Justified True Belief

(●) Two brothers from a Greek port city who gave the Slavs an alphabet, a Bible, and the right to worship in words they already understood. + Sometime around the year 863 a Greek scholar in Constantinople sat down to write a sentence in a language that had never been written. There was no script for it, no spelling, no punctuation, not a single letter anyone had agreed on. He had to invent the whole thing first, sign by sign, listening for sounds that Greek letters could not make. The language was Slavic, the speech of the Slavs, the peoples who had spread across eastern and central Europe in the centuries before and whose descendants are the Czechs and Slovaks, the Poles, the Serbs and Bulgarians, the Russians and Ukrainians. The sentence he chose to write first was "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1). His name was Constantine, and the church knows him by the monastic name he took a few weeks before he died: Cyril. His elder brother Methodius was with him from the start and outlived him by sixteen years, most of them spent defending what the two of them had made. They are told together because the work was never divided. One brother built the alphabet and one brother finished the Bible, and neither half stands without the other. They belong on a Christian apologetics shelf for a reason that has nothing to do with Slavic grammar. When they took their books to Italy, churchmen told them to their faces that God is praised in three languages only, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and that everything else is presumption. Constantine did not appeal to his emperor or to his patriarch. He argued, in public, from Scripture and from ordinary observation, and he won: first from Pope Hadrian II in 868, then in writing from Pope John VIII in 880. The principle he defended, that the gospel travels by translation rather than in spite of it, is now so much the common sense of Christian mission that it is hard to remember somebody had to win it. Somebody did.

(●) c. 815 and 826 AD: Two sons of an officer, Methodius and Constantine, grew up in a Greek city with Slavic spoken all around it. + Their father Leo was a man of property in Thessalonica, the second city of the Byzantine empire, and he held the rank of drungarios, a mid-level officer serving under the military governor of the Thessalonica district. Almost everything anyone knows about the household comes from two short biographies written within a generation of the brothers’ deaths, one for each of them: the Life of Constantine and the Life of Methodius, known together as the Lives. Both were written in Old Church Slavonic, which is the written Slavic language the brothers themselves made, the first there had ever been. The earlier of the two, the Life of Constantine, says that Leo "begot seven children of which the youngest, the seventh, was Constantine the Philosopher." After that the ground gets softer. Methodius is usually reckoned the eldest of the seven, though the Lives do not say so outright, and neither Life gives his birth year; around 815 is a working estimate from the age at which he could have held the office he later held. Constantine’s birth is firmer: the Life reports that he died at forty-two in February 869, which puts his birth in 826 or 827. A later tradition gives Methodius the baptismal name Michael, which the Lives never mention. The detail that shaped everything else is geography. Thessalonica was Greek, but the countryside around it had been settled by Slavs for two centuries, and a boy growing up in the city heard their speech in its markets. The brothers were bilingual before they knew it mattered. The Life of Methodius even claims the emperor sent the elder brother to govern a Slavic principality because he wished him "to learn all the Slavic customs, and gradually become accustomed to them," which is almost certainly the biographer reading backward, fitting an ordinary early posting to the mission it happened to lead to. The underlying fact holds all the same. When a Slavic prince eventually asked Constantinople for a teacher who could speak to his people, there were two men in the empire obviously fitted for the work, and they were brothers.

(●) c. 843 to 856 AD: The younger brother became the best-taught man in the empire, and the elder walked away from a governorship. + Constantine was sent to Constantinople as a boy and put into the hands of the two finest teachers in the Greek world: Leo the Mathematician, who ran the imperial school in the Magnaura palace, and Photius, the most formidable scholar of the century and later the patriarch of Constantinople, which is to say the senior bishop of the Greek East, whose long quarrel with Rome over who answered to whom would harden in time into the split between the Eastern and Western churches (†1). Constantine took a post as chartophylax of Hagia Sophia, which means keeper of the archives and library of the great church, and then taught philosophy himself. The nickname stuck for life. Every source calls him Constantine the Philosopher. The Life preserves a scene from those years that says more about him than any summary. A senior official offered him the usual package for a promising young man, a wealthy goddaughter in marriage and a career to match, and Constantine answered: "This is indeed a great gift for those who have need of it. But for me nothing is greater than learning." You can hear a young prig in that if you want to, and plenty of clever twenty-year-olds have said such things and meant nothing much by them. The rest of his life suggests he meant this one plainly. Methodius went the other way. He took the Slavic principality he was offered and governed it for some years, and then, the Life of Methodius says, "witnessing the excessive, disorderly tumult of this life," he resigned it, went to Mount Olympus in Bithynia where the monasteries were, and was tonsured, which is to say he had his head shaved in the monastic manner and put on the black habit of a monk. He was a competent administrator who had found out what he thought of administration. That combination, a scholar and a governor, turned out to be exactly what the mission needed, and it is why the two of them together could do what neither could have done alone.

