* Narek

St. Grigor Narekatsi was an Armenian mystical poet, theologian, and monk renowned for his profound lyrical works and spiritual insights. He is honored as a saint in both the Armenian Apostolic and Catholic Churches. In 2015, Pope Francis recognized him as a Doctor of the Church, highlighting his universal spiritual significance. 

Scholars place Gregory's birth and death dates circa 945–951 and 1003 or 1010–11, respectively. He lived in the Kingdom of Vaspurakan, a medieval Armenian kingdom, which is "notable for the high cultural level that it achieved." Vaspurakan, centered around Lake Van, is a region described by Richard Hovannisian as "the cradle of Armenian civilization". His works have inspired many Armenian literary figures and influenced Armenian literature in general throughout the ages.

After Bible, Book of Lamentations (Narek) is the second most important book for the Armenians.

St Gregory himself defined the work as an “encyclopedia of prayer for all nations”. He hoped that his book would provide guidance in prayer for people of all walks of life in order to reach God.

A profound analysis of his work can be found in the article by James R. Russell below (sadly without the notes). It is a truly fascinating reading and I hope James would not mind me sharing it.

With gratitude and respect for your work.

James R. Russell,

Harvard University,

Cambridge, MA

(Paper presented at the international symposium on the millennium of St. Grigor Narekacæi, Harvard University, 11 October 2003)

"A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment on account of your having understood the book... By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips they are yours, not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling." 

Herman Melville, letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, upon receipt of a letter from the latter, to whom he had dedicated Moby Dick, praising the novel. Cited by HARDWICK 2000, p. 66.

The pioneering work of the late Frances Yates, developed and refined by Mary Carruthers and an increasing number of other scholars, has shown how important a role the  ars memorativa, the art of memory of Classical Antiquity, played in the intellectual and spiritual life, both of European mediaeval Christendom and of the Renaissance. I would like to explore its use in the work of St. Gregory of Narek, Arm. Grigor Narekacæi. Aristotle, though not the first Greek to employ mnemonic techniques, was the first who articulated the theory on which the art was to be founded: the presence of an image, phantasma, is necessary, he suggested, to the function of mn¥m¥, memory. Order and regularity then facilitate recollection, anamn¥sis. Sensation and the more voluntary exercise of imagination (he calls the latter phantasia aisth¥tik¥, evocation of a felt image, as it were) are linked to memory; and he adds that memory seems to proceed from topoi, places. Cicero describes anecdotally how the Greek poet Simonides employed the art of memory; and the Latin texts Ad Herennium, generally attributed to Cicero, and Quintillian's De institutione oratoria, following Aristotle's principles, teach the art systematically. It was a very practical skill. A Roman lawyer or politician did not deliver a speech from a written text: had he done so, his argument would have lost its force in the reception of his hearers. He orated from memory; and the technique suggested was to memorize one's planned speech while walking through the furnished rooms of a deserted house, associating the progression of ideas with the harmonious elements of the three-dimensional picture through which one moved. This was not the rote memorization that Erasmus and Montaigne, at the far end the mediaeval period, were to deplore as an impediment to the exercise of an active intelligence: in the proper exercise of the art, linkages of active and flexible reasoning and feeling went together with  precise recollection of the factual details and rhetorical armature– aesthetic fantasy indeed. 

This exercise required of the practitioner a deliberate cast of mind, intentio, which Carruthers explains as a creative tension that makes the mind taut, prepared to engrave a new memory or to recover a stored one. This mental attitude is not value-free: it has certain moral overtones, reminding one of Jewish kavv‹n‹  and Buddhist Mindfulness, and I will come to these presently– but there were purely practical considerations that made the art important, before its religious possibilities. I have already noted the social factor: an audience lost its respect for an orator reading from a written text, much as we might today disdain an actor who cannot remember his lines. (Americans long ago gave up expecting our politicians to be masters of rhetoric: most of our leaders these days cannot manage complex, coherent sentences in English.) There are other aspects as well that made memory important in ways one must make a conscious effort now to appreciate. There were in antiquity few inexpensive or durable recording media or means of transmission and dissemination of information, and the average human life span was very brief; so the work of acquisition of knowledge and its transmission from one generation to the next, without which the maintenance of civilization should have been impossible, required efforts of Herculean prowess. It is not surprising, then, either that classical mnemonics long persisted, or that the mediaeval culture that inherited the art was itself memorial in character; for the material condition of culture had not changed appreciably from antiquity. Christianity added to the practice of mnemonics an explicitly moral dimension that is not stressed by the ancients– not so much because morality was absent from their conception of life as that paganism was innocent of the dogmatism that imposes its morality explicitly and universally. The new forms of the art might have acquired this moral facet, then, from Athens; but the propensity to articulate it came forth with the Law from Jerusalem. 

Ancient Judaism valued mnemonics: the faith was from early times as much an intellectual system of books and of learning requiring powers of acquisition as it was a spiritual discipline of faith and practice. The two purposes were not really separable, either. Memory, Hebrew zik‹r≈n, is a moral imperative as well: the act of remembering Creation, the Exodus, the Covenant at Sinai, and other events is an essential aspect of the celebration of all festivals, from the weekly Sabbath to the high holidays of the New Year. This memory infuses the believer with consciousness of the grace of God towards the cosmos, mankind, and His chosen people. The flux of history in the light of patterned religious memory is seen thus as the growth of a relationship, the refinement of the soul, and the strengthening of the ties of responsibility and care that bind the worshipper to his God and the members of the community to each other. Each ritual act also is made by memory to enter the numinous realm, in illo tempore: the ruinous, separating aspect of time is erased. We shall see presently how the Christian theory and practice of memory deal similarly with the burden of time passing.

Though one ought to speak properly of Judaism in the present tense as a religion that has continued to grow over millennia, mostly without theological reference to its younger siblings, Christianity and Islam, Israel became in the Christian cosmology a fixed substrate of vital relevance only to the past: Christians, creating for themselves the appellation of the New Israel in an act of appropriation, absorbed the morally tinged charge to remember of the Old, whilst categorizing the various events of the Old Testament as a fixed set of symbolic, almost code-like prefigurings upon which the parallel chain of events in the New Testament might be superimposed as perfections and fulfillments. These events concern the incarnation of God Himself and His self-sacrifice for us. The large themes of Divine love and care adumbrated by the Hebrew Bible in chronological progression, for the large universe first, for all mankind next, and then more specifically for Abraham and his legal progeny–Israel– continue in Christian symbolism to narrow, as it were, to the irreducibly specific point and emotional climax of the life of the single God-man. With Him, the focus widens again to the entire cosmos, the Covenant limited no longer to any particular nation. Armenian Christians have often perceived themselves as new Maccabees and a new Israel, not in a universal sense, but in a very special, national, particular way. I will return to this point below; for now it is important simply to stress that in Armenian writings the issue of memory is pulled in two directions: there is Armenian national memory, in which the history of St. Gregory the Illuminator, artificially elevated to the rank of an Apostle, the revelation of the Armenian script to St. Mesrop Ma¯tocæ, and the martyrdom of Sts. Øewond and Vardan and their companions, are equated with– and often elevated above– Old Testament (and, sometimes, even New Testament!) paradigms. The second is general, Biblical, Christian; and when employed with political purposes it represents the striving of the Armenians, often an embattled and isolated Christian island in an Iranian or Moslem sea, to gain recognition by others as a part of Christendom and of Western civilization. This aspect stresses Armenia's belonging, rather than its separateness.

