Cyril and Methodius
For Constantinople the middle of the ninth century was a
period of intensive missionary activity. The Byzantine Church, freed at last
from the long struggle against the Iconoclasts, turned its energies to the
conversion of the pagan Slavs who lay beyond the frontiers of the Empire, to the
north and the northwest — Moravians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Russians. Photius
was the first Patriarch of Constantinople to initiate missionary work on a large
scale among these Slavs. He selected for the task two brothers, Greeks from
Thessalonica, Constantine (826-869) and Methodius (815?-885). In the Orthodox
Church Constantine is usually called by the name Cyril which he took on becoming
a monk. Known in earlier life as "Constantine the Philosopher," he was
the ablest among the pupils of Photius, and was familiar with a wide range of
languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, and even the Samaritan dialect. But the
special qualification which he and his brother enjoyed was their knowledge of
Slavonic: in childhood they had learnt the dialect of the Slavs around
Thessalonica, and they could speak it fluently.
The first missionary journey of Cyril and Methodius was a
short visit around 860 to the Khazars, who lived north of the Caucasus region.
This expedition had no permanent results, and some years later the Khazars
adopted Judaism. The brothers’ real work began in 863 when they set out for
Moravia (roughly equivalent to the modern Czechoslovakia). They went in answer
to an appeal from the Prince of the land, Rostislav, who asked that Christian
missionaries be sent, capable of preaching to the people in their own tongue and
of taking services in Slavonic. Slavonic services required a Slavonic Bible and
Slavonic service books. Before they set out for Moravia the brothers had already
set to work on this enormous task of translation. They had first to invent a
suitable Slavonic alphabet. In their translation the brothers used the form of
Slavonic familiar to them from childhood, the Macedonian dialect spoken by the
Slavs around Thessalonica. In this way the dialect of the Macedonian Slavs
became Church Slavonic, which remains to the present day the liturgical
language of the Russian and certain other Slavonic Orthodox Churches.
One cannot overestimate the significance, for the future
of Orthodoxy, of the Slavonic translations which Cyril and Methodius carried
with them as they left Byzantium for the unknown north. Few events have been so
important in the missionary history of the Church. From the start the Slav
Christians enjoyed a precious privilege, such as none of the peoples of western
Europe shared at this time: they heard the Gospel and the services of the Church
in a tongue which they could understand. Unlike the Church of Rome in the west
with its insistence on Latin, the Orthodox Church has never been rigid in the
matter of languages; its normal policy is to hold services in the language of
the people.
In Moravia, as in Bulgaria, the Greek mission soon
clashed with German missionaries at work in the same area. The two missions not
only depended on different Patriarchates, but worked on different principles.
Cyril and Methodius used Slavonic in their services, the Germans Latin; Cyril
and Methodius recited the Creed in its original form, the Germans inserted the filioque.
To free his mission from German interference, Cyril decided to place it under
the immediate protection of the Pope. Cyril’s action in appealing to Rome
shows that he did not take the quarrel between Photius and Nicholas too
seriously; for him east and west were still united as one Church, and it was not
a matter of primary importance whether he depended on Constantinople or Rome, so
long as he could continue to use Slavonic in Church services. The brothers
traveled to Rome in person in 868 and were entirely successful in the appeal.
Hadrian II, Nicholas I’s successor at Rome, received them favorably and gave
full support to the Greek mission, confirming the use of Slavonic as the
liturgical language of Moravia. He approved the brothers’ translations, and
laid copies of their Slavonic service books on the altars of the principal
churches in the city.
Cyril died at Rome (869), but Methodius returned to
Moravia. Sad to say, the Germans ignored the Pope’s decision and obstructed
Methodius in every possible way, even putting him in prison for more than a
year. When Methodius died in 885, the Germans expelled his followers from the
country, selling a number of them into slavery. Traces of the Slavonic mission
lingered on in Moravia for two centuries more, but were eventually eradicated;
and Christianity in its western form, with Latin culture and the Latin language
(and of course the filioque), became universal. The attempt to found a
Slavonic national Church in Moravia came to nothing. The work of Cyril and
Methodius, so it seemed, had ended in failure.
