The Christian Prince

The synthesis of Vladimir’s Christian rulership — the shape of a reign in which faith and statecraft converged. This file draws together the threads of the transformed reign: Vladimir as patron and protector of the Church he founded, as a law-giver and ordered of the social peace, and as the very model of the baptized ruler within the Byzantine Commonwealth — the prince whose person joined the Christian faith to the Kyivan state, and whom the tradition would come to honor as Equal-to-the-Apostles for having made his realm a Christian one.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles)

Faith and Statecraft Joined

Vladimir’s greatness, in the tradition’s reckoning, lies in the joining of two things that might have stayed apart: a personal Christian faith and the power of a state. He was not a missionary bishop or a wandering ascetic but a Grand Prince — the ruler of the largest realm in Europe — and his conversion was at once the salvation of a soul and the reordering of a kingdom. The earlier files of this collection have treated the pieces: the personal conversion (see The Conversion of a Warlord), the changed life of charity and justice (see The Change of Life), the building of churches (see Building the Church), and the founding of the Church (see The Church of Rus). This file draws them together into a single portrait: the Christian prince, in whose person the faith and the realm were bound.

Patron and Protector of the Church

The first and most visible mark of Vladimir’s Christian rule was his patronage of the Church. He did not merely permit Christianity; he established it, funded it, and protected it with the full weight of the state. He raised the churches out of his own treasure and endowed the cathedral of Kyiv with a perpetual tithe of his revenues (see Building the Church). He brought clergy from Cherson and Bulgaria and founded the schools that would train a native clergy (see The Church of Rus). He took counsel from his bishops on the governance of the realm, even — in the Chronicle’s striking scene — being instructed by them in the duty of the sword (see The Change of Life). The relationship between prince and Church that Vladimir established — the ruler as the Church’s founder, endower, and protector, and the Church as the consecrator and counselor of the ruler — was the Byzantine model of symphonia, the harmony of the spiritual and temporal powers, transplanted to the Rus’ land. It would shape the relations of Church and state among the Eastern Slavs for a thousand years.

Law-Giver and Keeper of the Peace

Vladimir’s Christian rule also reached into law and social order. The Chronicle’s account of the wergild — his abolition of the man-price in favor of executing brigands, and its restoration at the bishops’ and elders’ urging (see The Change of Life) — shows a prince actively reshaping the customary law of his people under the pressure of the new faith and the old necessities together. The tradition came to associate Vladimir with the beginnings of a Christian legal order in Rus’, the foundation on which his son Yaroslav the Wise would build the Russkaya Pravda, the first written law-code of the Eastern Slavs. The Christian prince was a keeper of the peace as well as a patron of the altar: the charity to the poor, the care for the sick, the restraint of bloodshed, and the ordering of justice were all, in the Chronicle’s portrait, expressions of a single Christian conception of rule — the prince as the shepherd of his people under God.

The Model of the Baptized Ruler

Within the wider world of the Byzantine Commonwealth, Vladimir became the very model of the baptized ruler — the pagan king who, like Constantine before him, brought a whole people to the font and reordered his realm around the faith (see Why Byzantium). The earliest praise of him, Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace (c. 1050), reads his reign in exactly these terms: Vladimir as the apostolic sovereign, the ruler whose evangelization of his people was itself an apostolic act, the new Constantine of the Rus’ (Hilarion of Kiev, Sermon on Law and Grace; see The New Constantine). This is the conception of Christian rulership that underlies Vladimir’s later veneration: not the sanctity of the monk or the martyr, but the sanctity of the prince who used his power for the conversion and the care of his people. The title ravnoapostol’ny — Equal-to-the-Apostles — names precisely this: a ruler whose Christian reign accomplished what apostles accomplish, the bringing of a nation to Christ.

The Reign as the Ground of the Cult

Symphonia and Its Shadow

It is worth being clear-eyed about the model of Church-and-state that Vladimir’s reign established, because it cast a long shadow. The Byzantine symphonia — the harmony of the spiritual and temporal powers, the emperor (or prince) as the protector and the bishops as the consecrators and counselors of the realm — was a genuinely Christian ideal, and in its best form it produced exactly what the Chronicle praises in Vladimir: a ruler who fed the poor, restrained bloodshed, and built churches under the counsel of his bishops. But the same model also bound the Church closely to the state and to the dynasty, and the bishops’ counsel in the matter of the wergild shows the ambivalence plainly: the Church taught Vladimir mercy, and then taught him the sword (see The Change of Life). The Rus’ Church that Vladimir founded was, from the beginning, a Church under princely patronage and princely protection — endowed by the prince, defended by the prince, and woven into the legitimacy of his rule. This intimacy of Church and ruler would shape the whole later history of East Slavic Orthodoxy, for good and for ill: it gave the Church the support of the state and the state the blessing of the Church, but it also made the Church vulnerable to the state’s purposes, a tension that runs through the entire subsequent history this repository records, down to the contested invocations of Vladimir’s own memory in the present (see The Contested Memory and Scholarship). The collection notes the model’s ambivalence rather than presenting Vladimir’s symphonia as an unmixed good; it was the form Christian rule took in his age, and it bore both the fruits and the dangers of that form.

The Saint of the Reign

The Christian prince is, in the end, the figure on whom Vladimir’s whole veneration rests. He is not honored for visions or wonders or a martyr’s death — those belong to his sons Boris and Gleb (see Boris and Gleb) — but for the works of a reign: the baptism of a people, the building of a Church, the charity to the poor, the ordering of a Christian realm. That his cult was slow to form (see The New Constantine) is partly because this kind of sanctity, the sanctity of the ruler, was harder for the early Church to recognize than the sanctity of the passion-bearer. But it was recognized, and the title it earned — Equal-to-the-Apostles — places Vladimir among the small company of rulers whose reigns the Church honors as apostolic. The Christian prince of these pages is the saint the tradition came to keep: the man who joined the faith of the Gospel to the power of a throne, and made of the Kyivan state a Christian people.

See Also

References

  • The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text. Trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. Entry s.a. 996 (the charity, the bishops’ counsel, the wergild, the feasts).
  • Hilarion of Kiev. Sermon on Law and Grace (Slovo o zakone i blagodati), c. 1037–1050. Trans. in Simon Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’, Harvard Library of Early Ukrainian Literature, 1991. On Vladimir as apostolic sovereign and new Constantine.
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On Vladimir’s reign and the founding of a Christian polity.
  • Obolensky, Dimitri. The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. On the model of the baptized ruler within the Byzantine Commonwealth.