There is also a third aspect of the treatment of memory, conditioned by the Iranian, Zoroastrian cultural substrate in Armenia that includes stress upon the significance of religious memory. The Gospels themselves are called in Armenian awetaran, for which an etymology from Middle Iranian meaning "a collection of memorials" has been reasonably suggested by Prof. C. de Lamberterie. This would correspond, not only to a known– if somewhat rare– Greek designation of the Gospels, but also to the pre-Islamic Iranian practice of entitling epic narratives about legendary heroes of Zoroastrian sacred tradition as memorials, ay‹dg‹r-‹n (with the same etymon, Phl. ay‹d, as seems to be reflected in an earlier form in the Armenian awet–). If the word awetaran  waited long for this proposed etymology from Iranian, the common Armenian base yu¯– "remember" (yi¯el, yi¯atak), at least, has long been recognized as a Middle Iranian loan. So Armenian tradition focusses doubly, from the Iranian substrate and from Christian learning, on the aspect of memorial in Scripture. The Christian theologian is then charged to extract from the Gospels' four-fold narrative of a precious single life all its cosmic meaning, in all its divine symmetry. Associated to the ars memorativa  of the orator now is a kind of subset of it, the homiletic craft, the ars predicandi, which pursued the "practical aims of rhetorical persuasion, and need to construct images able to provoke controllable emotions." Forgetfulness, by contrast, is for Christians not just disadvantageous but morally perilous, and l¥th¥  is the vile sleep that makes for perdition. The various philosophical cults characterized as Gnostic, to a greater or lesser degree Platonic in their disposition and intersecting more or less thoroughly with the diverse types of nascent Christianity or Iranian dualism, agreed that the tragedy that lies at the base of the human predicament is not so much primordial sin and its effects as ignorance of what happened to get us where we are– Wordsworth's "a sleep and a forgetting". Gnosis is a martial reconquest of usurped memory. Here one can compare the Christian ascetic and saint, whose vigilance and wakefulness– strivings not to sleep, not to forget– are so often evoked in athletic and military terms. St. Gregory of Narek knew well the Greek meaning and sense of his name, gr¥goros, "awake, alert" (Arm. artæun, hskoø: in Arm., accordingly, the Zuartæunkæ  are the watchful angels called in Aramaic æIr¬n, Gk. Egr¥goroi): this understanding combines with the fact that it was also the Christian name bestowed upon the Arsacid prince who became the Illuminator of Armenia, to whom Narekacæi dedicated hymns, and who was for him so much the exemplar of the holy champion and priest, and theologian.

It is of passing interest that it is only in these and a very few other liturgical poems and orations that Narekacæi uses the terms "Armenia" and "Armenian" (Hayastan,  Hayk, Askæanaz, Tæorgom, etc., the latter two being of course Biblical Ashkenaz– the Scythians– and Togarmah). There are oblique allusions in his major work, the Matean oøbergutæean, "Book of Lamentation", to the local lore of the region of Lake Van. He describes a typical Armenian house. One prayer is patterned upon the form of a gaylakap, a folk spell against wolves. He mentions Ararat– but it is a Biblical mountain, as well as an Armenian one. The name of his people and country never appears there at all. The Narek  has been praised as an Armenian Divine Comedy; its author, as an Armenian Dante, or even a Dostoyevsky. Such comparisons are so wide of the mark that they distort more than illuminate: Narekacæi's language in the Matean  (the taøs  can be more idiomatic) is as pure a grabar  as his age allows; Dante departed from Latin to write The Divine Comedy  in Italian, with much loving specificity about Italians. St. Gregory of Narek has none of this. His focus is inwardly personal and vastly cosmic: the world that we inhabit in between the two extremes is of interest to him only insofar as monastic establishments (vankæ, krawnastan) or images useful to personal reflection and salvation are concerned. In the Matean, ch. 72.4, he declares: Yawazan¥ koˇæecæay Artæun, ew es i kæun mahu nn˙ecæ, i pærkutæean awur Hskoø yor˙or˙ecæay, baycæ zgastutæeann aˇæs kapæucæi. "I was called Awake at the baptismal font, and I fell asleep in death's slumber; on the day of salvation I was proclaimed Vigilant , but I shut my eyes fast against sobriety." The passage renders two terms, Gregory and egr¥goros, variously into Armenian; and the linkage of the underlying Greek words heightens the sub-text: neither as a baptized man, Gregory, nor as a consecrated priest elevated to the company of the Illuminator, even to the angelic orders, egr¥goros, is the lamenting petitioner capable of that memory without which alertness is of no use. Memory within religious practice is so critical that it cannot be merely factual, but must have a determining moral content. What is it, in the Narek? It is in its way like that of the Gnostic: my failure is on the same scale as the primordial cosmic tragedy. They are one. The difference is that for the Gnostic, to hell with the cosmos; for the Christian, the cosmos is my personal responsibility and guilt. But neither has time for what is in between my microcosm and the universal macrocosm– the sounds of vendors in the morning on a street in fourth-century Alexandria, for the Gnostic, perhaps, or, for St. Gregory, the plowman and his oxen, just below the monastery hill in tenth-century Vaspurakan.

In a recent monograph, The Ethics of Memory, the philosopher Avishai Margalit suggests that most specific remembrance is ethical and has to do with those near and dear to us– what he calls "thick relations"– while less of our memory, both as to content and precision, is moral, and has to do with "thin relations"– that is, humanity in general, people we do not know. Margalit suggests the Christian project is to make all relations "thick", to make the sphere of meaningful and intense memory include every being. It would seem to be a romantic intention, more emotionally appealing than practicable; but it would appear that Narekacæi's method of effecting it is to telescope Biblical allusions and the varieties of actual imagery (his vices as swarms of vermin and bugs; his spiritual crisis, as a shipwreck) into himself and, by extension, into the imagination of the reader, the drama of damnation or salvation of this soul then becoming the entire concern of Heaven. In Ch. 3 he addresses his words to all classes and people at all times and in all countries. This implication is all there is of the middle between individual and universe: exclusion of any more specific mention of that middle– as Armenia, or whatever– makes all cosmic ties "thick"; detailed evocation of the middle would "thin" them. Mention of Armenia would make the Matean  national, self-involved, exclusionary, defeating its purpose and ill serving the readers of Armenian. The morality of memory in the Narek  precludes dwelling upon the actuality of the tenth century or the author's native land. That is how all relations become thick.  

For the patterning required by a memorative, homiletical art, it is the architectural and geometrical metaphors Cicero and Quintilian preferred, that still offered to Christians the most effective system of images; except that instead of a quiet villa off the Via Appia, with its rooms as paragraphs and chairs and tables as individual rhetorical points, the practitioners of the ars predicandi  employed bigger structures: the hierachically-ordered cosmos of Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite, with the hosts and circles of the angelic orders; the Garden of Eden, its four rivers, and the dimensions of the body of the primordial Adam (explored in the Hebrew ∑iæºr Q≈m‹); the levels and measurements of the Ark of Noah (with the dimensions of Christ's body superimposed upon it); the holy Tabernacle and the tablets and other sacred objects it contained; the Temple of Solomon and its decorations, images, and furniture; Ezekiel's vision of the Divine Throne, with its divine figure, the four holy animals, and the divine Chariot (cf. the sophisticated Jewish mysticism of the Merkav‹); and Christ Himself, His Cross, and His tomb. Paul's metaphor is the Christian locus classicus: he is a master builder, and man is the Temple of God, in which his spirit dwells (I Cor. 3.10-17). Carruthers comments that architectural patterns, thus employed, then become "dispositive heuristics"– devices for discovering further meanings. That is, the images have their own intrinsic complexity and can be understood as more than one-on-one representations of the ideas they represent, leading the suitably prepared imaginer to envisage further symmetries and deeper symbolisms. The letter killeth, as it were, but the picture giveth life. In a way, it is alive itself. One speaks of the suitably prepared examiner and memorizer, since it is quite possible to possess an astonishingly sophisticated capacity to memorize a chain of data of any length, employing an array of synaesthetic mechanisms whereby a sound becomes a light, color, taste, tactile experience or object, distributed along a given imagined space– all without ever once having any of those elements lead to a second level of elaboration of reflection. Such is the case of the famous patient, known to us only as S., of the Soviet psychiatrist Alexander Romanovich Luria. According to the latter's case histories, compiled over decades, this man could memorize a list of nonsense syllables of almost any length, distributing the sequence of associated synaesthetic phenomena along familiar Moscow streets in the guise of various things, colors, and sounds, and then retrieve them many years later, in order and with perfect exactitude. It was a monstrously enlarged rote of the sort Erasmus might abominate, without that free play of thought whereby man raises his mind from the mechanical to the artistic.

