Cyril and Methodius

The Slavonic mission of Saints Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, the apostles to the Slavs, sent from Constantinople under Photius’s patriarchate. This file covers the brothers from Thessalonica, the Khazar embassy of 860 and the Moravian mission of 862–863, the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet and the translation of the Scriptures and liturgy into Slavonic, and the connection — real but sometimes overstated — between Photius and Constantine the Philosopher.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Brothers from Thessalonica

Constantine (who took the monastic name Cyril near his death) and his elder brother Methodius were sons of a well-placed official family of Thessalonica, a city on the edge of the Slavic world where Greek and Slavonic were both spoken. The brothers’ birthplace was no accident of their later vocation: Thessalonica, the second city of the empire, sat amid a populous Slavic hinterland, and a familiarity with the Slavonic tongue acquired in that environment was among the gifts that fitted them for their mission (Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth [1971], ch. on the conversion of the Slavs). Constantine, called “the Philosopher” for his learning, was educated at the highest level in Constantinople, where he came under the best masters of the age and rose to teach and to serve in posts that required both erudition and diplomatic skill; he became one of the most accomplished men of the capital’s intellectual revival (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Constantine the Philosopher”). Methodius, the elder, first pursued an administrative career, serving as governor of a province with a Slavic population, before withdrawing to the monastic life on Mount Olympus in Bithynia, from which he was drawn out to join his brother’s missions (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Methodios”). Both were figures of the same Constantinopolitan learned world over which Photius presided, and both would become, through their mission, the founders of Slavonic Christian civilization and saints venerated across the Orthodox and Catholic worlds alike — honored in the Orthodox Church as “Equals to the Apostles” and reckoned among the patrons of the Slavic peoples.

The Embassies: Khazaria and Moravia

The brothers’ missionary career was launched from Constantinople under Photius’s patriarchate. Around 860 — within Photius’s first patriarchate — Constantine was sent, with Methodius, on a diplomatic and religious embassy to the Khazars, the people of the steppe north of the Black Sea, on behalf of the emperor and patriarch (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Constantine the Philosopher”). The Khazar mission belonged to the wider Byzantine effort to win or hold the allegiance of the peoples of the northern frontier, a frontier on which Judaism and Islam were also competing for the ruling elite of the steppe; the embassy thus combined the aims of statecraft and of the faith, and it tested Constantine’s gifts as a disputant in the presence of representatives of the rival religions (Obolensky 1971). It was in connection with this northern journey, by way of the Crimea, that Constantine is associated with the discovery of relics held to be those of St. Clement of Rome — relics the brothers later carried with them, and which would figure in their reception at Rome (Obolensky 1971; ODB).

The decisive mission came in 862–863. The Moravian prince Rastislav, seeking to organize the Church in his Slavic realm independently of the Frankish (Bavarian) clergy who came with German political influence, petitioned Constantinople for teachers who could instruct his people in their own tongue. The request was at once religious and political: an independent, vernacular Christianity would loosen the grip of the East Frankish kingdom and its Bavarian bishops, whose ecclesiastical reach followed and reinforced German power, and so the appeal to Constantinople was a bid to secure the new faith without the foreign tutelage that came with the Frankish clergy (Obolensky 1971). The emperor Michael III and the patriarch Photius chose Constantine and Methodius for the task — men whose learning, diplomatic seasoning, and command of Slavonic made them uniquely fitted for it — and the brothers set out for Great Moravia in 863 (Obolensky 1971; ODB; on Photius’s role in the dispatch, the standard accounts of the mission). That the embassy from a distant Slavic prince was answered not with a token of clergy but with two of the ablest men the capital could furnish is itself a measure of the importance the imperial and patriarchal court attached to the enterprise (Obolensky 1971). The mission to Moravia is the foundational event of Slavonic Christianity, and it went out under Photius’s patriarchate and with his sanction.

The Glagolitic Alphabet and the Slavonic Liturgy

The brothers’ great innovation was linguistic and liturgical. Before departing, Constantine devised an alphabet — the Glagolitic — suited to the sounds of Slavonic, and began the translation of the Scriptures and the liturgical texts into the Slavic vernacular, creating the literary language now called Old Church Slavonic (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Glagolitic”). The Glagolitic was an original creation, carefully designed to render the distinctive sounds of the Slavic tongue that the Greek and Latin alphabets could not represent; the later and more familiar Cyrillic script, which superseded it across much of the Slavic Orthodox world and bears Cyril’s name in his honor, was a subsequent development associated with the disciples of the brothers rather than Constantine’s own first invention (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Glagolitic”). With an alphabet in hand, the brothers rendered the Gospel, the Psalter, and the texts of the divine services into Slavonic, so that the new converts could hear and read the word of God and worship in a language they understood.

