§ 73. The Slavonic Churches adhering to the Orthodox Greek Confession.Among the crowds of immigrants whom the wanderings of the people had set in motion, the Germans and the Slavs are those whose future is of most historic interest. The former went at once in a body over to the Roman Catholic church, and at first it appeared as if the Slavs were with similar unanimity to attach themselves to the Byzantine orthodox church. But only the Slavs of the Eastern countries remained true to that communion, though they were mostly with it brought under the yoke of the Turkish power. So was it with the specially promising Bulgarian church. All the more important was the incomparably more significant gain which the Greek church made in the conversion of the Russians.
Among the crowds of immigrants whom the wanderings of the people had set in motion, the Germans and the Slavs are those whose future is of most historic interest. The former went at once in a body over to the Roman Catholic church, and at first it appeared as if the Slavs were with similar unanimity to attach themselves to the Byzantine orthodox church. But only the Slavs of the Eastern countries remained true to that communion, though they were mostly with it brought under the yoke of the Turkish power. So was it with the specially promising Bulgarian church. All the more important was the incomparably more significant gain which the Greek church made in the conversion of the Russians.
§ 73.1. Soon after Justinian’s time the Slavic hordes began to overflow theGreek Provinces—Macedonia, Thessaly, Hellas and Peloponnesus. The old Hellenic population was mostly rooted out; only in well fortified cities, especially coast towns, as well as on the islands, did the Greek people and the Christian confession remain undisturbed. The empress Irene made the first successful attempt to restore Slavic Greece to the allegiance of the empire and the church, and Basil the Macedonian,A.D.867-886, completed the work so thoroughly that at last even the old pagan Mainottes (§42, 4) in the Peloponnesus bent their necks to the double yoke. Regenerated Hellenism by its higher culture and national, as well as ecclesiastical, tenacity, completely absorbed by assimilation the numerically larger Slavic element of the population, and Mount Athos with its hermits and monasteries (§70, 3) became the Zion of the new church.§ 73.2. TheChazariin the Crimea asked aboutA.D.850 for Christian missionaries from Constantinople. The court sent them a celebrated monk Constantine, surnamed the Philosopher, better known under his monkish name ofCyril. Born at Thessalonica, and so probably of Slavic descent, at least acquainted with the language of the Slavs, he converted in a few years a great part of the people. InA.D.1016, however, the kingdom of the Chazari was destroyed by the Russians.§ 73.3.The Bulgariansin Thrace and Mœsia had obtained a knowledge of Christianity from Greek prisoners, but its first sowing was watered with blood. A sister, however, of the Bulgarian king Bogoris had been baptized when a prisoner in Constantinople. After her liberation, she sought, with the help of the Byzantine monkMethodius, a brother of Cyril, to win her brother to the Christian faith. A famine came to their aid, and a picture painted by Methodius, representing the last judgment, made a deep impression on Bogoris. InA.D.861 he was baptized and compelled his subjects to follow his example. But soon thereafter, Methodius, along with his brother Cyril, was called to labour in another field, in Moravia (§79, 2), and political considerations led the Bulgarian prince inA.D.866 to join the Western church. At his request pope Nicholas I. sent bishops and clergy into Bulgaria to organize the church there after the Roman model. Byzantine diplomacy, however, succeeded in winning back the Bulgarians, and at the œcumenical Council at Constantinople inA.D.869, their ambassadors admitted that the Bulgarian church according to divine and human laws belonged to the diocese of the Byzantine patriarch (§67, 1). Meantime the two Apostles of the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius, by the invention of a Slavic alphabet and a Slavic translation of the Bible, laid the foundation of a Slavic ecclesiastical literature, which was specially fostered in Bulgaria under the noble-minded prince Symeon,A.D.888-927. Basil II., the Slayer of the Bulgarians, conquered Bulgaria inA.D.1018. It gained its freedom again, together with Walachia, inA.D.1186; but fell a prey to the Tartars inA.D.1285, and became a Turkish province inA.D.1391.§ 73.4.The Russian Church.