Impact Of Conversion To Christianity On Kievan Rus

1. Evaluate the impact of conversion to Christianity on Kievan Rus.
The conversion of the Kievan people to the Christianity took place when the rivalry between Constantinople and Rome on converting pagan peoples in the northern Europe reached its peak in the tenth century. Although the breakup of two churches happened in 1054, the Russian allegiance to Byzantium helped to determine much of the subsequent history of the country. The Prince of Kiev, Saint Vladimir Svyatoslavich, the baptizer of the Russians, adopted the Christianity in 988 according to the Primary Chronicle. This decision by Prince Vladimir was the result of a process of heightened activity by missionary monks and priests from Byzantium among the Slavs as well as increased military,
diplomatic, and trade contact between the Rus and Constantinople from the mid-ninth century onward. Unlike the Princess Olga of Kiev who personally baptized in Constantinople, the grandmother of Vladimir, he managed to impose the new faith on his subjects and soon after the Christianity became the religion of the Eastern Slavs.
As always happens, conversion to one religion comes with a huge transformation of cultural values from the converter to the converted. In the example of the Eastern Slavs, this resulted with the highly developed Byzantine intense influence on cultural and ideological affairs. The primary area of this effect was the alphabet. The Germanic tribes who came into contact with the Latins adopted the Latin alphabet, the Persians took the Arabic scripture, and the Khazars, the Jewish one. Although in the case of the Russian conversion something different happened in terms of alphabet, the effect of the conversion on the literature was immense. Despite the Kievan Slavs accepted the Christianity with the influence of the Byzantines, they did not adopted the Greek alphabet directly. Yet they adopted the fiction alphabet which was invented by two Byzantine churchmen, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius for the Slavic people. Before the conversion the Eastern Slavs had a very rich oral literature, written literature and writing itself came essentially with the conversion.
Accordingly, the language was inevitably affected by the conversion. A lot of terms in Greek and from the Balkan Slavs, notably the Bulgarians, who had accepted Christianity earlier flooded the Russian language. It is mostly because of the many of the Russian patriarchs were Greek origin only two of them Hilarion and Clement were known to be Russian. This Greek influence, however, cause one of the main weak points of the Kievan Christianity. It failed to produce anything of its own. Thus there was no Kievan theology, philosophy, or, perhaps more surprisingly, mysticism, which developed in subsequent centuries. The absence of independent creative theology and philosophy has generally been considered a historic weakness of the Russian Church. Besides the language and the literature, the Byzantine impact made itself apparent in church law, art and architecture. Building in stone, based especially on Greek ecclesiastical models, joined the age-old Slavic wooden architecture. The most important influence in art was the iconography which has a special place in the Russian Orthodoxy.
Beyond these cultural effects of the Byzantine Empire, the preference to adopt the Eastern Christianity determined the course of the Russian nation. Their affiliation to Constantinople resulted with the exclusion from the Roman Catholic world which was one of the main reason of the Russian isolation from Western European civilization. Additionally, it contributed the Russian suspicions of the West and the tragic enmity between the Russians and the Poles.
Until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, the relationship between the Ecumenical Patriarchy in Constantinople and the Russian Patriarchy first in Kiev and later in Moscow was mainly a mentorship or a role model of the former one for the latter.
The existence of the Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire and the Orthodox Patriarchate was the same, the transmission of non-religious elements to the Russian culture with the religious elements did not pose much problem from the part of the latter since the Roman Empire was Orthodox Christian itself. However, the fall of Constantinople into the Muslim hands changed this relationship of trainer and trainee. The supremacy of the Patriarchy in Constantinople was cast into shadow with the Muslim overlordship. Russian Orthodox Church became the most important of all the Orthodox churches de facto, since it was now by far the strongest in numbers and was also now the only one that enjoyed the backing of a powerful sovereign state. Therefore, the status of primus inter pares of the Patriarchate in Constantinople did not mean much in fact. The situation that the Russia was the only independent Orthodox empire at that time, eventually led the development of the Third Rome theory. The monk Theophilus of Pskov writes: “The Church of Old Rome fell because of its heresy, the gates of the Second Rome, Constantinople, have been hewn down by the axes of the infidel Turks; but the Church of Moscow, the Church of the New
Rome, shines brighter than the Sun in the whole universe… Two Romes have fallen but the third stands fast, a forth cannot be.” The motivation of being Third Rome and the protector of all Orthodox people formed the main pillars of the ideology of the Russian Empire, and the policymakers of the Tzar effectively used them in the international arena, especially at the expense of the Ottoman Empire which was the largest Orthodox reservoir at that time.
Consequently, the impact of conversion to Christianity on Kievan Rus was felt first in cultural affairs with immense Byzantine influence. The introduction of alphabet, the development of the language with many Greek origin terms, Byzantine-style art – especially iconography – , architecture, Byzantine church law, and customs were the main results of the conversion to Christianity via Byzantine Empire. It was also one of the main reasons of the isolation of Russia from the Western civilization. In short term, politically, it gave the Kievan prince and state a stronger ideological basis, urging the unity of the country and at the same time emphasizing its links with Byzantium and with the Christian world as a whole. In long term, Orthodox Christianity became one of the main pillars of the Russian nationalism and an important part of the Russian identity. A new element was introduced into the political affairs which was the Church. Since the capture of Constantinople by the Muslim Turks which eventually made Russia only independent Orthodox empire, the active importance of the Russian Orthodoxy became prominent. The motivations of Third Rome and the protectorship of the Orthodox Christians became the main tools of the Russian foreign missions particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To sum up, the conversion to Christianity of Kievan Rus via Constantinople deeply affected the identity of all of the Eastern Slavs, in terms of culture, ideology and politics whose effects reach until today.