The Photian Age

The Slavic mission was not an isolated initiative but one expression of a deliberate ninth-century Byzantine program of cultural renewal and outward mission, presided over by the scholar-patriarch Photius and backed by the imperial court. Constantinople in these decades revived classical learning, reformed its schools, and pushed evangelization outward toward the Khazars, the Rus, the Bulgars, the Armenians, and the Slavs of central Europe. This file sets the brothers’ work within that horizon — the missionary policy, the men, and the rivalry with the Frankish West that gave the Moravian mission its urgency.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equals-to-the-Apostles)

A Renaissance in Constantinople

The ninth century in Byzantium, especially the decades after the final restoration of the icons in 843, saw a marked revival of learning often called the “Macedonian Renaissance” in its later phase but already under way under the patronage of figures such as the Caesar Bardas, who refounded the Magnaura school (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 3; Dvornik, Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs, 1970, ch. 1). At the heart of this revival stood Photius (c. 810–893), the most learned man of his age, whose Bibliotheca surveys hundreds of works of pagan and Christian antiquity and whose teaching shaped a generation — including the young Constantine the Philosopher (Dvornik, The Photian Schism: History and Legend, 1948; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 2). Photius was twice patriarch of Constantinople (858–867 and 877–886), and his tenure coincided almost exactly with the brothers’ missionary careers. The renewed confidence of Constantinopolitan culture — its command of the Greek inheritance, its theological self-assurance, its sense of the empire as the divinely-appointed center of the Christian world — is the intellectual climate from which Constantine emerged and which he carried to the Slavs (Obolensky 1971, ch. 3).

It should be said plainly that Photius’s career was also the occasion of the great ninth-century estrangement between Constantinople and Rome — the “Photian schism” over his elevation, over the Bulgarian jurisdiction, and over the Filioque — which forms the immediate backdrop to the brothers’ dealings with the Papacy (see St. Photius the Great). The Slavic mission unfolded across this fracture and its temporary healing, and the brothers had to navigate it; that they secured papal approval for their work in the very years of and after the conflict is one of the remarkable features of their story (Dvornik 1970, ch. 3; see To Rome and the Death of Cyril).

The Missionary Policy of New Rome

The Byzantine state had long understood the conversion of neighboring peoples as an instrument of policy as well as an act of faith: a Christianized people received baptism from Constantinople, the church of New Rome, and entered thereby into the empire’s spiritual and often political orbit — the “commonwealth” of Orthodox peoples that Obolensky named (The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, esp. introduction and ch. 4). Photius made this outreach a conscious program. His famous Encyclical Letter of 867 to the Eastern patriarchs reports the conversion of peoples on the empire’s frontiers, naming the Bulgars and a people of the “Rhōs” (the Rus) who, he says, had received a bishop and embraced the faith (Photius, Encyclical Letter [867], in Dvornik 1948 and Obolensky 1971, ch. 4). The same years saw missionary diplomacy directed at the Khazars of the steppe, the Armenians, and others. Byzantine mission in this period had a characteristic instrument: not the imposition of Greek, but a willingness — at least in principle and increasingly in practice — to meet a people in its own setting, an openness that would reach its boldest expression in Constantine’s creation of a Slavic script and a Slavonic liturgy (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2).

The Khazar and Other Embassies as Context

It was into this program that the brothers were first sent. The Khazar khaganate, a powerful steppe empire north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea, was religiously plural — with Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and pagan elements — and politically important to Constantinople as a counterweight to the Arabs and a guardian of the empire’s northern approaches (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 2). When, according to the Vita Constantini, a Khazar embassy came to the emperor asking for a learned man to discuss religion, Constantine was chosen and Methodius went with him (Vita Constantini 8; trans. Kantor 1983). The embassy was thus an act of Byzantine religious diplomacy of exactly the kind Photius’s policy favored, and it served as the brothers’ apprenticeship in cross-cultural disputation and in the practical problems of evangelizing a non-Greek people (see The Khazar Mission). On the same journey, at Cherson in the Crimea, Constantine undertook the linguistic and antiquarian researches — including, the sources say, the recovery of the relics of St. Clement of Rome — that would later bind the brothers’ mission to the Roman see (see Relics of Clement of Rome).

The Frankish West and the Contest for Central Europe

The other great fact of the ninth-century horizon was the Frankish, Latin Christian West, then at the height of the Carolingian achievement. The East Frankish kingdom under Louis the German pressed its power and its Church eastward into the Slavic lands of central Europe; Bavarian dioceses — Salzburg, Passau, Regensburg — claimed the evangelization of the Carantanian and Moravian Slavs and conducted it in Latin under German clergy (Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, chs. 1, 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4). The Bavarian view of this work survives in the Conversio Bagoariorum et Carantanorum (“The Conversion of the Bavarians and Carinthians”), the Salzburg memorandum of c. 870 that asserts the archdiocese’s long jurisdiction over these Slavs (Vlasto 1970, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 5). The competition between this Frankish-Latin Christianity and the Byzantine-Greek mission for the allegiance of the central-European Slavs is the geopolitical engine of the whole Moravian episode: when Prince Rastislav of Moravia, seeking to escape Frankish ecclesiastical and political tutelage, turned to Constantinople for teachers, he set the two Christian worlds directly against each other on Slavic soil (see Rastislav and the Request). The brothers’ mission, and the bitter “trilingual” conflict it provoked, can only be understood against this contest of empires and Churches (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Dvornik 1970, ch. 4).

The Brothers as Men of Their Age

To call Constantine and Methodius products of the Photian age is to say that they brought to the Slavs the most advanced resources of contemporary Byzantium: a renewed classical learning, a theology confident in disputation, a missionary policy ready to translate the faith into a people’s own tongue, and a diplomatic sense honed in the contest with both Islam and the Latin West. The genius of their work — the alphabet, the translations, the principled defense of vernacular worship — was an individual achievement, but it was made possible by the culture that formed them and the policy that sent them out (Tachiaos 2001, chs. 2–3; Dvornik 1970, chs. 1–2). It is to the first fruit of that sending, the Khazar embassy, that the next section turns.

References

Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapter 8. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
Photius. Encyclical Letter to the Eastern Patriarchs (867). Discussed in Dvornik, The Photian Schism, and Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth.
Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970, chs. 1–2, 4–5.
Dvornik, Francis. The Photian Schism: History and Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948.
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, chs. 3–4.
Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, chs. 2–3.
Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, chs. 1, 4.