Taking a step back

I'm going to take a minute to talk about why I decided to make this blog.  Here are some of the questions I have been asking myself.

Why am I qualified to write about St. Cyril and Methodius? (I'm not, but we'll get to that later) 

Why should anybody care about them?

What, if anything, can their story tell us about history, religion, or science? 

Is it dangerous to speculate on their personalities, opinions, and beliefs on the basis of a few biographical sources?

Well, first of all, I am not qualified to write about this topic on the basis of my education.  I have a major in Russian and East European studies, and have studied and taught Russian, but never learned about Cyril and Methodius in class, except for as a small part of medieval Russian history.  I try to keep the content of this blog grounded in primary sources - the translated texts as published in Duichev's Kiril and Methodius, works of art such as the San Clemente painting, and the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts which are the work of Cyril and his disciples and colleagues.  As I've searched on the internet for sources relevant to my interests, I've noticed that ancient scripts like Proto-Bulgarian are often hotly debated by European nationalists on white supremacist forums like Stormfront.  My comparison of Glagolitic and Cyrillic with material from other European and Mediterranean contexts, such as older alphabets and alchemy and astronomy symbols, is strictly for the sake of juxtaposition, and I do not intend to promote any particularist theory regarding religious beliefs, prehistory, or questions of national and ethnic identities.  The goal of this blog is to focus attention on Constantine the Philosopher and his brother Methodius as they are described in sources written by those who knew them.  Too often their story is considered only in a sectarian context.

Next, I think that the lives of Cyril and Methodius provide a great window into an obscure period of history - the second half of the 9th century.  The accounts of their lives give us a view of Byzantium in the years after the Iconoclast controversy, a time of renewed learning and culture.  The works have a polemic tone - they condemn the views, practices, and character of the Western (Frankish) clergy, and defend Christian Orthodoxy against the Muslims, Jews, and recently defeated Iconoclasts.  They provide a first-hand account of how Orthodoxy and Heresy were seen in the late 9th century.  The narration and the quoted speech are full of both Old and New Testament verses, which gives us a picture of how the early Slavic Christians interpreted the scriptures in the context of their own situation (or, how the early Slavic literati used biblical references in their framing of recent history).  They are often noteworthy for what they leave out.  There is hardly any reference to the tension between Rome and Constantinople at this time (the Photian Schism), or of Prince Vladimir's four-year restoration of Paganism in Bulgaria.  The main enemy is not Rome, or even Paganism (which is more error than evil), but the German Clergy.  The writings of Kliment and Theophylakt, among others, provide an important early record of an East-West division in the interior of Europe - based on the competing national developments of Germans and Slavs, not the much older rivalry between their southern neighbors the Latins and Greeks.  

More specifically, however, I think Cyril and Methodius themselves are important simply because the script and language they used for the Holy Scriptures have diffused so far among the Eastern and Southern Slavs.  Basically the entire literate Slavic culture is indebted to the work done by Cyril and Methodius, along with their students.  Because of this, I think it's important to try to understand, as much as possible, where Cyril and Methodius were coming from.  That is why i try to focus attention of their education (particularly Cyril's), their early activities, and the religious and intellectual culture of their times.  Constantine the Philosopher is not a typical 9th century man, but he is very much of his time - a Philosopher and debater in the classical sense, as well as a Christian evangelizer in the Apostolic and Patristic tradition.  Theophylakt Ohridski calls Constantine "great in his knowledge of the heathen philosophy, and even greater in his knowledge of Christian lore".  His life's work - the writing and teaching of the Holy Scriptures in a "barbarian" language, demonstrates how these two qualities combined to change the course of history.  

Now, the biggest problem with relying on the works of Kliment and Theophylakt of Ohrid is that they are excessively laden with praise.  They contain numerous mentions of miracles, for which it is tempting but probably fruitless to seek mundane explanations.  They deliberately demonize the enemies of Cyril and Methodius and put words in their mouths.  As I said before, they sometimes leave out historical events which one would think were important to them.  There are anecdotes that seem constructed for didactic, rather than historical purposes.  Despite all of this, I still think that it's worth something that these texts were written by people who personally knew Cyril and Methodius.  I don't think it's expecting to much to assume the texts contain some real information along with the platitudes that are found in hagiographic literature.  The parts about the two brothers working miracles or interceding in heaven on behalf of their followers are also not to be completely disregarded - they represent the beginning of a proper saintly cult of Cyril and Methodius, which was initiated by their students and colleagues.  It is almost exclusively as saints that we are familiar with them today - "St. Cyril" is much more widely known than "Constantine the Philosopher".

