Non-Resistance and Its Meaning

At the center of the cult of Boris and Gleb stands a single act: each brother, with the means to flee or fight, chose instead to submit and die rather than raise his hand against his kinsman. The devotional and Orthodox tradition reads this non-resistance as genuine Gospel imitation of Christ — voluntary, innocent suffering, and the very height of sanctity — and George Fedotov made it the founding instance of Russian “kenotic” holiness. A critical and sociological line of scholarship reads the same non-resistance differently, or additionally: as an ideal that also served the political interest of the senior prince and the principle of seniority, sacralizing submission within the dynasty and inviting the charge of “political quietism.” This file presents both readings fully and fairly, names their advocates, and marks where the disagreement is genuine and unresolved.

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

The Act in Question

Everything in the interpretation turns on one feature of the narrative, so it is worth stating precisely. In the Skazanie, Boris is not ambushed without warning; he learns that Svyatopolk holds Kiev and intends his death, he has the Kievan army with him, and his retainers explicitly urge him to march on the capital and seize the throne — a course he could realistically have taken (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the strategic situation is set out in The Succession Crisis of 1015). He refuses. He will not lift his hand against an elder brother; he dismisses the host, and waits to be killed. Gleb, lured north under false pretenses and warned too late, likewise does not flee or fight but submits, pleading, to his killers (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; The Killing of Gleb). The non-resistance is thus not mere passivity or the helplessness of the cornered; the texts present it as a choice, made by men who had alternatives, and it is on the meaning of that choice that the readings divide.

Reading A: Genuine Imitation of Christ

The first reading is the one the tradition itself holds and the cult enacts. On this view, the brothers’ non-resistance is the real thing — a voluntary, conscious imitation of the innocent and unresisting Christ, and therefore the highest form of sanctity available to a Christian who is not given the martyr’s confession.

The reading rests, first, on the hagiography’s own self-presentation. The Skazanie does not narrate the deaths as misfortune but constructs them as imitation: it places in Boris’s mind a meditation on the sufferings of the martyrs and of Christ, and on his lips the death-psalms of the innocent sufferer — Psalm 21 (LXX; = 22 MT) and Psalm 30 (LXX; = 31 MT, “into thy hands I commit my spirit”), the very psalms the Gospels read as the voice of the crucified Lord (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992; the scriptural construction is treated in A New Category of Sanctity). The non-resistance is, in the texts, a deliberate conformity to Christ, who “when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:23), and who emptied himself and “became obedient unto death” (Philippians 2:7–8). The Gospel itself commands what the brothers do: “Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39), and “Blessed are the meek … Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” (Matthew 5:5, 10). On this reading, Boris and Gleb did not fail to be martyrs; they succeeded in being something the Gospel explicitly blesses — the meek who do not resist the evildoer, the innocent who suffer rather than shed blood.

Fedotov gave this reading its classic modern form. In The Russian Religious Mind (1946) he argued that the brothers’ voluntary, non-resisting acceptance of death is the founding instance of a kenotic spirituality — an imitation of the self-emptying Christ of Philippians 2 — that becomes the distinctive and most precious strain of Russian holiness (Fedotov 1946; see A New Category of Sanctity). For Fedotov the non-resistance is not weakness or fatalism but a positive spiritual achievement: the deliberate refusal of violence and self-assertion in order to share the lot of the suffering Christ, and through it the Church of Rus’ chose, at the very outset, to honor humility and voluntary suffering above power. The cult’s own logic confirms the reading. The Church did not venerate Boris and Gleb despite their failure to fight but because they did not fight; the non-resistance is the content of their holiness, not an embarrassment around it. To the Orthodox tradition the deaths are an icon of the Cross: innocent love that absorbs violence rather than returning it, and is vindicated not by victory but by resurrection and glory (the cult is treated in The Formation of the Cult; the long spiritual legacy in Legacy in Russian Spirituality).

Reading B: The Sacralization of Submission

The second reading does not deny the devotional one its force but sets beside it a more critical question: whose interest does this ideal serve? On this view, the passion-bearer ideal, whatever its sincerity, also functions politically — it sacralizes submission to the senior prince and underwrites the dynastic principle of seniority, and so cannot be read as pure Gospel without attending to what it accomplishes for the holders of power.

The case begins from the texts’ own framing of Boris’s refusal. The reason the Skazanie gives for his non-resistance is not generically “I will not shed blood” but specifically I will not raise my hand against my elder brother: Boris is made to honor Svyatopolk precisely as the senior, invoking the duty owed to an older brother in the place of a father (Skazanie, in Hollingsworth 1992). The ideal it dramatizes is therefore not only Christ-likeness but seniority: the junior prince who submits to his elder unto death. In a polity with no fixed law of succession, where the throne was contested by force among brothers and cousins (see The Succession Crisis of 1015), a saint’s cult that glorifies a younger brother for not resisting his elder is, on this reading, also a charter for the principle that juniors must not rise against seniors — a sanctification of the very order the dynasty needed to hold together.

The point sharpens when one recalls who built the cult. The veneration of Boris and Gleb was promoted under Yaroslav — the brother who did fight, who won the war, and whose victory the cult of his non-resisting brothers helped to legitimate by casting the conflict as the martyrdom of innocents at the hands of the “accursed” Svyatopolk (on the cult’s formation under Yaroslav, The Formation of the Cult; on the contested authorship of the killings, Who Killed Them). The ideal of non-resistance is thus promulgated by the dynasty that profited from it, and a sociological reading is bound to notice that an ideology counseling junior princes not to resist serves the consolidation of power rather neatly. From here it is a short step to the charge most often pressed against the kenotic ideal as a whole: that it valorizes political quietism — that it teaches the subordinate to accept injustice and violence without resistance, and dignifies passivity before unjust power as holiness, with consequences that reach far beyond the eleventh century into critiques of a perceived Russian disposition to submission.