Yet in fact this was not so. Other countries, where the
brothers had not themselves preached, benefited from their work, most notably
Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia. Boris, Khan of Bulgaria, as we have seen, wavered
for a time between east and west, but finally accepted the jurisdiction of
Constantinople. The Byzantine missionaries in Bulgaria, however, lacking the
vision of Cyril and Methodius, at first used Greek in Church services, a
language as unintelligible as Latin to the ordinary Bulgar. But after their
expulsion from Moravia, the disciples of Methodius turned naturally to Bulgaria,
and here introduced the principles employed in the Moravian mission. Greek was
replaced by Slavonic, and the Christian culture of Byzantium was presented to
the Bulgars in a Slavonic form which they could assimilate. The Bulgarian Church
grew rapidly. Around 926, during the reign of Tsar Symeon the Great (reigned
893-927), an independent Bulgarian Patriarchate was created, and this was
recognized by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 927. The dream of Boris —
an autocephalous Church of his own — became a reality within half a century of
his death. Bulgaria was the first national Church of the Slavs.
Byzantine missionaries went likewise to Serbia, which
accepted Christianity in the second half of the ninth century, around 867-874.
Serbia also lay on the dividing line between eastern and western Christendom,
but after a period of uncertainty it followed the example of Bulgaria, not of
Moravia, and came under Constantinople. Here too the Slavonic service books were
introduced and a Slavonic-Byzantine culture grew up. The Serbian Church gained a
partial independence under Saint Sava (1176-1235), the greatest of Serbian
national saints, who in 1219 was consecrated at Nicaea as Archbishop of Serbia.
In 1346 a Serbian Patriarchate was created, which was recognized by the Church
of Constantinople in 1375.
The conversion of Russia was also due indirectly to the
work of Cyril and Methodius; but of this we shall speak further in the next
section. With Bulgars, Serbs, and Russians as their "spiritual
children," the two Greeks from Thessalonica abundantly deserve their title,
"Apostles of the Slavs."
Another Orthodox nation in the Balkans, Romania, has a
more complex history. The Romanians, though influenced by their Slav neighbors,
are primarily Latin in language and ethnic character. Dacia, corresponding to
part of modern Romania, was a Roman province during 106-271; but the Christian
communities founded there in this period seem to have disappeared after the
Romans withdrew. Part of the Romanian people was apparently converted to
Christianity by the Bulgarians in the late ninth or early tenth century, but the
full conversion of the two Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia did
not occur until the fourteenth century. Those who think of Orthodoxy as being
exclusively "eastern," as Greek and Slav in character, should not
overlook the fact that the Church of Romania, the second largest Orthodox Church
today, is predominantly Latin.
Byzantium conferred two gifts upon the Slavs: a fully
articulated system of Christian doctrine and a fully developed Christian
civilization. When the conversion of the Slavs began in the ninth century, the
great period of doctrinal controversies, the age of the Seven Councils, was at
an end; the main outlines of the faith — the doctrines of the Trinity and the
Incarnation — had already been worked out, and were delivered to the Slavs in
their definitive form. Perhaps this is why the Slavonic Churches have produced
few original theologians, while the religious disputes which have arisen in
Slavonic lands have usually not been dogmatic in character. But this faith in
the Trinity and the Incarnation did not exist in a vacuum; with it went a whole
Christian culture and civilization, and this too the Greek missionaries brought
with them from Byzantium. The Slavs were Christianized and civilized at the same
time.
The Greeks communicated this faith and civilization not
in an alien but in a Slavonic garb (here the translations of Cyril and Methodius
were of capital importance); what the Slavs borrowed from Byzantium they were
able to make their own. Byzantine culture and the Orthodox faith, if at first
limited mainly to the ruling classes, became in time an integral part of the
daily life of the Slavonic peoples as a whole. The link between Church and
people was made even firmer by the system of creating independent national
Churches.
