Origin of the Slavs and their Christianisation

The Slavic peoples constitute a major element in the ethnic make-up of Eurasia and are represented in diaspora communities across the world. In our time Slavs are divided into East Slavs, which includes the Russian people, West Slavs, including, for example, the Poles and Czechs, and the South Slavs, such as the Serbs and Croats. 

The origins of the Slavic peoples, as distinct from the earlier Balto-Slavs, can be traced back to a Urheimat (homeland) which many would locate in Polesia (southern Belarus, but overlapping with Poland, Russia and Ukraine). In historical sources dating back to the first and second century CE, the Slavs are referred to as "Veneti" and/or "Spori". Particularly during the second phase of the Völkerwanderung (Great Migration) around 500 CE, the Slavs, then known as Antes and/or Sklaveni, spread out in all directions. By 518 they were crossing the northern limes (frontier) of the Empire of Constantinople. By the 7th century the whole Balkan area was known as Skalvinia and was inhabited by tribal communities of Slavs known as Sklaveni, Other Slavs spread west, north and east. 

The Christianisation of Slavs by the Eastern Orthodox Church may, arguably, have begun under Emperor Heraclius (r. 610-641), when in 623 Croats and Serbs were settled from what is now Central Europe into their current homelands, however their Christian faith was short-lived. Somewhat later, as the Empire of Constantinople reclaimed areas such as Macedonia and the main Greek peninsula (the "Byzantine Reconquista"), settled by Slavs (and also Avars), these areas were Hellenised, a process, carried out for example under Emperor Nicephorus I (802-811), which included Christianisation. The experience of this missionary work inspired and informed work beyond the borders of the Empire, begun in the 860s: in Bulgaria, and later by Cyril and Methodius and their disciples in Moravia and Pannonia. The Five disciples of Methodius took refuge in Bulgaria, where Clement of Ohrid probably invented the Cyrillic alphabet. It was from Bulgaria that Serbia was evangelised. The work in Kievan Rus enjoyed initial success in 860, but it was the conversion of Princess Olga and later her grandson, Vladimir in 988 that brought Kievan Rus into the orbit of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  

The Slavs were also Christianised by the western Catholic church. The see of Magdeburg was a base for missionary work. For example, Moravia was originally missionised by Frankish missionaries before the Cyril-Methodian mission, and eventually came under the jurisdiction of western church - as did Pannonia. Later, Adalbert of Prague (d. 997) was a leading missionary across eastern Europe. Towards the end of the tenth century various peoples such as the Poles in 966 formally converted to Christianity. Later, in the twelfth century, a missionary crusade was directed against the Wends (a west Slavic people).  

VI. Chalcedon (the East, 430-681)

By about 430 the Roman Empire had largely been Christianised. While the western half of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Rome, was under attack and soon to fall, the eastern half of the Empire survived and thrived as a Christianised society with Constantinople as its capital. Its most illustrious ruler was Justinian who ruled 527-565 and, during that time, was able to temporarily reclaim lands occupied by Germanic peoples, engage in a building programme (most famously reconstructing the Hagia Sophia after the Nika riot) and codify Roman law. The two-headed eagle of Constantinople represented the "harmony" of the priesthood and the kingdom, the church and state working in tandem. In the East, unlike in the west, this always meant the state had the upper hand (this is sometimes termed "Caesaropapism") with the Emperor possessing divinely ordained power and above the law. After Justinian many of the lands to the west were lost again, although the following century Emperor Heraclius (r. 610-641) was able to hold the Sassinid Empire of Persia bay until the advent of the Islamic caliphate in the seventh century.

During this whole period, the theological "hot topic" in the church was Christology, that is to say, the relationship between the divine and the human in Christ.

The 381 Council of Constantinople had already condemned the teaching of Apollinarius and affirmed that Christ had a human soul, for, as Gregory of Nazianzen had famously said, “the unassumed is the unhealed”.

For a brief period Nestorius served as Archbishop of Constantinople. Nestorius, who had been trained in the Antiochene School of Theodore of Mopsuetia, was perceived as teaching that the eternal Son of God and the man Jesus are in fact two persons joined in union. Thus, the baby in Mary's womb was just a human. This teaching was opposed by Cyril of Alexandria, who proclaimed “one incarnate nature [sic] of the Logos”. The 431 Council of Ephesus proclaimed Mary to be the Theotokos, the Bearer of God, thus affirming Christ as a single person. This decision alienated a party within the church associated with the School of Edessa, which relocated outside the borders of the Empire to Nisibis. The "Church of the East", the Christian church in the Persian Empire, had already proclaimed itself autonomous in 424 headed by a Catholicos with his seat at Seleucia-Ctesiphon. By the end of the fifth century it had adopted the theology of Nestorius. This church was very missionary minded and reached into Central Asia, India, the Mongols and China. The height of its influence was under Catholicos Timothy I (780-823).

