Des Parthes au Califat. Quatre leçons sur la formation de l’identité arménienne

Throughout its history, Armenia has never ceased to look to the West. An ally of Rome from the time of Pompey, Christian in the Constantinian era, it has never made a secret of its aversion to the Sassanid Persians, nor, later, of its distrust of Islam. Yet linguistic, geopolitical and cultural realities attest to the primordial importance of Eastern components, which its national ideology has always sought to underplay. These four lessons on the Formation of Armenian Identity, presented at the Collège de France in 1993, endeavor to refocus the main stages of a hybridization process during the first Christian millennium, which gave Armenians an ambiguous external image and a paradoxical self-awareness; Christian as in Byzantium, but in love with the Iranian aristocratic ideal; nourished by Greek patristics, but more permeable to the current of Syriac-speaking churches; resistant to Islam, but concordant with the Caliphate; language and nation rather than state; a denomination attached to its Christian origins, yet jealous of its historical singularities. Guarantor of the founding traditions of national identity, the Church accompanies Armenians in all the countries to which the vicissitudes of history push them, as a center that brings them together and keeps them faithful to themselves.