Michael PAPAZIAN. The Doctor of Mercy. The Sacred Treasures of St. Gregory of Narek. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic, 2019. pp. xxiii + 254, incl. name and subject index, $36.99 hardback. ISBN 978081 4685013. Reviewed by Guy C. CARTER, St. Peter’s University, Jersey City, NJ 1992-2002.

 Across a thousand years we hear the voice of a man facing his own death from an unnamed illness, a member of an ancient and noble nation always surviving precariously on the knife-edge of history, a motherless child commended by his father to the Church as his new mother, a Christian monk, priest and scholar who internalized the Bible in the poetry of scripture, iconography and liturgy and who participated in the drama of church controversies that echo down to the present in both East and West.  It is an urgent voice expressed in ninety-five complex and beautifully crafted prayers, not his first book but his last, and his spiritual last will and testament at that, one of the proud treasures of each Armenian home. 

The man is Gregory of Narek (Krikor Narekatsi), priest-monk of Narek in the Kingdom of Vaspurakan, long acclaimed a saint in the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox and the Armenian Rite Catholic Churches, regarded a Doctor of the Universal Church by Pope Saint John Paul II and acclaimed as such by Pope Francis.  His works are among the most treasured writings of the Armenian Church.  This one, the subject of this masterful study, is expressively titled, Speaking with God from the Depths of the Heart,or simply The Lamentations.  Our guide to its meaning and multi-layered context is Michael Papazian, Professor of Philosophy at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, USA, scholar of Greek philosophy and medieval Armenian theology, who brings an impressive depth and breadth of acumen in historical and ecumenical theology to bear.  This book is not only a monumental work of scholarship.  The author writes out of the depths of his own heart and living faith.  In many places Professor Papazian explains how Gregory’s masterpiece is part of the living faith and community of Armenian Christians today.

This beautifully written book of late Patrology has as its specific occasion an interpretation for the Latin Church of the significance of Pope Francis’ 2015 elevation of St. Gregory of Narek.  A near contemporary of St. Hildegard of Bingen, whose status as Doctor was re-acclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI, Gregory participated in an intellectual and religious renaissance of the late 10th and early 11th century in the East marked by as much ferment as that of the Cluniac Reforms and the age of Ss. Bernard and Hildegard, Abelard and the beginnings of Scholasticism in the West.  Without specifically meaning to, the author reveals some surprising parallels between the historical theology of the West and specifically the Armenian Church.  For instance, the iconoclastic profile of the T’ondrakean heresy, e.g., sounds dissonant tones similar those of the Lollard proto-Reformation and the Radical Reformation.  It was against this threat that Gregory developed his profoundly sacramental theology.  Whereas the Augustinian doctrine of original sin simply does not register on the radar in either Byzantine or ‘Oriental’ Orthodoxy, Armenian theologians were aware of the epic show-down between Saint Augustine and Pelagius. They arrived at their own Augustinian-like conclusions about grace election both from their response to the Julianist controversy in Christology and Soteriology.   Though the debate and eventual dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mother may be considered an exclusively Western issue, hammered out in debate at Paris between its Dominican opponents and Franciscan proponents, Gregory comes very close to affirming the equivalent in both The Lamentations and in his Encomium on the Holy Virgin.  The ecumenical graciousness of Gregory toward the Chalcedonian churches of East and West, is evident in his charitable sense that, even if they do not distinguish correctly in their theology between the extremes of Dyophysitism (Chalcedonian Byzantines and Latins) and Monophysitism (Copts et al.), apparently unconscious of the golden Christological mean of (Armenian) Miaphysitism, the Chalcedonians do intend to affirm the full humanity and divinity of Christ and the assumption of humanity in Christ in the work of salvation culminating in Theosis.  Papazian sees Gregory’s overall attitude toward women in concert with the Armenian Church’s continued practice of ordaining women to the diaconate.

Gregory was not unique in being imbued with the theology of the Cappadocian Fathers, especially Saints Gregory of Nyssa (‘Nyssen’) and Gregory of Nazianzen, as well as the monastic ideals of Saint Basil the Great, but indebted to the Cappadocians he was, especially to their use of allegory.  The very structure of The Lamentations is an allegory of the Church.  The heart and mind are directed toward transformational union with God (Theosis) by entering the Church, like neophytes, and progressing further, an action analogous to the union of the human and the divine natures in the one Christ and the union between Christ and the Church. 

Gregory’s theology of repentance, built around the parable of the Good Samaritan and expounded by Papazian in Chapters 6 and 7, is a true theologia crucis, absolutely striking, with applications he could not have foreseen.  As the soul gazes upon the Crucified and is shamed into contrition by the costliness of God’s love (as in Peter Abelard’s Soteriology), the soul becomes conscious of responsibility for the pain of others.  Ascent to union with Christ goes beyond forgiveness of the enemy who has injured me.  Much more—and the most difficult challenge of following Christ, according to Gregory—is that I must love, do good toward and “bless” the neighbor whom I have wronged and hurt and even anathematized.  Gregory may be thinking specifically of his anathematizing zeal toward the T’ondrakeans.  For those who know the work of Bogdan Białek in the city of Kielce, Poland, reconciling victims of the Kielce Pogrom of 1946, their descendants and the descendants of the perpetrators of the pogrom, Gregory’s approach toward the one I have injured, for whom restorative justice is impossible, will ring true.  This only works sociologically if consciousness of guilt as my failure to take responsibility for the other underlies the rage exhibited in social conflict.

            In our own hour of fear and doubt about the endurance of societies, civilization and the planet, The Doctor of Mercy is a treasure chest well worth opening