Twelfth-century Europe provides several striking examples of the use of architectural symbolism in tracts of mnemonic-homiletic type. Hugh of St. Victor's De arca Noe mystica  provides detailed instructions for the mental construction of a model of the tripartite Ark of Noah, which is itself likened to Tabernacle and Temple. The schema includes lists of Old Testament figures, Biblical books, the stations of the Israelites in the desert, the angelic orders, the Tree of Paradise, the four directions of the compass (which the letters of Adam's name spell out in Greek; so he is here the Primal Man), ladders of ascent, and Christ Himself at the center. The exercise has been likened to the Indian and later Tibetan Buddhist practice of visualizing a mandala, a circle with gates at the four cardinal points  and many other details, to which it is strikingly similar. The psychiatrist C.G. Jung found that patients drew such complex mandalas without prior training or knowledge and derived therapeutic benefit from them. Characteristically he sought an explanation in the theory of archetypes; but one might reasonably argue that the circle as a symbol of perfection (or a halo) is sensibly ingrained in European imagination; as are, of course, the various quaternities of directions and the Cross. The store of geometric figures available to human meditation is generally rather limited. Another brother of Hugh's monastery prepared a similar mnemonic treatise in which the object of mnemonic visualization is the divine Throne in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel; and Alan of Lille focussed upon one of the Seraphim in a work which employs a mnemonic based upon the six wings of the heavenly being to list the stages of penance. Alan was a poet; so the terms in his lists are also chosen so as to be alliterative in sound, allowing an aesthetic and emotional affect to facilitate further the process of memorization. 

We can observe some similarities in the great monument of Armenian spirituality, the Matean oøbergutæean  ("Book of Lamentation") of the tenth-century mystical poet and theologian, St. Gregory of Narek, and in some other, shorter works of his. It has long been recognized that the overall structure of the Matean  corresponds to the three parts of a church– porch, nave, and altar– and, simultaneously, to the three stages of the Divine Liturgy; so that the worshipper employing the prayers of the book proceeds in his imagination spatially, temporally, and imaginally through the perfecting stages of the Christian mystery. Since this progress is an ascent, one is reminded also of the three levels of the Ark of Noah; and of earth, the middle air of the sky (Arm. an˙rpet), and heaven. Litanies of alliterative images superimposed upon each other produce the emotional, cathartic abreaction of tears sought by Christian mystics, and in Armenian tradition particularly known through the writings of St. Ephrem Syrus; whilst the author refers obliquely or by chapter and verse to Biblical passages and characters. It is possible either to pass over these strings of references or thoroughly to research each; and if one takes the latter option, it quickly becomes clear that the meanings of the Biblical texts, or of the Scriptural images evoked, comment upon each other, creating a second level of complexity, of a textual, rather than pictorial, "dispositive heuristics". It is thus possible to employ most of the Matean as a book of prayer alone, or as a theological work as well: Gregory at the outset declares that his work is intended for all classes and stations of believers in the world. The qualification "most" is necessary, because the great theological meditations on the Nicene Creed and on the Holy Chrism in the culminating third of the book are perhaps less accessible than shorter chapters to the untrained.

Memory and architectural metaphor frequently go together in the Matean: Narekacæi speaks of his book as a (mah)arjan, literally, "(death) monument"– to a resident of New England this evokes the rather dismal image of a thin, small tablet of slate enblazoned with a skull and crossbones or winged hourglass; but in Armenia the object is more often a lofty stele with scenes in relief of Biblical and local sacred history, or else the noble xaˇækæar, a Cross-stone. The latter is often a cosmogram: the Cross, blossoming as a Tree of Life, surmounts the cosmic symbols of a stepped mountain and a disk inscribed with radiating spirals. And in any case the term maharjan  in Arm. lost early its exclusive association with death, coming to mean any towering monument or even decoration. 

If, however, we consider Narekacæi's use of maharjan  in its literal sense, the association with death raises some interesting aspects that are relevant to this exploration of his use of memory. A number of mediaeval European sarcophagi are constructed as simulacra  (the same word employed for images in the ars memorativa) of houses, sometimes with scenes in bas relief separated by arcades– enabling the viewer to proceed from one scene to the next as though progressing through a house used for the mnemonic art. The Armenian monumental steles have separate scenes in bas relief, divided vertically, of sacred history; and there are a number of tombs, belonging to a school that flourished, notably, in the regions of Zangezur and Arcæax, with horizontal scenes of the life of the departed. The imagery of these is sometimes very archaic, suggesting a longer tradition than the relatively late date of the ones studied might otherwise imply. The tomb of a saint might be screened, in the manner of the Catholic fenestella confessionis– and this raises the association, frequent in the Matean, of recollection with xostovanutæiwn, confession. The Subvenite  hymn of the Catholic funeral service asks angels and saints to raise (suscipere) the soul: the verb is the same the Romans used for a father raising a newborn child from the ground to acknowledge it. In the Armenian case, Narekacæi prays thus to be raised up at death: etæ¥ nkateal dimecæicæ i ver yamenagraw uøin soskali, hre¯tak kæo xaøaøutæean kæaøcærutæeamb inj patahescæ¥. Cæoycæ inj, T¥r, i yelicæn awur ¯nˇæoys arjakman, makærutæean ogi lusov ambarjeal i yerknaworacæn er˙ankacæ pargewawkæ siroy kæoy ekeal haseal, "If I direct my gaze upwards onto the all-seizing and frightful path, may your angel of peace meet me in sweetness. Show me, O Lord, on the day of departure, the release of my breath, a spirit of purity arisen in light from amongst the blessed heavenly ones, coming and arriving with the gifts of your love" (Matean, 2.2). The common Armenian belief is that the angel Gabriel, armed, with the written decree of death, comes and removes the soul, which is in the form of a swaddled baby (cf. the Latin association with a newborn child). The epithet amenagraw  is used by Narekacæi in Ch. 8.1 of Tartarus; and this characterization of Hell, literally the hollow place under the earth, into which all is taken, is probably of common Indo-European antiquity, though the Arm. adjective includes a MIr. loan, from grab– "seize" (cf. NP. gereftan). The old Armenian ballad of prince Aslan and Gabriel, the angel of death, is a local treatment of the mythologem of Alcestis; and in Greek both her name ("seizing") and that of her husband, Admetus ("indomitable"), are good epithets for Hades (as indeed is the name of Eurydice, lit. "of wide-spreading justice", in the related mythological complex of Orpheus). Narekacæi's use of the epithet thus introduces a subtle contradiction, or perhaps conflation of two contradictory realities: when he looks up to heaven, he sees a path that will lead sinners down to hell. It is possible here too to imagine the archaic conception of the night sky as a dark, inverted world: how else, indeed, can the angel, the light spirit rise (amba˚nam> ambarjeal) to descend to Gregory to take his soul at the "release of the breath" (literally nirv‹na!)? The word arjakman, gen. sg. of arjakumn, from MIr. harz– "release" (cf. also the Arm. loan apaharzan, "divorce"), in the second strophe may encode arjan, "monument", to which it is probably etymologically related as well; and the visual aspect is stressed by the preceding imper. 2 sg. cæoycæ, "show!" It is true Gregory wishes his soul to see the angel; but there is another implied beholder– the reader– of the truly monumental scene. The image of the grave monument for Narekacæi is thus one of memory for the beholder, and of the reminding of future events for him– and this memory-in-reverse is apposite, since the Cross of the grave-stone becomes, literally, the Gate (Arm. drunkæ, see below) into the otherworld that reverses and inverts this one. "The things of this world must be looked at in reverse, to be seen the right way round." 