—Photius speaks inA.D.866 of theConversion of the Russiansas an accomplished fact. In the days of the Grand Duke Igor, aboutA.D.900, there was a cathedral at Kiev. Olga, Igor’s widow, made a journey to Constantinople and was there baptized inA.D.955 under the name Helena. But her son Swätoslaw could not be persuaded to follow her example. The aged princess is said according to the report of German chroniclers to have at last besought the emperor Otto I. to send German missionaries, and that in response Adalbert of Treves, afterwards archbishop of Magdeburg, undertook a missionary tour, from which, however, he returned without having achieved his purpose, after his companions had been slain. Olga’s grandson, Vladimir, “Equal of the Apostles,” was the first to put an end to paganism in the country. According to a legend adorned with many romantic episodes he sent ten Boyars in order to see how the different religions appeared as conducted in their chief seats. They were peculiarly impressed with the beautiful service in the church of Sophia. InA.D.988, in the old Christian commercial town Cherson, shortly before conquered by him, Vladimir was baptized with the name Basil, and at the same time he received the hand of the princess Anna. The idols were now everywhere broken up and burnt; the image of Perun was dragged through the streets tied to the tail of a horse, beaten with clubs and thrown into the Dnieper. The inhabitants of Kiev were soon afterwards ordered to gather at the Dnieper and be baptized. Vladimir knelt in prayer on the banks and thanked God on his knees, while the clergy, standing in the stream, baptized the people. On the further organization of the Russian church Anna exercised a powerful and salutary influence. Vladimir died inA.D.1015. His son Jaroslaw I., the Justinian of the Russians, attended to the religious needs of his people by the erection of many churches, monasteries and schools, improved the worship, enriched the psalmody, awakened a taste for art and patronized learning. The monastery of Petchersk at Kiev was the birthplace of Russian literature and a seminary for the training of the clergy. Here, at the end of the 11th century, the monk Nestor wrote his annals in the language of the country. The metropolitan of Kiev was the spiritual head of the whole Russian church under the suzerainty of the patriarch of Constantinople. After the great fire ofA.D.1170, which laid the glory of Kiev in ashes, the residency of the Grand Duke was transferred to Vladimir. InA.D.1299 the metropolitan also took up his abode there, but only for a short time; for inA.D.1328 the Grand Duke Ivan Danilowitsch settled at Moscow and the metropolitan went there along with him. The patriarch of Constantinople on his own authority consecrated inA.D.1353 a second Russian metropolitan for the forsaken Kiev, to whom he assigned the Southern and Western Russian provinces which sinceA.D.1320 had been under the rule of the pagan Lithuanians. This schism was overcome inA.D.1380 on the next occasion of a vacancy in the Moscow chair by the appointment to Moscow of the Kiev metropolitan. But the Lithuanian government, which had meanwhile become Catholic (§ 93, 15), compelled the South Russian bishops inA.D.1414 to choose a metropolitan of their own independent of Moscow, who inA.D.1594 with his whole diocese at the Synod of Brest (§ 151, 3) attached himself to Rome.The primate of Moscow continued under the jurisdiction of Constantinople until, inA.D.1589, the patriarch Jeremiah II. (§ 139, 26), on the occasion of his being personally present at Moscow voluntarily declared the Russian church independent of him, and himself consecrated Job, the metropolitan of that time, its first patriarch.197§ 73.5.Russian Sects.—AboutA.D.1150, the monk Martin, an Armenian by birth, insisted upon a liturgical reform that seemed to him most necessary. Among other things he declared that it was sinful to lead the subject of baptism to the baptismal font from right to left or from south to north; the direction should be reversed following the course of the sun. But it seemed to him most important that a reform should be made in the hitherto prevalent mode of making the sign of the cross. Instead of symbolizing, as up to this time had been done, the two natures in Christ and the three persons in the Trinity by bending the little finger and the thumb, and making the sign of the cross with other three, they made this sign with the fore and middle fingers. For nearly ten years this monk was allowed to disseminate his errors unchecked, till a Council obliged him to retract. Two hundred years later a certain Carp Strigolnik at Novgorod inA.D.1375 publicly accused the clergy of sinning, because, in accordance with an old custom, they took fees in assisting in the consecration