Theodosius “the Greek”, Kliment Smoliatich, and the Unnamed Patriarch

Abstract

The article addresses the issue of dating a Church Slavonic translation from Greek of Pope Leo the Great’s Tome to Archbishop Flavian of Constantinople (449), confirmed by the Fourth Ecumenical Council as an essential document of dogma (451). So far the translation has been dated as widely as the 12th century. The existing interpretations were mainly concerned with the biography of the translator, a monk Theodosius, who lived in the Kievan Rus' in the 12th century and is thought to have been an abbot of the Kievan Caves monastery (A. Shakhmatov’s version) or a cleric under the metropolitan (E. Golubinski’s version). Dwelling on the second of these suggestions, and adding his own hypothesis that Theodosius was educated in Byzantium, at the Orphanotropheion of St. Paul, the author of the article goes on to elucidate an obscure passage in Theodosius’s introduction to the Slavic translation of the Tome with a mention of an unnamed patriarch and to further hypothesize about the date of the translation: supposedly the translation activities took place at the time when Kliment Smoliatich was the nominal head of the Kievan metropoly and thus can be dated between September 1149 and April 1151. The final part of the article addresses the issue from a different perspective, discussing Theodosius’s introduction in the context of Old Slavonic hymnography. It interprets the phrase about the unnamed ʽPatriarch’ in the view of the Slavonic text of a church service devoted to Pope Leo and held in monasteries, thus producing a more exact date for the translation, February 18, 1151.