Ветхозаветные образы в великом каноне Андрея Критского и в «Книге скорбных песнопений» Григора Нарекаци

Abstract

The Great Canon, composed in the early 8th century by St. Andrew, the archbishop of Gortyna in Crete, became an integral part of the Great Lent services of the Orthodox Church and thus acquired the status of the main penitential hymnographic work. It abounds with examples from the Old and New Testaments: St. Andrew describes persons and events from biblical history, starting from the creation of the first man, and uses them to reflect the moral state of man, deriving from their actions both warnings and reproofs, as well as examples of hope and trust in the mercy of the Creator. The mystical poem The Book of Lamentations, written by the Armenian hymnographer Grigor, a monk and vardapet of the Narek monastery, in the very first years of the 11th century (presumably in 1002), also sets the incitement of a repentant mood in the soul of the reader together with contrition for sins as one of its aims, in which it intersects very closely with the Great Canon. A certain similarity in the approach to the use of biblical figured between these two penitential works, although belonging to different Christian traditions, had been noted by those few researchers who were familiar with both the Great Canon and The Book of Lamentations, but a closer study of this similarity – or, on the contrary, differences in the approach of the authors – has not yet been undertaken. This paper will attempt to compare the exegetical principles of these great Christian poets on the examples taken from the Old Testament.