Gregory the Illuminator

Gregory was born about 257 in the Parthian Empire. His father Anak was a Parthian nobleman who, on orders from the Sassanid king of Persia, assassinated King Khosrov II of Armenia. Anak’s entire family was then put to death in retaliation by the Armenians. The infant Gregory was rescued by his Christian nurse, smuggled out of Armenia, and taken to Caesarea in Cappadocia, where he was raised by a Christian family. He was baptized, given a Greek and Christian education, married a devout Christian woman named Mariam, and had two sons. He returned to Armenia and entered the service of King Tiridates III, the son of the very king Gregory’s own father had assassinated. Tiridates did not initially know who Gregory was. When the king ordered Gregory to make sacrifice to the goddess Anahit, Gregory refused and confessed Christ. He was tortured. When Tiridates discovered his identity, he had him thrown into a pit at the foot of Mount Ararat, the Khor Virap, full of poisonous serpents. Gregory survived. A Christian widow lowered bread to him each day. He stayed in the pit fourteen years. While he was there, Tiridates persecuted Christians, killed thirty-seven Christian virgins led by Hripsime and Gayane, and was struck with madness in punishment. His sister Khosrovidukht had a vision that only Gregory could heal him. They drew him from the pit. He healed the king. Tiridates and the entire Armenian nation were baptized in 301. Armenia became the first Christian state in history.

The story begins with a political assassination. Anak, a Parthian noble of high rank, was sent by the Sassanid king of Persia to murder Khosrov, the king of Armenia, because Khosrov had been supporting the deposed Parthian dynasty against the new Sassanid one. Anak completed the assassination at his master’s direction. The Armenians, recognizing the murder, killed Anak in turn. The Armenian custom in such cases was to exterminate the entire male line of the assassin, so Anak’s family was systematically killed. The infant Gregory was perhaps a year old. His Christian nurse, named Sophia in some traditions, recognized that the child would also be killed if his identity were known. She wrapped him up, carried him out of the city, traveled west across the mountains, and kept moving until she reached Caesarea in Cappadocia, the great Christian center of central Anatolia within the Roman Empire and beyond the reach of Armenian or Persian authorities. There she gave the child to a Christian family she could trust. The child was raised as a Christian. He learned Greek. He learned the Scriptures. He became a Christian gentleman of late ancient Cappadocia. Nobody outside the small group that knew his origin had any idea that he was a Parthian noble or the son of a regicide. He grew up under a different name in a different culture. Years later, when he returned to Armenia to enter Tiridates’s service, the king did not recognize him as the son of his father’s killer.

When Gregory was a grown man, married, and the father of two sons, he made a deliberate decision: he would return to Armenia. The motives in the sources are variously described. One tradition says he wanted to do penance for the family crime of regicide. Another says he had received a vision calling him to evangelize the Armenians. A third combines the two motives. Gregory traveled back to Armenia and entered the service of King Tiridates III. He served loyally for several years. Tiridates came to like and trust him. He gave him various administrative responsibilities. He had no idea who Gregory really was. The decisive moment came in the New Year ceremonies, which traditionally required the king’s officials to make sacrifice to the Armenian goddess Anahit, the principal female deity of the Armenian pantheon. When the moment came for Gregory to perform the sacrifice, he refused. He said openly: I am a Christian. I worship the one true God. I cannot make sacrifice to your goddess. The king was shocked. He thought at first that Gregory must be joking, or that some misunderstanding had occurred. When he understood that Gregory was serious, he ordered him tortured to compel his compliance. The tortures were severe and prolonged. Gregory endured them without recanting. While the torture was proceeding, someone informed the king that Gregory was the son of Anak, the man who had assassinated the king’s father. Tiridates, now enraged by both the religious refusal and the personal connection, ordered Gregory thrown into the Khor Virap pit.

