The New Constantine

The title under which Vladimir is venerated — Equal-to-the-Apostles — and the comparison to Constantine the Great that shaped his cult; together with the central puzzle of his veneration: why the man who baptized a whole nation was not canonized at once, as his martyred sons were, but came to firm veneration only in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This file treats the Constantinian typology that the Primary Chronicle and Hilarion of Kiev applied to Vladimir, the obstacles that delayed his formal cult, the traditional link of his veneration to Alexander Nevsky’s victory at the Neva on his feast day of 15 July 1240, and the feast itself.

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

Equal-to-the-Apostles

Vladimir is venerated in the Orthodox Church under the title Equal-to-the-Apostles — in Greek isapostolos, in Slavonic ravnoapostol’ny — the rare honorific reserved for those who, though not themselves of the apostolic age, accomplished an apostolic work: the bringing of a whole people to Christ. It is the title of Constantine the Great, of Mary Magdalene, of St. Nina of Georgia, of Saints Cyril and Methodius — and of Olga, Vladimir’s grandmother (see St. Olga of Kiev, and the comparable case of St. Nina of Georgia). For Vladimir the title names exactly the form of his sanctity treated throughout this collection: not the holiness of the monk or the martyr, but the holiness of the ruler whose reign converted a nation (see The Christian Prince). He is honored because, like an apostle, he brought the Gospel to a people who had not known it.

The New Constantine

From the beginning the tradition reached for one comparison above all: Vladimir as a new Constantine. The parallel was irresistible and exact. Constantine had been a pagan ruler who embraced Christianity and made it the faith of his empire; Vladimir was a pagan ruler who embraced Christianity and made it the faith of his realm. Constantine had been baptized and led an empire to the font; Vladimir was baptized and led the Rus’ to the Dnieper.

The Primary Chronicle makes the comparison its own in the obituary it gives Vladimir under the year of his death: “He is the new Constantine of mighty Rome, who baptized himself and his subjects; for the Prince of Rus’ imitated the acts of Constantine himself” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015). The earliest praise of Vladimir, Hilarion of Kiev’s Sermon on Law and Grace (c. 1050), had already cast him in Constantinian terms — the apostolic sovereign whose evangelization of his people was itself an apostolic act (Hilarion of Kiev, Sermon on Law and Grace; see The Sources). The liturgical service for Vladimir’s feast preserves the same typology, hailing him as “a second Constantine in word and deed.” The Constantinian comparison is the deepest key to Vladimir’s veneration: he is the Constantine of the Rus’, the baptizer of a nation, and his title Equal-to-the-Apostles places him in Constantine’s own company.

The Puzzle of the Slow Canonization

Here, though, lies the central puzzle of Vladimir’s cult. The man who baptized a whole nation — who would seem the most obvious candidate for sainthood in the entire history of Rus’ — was not canonized at once. His martyred sons Boris and Gleb were glorified within two generations, by 1071/1072 (see Boris and Gleb); their father’s formal veneration lagged far behind, firming only in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries — two and three hundred years after his death.

Remarkably, the delay is attested within the sources themselves. The very obituary that calls Vladimir a new Constantine goes on to lament that the Rus’ had not yet given him his due: “But we, though Christians, do not render him honor in proportion to this benefaction… If we had been zealous for him, and had offered our prayers to God in his behalf upon the day of his death, then God, beholding our zeal, would have glorified him” (Primary Chronicle, s.a. 1015). The chronicler, writing a century after Vladimir, is openly puzzled and troubled that the baptizer of Rus’ is not yet a glorified saint.

The reasons usually given for the delay are concrete. Canonization in this period commonly rested on the evidence of holiness after death — above all incorrupt relics and attested miracles at the tomb. Boris and Gleb had both: their relics worked wonders, and the cult gathered around the shrine at Vyshgorod. Vladimir had neither in the early record: there is no early tradition of incorrupt relics or of miracles at his tomb in the Church of the Tithes, and so the ordinary engine of medieval canonization did not engage. The sanctity of the ruler, moreover — holiness shown in a reign rather than in martyrdom or asceticism — was harder for the early Church to recognize and to celebrate than the dramatic sanctity of the passion-bearer. Vladimir’s was a sanctity of works, not of wonders, and works take longer to be raised to the altar.