Certainly this close identification of Orthodoxy with the
life of the people, and in particular the system of national Churches, have had
unfortunate consequences. Because Church and nation were so closely associated,
the Orthodox Slavs have often confused the two and have made the Church serve
the ends of national politics; they have sometimes tended to think of their
faith as primarily Serb, Russian, or Bulgar, and to forget that it is primarily
Orthodox and Catholic. Nationalism has been the bane of Orthodoxy for the last
ten centuries. Yet the integration of Church and people has in the end proved
immensely beneficial. Christianity among the Slavs became in very truth the
religion of the whole people, a popular religion in the best
sense. In 1949 the Communists of Bulgaria published a law stating: "The
Bulgarian Orthodox Church is in form, substance, and spirit a People’s
Democratic Church." Strip the words of their political associations, and
behind them there lies an important truth.
The baptism of Russia: The Kiev period (988-1237).
Photius also made plans to convert the Slavs of Russia.
Around 864 he sent a bishop to Russia, but this first Christian foundation was
exterminated by Oleg, who assumed power at Kiev (the chief Russian city at this
time) in 878. Russia, however, continued to undergo a steady Christian
infiltration from Byzantium, Bulgaria, and Scandinavia, and there was certainly
a church at Kiev in 945. The Russian Princess Olga became Christian in 955, but
her son Svyatoslav refused to follow her example, saying that his retinue would
laugh at him if he received Christian baptism. But around 988 Olga’s grandson
Vladimir (reigned 980-1015) was converted to Christianity and married Anna, the
sister of the Byzantine Emperor. Orthodoxy became the State religion of Russia,
and such it remained until 1917. Vladimir set to in earnest to Christianize his
realm: priests, relics, sacred vessels, and icons were imported; mass baptisms
were held in the rivers; Church courts were set up, and ecclesiastical tithes
instituted. The great idol of the god Perun, with its silver head and gold
moustaches, was rolled ignominiously down from the hilltop above Kiev.
"Angel’s trumpet and Gospel’s thunder sounded through all the towns.
The air was sanctified by the incense that ascended towards God. Monasteries
stood on the mountains. Men and women, small and great, all people filled the
holy churches" (Quoted in G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind,
p. 410). So the Metropolitan Hilarion described the event sixty years
afterwards, doubtless idealizing a little; for Kievan Russia was not at once
completely converted to Christianity, and the Church was at first restricted
mainly to the cities, while much of the countryside remained pagan until the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Vladimir placed the same emphasis upon the social
implications of Christianity as John the Almsgiver had done. Whenever he feasted
with his Court, he distributed food to the poor and sick; nowhere else in
medieval Europe were there such highly organized "social services" as
in tenth-century Kiev. Other rulers in Kievan Russia followed Vladimir’s
example. Prince Vladimir Monomachos (reigned 1113-1125) wrote in his Testament
to his sons: "Above all things forget not the poor, and support them to the
extent of your means. Give to the orphan, protect the widow, and permit the
mighty to destroy no man" (Quoted in G. Vernadsky, Kievan Russia,
New Haven, 1948, p. 195) Vladimir was also deeply conscious of the Christian law
of mercy, and when he introduced the Byzantine law code at Kiev, he insisted on
mitigating its more savage and brutal features. There was no death penalty in
Kievan Russia, no mutilation, no torture; corporal punishment was very little
used. (In Byzantium the death penalty existed, but was hardly ever applied; the
punishment of mutilation, however, was employed with distressing frequency).
The same gentleness can be seen in the story of
Vladimir’s two sons, Boris and Gleb. On Vladimir’s death in 1015, their
elder brother Svyatopolk attempted to seize their principalities. Taking
literally the commands of the Gospel, they offered no resistance, although they
could easily have done so; and each in turn was murdered by Svyatopolk’s
emissaries. If any blood were to be shed, Boris and Gleb preferred that it
should be their own. Although they were not martyrs for the faith, but victims
in a political quarrel, they were both canonized, being given the special title
of "Passion Bearers": it was felt that by their innocent and voluntary
suffering they had shared in the Passion of Christ. Russians have always laid
great emphasis on the place of suffering in the Christian life.