(●) 851 to 861 AD: Two embassies took Constantine to a caliph’s court and both brothers to a Khazar khagan’s, and they came home carrying a martyr’s bones. + Byzantium used its scholars as diplomats, and Constantine was sent out twice. The first journey, when the Life says he was twenty-four, took him to Samarra on the Tigris, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. A caliphate is the Muslim empire ruled by a caliph, a title meaning successor, since the caliph held his office as the successor of Muhammad; the Abbasid one ran from North Africa across to Persia, and it was the great power on Byzantium’s eastern border. There Constantine was put in front of Muslim scholars and expected to give an account of the Christian faith (T4). That age puts the embassy at about 851, though scholars who weigh it against the record of Byzantine missions to the caliph place it later in the 850s. The second journey, around 860, took both brothers north to the Khazars, a Turkic people on the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian whose ruling house had adopted Judaism and who were being courted by Christians and Muslims alike. Their ruler was called the khagan, a title closer to emperor than to chieftain. Constantine debated before the khagan with Jewish and Muslim scholars present. The khagan did not convert. About two hundred of his people were baptized, and when he offered Constantine gifts at parting, Constantine asked instead for the Greek prisoners held at the court, and took two hundred of them home. On the way north the party stopped at Cherson in the Crimea, and there, on 30 January 861, they dug at a spot the local church pointed them to and brought up human bones. Constantine identified them as the bones of Clement of Rome, the third bishop of Rome after Peter, whom an old story said had been drowned in the sea off Cherson with an anchor about his neck. Bones like these are called relics: the bodily remains of a saint, kept by a church and honoured there, and in the ninth century a church that held the relics of one of Peter’s own successors had something no amount of money could buy. Constantine wrote a short history of the finding, a sermon of praise, and a hymn. The Greek is gone, but Anastasius the Librarian, a Roman churchman who read Greek and who would meet Constantine in person a few years later, put the first two into Latin at Rome and both of those survive, along with a Slavonic text of the sermon. Whether the bones were Clement’s is another question, and a fair one (†4). What matters for the story is that the brothers carried them for the rest of their lives, and that when they finally walked into Rome, the relics walked in with them.

(●) 863 AD: Moravia asked for a teacher who could speak its own language, and Constantine built it an alphabet. + Great Moravia, a Slavic state in what is now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, had been christianized by Frankish clergy who preached through interpreters and worshipped in Latin. Its prince, Rastislav, wanted priests who were not also agents of his powerful German neighbours, and in 862 he sent to the emperor Michael III in Constantinople. The Life of Constantine records his message: "Though our people have rejected paganism and observe Christian law, we do not have a teacher who can explain to us in our language the true Christian faith." Constantine’s first response was not enthusiasm. He said he would go gladly "if they have a script for their language," and when the emperor admitted there was none, he asked the question of a man who can see the size of the job and the size of the risk in the same glance: "Who can write a language on water and acquire for himself a heretic’s name?" Both halves of that sentence came true. Writing Slavic did prove to be like writing on water, since he had to make the surface before he could make the mark. And the charge of heresy was waiting for him in Italy four years later. He made the alphabet anyway. It is called Glagolitic, from the Slavic word for "utterance," and it was not borrowed from Greek or Latin; the letter shapes are original, and they were designed around sounds that Greek letters simply cannot spell. Then he translated, starting with the opening of John’s Gospel, and went out with his brother to Moravia in 863. They stayed forty months, and they put the whole daily round of the church into Slavic. That round is worth naming, because they translated every part of it: Matins is the morning service, the Hours are the short offices said at intervals through the day, Vespers comes at evening and Compline at bedtime, and the Liturgy is the central service of the church, the one built around the Scripture readings, the preaching and the Lord’s Supper. All of it went into a tongue nobody had written down at all until Constantine sat and invented its letters. Then they trained local students to run the whole thing without them, which is the part that mattered most and the part the Frankish clergy had never attempted. The Life adds one detail worth keeping. Rastislav was the Moravian prince who had sent for them, and Kocel a Slavic prince whose lands lay on their road home and who became their patron, and of both of them the biographer says the same thing: "Constantine took neither gold nor silver nor other things from either Rastislav or Kocel."

