Toss away the black robes

Vahe H Apelian\\V

The black robe is expected to symbolize the piety of the clergy and impartiality of judges, and justices.  Let me say upfront. I am not suggesting that the clergy and the justices toss their robes.  Read on,  if you are interested to hear.

I do not know when the tradition of wearing black robes started within the Armenian Apostolic Church. I doubt that Gregory the Illuminator wore a plain black robe when he sat on the ecclesiastical throne King Drtad III established for him or both cooperated in establishing the Apostolic ecclesiastical throne. Let us be mindful that he was a blue blood. He was a son of Parthian king (prince?) Arnak.  His two sons, St. Aristages and St. Vrtanes and his grandson St. Husik inherited the Apostolic church throne. For almost next two centuries the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin was related to Gregory Illuminator one way or another.  Surely, at one point the Catholicos, as well as the clergy, started wearing a black robe. 

Chief Justice of SCOTUS John Marshall is credited to having started in the early 19th century the tradition of judges wearing a black robe to symbolize neutrality and uniformity in the courtroom. I quote from Wikipedia: “John Marshall (September 24, 1755 – July 6, 1835) was an American statesman, lawyer, and Founding Father who served as the fourth chief justice of the United States from 1801 until his death in 1835. He remains the longest-serving chief justice and fourth-longest serving justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and is widely regarded as one of the most influential justices ever to serve.” 

With all that is going on in Armenia and in the U.S. of America, the public is hard-pressed to accept that the Armenian Apostolic clergy and the justices of the SCOTUS are living up to all that the black robe they wear is meant to symbolize. 

Wearing a white laboratory coat was a second nature for me throughout those years I worked to earn a living. The white laboratory lab coats are all together for a different perpose. They are meant to safeguard the public from laboratory work. Unlike the clergy and the justices, the scientists or the technicians who wear laboratory white coats take them off when they step outside the laboratory, whether for lunch breaks, or presentations of their work  or for doing the necessary work in the office. It is said that the laboratory lab coat symbolizes LABOR in the laboratory and not ORATORY, outside the laboratory.

In the attached picture I am depicted in my laboratory coat in a lab in the scientific institute of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. I was a recipient of Calouste Gulbenkain Foundation scholarship. After my graduation from the pharmacy school of the American University of Beirut (AUB), I was qualified to further my studies for a master’s degree. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation invited me and a few other Armenian students for a summer long laboratory work in their scientific institute outside Lisbon. The other pictures are self-evident.

Black robes cloud judgement. 

I did not mean for the Armenian Apostolic clergy or the SCOTUS justices toss their black robes, but for the public to toss the black robe they wear. I do not mean to have them disrobed to the point of Gandhi, but see them in ordinary attire, much like the scientists of the Moderna laboratories who came up with and produced the Covid-19 vaccine, or Artem Patapoutian who won the Noble Prize for his breakthrough work, wear outside the laboratory. It behooves us to see the man without the black robe he is wearing.  

When the nation was breaking apart from its seams, president Abraham Lincoln was not wearing a black robe when he concluded his second inaugural speech saying: "With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan ~ to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."