[1] The Armenians and Kurds have lived together from the earliest
times. The adoption of Islam by the latter, and by many Armenians,
divided the people sharply into Christian and Moslem, and placed the
Christian in a position of inferiority. But the relations between the
two sects were not unfriendly previously to the Russian campaigns in
Persia and Turkey. After 1829 the relations became less friendly; and
later, when the Armenians attracted the sympathies of the European
powers after the war of 1877-78, they became bitterly hostile.
[2] According to some estimates the number killed was 50,000 or more.
ARMENIAN CHURCH. No trustworthy account exists of the evangelization of
Armenia, for the legend of King Abgar's correspondence with Christ, even
if it contained any historical truth, only relates to Edessa and Syriac
Christianity. That the Armenians appropriated from the Syrians this, as
well as the stories of Bartholomew and Thaddeus (the Syriac _Addai_),
was merely an avowal on their part that Edessa was the centre from which
the faith radiated over their land. In the 4th century and later the
liturgy was still read in Syriac in parts of Armenia, and the New
Testament, the history of Eusebius, the homilies of Aphraates, the works
of St Ephraem and many other early books were translated from Syriac,
from which tongue most of their ecclesiological terms were derived. The
earliest notice of an organized church in Armenia is in Eusebius, _H.
E_. vi. 46, to the effect that Dionysius of Alexandria c. 250 sent a
letter to Meruzanes, bishop of the brethren in Armenia. There were many
Christians in Melitene at the time of the Decian persecution in A.D.
250, and two bishops from Great Armenia were present at the council of
Nice in 325. King Tiridates (c. A.D. 238-314) had already been baptized
some time after 261 by Gregory the Illuminator. The latter was ordained
priest and appointed _catholicus_ or exarch of the church of Great
Armenia by Leontius, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. This one fact is
certain amidst the fables which soon obscured the history of this great
missionary. Thus the church of Great Armenia began as a province of the
Cappadocian see. But there was a tradition of a line of bishops earlier
than Gregory in Siuniq, a region east of Ararat along the Araxes (Aras),
which in early times claimed to be independent of the catholicus. The
Adoptianist bishop Archelaus, who opposed the entry of Mani into Armenia
under Probus c. 277, was also perhaps a Syriac-speaking bishop of
Pers-Armenia. Almost the earliest document revealing anything of the
inner organization and condition of the Armenian church in the Nicene
age is the epistle of Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, to the Armenian
bishop Verthanes, written between 325 and 335 and preserved in Armenian.
Its genuineness has been unreasonably suspected. It insists on the
erection of fonts; on distinction of grades among the ordained clergy;
on not postponing baptism too long; on bishops and priests alone, and
not deacons, being allowed to baptize and lay hands on or confirm the
baptized; on avoiding communion with Arians; on the use of unleavened
bread in the Sacrament, &c. We learn from it that the bishop of Basen
and Bagrevand was an Arian at that time. By the year 450 these two
districts already had separate bishops of their own. The letter of
Macarius, therefore, if a forgery, must be a very early one.[1] The
Armenians must, like the Georgians a little later, have set store by the
opinion of the bishop of Jerusalem, or they would not have sent to
consult him. It was equally from Jerusalem that they subsequently
adopted their lectionary and arrangement of the Christian year; and a
9th-century copy of this lectionary in the Paris library preserves to us
precious details of the liturgical usages of Jerusalem in the 4th
century. We can trace the presence of Armenian convents on the Mount of
Olives as early as the 5th century.
Tradition represents the conversion of Great Armenia under Gregory and
Tiridates as a sort of triumphant march, in which the temples of the
demons and their records were destroyed wholesale, and their undefended
sites instantly converted into Christian churches. The questions arise:
how was the transition from old to new effected? and what was the type
of teaching dominant in the new church? Armenian tradition, confirmed by
nearly contemporary Greek sources, answers the first question. The old
order went on, but under new names. The priestly families, we learn,
hearing that the God preached by Gregory needed not sacrifice, sent to
the king a deputation and asked how they were to live, if they became
Christians; for until then the priests and their families had lived off
the portions of the animal victims and other offerings reserved to them
by pagan custom. Gregory replied that, if they would join the new
religion, not only should the sacrifices continue, but they should have
larger perquisites then ever. The priestly families then went over _en
masse_. How far the older sacrificial rules resembled the levitical law
we do not know, but in the canons of Sahak, c. 430, the priests already
receive the levitical portions of the victims; and we find that animals
are being sacrificed every Sunday, on the feast days which at first were
few, in fulfilment of private vows, in expiation of the sins of the
living, and still more of those of the dead. No one might kill his own
meat and deprive the priest of his due; but this rule did not apply to
the chase. The earliest Armenian rituals contain ample services for the
conduct of an _agape_ (q.v.) or love feast held in the church off
sacrificial meat. The victim was slaughtered by the priest in the church
porch before the crucifix, after it had been ritually wreathed and given
the holy salt, by licking which it appropriated a sacramental purity or
efficacy previously conveyed into the salt by exorcisms and
consecration. In the canons of Sahak the priest is represented as eating
the sins of the people in these repasts.