The Matean itself begins, appropriately, with a preface, or Theses (Drutæiwnkæ), or Doors (Drunkæ, as the title is also frequently given in MSS.), into which the image of the Cross is verbally encoded, the literal or symbolic attributes of Christ's body and the Cross upon which He is splayed mentioned exactly at the points on the page where they might be, had one drawn a picture: a textual xaˇækæar  and maharjan. And the Cross, with its complex symbolism and centrality to Armenian Christianity, is not only the gate of passage, outward into the otherworld and inward into the heart at prayer from which the words of the Narek emanate. It becomes also an object of memorious contemplation throughout the book: in Ch. 90, for instance, Narekacæi prays, Vasn pæaytid awrhnutæean kenacæ, yorum prkecæar Astuacd an≤mb˚neli, yi¯atakaw bewe˚acæd, orov i gorci mahun macucæar arariˇæd erkni ew erkri, areambd t¥runakanaw, orov zvi¯apn mec kartæiw aceal orsacæar... eøicæin ays amenayn pargewkæ ¯norhacæ, "Let all these gifts of grace come for the sake of your tree of the blessing of life, upon which you, unencompassable God, were tied down, by the memory of the nails by which  you, Creator of heaven and earth, were fastened in the work of death, by your dominical blood, by which you fashioned a hook and hunted the great dragon..." In the passage Christ bleeding on the Cross becomes bait on a hook to snare the sea-monster in whose hellish maw the dead languish. Narekacæi has the reader use the nails to remember the Biblical text, where God challenges Job to catch Leviathan with a hook. That memory links one to another watery scene: that of the Baptism, where Christ in the Jordan treads Leviathan underfoot. 

In Ch. 28, Narekacæi enumerates the sufferings of Christ on the a¯tarak  "tower" of the Cross: by the yi¯atak, recollection, of each Satan is to suffer pain and be driven out of the ¯inuacoy xoran, the edifice of the tabernacle of God's dwelling– Ew yi¯escæe za˚a˙in haruacn anbå¯kakan orov mahacæaw dimamartutæiwn tæiwnicæ vi¯apin, "And may [the devil] remember the incurable blow, by which the resistance of the dragon's poisons died." Here is a mental picture of the Cross as the towering tree of life and the center– Jerusalem– of the tabernacle of the edifice of the cosmos. It employs the conceit of impressing Biblical realities upon one through the reversal of images: the blow that killed Christ (whose right hand in the verbal icon of the Drutæiwnkæ  is labelled "healing")– what could be more "incurable"– was in fact the cure, specifically the antidote to the dragon's poison, which is of course death itself. But the reversal has an aim beyond that of instruction of believing men: it is Satan himself, in this passage who is to undertake the exercise of memory, from cosmic edifice to tabernacle to Cross to wounds. And now the expulsion of the archdemon from the imagined building at the start of the string of images makes sense: it is a reversal of the expulsion from Eden, of which he had been the cause. And the human reader, following Satan's act of memory, is accordingly to regard the xoran, the Tabernacle, as the Church: an Eden re-entered and a world restored. None of this is particularly original: the progress of restorative time and the remedy of the vices of the fall of man through mystical ascent, all portrayed symbolically, is standard Dionysian theology. It is the koin¥  of Christiam mysticism generally. St. Gregory, with his poetic and linguistic intricacy and intellectual mastery, expresses these verities nobly. It was not originality he strove for.

Let us return to the metaphor discussed earlier, of maharjan, of monument and death: in his meditation on the Chrism, Narekacæi inverts time (and, thus, frustrates death), making Jacob's prototype an object present in the memory of the future: Zarjann iwøeal ka˚oycæ npatak i cæoycæs apa˚neacæn yi¯ataki: "He constructed the monument, anointing it, his aim a demonstration for the memory of those to come" (Buenos Aires ed., p. 252, section 5). Jacob foreeshadows the Narek  itself, whose author prays: ... arascæes zawranal krkin yaˇaxutæeamb burman xostovanutæean aysr mateni i bazums azdeal, hamaspæiw˚, amenatarac, ew a¯xarhalir tann tesakaw, ≤st awrinaki hamematutæean nocæayn yi¯ataki. "... make me become strong by the frequent repetition of the aroma of confession of this book, having an influence upon many, in the form of a house that spreads all over, extends everywhere, and fills the world, according to the example, by comparison, of their own memory" (Ch. 33.1). Narekacæi's book becomes a house of all the nations and a universal memorial, extending spatially and temporally, pervaded by the sweet savor of incense that serves as the synaesthetic representation of the soul engaged in the work of perfection within. The smell of incense should remind one of the first chapter of the Narek, in which the author introduces the complex image of burnt offering and of incense in a censer, whose several parts adumbrate the structure of the book as a staged progression through the actions of the Divine Liturgy, the theme of ascent, and the contradictory senses of burning and refinement the soul is to undergo. 

A further conceit of reversal of direction introduces the important theme of crying at prayer that, as was mentioned earlier, pervades the Matean: it is tears falling, not smoke rising, that will incline God, one hopes, to lift the soul. (Cf. Ch. 4.3, where Narekacæi cites Isaiah, zi zoøormutæiwn kamim, ew oˇæ patarag, "for I will mercy, and not a sacrifice", and adds, aha barjracæir verstin xnkeal aysr yi¯atakaw, "Therefore ascend now, offered incense anew, through the memorial of this.") The image, common enough in its context to be gracefully harmonious  rather than awkwardly outlandish– as a more artificial word-picture might have been–is fertile, a true aisthetik¥ phantasia, itself inspiring further consideration and remembrance of liturgical symbolism. Narekacæi often calls his work a xostovanutæiwn, "confession"; and it is worth noting that St. Ners¥s ∑norhali ("the Graceful"), the twelfth-century poet and patriarch whose compositions may be viewed as a continuation– and, stylistically, a simplification– of the tradition of Narek in the changed circumstances of Cilician Armenian culture, is rightly best remembered for his great credal poem, beginning precisely with the words Hawatov xostovanim, "In faith I confess..." Keeping in mind that "confession" is a marker of the Narek, we note the request of Grigor in Ch. 72.1 that his brethren of the clergy accept his awandutæiwn xostovanutæean, "bequest of confession" i ¯inuac pærkutæean hogwocæ, "into the edifice of the salvation of souls" a complex architectonic image incorporating memory and memorial (it is a bequest) and evoking both the Church itself as a heavenly Temple not built by hands and its corpus of literature. But they are to receive the offering of the book also into themselves, since they are themselves the Temple of the Lord: in the second chapter of the Narek  we read of the Scriptural inner room into which one should retreat for prayer, this room standing for the solitude of the monk and the inwardness of the heart at once (on which the Armenian version of the Commentary  on Matthew of St. John Chrysostom discourses: Narekacæi probably read the translation). Indeed, every chapter of the Narek  begins with the title, "Speech with God from the depths of the heart(s)." From the image of the heart as the inner room within every man Narekacæi moves gradually to the concept of the special and sacred being who is entirely esoteric, the nerkæin mard, the "inner man", who becomes visible in the forms of the saints. In Ch. 71.1 he calls the saints, thus, andams Kæristosi, "limbs of Christ", ibrew zawtæewans Hogwoyn Srboy "as it were, inns of the Holy Spirit", whose kerparans  "(bodily) forms" and yi¯ataks  "memories" are to be invoked. (Compare Ch. 5, where the postlapsarian human visage is yet that damaged and distorted sign, n¯anak aøartacæeal, that sees in a glass darkly and is itself obscured from its pristine original nature.) 

