The Church of Rus’

The institutional and cultural founding of the Rus’ Church under Vladimir. This file sets out the one secure fact and the several uncertain ones: that the Church of Rus’ was organized as a metropolitanate of Kyiv under the Patriarchate of Constantinople — this much is undisputed — while the identity of its first hierarchs and the precise date of the metropolitanate’s establishment are genuinely unknown, the early names resting on late and partly legendary attestation. It then treats the inheritance that gave Rus’ Christianity its enduring character: the Church Slavonic liturgy, Scripture, and books of the Cyrillo-Methodian tradition, received chiefly through Bulgaria, and Vladimir’s founding of schools for “book learning.”

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

Under the Patriarchate of Constantinople

The one fact about the organization of the Rus’ Church that is beyond dispute is its canonical dependence on Constantinople. When Vladimir received the faith from Byzantium, he received with it the Byzantine ecclesiastical order: the Church of Rus’ was constituted as a metropolitanate of Kyiv under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the mother church from which its hierarchy, its liturgy, and its canon law all derived (see Orthodoxy: The Patriarchate of Constantinople). The metropolitan of Kyiv was, for centuries, a hierarch sent or confirmed by Constantinople — most often a Greek — and the Rus’ Church was a daughter church within the Byzantine Commonwealth (see Why Byzantium). This canonical relationship is the secure frame within which everything else about the early Rus’ Church must be set, and it would remain the defining fact of that Church’s status until the events of much later centuries. The contested modern question of Ukrainian autocephaly, nearly a thousand years on, turns in part on this original dependence of Kyiv on Constantinople (see The Contested Memory and Scholarship).

The Disputed First Hierarchs

If the canonical frame is secure, the personnel are not. The identity of the first metropolitan of Kyiv and the precise date at which the metropolitanate was formally established are genuinely unknown, and the question is one of the real cruces of early Rus’ church history.

[Disputed: The identity of Vladimir’s first metropolitan is uncertain. (1) Church tradition names Michael — variously called Greek, Syrian, or Bulgarian — as the first Metropolitan of Kyiv (c. 988–992), sent by Patriarch Nicholas II Chrysoberges; he is commemorated as a saint (30 September). (2) The tradition also preserves the names Leontius (Leon) and Theophylact (said to have been transferred from the see of Sebasteia) among the earliest metropolitans. (3) Skeptical scholarship holds these early names to be late, weakly attested, and partly legendary back-projections; Andrzej Poppe in particular argues the early-hierarch list cannot be relied upon. The first metropolitan resting on solid documentary ground is Theopemptos, a Greek attested c. 1037 under Vladimir’s son Yaroslav. Franklin & Shepard treat the structure of Vladimir’s church as obscure, noting it is not certain that Kyiv was a fully constituted metropolitanate in Vladimir’s own lifetime rather than being definitively organized only under Yaroslav. The undisputed constant is the canonical dependence on Constantinople; only the names and the founding date are contested.]

The honest statement, then, is that Vladimir founded a Church whose first leaders we cannot securely name. The tradition’s Michael stands as the traditional first metropolitan; Leontius and Theophylact as disputed early names; and Theopemptos (c. 1037) as the first firmly documented holder of the see. The collection reports the tradition and the scholarship together, per methodology §3, without forcing a resolution the sources cannot bear.

The Cyrillo-Methodian Inheritance

Far more consequential than the names of the first bishops was the form of Christianity Vladimir’s Church received — and here the decisive fact is the Slavonic inheritance. Unlike the Latin Church of the West, which bound its worship to Latin, the Byzantine mission to the Slavs had created, in the ninth-century work of Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples, a complete Christian culture in the Slavic tongue: an alphabet, a translated Scripture, and a translated liturgy. By Vladimir’s day this Church Slavonic literature was flourishing in newly Christian Bulgaria, and it was from Bulgaria above all — alongside the Greek clergy from Cherson and Constantinople — that the books, the liturgical texts, and much of the early teaching of the Rus’ Church came (Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200, 1996; see Building the Church).

