Cyril and Methodius Pictures

This isn't a real entry but I will do one soon.  For now here are a few representations of Cyril and Methodius.  The second is my favorite.

Patriarch John

Here is a short excerpt from an OCS life of Cyril, a very brief one compared to those in Duichev's collection.  The translation is my own and very rough.

"At that time Ioann was patriarch of Tsarograd (Constantinople).  He stirred up heresy and abused the holy icons.  And for this he was removed from his seat by the Holy Council.  And Constantine the Philosopher came to him and put him to shame, and corrected his wicked heresy."

I was pleased to find this, since it confirms something that is described in the longer account in Kliment Ohridski's Life.  As it goes, early in Constantine's professorship (probably the late 840s) he was called on to publicly debate a former patriarch called by the pseudonym "Anis[os]" (Grk. "the unequal").  This account shows that it was indeed John the Grammarian, the last Iconoclast Patriarch.

In Kliment's account, John boasts of his debating skills, saying that his enemies removed him "by force and not by arguments of reason; for there is none can stand up to my word."  He contemptuously declares that the philosopher and his colleagues are "unworthy to sit at my feet; how can I discourse with you?"  However, Constantine goes on to refute all of the iconoclast arguments and leaves John "shamed", "disgraced", and "silent".

In a future entry I hope to shed some light on the role of then-Patriarch Ignatios in this last iconoclast controversy.

Aristotle on Truth

"To give a satisfactory decision as to the truth it is necessary to be rather an arbitrator than a party to the dispute."

-Aristotle, On the Heavens

Peoples of the Book Part II

To repeat the quote I focused on in my earlier post;

 "We on our part know of many peoples who have books and give praise to God each in its own tongue.  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."

-St. Cyril (Constantine the Philosopher), as recorded by Kliment Ohridski

 "Hazaras" (or Khazars) were mainly known for being Turkic and pagan converts to Judaism, so apparently this is a list of both Christian and Jewish groups - i.e. people who use either the New or Old Testament or both, which makes sense because the Trilingual doctrine applies to both.  Constantine had encountered Jews and Samaritans in or on his way to Khazaria from Cherson, and had supposedly learned the Samaritan alphabet and studied the Samaritan books in preparation for his debates with the Khazars.  I am not sure if this was the form in which the Khazars initially encountered the Hebrew Bible, but it would make sense if Samaritans as well as Hebrew speaking Jews had influenced their religious practices.  The Samaritans were brutally suppressed in Palestine during the reign of Justinian (6th century), and some of the survivors travelled as far as the Crimea.  The Khazars seem to have adopted Old Testament-style monotheism gradually, becoming a properly Jewish state only by the 9th century.

Apparently knowledge of Samaritan was something Constantine considered useful for his mission there in 860-861.  It was important enough that he supposedly shut himself up for  days in Cherson (Crimea) to perfect his Samaritan before continuing east to Khazaria.  There is no mention of him learning the Turkic Khazar language.  There would be no reason to include the Khazars in his list of peoples of the book if they used only Hebrew, since Trilingualism recognizes Hebrew as the "official" language of the Old Testament, as Greek is for the New Testament.  The possibility that the scriptures were written in the Turkic Khazar language seems remote, since there is so little tradition of writing in that language.  Anyway, in short, Kliment's own account of Constantine's time in Khazaria gives no evidence of a local version of the New Testament, and if they had the Old Testament they must have used a language other than Hebrew to be worth including in Constantine's list of people who have books in languages other than the "official" three.  This would mean Constantine included the Khazars in the list in order to generalize his argument to all three aspects of trilingualism - showing that there are different versions of the old testament as well as new.

The mention of Arabic scriptures after the Khazars' is also important, because the Koran is certainly not what he is referring to - this would be pretty ridiculous in his situation of trying to justify to the Romans the orthodoxy of his translated Slavonic gospels.  He must be referring to Arabic versions of the Old and/or New Testament.  The Christians in Arabic-speaking lands, however, used their own languages and scripts, such as Coptic and Syriac (which he mentions specifically).  Its likely he is referring only to the Old Testament, as seems to be the case for the Khazars.  We know this was translated by Jewish scholars in the middle east.  The oldest existing version dates from decades after his death, but evidently Jewish scriptures in Arabic were not unknown to Constantine the Philosopher, who had traveled to Baghdad in the 850s.  Thus, he is giving two examples of Jews who write their holy books (which the Christians share) in languages other than Classical Hebrew.  The first, the "Khazars/Samaritans" (my own interpretation), had books in an ancient but controversial writing, while the Jews of the Middle East and Muslim Spain had adopted the new lingua franca, Arabic.  (Latin, remember, is dubiously included in the trinity of holy languages merely for having been the lingua franca for the Church's first half millennium, and as Constantine pointed out, appears in the New Testament only on the head board of the crucifix - hence referring to the Latinophiles as "Pilates".)

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.