The Body as God’s Judgement: Ordeal Somatics and Political Theology in the Narrative of Agathangelos

Abstract

This article analyzes the confrontation between Gregory the Illuminator and King Tiridates III in Agathangelos’ History of Armenia through the lens of ordeal as a mechanism of legitimation and an instrument of political theology. The central argument holds that Agathangelos structures his narrative according to the principle of serial divine judgment, in which the positions of judge and defendant prove to be inverted: Tiridates believes he is testing Gregory — yet the true object of divine sentence is the king himself. Each of the ordeals — by salt, fire, water, air, and finally years of confinement in an underground dungeon — constitutes a distinct “round” of this judgment, from which Gregory invariably emerges victorious. The article examines the semantics of each element within Armenian, Iranian, and biblical traditions: salt as an instrument of symbolic mummification and sacred oath, fire as an appeal to the Zoroastrian sacred order, water as the ambivalent element of chaos and baptism, air as an attempt to sever the bond between body and spirit. The dungeon is read as the ultimate ordeal — an attempt to erase the saint from the world of the living, which instead becomes a space of spiritual maturation. In parallel, the article traces the symmetrical trajectory of Tiridates’ defeat: the hybrist king degrades to the chthonic state of a boar-shapeshifter, is healed and converted — but at the cost of his sovereign will. The typological parallel with the confrontation of Moses and Pharaoh inscribes the Armenian narrative into universal sacred history, endowing local events with cosmic significance. The final inversion of power positions reveals the true ideological program of the text: the History of Armenia is not merely a hagiographic narrative, but a manifesto of the structural supremacy of spiritual over secular authority — one that established the matrix of Armenian historiographical tradition and continues to shape the institutional logic of the Armenian Apostolic Church to the present day.