ABSTRACT
The court-centred and courtly poetry of Shavteli, Chakhrukhadze, and Rustaveli does not derive entirely from the new world of entertainment, secular love, and knightly prowess. When Davit Aghmashenebeli, before his foreign wars, conquered first the enemy within, the ecclesiastical aristocracy that had allied itself to the centrifugal provincial nobility, he subjugated, rather than destroyed, its culture. The traditions of hagiography and hymnography became hackneyed, but not broken. Praise of Christ and the Virgin provided the structures and imagery for eulogy of the king and the queen. The clerics that returned to the Georgia that Davit was reconquering, pacifying, and rebuilding, under the firm government of the bishop of Chqondidi (who was also secretary of state), expressed themselves in their security at the new centres of learning and worship, Gelati and Iqalto, with less pathos and more pomp than they had as exiles in multi-ethnic monasteries abroad. We can see stylization and didacticism, rather than religious passion, in the short lyric by the philosopher Ioane Petritsi (იოანე პეტრიწი c1050–1125) ‘Not for Love of the World’ (არ სიყვარულისათვის სოფლისა) where an elaborate triple acrostic gives the poem both a vertical and a horizontal reading: Know, take this to your mind, Why should you not hate the world? Do not make the fleeting world, like nothingness, a reality! May you look up to an entity that is truer, In every way you shall aspire to the eternal life of the sun.