(●) 867 to 869 AD: In Venice they were told God hears only three languages, and in Rome the pope disagreed, the year before Constantine died there as the monk Cyril. + The brothers left Moravia for the most practical reason there is. Their Slavic students could read the books and sing the services and teach what they had been taught, but not one of them could be made a priest, because only a bishop can ordain, that is, lay hands on a man and set him apart to celebrate the sacraments, and neither brother was a bishop. So they went looking for one, and their road ran through Venice. There the local clergy fell on them. Bishops, priests and monks put the objection at full strength: no apostle had made letters for the Slavs, and neither had Jerome nor Augustine nor Gregory of Nazianzus, and "we know of only three languages worthy of praising God in the Scriptures, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin." The proof text was the notice nailed over the cross: "Many of the Jews read this inscription, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city, and it was written in Aramaic, in Latin, and in Greek" (John 19:20). Constantine answered them for as long as they would stand there (T2), and the Life of Methodius records the nickname that stuck to that party afterward in Rome, where the pope called such men "Pilatists and trilinguists." Trilinguists for the three tongues they would allow, and Pilatists because the whole of their case rested on a signboard that Pilate had ordered written. Pope Nicholas I had already sent for the brothers. He died in November 867, weeks before they arrived, and it was his successor Hadrian II who came out of Rome to meet them with the townspeople and candles, because of the relics of Clement they were carrying. Hadrian took the Slavic books and laid them on the altar of the church the Life calls St Mary Phatne, Santa Maria Maggiore, and had the liturgy sung over them, the service the Latin church calls the Mass. Two bishops, Formosus and Gauderic, ordained the Slavic students, and the new priests sang the liturgy in Slavonic in St Peter’s, then in St Petronilla’s, then in St Andrew’s, then through a whole night in St Paul’s. For a few weeks in 868 the most Latin city in the world was hearing Mass in the language of a people most Romans could not have found on a map. Constantine did not leave Rome. He fell ill, took the monastic habit with the name Cyril, and lived fifty days in it. His dying prayer, which the Life preserves at length, asks God to "preserve Thy faithful flock which Thou appointed to me" and to "destroy the trilingual heresy belief," so the fight was the last thing on his mind. He died on 14 February 869, aged forty-two, and was buried in the church of San Clemente, beside the relics he had carried from the Crimea.

(●) 870 to 873 AD: Methodius went back alone as archbishop, was tried by Frankish bishops, and spent two and a half years locked up. + Kocel, the Slavic prince of Pannonia, the old Roman province along the middle Danube in what is now western Hungary, asked Rome to send Methodius back to him. Hadrian II consecrated him archbishop for the Slavic lands, consecration being the rite that makes a man a bishop, and revived for the purpose the ancient see of Sirmium. A see is the city a bishop sits in together with the territory he answers for, and this one had stood empty for centuries; the Life of Methodius calls it "the seat of Saint Andronicus," the man Paul greets in Romans 16:7. On paper it was a clean solution: a Slavic church with its own archbishop, answerable directly to Rome. On the ground it was a declaration of war. The bishops of Salzburg, Passau and Freising had regarded Pannonia and Moravia as their mission field for two generations, and a Greek monk with a Roman commission and a Slavic liturgy was, from where they sat, a foreign appointment on their own land. Worse, the prince who had asked for the mission in the first place was no longer there to shelter it. Rastislav had been seized by his own nephew Svatopluk and handed over to the Franks, who blinded him on the orders of Louis the German, king of the East Franks. With him went the only political protection the brothers had ever had. The Frankish bishops arrested Methodius and put him on trial before that same king. The Life gives the exchange, and he does not come off as a meek man: warned that he would come to evil, he answered, "I speak the Truth before emperors and am not ashamed," and told the bishops that in prohibiting God’s teaching they were "wishing to pierce an iron mountain with a skull of bone." They banished him to Swabia and held him there two and a half years. What freed him was Rome. Pope John VIII placed the whole Bavarian episcopate under interdict, which meant that not one of those bishops could celebrate Mass for as long as Methodius was held, and in 873 his legate Paul of Ancona, a legate being an envoy who carries the pope’s own authority with him, brought the archbishop out. The imprisonment cost him the best years he had left, and it settled nothing; his opponents simply changed tactics.