Liberal Arts

The "Seven Liberal Arts" that make up a classical higher education are as follows.  The "Trivium" ("threefold path") consists of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric - the prerequisites needed to engage with the higher arts, the "Quadrivium" of Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, and Music.  From Life of Constantine we learn, not surprisingly, that these were the subjects studied by Constantine.

Proclus Diadochus, a great (Pagan/Neo-Platonist) theorist of late antiquity, declared;

"Arithmetic is the Discrete At Rest, 

Astronomy is the Discrete In Motion 

Geometry is the Continuous At Rest

Music is the Continuous in Motion."

He also is reported to have said "wherever there is number, there is beauty."

This description of beauty resonates in the Memory and Life of Methodius by Kliment Ohridski, who states that "God, who has made out of non-being into being everything, both visible and invisible, has adorned his creation with every beauty which man, in contemplating it, and meditating upon it, may gradually and to an extent understand." 

Beauty, in this passage, is seen as that which draws the human mind to contemplation of the divine.  Let us contrast this with the definition of Philosophy, attributed to Constantine himself in Kliment's Life and Acts of Constantine the Philosopher as;

"The knowledge of the divine and human things which says in how far man can get nearer to God and how through deeds he can become the image and likeness of Him who is his Creator."

In these last two statements, the idea of directing the mind towards God is intertwined with higher and more abstract thinking.  This is what is meant by the two earlier quotes from Proclus Diadochus, with his heirarchy of the sciences from "discrete" to "continuous".  Proclus and Kliment seem to share the idea that beauty reveals an underlying (or, thanks to the ambiguities of language, "higher") order.  Order as it is found in nature is seen by both Pagan and Christian thinkers as manifestation of the divine will.  Therefore, observing and understanding nature's creations directs the mind to the higher source from which the creations originate - whether this be the Platonic ideal forms, or the divine Logos of Christianity.  The Platonic contrast between mundane manifestations and ideal forms is paralleled by the Christian duality of the "visible and invisible".

Back to San Clemente

So this picture was the first thing i posted about.  I want to compare it with another quote, this one from "Memory and Life of our Blessed Father and Teacher Methodius, Archbishop of Moravia", by Kliment Ohridski.  As always I am quoting from Duichev's Kiril and Methodius.

"There were many others, however, who abused the Slavonic books, saying that no other people may have alphabets but the Jews, the Greeks, and the Latins, according to the inscriptions placed by Pilat on the cross of the Lord.  But the Pope condemned them, calling them 'Pilats' and 'Trilingualists,' and ordered a bishop with a mind diseased by the trilingual contagion to ordain three priests and two readers from among the Slav-disciples." (Kliment recorded in "Life of Constantine" that the Bishops Gauderic and Formosus performed the ceremony. Formosus in particular was a rival for influence among the Slavs, and he may be the "bishop with a mind diseased".)

I don't know what the different staffs held up on the left all mean, but its clear that Methodius (the Bishop on the left) is under a big cross, while there are three smaller crosses (with hanging cloth), and two "shepherd's crooks" (crosiers).  I don't know exactly how these are used in church ceremony, but could they indicate the three priests and two readers/deacons ordained along with Constantine and Methodius?

The "Life and Toils of Kliment", written by Theophylakt Ohridski, states that "among [the disciples] the leaders chosen were Gorazd, Kliment, Naum, Anguellarii, and Sava." This gives us five names.  Gorazd was Methodius' preferred successor as Archbishop of Moravia, but the Frankish bishop Wiching usurped the seat.  Kliment was expelled from Bulgaria, "taking Naum and Anguellari with him", and went on to be Bishop of Bulgaria.  Naum became a leading religious scholar there.  Anguellarii made it to Bulgaria too but, "after living [there] for a short time, gladly gave up his soul into the hands of the holy angels." Gorazd did not join them, but his exact fate is uncertain.