The closing section of Ch. 12, so explicitly vivid in its imagery that it is employed by the Armenian Church and the lay faithful as a prayer for protection of the home at night, speaks both of the actual house and of the body itself as a house, forcing the reader imaginally to connect macro- and micro-cosm, enabling him to remind himself through the living interplay of the images that both are mutually reinforcing symbols recalling spiritual realities. In the passage, the parts of the house receive, as one would expect, metaphorical meanings, as for instance: Ampæopæeal parurea zpatuhan tesutæeancæ zgayakanacæs imasticæ anzarhureli zeteømamb i cpæakan x˚ovutæeancæ, kencæaøakan zbaømancæ, anr˙akan erazocæ, xawlakanacæ cænoricæ, yi¯atakaw kæo yusoyd, anvnaseli pa¯tpaneal. "Surround and enclose the window of the visions afforded by my senses of intelligible things, by placing them, defended from harm by the memory of your hope, beyond the terror of troubles' agitation, the cares of everyday life, dreams in slumber, and senseless fantasies." The window of a house should thus remind the reciter of the meditation of one's eyes; and their vision of temporal things is then to remind one of the vision of imaginal things: the chains of images of reveries and daydreams to which the anxieties and concerns of life give birth, as well as the dream-images that come in sleep. The mindful, associative memory of window as eye as inner eye of thought receives its specific moral power through the associated operation of memory of the hope of salvation that comes from the Scriptures.

The twelfth chapter of the Narek  discussed above follows Paul and evokes a mass of Biblical imagery behind him, in calling the metaphorical house also a taˇar, meaning both a Christian sanctuary and the prototypical Jerusalem Temple. Having noted above the importance of the metaphor of sacred architecture in the theology of Christian mysticism, and its use for mnemonic purposes within the ars predicandi, we may consider it now in two hymns composed by Narekacæi, with a prefatory comment. The ninety-five prayers of the Book of Lamentation, whether employed privately by a celebrant of the Divine Liturgy for purposes of internal purification and illumination, chanted in the context of the liturgy itself, or used in the devotions of lay people, are in essence penitential. Intense remorse and guilt pervade every chapter; and if tears do not well from the worshipper's eyes at some point in his recitation, he is accursed, obtuse, or insincere. However this work does not stand alone as the sole expression of Narekacæi's theology or mysticism: many of the hymns he composed for festivals of the Church are ecstatic and joyful, evoking the wonder of the chariot of Ezekiel's vision, the beauty of the Tabernacle, and the serene joy of the Nativity: far from bewailing alienation, they celebrate the glory and luminosity of the divine presence. In this respect, his mysticism belongs to the same stream as that of Vardan of Ani, whose commentary on Ezekiel's vision was published by Mnacæakanyan. The frequent portrayal of St. Gregory as a lachrymose, tortured soul merely is surely as misleading as the facile comparison to Dante. Let us consider here two hymns attributed to Narekacæi that employ images familiar from the Matean, presented in familiar configurations, yet suffused, not by penitence, but by the sense of triumph and glory, ecstasy even. Both are dedicated to the Church; and that physical and supernatural reality binds the successive architectural metaphors together. The theology is that of Ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite– divine thrones, hierarchies, extravagant and verbose evocations of luminescence. The Armenian version of Dionysius would have been easily available to Narekacæi : there is no indication that he relied upon the Greek original. The translations that follow are based upon the text published by Kæyo¯keryan: the first is attested in a sole manuscript.

HOMILY OF THE CHURCH AND THE ARK OF THE LORD, OF GREGORY OF NAREK.

We who are all gathered into the holy, universal, and Apostolic church,

Sing in it, we in the earthly circle in glorification, with many choruses,

In spiritual multitudes, by miraculous birth

Conjoined to the rings of the races aglow like the sunlit sky.

(5) We bless the coming into you,

Most holy Trinity, we do beseech.

You who are upraised in the arches of the watchtower of the four-faced cherubim

And receive proskynesis by all the circles and the races wondrous in aspect,

Three-fold reality,

(10) You willed through the holy Apostles to establish this rock,

City undefeated, by miracles performed at will,

Four-fold, in the midst of the cosmos:

You made it resplendent upon foundations that scatter rays

Commingled with heat and dazzling with light,

(15) And you ordained this noble queen into being, splendidly adorned and glorious in comeliness,

Daughter of the heavenly Zion,

From whose midst the cohorts in many voices that are in her

Acclaim loud their superiors in heaven.

We bless...

Tabnernacle built by the one without beginning, universal, holy,

Who wast founded in the cosmos on this day, holy Church,

In example of the paradise made by the Creator, lovely in appearance,

Planted in Eden, place of delight,

(25) Which the Seraphim and Cherubim, by the command of the Uncreate,

Surrounded, guarding the ways to the tree of knowledge.

Opened are the joys of the great and strongly-hidden paradise,

And we, with boldness aglow in joy, in the earthly circle,

Joined to the ring of the Seraphim aglow like the sunlit sky,

(30) Bless...

Ineffable tabernacle, in this wondrously bright illumination

Thou wast established in the midst of the cosmos this day, holy Church,

Exemplar of the high-domed Ark

(35) Which the patriarch Noah, by the command of the Creator,

Founded of unputrefying wood

And built, the Ark for the salvation of the many throngs of animals,

To rescue in life those who sought refuge

From the sweeping billows of the waves of the waters of wrath.

(40) Today, brought into being by Him who creates the sunlit sky,

Instead of the Ark there was revealed to us holy Zion–

To us, the nation of rational sheep,

Stair of miracles aglow with light. Ranks united in glorification,

We bless...

Tabernacle aglow like the sunlit sky, torch set ablaze with the wondrous beams of the solar orb,

This day, holy Church, in the midst of the cosmos:

Exemplar of the banquet-tent of Abraham the patriarch

Seated at the threshold of heaven's gates,

Seeing into heaven and into earth:

From there the Lord appeared with egr¥goroi  twain,

Came, attained the shady tree,

Repaying his lovèd ones the recompense of good–

At which Abraham came running,

(55) Nursing calves and three loaves

He proferred in sacrificial offering to the Lord God.

This day, itself, holy Zion, comes, God, unto thee:

Heaven-like place of the sinners' atonement,

Suckling thy children at the waters of repose,

(60) From which the generations of the font

And the principalities in Seraphim abounding, of the wonders on high

Are joined together in the circle.

We bless...

(65) Four-cornered temple, surpassingly wondrous at its dawning,

Ablaze with interpenetrating light,

Holy Church, this day in the midst of the cosmos,

Art exemplar of the Ark that Moses made

Amongst the congregation of Israel's host,

(70) Placing within the incense-burner with gold pillars shining all around,

Which exhaled the perfume of frankincense within;

The golden vessel full of manna;

With the stone tablets of the Commandments.

And the flowering staff therein

(75) Today by the hand of Melchizedek's priest

Appears in you always, instead of the tablets that the Lord inscribed.

The Table, shining like the sun's orb, upraiser of the offering sweet to savor,

Is transferred and established in thee, holy Zion, mother church,

In which the ranks of earthborn living creatures

(80) And the hosts of the lofty, rich in Seraphim, are joined together in the circle.

We bless...

Temple of four torches

Illuminated in the midst of the cosmos by miraculous, supernal rays, holy church,

(85) Example of the wondrous globes and halls light-bedecked and censed, of molten gold,

Which Solomon the wise

Taking cedar wood and juniper

Shaped into the Temple, glowing with gold,

All dazzling in appearance, with candelabra of seven lamps,

(90) And wonders lovely roundabout, in the shape of lilies made,

The gilded Seraphim:

And he establishes them in God's house.

We bless...