Having resolved that Christ is a single person, the next debate surrounded the issue of "nature". Did Christ have one composite divine-human nature, as Eutyches taught? The Patriarch of Rome, Leo the Great, formulated the orthodox answer to the question, speaking of two natures united but distinct from one another. This was the ruling of the 451 Council at Chalcedon. However, the terminology of the ruling alienated the followers of Cyril of Alexandria, who had used the terminology of "one nature". Churches in Egypt (Copts) and Syria (later known as Jacobites) did not accept the ruling of the Council. They are known as the Oriental Orthodox Churches (or "Monophysites"). These churches, both Coptic and Jacobite, engaged in missionary work, covering an area comparable to the work of the Nestorians. A particularly successful Monophysite churchman and missionary was Jacob Baradaeus (578); there was a twin monophysite movement centred in Egypt. By 575 parallel structures of Oriental Orthodox Churches had been set up. The Chalcedonian church strucure remained and was known as the Melkite (i.e. Imperial) church.

While the Nestorians were outside the Empire, the ongoing presence of non-Chalcedonian Monophysites within the Empire was a major concern for the Empire and for the Church. On the one hand the Monophysites engaged in missionary work. On the other hand they represented disunity. Several attempts were made by Emperors to win over the schismatics with formulations they could accept, such as the Henotikon (482), the theological qualifications of Leontius (d. 543) in respect of “enhypostasis”, or the condemnation of the Three Chapters at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), but to no avail. A controversial monphysite formulation used in worship in 512, and then withdrawn, was "one of the Trinity was crucified for us". The Fifth Ecumenical Council was more careful in its language: "one of the Holy Trinity suffered in the flesh".

In the seventh century an attempt was made to speak of the "single will" in Christ. This was proclaimed in Imperial edicts, the Ekthesis (638) and the Typos (648). However, Maximus the Confessor and others perceived this compromise to undermine the full humanity and free cooperation of Christ's human nature in redemption - with implications for our participation in salvation. After Emperors and even a Pope (Honorius I) had opposed what become the orthodox position, the church finally ruled in 681 that there are two wills in Christ.

In the eastern tradition, theologians are mystics. As Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “the one who is going to associate intimately with God must go beyond all that is visible and… believe that the divine is there where the understanding does not reach.” Pseudo-Dionysius spoke of God in apophatic terms i.e. in terms of what He is not (rather than what He is); we progress in the knowledge of God as we follow the three-stage path of purification, illumination and union (theosis). Leading lights of eastern monasticism of the age, based in Palestine, were Euthymius the Great and Sabbas the Sanctified. At Sinai, a second centre of monasticism in the fifth and sixth centuries, was John Climacus (d. 649), who wrote the Ladder of Divine Ascent as a sort of 30-step road-map to ascetic growth and achievement. It was he who was one of the first to speak of the practice of inner mental prayer (hesychasm).

During this time the form of Christian public worship also continued to develop and diverge between east and west. The typical form of an eastern church was no longer the Roman-inspired rectangular basilica, but rather the square-shaped martyrium. These buildings were conceived not merely as "meeting houses", but as images of the cosmic order, places of encounter between heaven and earth. The divine liturgy, as public worship was called in the east, took the command "do this in remembrance of me" as a principle for reenacting the drama of salvation. Augustine had written, “All that is beautiful comes from the highest Beauty, which is God.” Christian worship was, correspondingly, aesthetic in character. During the course of the service first the Scriptures and then the elements for Communion were ceremonially brought into the nave. The culmination of the service is the anaphora prayer before Communion, in which the Holy Spirit is invoked (epiclesis) down upon the bread and wine before the worshippers partake. Following the basic two-part structure (liturgy of the Word followed by liturgy of the Eucharist) established in the early Christian centuries, this was further embellished with more elaborate set petitionary prayers (litanies), anaphora (see above) and songs proclaiming doctrine, such as the Trisagion (438), the creed (510) and “Only-Begotten Son” (536). Roman the Melodist (d.556), John of Damascus, Cosma the Melodist (d. 760) and Andrew of Crete were among those who contributed to the development of the divine liturgy.

