“…since our people rejected
idolatry and came under Christian law, we have not had a teacher capable of
explaining this faith to us in our own tongue.”
-
King Rastislav of Great Moravia, from his letter
to the Byzantine emperor
The
Age of Paradise: Christendom from Pentecost to the First Millennium, by
John Strickland
Missions to the East – would these be conducted from the
East and Constantinople, or the West and Rome?
The Frankish missionaries would require Latinization of Great Moravia,
so King Rastislav wrote a letter to the Byzantine emperor.
The Byzantines were fine with evangelizing the Slavs in
their own language, and in 863 sent two brothers, Cyril and Methodius, for this
task. History remembers them as the
“enlighteners of the Slavs.” Cyril would
develop an alphabet; a subsequent Slavic alphabet would be named for him.
The Franks, however, would not give up. they came up with a doctrine known as
trilingualism; only three tongues were proper for Christian worship: Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin. To this, Cyril would
reply that there are already many people who have their own script and give
glory to God – among them, the Armenians and Syrians.
The pope would give his blessing to this mission of Cyril
and Methodius, but the Franks paid little attention to this gesture. With Cyril dying shortly after this visit to
Rome, Methodius would return to Moravia – and would be immediately
arrested. Rastislav’s nephew had seized
power with the help of the Franks, turning the religious tables. Yet, the pope insisted on his release.
A new pope, Steven V, was not so generous. Noting that the Slavs were not using the
filioque in their liturgy (a pretext, perhaps), two hundred missionaries were
arrested and expelled from Moravia, with some sold by the Franks into slavery.
Then there were the Bulgarians, who were successfully
converted into the Eastern tradition:
Sadly, a common faith did not
prevent the relationship between the mighty empires of Byzantium and Bulgaria
from deteriorating in the years following [Tsar] Boris’s conversion.
Under a subsequent Tsar, the Bulgarians would invade
Byzantium, even reaching Constantinople before being stopped. Future battles would have the Byzantines on
the attack and suffer defeat, and further battles ending the other way. As the culmination of fifty years of
fighting, the Battle of Kleidion in 1014 resulted in only fifteen-thousand
Bulgarian soldiers surviving out of an army of forty-five thousand. Perhaps better to have died:
The ruthless and vengeful Basil,
thereafter known as the “Bulgar Slayer,” ordered that of every hundred men,
ninety-nine should have their eyes gouged out.
The others were left with one good eye, to lead the others l
back to the Bulgarian capital. Upon
seeing them, Tsar Samuel fell over dead in shock.
Russia Christianized under Grand Prince Vladimir. The account given has Vladimir sending
emissaries to look into the Judaism of the Khazars, the Islam of the Arabs, and
Latin Christianity. But it was in
“Greece” where they would find “the edifices where they worshipped their God,
and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.” They were impressed by the liturgical
worship, not any form of doctrinal debate.
Vladimir would be baptized in 988. Immediately thereafter, he dismissed his
numerous “courtesans,” and in exchange took a Christian wife, Anna – remaining
faithful to her for the rest of her life.
He would institute regular distributions of bread to Kiev’s poor and he opened
banquets for the common people; he worked to abolish capital punishment, but
was dissuaded by the bishops!
After his death in 1015, a civil war broke out between some
of his sons – including one born from one of his pre-baptismal liaisons. His preferred sons meekly laid down their
lives instead of fight, and became Russia’s first canonized saints: Boris and
Gleb.
Altered by Christianity, yet the Russian culture remained,
unlike in the Latin West where the culture of the Saxons disappeared or was
absorbed. By the mid-eleventh century,
Kiev was the capital of a distinctly Christian state – Russia had come to the
full inheritance of Christianity.
Conclusion
Distinctions were becoming ever-clearer between East and
West, yet we have not yet quite reached what is known as the Great Schism. Despite these differences – the filioque, a
common tongue for worship vs. local tongue for worship, the physical structure
of the temple, etc. – both East and West shared one characteristic: continuous
and regular battle.
By this time, the East had lost much territory to the Muslim
Arabs; the West suffered a similar fate for a time, until the tables were turned
and the Arab tide was stopped in the southwest and southeast of Europe. However, by this time, during the tenth and
early eleventh century, the Latin West and the relationship between Church and
emperor was in significant turmoil.
That will be a story for next time.