Sacred Mysteries: the ancient civilisation of Armenia remains exotic and unknown in the West, but a holy monk from lake Van has just been declared a Doctor of the Church

By Christopher Howse

There’s a little book on my shelf that I can’t read. It is in Armenian, and I cannot even make out the attractive curly alphabet. Byron, by all accounts, did rather better, taking lessons in the language, from 1816, at the monastery where my book was printed.

This is at San Lazzaro, an island in Venice, between San Giorgio and the Lido. It was granted to the Armenian monks in 1717. The little community was brought there in that year by their first abbot Mechitar of Sebaste, after whom the monks are called Mechitarists.

This monastery was of Armenian Catholics, in other words, Armenians who recognised the primacy of the Pope. The majority of Armenians belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Armenians are fond of telling you that theirs was the first country to adopt Christianity, in 301, thanks to St Gregory the Illuminator. Armenia, with its Indo-European language unrecognisably related to ours, has a proud civilisation, but to say that its history in recent centuries has been difficult is an understatement.

I was thinking about the Armenians because, in the bright winter sun on Tuesday, I stumbled across the Armenian church in Kensington, St Sarkis, its white Portland stone shining exotically amid the red-brick mansion flats around it. It was built in 1922 in memory of the philanthropist Calouste Gulbenkian’s parents.

The Prince of Wales visited the Armenians in London a few weeks ago at their nearby church of St Yeghiche as part of his efforts to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. He mentioned the destruction last November (by Islamists of the al-Nusra Front) of the Armenian church at Deir ez-Zor in Syria. It had been built as a memorial to the thousands of Armenian refugees from Turkey who died there in the second decade of the 20th century.

With these thoughts in mind, I discovered that Pope Francis had last Saturday named a great Armenian saint, Gregory of Narek (pictured above), as a Doctor of the Church. That is a rare title, there having been only another 35 in the history of the Church – people like St Jerome or St Athanasius.

St Gregory (950-1003) lived as a monk at Narek, near lake Van in what is now Turkey. A little more than 1,000 years later, the great monastery with its conical domes in the Armenian style was destroyed and the Armenians living around it killed.

St Gregory of Narek’s best-known work, the Book of Prayer, also called the Lamentations, might have been written as a meditation on that disaster and the episodess of martyrdom that have punctuated Armenia’s history. The saint’s aim is to bring God’s mercy to bear on mankind so that it might share in God’s nature. “This book will cry out in my place, with my voice, as if it were me,” he wrote. “May unspeakable faults be confronted and the traces of evil wrung out.”
Last year Pope Francis met the Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Karekin II, and spoke about martyrdom as a way of reuniting the Church. He had sketched out his thoughts before by remarking: “In some countries they kill Christians for wearing a cross or having a Bible; and before they kill them they do not ask them whether they are Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic, or Orthodox.”

In St Gregory of Narek’s day, the Armenian Church, having followed its own path after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was presumed by the Orthodox and by Western Catholics to be monophysite in teaching, with false beliefs about the nature of Jesus as God and man. It could hardly have been the case in practice, and the Catholic recognition of St Gregory and other Armenian saints demonstrated a shared faith. The proclamation of him as a doctor sets the seal on that unity of belief. In these murderous times, Christians in the East need all the unity of spirit they can muster.