of bishops, and demanded of all orthodox Christians that they should separate from them as unworthy of their office. But he, along with many of his followers, was mobbed by the adherents of the opposite party and drowned in the Volga. More dangerous than all the earlier sectaries was the so-called Jewish sect at the end of the 15th century, which sought to reduce orthodox Christianity to a rationalistic cabbalistic Ebionitism. AboutA.D.1470 the Jew Zachariah arrived at Novgorod. He won two distinguished priests Alexis and Denis to his views, that Christ was nothing more than an ordinary Jewish prophet, that the Mosaic law is a divine institution and is of perpetual obligation. By the advice of the Jew the two priests continued to profess the greatest zeal for the ceremonial laws of the Church, and by strict observance of the fasts obtained a great reputation for piety, but secretly they wrought all the more successfully for the dissemination of their sect among all classes of the people. When the czar, Ivan III., inA.D.1480, came to Novgorod, they made so favourable an impression on him that he took them with him to Moscow, where they reaped a rich harvest for their secret doctrine. They succeeded through their influence with the czar in placing at the head of the whole Russian church a zealous proselyte for their sect in the archimandrite Zosima. Meanwhile at Novgorod iconoclast excesses were committed by the sectaries, which the archbishop of that place, Gennadius, set himself to suppress by imposing generally mild penalties. His successor Joseph Ssanin proceeded much more energetically. He did not rest till the czar inA.D.1504 called a Church Synod at Novgorod which condemned the chiefs of the sect to be burnt, and their followers to be shut up in monasteries. Even the metropolitan Zosima as a favourer of the sect was sent to a monastery; but Alexis managed so cleverly that he retained his office and dignity to the end of his life.Secret remnants of this sect, as well as of the two previously referred to, continued to exist for a long time, even down to the 17th century, when sectarianism in the Russian Church made again a new departure (§ 163, 10).§ 73.6.Romish Efforts at Union.—From a very early time Rome cast a covetous glance at the young Russian church, and she spared neither delicate hints nor attempts to subdue by force by the aid of Danes, Swedes, Livonians and at a later time, the Poles. In order to avert this danger and to obtain from the West assistance against the oppressive yoke of the Mongols,A.D.1234-1480, the Grand Duke Jaroslav [Jaroslaw] II. of Novgorod was not averse to a union. His son Alexander succeeded him inA.D.1247. By a glorious victory over the Swedes inA.D.1240, on the Neva, he won for himself the surname Newsky, and inA.D.1242 he defeated the Livonians on the ice of Lake Peipus. Pope Innocent IV. who had already inA.D.1246 nominated Arch bishop Albert Suerbeer (§ 93, 12) a legate to Russia with the power to erect bishoprics there, addressed an earnest exhortation to the young prince inA.D.1248 with promises of help against the Mongols, urging him to go in the footsteps of his father and to secure his own and his subjects’ salvation by doing what his father had promised. The Grand Duke referred to the wisest men of the land and answered the Pope: From Adam to the flood, from that to the Confusion of languages, etc., down to Constantine and the seventh œcumenical Council, we know the true history of the Church, but yours we do not wish to acknowledge. Alexander Newsky died inA.D.1263, and has been ever since venerated by his country as a national hero and by his Church as a national saint. The prospects of the Roman Curia were more favourable during the 14th century owing to the Lithuanian and Polish supremacy in South and West Russia, and by the schism of the Russian Church into Kiev and Moscow primacies. In those Southern and Western provinces there was originally less disinclination to Rome than in Moscow. Still even here we meet during the 15th century in the metropolitan Isidore, born in Thessalonica, a prelate who made everything work toward a union with Rome. When the Union Synod ofA.D.1438 was to meet at Ferrara (§67, 6), he represented to the Grand Duke Vassili that it was his duty to appear there. He gave a hesitating and unwilling consent. At the Council Isidore along with Bessarion showed himself a zealous promoter of the union. He returned inA.D.1441 as cardinal and papal legate. But when at the first public service in Moscow he read aloud the union documents, the Grand Duke had him imprisoned and banished to a monastery. He escaped from his prison and died in Rome inA.D.1643.—Continuation, § 151, 3.
