Gérard Garitte

Gérard Garitte (15 January 1914 – 27 August 1990) was a Belgian philologist and orientalist.

From 1944 to 1946, he worked at the Vatican Library. Afterwards, he came to the Catholic University of Leuven, where he was appointed professor in 1950. He raised the study of Georgian ecclesiastical literature to a high level. In 1959, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Human Sciences ("Orientalisme chrétien - Philologie classique"). In 1962, strongly opposed to the expulsion of French speakers from the Catholic University of Leuven, he created the ACAPSUL movement together with Georges Lemaître to fight against the split of the university.

Biography Gérard Garitte was born in 1914 in the village of Houdeng-Gœgnies in Hainaut Province, Belgium. He earned a degree in classical philology in 1935 and another degree in Oriental philology and history in 1936. On the eve of World War II, he was in Rome as a research fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, spending time in the Latin archives of the Chapter of Saint Peter and the reading room of Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library. On the basis of his researches, he published lengthy studies of the works of Saint Anthony. He received his doctorate in 1940 for his dissertation titled Un témoin important du texte de la vie de s. Antoine par s. Athanase. After the German invasion of Belgium that same year, he returned to Rome, where he lived in difficult conditions —he was trapped in Vatican City until 1944 —and studied several Oriental languages. He worked at the Vatican Library from 1944 to 1946, then divided his time between Rome, Florence, and Paris. Garitte published several works on the versions of the History of Armenia attributed to Agathangelos, which are in various languages such as Armenian, Greek, and Arabic. He also continued to research on Saint Anthony and other figures of Eastern Christianity throughout his career.

In 1946, he became a lecturer at the Catholic University of Leuven where he taught Greek paleography, Byzantine philology and history, Oriental languages, Coptic, Old Georgian, Classical Armenian, Byzantine and Modern Greek. In 1950, he became a full professor at Leuven; the same year, he married in Rome. Starting in 1950, Garitte directed the academic journal Le Muséon. Also in 1950, he participated in an expedition organized by the US Library of Congress to Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai to photograph the Greek and Oriental manuscripts held there. In 1957, he returned to Mount Sinai on a UNESCO fact-finding mission. That same year, he signed on behalf of the United Nations the treaty which ended the first Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula. In 1959, he was awarded the Francqui Prize for his entire body of work, which was credited with "bringing scientific renown to Belgium abroad." He was a visiting professor for the chair of Armenian language and literature at Harvard University in 1960, but he turned down an offer to remain there (the chair was subsequently held by Garitte's student Robert W. Thomson). Instead, in 1962 he created the chair in Georgian language and literature at Leuven. That year, he was also elected to the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium. He was opposed to the division of the Catholic University of Leuven into separate French- and Flemish-speaking institutions, which occurred in 1968.

He became professor emeritus of the Catholic University of Leuven in 1978 and continued to publish works afterwards. He often focused on Armenia in his post-retirement studies, researching questions of Armenian-Byzantine relations. His last works were about Byzantine-Persian relations during the reign of the emperor Heraclius . He died on 27 August 1990.

Selected works

(1946) A publication and study of some of the versions of the fifth-century History of Armenia attributed to Agathangelos. (1952) A critical edition and commentary on the Narratio de rebus Armeniae. (1956) (1980) A collection of academic articles by Garitte.