04 — The Passion-Bearer Ideal
The theological heart of the collection: how the Church of Rus’ made saints of two princes who did not die confessing Christ before pagans, but were killed by a Christian kinsman in a dynastic struggle — and in doing so created, or first fully expressed, a distinctive category of holiness, the strastoterptsy or “passion-bearers.” These files set out what that category is, how it stands to the older martyr-ideal, and how its central feature — voluntary non-resistance in imitation of the innocent, unresisting Christ — has been read both as the height of Gospel sanctity and, more critically, as a sacralization of dynastic submission.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)
The deaths of Boris and Gleb posed a problem of definition before they became a model of imitation. The men were Christians, killed not for their faith but for their blood — rivals in a succession war, removed as rivals are removed. Yet the tradition that grew around them did not treat them as casualties of politics but as saints, and the kind of saint it made them was new. They were venerated not for what they confessed under torture, as the martyrs of the persecutions had been, but for how they died: meekly, without lifting a hand against their brother, accepting an unjust death after the pattern of Christ’s own. George Fedotov, in The Russian Religious Mind (1946), named this the “kenotic” ideal — the imitation of the self-emptying Christ of Philippians 2 — and argued that it is the distinctive note of early Russian sanctity. This section presents that ideal in full, and then the genuine and unresolved debate over what the brothers’ non-resistance means: whether it is pure Gospel imitation, or also, and at the same time, the dynasty’s own interest dressed as holiness.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| A New Category of Sanctity | The strastoterptsy / passion-bearers: how Boris and Gleb, killed in a dynastic struggle rather than for confessing the faith, were venerated under a category distinct from the classic martyr (martys); the kenotic, Christ-imitating ideal (Philippians 2:5–8) that Fedotov made central to the reading of early Russian holiness; and the conscious modeling of the brothers on Christ and the martyrs in the hagiography. |
| Non-Resistance and Its Meaning | The both-sides theological reading of the brothers’ non-resistance — the devotional/Orthodox interpretation (genuine voluntary suffering after Christ, the highest sanctity) set fully against the critical/sociological one (a sacralization of seniority and submission within the dynasty, the charge of “political quietism”) — with the advocates of each and the question of whether the brothers’ actual conduct matched the ideal the texts impose. |
See Also
- The Killing of Boris — the death on the Alta that the ideal interprets
- The Killing of Gleb — the younger brother’s death, the purest case of the meek pattern
- The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie — the texts in which the ideal is constructed and voiced
- The Formation of the Cult — how the veneration that defined the category took shape
- The Russian Orthodox Tradition — the tradition in which the passion-bearer ideal took root
References
- Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946.
- Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953.
- Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989.
- Ingham, Norman W. Studies on the cult of Boris and Gleb and the question of their classification as martyrs.