Faith, Letters, and Learning

Beyond the law-code, Sava shaped the inner life of the Serbian church and nation. He gave the church its standard of Orthodox faith — the profession associated with the council of Žiča — and he built the symphony of crown and church that has defined Serbian Orthodoxy ever since: the king to rule, the archbishop to teach and sanctify, the two in concord. Above all he became the father of Serbian education and letters — the translator, the founder of scriptoria, the writer of the first works of Serbian literature — the figure Serbia honors as its “Enlightener” (Prosvetitelj).

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox

The Profession of Faith at Žiča

When Sava organized the autocephalous church, he gave it not only a structure and a law-code but a standard of Orthodox faith. The Lives record that at a great council held at Žiča — the new archiepiscopal seat — Sava set out, before the king, the bishops, and the people, the right confession of the faith and the proper ordering of the church’s life, in what the tradition treats as a foundational profession of Orthodoxy for the Serbian Church (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; see Organizing the Church). The act had a double point. Inwardly, it instructed a new hierarchy and people in the Orthodox faith Sava had brought from Athos. Outwardly, it marked the decisive turn away from the Roman orientation of Stefan’s 1217 coronation toward firm Eastern Orthodoxy — the same turn embodied in the autocephaly itself (see Autocephaly 1219). The profession of faith was the doctrinal counterpart to the Zakonopravilo’s legal one: together they fixed what the Serbian Church believed and how it would live.

The Symphony of Church and State

The deepest of Sava’s structural creations was the symphony (symphonia) of church and state — the Byzantine ideal of a harmonious concord between the sacred and the royal powers, each supreme in its own sphere and the two cooperating for the good of the Christian people (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4). Sava realized this ideal in a peculiarly Serbian form, and he was uniquely placed to do so: he was at once the archbishop and the brother of the king, the spiritual head of the church and a prince of the dynasty. Through him the two powers were not merely allied but personally and dynastically interwoven:

The crown ruled the kingdom, defended the church, and founded and endowed the royal monasteries.
The church sanctified the crown, crowned and counseled the kings, canonized the dynasty’s saints, and gave the realm its law and learning.
The holy dynasty bound the two together: the Nemanjići were both rulers and saints, and Sava — who had made his father a saint and his brother a king — was the architect of that fusion (see The Cult of Symeon and Crowning the Kingdom).

This symphonic synthesis is Sava’s most lasting structural legacy. It made the Serbian Church the bearer of Serbian nationhood and the dynasty the guarantor of Orthodoxy — a bond so deep that, when the medieval state was destroyed under the Ottomans, the church carried the nation’s identity through the centuries until a state could be rebuilt (see Orthodoxy Guide: World Orthodoxy — Serbia).

The Father of Serbian Education and Letters

Sava is honored above all as the Enlightener (Prosvetitelj) — the father of Serbian education and literacy — and the title rests on concrete work:

The first works of Serbian literature. Sava’s own compositions — the Karyes, Hilandar, and Studenica typika, the Life of St. Symeon, the church ordo, and the Zakonopravilo — are among the earliest and most important monuments of medieval Serbian literature and of the Serbian literary language (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; see The Sources and The Typikon and the Monastic Vision).
Scriptoria and translation. The monasteries Sava founded and ordered — Hilandar above all, “the first Serbian university,” and Studenica — became centers of copying, translation, and education, where Greek theological, liturgical, and legal texts were rendered into Slavonic and where Serbian clergy and scribes were formed (see Founding Hilandar).
A literate clergy and church. By staffing his bishoprics with monks trained in these schools and supplying the church with translated books, Sava made literacy and learning constitutive of the Serbian Church from its foundation — the institutional root of the reputation that, six centuries later, would make him the patron saint of Serbian schools (see Patron of Serbia).

