In Slavic Christianity, the trilingual heresy or Pilatian heresy [1] [2] (less pejoratively trilingualism) is the idea that Biblical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are the only valid liturgical languages or languages in which one may praise God. Trilingualism was rejected in the 850s by Saints Cyril and Methodius, Byzantine brothers and missionaries who introduced a Christian liturgy in the vernacular of their Slavic converts, a language now called Old Church Slavonic.
The idea originates as Old Church Slavonic Трьѧзычьници́, [1] (Trĭẽzyčĭnici), literally meaning "threefold paganism" rather than "threefold heresy". [1] It appears as a neologism in several chapters of a contemporary hagiography of Cyril (then named Constantine), most prominently when recounting a disputation in Venice in AD 867 while he and Methodius were en route to the Holy See, bringing relics of Pope Clement I and hoping to resolve a jurisdictional dispute in Great Moravia with Latin Rite missionaries sent by the Bishop of Salzburg. [3] In St. Mark's Square, hostile clerics (branded "Latin accomplices" of the devil [1] ) "assembled against [Constantine] like ravens against a falcon and raised the trilingual heresy". [4] Constantine defeated them by citing scripture and by pointing to the many precedents of Oriental Orthodox churches with vernacular liturgy. [4] [5] Elsewhere Constantine points out that Pontius Pilate (hence "Pilatian" heresy) used Hebrew, Greek, and Latin for the inscription on Christ's cross. [1] In Rome Pope Adrian II duly approved the Slavonic liturgy. [3] A generation later, Chernorizets Hrabar's defence of the Glagolitic script used to write Old Church Slavonic, likewise, deprecates trilingualism on the basis that the Slavs would never have been converted if their own language had not been used. [6]
Papal edicts of 870 and 880 endorsed Slavonic liturgy, whereas others of the same era do not. [7] Ihor Ševčenko points out that Isidore of Seville had written that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were the languages of "sacred law". [7] Adrian II's support for Cyril and Methodius has been interpreted as motivated a desire to check the influence of the Bishop of Salzburg, [8] or avoid a dispute with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople to whom Cyril and Methodius were responsible. [9] A converse suggestion is that trilingualism was invented by the Salzburg lobby to attack Cyril and Methodius.
Some historians regard trilingualism as a straw man invented by Orthodox supporters of autocephaly or national churches, but never actually promoted by the Papacy or Constantinople. [10] Riccardo Picchio regards the Venetian story as apocryphal. [11] [12] The Council of Tours 813 had mandated homilies in the vernacular (Romance or German). For other parts of the Catholic Mass, widespread use of the vernacular rather than Latin came after the Second Vatican Council adopted Sacrosanctum Concilium in 1963. Ševčenko sees the Byzantine church as on the one hand grudging in allowing for vernacular churches, but on the other hand characterising trilingualism after the East–West Schism as an error of the Western church. [13]
The Cyrillic script, Slavonic script or simply Slavic script is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.
The Glagolitic script is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century for the purpose of translating liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzantine Emperor Michael III in 863 to Great Moravia to spread Christianity there. After the deaths of Cyril and Methodius, their disciples were expelled and they moved to the First Bulgarian Empire instead. The Cyrillic alphabet, which developed gradually in the Preslav Literary School by Greek alphabet scribes who incorporated some Glagolitic letters, gradually replaced Glagolitic in that region. Glagolitic remained in use alongside Latin in the Kingdom of Croatia and alongside Cyrillic until the 14th century in the Second Bulgarian Empire and the Serbian Empire, and later mainly for cryptographic purposes.
Cyril and Methodius (815–885) were brothers, Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries. For their work evangelizing the Slavs, they are known as the "Apostles to the Slavs".
Old Church Slavonic or Old Slavonic is the first Slavic literary language.
Great Moravia, or simply Moravia, was the first major state that was predominantly West Slavic to emerge in the area of Central Europe, possibly including territories which are today part of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Ukraine and Slovenia. The formations preceding it in these territories were the Samo's tribal union and the Pannonian Avar state.
A sacred language, holy language or liturgical language is a language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives.
Church Slavonic, also known as Church Slavic, New Church Slavonic, New Church Slavic or just Slavonic, is the conservative Slavic liturgical language used by the Eastern Orthodox Church in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Slovenia and Croatia. The language appears also in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, the American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese, and occasionally in the services of the Orthodox Church in America.
