An Armenian monk's thousand-year-old prayer book is treated like a talisman
Around 1002, a monk on the shores of Lake Van finished 95 chapters of anguished prayer, each addressed straight to God. Armenians have kept Gregory of Narek's Book of Lamentations at home for centuries, second in affection only to the Bible, reading passages to the sick in hope of a cure. In 2015 the Pope named him a Doctor of the Church.
Gregory was born around 950 in the Armenian kingdom of Vaspurakan, a region centred on Lake Van that one historian calls the cradle of Armenian civilisation. His mother died when he was small, and his father, a relative of the ruling Artsruni family, became a bishop after being widowed, only to be excommunicated over views close to Byzantine doctrine. Gregory and his brother were sent to the monastery of Narek, founded by their great-uncle Anania, a celebrated scholar. Ordained a priest in 977, Gregory taught theology there until his death, sometime between 1003 and 1011.
The Book of Lamentations, often simply called the Narek, runs to more than 10,000 lines. Nearly every chapter carries the same title, words to God from the depths of the heart. Its engine is a conflict: the longing to be perfect as Christ taught, set against the certainty that perfection is impossible and that the speaker is unworthy of grace, a gap only divine mercy can close. Critics compare its tone to Augustine's Confessions; one scholar called Gregory a cross between Augustine and James Joyce.
Gregory's emphasis on salvation through faith and grace led some to cast him as a forerunner of Protestantism, a reading more recent scholars dispute. He lived under suspicion himself. His great-uncle had been condemned for supposed sympathy with the Tondrakians, a sect that rejected the sacraments and the veneration of the cross, and Gregory wrote a treatise against them in the 980s, perhaps partly to clear his own name. His commentary on the Song of Songs, composed in the year of his ordination at a prince's request, also attacks them.
He wrote hymns still sung in Armenian churches and around two dozen odes that are the first documented religious poems in Armenian. An attempted printing of his masterpiece in Marseille in 1673 was blocked by Vatican censors; today it exists in three English translations, the first published in 1977.
Source: Gregory of Narek