(95) Stronghold for the fleeing, domicile and home,

City of refuge and house of atonement,

We beseech the heavenly king, who in unsundered unity within thee dwells,

To grant us peace: heavenly, spiritual, and intelligible,

Protecting us now

(100) From them that war against us: visible and invisible opposing powers–

And at the dawning of the glory of great power on the day that will have no night,

In the company of those raised, holy, in light, may we be glad in unconditional rejoicing.

Now may you remember and have mercy on the departed,

In hope of resurrection, we pray.

(105) And moreover

Grant us exhortation to love and good deeds, we pray.

And let us dedicate ourselves and each other

To the omnipotent Lord God, we pray.

By the intercession of the all-blessed lady Theotokos

(110) And forever Virgin, Mary;

By the petitions of the great prophet, John the Prodromos;

By the prayers of the sharer of Thy Cross and torments,

Stephen, Thy Protomartyr;

By the requests of Thy confessor

(115) St. Gregory, faithful archpriest;

By the general plea of them who love Thee,

Apostles and Prophets:

And have mercy on us now, O Lord our God,

In accord with your great mercy.  

The final list of invocations and intercessions seems to me most likely Narekacæi's, though abbreviated from similar lists elsewhere; and the rest is still more probably his own composition, since many of the same words, in a somewhat different order but still forming a hierarchical progression of pictures together, can be found, for example, in Ch. 29.1 of the Matean: patsparan (hzawr), du˚n (barjrutæean tarakuseloys), sanduxkæ (eranutæean eøkeloys) [instead of a¯tiˇan], ˇanaparh (¯awøacæ), tæagawor (neroø)– powerful stronghold; gate of loftiness for me in my waverings; stairs of blessedness for me, the wretched; way of roads, forgiving king. The hymn combines Dionysian imagery of the heavenly orders and of light with evocations of the great and powerful buildings, both physical and imagined, that were the hallmark of mystical vision, even power, of old, and which still have a sense of mystery and wonder: Noah's Ark, Abraham's tent and the visit of the three angels, the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple of Solomon. All these symbols occur in other hymns of his, too. Each is a forerunner of the Church; so Narekacæi wherever possible stresses quaternities. Each is a sign of the reconciliation of all earthly creatures with all the denizens of heaven; and Narekacæi uses the circle or ring to express this pl¥r≈ma. The circle may imply also the sense of the dance, which seems to me justified by the more explicit image of the dance in other, shorter songs of the saint (the taø  of the Nativity, for instance), and by the celebratory character of the hymn. Cross and circle: mandala, spiritual wholeness and perfection. The luxuriantly alliterative compound adjectives for light, arpæiapæayl  and the like, that Armenian is so good at– and at which Narekacæi especially excelled– are intended to induce a sense of ecstasy as well; whilst the facts of the descriptions and their Biblical allusions challenge and the intellect. The three orders of perception and being line 98, erknayin, hogewor, and imanali– heavenly, spiritual, and intelligible– are thus engaged simultaneously: the most favorable state for operation of the artes memorativa et predicandi. 

Here is a similar, longer hymn to the Church, this one more amply attested in several MSS.

HOMILY OF THE CHURCH, SAID BY GRIGOR NAREKACæI.

Desirable treasure of great good, found and concealed:

Pleroma without deficiency, bringer of all; and you yorself are within the entirety–

Which not even highest heaven could bear,

Your atopic canopy is the unattainable aether.

(5) You were shown defined, the non-intermediate space of the races of fiery nature beneath you.

Image unquantifiable of providential loving care,

On the throne of glory the king of the heights, above and beyond the mind,

Might you receive now supplications of prayers compounded with incense

In this consecrated place, holy Church, we pray.

(10) Splendid feast and intimate summons,

Delectable voice, unencompassable,

Which on the light wings of the windy air

By surest helmsmanship, enthroned in lordly fashion,

You have cast forth your throne in mystic parables of the completion of the outcome of good tidings.

You who guide the determined manner to its perfection,

Regarding the place of your dwelling,

Eternally sky and always in our souls:

A certain one, throne; the other, footstool–

Place of elemental light, of all the races. 

(20) Might you...

Maker of wisdom, creator without mistake,

Fashioner in fitting construction of all,

Who was pleased to be first the inhabitant of this form of the matter miraculously adorned,

First made with hands, constructed before, and then, the one enthroned.

You have stretched forth the heavens, and there, the heavenly ones:

You established Eden, and, thereafter, Adam;

The structure of the ark, and in it, those who lived;

The Tabernacle of the primordial hospitality of Abraham,

(30) Anointed stele and house of God,

The ladder of our ascent and the trace of your descent

And the tent of Aaron's service;

The testament of the book, the judge of the speakers of high Gerizim, [place] of election.

Light-bearing Temple of the great Solomon,

Mountain of the Lord and house of God,

Sign raised aloft to distant peoples,

Trumpet call summoning the world:

Your ineffable mystery, according to its seers.

Might you...

Tower erected in excellent beauty,

Indestructible pillar of iron and strong bulwark made of brass,

Tower of light, cast of gold, 

Island surrounded by fortress-like breakers,

According to Ezekiel's second vision:

Come with a new summoning out of Tyre,

In search of wisdom coming out of Sheba,

From Canaan's races of alien seed,

Hasening eagerly from Babylon

(50) Wounded to the quick for love of the Bridegroom.

Gate hewn of cedar planks,

Stones of crystal with rubies,

Orbs sun-inscribed on steles of silver,

Living city built of God,

(55) By the impulse of the Spirit; by Jesus, spoken:

Mountain of fatness, with holiness slathered,

Might you...

Rejoice, O queen, glorious bride,

(60) Woman of great wonder diademmed:

Rejoicing in many children whilst retaining your virginity,

As you were traced there at the beginning,

Now in this new time you are clothed in splendid being shining with gold:

In the manner of the call of Hagar,

(65) Serving woman taken from Sinai to Salem

As the Father's first-born came Himself,

He takes you in place of the rejected race of Jacob,

Making your foundations the worshipful assemblies of the Apostles,

Beautifying you with illumination by the stars' light,

(70) Making you splendid in a veil of dazzling fire.

Clean in womb and without vice in birth

Whence you bring forth in labor God's heirs,

This is the very example to hand of hopeful expectation

That verily found its peace.

(75) Might you...

Lord of light, mighty king, celestial bridegroom,

In ineffable mystery at the festive gathering encircling

Ordained unchanging canons for you:

(80) And example in diverse particulars of the forms

Of the same scheme of all existence,

In myriad kinds for the universal Church's construction.

The statures of diverse races are humbled in a single assembly,

House and place and hidden chamber

(85) That is a remedy from the burning heat, the rock of aid to us traced into bodies by the Spirit.

You who make God familiar to mankind,

Hope for the atonement of the condemned for all races gathered of like name,

The bold emerging first,

The band of perfected souls.

(90) Might you...

Dwelling-place of the Father's wisdom,

Built upon the pillars of the seven stars,

In which the blessed One is offered in sacrifice on the altar of will for the taste of bread—

(95) On the palanquin of the holy table—

Manna of life and celestial Lamb,

Who removes sin from the living and those gone to sleep:

He Himself is all, and the sacrifice in all is greater than Abel's—

He gathers in His economy the dispersed

(100) In uncompelled arrival to the embrace at His bosom,

Summoning with His hand in sweet love, to the unapproachable fortress.

He is refuge to the fleeing, in the high palace-hall borne by Spirit

Where He inscribed in wonder the Disciples,

And where the the enthroned elders in authority will be ranged in power,

(105) Rejoicing in honor of this, your day,

Who turn in the circles of the pure:

Our lord Patriarch [name],

With bishops, elders and deacons,

Teachers of the schools and all servants of the Church,

(110) Our king with his progeny,

And those who are rulers and princes under arms at his command,

Blessed by all with your own sacred love.

Remember now and have mercy upon the souls of the departed,

We pray, in hope of resurrection.

(115) And also we ask there be granted us

Exhortation to love and to good works.

