A New Category of Sanctity

Boris and Gleb were not martyrs in the classic sense: they did not die confessing Christ before pagan persecutors, but were Christians killed by a Christian kinsman in a struggle for the throne of Kiev. Yet the Church of Rus’ venerated them as holy — and in doing so gave full expression to a distinct category of sanctity, the strastoterptsy, the “passion-bearers,” who accept an unjust and violent death in voluntary non-resistance, after the pattern of Christ’s own innocent suffering. This file sets out what that category is, how it differs from the older ideal of the martys, how the hagiography makes the brothers consciously imitate Christ and the martyrs, and why George Fedotov made this “kenotic” Christ-imitation the centerpiece of his reading of early Russian holiness.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Passion-Bearers; first canonized Rus saints)

The Problem the Deaths Posed

The first thing to be said about the sanctity of Boris and Gleb is that it required a category the inherited Christian vocabulary did not quite supply. The model of holiness that the Rus’ received from Byzantium at the conversion of 988 was furnished above all by two ranks: the martyrs of the persecutions, who had died confessing Christ before pagan magistrates rather than sacrifice to the gods; and the ascetic saints, the monks and holy bishops whose sanctity was a matter of a life of struggle rather than a death. Boris and Gleb fit neither cleanly. They were not ascetics — they were young princes of the ruling clan, men of the world, one of them at the head of an army. And they were not martyrs in the strict and classic sense, because the circumstances of their deaths lacked the defining note of the martyr’s death: a demand to deny Christ, refused.

The men who killed them did not ask them to apostatize. The killers were not pagan persecutors but the agents of a fellow Christian prince — in the tradition’s account, their own half-brother Svyatopolk — and the cause was not the faith but the throne. Boris and Gleb were removed because they were rivals, or potential rivals, in the succession war that opened on the death of Vladimir in July 1015 (Russian Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015; trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; on the political setting, see The Succession Crisis of 1015). By the older measure, this was a dynastic murder, not a martyrdom: no confession was demanded, none was refused, and the men died for their blood and not for their God.

That the Church of Rus’ nonetheless made them its first native saints — venerating them, translating their relics, composing offices and lives for them within a few generations of their deaths (see The Formation of the Cult) — is the fact from which everything in this section follows. The tradition did not stretch the definition of the martyr to cover them; rather, it found in the manner of their dying a different ground of holiness, and named it.

Strastoterpets: The Passion-Bearer

The Slavonic term the tradition settled on is strastoterpets (plural strastoterptsy) — a compound of strast’, “passion” or “suffering,” and a root meaning “to endure” or “bear”: literally, the “passion-endurer” or “passion-bearer.” It renders, and narrows, a Greek term, athlophoros / passiotaktes family of words for one who bears suffering, but in the Slavic usage it came to mark a specific kind of holy death distinct from that of the muchenik, the martyr proper (muchenik renders Greek martys, “witness”). The distinction is not merely lexical. The muchenik is a witness: his death is an act of testimony, a public confession of Christ sealed in blood before those who would have him deny. The strastoterpets is a bearer: his holiness lies not in what he confesses against his killers but in how he suffers — innocently, willingly, without resistance or revenge, conforming his death to the meek and unresisting death of Christ.

The two categories overlap, and the tradition was never rigid about the boundary; the Skazanie and the liturgical texts call Boris and Gleb muchenitsy (martyrs) as well as passion-bearers, and the Church’s later usage applies strastoterpets even to figures, such as the murdered Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II and his family, whose deaths it wishes to honor without claiming a confession of faith refused under interrogation. But the center of gravity is clear. Where the martyr’s death is structured around a demand and a refusal — sacrifice, and “I will not” — the passion-bearer’s death is structured around a threat and a non-resistance — flee or fight, and “I will not.” What makes Boris and Gleb the paradigm of the second type is precisely that they had the means to resist and declined to use them.

The Conscious Imitation of Christ

The hagiography does not leave the brothers’ deaths as bare facts to be interpreted; it builds the imitation of Christ into the narrative itself, putting the pattern in the saints’ own minds and mouths. The most developed case is Boris. In the Skazanie, when Boris learns that his father is dead and that Svyatopolk has seized Kiev and means him harm, his retainers and the army press him to march on the capital and take the throne by force, which he could plainly have done (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the political logic is set out in The Succession Crisis of 1015). He refuses to raise his hand against an elder brother, dismisses the host, and prepares to die. As he waits, the Skazanie has him meditate on exactly the models he means to follow: he calls to mind the sufferings of the holy martyrs who went before him, and above all the suffering of Christ, who was innocent and yet was killed (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on Boris’s meditation as the interpretive center of the vita). The hagiographer thus makes Boris a conscious imitator: the saint reasons his way to non-resistance by the example of Christ and the martyrs, and the reader is shown the reasoning.

This meditation is saturated with Scripture, and the choice of texts is deliberate. The Skazanie puts the Psalms of the persecuted righteous on Boris’s lips — the prayers of the innocent man surrounded by enemies who seek his life. He prays in the words of the Psalter’s laments: “Many are they that rise up against me … many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in God” and the surrounding verses of Psalm 3, and the cries of the encircled sufferer in Psalm 21 (LXX; = Psalm 22 in the Hebrew/Masoretic numbering, the psalm of “they pierced my hands and my feet,” which the Gospels already read as a prophecy of the Crucifixion) and Psalm 30 (LXX; = Psalm 31, “Into thy hands I commit my spirit,” the words Luke gives the dying Christ) (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the Psalm numbering follows the LXX/Slavonic Psalter used by the hagiographer, which runs one behind the Masoretic from Psalm 9 onward). The effect is to assimilate Boris’s death to Christ’s by making him die praying Christ’s own death-psalms: the prayer the Church already heard as the voice of the crucified Lord becomes the prayer of the dying prince.