This was a momentous decision, and it set the Byzantine mission directly against a principle dear to the Frankish clergy. The Latins of central Europe held to what is called the three-languages (or “trilingual”) doctrine: that the liturgy and the Scriptures could rightly be set forth only in the three “sacred” languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin — the three, it was said, in which Pilate’s inscription had been written over the Cross (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Moravia”). Against this the Byzantine mission gave the Slavs the Gospel and the services in their own tongue, and Constantine is remembered for defending the vernacular principle as consonant with Scripture’s own summons to every nation and tongue to praise God. The principle — that the Church speaks to each people in its own language — would shape the whole subsequent history of Orthodox Christianity among the Slavs, and the Slavonic liturgy created under Photius’s patriarchate became the worship of a great part of the Orthodox world. The collision of this vernacular mission with the Frankish “three-languages” claim, and the brothers’ eventual appeal to and vindication at Rome — where Pope Hadrian II approved the Slavonic books — belong to the complicated later history of the Moravian Church; what belongs here is that the enterprise began under Photius, and that the vernacular principle it established became a permanent mark of Orthodox missionary practice.

Photius and Constantine: A Sober Account

The connection between Photius and Constantine-Cyril is real and important, but it has sometimes been overstated in the tradition, and the methodology requires it to be stated soberly. Constantine the Philosopher belonged to the same Constantinopolitan circle of letters as Photius; the two were associates, and Photius was among the senior teachers and scholars of the world in which Constantine was formed and worked (Obolensky 1971; Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983]; see The Scholar and Statesman). That world was a small and intensely learned one — the revival of classical and theological scholarship over which Photius towered as its leading figure — and within it the gifted younger Constantine and the great scholar-patriarch were certainly known to each other and moved in the same intellectual ambit (Wilson 1983; Obolensky 1971). It was as patriarch that Photius, with the emperor, dispatched the brothers on the Moravian mission, an act that places the whole Slavonic enterprise squarely within his patriarchal responsibility. But the further claim, found in some traditions, that Photius was in a strict sense Constantine’s master and teacher goes beyond what the sources securely establish; the relationship is better described as that of a senior colleague and patron within a shared learned milieu than as a documented master-disciple bond (Obolensky 1971; ODB). The distinction matters, because the honest portrait of Photius’s role does not need the embellishment: it is enough, and it is certain, that the mission went forth under his authority and from the learned world he led. What is certain — and what matters for Photius’s legacy — is that the most consequential missionary enterprise of the Byzantine Middle Ages, the one that brought a whole family of nations into the Orthodox Church, went forth under his patriarchate and by his authority. The same patriarch who was carrying on a dogmatic war against the Latin Filioque was also presiding over the expansion of Orthodox Christianity into the Slavic world — and the two facts would shortly intersect, for it was the rival evangelization of Bulgaria that turned the Photian controversy doctrinal (see Bulgaria and the Jurisdictional Dispute).

The Enduring Inheritance

The Moravian mission itself was, in the short run, a fragile and embattled thing: hemmed in by the Frankish clergy, dependent on the shifting fortunes of the Moravian princes, it did not long survive the deaths of the brothers in the form they had given it, and Constantine died at Rome in 869 while Methodius labored on under Frankish opposition until his own death in 885 (Obolensky 1971; ODB, s.v. “Methodios”). Yet the work proved indestructible because its seed had been sown elsewhere. Expelled from Moravia after Methodius’s death, the disciples of the brothers carried the Slavonic books and the vernacular liturgy southward, above all into Bulgaria, where they found a welcome and where the Slavonic letters took root and flourished as the literary and liturgical language of a great Orthodox culture (Obolensky 1971). From that base Old Church Slavonic spread across the Orthodox Slavic world, becoming in time the sacred tongue of the Serbs and the Rus’ as well as the Bulgarians, so that the brothers’ invention outlived the particular mission for which it was made and became the common inheritance of Slavic Orthodoxy (Obolensky 1971). The principle established under Photius — that the Church addresses each people in its own language — thus passed, through the brothers’ disciples, into the permanent practice of the Orthodox East.

References

Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971. The standard account of the conversion of the Slavs, the Khazar and Moravian missions, and Photius’s role.
Kazhdan, Alexander P., ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, s.v. “Constantine the Philosopher,” “Methodios,” “Glagolitic,” “Moravia.” On the missions, the alphabet, and the dates.
Wilson, N. G. Scholars of Byzantium. London: Duckworth, 1983. On the Constantinopolitan learned circle of Photius and Constantine.
Cyril and Methodius. Encyclopedia.com (drawing on standard reference works); used to locate the chronology of the Khazar and Moravian missions, cross-checked against Obolensky.