Shot’ha Rust’haveli - The Man in the Panthers Skin

THIS is an attempt to give a faithful rendering, word by word, of a book which is the mirror of the soul of a cultured people with a great past; the mirror is chipped and tarnished by time and mischance, but the loving labour of scholars may soon renew its lustre and repair some of its injuries. Even in the state in which it is here presented the work can hardly fail to provoke interest. The history of the poem makes it worthy of perusal, for it has been in a unique manner the book of a nation for seven hundred years; down to our own days the young people learned it by heart; every woman was expected to know every word of it, and on her marriage to carry a copy of it to her new home. Such veneration shown for so long a period proves that the story of the Panther-clad Knight presents an image of the Georgian outlook on life, and justifies the presumption that merits tested by the experience of a quarter of a million days, most of them troublous, may be apparent to other races, that such a book may be of value to mankind, and chiefly to those peoples which, like the Georgian, came under the influence of Greek and Christian ideals. Here we are dealing with no alien psychology, but with a soul which, though readily responsive to the great cultural movements of nearer Asia, 1 showed in a thousand years of struggle that its natural gravitation was towards Western Europe, whither with pathetic constancy it kept its gaze fixed. 2 Iberia of the East and Iberia of the West, the high-water marks of Arab conquest, were both fertilized by the Semitic flood, and, whether or not they have some ancient ethnic affinity, this has given them not a few common characteristics; Spain had Christendom at her back, Georgia carried on her glorious crusade in isolation till the struggle was hopeless, and a century ago she was forced into an alliance with the Russian Empire. From her situation, geographical and political, Georgia was the country most likely to show that approximation of Eastern and Western thought typical of the epoch of the Crusades, and in these latter days it is largely due to the infusion of Iberian blood that Turkey and Persia have still sufficient vitality to attempt reforms.
It might have been expected that a people whose life was a ceaseless fight to keep for Christendom the bridge between Asia and Europe would have put into its greatest artistic effort an uncompromising confession of faith; but freedom of thought rather than fanaticism is characteristic of Shotha, so at various times, down to the eighteenth century, the orthodox clergy destroyed manuscripts of the poem, and the editio princeps of 1712 could only appear because its royal editor appended to it a pious mystical commentary. We find one reference apiece to Mohammed (1010) and Mecca (1144), and three mentions of the Koran (339, 514, 1144); the official representatives of Islam are spoken of with scant sympathy (339). To Christianity as an ecclesiastical system we have, possibly, allusions (Easter Eve, 536; icon, 247; shrine, 1345; halo, aureole, 226, 229, 1110, 1410); there may be a few quotations from the Scriptures ("gall of bitterness," 99; "hart and waterbrooks," 835, 1564; "tinkling cymbals," 772;" charity faileth not," 1520; "through a glass darkly," 110, 656, 707, 1431; "hidden treasure," ?882; "be content," "judge not," 18; "rivers run into the sea," 49); the Biblical personages incidentally mentioned are--Adam, Beelzebub, ?Ezra, Goliath, Levi, and Satan, and the geographical, names Eden, Euphrates, Gihon, Pison, and Gibeon, are used in similes; there seems to be a reference to the doctrine of regeneration (184), and another perhaps to purgatory (785).
When he wrote his poem, Rusthaveli had evidently no violent prejudice for one religion more than another, but was of a critical and eclectic turn of mind, and formed for himself a working philosophy of life, showing Persian and Arabian tendencies, but with so much of Christianity and Neo-Platonism as to bring it near to Occidental minds. "The Georgians in the tenth and eleventh centuries interested themselves in the domain of philosophy in those same questions which occupied the leading minds of the Christian world of that period both in the East and the West, with this distinction from the others--e.g., Europeans--that in those days the Georgians responded earlier than others to the newest tendencies of philosophic thought, and worked in a panoply, exemplary for its time, of textual criticism directly on the Greek originals." 1