In the early 2010s, as I began to offer my first course on the history of Orthodox Christianity in what is now present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, I asked students to read Metropolitan Ilarion's eleventh-century “Sermon on Law and Grace.” The intent of that assignment was to demonstrate the impact that Christian concepts, symbols, and narratives had on the political and religious discourse of Kievan Rus΄. Following the baptism of Prince Vladimir in 988 and the spread of Christianity among the Eastern Slavs, Kiev's rulers started to talk about themselves and their predecessors in unprecedented ways, mainly in the Christian idioms of universalism, successionism, and soteriology. A providential drama that had begun at the divine act of creation—enacted in time by the Israelites, eschatologically manifested in Christ, and bequeathed first to the apostles and then to the Roman Empire—was now a story that both encompassed and culminated in Rus΄.

In ways textually, historically, and historiographically more sophisticated than a scholar of modern Russian Orthodoxy like I could accomplish or imagine, Sean Griffin's excellent new study, The Liturgical Past in Byzantium and Early Rus, reveals just how complex, vital, revolutionary, and central this particular event—the Christianization of the Eastern Slavic peoples—was to the self-understanding and self-representation of Kiev's ruling elite. Through an attentive reading of the Rus Primary Chronicle and a careful comparison of that text with Byzantine texts and rites, Griffin demonstrates that twelfth-century chroniclers of early Rus΄ scripted the triumphs and tribulations of their rulers onto preexisting storylines, often adopting the exact same phrases, plot devices, and narrative arcs that they had inherited from Byzantium. In this manner, Princess Olga, the first member of the Rurik dynasty to convert to Christianity, became a “Slavic Mary” and, akin to John the Baptist, a “Slavic Forerunner,” whose conversion story was very likely taken “from the prayers, hymns, and rubrics of the [Byzantine] baptism service” (132–33). The story of Prince Vladimir, especially his conversion and Christian reign, was similarly modelled on Byzantine liturgical images of and panegyrics to Constantine the Great, whereby Vladimir, perhaps the first bishop of Rus΄, succeeded not only Constantine, a bishop of Constantinople, but also Paul, who, like Vladimir (and Constantine), had once persecuted Christians but was now a follower of Christ and a defender of the faith (Chap. 5). Finally, the killings of Boris and Gleb in the early eleventh century were rendered as Christian martyrdom in terminology derived from Byzantium's eucharistic canon of the divine liturgy, which commemorates the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ—and, by analogy, the martyrdom of Boris and Gleb—through hymns and prayers (Chap. 6). Chroniclers also scripted the killings of Vladimir's two sons onto a key myth in the Byzantine consecration rite: each new Christian community, like that of early Rus΄, was to be “built on the bones of the martyrs” and was to offer “to God martyrs of its own” (228), a task fulfilled by the blood of Vladimir's progeny.

Despite the focus on comparative textual analysis, Griffin's work is much more than philological investigation, at least in the conventional sense. It principally is about power, discourse, ideology, and practice—in this case, the “very public and very powerful Roman [Christian] technology” of liturgy as it was adopted, reconfigured, and, most importantly, performed in early Rus΄ (13). Repeated, almost constant performances of liturgical rites occurred throughout the principality, including vespers services at the Kiev Monastery of Caves and the many feast days inherited by and celebrated in the new church (Chap. 3). “The cumulative effect” of “this liturgical repetition,” Griffin argues, “was to immerse early medieval Christians,” including those of Rus΄, “in a shared mythological past” (90, 229). What liturgically occurred every day in the minds and through the bodies of the faithful “was the experience of [sacred] history itself” (13), which in turn allowed the Rus΄ narratively and experientially to enter the liturgical calendar and become participants in Providence. More specifically, liturgy constituted the lived medium through which “autocratic political propaganda was disseminated” in Rus΄ and by which its rulers were legitimized (90). The result of these experiences, practices, and dynamics was not just the Christianization of the Eastern Slavic peoples, although it was certainly that. “The politics of liturgy” also bound together “imagined political communities” and helped to form “new ethno-political identities” in Rus΄ (13, 240–42), all of which, as Griffin provocatively reminds us in his thoughtful introduction, resonates among the political and ecclesiastical elite of contemporary Russia.