The Slavic Liturgy of the Byzantine Rite and the Corpus of Slavic Liturgical Books at the End of the 9th and the Beginning of the 10th Centuries

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the historical development of the Slavic liturgy in its early stage has shown that one of the important prerequisites for its practical implementation was the establishment, under the guidance of a bishop, of a church organization which was entitled to use Church Slavonic as a liturgical language. Research has also demonstrated that the methodological approach linking the history of the Slavic liturgical texts with the development of the Slavic ecclesiastical structures administered by bishops offers valuable insights. The first Slavic corpus of liturgical books of Byzantine rites (the so-called Corpus of Clement, CC) came into being in the Slavic ethnic eparchy and then in the Slavic territorial dioceses which were to be integrated into the church organization of the First Bulgarian Empire. The core part of the CC, to which the complex of original Slavic hymnographic writings belongs, was created in the years between 893 and 916 in the Slavic ethnic eparchy of St. Clement of Ohrid in the western part of the First Bulgarian Empire (in the region of southern Albania, northwestern Greece, and southwestern Macedonia). The supplementary part of the CC, which contains the complex of the word-by-word translations of hymnographic writings, originated in the mid-10th century in Slavic territorial dioceses located at that time in the western part of the First Bulgarian Empire. This two-stage formation of the CC was due to the two-stage development of the Slavic church organizations, and it was thus neither linguistic nor literary in nature. Having special features characteristic of the western Byzantine liturgy, the CC differed from both its preceding and subsequent corpora of Slavic liturgical books in its liturgical, textological, and linguistic character. Every subsequent corpus of Slavic liturgical texts, however, built upon the preceding one, and this ensured the continuity of the Slavic liturgical and, consequently, linguistic tradition as a whole.