(●) 880 to 885 AD: Rome put its approval in writing, and Methodius finished the Bible in Slavonic before he died. + The charges kept coming, so in 880 John VIII summoned Methodius to Rome, examined his teaching, found it sound, and issued the letter Industriae tuae. It approves "the Slavic letters devised by Constantine the Philosopher" by name, permits Mass, the Gospel and the daily offices in Slavonic, and attaches one condition: at solemn Mass the Gospel is to be read first in Latin and then in Slavic. Eighteen years after Rastislav’s messengers reached Constantinople, and thirteen after the shouting in Venice, the answer came back in writing. In the same document John made a Swabian priest named Wiching bishop of Nitra under Methodius, which handed the archbishop’s most determined opponent a seat inside his own province, and Wiching spent the next five years using it. Methodius answered by working. The Life says he took two of his disciples who were skilled scribes and translated the whole of Scripture out of Greek into Slavic, "all the Scriptures in full, save Maccabees." It dates the effort from March to the twenty-sixth of October and calls that six months. Count the months on your fingers and you get eight, so either the figure or the dates slipped somewhere in the copying. Either way, three men translated a Bible in under a year, and he marked the finish by celebrating the feast of St Demetrius, the patron of the city he was born in. He also translated the Nomocanon, the Greek church’s book of canon law, and a collection of the sayings of the desert fathers, so that a Slavic church would have not only Scripture but law and spiritual counsel in its own hands. He came into church sick on Palm Sunday of 885, blessed the emperor, the prince, the clergy and the people, and told his disciples to watch over him for three days. Asked who should succeed him he named Gorazd, a Moravian, "a free countryman of yours who is Orthodox and well versed in Latin letters," which was a shrewd choice as well as a holy one. Orthodox there means right-believing rather than Eastern: Gorazd was a local man, not a Greek anybody could call a foreigner, and he had the Latin his opponents respected. He died on 6 April 885. His funeral was sung in Latin, Greek and Slavic over the same coffin, which was, for one afternoon, exactly the church he had spent his life arguing for.

What They Taught

(T1) Worship in a language you do not know is a bell with no message in it. + Anyone who has sat through a wedding or a funeral in a language they do not speak knows the feeling. You can tell when something solemn is happening. You stand when everyone stands. You can hear that the words are beautiful, and you cannot tell what any of them mean, and after an hour you have received a mood and no content at all. That was the ordinary Sunday of a Moravian farmer in 860. The liturgy, the fixed public worship of the church with its prayers and readings and songs in their set order, was conducted in Latin by German priests. A homily might be interpreted for him afterwards, roughly, if anyone bothered. The Scriptures themselves he never heard in words he thought in. Constantine’s answer was not that Latin is a bad language. It was that a service is speech, and speech that is not understood has failed at the only thing speech does. He is standing on solid ground here, and he knew it. Paul had made the identical argument to the Corinthians about the gift of tongues in church: "Nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind in order to instruct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue" (1 Corinthians 14:19). The verse preface Constantine wrote for the Slavic Gospel quotes it almost word for word. One thing about this is easy to get wrong. The brothers were not proposing that every congregation invent its own service. They translated the Greek liturgy, whole and unaltered, and they kept the church’s law with it. What they moved was the language, not the faith, and Rome agreed with them on exactly those terms in 880.

(Q) "So that you will not have intellect without intelligence, / Hearing the Word in a foreign tongue, / As if you heard only the voice of a copper bell." + Source: Proglas (the verse prologue to the Slavic Gospel), lines 47 to 49, translated by Roman Jakobson. The Proglas is the first poem in Old Church Slavonic, written as a preface to the Gospel translation. Most scholars attribute it to Constantine-Cyril himself, though a minority assign it to Methodius’s disciple Constantine of Preslav, and the oldest surviving copy is a fourteenth-century Serbian manuscript from Hilandar on Mount Athos that names Constantine the Philosopher as its author. The lines directly after it quote Paul on the five intelligible words against the ten thousand unintelligible ones (T1).