We ask for those rejected by you to be gathered in again

By the intercession of the one who sits with you.

{Var.] The Holy Mother of God found the precious jewel, the pearl

(120) By ineffable energy in the sea of this world—

Daughter of light, mother of Zion,

Faith's foundation not built by hands, true eidolon,

By whose name in this type you were anointed and sealed.

Bridal-chamber of the sole incarnated God from you,

(125) Accept your intercession for the reconciliation of us, the condemned,

The scion of immortal life, the Forerunner of the calling of the Saints

And crown of Martyrs, with the Apostles and Prophets

And him who is our Illuminator,

With the ascetic hermits who are God's heirs,

(130) Those born into adoption by your holy font, with membership in spiritual kinship unseparated by space,

 In which again you will behold the renewal of the small

Into the wideness of enlargement of glory in uncontainable expansion,

Mother with children pure,

Marriage-crowned with the covenant in that celestial chamber

(135) On the day of your awful appearance, great God.

And our Lord God have mercy upon us,

As befits your great compassion.

The study of the art of memory invites one to consider a possible solution to a problem of the image of St. Gregory of Narek within Armenian tradition: the aura of heresy, even sorcery, that clings to this holiest of Armenian divines. The theological density of the Matean  makes it, inter alia, a massive Scriptural mnemonic, on the scope of Raymond Llull's schemata for the acquisition of universal knowledge. Narekacæi's use of the Throne Vision and related material links him to those seen to have gained access to direct knowledge of divine mysteries veiled from the unworthy and uninitiated. One may note here that at the mention of Llull we touch upon the ars notoria, a slightly disreputable relative of the ars memorativa. Practitioners of the former often created their systems of symbols with the purpose of facilitating, not pious learning, but the all-encompassing and therefore necessarily amoral knowledge of universal reality. The ars notoria  then became a tool of occultists seeking power by acquiring intelligence beyond man's proper ken altogether. This aspect may help to explain why the vast, potent, eloquent Matean  in Armenian popular religion came to be regarded as a magical book: the belief was that to master one's fate, one must trace a circle, stand within, and recite forty chapters of the Narek in a row (folkloric shorthand for "a lot") without stopping or heeding the demons who will gather just beyond the charmed perimeter and try to distract one from the task; for if one yields to them, one is damned. There is a ballad, too, in which two inquisitors from Sis come, rather anachronistically, to investigate Narekacæi for heresy. He makes fire burn in water, resurrects from the dead a skewer of roasted pigeons, and curses a dying man, telling him the earth will not accept his corpse. It doesn't; later the revenant repents and the saint lifts the curse. Armenian folk prayers, many of which really qualify as magical spells, often include a Cross and Seraphic choir, or the Throne Vision of Ezekiel itself. Such symbols of power, of which the latter was regarded already in Jewish tradition with an ambiguous unease, are common in Gregory's writings, too, as we have seen. His own prayers find their way into talismanic scrolls, Arm. hmayil, a few centuries after his death. The usual explanation for the tradition is that Narekacæi was considered a caytæ– that is, a Chalcedonian, a sympathizer with the Byzantine Church. But that explanation, while not at all beyond the realm of possibility, when one considers the wild excesses of fantasy that the least suspicion of heresy might provoke, still seems scarcely sufficient to justify his reputation, which is that of a magician. No other Armenian saint shares it. I think the image comes from the sheer prodigiousness of the Matean, the vastness and depth of his knowledge, his familiarity with the angelic world.

So we have observed the great work of a penitent, a visionary, a prodigious intellectual and master of the art of teaching and of memory, an ecstatic poet, of such spirit and gifts that to tradition he was not merely a saint: in a culture where the small books containing the story of the conversion of the magician Cyprian of Antioch are still bestsellers– and yes, Dr. Faustus seems to come from Gregory's vicinity– it is perhaps inevitable that Gregory is seen also as a magician. I think the idea that great sages were instructed by supernatural beings contributed strongly to the aura of awe with which tradition surrounded them. In the Talmudic period and probably earlier (since earlier Greek magical texts which bear the marks of Jewish influence offer their testimony), Jewish sages adjured an angel they sometimes called Sar ha-Torah, Master of the Law, to come and assist them in the labor of learning and memorizing. This being bore also the name Yofiel, which appears to combine the Hebrew word for beauty with the customary divine suffix. He it at all events always described as brightly shining, young, and handsome: in some texts he is the brilliant archangel Metatron. In the high and late Middle Ages (with even swift Metatron perhaps too busy to attend to a growing clientele), rabbis are often visited by peternatural but less beautiful maggid¬m, angelic narrators of information. 

Something similar happens in Armenia. In the seventh century, the Armenian scientist Anania of ∑irak fell asleep one morning in a chapel at Trebizond (he had come to the seaport to study the profane sciences with a Greek, Teukhikos), and had a vision of the Sun descending as a radiant, beautiful youth: he asked whether there were inhabitants of the Antipodes. The boy informed him that there were not, and quoted God (from the book of Job) to the effect that waves crash on uninhabited shores. The citation from Scripture seems a mild rebuke to Anania for his inquisitive audacity, and it also suggests that the creature was either an angel or a piously Christian planetary being. No matter: Teukhikos strongly advised Anania not to discuss his experience, as though, one thinks, a stigma of sorcery attached to it. He had a point, for Anania was to gain an uncanny reputation in posterity: the Vecæ hazareak, a mathematical table he compiled based on the eschatologically important number 6000, later gave its name to the most dreaded manual of Armenian magic. Over half a millennium later, Kostandin of Erznka describes in an unusual lyric poem such a vision of a sun-like, angelic youth: this one gave him his poetic gift. He goes on to lament the hatred, fear, and envy his talent provoked amongst monastics. Ominously, that poem is unfinished. In the eighteenth century, the great bard of Tiflis, Sayatæ Nova, records that St. John the Prodromos came to him in an initiatory dream and taught him to play musical instruments. (This was standard practice: Moslem 拯iqs  ["lovers", i.e., minstrels] in training waited for a vision of Khidr: for Armenians, Surb Karapet  is the patron, not only of poets and musicians, but of tightrope walkers and entertainers generally.) Sayatæ Nova's dream-vision, which he records in his own hand, proudly, in his divan, was considered proper and necessary, and he got into quite another sort of trouble later in life– he had an affair with the queen of Georgia, after which the penitential prayers of St. Gregory came to his help and consolation: before his death, Sayatæ Nova copied the Narek  at Sanahin monastery, to whose precincts the ashugh  had been confined. 