The importance of this can hardly be overstated. Because of the Cyrillo-Methodian inheritance, the Rus’ worshipped, read the Scriptures, and were taught the faith in a language they could understand — Church Slavonic, close enough to their own speech to be intelligible. The Rus’ Church was, from its founding, a vernacular church, and this gave East Slavic Christianity its enduring character: a rich native liturgical and literary tradition, the swift growth of an indigenous Christian literature (the chronicles, the saints’ lives, the sermons of Hilarion), and a faith that struck deep roots precisely because it spoke the people’s tongue. The relics of St. Clement of Rome that Vladimir brought from Cherson — recovered there, in the tradition, by Cyril and Methodius themselves and now resting in his cathedral at Kyiv — made the connection tangible: the apostles of the Slavs and the newest Christian Slavic people joined in the bones of an ancient martyr (see Building the Church).

Schools and “Book Learning”

Vladimir’s Church needed literate Christians to serve and to lead it, and the Chronicle credits him with founding the first schools of Rus’. The passage is vivid and revealing: “He took the children of the best families, and sent them to schools for instruction in book learning. The mothers of these children wept bitterly over them, for they were not yet strong in faith, but mourned as for the dead” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 988). The detail of the weeping mothers — grieving over sons taken for “book learning” as if for death — captures the strangeness of the new literate Christianity to a society that had known no books, and the force with which it was introduced from above. Yet from these schools, and from the Slavonic inheritance they transmitted, grew the literate clergy and the native scholarship that would, within two generations, produce Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace, the lives of Boris and Gleb, and the Primary Chronicle itself — the very source through which we know Vladimir. The Church Vladimir founded was, from the first, a Church of books as well as of liturgy, and the foundations of that literate Christian culture were laid in his reign.

The Church He Founded

The Long Trajectory of the See of Kyiv

The metropolitanate Vladimir founded had a long and consequential history, and its later trajectory bears directly on the disputes of the present. For centuries the metropolitan of Kyiv was a hierarch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, most often a Greek sent from Constantinople, governing the Church of all the Rus’ from the mother city of Kyiv. The Mongol devastation of Kyiv in 1240 and the shifting of political power northward led, over the following century, to the effective transfer of the metropolitan’s residence — first to Vladimir-on-the-Klyazma and then to Moscow — even as the see retained the title “of Kyiv.” The rise of Moscow, the eventual division of the Rus’ lands between the grand principality of Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian realm, and the long contest over the headship of the East Slavic Church all unfolded from the single metropolitanate Vladimir had planted. In 1448 the Church of Moscow declared its independence of Constantinople; in 1589 the Patriarchate of Moscow was established; and in 1686 the metropolitanate of Kyiv itself came under the administration of Moscow — an act whose meaning and validity are, three centuries later, at the heart of the modern Ukrainian autocephaly dispute (see Orthodoxy: Ukraine Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism). Every turn of this long story traces back to the founding act treated here: the planting, under Vladimir, of a metropolitanate of Kyiv under Constantinople. The collection does not adjudicate the modern dispute, which it treats even-handedly elsewhere (see The Contested Memory and Scholarship); it notes only that the dispute is, in part, a dispute over the inheritance of the Church Vladimir founded.

The Church He Founded

The Church of Rus’ that Vladimir founded was thus a daughter of Constantinople in its hierarchy and canon law, a daughter of the Cyrillo-Methodian mission in its language and books, and a creature of the prince’s own will in its endowment and its schools. Its first hierarchs are lost to certainty, but its character was set: Byzantine in faith and order, Slavonic in tongue, and rooted in the wealth and authority of the Kyivan state. From this founding grew, over the following centuries, the whole institutional history of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Churches — the metropolitanate of Kyiv, its later removal to the north, the rise of Moscow, and the long story the rest of this repository tells. Vladimir did not merely baptize a people; he gave them a Church, and the shape he gave it has lasted a thousand years.

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. 988 (the founding of schools and “book learning”; the weeping mothers).
  • Franklin, Simon, and Jonathan Shepard. The Emergence of Rus 750–1200. London: Longman, 1996. On the obscurity of the early church structure, the Slavonic inheritance via Bulgaria, and the uncertainty over the founding of the metropolitanate.
  • Poppe, Andrzej. The Rise of Christian Russia (Variorum Collected Studies). London: Variorum, 1982. On the early metropolitans and the dating of the Kyivan metropolitanate.
  • On the disputed first hierarchs (Michael, Leontius/Leon, Theophylact, and the documented Theopemptos c. 1037): the standard accounts in the OCA Lives of the Saints (for the traditional Michael, 30 September) and in Poppe and Franklin & Shepard (for the scholarly skepticism).
  • Dvornik, Francis. Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970. On the Cyrillo-Methodian Slavonic inheritance.