It is easy to underrate the importance in religion of a change of names.
The old sacrificial hymns were probably obscene and certainly
nonsensical, and the substitution for them of the psalms, and of
lections of the prophets and New Testament, was an enormous gain. We do
not know precisely how the eucharistic rite was adjusted to these
sacrificial meals; but, in the canons of Sahak, 1 Cor. xi. 17-34 is
interpreted of these meals, which were known as the Dominical (suppers).
The Eucharist was, therefore, long associated with the _matal_ or animal
victim, and only in the 8th century do we hear of an interval of time
being left between the fleshly and the spiritual sacrifices, as the two
rites were then called. The Basilian service of the Eucharist was used
in the 5th century, but superseded later on by a Byzantine rite which
will be found translated in F.E. Brightman's _Eastern Liturgies_. The
Eucharist was no doubt the one important sacrifice in the minds of the
clergy who had attended the schools of Constantinople and Alexandria;
yet the heart of the people remained in their ancient blood-offerings,
and as late as the 12th century they were prone to deny that the mass
could expiate the sins of the dead unless accompanied by the sacrifice
of an animal. Perhaps even to-day the worst fate that can befall a
villager after death is to be deprived, not of commemoration in the
mass, but of the victim slain for his sins. The keenest spiritual weapon
of the Armenian priest was ever a threat not to offer the _matal_ for a
man when he died.
Another survival in the Armenian church was the hereditary priesthood.
None but a scion of a priestly family could become a deacon, elder or
bishop. Accordingly the primacy remained in the family of Gregory until
about 374, when the king Pap or Bab murdered Nerses, who had been
ordained by Eusebius of Caesarea (362-370) and was over-zealous in
implanting in Armenia the canons about celibacy, marriage, fasting,
hospices and monastic life which Basil had established in Cappadocia. It
may be remarked that Gregory's own family was a cadet branch of the
Arsacid kin which had occupied the thrones of Persia, Bactria, Armenia
and Georgia. His primacy therefore was in itself a survival of an
earlier age when king and priest were one. He was in fact a _rex
sacrificulus_, and later on, when the Arsacid dynasty fell in Armenia c.
A.D. 428, the Armenian catholicus became the symbol of national unity
and the rallying-point of patriotism. The line of Gregory was restored
in 390 in the person of Isaac or Sahak, son of Nerses, and his
patriarchate was the golden age of Armenian literature. But by this time
the autonomy of the Armenian church was thoroughly established. On the
death of Nerses the right of saying grace at the royal meals, which was
the essence of the catholicate, was transferred by the king, in despite
of the Greeks, to the priestly family of Albianus, and thenceforth no
Armenian catholicus went to Caesarea for ordination. The ties with Greek
official Christendom were snapped for ever, and in subsequent ages the
doctrinal preferences of the Armenians were usually determined more by
antagonism to the Greeks than by reflection. If they accepted the
council of Ephesus in 430 and joined in the condemnation of Nestorius,
it was rather because the Sassanid kings of Persia, who thirsted for the
reconquest of Armenia, favoured Nestorianism, a form of doctrine current
in Persia and rejected in Byzantium. But later on, about 480, and
throughout the following centuries, the Armenians rejected the decrees
of Chalcedon and held that the assertion of two natures in Christ was a
relapse into the heresy of Nestor. From the close of the 5th century the
Armenians have remained monophysite, like the Copts and Abyssinians, and
have only broken the record with occasional short interludes of
orthodoxy, as when in 633 the emperor Heraclius forced reunion on them,
under a catholicus named Esdras, at a council held in Erzerum. Even then
all parties were careful not to mention Chalcedon. The march of Arab
conquest kept the Armenians friendly to Byzantium for a few years; but
in 718 the catholicus John of Odsun ascended the throne and at the
council of Manazkert in 728 repeated and confirmed the anathemas against
Chalcedon and the tome of Leo, that had been first pronounced by the
catholicus Babken in 491 at a synod held in Valarshapat by the united
Armenian, Georgian or Iberian, and Albanian churches. The Armenians
marked their complete disruption with the Greeks by starting an era of
their own at the synod of Dvin. The era began on the 11th of July 552,
and their year is vague, that is to say, it does not intercalate a day
in February every fourth year, like the Julian calendar.