The Movie?

I should have guessed this would exist.

Which reminds me, that this is another great movie about Slavic Christianity and paganism.

Its kind of a dark comedy.  Note - the Old Bulgarian style letters!  See if you can find them on this chart.

Peoples of the Book

When Constantine the Philosopher is forced to defend his new Slavonic translation of the scriptures, he draws on his extensive historical knowledge to point out than in centuries past, the bible was written in many languages other than Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.  "We on our part know of many peoples who have books and give praise to God each in its own tongue." he says in Kliment's Life and Acts of Constantine, "Such peoples, it is known, are the Armenians, the Persians, the Abzags, the Ivers, the Sugds, the Goths, the Tirsians, the Hazaras, the Arabs, the Egyptians, the Syrians, and many more."

Its quite interesting that many of these groups whom he mentions were considered heretical.  The Goths had their own translation of the bible, by St. Ulfilas, an Arian Christian who conceived of a script for the Gothic language which mixed Greek letters with runes (looking a little like cyrillic).  These books were mostly destroyed by the Trinitarian Christians throughout the dark ages (although Gothic continued to be spoken in parts of the Crimea).  The Persian and Syrian Christians had broken from the Orthodox church in the Nestorian and Chalcedonian schisms.  Armenia and Egypt, nations which played an important role in the early spread of Christianity, also had separate church structures.

By the Ivers, I assume he means the Georgians, and the Sugds would be the Sogdians of Central Asia, who practiced a Manichean-influenced Christianity.  Its interesting that he names all these nations as people who "have books" (i.e. one or more of the Gospels) regardless of their perceived orthodoxy or lack thereof.  He seems to be holding up the heterogeneity of pre-Nicene or "pre-Ecumenical" Christianity as a strength.  This fits with the view expressed by Theophylact Ochridski, which holds the age of the apostles and church fathers to be superior to recent centuries.  The first through fourth centuries saw Christianity spread across all three continents of the Old World, influencing all literate cultures and even going hang in hand with the creation of new writing systems (largely the ones Constantine lists - Georgian, Armenian, Gothic, and Coptic were all created by Christian scholars).  In the 6th-9th centuries, Christianity had largely not spread further, but had divided against itself and lost ground to Islam (in Asia, Africa and Spain) and Paganism (in Northern and Eastern Europe).  

In this sense, Constantine could be called an Evangelical Christian.  Not that he performed charismatic rituals or encouraged speaking in tongues, but he believed in spreading the teachings of the Gospels, which he considered to contain true wisdom.  This is of course the definition of evangelizing.  He believed that the Church should not stand aloof from those who do not accept (that is, fail to understand) Christianity, but should go to them, engage them in terms they can understand, convince them, and make committed, intellectually adroit christians out of them.  This is what the early church did as it spread outward through the pagan mediterranean world of late antiquity.  By endorsing those Christians of past centuries who spread the faith in new languages and letters, he implicitly condemns those who, by insisting on dogma (an idea of truth which is shaped by a particular language,) drove many Christian nations away from the Orthodox-Catholic Church.

Now, I have been wondering about two of the names here:  the Abzags and the Tirsians.  At first i thought the Abzags could be the Alans/Ossetians/Sarmatians (since their word for language is "aevzag", or according to this Russian site, "abzag").  This site mentions the Abzags as predecessors to the Abkhaz people, who are southern Caucasian, not "Scythian" (i.e. northern Iranian).  But I have no idea who the Tirsians could be.  Tiras is a son of Japheth in Old Testament genealogy, so Constantine may be referring to some nation that claims descent from them.  The Dniestr river was once called Tiras (hence the city Tiraspol), but I have never heard of a literate Christian nation existing in this area before the time of St. Cyril.  This area is part of Moldova now but it seems unlikely that Constantine was referring to Vlachs.

Cyril and Homer

I mentioned earlier that Constantine (Cyril) is said to have studied Homer during his years as a student in Constantinople (the 840s).  I want to take some time to talk about what reading the Iliad in Byzantium might have been like.