§ 73.1. Soon after Justinian’s time the Slavic hordes began to overflow theGreek Provinces—Macedonia, Thessaly, Hellas and Peloponnesus. The old Hellenic population was mostly rooted out; only in well fortified cities, especially coast towns, as well as on the islands, did the Greek people and the Christian confession remain undisturbed. The empress Irene made the first successful attempt to restore Slavic Greece to the allegiance of the empire and the church, and Basil the Macedonian,A.D.867-886, completed the work so thoroughly that at last even the old pagan Mainottes (§42, 4) in the Peloponnesus bent their necks to the double yoke. Regenerated Hellenism by its higher culture and national, as well as ecclesiastical, tenacity, completely absorbed by assimilation the numerically larger Slavic element of the population, and Mount Athos with its hermits and monasteries (§70, 3) became the Zion of the new church.
§ 73.2. TheChazariin the Crimea asked aboutA.D.850 for Christian missionaries from Constantinople. The court sent them a celebrated monk Constantine, surnamed the Philosopher, better known under his monkish name ofCyril. Born at Thessalonica, and so probably of Slavic descent, at least acquainted with the language of the Slavs, he converted in a few years a great part of the people. InA.D.1016, however, the kingdom of the Chazari was destroyed by the Russians.
§ 73.3.The Bulgariansin Thrace and Mœsia had obtained a knowledge of Christianity from Greek prisoners, but its first sowing was watered with blood. A sister, however, of the Bulgarian king Bogoris had been baptized when a prisoner in Constantinople. After her liberation, she sought, with the help of the Byzantine monkMethodius, a brother of Cyril, to win her brother to the Christian faith. A famine came to their aid, and a picture painted by Methodius, representing the last judgment, made a deep impression on Bogoris. InA.D.861 he was baptized and compelled his subjects to follow his example. But soon thereafter, Methodius, along with his brother Cyril, was called to labour in another field, in Moravia (§79, 2), and political considerations led the Bulgarian prince inA.D.866 to join the Western church. At his request pope Nicholas I. sent bishops and clergy into Bulgaria to organize the church there after the Roman model. Byzantine diplomacy, however, succeeded in winning back the Bulgarians, and at the œcumenical Council at Constantinople inA.D.869, their ambassadors admitted that the Bulgarian church according to divine and human laws belonged to the diocese of the Byzantine patriarch (§67, 1). Meantime the two Apostles of the Slavs, Cyril and Methodius, by the invention of a Slavic alphabet and a Slavic translation of the Bible, laid the foundation of a Slavic ecclesiastical literature, which was specially fostered in Bulgaria under the noble-minded prince Symeon,A.D.888-927. Basil II., the Slayer of the Bulgarians, conquered Bulgaria inA.D.1018. It gained its freedom again, together with Walachia, inA.D.1186; but fell a prey to the Tartars inA.D.1285, and became a Turkish province inA.D.1391.
