SAINT VLADIMIR, APOSTLE OF RUSSIA

Prince Vladimir of Kiev is glorified by the Church as a saint. He is called “Equal to the Apostles.” Was his canonization an expression of gratitude from the Church and the people for the Baptism of 988 only, or were his other deeds also relevant and even prophetic?

1 On July 28, the Church honors the memory of Prince Vladimir. In accordance with the Orthodox tradition of naming saints who acted as baptizers of their peoples, he is called “Vladimir Equal to the Apostles.” Following the Western practice of the ancient undivided Church, he should be called “Apostle.” Saint Vladimir is therefore the Apostle of Kievan Russia, the Apostle of Eastern Europe and the Apostle of Russia. About ten years after beginning his reign, he decided to convert to Christianity. Vladimir is revered as a saint in both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and the celebration of his memory is universal among Christians.

2 Vladimir ruled for a long time, from 978 to 1015, thirty-seven years, of which twenty-seven were after baptism. But if we believe the chronicles, he was born in 960, that is, he lived only 55 years. He spent exactly half of his life as a pagan, and the next half as a baptized Orthodox Christian. He died in midsummer, on July 15, 1015. Such a division of time into two equal parts is surprising. This is a wonderful sign, a kind of biblical proportion, for only God is the master of time and the author of coincidences.

3 Nowadays, the solemn commemoration of the Baptism of Russia is associated with the memory of Saint Vladimir. However, under the Ancient Régime, before 1917, the Baptism of Rus’ was celebrated on August 14. This day coincides with the feasts of the Holy Cross of the Lord and the Merciful Savior. These two local holidays of Constantinople would probably have disappeared from the calendars, but thanks to Saint Vladimir and his Baptism, they not only survived in the Russian Church but were also accompanied by the blessing of water.

4 The chronicles have preserved the story of Saint Vladimir’s famous “choice of faith.” He reportedly rejected Islam because the religion prohibited alcohol. Apparently, Vladimir feared the “ritualization” of everyday life and did not want to introduce dietary restrictions for his people. He rejected Germanic Christianity, considering it foreign, because “his ancestors did not accept it.” This was a prophetic gesture, as the “Christianization” of Slavic peoples by the Germans often ended in complete assimilation. Judaism, which came from neighboring Khazar Khaganate, worried Vladimir because the “original Jews” had been exiled from Palestine by the Romans long ago. The prince saw this as a dangerous omen. Finally, Vladimir chose Byzantine Christianity thanks to the magnificence of the liturgy of Constantinople. This detail bears a striking resemblance to our postmodern era, where the aesthetic dimension of religion is paramount. “Beauty will save the world,” as Dostoevsky prophetically wrote.

5 It is essential that there be no trace of lust for power or political interests in Vladimir’s motives for embracing Byzantine Orthodoxy. “Your grandmother Olga was wise, and she had already made this choice,” declared his advisers. “The Greek liturgy is magnificent, and we didn’t know if we were on earth or in heaven,” affirmed his envoys. These were the arguments in favor of Orthodox Christianity. This justification for religious choice makes no reference to dogma. This means that Vladimir’s decision was neither dogmatic nor polemical. The choice of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity was not “anti-Catholic.” Constantinople was the City of Light, the center of world civilization, and Vladimir chose what was best for his people. The division of the Churches, even in a purely formal sense, had not yet taken place. It is therefore no coincidence that, after his baptism, Vladimir began to spread literacy among his people and to erect buildings and churches. Unlike many rulers of the past, Christianity was not for him a “will to power,” but a sign of Enlightenment and social commitment.

6 Chronicles report that after his baptism, Vladimir decided to stop punishing criminals. This episode is usually viewed with irony, as if the “prince” had suddenly reverted to childhood or become a neophyte in his new religion. But he was a highly educated man; his choice of Christianity was mature and conscious.

7 The Church is a community of interpreters. Let us try to give the gesture of saint Vladimir a proper explication First, it may be an act of foolishness in Christ Jesus. Foolishness here is understood not as the behavior of a lonely, mad person, but as a conscious prophetic gesture, a kind of sacred provocation. From the perspective of the “theology of foolishness in Christ,” refusal to observe a commandment or a law becomes a provocation, a call for profound spiritual change. In other words, if the people were baptized voluntarily and with a sincere desire, then where did the criminals come from?

8 Second, this gesture is the creation of a prototype. The first Russian saints were Boris and Gleb. After Vladimir’s untimely death, they refused to fight for power against their brother and were treacherously killed by him. Their veneration began shortly after their deaths. However, they could not be canonized as martyrs, as they had not been killed for the Christian faith. Therefore, the Church, for their glorification, literally invented a new form of holiness: the holiness of the suffering innocent. Boris and Gleb were the sons of Vladimir, the one who, according to the chronicles, refused to punish criminals in the name of biblical commandments. The sons literally followed their father’s example. But they did so in a peculiar and asymmetrical way. They behaved like prophets, and like the sons of a prophet. Thus, was established one of the key characteristics of Russian holiness, without which one cannot understand either Russian history or the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. More than nine centuries later, the example of Boris and Gleb was followed by the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II, glorified by the Church precisely as a suffering innocent. Moreover, many new martyrs of the Russian Church suffered not for their faith in Christ, but were killed without any guilt, for fictitious reasons invented by the murderers. This happened because the rulers “respected the law”. They executed the “presumed criminals”, when, like Vladimir, they should have stopped. This is the third prophetic significance of the holy prince’s refusal to punish the criminals. It is a clear and extraordinary warning, of biblical proportions, for all subsequent generations.

9 The communist regime in the Soviet Union lasted exactly seventy years, from 1918 to 1988. The millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ was approaching. Initially, the Soviet government had not planned to celebrate this event, as the official state ideology was atheism, and religion was considered a thing of the past. But this decision suddenly changed. The then Patriarch of the Russian Church, Alexy II, called atheism a “spiritual Chernobyl.” The Church received government permission to celebrate the millennium of Baptism, and the state itself actively participated in the celebrations. It was then that many remembered for the first time that Russia, and other countries of the Soviet Union, had long been baptized as Orthodox Christians.

10 It is generally accepted that the election of Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla John Paul II as Pope played a decisive role in returning Eastern Europe to the path of history. This belief has become such a stereotype that few people have noticed that the number of believers in the Catholic countries of Europe did not increase after the fall of the Iron Curtain, but on the contrary, declined. The celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Russia in 1988 marked the true return of Russian Orthodoxy. It transformed it from a forgotten legacy of the past into a new form of Christian religious revival, the echoes of which spread throughout the world. As a Russian religious poet sang at the time: “My joy and my friend, the time of repentance is approaching, the churches are white as snow, they celebrate their millennial birthday.” The return to Christianity had begun. We are all witnesses to this last great miracle of Saint Vladimir.