In the 9th century Pagan slavs were settled throughout much of the Greek countryside, as far as the Peloponnesus.  Greek speakers were largely confined to cities and church property.  The real core of the Byzantine state was not Greece itself, but Thrace and Western Anatolia - the regions that had sided with Troy in the Trojan war.  The Emperor Michael III (reigned 842-867) was of Phrygian ancestry on his father's side, and Paphlagonian and Armenian on his mother's.  Even if the peoples of the empire largely spoke Greek as common language, it is doubtful that they identified with Homer's Achaean protagonists.

We know from quotations attributed to him during his mission to the Khazars that Constantine the Philosopher did not consider the Byzantine state's legitimacy to be based on its Hellenic or Roman heritage, but on Christianity.  In his time and place, the Trojan War would have been seen as an unjust war between different heathens, certainly not worth fighting over an unfaithful wife.  Someone as educated as Constantine would see the destruction of Troy as a great loss to civilization.  While hard evidence is scanty, I think it is important to consider what the Troy mythos meant to Constantine the Philospher, and whether it helped shape his attitude toward "barbarian" peoples.  

The Christian scholars of Constantine's time rejected the pagan greeks' morality, but embraced their great ancient thinkers.  The Illiad would have given a glimpse of the lost splendor of the ancient "Trojan world" - Western Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Black Sea coast - places he and his brother became well acquainted with in their travels.  The Trojan culture must have had great thinkers like their rivals the Greeks (in fact, even centuries later, Western Anatolian influence on the emergence of classical Athenian thought is well documented).  Constantine would likely have taken an interest in tracing contemporary peoples back to Troy and its allies.  If this was his take on the Illiad, it would explain the great intellectual effort he put into to the study of "barbarian" cultures while he was working to convert them.  But really all the hagiography tells us is that he read Homer.

All this brings me to the topic of my problem with calling the Byzantines a "Greek" Empire.  It is like calling America an "Anglo-Saxon Nation" because English is the common language.  Even those ethnic greeks from the Hellenic Theme in the middle ages would decline to call themselves Hellenes, associating the term with paganism.  The Byzantines were a diverse group including representatives of ancient Balkan and Near Eastern nations (Thracian, Phrygians, Armenians, Lydians, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian and Judeo-Christians), the remnants of Latin speaking populations (Vlachs), as well as newcomers (the Turkic peoples, Slavs, even some Kurdish and Persian refugees from the Muslim conquest).  They called their state Roman and their language Greek, but their culture is hardly what we think of as "Greco-Roman" in the west.  Hellenism as a cultural attitude still existed in some parts of Byzantine society, but it was not the dominant idiom.  Theophylakt Ohridski, a Bulgarian writer of the generation of Cyril and Methodius' students, writes in the early 10th century; 

"Many think that our age is in some respects a step back from antiquity's miracles and the lives of men who, though dwelling in the flesh, lived almost entirely in the spirit."

This is a medieval conception of the dark age/golden age distinction.  But for him (and likely many contemporaries), the golden age of years past was not the age of Athens, Alexander, and the Roman Republic, but the Apostolic and Patristic age, which saw the spread of Christianity and reform of the decadent pagan world of the mediterranean, culminating with the establishment of Christianity as a state religion in the 4th century.  This was the period in which the great theological writings which would shape the debate over orthodoxy were produced.  Cyril and Methodius are both named after saints of this period, as was their contemporary patriarch Ignatios.  The Cappadocian Fathers, of whom Gregory of Nazianzus was a favorite of Cyril, make up a particularly influential group based in Asia Minor.  Other important church fathers were from Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt.  Plato and Aristotle were read and well regarded,  but the Christians did not want a return to the society and values of that age.  The pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture did not have the same romantic associations for them that it has had for Westerners since the Rennaissance.  