The Khor Virap was a pit at the foot of Mount Ararat, used as an execution chamber by the Armenian kings. The pit was perhaps fifty feet deep, narrow at the top, opening out at the bottom into a small chamber. The bottom was muddy and damp. Snakes lived in it. Other reptiles. Insects. The smell of long-decayed bodies. Anyone thrown in died within days. Gregory was thrown in. The mouth of the pit was sealed. Tiridates assumed he was dead. Tiridates was wrong. A Christian widow who lived nearby had received some kind of revelation about the saint. Every day, secretly, she came to the mouth of the pit and lowered a small portion of bread to Gregory through a crack in the seal. Day after day, year after year, this woman fed Saint Gregory. He survived. The snakes did not bite him. The damp did not kill him. The pit became, in effect, his hermitage. He prayed. He recited the Psalms. He fasted (his diet was perhaps more severe than even the Egyptian Fathers practiced). He underwent every form of ascetical struggle that prolonged enclosure with no human contact will produce in a human soul. He was forgotten by the world. The world believed him long dead. He was alive, and in the providence of God being prepared for the work he would do when he came out. Fourteen years passed.

While Gregory was in the pit, Diocletian’s persecution of Christians began in the Roman Empire (303). A community of Christian virgins in Rome was led by an abbess named Gayane and a particularly beautiful young woman named Hripsime. Diocletian himself had developed a passion for Hripsime and intended to take her as his concubine. To save her virginity, Gayane, Hripsime, and a group of about thirty-five companion virgins fled Rome and traveled east, eventually crossing into Armenia. They settled near the Armenian capital of Vagharshapat. King Tiridates, learning of the beautiful Hripsime, sent for her. He was as taken with her as Diocletian had been. She refused him as she had refused Diocletian. Tiridates ordered her tortured. She still refused. He had her killed. Gayane and the other virgins were also killed. They were put to death in various brutal ways: stoning, beheading, exposure to wild animals. The whole community of approximately thirty-seven Christian women was wiped out. Tiridates went, in some sense, mad. He developed a strange ailment: his face changed, his mind broke, his behavior became bestial; the hagiographical tradition describes him as transformed into something resembling a wild boar. None of his physicians could heal him. The court was paralyzed. Then his sister Khosrovidukht had a dream. In the dream a brilliant figure told her: only Gregory, who is in the pit, can heal your brother. She woke up and reported the dream. The court did not believe it. The dream came back. She insisted. They went to the pit. They opened it. They found Saint Gregory alive, calm, formed by his fourteen years of prayer.

Saint Gregory came out of the pit. They took him to the king. He prayed over Tiridates. The madness lifted. The king’s appearance returned to normal. The court was witness to the healing. Tiridates immediately understood what he had to do. He had been wrong about everything. The God whom Gregory served was the true God. The whole apparatus of Armenian paganism, including the goddess Anahit and the entire pantheon, had to come down. He summoned his army. He summoned his court. He summoned his family. He told them what had happened. He announced that he was going to be baptized and that they would be baptized with him. There was very little resistance -- the demonstration of the king’s healing was too vivid, the corporate witness of the persecuted virgins too powerful, the witness of Saint Gregory himself too compelling. In approximately the year 301, near the town of Bagavan, Saint Gregory baptized King Tiridates, his sister Khosrovidukht, his entire court, and the bulk of the Armenian army in the waters of the Euphrates River. Within a few years the population of Armenia, perhaps several million people, had been baptized. The pagan temples were systematically destroyed. Saint Gregory himself, sometimes accompanied by Tiridates, traveled across the country breaking down the temples of Vahagn, Anahit, Astghik, and the other deities, and building Christian churches on the sites. Armenia became the first state in human history to adopt Christianity as its national religion.

After the baptism of the nation, Gregory had the work of organizing the new Armenian Church. He went to Caesarea in Cappadocia and was consecrated bishop of Armenia by Leontius, the Archbishop of Caesarea. He returned to Armenia as Catholicos. He had to build a hierarchy from nothing. He ordained priests. He built churches. He established schools (using both Greek and Syriac, as the Armenian alphabet had not yet been invented). He sent missionaries to neighboring regions. The most important single foundation was the Cathedral of Etchmiadzin. Saint Gregory had received a vision in which he saw the Lord Christ descending from heaven and striking the earth with a golden hammer at a specific spot near the city of Vagharshapat. The Lord told him to build the principal church of the new Armenian nation on that exact spot. The name Etchmiadzin means "the descent of the Only-begotten" and refers directly to the vision. The cathedral was completed in 303. It is the oldest cathedral in the world. It has been the seat of the Catholicos of All Armenians, the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, continuously from its foundation to the present. Saint Gregory’s son Aristaces succeeded him as Catholicos. Aristaces attended the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325 as one of the 318 Holy Fathers. The line of Saint Gregory continued to hold the Catholicate for several generations, transmitting the apostolic deposit from father to son.

