A Historical-Index Measurement Framework for Agentic Capital: The Georgian Church, Monastic Knowledge Networks, and Institutional Resilience

Abstract

This article develops a theoretical and methodological framework for measuring agentic capital through historical indices, using the Georgian Church as a longitudinal institutional case. It argues that durable institutional status emerges from the cumulative interaction of legitimacy, knowledge accumulation and transfer, monastic networks, effective institutional leadership, autonomy, external recognition, and post-shock recovery. Accordingly, the Georgian Church is analyzed as an institution that converted knowledge, canonical authority, reputation, and organizational memory into long-term resilience and international positioning. The empirical foundation is an author-constructed historical-index dataset covering AD 33-1990. Historical events, ecclesiastical statuses, monastic centres, hagiographic evidence, Georgian knowledge networks abroad, and episodes of external recognition are coded on a 0-100 scale and organized into twelve interrelated indices. The analysis combines descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, principal component analysis, HAC-OLS, interaction and threshold specifications, ridge regression, and first-difference event regressions. These techniques are used to examine structured associations, cumulative co-development, and conditional effects within the coded dataset; they are not intended to establish direct historical causality. The results associate the Georgian Church's international institutional positioning with the combined operation of knowledge capital, institutional autonomy, external recognition, and recovery capacity. Georgian monasteries abroad, the network legacy of the Syrian Fathers, the academic traditions of Gelati and Ikalto, and the intellectual and canonical activity of George the Hagiorite and other ecclesiastical actors provide the principal mechanisms through which knowledge was converted into status, and institutional memory was transformed into a resource for recovery. The sequence of abolition in 1811, restoration in 1917, and formal recognition by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1990 further shows that the loss of formal autonomy did not eliminate accumulated legitimacy or knowledge capital. The article contributes an econometric framework based on historical indices that connects historical ecclesiology, institutional economics, knowledge-capital theory, and the concept of the agentic economy. Its numerical estimates are generated from an explicit author-coded database and should be interpreted as model-based representations of historical institutional relationships, not as direct statistical observations from the medieval period.