In Kievan Russia, as in Byzantium and the medieval west,
monasteries played an important part. The most influential of them all was the Petchersky
Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev. Founded around 1051 by Saint
Antony, a Russian who had lived on Mount Athos, it was reorganized by his
successor Saint Theodosius (died 1074), who introduced there the rule of the
monastery of the Studium at Constantinople. Like Vladimir, Theodosius was
conscious of the social consequences of Christianity, and applied them in a
radical fashion, identifying himself closely with the poor, much as Saint
Francis of Assisi did in the west. Boris and Gleb followed Christ in his
sacrificial death; Theodosius followed Christ in his life of poverty and
voluntary "self-emptying." Of noble birth, he chose in childhood to
wear coarse and patched garments and to work in the fields with the slaves.
"Our Lord Jesus Christ," he said, "became poor and humbled
Himself, offering Himself as an example, so that we should humble ourselves in
His name. He suffered insults, was spat upon, and beaten, for our salvation; how
just it is, then, that we should suffer in order to gain Christ" (Nestor,
"Life of Saint Theodosius," in G.P. Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian
Spirituality, p. 27). Even when Abbot he wore the meanest kind of clothing
and rejected all outward signs of authority. Yet at the same time he was the
honored friend and adviser of nobles and princes. The same ideal of humility is
seen in others, for example Bishop Luke of Vladimir (died 1185) who, in the
words of the Vladimir Chronicle, "bore upon himself the humiliation
of Christ, not having a city here but seeking a future one." It is an ideal
found often in Russian folklore, and in writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Vladimir, Boris and Gleb, and Theodosius were all
intensely concerned with the practical implications of the Gospel: Vladimir in
his concern for social justice and his desire to treat criminals with mercy;
Boris and Gleb in their resolution to follow Christ in His voluntary suffering
and death; Theodosius in his self-identification with the humble. These four
saints embody some of the most attractive features in Kievan Christianity.
The Russian Church during the Kievan period was subject
to Constantinople, and until 1237 the Metropolitans of Russia were usually
Greek. In memory of the days when the Metropolitan came from Byzantium, the
Russian Church continues to sing in Greek the solemn greeting to a bishop, eis
polla eti, despota ("unto many years, O master"). But of the rest
of the bishops, about half were native Russians in the Kievan period; one was
even a converted Jew, and another a Syrian.
Kiev enjoyed relations not only with Byzantium but with
western Europe, and certain features in the organization of the early Russian
Church, such as ecclesiastical tithes, were not Byzantine but western. Many
western saints who do not appear in the Byzantine calendar were venerated at
Kiev; a prayer to the Holy Trinity composed in Russia during the eleventh
century lists English saints such as Alban and Botolph, and a French saint,
Martin of Tours. Some writers have even argued that until 1054 Russian
Christianity was as much Latin as Greek, but this is a great exaggeration.
Russia was closer to the west in the Kiev period than at any other time until
the reign of Peter the Great, but she owed immeasurably more to Byzantine than
to Latin culture. Napoleon was correct historically when he called Emperor
Alexander I of Russia "a Greek of the Lower Empire."
It has been said that it was Russia’s greatest
misfortune that she was allowed too little time to assimilate the full spiritual
inheritance of Byzantium. In 1237 Kievan Russia was brought to a sudden and
violent end by the Mongol invasions; Kiev was sacked, and the whole Russian land
was overrun, except the far north around Novgorod. A visitor to the Mongol Court
in 1246 recorded that he saw in Russian territory neither town nor village, but
only ruins and countless human skulls. But if Kiev was destroyed, the
Christianity of Kiev remained a living memory:
Kievan Russia, like the golden days of childhood, was
never dimmed in the memory of the Russian nation. In the pure fountain of her
literary works anyone who wills can quench his religious thirst; in her
venerable authors he can find his guide through the complexities of the modern
world. Kievan Christianity has the same value for the Russian religious mind as
Pushkin for the Russian artistic sense: that of a standard, a golden measure, a
royal way (G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, p. 412).
The Russian Church under the Mongols (1237-1448).