Sava’s educational legacy is thus not a single school or text but a whole literate, theological, and legal culture planted in Serbia and rooted in its monasteries. It is the reason that, since 1840, Serbian schools have kept his feast as their slava and have honored him as “the first Serbian educator” and “the man who introduced enlightenment” into the country (Serbia.com, “Saint Sava Day”; see Patron of Serbia). The lawgiver, the teacher of the faith, and the founder of letters are, in Sava, a single figure: the maker not only of a church but of a civilization.

The Byzantine Roots of Symphonia

The ideal of symphonia that Sava brought to Serbia was not his invention but a Byzantine inheritance with a precise classical source, and recovering that source clarifies what he was building. The locus classicus of the doctrine is the sixth Novella of Justinian (issued 535), whose preface set out the relationship of the two great gifts of God to mankind — the priesthood (sacerdotium) and the empire (imperium) — the one ministering to things divine, the other presiding over things human, both proceeding from the same source and adorning human life, so that nothing was so desired by emperors as the honor of the priests, who in turn prayed for the empire (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Orthodoxy Guide: Canon Law). This image of a “concord” (symphonia) between two distinct but harmonized powers, neither absorbing the other, became the governing political theology of Byzantium and passed, through texts like the Zakonopravilo, into the law of the Orthodox Slavs. Sava, formed on Athos in this tradition, brought it whole into Serbian soil. [Disputed: The term symphonia as a label for the church-state doctrine is a modern scholarly usage drawn from the language of Justinian’s sixth Novella; the Byzantines did not employ it as a fixed technical term, and historians debate how consistently the ideal was realized in Byzantine practice (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).]

Sava’s Distinctive Serbian Symphonia

What made Sava’s realization of the Byzantine ideal distinctive was that he embodied both of its terms at once. In Byzantium, symphonia described the relation between two persons — emperor and patriarch — who were, however cooperative, structurally distinct and not infrequently rivals. In Serbia the concord was sealed within a single family and, at its founding moment, within a single man: Sava was at once the first archbishop of the autocephalous church and the brother of the first crowned king, Stefan the First-Crowned, and the son of the dynasty’s founding saint, Symeon-Nemanja (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, on the early Nemanjić church-state). He had made his father a saint and helped make his brother a king; he then became the church’s head himself. The two powers were therefore not merely allied across a boundary but fused in the dynasty and personified in Sava. This is why the Serbian symphony proved so durable and so national: where the Byzantine version balanced two great institutions of a universal empire, the Serbian version bound church and crown into the single sacred history of one ruling house, making the church the keeper of the nation’s identity. It is the form of symphonia most fully realized in any of the Orthodox Slavic states (Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans; see Orthodoxy Guide: World Orthodoxy — Serbia).

The Profession of Orthodoxy and the Anti-Heresy Dimension

The profession of faith at Žiča had a sharp polemical edge that the Lives do not let the reader miss: it was directed not only toward instruction but against heresy. The Serbia of Sava’s day lay along the frontier of the dualist heresy — the Bogomils, the Balkan kin of the Cathars — which Sava’s father Nemanja had already suppressed by force, and the firm public confession of the Orthodox faith at Žiča was in part a declaration against that error and against the Latin orientation that the 1217 coronation had implied (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans, on Bogomilism and the early Serbian church). In the wider Orthodox tradition such a public affirmation of right belief and condemnation of error belongs to the order of the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, the solemn proclamation of the faith and anathematization of heresies read on the Sunday of Orthodoxy; Sava’s profession functioned for the young Serbian Church as such a foundational standard of belief, fixing the boundary of Orthodoxy at the church’s very beginning (Domentijan and Teodosije, Lives; see Organizing the Church). The defense of Orthodoxy against heresy was, moreover, written into the law as well as the council: the civil and canonical chapters of the Zakonopravilo carried the imperial law’s provisions against heresy, so that the doctrinal stand at Žiča had its legal teeth in the nomocanon (see The Nomocanon).