The most famous short hymn, or taø, of Narekacæi is the Song of the Resurrection, which describes an ox-drawn cart, upon which stands a throne. These mystical images, of God's throne and merkava, are drawn from Habbakuk, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, and they haunt even mediaeval Armenian doodlers in model-books; and in the concluding stanzas the poet explains their Christian metaphorical meaning. But the cart is still, till its charioteer makes its oxen move. This is a powerful, radiant youth described by Narekacæi as xarti¯ageø, having beautiful blond tresses: in the explanatory stanza, he is revealed as Surb Karapet, St. John the Prodromos. The epithet xartea¯  belongs to the hymn preserved by Movs¥s Xorenacæi on the birth of the old Zoroastrian divinity Vahagn (Avestan V≤r≤thraƒna), who had reluctantly surrendered his shrine at A¯ti¯at, near Mu¯– perhaps two hard days on horseback from Narek– and his attributes to Surb Karapet  in the fourth century. But perhaps it is for Narekacæi foremost in the tradition that the ancient solar angelus interprans  is specifically St. John, and, presumably, Gregory's teacher. Now, Prof. Abraham Terian once advanced what I will call the principle that "Sacred events either take place first and best in Armenia or else repeat themselves there better than they were the first time around elsewhere in the Bible and the world." We can see it at work in Koriwn's Life of Ma¯tocæ, where the saint who invents the Armenian script produces heavenly letters better than those Daniel saw, and brings them on a tablet more propitious than those that Moses bore down the slopes of mount Sinai to an ungrateful mob. I've applied it in a study of the story of St. Gregory the Illuminator and its iconography: Armenia's patron saint spends a longer time in his pit, and with more dragons, than did Jesus Christ in Hell before His Resurrection. But the song continues and the cart is moving. What is its itinerary? The divine Throne on its wheeled Chariot, descending first out of heaven, creaks down the right flank of Ararat, and only thereafter proceeds, from Armenia, that is, to the other holy mountain– Zion– at Jerusalem. The theophanic vision of Throne and Chariot thus comes to the mystic hymnologist St. Gregory, as it were, and to Armenia, even before it is vouchsafed to th prophet Ezekiel. (And presumably Grigor Narekacæi has also in mind the vision of Christ by his namesake, Gregory the Illuminator, in Vaøar¯apat, at the foot of Ararat– hence the present name of the town, E˙miacin, the place where God's sole-begotten Son descended.) Such usurpation by a sacred mountain of the Armenian highland of a lofty Biblical locus classicus  has a parallel, though not, chronologically, a precedent, in a mediaeval Armenian prayer which combines lines of the Paternoster and Psalm 133. The latter evokes the dew from heaven that falls on Mt. Hermon, in Israel, and the oil of the flowers that grow there is used to anoint the high priests, sons of Aaron, at the holy Temple. In the Armenian poem, this dew comes to the Armenian mountain Sukaw¥t first, where Alano-Armenian disciples of St. Thaddeus– the Oskeankæ and Sukæiaseankæ– were martyred; and from their blood grows the magic hamaspæiw˚  flower of Armenian mythology, a native complement to Hermon's blossoms and a nod to the particular composition of the Armenian miw˚on, "chrism", which, indeed, Narekacæi praises in the long 93rd chapter of the Matean. The mountain's name is itself theophoric: and Avestan Saoka (> Arm. *Soyk) happens to be preecisely the divinity through whom, according to the Zoroastrian Pahlavi Bundahi¯n, heavenly blessings are channelled down to earth. Though the prayer is in late middle Armenian, and cannot therefore formally be a precursor to St. Gregory of Narek's own hymn, it contains material unquestionably anterior to him, from both pre-Christian past and the legendry of the Apostolic tradition. And Narekacæi's present example of the usurped locus classicus  is, albeit in encoded form, a proud exegi monumentum; and it reminds one that, however absorbed was Narekacæi in the art of remembering the intimate and the cosmic, that he was an Armenian, of the race of golden-hairedVahagn and of king Artawazd imprisoned in Ararat and of the Illuminator who saw the temple of light at Ararat's base, he did not forget.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Censing= Xnkarkutæean uøecæoycæ, Jerusalem: St. James', 1991

Chrysostom= S. Yovhann¥s Oskeberan, I meknutæen¥ Mattæ¥i ˇa˚ XIX, in Kæaøuacoykæ i tæargmanutæeancæ naxneacæ handerj yoyn bnagraw, Vienna: Monastery of the Order of S. Astuacacin [Theotokos], 1849.

Mary Carruthers and Jan Ziolkowski, eds., The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Charles de Lamberterie, "Le nom de l'Évangile en arménien," Il Caucaso: Cerniera fra culture dal Mediterraneo alla Persia (secoli IV-XI), Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo XLIII, Spoleto, 1996, pp. 779-830.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Herman Melville, New York: Viking, 2000.

A. Kyo¯keryan, ed., Grigor Narekacæi, Taøer ev ganjer, Erevan: Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR, 1981.

S. La Porta, "Sorcerers, Witches, and Weasels: Grigor Tatæewacæi's Definitions of the Magical Arts," Revue des Études Arméniennes  28, 2001-2002, pp. 171-213.

A.R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. 

Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

A.∑. Mnacæakanyan, ed., Vardan Anecæi, Anecæi Vardana Vardapeti ergel i ka˚s... (Vasn ka˚acæ astuacutæeann nerboø), Banber Matenadarani  10, 1971, pp. 276-294.

Abp. Tiran Nersoyan, Pataragamatoycæ Hayastaneacæ A˚akelakan Surb Ekeøecæwoy, New York, 1950.

M. Ormanian, A Dictionary of the Armenian Church, New York: St. Vartan Press, n.d.

Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

James R. Russell, intro., Grigor Narekatsæi, Matean oghbergutæean (Facsimile repr. of the 1948 Buenos Aires ed.), Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1981.

James R. Russell, "A Mystic's Christmas in Armenia," Armenian Review, Summer 1987, Vol. 40, No. 2-158, pp. 1-13.

James R. Russell, "Grace from Van: A Micro-Historiola," Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies  7, 1994, pp. 35-45.

James R. Russell, "Gregory Narekatsi," in J. Greppin, ed., Studies in Classical Armenian Literature, Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1994(a), pp. 128-151.

James R. Russell, "Armenian ¯raw¯ak," Annual of Armenian Linguistics, 1996.

James R. Russell, "Armenian Spirituality: Liturgical Mysticism and Chapter 33 of the Book of Lamentation of St. Grigor Narekacæi," Revue des Études Arméniennes  26, 1996-1997, pp. 427-439.

James R. Russell, "The Four Elements and the Cross in Armenian Spirituality, with an Excursus on the Descent in Merkavah Mysticism," Jewish Studies Quarterly  4 (1997), no. 4, pp. 357-379.

James R. Russell, "Scythians and Avesta in an Armenian Vernacular Paternoster, and a Zok Paternoster," Le Muséon  110.1-2, 1997(a), pp. 91-114.

James R. Russell, "Truth is what the eye can see: Armenian manuscripts and Armenian spirituality," in T.F. Mathews and R.S. Wieck, eds., Treasures in Heaven: Armenian Art, Religion, and Society, New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library, 1998, pp. 147-162.

James R. Russell, "Bedros Tourian's Cruciform Prayer and Its Antecedents," Journal of Armenian Studies, Belmont, MA, Vol. VI, No. 2, Winter-Spring 2000-2001, pp. 27-45.

James R. Russell, "The Scepter of Tiridates," Le Muséon  114.1-2, 2001, pp. 187-215.

James R. Russell, "The Epic of the Pearl," Revue des Études Arméniennes  28, 2001-2002, pp. 29-100.

James R. Russell, "An Epic for the Borderlands: Zariadris of Sophene, Aslan the Rebel, Digenes Akrites, and the Mythologem of Alcestis in Armenia," in R. Hovannisian, ed., Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, UCLA Armenian History and Culture Series, Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces 3, Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002, pp. 147-183.

James R. Russell, "The Praise of Porridge," Le Muséon 116.1-2, 2003, pp. 137-179.

Robert W. Scheller, Exemplum: Model-Book Drawings and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the Middle Ages (ca. 900-ca. 1450), Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995.

Hraˇæya Tæamrazyan, "Banasteøcakan arvesti xndirner≤ Grigor Narekacæu steøcagorcutæyan me˙," A¯tanak  2, Erevan, 1998, pp. 114-133.

Tæamar Tasnapetean (Dasnabedian), ed., S. Banean, tr., Grigor Narekacæi, Patmutæiwn kensatu xaˇæin, Beirut, 1999.

Robert Thomson, The Armenian Version of the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, CSCO vol. 488 (text), 489 (translation), Louvain: Peeters, 1987.

Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo and Carol Stamatis Prendergast, eds., Memory and the Medieval Tomb, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000.

Alan R. Young, ed., The English Emblem Tradition, 5: Henry Peacham's Manuscript Emblem Books, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. 

Grover A. Zinn, "De Gradibus Ascensionum: The Stages of Contemplative Ascent in Two Treatises on Noah's Ark by Hugh of St. Victor," Studies in Medieval Culture  5, 1975, pp. 61-70.