The suzerainty of the Mongol Tartars over Russia lasted
from 1237 until 1480. But after the great battle of Kulikovo (1380), when the
Russians dared at last to face their oppressors in an open fight and actually
defeated them, Mongol overlordship was considerably weakened; by 1450 it had
become largely nominal. More than anything else, it was the Church which kept
alive Russian national consciousness in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
as the Church was later to preserve a sense of unity among the Greeks under
Turkish rule. The Russia which emerged from the Mongol period was a Russia
greatly changed in outward appearance. Kiev never recovered from the sack of
1237, and its place was taken in the fourteenth century by the Principality of
Moscow. It was the Grand Dukes of Moscow who inspired the resistance to the
Mongols and who led Russia at Kulikovo. The rise of Moscow was closely bound up
with the Church. When the town was still small and comparatively unimportant,
Peter, Metropolitan of Russia from 1308 to 1326, decided to settle there; and
henceforward it remained the city of the chief hierarch of Russia.
Three figures in the history of the Russian Church during
the Mongol period call for particular mention, all of them saints: Alexander
Nevsky, Stephen of Perm, and Sergius of Radonezh.
Alexander Nevsky (died 1263), one of the great warrior
saints of Russia, has been compared with his western contemporary, Saint Louis,
King of France. He was Prince of Novgorod, the one major principality in Russia
to escape unharmed in 1237. But soon after the coming of the Tartars, Alexander
found himself threatened by other enemies from the west: Swedes, Germans, and
Lithuanians. It was impossible to fight on two fronts at once. Alexander decided
to submit to Tartar overlordship and to pay tribute; but against his western
opponents he put up a vigorous resistance, inflicting two decisive defeats upon
them — over the Swedes in 1240 and over the Teutonic Knights in 1242. His
reason for treating with the Tartars rather than the west was primarily
religious: the Tartars took tribute but refrained from interfering in the life
of the Church, whereas the Teutonic Knights had as their avowed aim the
reduction of the Russian "schismatics" to the jurisdiction of the
Pope. This was the very period when a Latin Patriarch reigned in Constantinople,
and the German Crusaders in the north aimed to break Orthodox Novgorod, just as
their fellow Crusaders in the south had broken Orthodox Constantinople in 1204.
But Alexander, despite the Mongol menace, refused any religious compromise.
"Our doctrines are those preached by the Apostles," he is reported to
have replied to messengers from the Pope. "…The tradition of the Holy
Fathers of the Seven Councils we scrupulously keep. As for your words, we do not
listen to them and we do not want your doctrine" (From the
thirteenth-century life of Alexander Nevsky; quoted in Fedotov, The Russian
Religious Mind, p. 383). Two centuries later the Greeks after the Council of
Florence made the same choice: political submission to the infidel rather than
what they felt would be spiritual capitulation to the Church of Rome.
Stephen of Perm brings us to another aspect of Church
life under the Mongols: missionary work. From its early days the Russian Church
was a missionary Church, and the Russians were quick to send evangelists among
their pagan conquerors. In 1261 a certain Mitrophan went as missionary bishop to
Sarai, the Tartar capital on the Volga. Others preached, not among the Mongols,
but among the primitive pagan tribes in the north-east and far north of the
Russian continent. True to the example of Cyril and Methodius, these
missionaries translated the Bible and Church services into the languages and
dialects of the people to whom they ministered.
Saint Stephen, Bishop of Perm (1340?-1396), worked among
the Zyrian tribes. He spent thirteen years of preparation in a monastery,
studying not only the native dialects but also Greek, to be the better fitted
for the work of translation. While Cyril and Methodius had employed an adapted
Greek alphabet in their Slavonic translations, Stephen made use of the native
runes. He was an icon painter, and sought to show forth God as the God not of
truth only, but of beauty. Like many other of the early Russian missionaries, he
did not follow in the wake of military and political conquest, but was ahead of
it.
Sergius of Radonezh (1314?-1392), the greatest national
saint of Russia, is closely connected with the recovery of the land in the
fourteenth century. The outward pattern of his life recalls that of Saint Antony
of Egypt. In early manhood Sergius withdrew into the forests (the northern
equivalent of the Egyptian desert) and here he founded a hermitage dedicated to
the Holy Trinity. After several years of solitude, his place of retreat became
known, disciples gathered round him, and he grew into a spiritual guide, an
"elder" or starets. Finally (and here the parallel with Antony
ends) he turned his group of disciples into a regular monastery, which became
within his own lifetime the greatest religious house in the land. What the
Monastery of the Caves was to Kievan Russia, the Monastery of the Holy Trinity
was to Muscovy.
