Our Notes & References

First Georgian edition of Bellarmino’s celebrated catechism, used by Catholic missionaries to spread their faith amongst the Orthodox at a key time for Georgia.

A rare edition: we could trace only one copy in America (Yale) and one at auction in recent decades (more than 15 years ago).

Catholicism has a rich history in Georgia — in the early 18th century, with the Ottomans at the door, King Vakhtang VI corresponded with Pope Innocent XIII in an attempt to secure help for his beleaguered kingdom. By 1723, the Ottomans had divided Georgia and begun to print counter-propaganda like the Anvil, an extensive anti-Catholic treatise disputing the conclusions of the Council of Florence.

Playing an active part in this war of words was the Propaganda Fide, established in Rome in the previous century to train foreigners as Catholic missionaries. It had two permanent places for Georgians, and printed the first ever books in Georgian (in 1629), from its own original type.

The lovely last page of this edition bears their distinctive device with the motto “Euntes in mundum universum, praedicate evangelium omni creaturae” [Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, Mark 16:15]. Little is known about the translator, variously rendered David Tluk’aanti or Tlukaashvili, but his surname may indicate that he was not Georgian — in some editions he is “the Georgian” but in a later 1797 edition he is given the epithet of “the Armenian”.

Bellarmino was an Italian Jesuit and cardinal, known most for his role in serving the injunction on Galileo in 1616. This text, the “Compendio della dottrina cristiana” (1597), was used as a catechism for centuries: in the form of a dialogue between teacher and student, it aims to instil the habits of Christian faith and Catholic morality. Bellarmino was canonised and made a Doctor of the Church in 1930, and he is sometimes called the patron saint of catechists.

This version is the Dottrina cristiana breve (1597) rather than the più copiosa (1598), and was likely intended for travel and daily use, considering its reduced format compared to the other version, also published in Georgian that same year 1741 (but with an Italian title page). Other editions of this text were printed by the Propaganda Fide in an array of languages as diverse as Albanian, Maltese and Arabic.

With the inclusion of interesting, possibly original Georgian prayers not present in the original Italian. The prayers accompanying this text are very varied and adapted to local readers — the Albanian version omits them altogether, the English translation has longer prayers and graces, while the Italian original has a prayer for the Communion.

Bibliography

Blackwell, Richard J. 1991. Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible: Including a Translation of Foscarini’s Letter on the Motion of the Earth. Notre Dame, Ind ; University of Notre Dame Press. p. 126; ‘How the Georgian Language First Appeared in Print’, BL blog (online); K’arijashvili, D. 1929. Kartuli Wignis Bej’dvis Ist’oria. Sakhelgani. 39-43; Megeneishvili, Nino. 2021. ‘Textological-Codicological Analysis of Besarion Orbelishvili ‘Grdelmi”’. Karadeniz Uluslararası Bilimsel Dergi [Black Sea International Scientific Journal] 1 (51): 199–209; Tinikashvili, David. 2021. ‘An Anti-Catholic Georgian Theological Treatise (Eighteenth Century) in the Context of Georgian-European Relations’. The Catholic Historical Review 107 (4): 561–84.