IX. Aachen (the Western Catholic Church, 732-1046)

By 750 the “centre of gravity” of the western Christian world had moved from Rome in the south to the Kingdom of the Franks in the north. For centuries, since the fall of the western Roman Empire, Europe had been dominated by Arian (or former Arian) Germanic tribes (such as the Goths). By the eighth century, the Franks, also a Germanic people, but who had been Nicene Christians since the baptism of their ruler, Clovis, in 496, assumed hegemony. This was sealed with military victories, defeating Muslim forces at Poitiers in 732 and defending Rome against the Lombards in the 740s. By the mid-8th century the Pope was transferring his political allegiance from the eastern Christian Empire at Constantinople to the Frankish ruler, Peppin. Later, at Christmas 800, Pope Leo III famously crowned Charles the Great as Emperor of a renewed Roman Empire. Charles saw himself as a ruler with religious and moral responsibility. 

About the same time, following in the footsteps of Irish monks the previous century, several prominent Anglo-Saxon missionaries, such as Wilfrid (later Boniface), Willibrord and Wynfrith, bravely reached out with the gospel to the pagan Germanic peoples such as the Frisians and Thuringians. The former was appointed by Pope Zachary as missionary archbishop of Mainz. Fulda monastery was founded in 744 as a centre for learning and a base for missionary work. Later missionary work among the Saxons would be more political and coercive.

Alongside missionary achievements, the Anglo-Saxons, along with the Franks, furthered a process of “Romanisation” and raised the status of the Papacy. Just as the Pope no longer looked to the Emperor at Constantinople, so the western church also emphasised the Trinitarian theology of Filioque, not shared by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Competing missions to the Slavic peoples became a battle fro competing spheres of influence between Pope Nicolas I (d.867) and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius (d. 867). The two branches of the Nicene church were growing apart, divided by differences in ceremony, language, theological authorities (in the West Augustine was the chief authority), models of salvation (the western church spoke of salvation in legal terms) and the understanding of the Trinity. Controversy over the Papacy and the Filioque would lead to the temporary, Photian schism (863-7) and the permanent schism in 1054.

A major focus of the Frankish Kingdom was education; historians speak of the Carolingian Renaissance. At Aachen, the Frankish capital, was the Academy, an institution of Christian scholars, headed by an Anglo-Saxon, Alcuin (d. 804). The “General Admonition” of 791 ordered the creation of schools at monasteries (such as St. Gall) and cathedrals (such as Laon, Mainz, Reims and Orleans) throughout the realm. This is where future monks and priests, but also laymen, were educated. From the XI century some of these schools grew into the first universities in Europe. Preaching in the language of the people, who did not speak the Latin of the church services, was also encouraged, although most preaching involved reading out written sermons by authorities such as Paul the Deacon (d.799). While on the whole this was not an age of great theological thought, in the eighth century in Spain there was controversy over Adoptonist teaching (Elipandus of Toledo & Felix of Urgel), condemned by the church in 799. There was also discussion on the Eucharist (Paschasius versus Ratramnus), the doctrine of Mary (Paschasius was the first to posit Mary's immaculate conception), and also on the doctrine of predestination (Gottschalk, d.869). One of the finest minds of the age was John Scotus Eriugena (810-877). Somewhat later Benedict of Aniane (d.821) spearheaded a process of “Benedictinisation” in the monastic movement, making the monastic rule of Benedict of Nursia (6th century) almost universal and placing a major emphasis on liturgical celebration.

The Carolingian Empire declined and broke up by the mid-9th century, and was eventually replaced by multiple kingdoms throughout Europe. Paradoxically, this situation led to the church being dominated by powerful families (“Lay Domination”); during the period 850-1050 popes were typically in office for just a few years at a time. The practice of Lay Investiture integrated the clergy into the feudal structure; clerics were invested in their posts by non-church laymen. (This controversy was finally resolved in 1122.) 

In response to this, and to combat abuses such as simony (the buying and selling of church positions) and non-observance of clerical celibacy, in the tenth century monastic reform movements sprang up in multiple locations. The most famous was Cluny monastery (from 910), free of lay interference, which grew into a huge centralised network of monastic houses across Europe. By the time of Hugo, the Abbot of Cluny was the second person in the western Catholic church – and arguably more influential than the Pope himself.

By the Xth century the church was recovering strength, as reflected in renewed missionary success, converting the Scandinavians and Hungarians to Christianity, who during the eighth century had presented a military threat, as well as the Poles and other Slavic peoples. An important missionary base was the episcopal see of Magdeburg (founded in 968). An important missionary was Adalbert of Prague (d. 997), who spearheaded missionary work throughout Eastern Europe.