Two Armenian Historians: Kirakos of Gandzak and Ukhtanes of Edessa

IV
INTRODUCTION.

wanted to avoid repetitions; yet the writing of Vanacan has not been able to be found until now. According to Vardan (Ven. p. 147), the narrative started there in the year 1236 and embraced at most fifteen years, since Vanacan died, according to Kiracos, on Saturday 18 March 1251.

The two Armenian authors who have sketched the picture of their national literature, the Mekhitarist Fathers Somal and Garégin, do not express themselves with praise on the style of Kiracos, which is indeed excessively simple, without however reaching the incorrectness and coarseness of certain writers of the late period. What they praise above all in him, although he was a pronounced anti-Chalcedonian (p. 17), is his orthodoxy regarding the dogma of the procession of the Holy Spirit, that is to say, of course, the conformity of his doctrines with those of the Roman church. It was in 1251, according to Vardan (Ven. p. 148), that Pope Innocent IV raised this question again among the Eastern Christians, Greeks, Syrians, Iberians, Armenians, who rejected the Roman dogma (Vardan, Mosc. p. 194), while the Armenians, following a variant of the Venice manuscript, which seems correct to me, adopted it. I say "which seems to me," because if, indeed, §§ LI—LIII of Kiracos approach the Latin version very closely; if even, at bottom, this version was approved by the authentic conclusum conclusion of the Council of Florence, proclaimed on 6 July 1439, and found very admissible, in 1717, by the doctors of the Sorbonne, with whom Peter the Great had treated verbally of this matter 1), on the other hand, the catholicos Nersès the Graceful in his letter to Alexius Comnenus, such as Kiracos gives it, at the end of § III, expresses himself very categorically in the terms of the Greek formula "from the Father." Also, I hesitate a great deal to believe that the Eastern Armenians and notably Vardan, Vanacan, and Kiracos, really agreed in the sense of the Pope; for it is known that in questions of this kind it is not only the substance, but also the form and every word of the formula, having a sacramental force, which must be admitted, under pain of non-conformity and anathema. In any case, it is very certain that the Armenian catholicos Constantine 1st and the 3rd council of Sis, convened for this purpose, in 1251, admitted the thesis and the formula "filioque" and from the Son, while making there the modification "from the Father by the Son," admitted by the Council of Florence; but when they were required that the dogma, with the Latin formula, be introduced into the liturgy and in all theological works, the Armenians formally refused. This had already happened a century earlier, when after the death of Nersès the Graceful, the Greek emperor had required of the Armenians a similar act of conformity with regard to the Greek formulas. They had opposed to him an invincible resistance. The Council of Florence, after apparent concessions, during the theological struggle, had also obtained for conclusion only the same categorical refusal from the Greeks and the Armenians. In the profession of faith published by Schröder, Gramm. arm., p. 251, one also reads the simple formula "from the Father," and in the commentary, on this passage, p. 265, several passages of Gregory of Narec are identical, it is true; but on the following page the same

1) Hist. of the universal Catholic Church, by Rohrbacher, vol. XI, p. 564; Hist. of Siunia, Fr. trans. p. 305.