Sergius displayed the same deliberate self-humiliation as
Theodosius, living (despite his noble birth) as a peasant, dressing in the
poorest of clothing. "His garb was of coarse peasant felt, old and worn,
unwashed, saturated with sweat, and heavily patched" (Saint Epiphanius,
"The Life of Saint Sergius," in Fedotov, A Treasury of Russian
Spirituality, pp. 69-70). At the height of his fame, when Abbot of a great
community, he still worked in the kitchen garden. Often when he was pointed out
to visitors, they could not believe that it was really the celebrated Sergius.
"I came to see a prophet," exclaimed one man in disgust, "and you
show me a beggar" (Epiphanius, in Fedotov, op. cit., p. 70). Like
Theodosius, Sergius played an active part in politics. A close friend of the
Grand Dukes of Moscow, he encouraged the city in its expansion, and it is
significant that before the Battle of Kulikovo the leader of the Russian forces,
Prince Dmitry Donskoy, went specially to Sergius to secure his blessing.
But while there exist many parallels in the lives of
Theodosius and Sergius, two important points of difference must be noted. First,
whereas the Monastery of the Caves, like most monasteries in Kievan Russia, lay
on the outskirts of a city, the Monastery of the Holy Trinity was founded in the
wilderness at a distance from the civilized world. Sergius was in his way an
explorer and a colonist, pushing forward the boundaries of civilization and
reducing the forest to cultivation. Nor is he the only example of a colonist
monk at this time. Others went like him into the forests to become hermits, but
in their case as in his, what started as a hermitage soon grew into a regular
monastery, with a civilian town outside the walls. Then the whole process would
start all over again: a fresh generation of monks in search of the solitary life
would make their way into the yet more distant forest, disciples would follow,
new communities would form, fresh land would be cleared for agriculture. This
steady advance of colonist monks is one of the most striking features of
fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Russia. From Radonezh and other centers a vast
network of religious houses spread swiftly across the whole of north Russia as
far as the White Sea and the Arctic Circle. Fifty communities were founded by
disciples of Sergius in his own lifetime, forty more by his followers in the
next generation. These explorer monks were not only colonists but missionaries,
for as they penetrated farther north, they preached Christianity to the wild
pagan tribes in the forests around them.
In the second place, while there is in the religious
experience of Theodosius nothing that can be termed specifically mystical, in
Sergius a new dimension of the spiritual life becomes evident. Sergius was a
contemporary of Gregory Palamas, and it is not impossible that he knew something
of the Hesychast movement in Byzantium. At any rate some of the visions granted
to Sergius in prayer, which his biographer Epiphanius recorded, can only be
interpreted in a mystical sense.
Sergius has been called a "Builder of Russia,"
and such he was in three senses: politically, for he encouraged the rise of
Moscow and the resistance against the Tartars; geographically, for it was he
more than any other who inspired the great advance of monks into the forests;
and spiritually, for through his experience of mystical prayer he deepened the
inner life of the Russian Church. Better, perhaps, than any other Russian saint,
he succeeded in balancing the social and mystical aspects of monasticism. Under
his influence and that of his followers, the two centuries from 1350 to 1550
proved a golden age in Russian spirituality.
These two centuries were also a golden age in Russian
religious art. During these years Russian painters carried to perfection the
iconographic traditions which they had taken over from Byzantium. Icon painting
flourished above all among the spiritual children of Saint Sergius. It is no
coincidence that the finest of all Orthodox icons from the artistic point of
view — the Holy Trinity, by Saint Andrew Rublev (1370?-1430?) — should have
been painted in honor of Saint Sergius and placed in his monastery at Radonezh.
Sixty-one years after the death of Sergius, the Byzantine
Empire fell to the Turks. The new Russia which took shape after Kulikovo, and
which the Saint himself had done so much to build, was now called to take
Byzantium’s place as protector of the Orthodox world. It proved both worthy
and unworthy of this vocation.
[A TEST IS DUE]
