Prologue to the first Slavic Gospel

Editor's Introduction: St. Cyril (fellow missionary with St. Methodius) was only named Cyril later in life when he was tonsured into monasticism. Most of his life, he was named Constantine. His life is an impressive tale and in 1963, St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary published a piece in its quarterly from Roman Jakobson. The crown jewel of the article is the translation of the poetic prologue that St. Cyril wrote for the Slavs and introducing the Gospel accounts to them, i.e., the first time they would encounter the Holy Scriptures. It's an edifying read. Naturally, he avoids any future distortions of Papist and Protestant thinking. Its praise is uniquely Orthodox and purposefully instructs the reader in a very correct and healthy approach to the Holy Scriptures, especially the Gospels. A significant message is the importance for all nations to have the many books of the Church which guide to salvation. The poem is a great read and which both Greeks and Slavs can appreciate.

Sts. Cyril (right) and Methodius (left).

St. Constantine's Prologue to the Gospel*

by Roman Jakobson

Constantine (better known under his monastic name, Cyril), surnamed the Philosopher, and canonized by both the Eastern and Western Churches, was born in about 826. He was the youngest son of Leo, a Byzantine nobleman and dignitary in the Macedonian city of Salonika, which at that time was bilingual—Greek and Slavic. After reading extensively at home, he was educated at the Graduate School of Constantinople under Leo the Mathematician and Photius, later the renowned patriarch and Constantine’s friend and patron. The Old Church Slavonic Vita of the Saint, compiled soon after his death, lists the subjects studied by Constantine—grammar, Homer, geometry, dialectic, and all the philosophical disciplines, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, and music, along with “all other Hellenic arts.” Also his mastery of Greek, Slavic, Latin, Hebrew, and Syriac is attested by the hagiographic sources.

After brief service in the Patriarchal Library and successful disputations with the iconoclasts, Constantine was nominated Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate School of Constantinople. He defined philosophy as the cognition of divine and human things: to what extent could man approximate God and be the image of the Creator.

The Philosopher was sent on several responsible missions: to the Arabs, Khazars, and finally to Moravia, whose reigning prince, Rastislav, had asked the Byzantine emperor for teachers and propagators of the Christian faith in the Slavic vernacular. Constantine worked in Moravia from 863 to 867, together with his eldest brother, Methodius. He composed the Slavic alphabet that was later called Glagolitic, and he fashioned the first literary language of the Slavs, now termed Old Church Slavonic. The philosopher first put into this language the Evangeliarium—a selection of texts from the Gospels for reading in Divine Services—and the liturgic prayers. Later, together with his brother, he translated the complete Gospels, the Psalter, and selected lections from the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles.

After laying the foundations of the Slavic Church in Moravia and then in Pannonia, he left Moravia in 868 with Methodius to plead for the Slavic Liturgy before the Bishop of Rome, to whose jurisdiction Moravia belonged. Constantine did not live to return to Moravia. Having fallen ill in Rome, he took monastic vows under the name of Cyril and died on February 14, 869.

In his famous speech made in Venice en route to Rome, and concisely reproduced in the Old Church Slavonic Vita, the Liturgy in the vernacular is ardently defended with eloquently commented references to St. Paul’s exhortation for the comprehensibility of prayers (I Corinthians 14) and allusions to the equality motif in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:45): “Tell me,” he said, “do you think that God is helpless and cannot bestow the equality of languages and peoples or that He is envious and will not give it?” The culmination of Constantine’s life-work is depicted in the same way by the Vita of St. Clement, one of the paramount sources for the history of the Slavic Apostles: “Taking the translated books, Cyril placed them on the altar of God, offering them as a sacrifice to the Lord, thus showing that God rejoiced in such a sacrifice, for what is more gladsome to the Word than the word? The word that enables intelligent beings to vanquish unintelligibility! Thus an equal delights in an equal.”

The significance of Slavicized Scripture and Liturgy as enabling “intelligent beings to vanquish unintelligibility” is precisely the subject of the remarkable poem which Constantine wrote as a prologue, Proglas, to the Slavic rendition of the Four Gospels, whereas his initial Slavic work, the Evangeliarium, was introduced by a prose preface discussing the principles and devices of translation. The followers of both Slavic Apostles admired Constantine as a writer, not only for his translation of Biblical books, his didactic and polemic sermons and treatises, but also—and equally—as the first Slavic poet, “the melodious nightingale,” as the ancient prayers call him. Of Constantine’s poems we still possess the highly original Prologue to the Gospels, his adaptation of Greek liturgic poetry, vestiges of an alphabetic acrostic prayer which presumably furnished the spelling names of the Slavic letters, and a few poetic fragments written by Constantine in Greek and transposed into Slavic verse, probably by the author himself. Quotations from these translations have been preserved in such Old Church Slavonic texts as Constantine’s Vita and his History of Finding St. Clement’s Relics.

A canon, “To the Two Teachers of the Slavic Nation,” composed by a disciple of Constantine and Methodius at the beginning of the tenth century, extols both brothers, for despite adversities they taught the Moravian land to glorify God in the native tongue and thereby set an example to the whole world. According to this Canon, the illuminator of Moravia was himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit, from Whom he received “a grace like the apostles.” He was thus embraced in the Pentecostal miracle, which transmuted the confusion of languages—the punishment at Babel—into a blessed gift of tongues. In the words of the Greek service for Whitsunday, “that this grace might be most clearly known to Thy disciples and Apostles Thou didst today send down and open their lips with tongues of fire, so that by them we and the whole race of mankind received the knowledge of God in our own language, according to the hearing of the ear; and by the light of the Spirit have we been enlightened. . .” Constantine himself points out the worldwide mission of the Moravian Church in his inspired Prologue, where the inaugural apostrophe, “Hearken, all ye Slavs!” is replaced first by the unifying summons, “Hear now, . . . Slavic people!” Then the Slavic exhortation becomes universal, first with an individualized addressee, “ye men,” and finally with a collective appeal, “ye nations,” which intimately relates Constantine’s mission to the initial, Biblical image of the Prologue, “Christ comes to gather the nations and tongues.”