§ 73.4.The Russian Church.—Photius speaks inA.D.866 of theConversion of the Russiansas an accomplished fact. In the days of the Grand Duke Igor, aboutA.D.900, there was a cathedral at Kiev. Olga, Igor’s widow, made a journey to Constantinople and was there baptized inA.D.955 under the name Helena. But her son Swätoslaw could not be persuaded to follow her example. The aged princess is said according to the report of German chroniclers to have at last besought the emperor Otto I. to send German missionaries, and that in response Adalbert of Treves, afterwards archbishop of Magdeburg, undertook a missionary tour, from which, however, he returned without having achieved his purpose, after his companions had been slain. Olga’s grandson, Vladimir, “Equal of the Apostles,” was the first to put an end to paganism in the country. According to a legend adorned with many romantic episodes he sent ten Boyars in order to see how the different religions appeared as conducted in their chief seats. They were peculiarly impressed with the beautiful service in the church of Sophia. InA.D.988, in the old Christian commercial town Cherson, shortly before conquered by him, Vladimir was baptized with the name Basil, and at the same time he received the hand of the princess Anna. The idols were now everywhere broken up and burnt; the image of Perun was dragged through the streets tied to the tail of a horse, beaten with clubs and thrown into the Dnieper. The inhabitants of Kiev were soon afterwards ordered to gather at the Dnieper and be baptized. Vladimir knelt in prayer on the banks and thanked God on his knees, while the clergy, standing in the stream, baptized the people. On the further organization of the Russian church Anna exercised a powerful and salutary influence. Vladimir died inA.D.1015. His son Jaroslaw I., the Justinian of the Russians, attended to the religious needs of his people by the erection of many churches, monasteries and schools, improved the worship, enriched the psalmody, awakened a taste for art and patronized learning. The monastery of Petchersk at Kiev was the birthplace of Russian literature and a seminary for the training of the clergy. Here, at the end of the 11th century, the monk Nestor wrote his annals in the language of the country. The metropolitan of Kiev was the spiritual head of the whole Russian church under the suzerainty of the patriarch of Constantinople. After the great fire ofA.D.1170, which laid the glory of Kiev in ashes, the residency of the Grand Duke was transferred to Vladimir. InA.D.1299 the metropolitan also took up his abode there, but only for a short time; for inA.D.1328 the Grand Duke Ivan Danilowitsch settled at Moscow and the metropolitan went there along with him. The patriarch of Constantinople on his own authority consecrated inA.D.1353 a second Russian metropolitan for the forsaken Kiev, to whom he assigned the Southern and Western Russian provinces which sinceA.D.1320 had been under the rule of the pagan Lithuanians. This schism was overcome inA.D.1380 on the next occasion of a vacancy in the Moscow chair by the appointment to Moscow of the Kiev metropolitan. But the Lithuanian government, which had meanwhile become Catholic (§ 93, 15), compelled the South Russian bishops inA.D.1414 to choose a metropolitan of their own independent of Moscow, who inA.D.1594 with his whole diocese at the Synod of Brest (§ 151, 3) attached himself to Rome.The primate of Moscow continued under the jurisdiction of Constantinople until, inA.D.1589, the patriarch Jeremiah II. (§ 139, 26), on the occasion of his being personally present at Moscow voluntarily declared the Russian church independent of him, and himself consecrated Job, the metropolitan of that time, its first patriarch.197
§ 73.5.Russian Sects.—AboutA.D.1150, the monk Martin, an Armenian by birth, insisted upon a liturgical reform that seemed to him most necessary. Among other things he declared that it was sinful to lead the subject of baptism to the baptismal font from right to left or from south to north; the direction should be reversed following the course of the sun. But it seemed to him most important that a reform should be made in the hitherto prevalent mode of making the sign of the cross. Instead of symbolizing, as up to this time had been done, the two natures in Christ and the three persons in the Trinity by bending the little finger and the thumb, and making the sign of the cross with other three, they made this sign with the fore and middle fingers. For nearly ten years this monk was allowed to disseminate his errors unchecked, till a Council obliged him to retract. Two hundred years later a certain Carp Strigolnik at Novgorod inA.D.1375 publicly accused the clergy of sinning, because, in accordance with