Feast and Equal-to-the-Apostles

The Orthodox Church commemorates Saints Cyril and Methodius together on 11 May (24 May new style), honoring them with the title Equals-to-the-Apostles and as the Enlighteners — or Apostles — of the Slavs; Cyril is also remembered on 14 February, the day of his death, and Methodius on 6 April. The title and the feast express the Church’s judgment that the brothers’ gift of letters, Scripture, and worship to the Slavic peoples was an apostolic work — a bringing of whole nations to Christ. This file sets out the feast, the title, the iconography, and the brothers’ place in Orthodox devotion.

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

The Feast of 11/24 May

The principal feast of Saints Cyril and Methodius falls on 11 May in the Church calendar — 24 May by the civil (Gregorian) reckoning for those Churches on the old calendar — a joint commemoration of the two brothers together (Tachiaos, Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica, 2001, ch. 12; Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971, ch. 4). The joint feast reflects the way the tradition remembers them: not as two separate saints who happened to be related, but as a single apostolic partnership — “like two oxen drawing one furrow,” in the phrase the Vita Constantini puts in the dying Cyril’s mouth (Vita Constantini 18; trans. Kantor 1983; see To Rome and the Death of Cyril). Alongside the joint feast, each brother has his own day: Cyril on 14 February, the day of his death in Rome in 869, and Methodius on 6 April, the day of his death in 885 (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12; see To Rome and the Death of Cyril and The Imprisonment).

In the Slavic Orthodox lands the 24 May feast has acquired a second, civic dimension: it is kept as a Day of Slavic Letters and Culture, celebrating the alphabet and the literacy the brothers gave — a national as well as ecclesiastical observance, especially prominent in Bulgaria, where it is a major public holiday, and marked also in Russia, North Macedonia, Serbia, and elsewhere (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12; see Sources and Modern Reception). The feast thus joins the veneration of two saints to the celebration of a cultural inheritance — fittingly, since the inheritance is precisely what the saints are venerated for.

The Title: Equals-to-the-Apostles

The Orthodox Church gives the brothers the high title Equal-to-the-Apostles (Greek Isapostolos; Slavonic ravnoapostol’nyi) — the rank it reserves for those who, like the apostles themselves, brought whole peoples to the Christian faith. It is the title borne by St. Constantine the Great and St. Helen, by St. Nina of Georgia, by St. Mary Magdalene, by St. Vladimir and St. Olga of Rus — those whose evangelizing labor is judged apostolic in scope (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12; see St. Nina of Georgia, St. Vladimir of Kiev, and St. Olga of Kiev). To call Cyril and Methodius Equals-to-the-Apostles is to set their work beside that of the first apostles: as the apostles carried the gospel to the nations of the ancient world, the brothers carried it to the Slavs, and gave them, beyond the gospel, the very letters in which to receive it (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12).

They are honored too as the Enlighteners (prosvetiteli) and Apostles of the Slavs — the “Slavic Apostles” — the founders of Slavic Christianity and Slavic letters (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12; Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom, 1970, ch. 2). The language of “enlightenment” here is the Church’s traditional metaphor for baptism and for the bringing of the light of Christ to those in darkness; applied to the brothers it carries the double sense of spiritual illumination and the literal light of literacy, the two being inseparable in their work (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4).

Iconography

In Orthodox iconography Cyril and Methodius are traditionally depicted together, as the partnership the Church remembers. Cyril is shown as a monk, in the monastic habit and often with the schema, bearded, sometimes holding a book or a scroll; Methodius is shown in the vestments of a bishop — the omophorion and episcopal garb proper to his rank as archbishop — likewise bearded and often holding a Gospel book (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12). A characteristic attribute is a scroll or tablet bearing the Slavic alphabet — the Glagolitic or Cyrillic letters they gave the Slavs — held by one or both, a visual sign of their distinctive achievement (Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12). They are frequently depicted holding a church or a Gospel between them, or with an open book showing the opening words of John’s Gospel in Slavonic, recalling the first sentence Constantine wrote in the new letters (see The Invention of the Alphabet). The icon thus compresses their whole story into a few signs: the monk and the bishop, the book and the alphabet, the two brothers of one work.

Their Place in Orthodox Devotion

For the Orthodox Slavs especially, Cyril and Methodius hold a place of peculiar honor as the spiritual fathers of their Christian nationhood — the men through whom they received not only the faith but the means to make it their own, in their own tongue (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12). The hymnography of their feast praises them as those who “enlightened the Slavic nations” and “translated the divine Scriptures into the Slavonic tongue,” and the troparion and kontakion of the feast celebrate the gift of letters and the Word together (liturgical texts of 11 May; cf. Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12). Their veneration is genuinely pan-Orthodox — kept across all the canonical Orthodox Churches, Greek and Slavic alike — for although their most direct heirs are the Slavs, the brothers were Greek sons of Thessaloniki sent by Constantinople, and their work belongs to the whole Orthodox tradition of mission and of the inculturation of the gospel (Obolensky 1971, ch. 4; Tachiaos 2001, ch. 12). In them the Orthodox Church honors the principle for which they contended at Venice and Rome: that the gospel is for every nation in its own tongue, and that to give a people the Word of God in its own language is an apostolic act (see The Trilingual Dispute).

See Also

References

  • Vita Constantini (Life of Constantine), chapter 18. Trans. in Marvin Kantor, Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.
  • Liturgical texts (troparion, kontakion) of the feast of Ss. Cyril and Methodius, 11 May.
  • Tachiaos, Anthony-Emil N. Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, ch. 12.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971, ch. 4.
  • Vlasto, A. P. The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, ch. 2.