Naum (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Свети Наум, Sveti Naum, also known as Naum of Ohrid or Naum of Preslav, was a medieval Bulgarian writer and missionary among the Slavs, considered one of the Seven Apostles of the First Bulgarian Empire. He was among the disciples of Cyril and Methodius and is associated with the creation of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic script. Naum was among the founders of the Pliska Literary School. Afterwards Naum worked at the Ohrid Literary School. He was among the first saints declared by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church after its foundation in the 9th century. The mission of Naum played significant role by transformation of the local Early Slavs into Bulgarians.
Constantine of Preslav was a medieval Bulgarian scholar, writer and translator, one of the most important men of letters working at the Preslav Literary School at the end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. Biographical evidence about his life is scarce but he is believed to have been a disciple of Saint Methodius. After the saint's death in 885, Constantine was jailed by the Germanic clergy in Great Moravia and sold as slave in Venice. He escaped to Constantinople, moving to Bulgaria around 886 and working at the Preslav Literary School.
Tyniec is a historic village in Poland on the Vistula river, since 1973 a part of the city of Kraków. Tyniec is notable for its Benedictine abbey founded by King Casimir the Restorer in 1044.
Ihor Ševčenko was a Polish-born philologist and historian of Ukrainian origin. He was a Byzantinist and paleo-Slavic professor of classical philology at Harvard University. He died 26 December 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Euchologium Sinaiticum is a 109-folio Old Church Slavonic euchologion in Glagolitic script. It contains parts of the liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, and is dated to the 11th century. It is named after Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, where it was found in the 19th century.
As the 9th-century missionaries Saints Cyril and Methodius undertook their mission to evangelize to the Slavs of Great Moravia, two writing systems were developed: Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Both scripts were based on the Greek alphabet and share commonalities, but the exact nature of relationship between the Glagolitic alphabet and the Early Cyrillic alphabet, their order of development, and influence on each other has been a matter of great study, controversy, and dispute in Slavic studies.
In the 9th century, Christianity was spreading throughout Europe, being promoted especially in the Carolingian Empire, its eastern neighbours, Scandinavia, and northern Spain. In 800, Charlemagne was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor, which continued the Photian schism.
Christianity in the Middle Ages covers the history of Christianity from the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The end of the period is variously defined. Depending on the context, events such as the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453, Christopher Columbus's first voyage to the Americas in 1492, or the Protestant Reformation in 1517 are sometimes used.
The Christianization of Moravia refers to the spread of the Christian religion in the lands of medieval Moravia.
The history of Christianity in the Czech lands began in the 9th century. Moravia was the first among the three historical regions of what now forms the Czech Republic whose ruling classes officially adopted Christianity, between the 830s and the 860s. In 845 Bohemian chieftains or duces also converted to the new faith, but it was just a short-lived political gesture. The real beginning of efforts to promote Christianity in Bohemian territory has to be placed in the period after 885. Moravia was the earliest center of the Old Church Slavonic liturgy after the arrival of Constantine (Cyril) and Methodius in 863, but their opponents, mainly priests of German origin, achieved the banishment of their disciplines in the 880s. Bohemia became the center of Christianization following the fall of Moravia in the early 10th century. Changes in burials and the erection of churches throughout the Czech lands demonstrate the spread of the new faith in the 10th century.
The Archbishopric of Moravia was an ecclesiastical province, established by the Holy See to promote Christian missions among the Slavic peoples. Its first archbishop, the Byzantine Methodius, persuaded Pope John VIII to sanction the use of Old Church Slavonic in liturgy. Methodius had been consecrated archbishop of Pannonia by Pope Adrian II at the request of Koceľ, the Slavic ruler of Pannonia in East Francia in 870.
The Slavs were Christianized in waves from the 7th to 12th century, though the process of replacing old Slavic religious practices began as early as the 6th century. Generally speaking, the monarchs of the South Slavs adopted Christianity in the 9th century, the East Slavs in the 10th, and the West Slavs between the 9th and 12th century. Saints Cyril and Methodius are attributed as "Apostles to the Slavs", having introduced the Byzantine-Slavic rite and Glagolitic alphabet, the oldest known Slavic alphabet and basis for the Early Cyrillic alphabet.
Cyrillo-Methodian studies is a branch of Slavic studies dealing with the life and works of Cyril and Methodius and their disciples.