an old custom, they took fees in assisting in the consecration of bishops, and demanded of all orthodox Christians that they should separate from them as unworthy of their office. But he, along with many of his followers, was mobbed by the adherents of the opposite party and drowned in the Volga. More dangerous than all the earlier sectaries was the so-called Jewish sect at the end of the 15th century, which sought to reduce orthodox Christianity to a rationalistic cabbalistic Ebionitism. AboutA.D.1470 the Jew Zachariah arrived at Novgorod. He won two distinguished priests Alexis and Denis to his views, that Christ was nothing more than an ordinary Jewish prophet, that the Mosaic law is a divine institution and is of perpetual obligation. By the advice of the Jew the two priests continued to profess the greatest zeal for the ceremonial laws of the Church, and by strict observance of the fasts obtained a great reputation for piety, but secretly they wrought all the more successfully for the dissemination of their sect among all classes of the people. When the czar, Ivan III., inA.D.1480, came to Novgorod, they made so favourable an impression on him that he took them with him to Moscow, where they reaped a rich harvest for their secret doctrine. They succeeded through their influence with the czar in placing at the head of the whole Russian church a zealous proselyte for their sect in the archimandrite Zosima. Meanwhile at Novgorod iconoclast excesses were committed by the sectaries, which the archbishop of that place, Gennadius, set himself to suppress by imposing generally mild penalties. His successor Joseph Ssanin proceeded much more energetically. He did not rest till the czar inA.D.1504 called a Church Synod at Novgorod which condemned the chiefs of the sect to be burnt, and their followers to be shut up in monasteries. Even the metropolitan Zosima as a favourer of the sect was sent to a monastery; but Alexis managed so cleverly that he retained his office and dignity to the end of his life.Secret remnants of this sect, as well as of the two previously referred to, continued to exist for a long time, even down to the 17th century, when sectarianism in the Russian Church made again a new departure (§ 163, 10).
§ 73.6.Romish Efforts at Union.—From a very early time Rome cast a covetous glance at the young Russian church, and she spared neither delicate hints nor attempts to subdue by force by the aid of Danes, Swedes, Livonians and at a later time, the Poles. In order to avert this danger and to obtain from the West assistance against the oppressive yoke of the Mongols,A.D.1234-1480, the Grand Duke Jaroslav [Jaroslaw] II. of Novgorod was not averse to a union. His son Alexander succeeded him inA.D.1247. By a glorious victory over the Swedes inA.D.1240, on the Neva, he won for himself the surname Newsky, and inA.D.1242 he defeated the Livonians on the ice of Lake Peipus. Pope Innocent IV. who had already inA.D.1246 nominated Arch bishop Albert Suerbeer (§ 93, 12) a legate to Russia with the power to erect bishoprics there, addressed an earnest exhortation to the young prince inA.D.1248 with promises of help against the Mongols, urging him to go in the footsteps of his father and to secure his own and his subjects’ salvation by doing what his father had promised. The Grand Duke referred to the wisest men of the land and answered the Pope: From Adam to the flood, from that to the Confusion of languages, etc., down to Constantine and the seventh œcumenical Council, we know the true history of the Church, but yours we do not wish to acknowledge. Alexander Newsky died inA.D.1263, and has been ever since venerated by his country as a national hero and by his Church as a national saint. The prospects of the Roman Curia were more favourable during the 14th century owing to the Lithuanian and Polish supremacy in South and West Russia, and by the schism of the Russian Church into Kiev and Moscow primacies. In those Southern and Western provinces there was originally less disinclination to Rome than in Moscow. Still even here we meet during the 15th century in the metropolitan Isidore, born in Thessalonica, a prelate who made everything work toward a union with Rome. When the Union Synod ofA.D.1438 was to meet at Ferrara (§67, 6), he represented to the Grand Duke Vassili that it was his duty to appear there. He gave a hesitating and unwilling consent. At the Council Isidore along with Bessarion showed himself a zealous promoter of the union. He returned inA.D.1441 as cardinal and papal legate. But when at the first public service in Moscow he read aloud the union documents, the Grand Duke had him imprisoned and banished to a monastery. He escaped from his prison and died in Rome inA.D.1643.—Continuation, § 151, 3.