Byzantine Christians were familiar with writers who had articulately opposed the emperor worship, mysticism, and sexual perversion which pervaded religious practices in late Pagan times.  Even the Fall of Rome was not really seen as the beginning of a dark age for the Byzantines - the Goths were defeated under the Emperor Justinian and their Heretical sect, the Arian Christians, was crushed.  Even the long and costly war with Persia in the early 7th century ended with a victory for the Byzantines.  The advance of Christianity continued even as the western Roman empire gave way to feudalism.  Only a major disaster for Christianity could bring about the dark age that Theophylact Ohridski alludes to.  And this is just what happened in the 7th and 8th centuries.  Islam and Iconoclasm, not Visigoths and Vandals, made the Byzantine dark ages dark.

Also, as a librarian, Cyril knew what the sacking of a city could do to the cause of learning.  It had happened 2 centuries before his own time, at Alexandria, where the Muslims destroyed or captured the best written works of antiquity.  He might have imagined the Greeks looting the libraries and temples of Troy in the same way, cutting short the study of sciences that would not be known again for centuries.  Astronomy was one science which was well developed in the east before it reached Greece.  The Trojans would have been a perfect link between pre-Zoroastrian Persia, and classical Greece.  Astronomy was the most advanced theoretical knowledge the barbarians of Cyril's time possessed.  As he studied their symbols along with their traditions and religion, the memory of reading the Iliad must have been with him.  Could it be that their beliefs were not just local superstition, but relics of a great civilization's science?

 This is getting a little off subject, so I'm going to read the Illiad (for the first time since 9th grade) and see what I can find. 

Here is an inscription from Livno, Bosnia.  Now this is 2 or 3 centuries later but I want to point out the continuing interplay of "pagan" letter forms and the otherwise standard Old Cyrillic.  The text seen here reads "СЕ ЛЕЖИТ П[О]ПЪ ТѢХОДР[АГ]... РѢДЪЕДИНѢМЪ ГОД...".

For the "yats" (Ѣ), the writer has used a symbol resembling the alchemy sign for phosphorous   (composed of the element of fire triangle and the equilateral cross) which is identical to an Old Bulgarian sign from the Pliska Rosette. The same symbol is used for both mars and mercury.  The downward hooking arms of the "yats" are found in other old pagan letters - including the ancient Vinca Danube region script.  

That undeciphered writing system also shares the "two hockey sticks" shape which serves as a "X" in "ТѢХОДРАГ".  In Lithuania, these are seen as two sheathes of wheat, the symbol of Jumis, a fertility and harvest deity.  Because of its similarity to the Greek Chi derived "X" of cyrillic, the old pagan-era symbol is used.  

The Ж (which in its traditional shape is the same as the symbol for sal ammoniac and  the planet uranus)  is instead shaped like two tridents put end to end, something like a pisces  sign turned 90 degrees.

The Life of Constantine tells us that Constantine "mastered the whole of grammar" and then studied "Homer and geometry, and with Leo and Photius did dialectics and all the philosophy, besides rhetorics, and arithmetics and astronomy, and music, and all other Hellenic arts."  Its important to note that Constantine studied astronomy.  If he did use these "alchemy" symbols, it was not with their chemical meanings but probably because he was familiar with their planetary identities.  The Pliska Rosette is thought to represent the seven planets known to the early Bulgars.  This is where the overlap of Constantine's classical education and pagan wisdom can be seen.

His studies of Homer, also, may have led him to the belief that the ancient pagan writings of the barbarians could be a remnant of the highly developed ancient civilization of which Troy was the center.  In Byzantine times, "Scythian" usually referred to barbarians from north of the black sea who fought on horseback.  This includes the Proto-Bulgars, the Huns, the Alans, and the Avars - not all Indo Iranian peoples, but seen by the Greeks as having adopted much of the Scythian way of life and religion.  Troy was renowned as a center of horse breeding before the Trojan war.  The horse had great importance in the cult of Troy, as it did in "scythian" cultures.

In addition to using astronomical signs that represent planets or constellations, Constantine used several shapes resembling other astronomical concepts.  The glagolitic letters V, G, and Dlook a hell of a lot like astrological symbols for the movement of heavenly bodies.  V= setting, D=rising, G=something a little more complicated to explain here.  And these are only theories.  

But we know Cyril studied astronomy, which shares the ball and curved line constructions with Glagolitsa.