Saints Cyril and Methodius

Saints Cyril and Methodius were ninth-century Byzantine missionary brothers, born in Thessalonica in the Byzantine Empire, who became the chief apostles of the Slavic peoples and the founders of a written Slavic Christian culture. Methodius, the elder brother, was born in the mid-810s; Constantine, who later took the monastic name Cyril, was born in the later 820s. Their father, Leo, held the military rank of drungarios in the theme of Thessalonica, a city whose mixed Greek and Slavic population almost certainly gave the brothers an early command of a Slavic dialect as well as Greek. Constantine was educated in Constantinople at the imperial school, studied philosophy, grammar, and languages, and was ordained a deacon; he taught as a professor of philosophy and was known as Constantine the Philosopher. Methodius entered imperial administration and is described as having governed a Slavic-inhabited district before he withdrew to become a monk, and later abbot, at a monastery on Mount Olympus in Bithynia.

In the 850s Constantine was sent on a diplomatic-theological mission to the Abbasid court, and around 860 he and Methodius together undertook a mission to the Khazars. In 862 Prince Rastislav of Great Moravia requested from Emperor Michael III and Patriarch Photius missionaries able to teach the Christian faith in the Slavic language, seeking both conversion and a measure of independence from Frankish ecclesiastical control. The brothers were chosen for the task and arrived in Moravia in 863. Constantine devised the Glagolitic alphabet, the first script created specifically for a Slavic tongue, and with Methodius translated the liturgical offices, portions of the Bible, and other ecclesiastical texts into the language now called Old Church Slavonic. Their vernacular liturgy provoked opposition from Latin-rite clergy who maintained that worship should be conducted only in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin.

In order to secure authorization for their work, the brothers traveled to Rome in the late 860s, bringing with them relics of Pope Saint Clement that they had recovered in the Crimea. Pope Hadrian II received them favorably, approved the Slavic liturgical books, and arranged the ordination of several of their disciples. Constantine became a monk and took the name Cyril; he died in Rome on 14 February 869 and was buried in the Basilica of San Clemente. Methodius was consecrated archbishop for the Moravian and Pannonian mission, with a title linked to the ancient see of Sirmium, and returned to Central Europe. There the Bavarian bishops opposed him; he was imprisoned for about two and a half years, roughly 870 to 873, and was freed only after Pope John VIII intervened. Restored to his office, Methodius continued to defend the Slavic rite, translated further biblical and canonical books, and worked under the Moravian ruler Svatopluk amid recurring conflicts with Latin clergy over language, jurisdiction, and the Filioque.

Methodius died on 6 April 885, in Moravia; the exact place of his death and burial has not been established with certainty. After his death, pressure from the Frankish party and from Svatopluk’s court led to the expulsion of his leading disciples, including Clement of Ohrid, Naum, Angelar, Sava, and Gorazd. They were received in the First Bulgarian Empire by Boris I, where they founded schools and, developing the brothers’ linguistic work, helped create the Cyrillic alphabet that later spread through the Orthodox Slavic world. Cyril and Methodius were venerated as saints in the Christian East from an early period. Pope Leo XIII extended their feast to the whole Latin Church in 1880, and Pope John Paul II declared them co-patrons of Europe in 1980. The Catholic Church commemorates them on 14 February; the Eastern Orthodox Church on 11 May. They are patrons of Europe and of several Slavic nations, and they are invoked for the unity of Eastern and Western Christianity.