The Life of Mashtots

guage comes from the mouth and pen of the clever rhetorical artist. Koriwn, this "blessed," "spiritual," "desirable," "holy," and "wondrous" writer, as our ancestors titled him, had fire within him to ignite and to set ablaze when he ascended the stage as a rhetorician or expressed himself in writing. In this temperament of his, we feel the triumphant power of his soul. He had learned the Armenian language in Mashtots’s school, within the circle of the pioneers of new Armenian literature, through the reading of the literature they produced, and he emerged as the first writer among his companions who authored an original work, the History of the Life of his Great Teacher, the first fruit of the new Armenian Literature.

How pleasant his style appeared even to his contemporaries, we see with the editor of Agathangelos, who wanted to be multi-colored and adorned with the countless lexical excerpts from this writing. At the beginning of the 8th century, the editor of the first section of Ghazar Parpetsi’s History affirms that he "has read many times" the "History by the desirable man Koryun" (page 13). In subsequent centuries, this writing was also hosted within Charentir collections of selected sermons/lives, with slight abbreviation.

34

7. Regarding the language, the judgment of Armenian scholars has been varied. The authors of the New Armenian Dictionary (Nakhadrunk, 14a) write: "The style is pure and genuine Armenian, sometimes simple, and sometimes sublime; yet the brevity brings darkness; which would have been more accessible to unskilled pens, had it not been testified by Parpetsi that it is understood through repeated reading34."

35, 36

Fr. M. Garagashean35 writes: "It is astonishing to see... (as in the works of Chrysostom and Basil) also in the works of Koryun the impossible abundance and the magnificent ornamentation of words, which do not cast boredom upon the listeners." Fr. H. Gatrchean36, considering the Agathangelos and Pawstos adjacent to Koriwn, characterizes his style: "It sounds like a bureaucratic or high-sounding imperial decree."

37

Norayr Buzandatsi37 expresses: "Flowery, magnificent, sublime; here is the Armenian of Koryun in the biography of Mashtots. What richness of well-sounding words; what spinning periods (période); how many ornaments; what handiwork and variety of sayings; how the voice rests at the end of every sentence as if you were reading a smooth poem; simultaneously, along with his decorative abundance, how well he knows how to give his ideas expression in sharp and concise turns with participles, and with what great art he pairs forms and constructions specific to the high literary language with forms and constructions of familiar speech." "Eznik and Koriwn are decorative writers; Eznik does not like to be affected at the cost of clarity; while Koryun’s ornaments obscure the clar-"

34: The author of the first section of Gh. Parpetsi’s History writes that he has "become informed with certainty by reading Mashtots’s Life many times" (p. 13); that is, what we have read many times, and from him, from Koriwn, is where we received our information; as we learned above.
35: Description of Studies, Vienna 1845, p. 29.
36: Excerpts from the translations of the ancients, Vienna 1849, p. 7.
37: Norayr, Koriwn, pp. 10—13.