KIEVAN RUS’

KIEVAN RUS’. The Slavic Churches trace their origins back to Constantinople through the missionary efforts of Constantine-Cyril and Methodius (qq.v.), and to the baptism of Kievan Rus’ in the Dnieper River in 988 in the reign of Prince Vladimir (956–1015). It was under the inspiration of Vladimir’s Christian grandmother, Princess Olga, and Vladimir’s Greek (political) relations from the court of Emperor Basil II that Vladimir himself was baptized “Basil” at this time. He actively promoted Christianity by building churches and monasteries and doing charitable works. But he was known to have used inappropriate compulsion to promote baptism, and paid insufficient attention to the required catechesis (q.v.) of new Christians. The anomalous situation that resulted had noteworthy characteristics: Christianity spread “from the top down,” i.e., from the political and educated elite to the peasantry; the language of worship from the beginning was Slavic, even though a metropolitan, hierarchy, and initial group of clergy were brought from the Byzantine Empire (q.v.); for many centuries afterward the popular religion was a “dual-faith” (q.v.) based on an admixture of Christianity and paganism. All things considered, Vladimir was canonized in the 12th c. as an apostle (q.v.) to the Slavs. The traditional, glorious legend of the conversion of the Kievan Slavs from the Chronicles (q.v.)-at the recommendation of Vladimir’s emissaries to foreign lands-is worthwhile reading and considered by many experts to contain a kernel of historical fact.

The Kievan Period in Slavic Church history covers the 10th-13th c. The history of Kievan Rus’ was punctuated by the assimilation of Byzantine spirituality through translations, internecine warfare in the princely families, the establishment of an indigenous monasticism (q.v.) that spread from Kiev north and found a new impetus with Sergius of Radonezh, the Tartar invasions that decimated the entire region and left intact only Novgorod and its environs, and the moving of the secular and religious “capital” from Kiev to Moscow.

Kievan Rus’ is best known by its literature-which centered on Scripture (q.v.). Ironically, no complete manuscript of the Slavic Bible exists from this period. (See Constantine-Cyril; Gennadievskii Bible; Methodius.) Nonetheless, the popular power of liturgy and the personal piety (qq.v.) of the people of Kievan Rus’ dictated that spiritual writings were of the utmost importance. Religious writings were called sacred and divine insofar as they were not heretical. The idea of distinguishing between the inspired Holy Scriptures, the Church Fathers (q.v.), and the apocrypha (i.e., non-Biblical rather than “deuterocanonical”) did not exist. Indeed, the apocrypha was especially liked because of its fabulous content, which appealed to the imagination and was entertaining.

Since the Old Testament enjoyed limited liturgical use, only the prescribed church readings were collected into one liturgical book (q.v.), rendering a complete Old Testament unnecessary. Other available biblical books for church and private use circulated in smaller collected editions. The Book of Psalms was the most popular one, outpacing even the Gospels, and was used not only as the “prayerbook of the Church” but also as the chief reading primer. After the psalter and individual Gospels came the prophets and wisdom literature, especially Sirach. The Palaea, a “Reader’s Digest version” of the “historical books” of the Old Testament dressed up with apocryphal legends, completed the list.

While reading was a virtue of the elite, and liturgy appealed to both elite and peasant, Holy Scripture and apocryphal works were rivaled in popularity only by translations of the lives of saints, followed by sermons (see Kirill of Turov) and patristic exegeses. Thus, three of the largest and most popular literary corpuses of Kievan Rus’ had Scripture as their centerpiece. (See Russian Orthodox Church.)