The two churches of Iberia and Albania at first depended on the Armenian
for ordination of their primates or _catholici_, and in large part owed
their first constitution to Armenian missionaries sent by Gregory the
Illuminator. The Iberians still reverence as saints the Armenian doctors
of the 5th century, but as early as 552 they began to resent the
dictatorial methods of the Armenians, as well might a proud race of
mountaineers who never wholly lost their political independence; and
they broke off their allegiance to the Armenian see very soon
afterwards, accepted Chalcedon and joined the Byzantine church. The
Albanians of the Caucasus were also converted in the age of Gregory,
early in the 4th century, and were loyal to the Armenians in the great
struggle against Mazdaism in the 5th; but broke away for a time towards
600, and chose a patriarch without sending him to Armenia for
ordination. Eventually this interesting church was engulfed by the
rising tide of Mahommedan conquest, but not before one of their bishops,
named Israel, had converted (677-703) the Huns who lay to the north of
the Caspian and had translated the Bible and liturgies into their
language. If the Albanian and Hunnish versions could be found, they
would be of the greatest linguistic importance.
The mother church of Armenia was established by Gregory at Ashtishat in
the province of Taron, on the site of the great temple of Wahagn, whose
festival on the seventh of the month Sahmi was reconsecrated to John the
Baptist and Athenogenes, an Armenian martyr and Greek hymn writer. The
first of Navasard, the Armenian new year's day, was the feast of a god
Vanatur or Wanadur (who answered to [Greek: Zeus xenios]) in the holy
pilgrim city of Bagawan. His day was reconsecrated to the Baptist, whose
relics were brought to Bagawan. The feast of Anahite, the Armenian Venus
and spouse of the chief god Aramazd, was in the same way rededicated to
the Virgin Mary, who for long was not very clearly distinguished by the
Armenians from the virgin mother church. The old cult of sacred stones
and trees by an easy transition became cross-worship, but a cross was
not sacred until the Christ had been, by priestly prayer and invocation,
transferred into it.
What was the earliest doctrine of the churches of Armenia? If we could
believe the fathers of the 5th and succeeding centuries Nicene orthodoxy
prevailed in their country from the first; and in the 5th century they
certainly chose for translation the works of orthodox fathers alone,
such as Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril
of Jerusalem and Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, Julius of Rome,
Hippolytus, Irenaeus, avoiding Origen and other fathers who were
becoming suspect. However, we do hear of versions of Nestorian writers
like Diodore of Tarsus being in circulation, and the _Disputation_ of
Archelaus proves that the current orthodoxy of eastern Armenia was
Adoptianist, if not Ebionite in tone. The Persian Armenians as late as
the 6th century had not heard of the faith of Nicaea, and only then
received it from the catholicus Babken. They sent a copy of their old
creed to Babken, and it closely resembles the Adoptianist creed of
Archelaus, the gist of which was that Jesus, until his thirtieth year,
was a man mortal like other men; then, because he was righteous above
all others, he was promoted to the honour and name of Son of God. He
received the title by grace, but was not equal to God the Father.
Because the Spirit worked with him, he was able to vanquish Satan and
all desires, and because of his righteousness and good works he was made
worthy of grace and became a Temple of God the Word, which came down
from heaven in Jordan, dwelt in him and through him wrought miracles.
From such a standpoint the baptism of Jesus was the moment of the divine
incarnation. The man righteous above all others was then reborn of the
Spirit, was illuminated, was spiritually anointed, became the Christ and
Son of God. In effect the fathers of the Armenian church often fell back
into such language, far removed as it is from orthodoxy; and they
emphasized the importance of the baptismal feast of the Epiphany on the
6th of January by refusing to accept the feast of the physical birth of
the 25th of December. As late as 1165 their patriarch Nerses defends the
Armenian custom of keeping Christmas on the 6th of January on the
express ground that as he was born after the flesh from the Virgin, _so
he was born by way of baptism from the Jordan_. The custom from the
first, he says, had been to feast on one and the same day the two
births, much as they differed in sacramental import and in point of
time. We see how deep the early Adoptianism had struck its roots, when a
primate of the 12th century could still appeal to the baptismal
regeneration of Jesus. The same Nerses held that the second Adam, Jesus
Christ, received a new body and nature and the sevenfold grace of the
Spirit _in the Jordan_. The Armenian doctors also taught that John by
laying hands on Jesus and ordaining him at his baptism sacramentally
transferred to him the three graces or _charismata_ of kingship,
prophecy and priesthood which had belonged to ancient Israel. After
baptism, if not before, the flesh of Christ was incorruptible. It
consisted of ethereal fire, and he was not subject to the ordinary
phenomena of digestion, secretions and evacuations.
