Cyril and Methodius among the Slavs

In the early 860s Rastislav, ruler of the Moravians, sent to the emperor Michael III at Constantinople. His people, he said, had given up paganism and kept the Christian law, but had no teacher to explain the faith in their own language (Life of Constantine 14). The emperor chose Constantine, called the Philosopher, and his brother Methodius, natives of Thessalonica, where, the Life of Methodius has him say, everyone spoke good Slavonic (Life of Methodius 5–6). Constantine, known by his later monastic name as Cyril, devised letters for the language, and the Life says that the first words he wrote in them were the opening of John’s Gospel (Life of Constantine 14).

In Great Moravia the brothers trained pupils and translated the services of the church. Latin clergy objected that God might be praised only in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Constantine called them followers of Pilate, who had written the title on the cross in those languages (Life of Constantine 15); the Life calls their view the heresy of the three tongues (Life of Constantine 16). At Venice he asked his critics whether the rain does not fall on all alike, and quoted Paul on the uselessness of prayer that the hearers cannot understand (Life of Constantine 16) (1 Corinthians 14:14–19).

They went on to Rome, bringing relics believed to be those of Clement of Rome. Pope Hadrian II came out to meet them, laid the Slavonic books in the church of St Mary and had their pupils ordained, and the liturgy was sung in Slavonic in St Peter’s (Life of Constantine 17). Constantine fell ill there, became a monk under the name Cyril and died in February 869 (Life of Constantine 18).

Methodius was sent back to the Slavs and, at the request of the prince Kocel, made bishop for Pannonia (Life of Methodius 8). The Life of Methodius gives a letter of Hadrian allowing the liturgy in Slavonic provided that the Epistle and Gospel were first read in Latin; no Latin text of it survives, and the editor of the translation cited here marks it as spurious (Life of Methodius 8). The Frankish king’s bishops accused him of teaching in their territory and held him in Swabia for two and a half years, until the pope forced his release (Life of Methodius 9–10). Pope John VIII’s own letters show Rome’s hesitation. In 879 he summoned Methodius and reminded him that he had already been forbidden to sing mass in Slavonic, which the letter calls a barbarous tongue, though he might preach in it (John VIII, Letters, 201 (879)). In 880, having examined him, he declared him orthodox, praised the letters devised by Constantine and permitted mass and the offices in Slavonic, with the Gospel read first in Latin (John VIII, Letters, 255, Industriae tuae (June 880), pp. 223–224).

Methodius finished translating the Scriptures (Life of Methodius 15) and died in 885 (Life of Methodius 17). A letter in the name of Stephen V then forbade the Slavonic liturgy under anathema (Stephen V, Letter to Svatopluk p. 357). The work outlived the ban elsewhere: the chronicle of Kyiv, more than two centuries later, says that the books first written for the Moravians were those in use in Rus’ and among the Bulgarians (Primary Chronicle, years 888–898).