Byzantium and the Recognition

The Rus’ Church was a metropolitanate of Constantinople, usually headed by a Greek metropolitan, and the cult of two princes killed in a dynastic feud — not for confessing the faith — posed an unusual problem of recognition. This file sets out, with sourcing on both sides per METHODOLOGY.md §4, the contested question of Byzantine endorsement: the tradition that a Greek metropolitan (named Ioann, John I) endorsed the cult and helped translate the relics, against the case that Byzantine authorities were initially reserved about canonizing princes who were not martyrs for the faith, the cult being driven from below and by the dynasty. The genuine uncertainty about the degree and timing of Greek endorsement is presented as a structured dispute naming the scholars — Poppe, Lenhoff, Müller.

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

A Greek-Led Church and a Native Cult

To understand the problem of Byzantine recognition, one must hold in view the institutional position of the Rus’ Church in the eleventh century. It was not an autocephalous Church but a metropolitanate — a province — of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and for most of this period its presiding hierarch, the metropolitan of Kiev, was a Greek appointed from Constantinople (Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the Greek metropolitanate of Kiev; see The Russian Orthodox Tradition). The liturgical, canonical, and hagiographical norms of the young Rus’ Church were Byzantine norms, mediated through Greek hierarchs and Greek (and Slavonic-from-Greek) books.

Into this Greek-shaped Church came a cult of an unusual kind. Boris and Gleb had not died for the faith. They were Christian princes killed by a Christian kinsman in a contest for the throne — victims of a dynastic feud, not confessors before a pagan tribunal. The classical Byzantine categories of sanctity — apostle, martyr, hierarch, ascetic, holy ruler — did not obviously accommodate two young men whose holiness lay precisely in not resisting their killers (see A New Category of Sanctity). That the Slavic tradition eventually named them strastoterptsy, “passion-bearers,” is itself a sign that the inherited Greek vocabulary of martyrdom had to be stretched to receive them. The recognition of Boris and Gleb thus put a specific question to the Greek-led Church of Rus’: could the death of princes in a family quarrel be honored as a saint’s death, and on whose authority?

The Two Sides of the Recognition Question

The sources and the scholarship support two pictures of how the Greek hierarchy responded — not flatly contradictory, but differing in emphasis and in what they make central. Both are set out here.

(A) The Greek Metropolitan Endorsed the Cult

The first picture, closest to the tradition’s own account, has the Greek hierarchy receiving and confirming the cult. The hagiographical and chronicle tradition names a metropolitan Ioann (John I) as presiding over the honoring of the brothers — building or consecrating a church for the relics at Vyshgorod, leading the translation of the relics, and composing or sanctioning the liturgical office for the new saints (the Skazanie and the miracle collection, in Hollingsworth 1992, which name the metropolitan’s role in the translations and the building of the church). On this reading, the Greek metropolitan of Kiev — the very embodiment of Byzantine ecclesiastical authority in the Rus’ — did not stand aloof from the cult but actively established it, giving it precisely the hierarchical sanction that recognition required.

This picture has strong support. It accords with the texts, which present the metropolitan as a participant in, not an obstacle to, the cult; it fits the general pattern by which recognition in this period came through the translation of relics into a church under episcopal authority (Lenhoff 1989, on the metropolitan’s role in the translations); and it makes the Boris and Gleb cult a joint achievement of dynasty and hierarchy, Rus’ prince and Greek metropolitan together. Poppe’s work, which examines the institutional history of the cult closely, allows that a metropolitan named Ioann is associated with the early establishment of the veneration and the construction of the shrine-church (Poppe’s studies of the cult and the Kievan metropolitanate). On this side, in short, Byzantine authority in the person of its metropolitan endorsed the new saints.