Gleb’s death, in the tradition, presses the meek pattern even further. The younger brother is lured to his death unsuspecting, and the Skazanie portrays him not as a warrior choosing non-resistance but as a young man pleading for his life with a child’s helplessness — begging his killers to spare him, likening himself to an unripe ear of grain cut down, before he too submits and is slaughtered (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; Fedotov 1946, on the literary portrait of Gleb’s youth and helplessness; on the death itself, The Killing of Gleb). If Boris is the warrior who lays down the sword, Gleb is the lamb led to slaughter (cf. Isaiah 53:7; Acts 8:32), and the hagiography draws the contrast deliberately, so that the two brothers between them display the passion-bearer’s submission in both its heroic and its utterly vulnerable forms.

The Kenotic Ideal: Philippians 2

The scriptural key that the tradition, and Fedotov after it, found in these deaths is the great kenotic passage of Philippians: that Christ Jesus, “being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation [Greek ekenōsen heauton, ‘emptied himself’], and took upon him the form of a servant … and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5–8). The verb kenoō, “to empty,” gives the theological term kenosis — the self-emptying of God in the Incarnation, the voluntary descent of the Almighty into the powerlessness and humiliation of the servant who does not grasp at his rights but submits even to an unjust death. The passage opens with an imperative that is the hinge: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). The self-emptying of Christ is set before the believer not only as the ground of salvation but as a pattern to be reproduced.

It is this pattern that the passion-bearers were seen to reproduce. Boris and Gleb, princes of the ruling house, possessed of power and the right to defend themselves, emptied themselves of that power; they did not grasp at the throne or at their own lives but submitted, as servants, to an unjust death — and in this voluntary, innocent, unresisting suffering the tradition saw the kenosis of Christ made visible in His own land. The brothers do not die for a doctrine; they die into a likeness. Their sanctity is conformity: the reproduction in a human death of the shape of the death of God.

Fedotov and the Kenotic Thesis

It was George Fedotov who gathered these threads into a thesis and gave it the name under which it is now discussed. In The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1 (1946), in the chapter he devotes to Boris and Gleb, Fedotov argued that the veneration of the two princes expresses the distinctive note of early Russian holiness, which he called kenoticism: a special attraction to the humble, suffering, self-emptying Christ — the Christ of the Passion rather than the Christ of glory — and a corresponding ideal of sanctity as voluntary, meek, non-resisting acceptance of suffering and humiliation in His likeness (Fedotov 1946). For Fedotov, what is striking about Boris and Gleb is precisely that they are not martyrs in the classic mold and yet are the first and most beloved native saints of the Rus’: the tradition reached past the witness-martyr to honor the imitation of Christ’s own passion as such, and in this Fedotov saw the seed of a whole national spirituality, recurring down the centuries in the Russian veneration of meekness, voluntary suffering, and self-abasement.

Two qualifications keep this honest. First, Fedotov’s “kenoticism” is an interpretive construct — a powerful and influential reading of the sources, not a category the eleventh-century texts themselves use; later scholarship has both built on it and pressed against it (the critical engagement is taken up in Non-Resistance and Its Meaning). Second, the kenotic reading is a reading of the hagiography: it tells us what the Skazanie and the Chtenie make of the deaths, and what the cult honored, far more securely than it tells us what Boris and Gleb historically thought or did. The brothers as the texts present them are conscious imitators of Christ; the brothers as they lived are recoverable only through those texts (see The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie). With those qualifications, Fedotov’s thesis remains the indispensable starting point: it is he who taught modern readers to see in the two murdered princes not failed martyrs but the founders of a category — the passion-bearer, the kenotic saint.

What the Category Establishes

The passion-bearer ideal does three things at once, and it is worth separating them. It redefines the ground of sanctity: holiness is located not in confession under interrogation but in conformity to the meek, unjustly suffering Christ, so that a death without a confession can still be a holy death. It reads a scriptural pattern into a political event: the murder of two princes in a succession war is interpreted through Philippians 2 and the death-psalms of the innocent, so that the event becomes a kenosis. And it founds a tradition: the strastoterptsy become a recognizable rank, invoked again at moments far removed from 1015, down to the twentieth-century veneration of the murdered imperial family as passion-bearers. All three rest on the single act the hagiography places at the center — the deliberate refusal to resist, the laying down of the means of self-defense in imitation of the Lamb. What that refusal means — pure Gospel, or also dynastic ideology — is the question the companion file takes up.

References

Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1: Kievan Christianity, the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. (The chapter on Boris and Gleb; the “kenotic” thesis as the distinctive note of early Russian sanctity; the reading of Boris’s meditation on the martyrs and on Christ; the literary portrait of Gleb’s youth.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, English Translations, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie; Boris’s refusal to march on Kiev and his death-meditation; the Psalms placed on his lips; Gleb’s pleading and his death.)
Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The narrative of 1015 and the political circumstances of the killings.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The terminology of the cult and the texts; the construction of the saints in the hagiography.)
The Holy Scriptures: Philippians 2:5–8 (the kenotic hymn, ekenōsen heauton); Psalm 3, Psalm 21 (LXX = 22 MT), Psalm 30 (LXX = 31 MT) (the death-psalms of the innocent sufferer, cited by LXX/Slavonic numbering); Isaiah 53:7; Acts 8:32; Matthew 5 (the Beatitudes and the blessing on the meek and persecuted).