Ecumenical Commemoration
Apostles to the Slavs
February 14 · d. 885
also known as Constantine and Methodius
Two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine (called the Philosopher, and Cyril only in the last fifty days of his life) and Methodius, who went to Great Moravia in 863 at a prince's request, made an alphabet for a people who had none, and translated the Gospels and the liturgy into their tongue. Cyril died at Rome in 869; Methodius carried the work sixteen years more, through a synod, a prison, and a second trial, and died in 885.
Constantine was the youngest of seven sons born to Leo, an officer of the Thessalonica garrison, and his wife Maria; Methodius was among the eldest. Constantine was about fourteen when his father died, and a minister of the imperial court named Theoktistos took the boy into his care and sent him to school at Constantinople. There he studied under teachers who included Photius, who would one day be patriarch, and he learned so well that the palace school at the Magnaura gave him a chair in philosophy. Men began to call him the Philosopher, and it stuck to him for life; even the popes wrote to him under that name. Someone once asked him what philosophy actually was. He answered without stopping to think: "The knowledge of matters divine and human, to what extent man can approach God and how, through virtue, man is taught to be in the image and likeness of the One who created him." The word Marvin Kantor renders as the image and likeness is worth holding on to, because Constantine would spend his life arguing that it applied to everybody.
Methodius took a different road first. He served the empire for about ten years in some frontier post (the sources give the rank and not much else) and then gave it up for a monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia. He loved that mountain. Remember it.
In 862 a prince called Rastislav sent word from Great Moravia, far up the Danube, to the emperor at Constantinople. His people had received the faith, but it came to them in Latin from Frankish and Bavarian clergy, and they could not understand a word of it. The Life of Methodius reports his message: "We Slavs are a simple people, and have no one to instruct us in the truth." The court sent the two brothers. They had no alphabet to work with, because the Slavs had none, so Constantine made one, the letters now called Glagolitic, and the brothers began putting the Gospels and the service books into words their hearers actually spoke.
This was not received as a gift by everyone. There was a settled opinion in the West that God could properly be praised in three languages only, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, because those three were the languages written over the Cross. At Venice, on the road to Rome, the bishops and priests and monks came at Constantine, as the Life puts it, "like ravens against a falcon," and demanded to know by what right he had invented letters that neither the Apostles nor the pope nor Jerome nor Augustine had thought to invent. He answered them with three questions: "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?" Then he named peoples who already glorified God in their own writing, Armenians and Persians and Goths and Khazars and Egyptians and more, and turned the Psalms and the Gospels back on his accusers.
At Rome the brothers were received by Pope Adrian II, who settled the question in the plainest way available to him: he took the Slavonic books and laid them on the altar. Methodius, who had been only a deacon, was ordained priest, and their disciples were ordained with him. But Constantine was ill by then. He put on the monastic habit and took the name Cyril, and he lived under it fifty days. Before he died he called his brother and said: "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. Though you have great love for the mountain, still leave not your teaching for the mountain's sake." Methodius did not go back to the mountain. He was made archbishop, and he went north again alone.
What followed was worse than argument. Around 870 the Frankish and Bavarian bishops (Adalwin of Salzburg, Ermanrich of Passau, Anno of Freising) seized him and tried him at a synod. "You are teaching in our territory," they told him. He said that if it were theirs he would have stayed far away, but it was Saint Peter's, and he warned them not to spill their brains trying to pierce an iron mountain with a skull of bone. They told him he would come to evil. "I speak the Truth before emperors and am not ashamed," he answered. "But work your will upon me. For I am no better than those who lost their lives through many torments for speaking the Truth." They banished him to Swabia and held him there two and a half years, until Pope John VIII intervened and got him out. In 878 they hauled him back to Rome on a charge of heresy, and he was acquitted, and the Slavonic liturgy was confirmed again.
He kept at it to the end. On Palm Sunday in 885 he came into the church a sick man, named a disciple called Gorazd as his successor, blessed the emperor and the prince and the clergy and all the people, and said, "My children, watch over me until the third day." On the third day he said, "Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit," which were Christ's own words from the Cross, and he died in the arms of his priests on the sixth of April.
Within a year his disciples were driven out of Moravia altogether, and the work looked finished. It was not. They went south to Bulgaria, where King Boris took them in and paid for schools at Pliska and Preslav and Ohrid, and there the alphabet was simplified into the letters we now call Cyrillic, after a man who never saw them. A century later, when Rus' received the faith, it did not have to begin again: the Scriptures and the liturgy were waiting in a language its people could read.
You have almost certainly been handed the faith in your own language, and you have almost certainly never thanked anyone for it. Cyril spent his gifts making that possible for people who did not have it, and was told to his face that he had no business doing so, that God had only ever authorized three tongues and the rest of the world could stay deaf. He answered that the rain falls on everyone. Consider where you have quietly assumed that God speaks in your idiom and not in someone else's: a neighbourhood, a generation, a first language not your own, a person whose way of putting things grates on you. What would it cost you to do the patient, unglamorous work of translation, so that what you have received arrives in words another person can actually hear?