(B) Byzantine Authorities Were Initially Reserved

The second picture stresses that the cult arose from below and was carried by the dynasty, against a backdrop of Greek caution about so unusual a canonization. The argument runs that a Byzantine hierarchy schooled in the classical categories of sanctity would have hesitated to recognize as saints two princes who died not for Christ but in a struggle for power — that the cult of Boris and Gleb was, in its origins, a Rus’ and dynastic devotion which the Greek metropolitanate accepted only gradually, or with reserve, rather than initiating (the case for initial Greek hesitation is developed in Poppe’s studies of the cult’s politics and in Müller’s work on the early Rus’ Church; Lenhoff 1989 emphasizes the cult’s impetus from below and from the dynasty). On this view, the driving forces were the popular veneration at the tomb, the reported miracles, and above all the interest of the ruling house — Yaroslav and his successors — in honoring brothers whose cult vindicated the dynasty and damned the defeated Svyatopolk (see The Formation of the Cult).

This picture, too, has support. It explains why the cult’s recognition was a drawn-out process rather than a prompt decree; it fits the genuine novelty of the passion-bearer category, which had no ready Byzantine precedent and which a Greek hierarch might well have approached warily; and it accounts for the prominence of princes and people, rather than the metropolitan alone, in the cult’s growth (Lenhoff 1989; Franklin and Shepard 1996, on the dynastic impetus of the cult). On this side, Byzantine endorsement, when it came, ratified a fait accompli that the Rus’ had already created.

How the Two Sides Relate

The two pictures are not strict contradictories, and the most careful scholarship treats them as describing different phases or aspects of one history: a cult generated locally and dynastically, which a Greek-led hierarchy came in time to sanction and to lead in its public, institutional form. The honest difficulty is that the sources do not let us measure precisely how reserved the Greek authorities were at first, or how quickly and fully they came to endorse the cult — and that is the substance of the dispute below.

The Silence of the Greek Sources

A large part of the uncertainty comes from a simple but decisive fact: the question of Boris and Gleb’s recognition is documented almost entirely from the Rus’ side. The Skazanie, the miracle collection, and Nestor’s Chtenie are Rus’ compositions, written within the cult they celebrate (Hollingsworth 1992; see The Skazanie and Nestor’s Chtenie); the Primary Chronicle is a Kievan chronicle (Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953; see The Primary Chronicle). The Byzantine sources of the eleventh century — the patriarchal registers, the Greek chronicles, the synaxaria of Constantinople — preserve, so far as the scholarship has found, no notice of the two Rus’ princely saints at all. There is no surviving Greek decree of recognition, and equally no surviving Greek record of objection or refusal.

This silence cuts both ways, which is precisely why it sustains the dispute rather than settling it. On the one hand, the absence of any Greek objection can be read as evidence that the Greek hierarchy raised none — that the metropolitan of Kiev, the Patriarchate’s own man, presided over the cult without resistance, as the Rus’ texts suggest (reading A). On the other hand, the absence of the two saints from the Byzantine calendars and registers can be read as evidence of indifference or reserve at Constantinople — a cult locally honored in the Rus’ but not received into the wider Byzantine sanctoral, at least not promptly (reading B). The most that can be said with confidence is that whatever the Greek hierarchy did or did not do, it left little or no trace in the Greek record, and the reconstruction of its attitude depends almost wholly on inference from the Rus’ sources and from what is known generally of Byzantine practice toward provincial cults (Poppe’s studies of Rus’–Byzantine church relations; Müller, on the early Rus’ Church; Lenhoff 1989).

There is a further wrinkle in the very name the tradition gives the endorsing hierarch. The “metropolitan Ioann (John I)” associated with the early cult is himself a somewhat shadowy figure, and the chronology of the early Kievan metropolitans is not securely fixed; scholars differ on the dating of John I’s tenure and on which acts of the cult fall within it (Poppe’s reconstruction of the early Kievan metropolitanate; Lenhoff 1989). So even the strongest evidence for active Greek endorsement — the metropolitan’s presiding role in the church-building and the translations — is entangled in the same chronological uncertainty that clouds the canonization date itself (see The Formation of the Cult). The figure who would settle the question is precisely the figure the sources hold least securely.

