The Spread to the Slavs

From its Bulgarian refuge the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance spread across the Slavic Orthodox world. The Golden Age of Old Bulgarian letters under Symeon made Bulgaria the first great center of Slavonic Christian culture; from Bulgaria the Slavonic books, language, and rite passed to Serbia, where they became the foundation of the Serbian Church and its literature, and — most consequentially — to Kievan Rus, which after its baptism in 988 received Slavonic Christianity from the Bulgarian and Byzantine tradition and carried it into the vast Russian future. This file traces that diffusion and the brothers’ role as founders of a Slavic Orthodox commonwealth.

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

Bulgaria: The First Center

Bulgaria was the cradle in which the rescued tradition grew to maturity. Under Prince Boris and, above all, his son Symeon the Great (ruled 893–927) — a ruler educated at Constantinople and devoted to letters — the Slavonic culture established by the disciples flowered into what is justly called the Golden Age of Old Bulgarian literature (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 3). The schools of Ohrid and Preslav produced a wealth of translation and original composition: liturgical books, biblical texts, patristic translations (the homilies of John Chrysostom and others), hagiography, the defense of the Slavic letters by the monk Hrabar, and the works of writers such as Constantine of Preslav and John the Exarch (Vlasto 1970, ch. 3; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 11). The Bulgarian Church, organized as an autonomous and eventually patriarchal body within the Orthodox communion, became the first national Slavic Church worshipping wholly in Slavonic — the realization, in the East, of what the brothers had attempted in Moravia (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; see Greece, Bulgaria and Others).

Serbia

From Bulgaria the Slavonic tradition passed to the Serbs, whose lands lay adjacent and whose Christianization, completed over the ninth and tenth centuries, drew on both Byzantine and Bulgarian-Slavonic sources (Vlasto 1970, ch. 5; Obolensky 1971, ch. 4). Serbian Christianity adopted the Slavonic liturgy and the Cyrillic script, and in time developed its own recension of Church Slavonic and its own rich literature. The decisive consolidation came in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries with the work of the Nemanjić dynasty and above all of St. Sava (d. 1236), who secured an autocephalous Serbian Church and gave it its organization, its law, and its literature in the Slavonic inheritance the brothers had founded (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 5; see St. Sava of Serbia). The Serbian Church thus stands as another branch grown from the Cyrillo-Methodian root, mediated through Bulgaria.

Kievan Rus: The Greatest Inheritance

The most consequential transmission of all carried the Slavonic inheritance north and east, to the Eastern Slavs of Kievan Rus. When Rus accepted Christianity under St. Vladimir in 988 — building on the earlier Christian openings under his grandmother St. Olga — it received the faith from Byzantium, but it received its books and liturgy in the Slavonic of the Bulgarian tradition, not in Greek (Obolensky 1971, chs. 4, 6; Vlasto 1970, ch. 7; see The Baptism of Rus). This was a fact of immense importance: because of the work of Cyril, Methodius, and their Bulgarian heirs, the Rus did not have to worship in a foreign tongue but received the Scriptures, the Liturgy, and the Christian literature in a Slavic language they could largely understand (Obolensky 1971, ch. 6; Vlasto 1970, ch. 7). The Slavonic books flowed north from Bulgaria — directly and through the Balkan Slavic channels — and became the foundation of Russian Christian literacy, the language of the Rus Primary Chronicle, the law-codes, the homilies of Hilarion of Kiev, and the whole tradition of Old Russian letters (Obolensky 1971, ch. 6; Vlasto 1970, ch. 7).

From Kiev the Slavonic, Cyrillic, Orthodox Christianity spread across the vast East Slavic world — to Novgorod and Vladimir, to Moscow, and ultimately across northern Eurasia — carrying with it the alphabet Constantine had devised and the liturgical language the brothers had forged, down to the present day (Obolensky 1971, ch. 6; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 11; see The Baptism of Rus and St. Vladimir of Kiev). Of all the fruits of the Moravian mission, this — the Slavonic Christianity of the Rus and their heirs — was the largest, embracing in the end hundreds of millions of the faithful.

A Slavic Orthodox Commonwealth

The cumulative result of this diffusion was the creation of what Obolensky named the “Byzantine Commonwealth”: a family of Slavic Orthodox peoples — Bulgarians, Serbs, the Rus, and others — bound together by a shared Orthodox faith, a shared Byzantine rite, a shared Cyrillic script, and a shared liturgical and literary language descended from the brothers’ Slavonic (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, esp. introduction and ch. 4). Within this commonwealth Old Church Slavonic functioned much as Latin did in the Catholic West — a common sacred and learned language transcending the boundaries of the several peoples and giving them access to a shared inheritance — but with the difference that it was far closer to their spoken tongues (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 11). The brothers of Thessaloniki, whose own foundation in Moravia had been destroyed within a generation, were thus in the deepest sense the founders of this Slavic Orthodox civilization: the alphabet, the language, the liturgy, and the literary culture of the Orthodox Slavs all trace back to the work begun when Constantine wrote “In the beginning was the Word” in letters no Slav had seen (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Vlasto 1970, ch. 2; see The Textual Legacy).

This is why the Church venerates them as Equals-to-the-Apostles and Enlighteners of the Slavs: not for the Moravian mission alone, which failed, but for the civilization that grew, against all expectation, from its scattered seed (see Feast and Equal-to-the-Apostles).

See Also

References

  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, chs. 4, 6.
  • Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, chs. 3, 5, 7.
  • Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 11.