Constantine the Convincer

It's interesting to compare the Cyril of common history - Apostle of the Slavs, translator of scripture, saint - with the living Constantine the Philosopher, the subject of Kliment Ohridski's Vita (as translated by Spas Nikolov in Duichev's Kiril and Methodius).  He is a Socrates-like figure, who debates numerous confident and well spoken opponents and turns their words against them with the aid of scriptural knowledge and sheer intellect.  He was able to correct his opponents views by clarifying the fine points of theology in terms they understood.  He outdoes an iconoclast ("Anisos") in understanding of the commandment against graven images.  He bests the Muslims in an argument in which he defends the Christians frequent disagreements and diversity of practices against the uniformity of Islamic law (I will try to include some of this debate later).  He knew the Hebrew Language and even learned the Samaritan letters and debated with a Samaritan in the city of Cherson, before discussing theology with the Jewish Khazar court.  In Rome he outdoes a Jew in knowledge of the generations of the Old Testament.  He produces biblical verses to refute the "trilingual" Western Christians.

The point is, its a little strange that the Saint who is most famous for evangelizing and teaching among the pagan Slavs is barely shown to argue with any Slavic Pagans.  And yet the Glagolitic alphabet and the Cyrilic alphabet clearly show that his students were part of an intellectual community that participated in the dialogue between Christian theology and pre-existing slavic pagan beliefs.  The interaction of the two elements is usually shown in hagiographic literature as simply correcting ignorant customs (like polygamy or shunning a wife to keep mistresses, or the belief that "big-headed men lived underground".  Even these errors Kliment blames on the laxity of the western clergy in Moravia, not native pagan wickedness).  There is little proper argument or debate against the old religion mentioned.  But the dialogue between pagan belief and orthodoxy might not have been between antagonists like the arguments elsewhere in the Vita, but within the community of Cyril and Methodius' students, most of them Slavs and certainly some former pagans.  However, it is assumed from Prince Rostislav's letter that the Moravians had already rejected paganism and were eager to be taught the true Christian faith - this was not the case in Constantine's debates with an Iconoclast, Muslims, Jews, and the Trilinguals.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The pagan symbolism that I'm referring to is not strictly the alchemy I mention in the previous post, but Old Bulgarian (sometimes called Sarmatian) characters, which I will discuss later.  It is also important to note that the possible influence of both "hellenistic" alchemy and Slavic/"Scythian"(as the Greeks called old Bulgarian religion) pagan symbolism could have gone into the making of Glagolitsa in the time of Cyril and also factored into the shift to "Cyrillic" in the time of Kliment Ohridski.  The shift to Cyrillic seems to coincide with or follow shortly after the reign of Bulgaria's pagan apostate Prince Vladimir, who separated the reigns of his father the first Christian Prince Boris-Mikhail and his younger brother Simeon the the Great, who would be crowned Tsar.  Paganism was certainly a vital force which Cyril's students confronted in Bulgaria.  The students may have shared their teacher's idea that studying the wisdom of the opponent you wish to win over is the key to argument.  The Life of Methodius, also by Kliment, says that before the Moravian mission, the Emperor gave Methodius "a Slavic princedom to rule... so that when he went [to Moravia later], he might already be familiar with their customs and might come to love them."  Kliment is attributing this foresight to the Emperor Michael III, who was just a child.  Really it was Theoktistos the Logothetes who made the choice to appoint Methodius as an official over the Slavs, and Theoktistos was dead by the time of the Moravian mission.  But Kliment, by attributing this reasoning to the Emperor, is endorsing the idea that having intimate knowledge of local culture is helpful to missionaries.