The Disputed Degree and Timing of Greek Endorsement

[Disputed: the degree and timing of Byzantine/Greek endorsement of the Boris and Gleb cult are genuinely uncertain, and scholars weigh the evidence differently. (A) The tradition and one line of scholarship hold that a Greek metropolitan of Kiev — named Ioann (John I) — actively endorsed the cult, built or consecrated the shrine-church at Vyshgorod, and led the translation of the relics, so that Byzantine hierarchical authority established the cult from early on (the Skazanie and miracle collection naming the metropolitan’s role, in Hollingsworth 1992; Lenhoff 1989; and Poppe’s studies, which associate a metropolitan Ioann with the early shrine and veneration). (B) Another line stresses initial Greek reserve about canonizing princes who were not martyrs for the faith, holding that the cult was driven from below — by popular veneration, reported miracles, and dynastic interest — and was accepted by the Greek hierarchy only gradually (the case for early Byzantine hesitation in Poppe’s work on the cult’s politics and in Müller’s studies of the early Rus’ Church; Lenhoff 1989 on the cult’s impetus from the dynasty and the people). The sources do not preserve a Greek act of recognition or a record of any Greek objection, so the degree of early endorsement versus reserve, and its timing relative to the cult’s growth under Yaroslav and to the translation of 1072 (Russian Primary Chronicle s.a. 1072; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor 1953), cannot be fixed with certainty. What is common ground is that the cult originated and grew strongly within the Rus’ and the dynasty, and that the Greek-led metropolitanate came to sanction it; what is disputed is how willingly and how early.]

Why the Question Matters

The Byzantine-recognition question is not antiquarian. It bears on how one understands the relationship of the daughter-church to the mother-church at the very moment the Rus’ first produced saints of its own. If the Greek metropolitan led the recognition, the cult is a model of Byzantine authority adopting and elevating a native devotion — the mother-church making room within its own order for a new kind of holiness. If the Greek hierarchy was reserved and the cult was carried from below, then Boris and Gleb represent the first assertion of a distinctively Rus’ holiness, generated locally and accepted by Constantinople’s representatives only after the fact — an early sign of the Rus’ Church’s growing capacity to define its own saints (Franklin and Shepard 1996; Lenhoff 1989). The two readings give two different genealogies of Rus’ sanctity, and the evidence underdetermines the choice.

What can be said without overreaching is this. The Rus’ Church was Greek-led and Byzantine in its norms; the cult of Boris and Gleb was unusual by those norms, honoring princes killed in a feud rather than confessors of the faith; the cult arose strongly within the Rus’ and the dynasty; and it was, in the end, sanctioned by the hierarchy, with the tradition naming a metropolitan Ioann among those who established it. The degree of early Greek reserve and the exact timing of full endorsement remain, on the surviving evidence, a matter of scholarly judgment rather than of record — and this collection presents them as such, naming the positions and their advocates rather than asserting a verdict (per METHODOLOGY.md §4; see Holy Tradition on how the Church’s reception of saints is itself a tradition-borne process).

References

Cross, Samuel H., and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, trans. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953. (The translation of the relics s.a. 1072 and the institutional life of the cult.)
Hollingsworth, Paul, trans. The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. (The Skazanie and the miracle collection naming the metropolitan’s part in the church-building and the translations.)
Lenhoff, Gail. The Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb: A Socio-Cultural Study of the Cult and the Texts. Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989. (The metropolitan’s role in the translations; the cult’s impetus from the dynasty and the people; the gradual, staged character of recognition.)
Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. (The Greek metropolitanate of Kiev; the dynastic impetus of the cult; the relationship of the Rus’ Church to Constantinople.)
Poppe, Andrzej. Studies on the politics and chronology of the Boris and Gleb cult and on Rus’–Byzantine church relations (cited generically for the metropolitan Ioann’s association with the early cult and for the question of early Byzantine reserve).
Müller, Ludolf. Studies on the early Rus’ Church and the recognition of its first saints (cited for the case of initial Byzantine hesitation toward a non-martyr princely cult).