By Fr. George Dorbarakis
1. Saint Gregory lived during the reign of Diocletian. He was a Parthian by descent, the son of Anak, a relative of Kusaros, king of Armenia. He was arrested by King Tiridates as a Christian and endured many punishments for this reason. When Tiridates learned, moreover, that he was the son of Anak the Parthian, who had murdered his father, he had his hands and feet bound and sent him to the city of Artaxata, where they cast him into a deep pit filled with wild beasts and reptiles. He lived in this pit for fifteen years, secretly fed by a widowed woman. Meanwhile, King Tiridates went mad; he ate his own flesh and lived among the pigs in the mountains. His sister, Kusarodukta, then had a dream and heard a voice saying: ‘Unless Gregory comes out of the pit, Tiridates will not recover.’ Indeed, Kusarodukta freed Gregory, and at the same time the king was healed. Gregory became Bishop of Armenia, baptized its inhabitants, built many churches, and finally departed peacefully to the Lord.
2. When one reads the life of Saint Gregory, the Enlightener of the Armenians, two things come to mind: either to close one's eyes in shame before the immensely great personality and the immense work of Gregory, vast in both depth and breadth, attempting to “repress” it into one's subconscious, or to begin weeping over one's own wretched condition. For this Saint—one man alone, and not thousands of “Christians” like us—who, according to the Hymnographer, “made himself a dwelling place of the Trinity,” that is, made himself a dwelling place of the Holy Trinity, succeeded, by the grace of God, in converting an entire pagan people to the Christian faith, a people tyrannized by the evil devil and his schemes. “By divine power you cast down the enemy who impiously ravaged the entire land of the Armenians; and having shone forth like a torch, you illumined with great light those who lay in the darkness of vanity, O wise one.” For this reason, the Saint is compared with the Holy Apostles, the disciples of the Lord; he is likened to Saint Gregory of Neocaesarea the Wonderworker, who, like today's Gregory, found very few Christians when he went to Neocaesarea and, when he departed this life, left very few pagans behind; and he calls to mind the more recent Saints Cyril and Methodios, the Enlighteners of the Slavs.
The grace of God worked in all the well-disposed hearts of the Armenians through His chosen instrument, Gregory, in three ways: through the power of his word, through the power of the miracles he performed, and through the wondrous sufferings he endured for his faith. His word, indeed, confirmed also by the miracles that God permitted him to perform, was filled with the power of God; it was not composed of human arguments, which usually strike the ears of men like “a clanging cymbal.” Through this word, the pagan temples fell and the demons hidden within them were driven away, while the hearts of the people were established in divine love, as the Hymnographer records in amazement: “By the might of your words, the temples were shattered, and the unestablished idols of the demons were cast down, while the hearts of the faithful were firmly established in divine eros.”
Yet it was above all in the sufferings he endured that he functioned as a beacon illuminating the people. These sufferings were his glory, corresponding to the Passion and martyrdom of the Lord his God. The profoundly theological poet of his service points this out in order to show what characterizes Christian martyrdom: “The Lord Most High, exalted in glory, raised you to a conspicuous height of martyrdom, O glorious one; you joyfully portrayed His sufferings, O Hieromartyr, crying out, Glory to Your power.”
This kind of Christian martyrdom, as participation in the martyrdom of Christ, produces results which, although unmistakable, are not immediately visible. The martyrdom of the Saints, that is, like the Passion of Christ, contains within it the mystery of the power of God. This means that, just as in the event of the Cross sin, death, and the devil were defeated without this being outwardly apparent, so also in the martyrdom of the Saints the devil and his instruments are crushed. What we wish to say, following the hymns of the feast, is that every blow of a Saint is also a blow against wickedness; every pain and suffering he endures brings the groaning and torment of the evil one. Let us see how beautifully the ecclesiastical poet once again presents this to us: “With the blows upon your cheeks, you crush the teeth of lions, and with streams of your blood you wipe away the filth of the demons; you utterly destroy the pillars of idols from their foundations, O greatly wondrous one.”
Perhaps at some point we must learn to see our own sufferings and our own pains in this life with this “eye” of faith: if we endure our sufferings with faith, then the power of God will also work through us, crushing evil and the devil. And then we too will begin, perhaps to some degree, to become enlighteners of our fellow human beings, so that they may find the true light, Jesus Christ.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
