The Life of Mashtots

INTRODUCTION

"After Christ, in the 1st–4th centuries, a terrible laziness of mind is seen in the Roman State, which spreads not only over the military sphere but also over all other spheres. No remarkable innovation appeared in art, nor in crafts, nor in state administration. Literature also turns toward vain imitation of past creations, which is gradually decreasing and fading. One man alone forms an exception: the religious one. Neo-Platonic philosophy and the creative flourishing of Christian doctrine are the only creative achievements that defend this era against the accusation of absolute nothingness. In this point, Cappadocia and Syria were productive" 1.

While civilized states, with high culture, were decaying, bowing, and becoming prey for barbarian peoples, a barbarian people of the northern Caucasus, having shaken off the rust of pagan antiquity, was adorning itself with new feathers in Christian attire, ennobling and refining its mind and heart, its life and customs, and preparing to dress itself in an original, proprietary literature (218–408). And a child of that people, Mashtots, emerges with high genius and inventive vigor, and creates alphabets for the barbarian languages of three peoples, giving them the impulse to cultivate their own literature and to participate in the academy of literate peoples. He even invites a fourth people, the Caucasian Albanians, to partake in the benefits of writing. Thus, at the dawn of the 5th century, the Armenians, Georgians, and Albanians shine with literature, throughout the entire north, where Christianity had also been preached through the mediation of the Armenians. And the Alan-Gothic people, who had settled in the Eastern Roman State through migration from the north, under the influence of Hellenic civilization and in danger of being consumed by that influence, pulls itself out of that furnace with its powerful arm; he invents a newly crafted alphabet for its language and makes it possible to develop a literature for a dialect belonging to the German language group, which, although it lived a short life, became the pride of the multi-branched German tribes and the first beginning of the future world-dominating German-speaking literature.

That great genius dedicated his energies primarily to the flourishing of his own people’s culture, to the prosperity of Armenian literature, and to the soaring of the Armenian language to classical heights. He translates rhetoric-skilled orators, instructed and cultivated with fine Hellenic taste, and magnificent writers into his own world, making them speak eloquently in Armenian on the Armenian stage, even more sublimely.

1 Seeck, Untergang des Römischen Reiches.