The Scriptorium Culture of Hilandar and Studenica

The “letters” of Sava’s legacy rested on an institutional base: the scriptoria of the monasteries he founded and ordered, where the work of copying and translation made a Serbian Christian literature possible. At Hilandar on Athos — remembered as “the first Serbian university” — and at Studenica, the dynastic monastery in Serbia itself, monks trained under Sava’s typika rendered the Greek inheritance into Church Slavonic: the liturgical books, the lives of the saints, the theological and ascetic Fathers, and the legal corpus that became the Zakonopravilo (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; see Founding Hilandar and The Typikon and the Monastic Vision). This translation work was not incidental but constitutive: a Slavonic church needed Slavonic books, and the production of those books in Sava’s monasteries founded the technical and intellectual culture — the trained scribes, the assembled libraries, the habit of rendering Greek into Slavonic — from which Serbian literacy grew. Athos itself, the cosmopolitan center of Orthodox monasticism, gave the enterprise its models and its texts; through Hilandar that Athonite learning flowed into Serbia (see Orthodoxy Guide: Russian Monasticism for the parallel role of monastic scriptoria among the Slavs).

Sava’s Literary Corpus

The works that flowed from Sava’s own hand are the first monuments of Serbian literature, and they can be characterized as a coherent body rather than a miscellany. They are, in the main, monastic and legislative writings turned to the building of a church. The Karyes Typikon, written for the hesychast cell at Karyes on Athos, is the rule of a contemplative hermitage; the Hilandar Typikon and the Studenica Typikon are the foundational rules of his two great monasteries, the latter prefaced by the Life of St. Symeon, Sava’s biography of his father, which is at once a work of hagiography and the founding document of the dynasty’s holiness (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4; see The Sources). To these belong the liturgical ordo he arranged for the church and, crowning the whole, the Zakonopravilo itself, his great legal compilation (see The Nomocanon). Taken together the corpus is the work of a founder: rules to order monastic life, a life to sanctify the dynasty, an ordo to order worship, and a nomocanon to order the church and realm. It is literature in the service of institution-building, and as the first body of writing in the Serbian recension of Church Slavonic it stands at the head of the entire Serbian literary tradition (Obolensky, Six Byzantine Portraits, ch. 4).

The Long Reception: Patron of Schools

The reputation built on this foundation took its enduring institutional form only centuries later, but in direct descent from what Sava had planted. Having made literacy and learning constitutive of the Serbian Church from its origin, Sava was remembered through the Ottoman centuries as the nation’s teacher and enlightener, and when modern Serbian education was organized in the nineteenth century the memory crystallized into formal patronage: since 1840 Serbian schools have kept the feast of Saint Sava (27 January) as their slava, honoring him as “the first Serbian educator” and the man who brought enlightenment to the country (Serbia.com, “Saint Sava Day”; see Patron of Serbia). The long arc from the scriptoria of Hilandar to the schoolrooms of modern Serbia is unbroken: the same figure who translated the Greek Fathers and wrote the first Serbian books became, six centuries on, the patron under whose name Serbian children are taught their letters. In Sava the founder of the church, the lawgiver, the teacher of the faith, and the father of letters remain a single figure, and the cult of the Prosvetitelj is the nation’s recognition of that unity (see Patron of Serbia).

References

Obolensky, Dimitri. Six Byzantine Portraits. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, chapter 4. On the church–state symphony, the sixth Novella of Justinian, Sava’s writings and literary corpus, and his place in Serbian letters.
Fine, John V. A., Jr. The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. On the early Nemanjić church-state, Bogomilism, and the political setting of Sava’s work.
Domentijan and Teodosije. Lives of Saint Sava, 1253/54 and c. 1290–1320. On the council of Žiča and the profession of faith.
St. Sava. Life of St. Symeon; the Karyes, Hilandar, and Studenica typika; the Zakonopravilo. The first monuments of Serbian literature.
“Saint Sava Day: Celebrating Education and Tradition in Serbia.” Serbia.com. On Sava as “the first Serbian educator” and “the Enlightener,” and the school slava.