied than most other people, just as we observe, not only with people of a limited station, but with him who is greater than all. A king who does not have wisdom sharing his throne cannot measure up to his own lot. And if such is the case in the bodily state, how much more so it is, in the spiritual one. The soul is the life of the entire body; and the mind guides both. And as it is with one man, so it is with the whole world. A king will not be liable for himself alone, but for those also, for whom he has been the cause of perdition." As Prof. Jean-Pierre Mahé has shown in his work on Hermeticism, Hermès en Haute-Égypte, most of the material in this passage, and not just the direct and famous quotation, derives from the Hermetic treatise.



In practice, Vardan Mamikonean and his men declared themselves to be earthly servants of the Persian king in all respects, even allowing him to kill them if he chose– and in fact many thus found martyrdom. However they refused him dominion over their souls, for in this respect they regarded themselves as his rulers, and, consequently, responsible to rule over him and not to allow his temporal power to destroy the Christian polity to which they belonged. That is, while refusing any attachment to the body, they perceived a limited war of self-defense to be justified by the very nature of the illuminated soul. The concept of a just war of this kind exists independently of Greek philosophy: we find it in thie Indian Bhagavad Gita, and in an analogous Parthian epic cycle, known to the ancient Armenians, of which only a fragment, albeit the crucial episode, The Memorial of Zarer, now survives. However the numerous references to a Hermetic treatise in Elishe's oration, and the scornful reference to anusumnut'iun, "paideia-less-ness," is proof that Armenian intellectuals in the wake of the battle of Avarayr had assimilated into their Christian world view both the ethics of Hellenistic philosophy and the institutions that underpin it, educating the individual to perceive the freedom and joy within his true nature, and to act with compassion and charity but without fear. Remember Jason the actor at Artaxata, declaiming a monologue from a play about a young tyrant and a barbarian god? How differently he might have seen Armenia in the spring of A.D. 451, on the eve of another fateful battle. Vardan and his companions were weighing the balance of power– we will be Persian subjects but we will also be Christians– statecraft of a kind king Artavazd would have recognized at once, and, after some explanation, probably approved. But Vardan and Levond erets' were no longer barbarians. They had, to recall Martha Nussbaum's words, become the people of a city, members of a community of beings who can take charge of their own life story, a story that is in large part, as you see, Greek to me.

V.V