Monastic institutions were hardly introduced in Armenia before the 5th
century, though Christian rest-houses had been erected along the
high-roads long before and are mentioned in the _Disputation_ of
Archelaus. The Armenians called them _wanq_, and out of them grew the
monasteries. The monks were, strictly speaking, penitents wearing the
cowl, and not allowed to take a part in church government. This belonged
to the elders. At first there was no separate episcopal ordination, and
the one rite of elder or priest (Armen. _Qahanay_, Heb. _cohen_)
sufficed. There were also deacons, half-deacons and readers. Besides
these there was a class of _wardapets_ or teachers, answering to the
_didascalos_ of the earliest church, whose province it was to guard the
doctrine and for whom no rite of ordination is found in the older
rituals.
A few other peculiarities of Armenian church usage or belief deserve
notice. In baptism the rubric ordains that the baptized be plunged three
times in the font in commemoration of the entombment during three days
of the Lord. In the West trine immersion was generally held to be
symbolic of the triune name of "Father, Son and Holy Ghost." This name
the Armenians have used, at least since the year 700; before which date
their fathers often speak of baptism into the death of Christ as the one
essential. As late as about 1300 a traveller hostile to the Armenians
reported to the pope that he had witnessed baptisms without any
trinitarian invocation in as many as three hundred parish churches.
The paschal lamb is now eaten on Sunday, but until the 11th century, and
even later, it was eaten with the Eucharist at a Lord's Supper
celebrated on the evening of Maundy Thursday after the rite of
_pedilavium_ or washing of feet. On the morning of the same day the
penitents were released from their fast.
The rite of extreme unction was introduced in the crusading epoch,
although it was already usual to anoint the bodies of dead priests. The
worship of images never seems to have taken root among Armenians; indeed
they supplied the Greek world with iconoclast soldiers and emperors. The
worship of crosses into which the Spirit or Christ had been inserted by
the priest must have satisfied the religious needs of a people who, save
in architecture, showed little artistic faculty. In their older rituals
we find a rite for blessing a painted church, but no word of statues.
Frescoes in their churches are rare, and mostly too high up for
veneration to be paid to them.
On certain days the cross was washed, and the water in which it had been
washed was a sovereign charm for curing sickness in men and animals and
for bringing fertility to the land.
In the older rituals we find a rite of _exhomologesis_, for restoring
those who had sinned after baptism. It was a medicine of sin that could
only be used once and not a second time. In form it is a rehearsal of
the first baptismal rite, but with omission of the water. It involved
like the first rite open confession and repentance, and absolution by
the church. In a later and less rigorous age this rite was abridged and
adjusted to constant repetition, in such wise that a sinner could be
restored to grace not once only, but as often as the clergy chose to
accept his repentance and confession. Thus the whole development of the
penitentiary system is traceable in the MSS.
The confession of a dying man might be taken by any layman present, and
written down in order to be shown to the priest when he arrived. It then
was the duty of the latter to supplicate for his forgiveness, and
administer to him the Eucharist.
The clergy of all grades were originally married. The parish priests, or
white clergy, are so still, except some of the Latinizing ones. But
since the 12th century, or even earlier, the higher clergy, i.e.
patriarchs and bishops, have taken monkish vows and worn the cowl.
There were abortive attempts to unite the Armenian church with the
Byzantine in the 9th century under the patriarch Photius, and again late
in the 12th under the emperor Manuel Comnenus, when a joint council met
at Romkla, near Tarsus, but ended in nothing (A.D. 1179). Neither could
the Armenians keep on good terms even with the Syriac monophysites. From
the age of the crusades on, the Armenians of Cilicia, whose patriarch
sat at Sis, improved their acquaintance with Rome; and more than one of
their patriarchs adopted the Roman faith, at least in words. Dominican
missions went to Armenia, and in 1328 under their auspices was formed a
regular order called the United Brethren, the forerunners of the Uniats
of the present day, who have convents at Venice and Vienna, a college in
Rome and a numerous following in Turkey. They retain their Armenian
liturgies and rites, pruned to suit the Vatican standards of orthodoxy,
and they recognize the pope as head of the church.