The most important critical editions of the Prologue have been published by E. Georgiev in Studia historico-philologica Serdicensia, Supplementi vol. II, Sofia, 1938, and especially by R. Nahtigal in the Razprave of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Ljubljana, vol. I, 1943. In the following translation of the Prologue I have tried to render as closely as possible the composition of the original and its symbolism, inspired foremost by The Divine Names, a treatise of Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Constantine cites as “Paul’s disciple, great in truth.”

PROLOGUE TO THE GOSPELS

1. I am the Prologue to the Holy Gospels:

2. As the prophets prophesied of old—

3. "Christ comes to gather the nations and tongues,

4. Since He is the light of the world"—

5. So it has come to pass in this seventh millennium.

6. Since they have said, "The blind shall see,

7. The deaf shall hear the Word of the Book,

8. For it is proper that God be known.”

9. Therefore hearken, all ye Slavs!

10. For this gift is given by God,

11. The gift on God's right hand,

12. The incorruptible gift to souls,

13. To those souls that will accept it.

14. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

15. Teach all the people, saying:

16. "If you see and love the beauty of your souls,

17. And hence are striving

18. To dispel the darkness of sin,

19. And to repel the corruptness of this world,

20. Thus to win paradise life

21. And to escape the flaming fire,

22. Then hear now with your own mind,

23. Since you have learned to hear, Slavic people,

24. Hear the Word, for it came from God,

25. The Word nourishing human souls,

26. The Word strengthening heart and mind,

27. The Word preparing all to know God."

28. As without light there can be no joy—

29. For while the eye sees all of God's creation,

30. Still what is seen without light lacks beauty—

31. So it is with every soul lacking letters,

32. Ignorant of God's law,

33. The sacred law of the Scriptures,

34. The law that reveals God's paradise.

35. For what ear not hearing

36. The sound of thunder, can fear God?

37. Or how can nostrils which smell no flower

38. Sense the Divine miracle?

39. And the mouth which tastes no sweetness

40. Makes man like stone;

41. Even more, the soul lacking letters

42. Grows dead in human beings.

43. Thus, considering all this, brethren,

44. We speak fitting counsel

45. Which will divide men

46. From brutish existence and desire,

47. So that you will not have intellect without intelligence,

48. Hearing the Word in a foreign tongue,

49. As if you heard only the voice of a copper bell.

50. Therefore St. Paul has taught:

51. "In offering my prayer to God,

52. I had rather speak five words

53. That all the brethren will understand

54. Than ten thousand words which are incomprehensible."

55. What man will not understand this?

56. Who will not apply the wise parable,

57. Interpreting to us the true message?

58. As corruption threatens the flesh,

59. Decaying and rotting everything worse than pus

60. If there is no fit nourishment,

61. So each soul no longer lives

62. Deprived of Divine Life,

63. Hearing not the Divine Word.

64. Let another very wise parable

65. Be told, ye men that love each other

66. And wish to grow toward God!

67. Who does not know this true doctrine?

68. As the seed falls on the field,

69. So it is upon human hearts

70. Craving the divine shower of letters

71. That the fruit of God may increase.

72. What man can tell all the parables

73. Denouncing nations without their own books

74. And who do not preach in an intelligible tongue?

75. Even one potent in all tongues

76. Lacks power to tell their impotence.

77. Let me add my own parable

78. Condensing much sense into few words:

79. Naked indeed are all nations without their own books

80. Who being without arms cannot fight

81. The Adversary of our souls

82. And are ripe for the dungeon of eternal torments.

83. Therefore, ye nations whose love is not for the Enemy

84. And who truly mean to fight him:

85. Open eagerly the doors of your intelligence—

86. You who have now taken up the sturdy arms

87. That are forged through the Lord's Books,

88. And who mightily crush the head of the Enemy.

89. Whoever accepts these letters,

90. To him Christ speaks wisdom,

91. Feeds and strengthens your souls,

92. And so do the Apostles with all the Prophets.

93. Whoever speak their words

94. Will be fit to slay the Foe,

95. Bringing God good victory,

96. Escaping the suppurant corruption of flesh—

97. Flesh that lives as in a sleep;

98. These will not fall but hold fast,

99. And come forth before God as men of valor,

100. Standing on the right hand of God's throne,

101. When He judges the nations with fire,

102. And rejoicing throughout the ages with the angels,

103. Eternally praising God the merciful,

104. Always with songs from the holy books,

105. Singing to God who loves man:

106. To Him befits all glory,

107. To the Son of God, honor and praise forever,

108. With the Father and the Holy Ghost,

109. Unto the ages of ages, from all creatures!

ENDNOTES:

* A revised and expanded version of Prof. Jakobson's article published in St. Vladimir's Quarterly, Vol. 2 (Old Series), 1959, N.Y., now out of print.

SOURCE:

Jakobson, Roman, Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 (New York, NY: 1963), pp. 14-19.