Arsen of Sapara

Arsen of Sapara was a catholicos of Georgia and a historian, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and worked at the Sapara monastery in southern Georgia. The sources at hand do not say that he was canonized, nor do they give a day of commemoration.

His only surviving work is On the Separation of the Georgians and the Armenians, written after the year 1004. It is a treatise against Monophysitism and an important source for the church history of the Caucasus in the sixth and seventh centuries. It covers the church and political history of the countries of the South Caucasus, from the beginning of the fourth century to the end of the seventh.

In the work he analyses how the Armenian Monophysite Church was formed and the relations of Georgia and Armenia with Byzantium and Sasanian Persia. Arsen condemned Monophysitism, but maintained the innocence of the people who were forced to accept this faith. The work presents the Georgian view of the separation between the two Churches.