The patriarchs of Great Armenia first resided at Ashtishat, on the
Araxes. From 478 to 931 they occupied Dvin in the same neighbourhood,
then Aghthamar, an island in the Lake of Van, 931-967, the city of Ani,
992-1054, where are still visible the magnificent ruins of their
churches and palaces. Since 1441 the chief catholicus has sat at
Echmiadzin, the convent of Valarshapat, now part of Russian Armenia. A
rival catholicus, with a small following, still has his cathedral and
see at Sis. The catholicus of Valarshapat is nominally chosen by all
Armenians. A synod of bishops, monks and doctors meets regularly to
transact under his eye the business of the convent and the oecumenical
affairs of the church; but its decisions are subject to the veto of a
Russian procurator. There are Armenian patriarchs, subject to the
spiritual jurisdiction of Echmiadzin, in Constantinople and Jerusalem.
In the latter place the Armenians occupy a convent on Mount Sion, and
keep up in the churches of the Sepulchre and of Bethlehem their own
distinct rites and feasts, the only ones there which at all resemble
those of the 4th century.
The following list of councils was compiled by John, catholicus about
the year 728, and read at the council of Manazkert, when the dogmatic
and disciplinary attitude of the Armenian church was defined once and
for all:--
1. In twentieth year of catholicate of Gregory and thirty-seventh of
Trdat, the king, on return of Aristaces from council of Nice, bringing
the Nicene creed and canons.
2. Council held by St Nerses on his return from the council of the 150
fathers at Constantinople against Macedonius.
3. Held by St Sahak and Mesrop on receipt of letters from Proclus and
Cyril after the council of Ephesus, when the "Glory in the Highest" was
adopted. Held against Nestorianism.
4. Held by Joseph, disciple of Mashdotz (Mesrop) and St Sahak, in
Shahapiwan in the sixth year of King Yazkert (i.e. Yazdegerd) of Persia,
for the regulation of the church. Forty bishops present. (The Massalians
were anathematized.)
5. Held by Babken, catholicus, in the City-plain (i.e. Dvin), in the
18th year of King Kavat (i.e. Kavadh), against the heresy of Acacius and
Barsuma (Bar-sauma), the friends of Nestorius. The true (Nicene) faith
was sent to the Armenians of the farther East (shortly afterwards a
slightly different creed was adopted, identical with a pseudo-Athanasian
symbol used by Evagrius of Pontus and given in Greek in Patr. Gr. xxvi.
Col. 1232).
6. At the beginning of the Armenian era, held by Nerses in Dvin, in the
fourth year of his catholicate, in the fourteenth of Chosroes' reign and
in the fourteenth of Justinian Caesar. Held against Chalcedon, uniting
the Baptism and Christmas feasts on the 6th of January (Epiphany),
declaring for mono-physitism, and adopting in the _Trisagion_ the words
"who wast crucified for us." This settlement lasted for about
seventy-four years.
7. After the retaking of Jerusalem and recovery of the Cross from the
Persians in the eighteenth year of his reign, Heraclius called a mixed
council at Karin (Theodosiopolis) of Greeks and Armenians under Ezr
(Esdras), catholicus, at which the preceding council of Dvin was cursed,
its reforms repudiated and the confession of Chalcedon adopted. This
remained the official attitude of the Armenian church until the
catholicate of Elias (703-717). John, catholicus, denies to Ezr's
meeting the name of council, and so makes his own the seventh.
8. Under John, catholicus, in Manazkert, in the one hundred and
seventieth year of the Armenian era (= A.D. 728) under the presidency of
Gregory Asharuni Chorepiscopos (Gregory Asheruni). All the Armenian
bishops attended, as also the metropolitan of Urhha (Edessa), Jacobite
bishops of Gartman, of Nfrkert, Amasia, by command of the archbishop of
Antioch. Chalcedon was repudiated afresh, union with the Jacobites
instituted, use of water and leaven in the Eucharist condemned, the five
days' preliminary fast before Lent restored, Saturday as well as Sunday
made a day of feasting and synaxis, any but the orthodox excluded from
the Maundy Thursday Communion, the first communion of the new
catechumens; union of the Baptismal and Christmas feasts was restored,
and the faithful forbidden to fast on Fridays from Easter until
Pentecost. In general these rules have been observed in the Armenian
church ever since.
For list of authorities on the Armenian church see the works
enumerated at the end of ARMENIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. For the
relations of the Armenian church to the Persian kings see PERSIA:
_Ancient History_, section viii. SS 2 and 3. (F. C. C.)