Gail Lenhoff’s study (1989) is the influential modern treatment that situates the cult and its texts within their social and political functions, reading the Skazanie, the Chtenie, and the liturgical materials as products of a developing cult that did particular work for the dynasty and the Church, rather than as transparent windows onto the events of 1015 (Lenhoff 1989). Norman W. Ingham, in his studies of the cult and of the brothers’ classification, pressed the prior question of whether Boris and Gleb are properly “martyrs” at all, given the absence of a confession of faith, and located their veneration against Byzantine and broader European models of the murdered-prince saint — work that bears directly on whether their sanctity is sui generis Gospel imitation or an instance of a wider, politically conditioned type of royal cult (Ingham, studies on the Boris-Gleb cult and on the question of their martyrdom). The critical reading does not, in its serious forms, allege cynicism in the brothers themselves; it argues that the ideal as the texts construct it and the cult propagates it cannot be abstracted from the dynastic interests it also served.

Did the Conduct Match the Ideal?

A further and distinct question cuts beneath both readings: whether the brothers’ actual historical conduct matched the ideal of voluntary non-resistance the texts impose on them. Here the honest answer is that we cannot know, because the conduct is accessible only through the texts that already interpret it. The Skazanie‘s portrait of Boris deliberating, meditating on the martyrs, and choosing submission is a literary construction written generations after the event and shaped by the cult’s needs; the discordant Norse Eymundar þáttr, alone among the sources, tells of a princely killing carried out by Yaroslav’s Varangians and so unsettles the whole received account of who died how and at whose order (the saga evidence and the dispute it raises are treated in Who Killed Them). It is entirely possible that two young princes were simply hunted down and killed in a succession war, as such princes routinely were, and that the meaning of voluntary, Christ-imitating non-resistance was conferred on their deaths afterward by hagiographers who needed saints, not by the brothers who needed only to survive. The passion-bearer reading is, on this view, a reading the texts perform; whether it is also a true account of what Boris and Gleb chose is beyond recovery. This does not diminish the saints of the cult — sanctity in the Church is not a forensic verdict on a man’s last hours — but it marks the limit of what the sources can establish, in keeping with the collection’s discipline that hagiography is not adjudicated history (METHODOLOGY §3.5; the layering of the legend is treated under Who Killed Them).

The Disagreement, Marked

The two readings are not simply reconcilable, and the repository’s discipline is to say so rather than to harmonize them by fiat (METHODOLOGY §4).

[Disputed: The meaning of the brothers’ non-resistance is genuinely contested. (A) The devotional/Orthodox reading, given its classic modern form by Fedotov (The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 1946) and enacted by the cult itself, holds that the non-resistance is sincere, voluntary imitation of the innocent and unresisting Christ (Philippians 2:5–8; Matthew 5:39; 1 Peter 2:23) and the founding instance of Russian “kenotic” sanctity — the height of holiness, not its failure. (B) The critical/sociological reading, advanced in different keys by Gail Lenhoff (The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb, 1989) and bearing on the prior classification question raised by Norman W. Ingham (studies on the Boris-Gleb cult and on whether the brothers are “martyrs”), holds that the same ideal — framed in the Skazanie as a junior’s refusal to resist his elder brother and promoted under the victorious Yaroslav — also sacralizes seniority and submission within the dynasty and is open to the charge of “political quietism,” and so cannot be read as pure Gospel apart from the political interests it served. The two are not strictly exclusive: many hold that a death may be at once genuine imitatio Christi and ideologically useful, so that reading (A) describes what the act meant to the brothers and the faithful while reading (B) describes what the cult accomplished for the dynasty. Where they conflict is over whether the political function qualifies the spiritual claim; on that, the scholarship divides and this collection asserts no verdict beyond the positions held.]

What can be said without dispute is narrower and firmer. The non-resistance is the indisputable center of the cult; the tradition honors it as Christ-imitation; the texts that construct it were composed and propagated within, and for, a dynasty that had a stake in the ideal of submission; and the historical conduct beneath the texts is not independently recoverable. Holding all four together — neither collapsing the saints into political instruments nor pretending the cult floated free of power — is the even-handedness the subject demands.

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” reading of the non-resistance as voluntary imitation of the self-emptying Christ and the founding instance of Russian sanctity.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The cult and its texts read in their social and political functions; the Skazanie, Chtenie, and liturgical materials as products of a developing cult.)
Ingham, Norman W. Studies on the cult of Boris and Gleb and on the question of whether they are properly “martyrs,” situating their veneration against Byzantine and wider European models of the murdered-prince saint.
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 resist his elder brother; the death-psalms; Gleb’s submission.)
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 1015–1019 and the rise of Yaroslav under whom the cult formed.)
The Holy Scriptures: Philippians 2:5–8; Matthew 5:5, 5:10, 5:39; 1 Peter 2:23; Psalm 21 (LXX = 22 MT), Psalm 30 (LXX = 31 MT), cited by LXX/Slavonic numbering as in the hagiographer’s Psalter.