Ancient chronicles preserve the news of several baptisms of the rulers of ancient Russia during the 9th-10th centuries. No less interesting is the way in which Christianity came to Russia.
Orthodoxy and Catholicism had a different content than now
Do we often think about the fact that many terms in Russian church life are not of Greek but of Latin origin? First of all, the very word "church" comes (like the German Kirche and the English church) from the Latin circus - circle, and not from the Greek ecclesia. At the same time, it is noteworthy that the Italian chiesa and the French eglise come from the Greek word. Further, the Russian priest is called "priest" - the root in this word is the same as that of the Pope (Roman) in Western European languages. Finally, the first church, which, according to the chronicles, was built in Kiev by Prince Vladimir after his baptism, was called Desyatinnaya. She was assigned a tenth of the state income. But the custom of paying tithes to the church was common in the Roman Catholic Church, not in the Greek Orthodox.
To understand this, it is necessary to make an excursion several centuries ago, when there was no Old Russian state. In 726, the Byzantine emperor Leo the Isaurian began a struggle against the veneration of icons. It is believed that iconoclasm was based on the cultural influence of the Arabs and Islam, with their ban on depicting living things. And for more than a century, the Byzantine Church was torn apart by a struggle between opponents and defenders of icons. It was finished only in 842 with the triumph of Orthodoxy.
All this time, the Roman Church advocated the veneration of icons. Then she had not yet accepted the dogmas, which later put a gulf between her and the Orthodox Church. Thus, during the period when the Greek Church fell into the heresy of iconoclasm, Rome remained faithful to orthodoxy, that is, Orthodoxy, from which, however, subsequently departed. If we talk about the religion of such, for example, an outstanding figure in Western European history as Emperor Charlemagne, then we must admit that he professed precisely Orthodoxy, in contrast to the iconoclastic heresy of Constantinople.
The first news of diplomatic relations between Russia and Byzantium dates back to 838, when the iconoclasts still ruled in Constantinople. And after the restoration of Orthodoxy, for a long time, there were no significant dogmatic differences between the Greek and Latin Churches. Historians consider 1054 to be the year of their final separation, but contemporaries did not at all regard that break as final. Until the beginning of the 13th century, ritual differences between the Greek and Latin churches did not prevent dynastic marriages between the Russian house of Rurikovich and Western European royal families. No re-baptism, repentance and similar rituals of transition from one faith to another were required.
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Did not Prince Yaropolk baptize Rus?
In the agreement of the Russian prince Igor with the Byzantine government from 944, the Christian Rus are mentioned. This means that in Kiev, and possibly in other large cities of Russia, there were already Christian churches and communities at that time.
The chronicle reports that in 955 the ruler Olga was baptized in Byzantium. According to the same news, in 961-962. Olga invited missionaries from Germany to Russia, but they allegedly committed violence to those who converted to Christianity and were expelled. Without going into a detailed analysis of this event, let us again turn our attention to the absence at that time of irreconcilable religious differences between Rome and Constantinople. In Russia, they might not notice the difference between the one and the other.
There are a number of pieces of news that allow historians (for example, O. M. Rapov) to assume that Prince Yaropolk, Vladimir's elder brother, who reigned in Kiev in 972-980, was baptized, and most likely by Western European missionaries. Initially, the Church of the Tithes was also built by Yaropolk. At that time in Russia there was a fierce struggle between the pagan and Christian parties - remember that Prince Svyatoslav subjected all Christians who were in his army to a fierce execution. The pagan reaction with which the chronicles associate the first years of Vladimir's reign in Kiev could have been caused by his triumph over his Christian brother.
Cyril and Methodius and Arian influences
But were non-Byzantine Christian missionaries necessarily Catholic? A. G. Kuzmin drew attention to how the foundations of the Christian faith are presented in the chronicle legend about the choice of faith by Prince Vladimir. There, a Christian preacher says about fasting: "Fasting according to power: if anyone is and drinks, everything is for the glory of God." But this is not at all an Orthodox or Catholic understanding of fasting! And in what creed of that time could fast be interpreted so liberally?
The search for this leads us to the time of the Arian heresy, named after its founder, the priest Arius, who lived in the IV century and denied the doctrine of the Divine Trinity and the dual nature of Christ. Christ, according to his teaching, was a man. Although as early as 325 AD, Arianism was condemned in the Roman Empire as heresy, nevertheless, it found many adherents on the outskirts of the empire, among the "barbarians". The Goths and Franks, before becoming Catholics, adopted Christianity according to the teachings of Arius. For many centuries Ireland became the stronghold of Arianism. Arianism was a kind of historical stage in the assimilation of Christianity by the "barbarians". In the IX-X centuries. in Byzantium and the Balkans, Arianism, uniting with ancient Eastern Manichaeism, initiated the heresy of the so-called. bogomilism.
Arian and Bogomil motives were then very strong in the Bulgarian Church. At the same time, the Bulgarian Church absorbed the legacy of the activities of Saints Cyril and Methodius. We also note that when the Roman Church temporarily recognized the Church Slavonic language as one of the languages of Christian worship, along with Latin and Greek (and Cyril and Methodius, as you know, went into the service from Constantinople to Rome), Constantinople did not recognize this. Bulgaria and Byzantium were at that time a bitter struggle for domination in the Balkans. The Bulgarian Church at the turn of the X-XI centuries became one of the independent religious and political centers of Eastern Europe.
On the first metropolitans of Kiev and All Russia, fragmentary and contradictory information has been preserved, and even then only later. The first reliable metropolitan in Russia can be considered the Greek Theopempt, who established himself in the cathedra under Yaroslav the Wise in 1035 or 1037. Apparently, he was the first metropolitan of Kiev to be installed in Constantinople. It is interesting that one of the first acts of Theopemptus was the re-consecration of the Kiev Tithe Church as built before by heretics.
If we also take into account that in the north of Russia, in Novgorod, the Celtic cross was widespread in church symbolism up to the XIV century, it will become clear that Christianity came to Russia in various ways. Ultimately, the subordination of the Russian Church to the dogma and hierarchy of the Church of Constantinople was established. But this did not happen immediately in 988, but gradually and later.