(T2) No tongue is unfit for God, and three is an arbitrary number. + The doctrine Constantine had to break is called trilinguism, and it held that Scripture and worship belong properly to three languages only: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Its proof text, meaning the verse held up as settling the question, was the notice Pilate had fixed above the cross, written in those three tongues and no others (John 19:20). And the objection had real weight behind it. A fixed sacred language keeps a text from drifting, keeps a scattered church saying the same words, and keeps a half-trained village priest from improvising doctrine, and in a century with no printing and no dictionaries those were serious goods. The men in Venice were not simply being small. Constantine’s answer came in two moves. The first was an appeal to what anyone can see: God does not ration rain, or sunlight, or breathable air by nationality, so the burden of proof lies on anybody who says he rations the gospel that way. Either God cannot give a people its own letters, he said, or he does not want to, and which of those are you prepared to say out loud? The second move was a list, and it is the part that would have stung. Armenians, Persians, Abkhazians, Iberians, Sogdians, Goths, Avars, Turks, Khazars, Arabs, Egyptians: eleven nations he could name on the spot, peoples scattered from Egypt to the Danube and from the Caucasus out along the eastern trade roads, and many others besides, are at this moment praising God in their own writing, so the rule you are defending is not the practice of the church, it is the practice of your end of it. Then he moved to Scripture and did not stop, stringing together the psalms that tell all the earth and all nations to praise God (Psalm 66:4), the commission to disciple all nations (Matthew 28:19), Mark’s send-off to the whole creation (Mark 16:15), Paul’s chapter on intelligible speech in church (1 Corinthians 14), and the promise that every tongue will confess Christ (Philippians 2:11). Behind all of it stands Pentecost, where the first thing the Spirit did with the gospel was translate it: "And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?" (Acts 2:8).

(Q) "Does not God’s rain fall upon all equally? And does not the sun shine also upon all? And do we not all breathe air in the same way? Are you not ashamed to mention only three tongues, and to command all other nations and tribes to be blind and deaf?" + Source: Life of Constantine, chapter 16 (Marvin Kantor’s translation). Venice, 867, in front of the assembled bishops, priests and monks of the city, who have just told him that only Hebrew, Greek and Latin are worthy of praising God. He goes on: "Tell me, do you render God powerless, that He is incapable of granting this? Or envious, that He does not desire this?"

(T3) A people without books in its own language stands unarmed. + There is a difference between handing someone a translation and handing them the means to make their own. A visiting preacher with an interpreter leaves when he leaves. An alphabet stays. This is why the Moravian mission began with months of invention rather than with a sermon. Glagolitic has around forty letters, and Constantine built it for Slavic rather than adapting it from Greek, because Slavic has sounds Greek has no signs for, the consonants an English speaker hears in "shch" and "zh". Once the letters existed the rest could follow, and it did: the Gospels, the Psalter (the book of Psalms as the church sings it, and the book a praying community uses more than any other), the Epistles, the service books, and under Methodius the rest of the Old Testament and the church’s law. A village priest in Moravia could now be trained in his own tongue, out of books he could read, under a legal code he could consult. That is a church that can survive the death of its founders, which is precisely the test that came. The image Constantine reached for was military. A nation without its own books is a man sent into a fight with nothing in his hands. The picture only works on one view of Scripture, and the view is worth seeing clearly: a Bible in the reader’s own language is not a devotional nicety on these terms, it is equipment, the thing that lets an ordinary Christian stand up under pressure. Paul had used the same picture of the word of God as a sword (Ephesians 6:17). Constantine put it in verse and gave it to a nation that had just learned to read.

(Q) "Naked indeed are all nations without their own books / Who being without arms cannot fight / The Adversary of our souls." + Source: Proglas, lines 79 to 81, translated by Roman Jakobson. The poem calls this its own parable, "condensing much sense into few words," and the lines that follow turn the picture around: those who take up "the sturdy arms that are forged through the Lord’s Books" are the ones who crush the enemy’s head (T3).

