For the truly great, there are no easy lives or easy times. Among the boundless multitude of us mortals, the great themselves mark out their time and their task, and their life and time become a difficult life, a difficult time. They mark out the span of their earthly lives by recognising the lives and conduct of their forebears as boundaries and boundary stones.
Such was Tumanyan’s life, such were the lives of Komitas Vardapet and Charents.
Thus lived and worked Nerses the Great of Ashtarak; thus the great Catholicos Vazgen marked out his life and filled it with the living substance of his nation.
What an upright, clear-minded, fearless man he was, what a great Armenian, what an elder and guardian by birth! With his vigilant, living presence, you could lay your head peacefully on your pillow, innocently certain that no one would undermine your house or raise a treacherous sword above your head. His conduct and his mere presence made your ill-wishers tolerant, the tolerant your friends, and placed you amid a close-knit multitude of friends.
Rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar’s and unto God what was God’s, he never drove them apart, but brought them close to himself and united them in his gift of grace, thus never alienating from the nation what constitutes its inalienable strength: national unity.
During the forty years of his reign, this earth, torn apart, endlessly cracking, separating nations and peoples, splitting unions, cutting the present from the past, dividing family and church—during the forty years of his gracious reign, it never deepened its abysses beneath our people and homeland. On the contrary, never, at any other time, had we been so united in will and purpose.
Blessed is the one who, following his example as he followed that of our great forebears, will become the embodiment and symbol of the nation’s unity. In that man’s commanding presence, may we remain proud as rulers, restrained as men, steadfast as soldiers, as we were during His Holiness’s lifetime, as his conduct and character compelled us to be.
24 August 1994.