The Textual Legacy

The language the brothers created to carry their translations — Old Church Slavonic — was the first Slavic literary language: a written tongue, based on the South Slavic speech of the Thessalonian region but elevated and enriched to render Greek theology, which became the literary and liturgical medium of the medieval Orthodox Slavs. Its earliest texts survive in a small canon of Glagolitic and Cyrillic manuscripts; from it descended Church Slavonic, the liturgical language still used across much of the Orthodox world. This file sets out the character of the language, its manuscript tradition, and its afterlife.

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

A Created Literary Language

Old Church Slavonic (OCS) is the name modern scholarship gives to the language of the earliest Slavonic translations — the tongue Constantine and Methodius forged and their disciples transmitted (Lunt, Old Church Slavonic Grammar, 2001, introduction). Its spoken basis was the South Slavic dialect of the Slavs around Thessaloniki, which the brothers knew from their Thessalonian background; in the ninth century the Slavic languages had not yet diverged as widely as they later would, so a literary language built on Macedonian-Bulgarian Slavic was broadly intelligible across the Slavic world, which is one reason it could serve Moravians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and the Rus alike (Lunt 2001, introduction; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 2; Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4).

But OCS was never merely transcribed speech. To translate the Scriptures and the Greek Fathers, the brothers had to raise the vernacular into a literary instrument capable of carrying the most refined theological thought. They did this above all by modeling Slavonic on Greek: borrowing Greek syntactic constructions, calquing Greek compound words into Slavic compounds (rendering, for instance, Greek theological terms by element-for-element Slavic coinages), and creating a vocabulary for concepts — grace, redemption, hypostasis, the consubstantial Trinity — that the unlettered Slavic tongue had never had occasion to express (Lunt 2001, introduction; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 9). The result was a “made” literary language, Slavic in its bones but Byzantine-Greek in its higher architecture — a vessel shaped precisely to pour Greek Christianity into Slavic ears (Lunt 2001; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). In this OCS stands beside the other great translation-languages of Christian antiquity — the Gothic of Ulfilas, the Armenian of Mesrop, the Syriac, the Coptic — each created or elevated to carry the gospel to a people in its own tongue (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4).

The Manuscript Canon

No manuscript survives from the hands of the brothers themselves; the earliest texts are tenth- and eleventh-century copies, mostly produced in Bulgaria, that preserve the classical OCS of the first generations (Lunt 2001, introduction; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). Scholars define “Old Church Slavonic” narrowly by a small canon of these oldest, linguistically most archaic manuscripts. The Glagolitic witnesses include the Codex Zographensis and Codex Marianus (Gospel manuscripts), the Codex Assemanianus (a Gospel lectionary), the Psalterium Sinaiticum (Psalter), the Euchologium Sinaiticum (offices and prayers), the Glagolita Clozianus (homilies), and the Kiev Folia (a fragment of a Roman-rite Mass, among the very oldest) (Lunt 2001, introduction; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). The Cyrillic witnesses of the canon include the Codex Suprasliensis (a large menological collection) and the Savvina Kniga (a Gospel lectionary), together with early inscriptions (Lunt 2001, introduction). The priority of the Glagolitic manuscripts within this canon is one of the principal grounds for the conclusion that Glagolitic was the brothers’ original script (see Glagolitic vs Cyrillic).

This canon is precious out of all proportion to its size: it is the oldest written record of any Slavic language, the foundation-document of Slavic literacy, and the witness from which the whole subsequent tradition of Slavic Christian letters descends (Lunt 2001; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9). That the earliest manuscripts come from Bulgaria rather than Moravia is itself a historical testimony — the mark of the disciples’ flight from Moravia to Bulgaria, where the tradition was preserved and the manuscripts copied (see The Expulsion and the Ohrid School).

From Old Church Slavonic to Church Slavonic

The language the brothers created did not remain frozen. As OCS spread among the various Slavic peoples and was copied by scribes whose own living speech differed, the manuscripts absorbed local features, giving rise to regional “recensions” — the Bulgarian (and Macedonian), the Serbian, the Russian (East Slavic), and others — each the classical language overlaid with the copyists’ vernacular traits (Lunt 2001, introduction; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). The resulting later, recensional forms are collectively called Church Slavonic (as distinct from the narrow OCS of the oldest canon). It was Church Slavonic, in its Russian recension above all, that became and remains the liturgical language of the Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and other Slavic Orthodox Churches — the language in which the Divine Liturgy is still sung across much of the Orthodox world today (Lunt 2001; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; see The Spread to the Slavs).

This continuity is the deepest measure of the brothers’ legacy. The literary language they made in the 860s for a Moravian mission that failed within a generation became the sacred tongue of a great family of Churches and the matrix of their literatures — the medieval writings of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus were all composed in it or in languages it had shaped (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2). Church Slavonic did for the Orthodox Slavs something analogous to what Latin did for the Catholic West: it gave a diverse family of peoples a common liturgical and literary language, a shared script-culture, and access to the patristic and biblical inheritance — and it did so in a tongue closer to their own speech than Latin was to the Romance and Germanic peoples (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9).

The Saints in the Words They Made

It is fitting to end the account of the textual legacy by noting what kind of monument it is. Constantine and Methodius left no great institution that endured — their Moravian Church was destroyed, their disciples scattered, their archiepiscopal see extinguished (see The Expulsion and the Ohrid School). What they left was a language and a body of texts. Every Slavonic Liturgy sung from then to now, every Slavonic Gospel and Psalter, every line of Old Bulgarian, Old Serbian, and Old Russian Christian literature, rests on the alphabet Constantine devised and the translation-language the brothers forged (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 9). The Church’s title for them — Equals-to-the-Apostles, Enlighteners of the Slavs — is in the first place a judgment about this textual achievement: they gave a quarter of Europe the Word of God in its own tongue, and the words have outlasted everything else they built (see Feast and Equal-to-the-Apostles).

See Also

References

  • Lunt, Horace G. Old Church Slavonic Grammar. 7th ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001. (Introduction on the OCS manuscript canon, the language’s character, and the recensions.)
  • Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, ch. 2.
  • Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 9.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4.