A Nation Among Other Nations: The Political Theology of the Conversion of Georgia
By Nikoloz Aleksidze
ABSTRACT
The two medieval Caucasian cultures, Armenian and Georgian, experienced Christianization both as a single event in history and as a long history of the formation of national identity. The Georgian vision of the conversion is elaborated in several early medieval narratives and principally in the short narrative known as the Conversion of Kartli (Georgia). Here conversion is perceived not only as a story of Georgia becoming Christian, but also as a process of the formation of Georgia as a body politic and of its acquiring a place in the universal history and a specific political function within the Christian oecumene.The symbolic imagery forged in Late Antiquity has been consistently replicated in later Georgian identity discourses, particularly in the rhetoric of the nineteenth century national movement.
Here
____________________