GEORGIAN POLITICAL THEOLOGY AT THE CROSSROADS OF CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE ENLIGHTENMNET ("RUIS-URBNISI LEGAL DECREE" AND "KALMASOBA" BY IOANE BATONISHVILI)

The following article portrayed the fundamental principles of Georgian political thought, which historically represented a synthesis of Christian teachings and philosophical reasoning. Georgia is a country that has not waged a war of qonquest throughout its 2,000-year history of Christianity, and since the origins of philosophical thought are directly connected to the idea of sovereignty, the work unveils those type of Georgian political ideas that always been formed on the basis of Christian beliefs, was taking the form of Christian Philosophy, and ultimately developed into Georgian Politcal Theology. To illustrate this, the paper draws on two key documents: “Ruis-Urbnisi Legal Decree” – the first medieval text of original Georgian canonical writing (11th Century), and “Kalmasoba” by the nobleman Ioane Batonishvili – the first Georgian text with characteristics of the Enlightenment era (1813-1828). In the first case, the text is the chronotype of Orthodox Church’s canonry, while in the second case, a work of the encyclopedic genre that conveys knowledge across every field of the history of intellectual thought.