Nerses of Lambron

Nerses was born in 1153 at the castle of Lambron in Cilicia, Armenian Cilicia, the kingdom Armenians had built along the southeastern coast of Asia Minor after the Seljuk conquest of their homeland. He was a great-nephew of the Catholicos Nerses IV, and his family were among the ruling barons of the region. He was educated in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian, which put him in a very small class of men in the twelfth century.

He became a monk young, was consecrated bishop at twenty-two, and by 1176 was archbishop of Tarsus, Paul's city. He held that see until his death on 14 July 1198, at forty-five.

His life's work was reconciliation, and it made him unpopular at home.

The Armenian church had been separated from the Greek church since the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Nerses did not think the separation was worth what it cost. He led the Armenian delegations in negotiations with Constantinople, and at the Council of Hromkla in 1179 he delivered the Synodal Discourse, one of the great sermons of the medieval East. He told his own bishops that most of what divided them from the Greeks and the Latins was custom, not faith, the shape of a vestment, the day of a fast, whether water is mixed with the wine, and that men were treating their own habits as though they were the Gospel. He argued that unity in the essentials should not wait on uniformity in the rest.

It did not work. The Byzantine emperor Manuel I died in 1180 and the union collapsed with him. Nerses was attacked by Armenian conservatives as a compromiser, and he wrote a long letter to King Leo II defending himself that is one of the frankest documents of the period.

He kept working. He translated widely into Armenian, the Rule of Benedict, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, works of the Syriac and Greek fathers, because he thought his church should be able to read what other churches actually said before condemning them. He wrote commentaries on the Psalms, on the Twelve Prophets, on Revelation, and on the catholic epistles, and an explanation of the Armenian liturgy that is still the standard one.

He crowned Leo II first king of Armenian Cilicia in 1198, and died a few months later.

Sources: Nerses of Lambron, Synodal Discourse and Commentary on the Divine Liturgy; Vahan Hovhanessian, ed., The Armenian Church and the Councils; Sirarpie Der Nersessian, The Armenians; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).