The Bulgarian Church

St. John of Rila’s place in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and in Slavic Orthodoxy: the patron of a Church whose own history runs from the First Bulgarian Empire through the medieval Tarnovo patriarchate, the long Ottoman subjection and the schism over phyletism, to the restored modern patriarchate. The hermit of Rila as the spiritual constant across all of it — the figure in whom the Bulgarian Church’s continuity and self-understanding are anchored.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Saint and the Church

The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is one of the ancient autocephalous Churches of the Slavic Orthodox world, and St. John of Rila stands at its spiritual center — its foremost saint and patron (see Patron of Bulgaria). His relationship to the institutional Church is, fittingly, that of a witness rather than a prelate: he held no hierarchical office, founded no see, drafted no canon. He was a hermit. Yet the Church has placed him at its heart precisely for that reason — as the embodiment of the monastic-ascetic holiness from which, in Orthodox understanding, the life of the whole Church draws its renewal. The Testament attributed to him makes the saint a guardian of the pure and undivided faith (“preserve the holy faith immaculate… walk along the royal road”; see The Counsels), and it is in this guardian role that the Bulgarian Church most invokes him.

The Church’s Long History

The Church of which John is patron has one of the most turbulent histories in Orthodoxy, and his veneration runs through every phase of it (the institutional history is set out in Greece, Bulgaria, and the Other Autocephalous Churches; the summary here situates the saint within it).

The First Empire and the conversion. John was born into the Bulgaria of the first Christian generation, after the baptism under Tsar Boris I (c. 864) and the reception of the Cyrillo-Methodian Slavonic mission — the world in which Slavic Orthodoxy itself was being made (see Skrino and the Call).
The Tarnovo patriarchate. Under the Second Bulgarian Empire the Church attained patriarchal dignity at Tarnovo, the golden age of the Tarnovo Literary School under Patriarch Euthymius — the very hagiographer who wrote John’s great Life and to whose milieu the surviving Testament is sometimes traced (see The Sources and The Zavet). John’s relics rested at Tarnovo through these centuries (see The Journeys of the Relics).
The Ottoman centuries. With the conquest the patriarchate fell, and Bulgarian church life came under Greek-speaking hierarchy within the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Rila Monastery, with John’s relics returned in 1469, became one of the chief refuges of Bulgarian faith and letters through these centuries (see The Heart of Bulgaria).
The Revival, the schism, and the restored patriarchate. The nineteenth-century National Revival — of which the rebuilding of Rila was a monument (see The Revival and UNESCO) — produced the drive for an independent Bulgarian Church, the Exarchate of 1870, and the Council of Constantinople’s 1872 condemnation of phyletism; the schism was healed only in 1945, and the Bulgarian patriarchate was restored in 1953 (see Greece, Bulgaria, and the Other Autocephalous Churches). Through all of it, John of Rila remained the constant — the saint invoked across every faction and every century as the patron of Bulgarian Orthodoxy.

A Slavic and Pan-Orthodox Saint

Though pre-eminently a Bulgarian saint, John of Rila belongs to the wider Slavic Orthodox world and is venerated across the canonical Orthodox Churches. His Greek Life by George Skylitzes carried him into the Byzantine hagiographical tradition, and his cult spread through the Slavic lands; he appears in the Russian and other Orthodox calendars (the OCA, for instance, keeps his feasts) (Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila, Orthodox Church in America [oca.org]; see The Sources). He stands within the same Slavic-monastic stream as the other great founders of the Orthodox East — alongside St. Sava of Serbia, the founder of Serbian Orthodoxy, and St. Sergius of Radonezh, the heart of Russian monasticism — a brotherhood of national monastic fathers whose houses became the spiritual centers of their peoples (see St. Sava of Serbia and St. Sergius of Radonezh; on the Russian monastic tradition, Russian Monasticism).

The Anchor of Continuity

If the Bulgarian Church’s history is one of repeated rupture — empire, conquest, schism, restoration — John of Rila is its anchor of continuity. Across a thousand years in which the Bulgarian state vanished and returned, the patriarchate fell and was restored, and the Church was torn and reconciled, the hermit of Rila remained: the same relics venerated, the same monastery standing, the same saint invoked. He is the figure in whom the Bulgarian Church reads its own identity as unbroken — older than any of its institutions, surviving all of their crises, the patron who was there at the beginning and has never left. That is his place in the Bulgarian Church: not an office within it, but the spiritual ground beneath it.

The Phases in Depth

Each of the phases sketched above deserves a closer line, for the saint’s veneration takes a different color against each.

The Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance. John was born, around 876, into the first Christian century of the Bulgarian people — after the baptism under Boris I (c. 864) and into the world remade by the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who, expelled from Moravia, found refuge in Bulgaria and there established the Slavonic letters and liturgy as the foundation of a vernacular Christian culture (see Skrino and the Call) (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, 1971). The significance is that John’s holiness was Slavonic from the first: he prayed, was commemorated, and would be written about in the Church Slavonic that the mission had made — the saint of a Church that was, almost uniquely in its age, worshipping God in the language of its own people.

The Tarnovo golden age. Under the Second Bulgarian Empire the Church attained patriarchal rank at Tarnovo, and its fourteenth-century flowering — the Tarnovo Literary School under Patriarch Euthymius (Evtimiy), the last patriarch before the conquest — produced the definitive Slavonic Life of John, the very text by which later Bulgaria would know its patron (see The Sources) (Kalužniacki, Werke des Patriarchen Euthymius, 1901). Euthymius’ reform of the Slavonic letters and his hagiographies were a conscious gathering-up of the national tradition on the eve of catastrophe; that John’s Life stands among them places his cult at the very heart of the empire’s last and greatest cultural achievement.

Under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. With the fall of Tarnovo (1393) the Bulgarian patriarchate was extinguished, and for nearly five centuries the Bulgarian faithful lived within the Ottoman millet system under the Greek-speaking hierarchy of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (see Greece, Bulgaria, and the Other Autocephalous Churches). In this long interval the institutional Church that bore John’s name had effectively ceased to exist as a Bulgarian body — and it was precisely then that the monastery of Rila, with the relics returned in 1469, carried the continuity that the hierarchy could not (see The Heart of Bulgaria). The saint outlasted the institution.

The Exarchate and the phyletism controversy. The nineteenth-century Revival produced the demand for a Bulgarian Church free of Greek hierarchy, met by the Ottoman firman of 1870 establishing the Bulgarian Exarchate. In 1872 a council at Constantinople condemned phyletism — the subordination of Church order to ethnic-national principle — and declared the Bulgarian Exarchate schismatic (see Greece, Bulgaria, and the Other Autocephalous Churches). The episode must be held in careful balance, as the methodology of this collection requires of contested matters (METHODOLOGY §4): the council’s principle — that the Church is universal and may not be reorganized along the lines of nation or race — has been received as a genuine and enduring ecclesiological insight; yet the Bulgarian side experienced the ruling as the canonical sanctification of a hierarchy that had become, in practice, an instrument of Hellenization, and saw in its own demand a defense of the right to worship and be governed in its own language. Both judgments have their force, and Orthodox historiography has not resolved them into a single verdict. The schism was lifted in 1945, and the Bulgarian patriarchate was restored on 10 May 1953 — the institutional vessel at last refitted to the continuity the saint had always carried.

The Brotherhood of Slavic Founders, in Detail

The kinship of John with St. Sava of Serbia and St. Sergius of Radonezh is more than a pious analogy; it is a structural pattern of the Orthodox Slavic world, named and analyzed by Dimitri Obolensky in The Byzantine Commonwealth (1971). In each case a monastic founder’s great house became the spiritual axis of a people: Rila for Bulgaria, the Athonite-Serbian foundations and the autocephalous Church Sava secured for Serbia (see St. Sava of Serbia), and the Trinity Lavra of Sergius for Russia (see St. Sergius of Radonezh; on the tradition, Russian Monasticism). Yet the differences are as telling as the likeness. Sava was a royal prince who became an archbishop and an architect of his nation’s Church; Sergius was the spiritual father of a Russia gathering itself against the Mongol yoke, his blessing sought before the field of Kulikovo. John alone was neither prince nor prelate nor counselor of armies — a hermit who held no office and shunned all power. That the earliest of these national-founder saints should be the one most radically withdrawn from worldly authority gives the Bulgarian pattern its particular character: a Church that reads its identity not in a founding bishop or a kingmaking elder but in a solitary who fled the world entirely, and was claimed by the nation precisely for that flight.

References

Repose of Venerable John, Abbot of Rila. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, August 18. (John’s veneration across the Orthodox world; the feasts in the Slavic calendar.)
John of Rila. Wikipedia and OrthodoxWiki. (Patron of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church; the spread of the cult.)
Greece, Bulgaria, and the Other Autocephalous Churches (this repository, orthodoxy/11-world-orthodoxy). (The institutional history: the Tarnovo patriarchate, the 1872 phyletism schism, the 1945 reconciliation, the 1953 restored patriarchate.)
Kalužniacki, Emil, ed. Werke des Patriarchen von Bulgarien Euthymius. Vienna, 1901. (Euthymius of Tarnovo, patriarch and hagiographer of John.)
Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. (The Cyrillo-Methodian Slavonic inheritance; the structural pattern of Slavic national-founder saints within which John, Sava, and Sergius stand.)