Almost everything known about the brothers comes from two Old Church Slavonic Lives written by their own circle: the Life of Constantine, composed after Cyril's death in February 869 and before 882, and the Life of Methodius, written in the 880s within a few years of his death. Both are hagiography, written to establish sanctity and to defend the Slavonic liturgy in a dispute still live at the time of writing, and the speeches they record are remembered or reconstructed rather than transcribed. Neither survives in an early copy. The earliest witness to the Life of Constantine is a manuscript of 1469 associated with Vladislav the Grammarian, roughly six hundred years after composition; the earliest for the Life of Methodius is the Uspenskij sbornik of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, about half that gap. A 2016 study by Capaldo and Diddi counts eight primary South Slavonic witnesses and nine in the Russian February menologium tradition. The standard critical edition is Grivec and Tomšič (Zagreb, 1960); the standard English is Marvin Kantor's, first with Richard White in 1976 and then in his 1983 volume, from which the quotations above are taken.
Outside the Lives there is genuine corroboration for the central claim. Anastasius Bibliothecarius, a Roman curial librarian present in the period, describes the 868 reception at Rome and calls Cyril a man of apostolic life. Pope John VIII's letter Industriae tuae (880) names Constantine the Philosopher as the inventor of the alphabet and sanctions the Slavonic liturgy again, requiring only that the Gospel be read first in Latin. These are administrative documents settling a live jurisdictional fight, not disinterested history, but they are not Slavic and not hagiographic, and they say what the Lives say.
The dates are less settled than the outline. No birth record survives for either man. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) gives 826 for Methodius and 827 for Constantine; Slavorum Apostoli (1985) puts Methodius between 815 and 820 and Constantine at 827 or 828. All of these are reconstructions from ages at death and career milestones. Cyril's death is given as 14 February 869 by the Life of Constantine, by Slavorum Apostoli, and by the whole tradition; the 1908 encyclopedia's "4 Feb." stands alone and unexplained. The same sentence of the Life that fixes 14 February dates the year to the 6370th from the creation, which computes to 862 rather than 869; the era-figure is corrupt in transmission and only the day is sound. Methodius's death on 6 April 885 is essentially undisputed, and the Life's era-figure there converts correctly.
Some things the sources simply do not supply, and it is better to say so. Methodius's decade of imperial service has a rank and no posting, no appointment, and no dated event. Nothing is known of the mother beyond her name or of the other five brothers at all. Whether the family was Slavic, Greek, or both is an open question in modern scholarship. Neither brother is recorded as marrying, but no source states celibacy either, so the record is silent rather than positive. And where Methodius is buried is genuinely unknown: the Life says only "the cathedral church," the Moravian capital it stood in has not been identified (Mikulčice, Staré Město, and Nitra are all argued), and three modern accounts name three different places. Cyril has a tomb at San Clemente. His brother has none.
The Byzantine churches keep three days, not one: Cyril alone on 14 February, Methodius alone on 6 April, and the two together on 11 May, the joint feast at middle solemnity and the individual ones raised to Polyeleos rank. That structure is not merely inherited usage; it was fixed by decree of the Russian Holy Synod in 1885, the millennium of Methodius's death. Separate veneration is older still, an office for Cyril composed by his disciple Sava at the end of the ninth century and one for Methodius by Constantine, later bishop of Preslav, whose acrostic reads "I sing of you well, Methodius." The joint office is later, Bulgarian or Macedonian, of the tenth or eleventh century. In the West the date has moved repeatedly: a local 9 March in Bohemia and Moravia, then 5 July by Pius IX's permission in 1863 and for the whole Latin Church by Leo XIII's Grande Munus in 1880, then 7 July from 1887, and finally 14 February, Cyril's death-day, in the 1969 calendar reform. Bulgaria and North Macedonia and Russia keep 24 May as a civil day of Slavonic letters; the Czechs and Slovaks kept 5 July. John Paul II named the brothers co-patrons of Europe with Benedict in 1980. In Bulgaria and Macedonia they are honoured with their five disciples as the Sedmochislenitsi, the Seven.
The two Lives are read here in Marvin Kantor's English, in [Medieval Slavic Lives of Saints and Princes](work:kantor-medieval-slavic-lives) (Michigan Slavic Translations 5; Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983), which incorporates the 1976 translation Kantor made with Richard S. White. Constantine's definition of philosophy is at Life of Constantine ch. 4; the Venice disputation, with the rain, sun, and air, at ch. 16; the deathbed and the taking of the name Cyril at ch. 18. In the Life of Methodius, the charge to his brother and the yokemates image are at ch. 7; the synod, the iron mountain, and "I speak the Truth before emperors" at ch. 9; the naming of Gorazd, the Palm Sunday blessing, and the last words at ch. 17. The critical edition behind these texts is Franjo Grivec and Franc Tomšič, Constantinus et Methodius Thessalonicenses: Fontes (Zagreb: Staroslavenski institut, Radovi 4, 1960); the manuscript census is Mario Capaldo and Cristiano Diddi, "Towards the Critical Edition of the Vita Constantini," in The Bible in Slavic Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2016). For the birth years and the Roman feast, see the Catholic Encyclopedia (1908), s.v. "Sts. Cyril and Methodius," by L. Abraham; Leo XIII, Grande Munus (30 September 1880); John Paul II, Egregiae Virtutis (31 December 1980) and Slavorum Apostoli (2 June 1985), the last at §3–4 for the birth ranges and Methodius's imperial rank. The Byzantine calendar structure rests on the Russian Holy Synod's decree of 1885 as reproduced, with its citation to Nikolskij's Ustav Bogosluzhenija (St Petersburg, 1900), pp. 524–525, in the Carpatho-Rusyn Diocese's chapter on the veneration of the two saints.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servants Cyril and Methodius to preach the Gospel to the Slavic people: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Sirmium /ˈsɜːrmiəm/; Constantini /ˌkɒnstənˈtiːniː/
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11