The Firming of the Cult

When, then, did Vladimir become a saint in the full liturgical sense? The question is debated, and the collection gives the named positions.

[Disputed: The date of the firm establishment of Vladimir’s cult is uncertain. (1) The traditional link to 1240: a long-standing tradition holds that veneration of Vladimir was instituted or greatly promoted after Alexander Nevsky’s victory over the Swedes at the battle of the Neva on 15 July 1240 — Vladimir’s death-date — the victory being attributed to the intercession of the prince’s ancestor; the earliest secure textual signs of his veneration appear in the mid-thirteenth century (Vladimir is called “saint” in the Hypatian Chronicle for 1254; his feast is noted by the 1260s). (2) Andrzej Poppe argues there was no formal canonization procedure in the period and that the cult crystallized into firm, general recognition between roughly 1290 and 1311. (3) An alternative view ties the firming of the cult to the reign of Mikhail Yaroslavich of Tver in the early fourteenth century. The honest summary is: the cult was emergent from the eleventh century (Hilarion’s praise) but became firm and general only in the later thirteenth to early fourteenth century.]

The traditional association with Alexander Nevsky and the Neva is especially fitting: the prince-saint who defended the Rus’ land won his victory on the feast of the prince-saint who had Christianized it, and the link between the two became part of the fabric of the cult. Whatever the precise date, by the fourteenth century Vladimir was firmly established as a saint of the Rus’ Church, his veneration secure throughout the East Slavic lands.

The Feast of July 15

The feast of St. Vladimir is kept on 15 July, the day of his death in 1015 — by both the Russian and the Ukrainian Churches, and across the Orthodox world. (In civil reckoning, the Julian-calendar 15 July corresponds, in our era, to 28 July in the Gregorian calendar, and 28 July is now marked in Ukraine and Russia alike as a state day of the Baptism of Rus’.) On that day the Church honors Vladimir as Equal-to-the-Apostles and as the new Constantine of the Rus’ — the prince who, in the words of his service, “didst love Christ” and “didst lead thy people to holy baptism.” The slow path by which he came to the altar does not diminish the honor in which he is now held: the baptizer of the Eastern Slavs is venerated, a thousand years on, as one of the great Equal-to-the-Apostles of the Orthodox Church, the father in Christ of three Christian nations.

See Also

  • Relics and Cult — the fate of Vladimir’s relics and the material history of his veneration
  • The Christian Prince — the ruler-sanctity for which Vladimir is honored as Equal-to-the-Apostles
  • Boris and Gleb — the sons whose swift canonization throws Vladimir’s slow one into relief
  • The Sources — Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace, the earliest praise of Vladimir
  • The Baptism of Rus’ in Memory — the later memory of Vladimir and the millennium of 1988
  • St. Olga of Kiev — Vladimir’s grandmother, the other Equal-to-the-Apostles of the dynasty

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. 1015 (“the new Constantine of mighty Rome”; the lament that Vladimir was not yet glorified).
  • Hilarion of Kiev. Sermon on Law and Grace, c. 1037–1050. Trans. in Franklin, Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’, 1991. The earliest Constantinian praise of Vladimir.
  • Poppe, Andrzej. “Politik und Heiligenverehrung in der Kiever Rus’” and related studies, in Christian Russia in the Making (Variorum). On the dating of Vladimir’s cult (c. 1290–1311) and the absence of a formal canonization procedure.
  • Holy Great Prince Vladimir, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, July 15. For the title, the feast, the Constantinian comparison, and the traditional link to Alexander Nevsky and the Neva (1240).
  • Fedotov, George P. The Russian Religious Mind, Vol. 1: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. On the slow recognition of ruler-sanctity in Kievan Rus’.