(T4) The faith can be argued for in the courts of the people who deny it. + Before Constantine was a translator he was a debater, and the empire sent him where the arguments were: to Samarra, the Abbasid capital, at about twenty-four, and to the Khazar court on the steppe at thirty-four. In both places he sat in a room where Christianity was the minority report and was expected to answer for it out loud. The Life preserves the hardest question the Muslim scholars put to him, and it is a question Christians still get. Your Christ told you to pray for your enemies and to give up your coat as well as your shirt. Your empire fights wars every summer. Which is it? His answer was a piece of careful logic. If a law contains two commands, who keeps the law: the man who obeys one of them, or the man who obeys both? Christ said "bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you" (Luke 6:28), and Christ also said that no one has greater love than the man who lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13). Soldiers who die defending their neighbours are keeping the second while the first still stands, and it is the man who quietly drops one of the two who has failed the law. The answer settles one thing and leaves another standing. It is a real answer to the charge of simple inconsistency, and it is the standard shape of just-war reasoning, the Christian tradition that asks when force may be taken up without sin and under what limits, which Augustine had worked out four centuries earlier. It is not a full account of Christian violence, and it was given by a subject of an empire that had been at war with his questioners for two hundred years, which he knew and they knew. What the scene shows is the method, and the method is the point: not a threat, not a bribe, not an appeal to the emperor, but an argument offered to people free to reject it. The Khazars rejected it. Constantine went home with two hundred freed prisoners and no convert khagan, and his biographer recorded the debate anyway.

(Q) "If the law contains two precepts, who appears to fulfill the law? He who keeps one precept, or both?" + Source: Life of Constantine, chapter 6 (Marvin Kantor’s translation). Samarra, around 851. The Muslim scholars have just asked how Christians can obey Christ’s command to bless their enemies while going to war. Constantine makes them answer his question first, and they concede the obvious: the man who keeps both. Only then does he name the two commands he has in mind (T4).

(Q) "Behold, brother, the two of us have been yokemates, plowing the same furrow. Now my days are ending and I am falling on the field." + Source: Life of Methodius, chapter 7 (Marvin Kantor’s translation). Rome, early 869. Constantine is dying, and Methodius wants to go back to the monastery on Olympus. Two oxen under one yoke cannot pull a straight furrow if one of them stops, and the dying brother is telling the living one that the field is not finished. He finishes the thought: "Though you have great love for the mountain, still leave not your teaching for the mountain’s sake, for you can sooner be saved through it." Methodius spent the next sixteen years in the furrow, and most of them under attack.

What the Church Made of Them

(†) Both halves of a dividing church claim them, and both halves have a right to. + Consider the position these two men occupied. They were Greeks, formed in Constantinople, taught by Photius, and sent out by a Byzantine emperor. They were also, for the last sixteen years of the work, officers of the Roman church: consecrated by a pope, defended by a pope against their own Latin colleagues, licensed by a pope in writing. All of this happened during the worst decade of the quarrel between Photius and Rome, the quarrel that eventually hardened into the split between East and West. If anyone had reason to choose a side, they did. They kept working instead. The result is that they are among the very few figures both communions venerate without reservation, that is, honour as saints and keep a feast day for. The two communions are simply the two families of churches the split left behind, the Orthodox East and the Catholic West, and they agree about fewer people than a newcomer might guess. The Orthodox churches call these two Equal-to-the-Apostles, a title given to very few, and keep their joint feast on 11 May. Leo XIII extended their feast to the whole Catholic world in an encyclical, which is a letter a pope circulates to the entire church, called Grande munus and dated 30 September 1880, exactly a thousand years after John VIII had licensed their books, and fixed it on 5 July; the Latin church moved it in 1969 to 14 February, the day Cyril died. In 1980 John Paul II named them co-patrons of Europe alongside Benedict of Nursia, and in 1985 devoted an encyclical, Slavorum Apostoli, to what their mission meant. For a Christian reader outside both communions, the interesting thing is not the honours. It is that the case Constantine argued in Venice was decided on its merits by the party with the most to lose by it. Hadrian II and John VIII were the bishops of the Latin church, ruling against Latin bishops, in favour of a liturgy neither pope could understand.

(†) Driven out of Moravia, their students carried the work to Bulgaria, and a whole Christendom grew from it. + The mission collapsed almost at once. Within months of Methodius’s death in 885 Pope Stephen V, persuaded by Wiching, issued the letter Quia te zelo fidei forbidding the Slavonic liturgy in Moravia. Gorazd, the successor Methodius had named, was imprisoned. Clement, Naum, Angelar, Laurence and the rest were expelled, some of them sold as slaves before they got out. On the face of it, twenty-two years of work had been erased by a single pope’s letter. Then the refugees crossed the Danube. Boris I, the khan who had brought Bulgaria to Christianity twenty years earlier, took them in during 886 and gave them exactly what they needed, which was schools. Clement went to Ohrid in the south west and Naum to Pliska and then Preslav, and between them they trained clergy in Slavonic by the thousand; the medieval Life of Clement credits him with three and a half thousand students. It was in those schools, at Preslav in the early 900s, that a second and simpler alphabet was worked out from Greek capital letters. Its inventor is unknown, though Clement and Constantine of Preslav are the usual candidates, and it was named Cyrillic in honour of a man who did not make it and had been dead for forty years. What followed is out of all proportion to a failed mission to one prince. Old Church Slavonic became the third liturgical language of Europe, and the Slavonic Bible and liturgy passed from Bulgaria to Serbia, and from there to Kievan Rus after 988, the Slavic state centred on Kiev whose ruler was baptized in that year, and so to Russia. Roughly a quarter of a billion people now read a script that carries Cyril’s name, and the reason a Russian or a Serb or a Bulgarian hears Scripture in a language shaped like their own is a decision two brothers made in a Greek city in 863.

(†) The argument they won in Venice had to be fought again in the West, and it took seven hundred years. + Here is the uncomfortable part of the story. Rome approved the Slavonic liturgy twice, in 868 and in 880, and withdrew it in 885, and after that the Latin West went back to Latin and stayed there. The principle had been argued, tested and conceded at the highest level available, and it did not take. Not quite everywhere. In 1248 Innocent IV granted the bishop of Senj in Dalmatia the right to keep the Glagolitic liturgy his people had never given up, and Croatian priests went on saying Mass in Church Slavonic out of Glagolitic books into the twentieth century, the one unbroken thread from 863. Charles IV founded a Slavonic-rite monastery in Prague in 1347 with papal permission. But these were exceptions granted, not a principle applied. So the case had to be made again from the beginning, by Wycliffe in England and then Hus in Bohemia and then Luther in Germany and Tyndale in England again, each of them arguing that Scripture belongs in the language of the people who will read it, and each of them arguing in front of authorities who had forgotten that a pope had already ruled on the question. Tyndale was strangled and burned in 1536 for the thing Hadrian II had blessed on the altar of Santa Maria Maggiore in 868. The Latin church came round at last at the Second Vatican Council, the assembly of the world’s Catholic bishops that met in Rome from 1962 to 1965, whose constitution on the liturgy in 1963 opened the Mass to the vernacular, meaning the everyday language of the people in the pews, and every modern Bible translation agency now works on Constantine’s premise without knowing his name. None of these people learned it from him. That is rather the point: the argument is available to anyone who reads the New Testament attentively, which is why the same man kept turning up to make it, and why it was made first by a Greek who could see that his own language was no more sacred than anyone else’s.

(†) Where their own record is open to question: bones identified on the strength of a legend. + The primary sources give little to hold against these two, and the honest ledger is short. One entry belongs on it. - The relics. On 30 January 861 Constantine dug at Cherson and identified the bones he found as those of Clement of Rome. The story he was working from is the Acts of Clement, a fourth-century account of a first-century bishop, written some three hundred years after the fact, which has Clement exiled to the Crimea and drowned there with an anchor round his neck. No earlier source knows anything about it. Nothing suggests Constantine was anything but sincere; he wrote a discourse, a sermon and a hymn about the finding, and he kept the relics with him until he was buried beside them. But the identification rested on a late legend and on local tradition, and he examined it nothing like as hard as he examined the case for three languages. - What the relics bought. The consequence is uncomfortable to look at squarely. When the brothers reached Rome carrying Clement’s bones, Hadrian II came out of the city to meet them with the whole population and candles, and it was in that atmosphere that their Slavic books were laid on the altar and their students ordained. The argument in Venice was won on its merits. The hearing in Rome was won, in part, by the box they were carrying. Neither point touches what they taught, and neither is the sort of thing that would keep a reader from trusting them. It is simply the difference between a man testing a claim he expects to be contradicted on and a man accepting one he already wanted to be true. That difference is worth noticing in anybody, and it is easiest to see in someone whose ordinary standard was as high as his.