The Armenian conversion teaches a pattern that has been used by the Church many times since. The pattern has several elements. First, individual Christian witness, often by a foreign-born or foreign-formed Christian who has been providentially placed in the target nation. Second, persecution of that Christian witness by the local civil authority. Third, corporate martyric witness by additional Christians (often a group of women, often virgins) whose collective deaths break something in the conscience of the persecutors. Fourth, a providential sign -- a healing, a miracle, a vision -- that demonstrates the truth of the Christian witness in a way the persecutor cannot ignore. Fifth, the conversion of the persecutor, often the king himself. Sixth, the corporate baptism of the royal household, the army, and the nobility. Seventh, the gradual baptism of the common people, the destruction of pagan temples, the construction of churches on the cleared sites. Eighth, the establishment of an indigenous hierarchy under the broader catholic patrimony. Ninth, the development of indigenous Christian culture in the local language. The Armenian conversion under Saint Gregory and Saint Tiridates is the prototype of every subsequent state conversion: Georgia under Saint Nina and King Mirian, Ethiopia under Saint Frumentius and the Aksumite kings, Ireland under Saint Patrick, England under Saint Augustine of Canterbury, Bulgaria under Saint Cyril and Methodius and Tsar Boris, Rus under Saint Vladimir. They all follow, with regional variations, the pattern that Saint Gregory established.

It set the pattern for everything that followed. The Armenian conversion in 301 was the first time in history that a sovereign state had adopted Christianity as its national religion. Before this date Christianity had existed for nearly three centuries entirely as an underground religion of persecuted minorities, growing through individual conversion within the Roman Empire and beyond. The Armenian moment changed everything. It demonstrated that an entire society could become Christian. It established a pattern for what subsequent state Christianization would look like: a Christian king, a Christian court, a Christian army, the systematic destruction of pagan worship, the construction of churches, the establishment of an indigenous Christian hierarchy, and the gradual baptism of the population. Twelve years after the Armenian conversion, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan (313) and began moving the Roman Empire toward Christianity. Eighty years later, under Theodosius I (380), Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Across the next thousand years, every other major Christian state adopted some version of the Armenian model: Georgia in the 320s, Ethiopia in the 340s, Ireland in the 430s, England in the 600s, Bulgaria in the 860s, Rus in 988. The relationship between Christianity and civil authority that the Christian world would work out across the next two thousand years was inaugurated by Saint Gregory and King Tiridates in Armenia in 301.

After the Christianization of Armenia and the foundation of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Saint Gregory eventually retired from active episcopal ministry. He turned over the Catholicate to his son Aristaces in approximately 318 and withdrew to a hermitage on Mount Sepuh in the Armenian highlands. There he spent his final years in solitary prayer and ascetical discipline, completing the pattern that had begun in his fourteen years in the Khor Virap. He reposed about 331, in great old age. He was buried at Thortan, his hermitage. His relics have been scattered through the Christian world by various historical events: portions are at Etchmiadzin, at the Armenian Cathedral in Antelias (Lebanon), at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome (a relic given to the Vatican by Catholicos Karekin II in 2000), at the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, at the Cathedral of Saint Gregory the Illuminator in Yerevan (the largest Armenian church in the world), and at numerous Armenian churches across the global Armenian diaspora. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on September 30 with the rare title Equal-to-the-Apostles. The Armenian Apostolic Church commemorates him with multiple feasts during the year, marking his entry into the pit, his emergence from the pit, his birth, his repose, and the deposition of his relics. The Roman Catholic Church added him to the universal calendar in 1837 by decree of Pope Gregory XVI. He is the only Eastern bishop with a statue inside Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome.