A Critical Reappraisal of the Concept of the Imagined Community and the Presumed Sacred Languages of the Medieval Period

Full text

Page 1

National Identities, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2004
A Critical Reappraisal of the Concept of the
‘Imagined Community’ and the Presumed
Sacred Languages of the Medieval Period
MICHEL BOUCHARD, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George,
Canada
Abstract
Anderson’s Imagined Communities, first published in 1983 and then reprinted in 1991.
Although the term has caught the imagination of many researchers, the concept of the
‘imagined community’ is based on a number of questionable premises. The first problematic
assertion is that prior to modernity the medieval period’s sacred languages and scripts provided
the basis for universal religious communities. The emergence of capitalism purportedly resulted
in a radical break with the medieval past. Imagined national communities emerged with
print-capitalism and the mass publication of texts in vernaculars. Anderson argues that: ‘In a
word, the fall of Latin exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities integrated
by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralised, and territorialised.’ For
Anderson, it was this process that led to the modern self-conceived nations. I do not question
the importance of the printed word in consolidating languages and standardising their forms;
however, the ‘old sacred languages’ that Anderson puts forward – Latin, Greek and Hebrew
– were perhaps not as sacred as he presumes. Though Latin was arguably hegemonic in
Western Europe in the latter Middle Ages, I will demonstrate that in the Eastern Orthodox
world there is a long tradition of Biblical translation that dates back to the second century, and
that Orthodoxy facilitated – if not encouraged – the rise of ‘national’ autocephalous Orthodox
Churches. Whenever Orthodox missionaries encountered major language groups, new alpha-
bets were invariably created in order to facilitate conversion. This was precisely the case with
the Russian Orthodox Church. Through the analysis of a fourteenth-century account of the life
of Stefan of Perm, who was later canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church, I will
demonstrate that there was a clear sense of nationhood in this account, and that Church
Slavonic did not become a sacred language until well into the modern period. Furthermore, I
will argue that these old religious texts demonstrate the need to revise some of our assumptions
concerning medieval history and the presumed modern nature of nationhood.
It is rare to find an analysis of nationalism that does not invoke Benedict
Keywords
medieval nationhood; Komi; ethnic minorities; Russia
Religion and nationhood; Orthodoxy and nations: Old-Russian; Russia
Ever since the publication of Imagined Communities in 1983 – its second edition
appearing in 19911– it has been difficult not to discuss nation and nationhood without
referring to this text. The phrase ‘imagined communities’ has become so pervasive that
ISSN 1460-8944 print/ISSN 1469-9907 online/04/010003-22  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1460894042000216481

Page 2

4
M. Bouchard
it is difficult to describe communities as anything other than imagined. Yet, the concept
of the ‘imagined community’, as defined by Benedict Anderson, is founded upon a few
central ideas, notably the concepts of the sacred languages of the classical communities
and the emergence of nationalism as concurrent with religion’s decline in importance.
After reviewing some of Anderson’s major ideas, I will examine the evidence for a
sacred language in the medieval Orthodox world and demonstrate that there was no
sacred language; instead, sacred languages such as Church Slavonic emerged in the late
modern period. Not only was there no sacred language, but there was a strongly
developed sense of nationhood present in medieval Russia, and the Orthodox Church
itself encouraged the consolidation of national communities. In essence, what is evident
in medieval history is that the origins of nationhood are to be found much earlier than
the modern period and that religion actually contributed to emerging nationhood.
These observations are much closer to the writings of Adrian Hastings,2who is one of
the few modern theorists on nationalism who recognised the importance of the Bible as
a mirror for nationhood.
Benedict Anderson’s central premise is that modern national communities share little
with classical communities linked by their sacred languages. He attests that: ‘All the
great classical communities conceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the
medium of a sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power.’3Dead
languages were even preferable to living languages as they were farther away from
speech and were relegated to the ‘pure world of signs’. These sacred languages were
only truly mastered, according to Anderson, by the literati, who would mediate between
earth and heaven. The very essence of these religious communities precluded national
consciousness. Anderson makes the claim that: ‘The fundamental conceptions about
“social groups” were centripetal and hierarchical, rather than boundary-oriented and
horizontal.’4These religiously imagined communities were characterised by their unself-
conscious coherence and, according to Anderson, began to wane steadily after the late
Middle Ages.5
The rise of nations began, in part, with the decline of sacred religious communities,
languages and lineages, but equally important to this decline were the fundamental
changes that occurred with the advent of modernity.6Whereas administrative vernacu-
lars may have emerged prior to the modern era, they were the result of a mix of
capitalism (means of production), new technology (printing press) and the existence of
linguistic diversity. It is this emerging print-capitalism that ‘laid the bases for national
consciousnesses’.7In addition, Anderson argues: ‘These fellow-readers, to whom they
were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility,
the embryo of the nationally imagined community.’8It was this convergence of print,
capitalism and linguistic diversity that allowed for a new form of imagined community
– the modern nation.9
Anderson’s work has been criticised by a number of authors. One critic, Umut
O¨zkirimli, summarises five major objections to Anderson’s account: ‘it is culturally
reductionist; his arguments concerning the relationship between nationalism and re-
ligion do not work for certain cases; his thesis that nationalism is born in the Americas
runs counter to available evidence; his examples of official nationalism are not correct;
he misinterprets the rise of anti-colonial-nationalisms’.10Despite this critique, the
objections that O¨zkirimli cites do not question the central thesis put forward by
Anderson that sacred languages that unite religious communities mark the medieval
period. Nations could only emerge with the decay of sacred languages, as print-capital-

Page 3

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
5
ism encouraged, even necessitated, standardised vernaculars. Even those authors criti-
cal of certain aspects of Anderson’s work – notably Partha Chatterjee11– still use the
concept of print-capitalism in their research.
Anthony D. Smith points out that the idea of the imagined community has been
‘detached from its Andersonian moorings’.12He refers to the fact that in the text
Imagined Communities, print-capitalism could only contribute to the creation of the
imagined community when certain conditions had been met, including the ‘decline of
sacred monarchies and cosmological script communities’.13Smith does raise some
additional critiques, reminding us that the medieval historian Lesley Johnson has
pointed out that people in the Middle Ages had clear conceptions of linear time (as
opposed to Anderson’s messianic time), as did other ancient peoples such as the Jews
and Greeks.14Nonetheless, Smith does not challenge the assumption that there were
sacred languages in the Middle Ages.
Charles D. Smith is equally critical of the usage of the term ‘imagined community’,
owing in large part to the ‘questionable historical analysis’ of some authors using the
concept of ‘imagined community’. In reviewing the text Redefining the Egyptian Nation,
1930–1945,15Smith reanalyses the historical data presented in this work and demon-
strates that the Egyptian evidence contradicts Anderson’s theory. The emergence of
twentieth-century print-capitalism does not promote a secular consciousness that
supplants religion; rather it encourages its reproduction.16Smith questions the uncriti-
cal assumption that Anderson’s theoretical construct is exact; he states that: ‘To take
Anderson’s contentions as a given, establishing the parameters of discussion within
which one can demonstrate the affinity of one’s subject to them, precludes critical
evaluation of the suitability of his hypotheses.’17Rather than seeing Egyptian nationality
as imagined, Smith believes that the Pharaonic era contributed to Egyptian distinctive-
ness in the Middle Ages and in turn provided the foundations for modern nationalist
identity.18Though print-capitalism encouraged a variety of communities – some ex-
traterritorial and religious – the idea of a territorially bounded Egyptian state can be
traced farther back than the emergence of print-capitalism and modernity.
When evaluating the historical record, it is possible to choose certain epochs and
certain facts that would seem to support the modern emergence of nations as imagined
communities. A case in point is the history of the Orthodox Church. If one were to
examine the Orthodox Church in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century,
one could imagine that the Orthodox world constituted a sacred religious community
that had a sacred language (liturgical Greek) and had as a central precept the concept
of ‘oikumene’ (ecumene), which signifies the unity of the Christian Church. This
assumption would overlook the historical rise of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchiate
under the Ottomans. In 1767, the Greek Patriarch succeeded in eliminating the rival
Ohrid archbishopric and pursued the Hellenisation of the Bulgarian and Slavic Mace-
donian churches in the Balkans.19A similar process occurred in Serbia; the Patriarchy
– autocephalous head of the Serbian Orthodox Church – was eliminated in the
eighteenth century and the Serbian Orthodox Church, like its Bulgarian and Slavic
counterparts, was Hellenised. In many ways, as I will examine through the recorded life
of Stefan of Perm, this process of Hellenisation runs counter to Medieval Eastern
Orthodox history.
The evidence in the Eastern Slav lands is that the spread of Christianity fostered a
sense of nationhood, so there is no reason to believe that a similar process could not
have occurred in the autonomous Orthodox Churches in the Balkans. This is recog-
nised in the writings of Dennis Hupchick, who identifies the imposition of Greek

Page 4

6
M. Bouchard
religious culture on non-Greek populations of the larger Orthodox community.20In
Hupchick’s work, Bulgarians in the Seventeenth Century, he recognises a pre-modern
ethnic (though, national may be more appropriate) identity. He writes that: ‘The
Bulgarians, whose past political and religious greatness to some extent was preserved in
their Slavic form of Orthodox culture, demonstrated their awareness of the difference
between Greek and Slavic forms of their common religion, and the danger to their
native form of religious culture posed by Greek control of the church in Bulgarian
lands.’21The short-lived Hellenisation of the various Orthodox Churches would not
necessarily have eliminated such ideas of nationhood and would explain the quick rise
of nationalism in the region and the persistence of a variety of nations to this day. Yet,
if we were to examine the history of the Balkans, we could mistakenly interpret the rise
of nationhood as a modern phenomenon that comes with the spread of print-capital-
ism, modernisation and the decline of the sacred language of the Orthodox Church.
A nation could be considered imagined if the historical analysis began in the late
eighteenth century, and this is precisely what occurs in Paschalis Kitromilides’ article
entitled ‘“Imagined Communities” and the Origins of the National Question in the
Balkans’. Kitromilides examines the Balkans in order to provide a case study of how
national identity is constructed and how ‘imagined communities’ emerge. The author
sets out to study the origins of nationhood, yet begins with the Greek Enlightenment
and focuses on a few ‘characteristic’ pieces of evidence, most of which date no earlier
than 1770. Not only does Kitromilides ignore anything that occurs before 1770, the
author assumes that the writings of the nineteenth-century Orthodox Church are
‘traditional’. As Kitromilides writes: ‘Thus Ignatius [b. 1832], although aware of
modern historical facts, persisted in a traditional conception of the community of the
faithful. The vision of the nation as a distinct community, defined primarily by its
language, was not beyond the purview of his vision but was superseded by a more
fundamental and essential collectivity, the community of the faithful.’22Paradoxically,
modernist writers may be guilty of the sin of inventing traditions, something that is
usually attributed to nationalists. This vision of ‘imagined communities’ in the Balkans
is only credible if the much longer history of the region is ignored; a history whose
traditional study is characterised by the author as ‘obfuscated by nationalist ideology’.23
Though Anderson proposes that sacred languages and sacred communities charac-
terised the medieval period, he spends little time examining the linguistic history of
Europe and, like most theorists of nationalism, focuses on Western Europe when trying
to understand the origins of national consciousness and nationhood. A cursory review
of the history of the Orthodox Church indicates that Greek was never a sacred language
and never enjoyed a status equal to Latin in Western Europe. Rather, Orthodox
Christianity readily translated Biblical texts into a number of languages in order to
facilitate conversion and the teaching of Christian principles. Kallistos Ware states
succinctly how: ‘From the start Orthodox missionary work outside the boundaries of
the Byzantine Empire adopted as a basic principle the use of the vernacular in church
worship.’24The impulse of the Orthodox Church was so strong that Greek missionaries
promoted new languages that undermined the importance of their own language, as
these new written vernaculars would come to challenge the supremacy of the Greek
language.
In the East, the historical record is quite clear – Christianity promoted nationhood.
In the Orthodox East, there emerged a loosely structured federation of local churches
organised along ethnic/national lines, with each of these churches possessing varying
theological approaches, forms of worship and, most importantly, vernacular liturgical

Page 5

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
7
languages. At the dawn of the sixth century, there existed a number of liturgical
languages including Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, and, in Orthodox Ethiopia,
Ge’ez.25In time, other liturgical Orthodox languages would be added and new auto-
cephalous Orthodox Churches created.
In Kenneth Scott Latourette’s classic, A History of Christianity. Volume I: Beginnings
to 1500, the author summarises the role of Orthodox Christian monks in promoting the
development of written vernaculars.26He sums up the impact of the Coptic language
propagated by the Orthodox Church as follows: ‘In Egypt it was the successful effort
to provide the masses of the population with a literature in the speech of everyday life
which halted the exclusive use of the alien Greek for the written page and which
stimulated the development of an alphabet which could be quickly and easily learned
by the multitude in place of the ancient hieroglyphics which could be the property only
of the few’.27Egypt was not exceptional; the Armenian golden age of literature followed
the translation of Christian texts into Armenian using an alphabet devised by monks
expressly for that purpose. The same can also be said for the Georgian language.
Likewise, Syriac literature flourished with the spread of Christianity as the written
vernacular was promoted to ‘make Christian literature accessible to the rank and file’.28
It is not surprising that Greek missionaries, when encountering Slavs, diligently set
about creating a new alphabet and immediately began translating liturgy and biblical
texts.
The Greek Orthodox Church never adhered to the idea of sacred languages; not only
did Greek missionaries devise new alphabets and create new literatures, two of the most
influential Greek medieval missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, mocked the German
Catholic clergy as ‘Pilatians’29when they tried to argued that only Greek, Latin and
Hebrew were sacred languages. These two brothers are credited with creating two
scripts – the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic – and their journey begins with Ratislav of
Moravia calling to Constantinople for Christian teachers. The Byzantine Emperor
Michael III immediately dispatched the two brothers to Ratislav’s court in 863. Once
installed, these two monks oversaw the creation of a new script (Glagolitic) and began
translating liturgy and Christian texts (notably the Psalter and the four gospels) into the
vernacular. Having done this, they began training local priests in the faith. The success
of the Greeks riled the German missionaries who had coveted this territory as their
own, and to counter their activities the German clergy accused the Greek missionaries
of error for translating the liturgy of the sacraments into the vernacular. This does not
mean, however, that they were entirely opposed to the use of vernaculars, as there was
at the same time the development of Old High German for the purpose of Christian
instruction.
From Moravia, the two brothers extended their efforts into Slavic Pannonia (a
territory covering western Hungary, eastern Austria, Slovenia and into northern
Yugoslavia) and there taught in Old Church Slavonic and trained local clergy. Though
the brothers benefited from the protection of the Pope, the German clergy eventually
prevailed; the Orthodox clergy was expelled from Moravia following the death of the
last of the brothers, Methodius, in 885. The influence of the two brothers did not die
with them, however. Two disciples, Clement and Naum, left Moravia to conduct
missionary work in the forcibly converted Khanate of Bulgaria. Once there, they
translated biblical texts into the vernacular and trained local priests. Finally, in 927, the
Bulgarians gained their own patriarch, thus joining the commonwealth of eastern
Christendom.30The use of the Cyrillic alphabet – much closer to the Greek alphabet
– was adopted in this period for the writing of texts in Old Church Slavonic. According

Page 6

8
M. Bouchard
to Richard Fletcher: ‘In this manner the Bulgarians kept their own distinctive script,
but it was one that was significantly close to Greek.’31In the same century, the Old
Church Slavonic language and texts would be used to convert new Slavic populations:
those in the territory of Rus’.
The spread of Christianity, especially Orthodox Christianity, promoted new written
vernaculars and the flowering of the first literatures. This was not antithetical to
Christianity, as it recognised that nations would be baptised into the Christian faith.
Emperor Michael III summarised this in a letter sent to Rastislav of Moravia in 863:
‘You too are numbered among those great people who praise God in their own
language.’32The practice of translating Biblical texts was not limited to the Orthodox
East; in the fourth century, the Bishop Ulfila translated the Bible into Germanic
Gothic, a feat Fletcher describes as a ‘towering intellectual achievement’.33This
accomplishment is especially remarkable owing to the fact that the Goths were located
outside the Roman Empire; as Fletcher highlights: ‘To no one had the notion occurred
of translating the scriptures into a barbarian tongue which had never been written down
before.’34Bishop Ulfila was precocious, yet the need to use the vernaculars of the
‘barbarians’ to effectively convert non-Christians came to the fore in the eighth and
ninth centuries. At this time, a new missionary fervour spread in the Catholic West of
Western Europe, which was accompanied by the decision of the Third Council of
Tours that ordered bishops to translate the homilies of the Church Fathers into the
rustic Roman language and other vernaculars.
Clearly, Christianity favoured the consolidation of nations. Medieval scholars have
long been cognisant of the fact that there were notions of national identity in the
Christian Middle Ages, and this challenges Benedict Anderson’s assumption that such
concepts were not ‘thinkable’ in the Middle Ages. In Concepts of National Identity in the
Middle Ages, the authors of the preface affirm that: ‘The contributors of this volume,
both implicitly and explicitly, counter such a view.’35In this work, there are numerous
examples of national identity, one of the most intriguing of which is represented in the
fourteenth-century poetry of Eustache Deschamps. In Deschamps’ verse, the world is
clearly depicted in national terms, peopled with French, English, Germans, Bretons
and numerous others, and is stereotyped accordingly. To cite Iris Black: ‘National pride
acts as a source of strength for him when his own position is physically weak; it is his
security through the disorienting experiences of a traveller in the Hundred Years
War.’36Though most of the chapters cover later periods of the Middle Ages, it clear
that the idea of ‘nation’ was already entrenched; the question remains, however, as to
how widespread it would have been in the population.
Other historians have pushed back the study of national identity to much earlier
periods. Josep Llobera in The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in
Western Europe provides an excellent overview of the early historical evidence for
emerging national identities. Llobera argues that the roots of national identities are
found in the medieval period; he states: ‘As to national identities, once they were
formed and had an opportunity to consolidate themselves, their chances of survival
were good even if they lost their political autonomy through incorporation into a
different state.’37However, Llobera, as is the case with other medieval historians,
overlooks one important factor in the emergence of medieval nations: the role of
vernacular sermons in promoting a common nationhood among the masses. Both
Llobera38and Smyth39ignore the contribution of the English Bishop Aelfric, who was
one of the most prolific authors of Old English. At the wane of the tenth century,
Aelfric composed two collections of homilies destined to be read in local parishes, and

Page 7

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
9
also compiled the Lives of the Saints and began translating biblical texts. These texts
were meant to be heard and understood. As Aelfric himself states:
Even if rashly or presumptuously, we have, nevertheless, translated this book
from Latin works, namely from Holy Scripture, into the language to which we
are accustomed for the edification of the simple who know only this language,
either through reading or hearing it read; and for that reason we could not use
obscure words, just plain English, by which it may more easily reach to the
heart of the readers or listeners to the benefits of their souls, because they are
unable to be instructed in a language other than the one to which they were
born.40
The Old English texts portray a world peopled with nations, among which is the
Angelcynn found in engla lande, but scholars have largely overlooked the impact of such
vernacular sermons and the role that Christianity played in promoting medieval
national identity.
Russian scholars have recognised the importance of religion in consolidating and
maintaining national identities. The role of religion was particularly pointed among the
Southern Slavs, as is examined in the book The Role of Religion in the Formation of
Southern Slav Nations [my translation].41In the conclusion of this work, Churkina
underlines the importance of vernacular languages in consolidating nations. She claims
that: ‘An important consequence of the adoption of Christianity for the Southern Slavs
was the establishment of writing systems and literature in their native language’ [my
translation].42For the Orthodox Bulgarians and Serbs, there was no question that their
liturgy would be in the vernacular, and both used the Cyrillic alphabet. For the
Catholic Croats and Slovenians, the continued use of the vernacular was problematic.
Churkina explains how the Croats accepted the supremacy of the Pope on the
condition of maintaining Old Church Slavonic as the liturgical language and the
Glagolitic script as their alphabet.43Adrian Hastings recognises the importance of this
compromise and affirms that this exception granted to a Slavic liturgy written using
Glogolithic script had an ‘absolutely decisive and irreversible effect upon the distinct
national shaping of the Croats’.44Hastings rightly identifies that the vernacular Psalter
and liturgy would have had ‘the same kind of nationalising effect that the vernacular
Bible had on Protestant countries’.45I have argued elsewhere that this same nationalis-
ing effect existed in the Eastern Slavic lands, the lands of Rus’.46
Kievan Rus’: Historical Overview
The origins of Rus’ can be traced back to the eighth–ninth centuries when Varangian
Princes from Gotland (Sweden) established a new principality among the pagan
Eastern Slav tribes. Over time, this principality covered a vast territory stretching from
the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic Sea. The ruling house of Kiev adopted
Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople (988 AD). At the outset, the Varangian
princes established new centres in order to better control trade to the Black Sea and the
Byzantine Empire, collecting tribute from the Slavs to be traded in Constantinople. In
time they were assimilated, eventually adopting the language of the Slavs, but the
Riurik royal house survived into the sixteenth century. Over time, the principality of
Kiev was fractioned into smaller principalities and, during the twelfth century, up to
fifteen hereditary principalities evolved. These principalities, however, were united by
a common culture, a common language (though certainly with dialectical difference)

Page 8

10
M. Bouchard
and a common faith that maintained the ideal of the Russian land and goaded princes
to defend it.
These political divisions facilitated conquest from outside forces; in the thirteenth
century, the Mongols sacked Kiev, and – following the devastating attacks of the
Mongols – other powers moved into the territory of Rus’. In the fourteenth century, the
Grand Prince of Lithuania moved into Belarus and then into Ukraine, while at the same
time the Kingdom of Poland annexed the Principality of Galicia and a part of Volhynia.
For centuries, much of the former Western territories of Rus’ was ruled by outside
interests – namely Lithuanians, Poles and finally the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and
it is this history that would lead to the emergence of Ukrainian and Belorussian national
identities. I concur with the Ukrainian-Canadian scholar and historian John-Paul
Himka that, under different circumstances, there would only have been one nation. If
the Mongols had been pushed back, the Lithuanians and Poles would never have
pressed into the lands of Rus’, and a single nation of Rus’ would have been formed.
According to Himka: ‘This would not be the “Russian” nation we know today, but it
would be a single East Slavic nation, probably reflecting the greater influence of the
Kievan, proto-Ukrainian element, with regional variations and some dialectical differ-
ences over its fairly extensive territory.’47
In spite of the political divisions, there was an overriding unity in the ‘Russian
Land’, and especially in those lands where the elite were not ‘denationalised’.48In
the case of the Russian language, this meant a much longer period of interaction
between the written and oral language resulting in a visible ancestral link between
Old Church Slavonic and modern Russian. The Ukrainian historian Likhachev
notes that in Kievan Rus’ there was a unity of language and culture. Not only were
all the princes of Kievan Rus’ descendants of Riurik, the language spoken through-
out the Russian Land was relatively homogenous. Likhachev further remarks that
the regional dialectal differences would have been relatively minor.49The Eastern
Slavs would have also shared a common folklore.50Additionally, the written lan-
guage was itself a cohesive force; the original alphabet and first texts were brought
to Rus’ from Bulgaria. Likhachev states that these two languages (Old Bulgarian and
Old Russian) were quite similar and would have continually absorbed Russian
elements, thus leading to a convergence of the written and spoken language.51
Differences would always have remained, and the religious texts would have been
sacred, but we cannot speak of two distinct languages, as was the case in Western
Europe with Latin and the vernaculars; at best, we can speak of a diglossic situation
in which the written form of the language represented the High language.52In spite
of these differences, Kiseleva underscores that the written form of the language
required no translation to be understood. Read out loud, the language would have
been easily understood ‘by ear’ by any Slav in Kievan Rus’, and as such it would
have been quite easy for any individual to learn how to read the language with
minimal formal training.53
Language and ‘nation’ (or ethnos) were closely tied in the minds of Slavs. In Old
Russian, the same word (yazyk) was used to describe both nations and languages. The
spread of Orthodoxy in the Eastern Slavic lands facilitated the emergence of a Slavic
nation; already in the Primary Chronicle, there is reference to a Slavic nation of Rus’
that speaks a common language.54An examination of Old Eastern Slavic (i.e., Old
Russian) texts, Psalters, apocrypha, sermons, chronicles and various other sources
confirmed the revisionist theory of nationhood put forward by Hastings in that the
Bible presented a developed model of what it meant to be a nation, and therefore this

Page 9

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
11
model could serve as a mirror for other aspiring nations. This Old Russian language
used in religious text had become somewhat archaic by the sixteenth century, but it
was still largely comprehensible to all speakers of the ‘simple language’, as vernacu-
lar Russian was then called. It was only in the middle of the seventeenth century that
Church Slavonic began to diverge radically from the spoken vernacular. Dmitrii
Chizhevskii describes, as I will review later, how during this period, Ukrainian
scholars from Kiev and other centres came to Moscow and changed both language
and beliefs.55Also, many of the Ukrainian scholars that came to Moscow had
travelled to the West, and many had been trained in Western universities and would
have known both Polish and Latin. Under their influence, the Old Russian variant
of Church Slavonic was largely replaced with a new Slavonic literature inspired from
religious texts found in Ukraine and Belorussia. This revised Church Slavonic
diverged from the vernacular and survives to this day as the liturgical language of the
Russian Orthodox Church. Paradoxically, Church Slavonic only came to be seen as
a sacred language, one that was distinct from spoken Russian, in the modern period;
it was only with Nikon’s reforms in the seventeenth century that there emerges a
schism between the vernacular and the language of the Church (Church Slavonic)
in which one can speak of two distinct languages as opposed to a High and Low
language. Kiseleva addresses this in terms of a ‘cultural schism’ that marks the end
of Old Russian literature.56
This modern view of Church Slavonic as a sacred language to be used for Russian
Orthodox liturgy is quite radically different from the medieval understanding of
language and Church texts, whereby the language of the Church was seen as simply
the language of Rus’ and its people. This is supported by the writing of the Russian
scholar Kiseleva, who describes how the written Old Russian was a form of high
language and, when read out loud, was easily understood by any illiterate speaker of
the surrounding vernacular.57Unlike the Latin language in Western Europe, there was
no need to translate from the written form to the vernacular as they comprised one
language.
Epiphanius’ accounts of the life of Stefan indicate that the modernist assumptions
of nationhood are not universally true. Stefan, a medieval Orthodox cleric, clearly
understood himself as having a national identity and he saw the world around him in
national terms. It is doubtful that Stefan is the sole exception, and more research will
help to better clarify the ways in which medieval identities were articulated. Neverthe-
less, an examination of this medieval text will demonstrate that a Russian national
identity had already been consolidated and that the nation was seen as speaking a
distinct language and inhabiting a set territory. When this Russian missionary set out
to convert the people of Perm, he followed in the 1,000 year-old Orthodox tradition
of creating a new alphabet, translating texts and preaching to the masses in order to
convert them to Christianity. This was, however, one of the first examples of Russian
missionaries seeking to convert other peoples to Christianity – in this case a Finno-
Ugrian population who differed drastically from the Russians in terms of language and
culture. Not only did Stefan recognise the existence of a Perm language, he also
considered that there was a Perm land (located in what is now northwestern Russia)
and a Perm nation. All of this contradicts the very essence of imagined community as
set out by Anderson; in what is now Russia, it is during the medieval period that you
have the circulation of religious texts written in a vernacular for the express purpose
of creating a national community with a clear consciousness of belonging to one
nation.

Page 10

12
M. Bouchard
Saint Stefan
Stefan of Perm, one of the most renowned missionaries of the Russian Orthodox
Church, was born in 1345 in Ustyug, a town in the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal
located in Northern Russia on the left bank of the River Sukhona, not far from the
point where it merges with the Yug River to form the Dvina River. Already in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Russian Orthodox Church was expanding
outwards from its Eastern Slav base into the lands of neighbouring peoples, the
‘heathens’ as described in the Primary Russian Chronicle. To the north and west were
the Finno-Ugrian populations stretching from the Baltic Sea across into Siberia. One of
the most important populations was the Zyrians, a people ancestral to the modern
Komi. Stefan was Russian (or more accurately a ‘Rusin’), but was born among the
Zyrians. After having spent many years as a monk at Rostov, Stefan travelled to the
Perm territory in 1379. Living among the Zyrian population, he undertook the
translation of Biblical texts into their language; he created an alphabet modelled upon
existing symbols that figured in indigenous embroidery and carving. Not only did he
establish churches, but he also founded schools to teach the language and seminaries
to train priests. For his efforts, Stefan was named the first bishop of Perm.
George Fedotov provides a summary of the original text written by Epiphanius.58
Chizhevskii has also produced an account of this text.59From an anthropological
perspective, the life of Stefan, as described by Epiphanius the Wise, is particularly
interesting. Predominantly meaningful to the study of medieval nationhood is the way
in which identity is described in the account of Stefan’s life. In this text we see that a
national identity is well anchored in Stefan – and quite feasibly, by extension, in the
entire Eastern Slav population – and that the previous ethnic identities are declining.
Also, the account provides ethnographic insight into the missionary activities of me-
dieval Russian Orthodox clerics; it describes the way in which a new religion established
itself in a previously shamanistic population. If anything, Epiphanius’ account of
Stefan’s life acts as a foil to the modernist accounts of nation and nationalism.
Fedotov clearly recognises the importance of Stefan in shaping medieval nationhood.
Fedotov writes how: ‘To the missionary calling he unites a thirst for pure theological
knowledge, and in defending his life work – the creation of the national Zyrian (or
Permian) Church – he produced a theological basis for the national idea which
remained unsurpassed in ancient Russia.’60Stefan’s life history is itself an interesting
examination of medieval ethnicity and nationality in that Stefan was born in a small
Slavic community surrounded by a Finno-Ugrian population, the Western Permian or
Zyrians (a group related to the ancestors of the modern Komi). In analysing the life of
Stefan, I have relied upon a reproduction of Epiphanius’ original medieval text edited
by Chizhevskii and published in 1959. The central passage in this text, as concerns my
analysis of early nationhood, is a detailed description of Stefan’s identity in which
Epiphanius first refers to his nationality:
The Venerable Father Our Stefan … born Rusin, from the Slavic Nation, from
the country of Polunoshchnaya, called Dvinskia [the city being located close
to the Lesser Northern Dvina River], from the city called Ustyug, from
well-known parents, the son of a definite lover of Christ, a man of the true
faith by the name of Simeon one of the servants [a cleric] of the great
ecumenical Church of the Blessed Virgin which is on the Ustuz and from a
mother, such a Christian, by the name of Maria.61(my translation)
In this passage, we clearly see an articulation of nationality. As argued in another text,

Page 11

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
13
nationality was present in the earliest works such as the Primary Chronicle, where a
Slavic nation (‘yazyk’) was conceived. However, the term ‘Slavic’ is plainly too general,
as it is used in other Old Russian texts to describe other Slavs, notably the Moravians
converted to Christianity by Cyril and Methodius. In this case, the term ‘Rusin’
specifies a particular group of Slavs, namely the Slavs of Kievan Rus. The term was
widespread as it was maintained in the Western fringes of Rus, lands that were later
incorporated into what are now Ukraine and Slovakia. It entered the English language
via Latin as ‘Ruthenian’, the first designation applied to Ukrainians in Canada and the
United States. The fact that nationality is listed first is significant in its own right; it
signifies that nationality is privileged over regional affiliations and city of origin, though
these identities are likewise recognised.
Not only is Stefan Rusin, but he speaks three languages: Russian (rusky), Greek and
Permian. The Permian (or Zyrian) language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian language
family and is related to the Komi language. In Epiphanius’ account, Stefan uses the
term ‘Permian land’ (Permskaya zemlya) continually.62This is not fortuitous; in Old
Slavonic, the Greek ‘patris’ (equivalent to the Latin ‘patria’) was translated as ‘zemlya’
or ‘land’. Stefan, and later Epiphanius, describe a population with a defined language
and territory. The term ‘nation’ (Old Russian: ‘yazyk’) is used to describe the people
of Perm, as Stefan considers them a nation, as are the Slavs in the Russian land. When
Stefan begins his missionary activity among the Permian people, the region is still
pagan, and Stefan creates an alphabet to aid in the conversion of the Perm. In the
surrounding territory, Epiphanius lists the various peoples that populate this northern
region of what is now Russia. The peoples listed include, among others, the Yugra,
Pechera and Samoyed, illustrating the ethnic nature of medieval Russia; populations
are divided along both ethnic and national lines. What is most remarkable is that Stefan
wants to convert the Perm, but not necessarily assimilate them into his culture. As
Fedotov correctly recognises, Stefan seeks to create a national Perm church – a national
church that in the Eastern Orthodox world could have become autocephalous (gov-
erned by its own head bishop) organised along a territorial/national line. Stefan
becomes the first Bishop of Perm, and had it not been for the rise of Muscovy and the
centralising tendencies of Moscow, a Permian Orthodox Church feasibly could have
been created along the lines of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Stefan demonstrates a vigorous campaign to convert the Permian nation. He sets
about creating the alphabet then translating texts from Old Russian to the Permian
language. Having started, he then builds a number of churches and trains deacons,
teaching them to read and write the new language he has created and the texts that he
is translating.63His work is guided by a Biblical understanding of nationhood and the
Final Judgment that awaits. The New Testament and the Psalms are used to justify the
translation of Biblical texts into the Permian language and the missionary work among
the heathen nations. Epiphanius cites a number of Biblical verses: Mark 13:10 – ‘And
the gospel must first be published among all nations’ (King James Version); Matthew
24:14 – ‘And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness
unto all nations; and then shall the end come’ (King James Version); followed by
numerous passages referring to the Psalms. The central theme is that the word of God
must be brought to all the nations of the world so that they may worship God as
described in the Psalms.64Epiphanius follows this discussion with a description of the
creation of the Permian alphabet. Rather than adapting the Russian or the Greek
alphabet, Stefan took various symbols that existed in Permian decorative arts and
fashioned an alphabet to suit the language. The importance of this act cannot be

Page 12

14
M. Bouchard
underestimated; as Fedotov states: ‘[Stefan] did for the Zyrians what Cyril and
Methodius had done for the whole Slavic world. He translated the liturgy and the Holy
Scriptures – or rather, a part of them.’65
What comes through in the account of the life of Stefan is the relationship between
oral vernacular and written text. Stefan does not distinguish between the written text
and the spoken word; both are equally Russian. Unlike Western clergy who worry about
error and heresy when translating sacred Christian literature into the vernacular, Stefan
is unfazed by the act of translation and sought the help of God in prayer (as did Cyril
and Methodius) in order to devise a new script for the Permian language. Stefan is
described as studying the Permian language and calling upon the help of God to
achieve his task. God is depicted as helping Stefan create a new alphabet, create a
written language from the Permian vernacular and, after a few years, translate a number
of texts into the new Permian language. This was seen as a natural process, as the
Church writings were translated from Hebrew to Greek and to other languages
including Russian. The creation of a Permian writing was seen as beneficial to the
spread of Christianity; thanks to the new writings, those who were not baptised studied
the new texts, and the knowledge they gained brought them to Christ and the Christian
faith.66In the account of his life, Stefan is described as a teacher, and it is clear that the
act of translating Christian texts is seen as serving a noble purpose: bringing pagans to
the Christian faith.
As was the case with Cyril and Methodius, Stefan quickly sets about training an
indigenous priesthood. Having successfully preached among the Perm, he went to
Moscow and was appointed a bishop in the Land of Perm by the Moscow Metropoli-
tan.67After baptising followers in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he
immediately set about teaching them to read the new Permian language; he greeted
followers young and old as they set about learning to read and write. All the while,
Stefan continued to translate books from Russian to Permian with the help of God.68
What is somewhat surprising in the account of Stefan’s life is the missionary zeal
expressed by the author, who discusses in great length the necessity of bringing the
word of God to all the heathen nations and acting as witnesses to the true faith.69Stefan
is then lauded for his work in establishing a Permian literature, and a parallel is drawn
between Stefan, who brought the word of God to the Permians, and Cyril, who brought
writing to the Slavs.
The conversion of the Permian people was not without conflict, however. Stefan set
about destroying all of the vestiges of pagan Permian religion: the idols, shrines,
sanctuaries and various offerings left to the gods of the pagan Perm. At times, he risked
his life to do so; after Stefan burned an empty sanctuary, the Permians gathered around
him with poles and axes. Thinking he was about to die, Stefan preached to the
assembled crowd and was spared.70This was not to be the only time that the
population threatened to kill him. Slowly, Stefan gained converts; he taught the newly
baptised Christian Perm – both adults and children – to read.71Later, when he was
named Bishop of Perm, he ordained indigenous Permians as priests, deacons, readers
and chanters, and taught them to write Permian books. The climax of the process of
conversion was Stefan’s encounter with Pam the shaman, who is referred to as a
‘magician’ in the text.
Pam offered much resistance to the work of Stefan. Finally, Stefan challenged Pam
to a trial by fire and water. The two were to pass through a burning hut and throw
themselves into a hole in the frozen river. Pam first agreed to it, but then lost courage.
Stefan dragged him to the fire before relinquishing. As the gathered crowd cried for the

Page 13

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
15
killing of Pam, Stefan refused; he instead banished Pam and forbade him from
appearing in any Christian settlement.72Clearly, the missionary activity of Stefan was
not an attempt at superficial conversion, but rather an effort to completely transform
Permian society. Through display and pageantry, Stefan is reaching out to the popu-
lation, and through literacy he is spreading Biblical knowledge. All the while, he was
implicitly acknowledging the existence of a Permian nation and establishing the infra-
structure for an autonomous Permian Orthodox Church, one with its own liturgical
language, church leadership and territory. In essence, Stefan fashioned a medieval
national church in which the liturgical language was the vernacular and literacy was
encouraged among Christian converts. Epiphanius (who had personally known Stefan)
ends the account with a lengthy description of the mourning of Perm after Stefan’s
death. The people are particularly distressed that the remains of Stefan are carried away
to Moscow.
In many ways, the writings of Epiphanius and the life of Stefan do not conform to our
expectations of the medieval period; only the writings of Adrian Hastings adequately
explain what occurred in this northern territory.73In this account of Stefan, we see how
a priest guided by biblical writings strives to create a national culture. It is not a state
that is creating a nation; rather, it is religion that is consolidating existing communities.
This is a striking revelation that demonstrates the existence of nationality and nation-
hood in the medieval period. Fedotov makes this point very clearly:
Epiphanius, or rather Stephen himself, whose idea was taken up by his
disciple, humbled himself and his own Russian national consciousness before
the scarcely born national consciousness of another people, and how a modest
one! Only now the religious meaning of the national culture, revealed in the
work of St Cyril and Methodius and inherited by Russia, assumes its deep
universal meaning. Every nation, however small, has its own religious calling
and its particular gifts. There are no privileged peoples, no messianic nations,
in the Kingdom of Christ. The ideal image of the ‘mourning Permian
Church’, conceived in the spirit of ontological realism, gives a metaphysical
basis for the national idea. Only the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth
century, perhaps only Vladimir Soloviev, will develop and philosophically
reaffirm the idea of Stephen and that of ancient Russia that was contaminated
in Muscovy in the late fifteenth century by the Byzantine dream of the
universal Christian Empire.74
Stefan’s vision was shattered by the political events that were to follow his death. While
Moscow had begun its expansion in his lifetime, the rise of Moscow began in earnest
in the fifteenth century. Stefan’s native city, Ustyug, was incorporated into Muscovy
during the reign of Basil I (1389–1425). This territory was nonetheless disputed, as
Novgorod had historic ties to these northern territories, but Moscow’s conquest of
Novgorod and its final capitulation in 147875settled the matter once and for all. Later
in the century, Ivan III (the Great) absorbed not only Novgorold, but also Yaroslav and
Tver, major centres of power that had once rivaled Moscow, into Muscovy. His
successor, Basil III, incorporated Pskov and Smolensk, and finally Ivan IV (the Dread
or Terrible) conquered the Tatar capitals of Kazan and Astrakhan, thus opening the
way for expansion to the South and East and the rise of the Russian Empire.
The Zyrians were not immune from the effects of the expansion of Moscow; some of
the western Zyrian lands were lost as Slavic populations moved in and Zyrians were
either displaced or assimilated. The history of Ustyug provides a telling example of the

Page 14

16
M. Bouchard
Slavic expansion into Finno-Ugrian territory. In the earliest Old Russian text The
Primary Chronicle, the Perm (Zyrians) are first mentioned as one of the peoples that
must pay tribute to Kievan Rus’. With the fractioning of Kievan Rus’ into a number of
smaller principalities, the region surrounding Ustyug was colonised by two different
principalities. Already in the eleventh century, Novgorod was expanding its influence to
the north and east. Later, the regions falls under the dominion of colonisation of the
Suzdal-Rostov Principality. The city of Ustyug was founded as a fortified outpost
located a short distance (across the river) from a much older Finno-Ugrian settlement
of Gleden, although the exact foundation date is not known (but certainly dates back
to at least the twelfth century). In the first decades of the thirteenth century, an
Orthodox monastary was established in Ustyug; another monastery, the Trinity Monas-
tery, had already been established in Gleden in the twelfth century.
In the first half of the second millennium, the Slavic peasantry benefited from a much
warmer climate and pushed northwards in search of arable land. With the influx of this
population, territories thad had been formerly inhabited by the Finno-Ugrian Perm
became increasingly ‘Rusin’, and for this reason the region that now surrounds Ustyug
(renamed ‘Veliky Ustyug’ in the intervening centuries) is largely Russian, and the Komi
are located further to the east. By the end of the fifteenth century, the remaining Zyrian
population was subjugated to both the Tsars of Muscovy and the Orthodox Patriarch.
The Russian colonisation continued; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Russian
peasants continued to expand into Zyrian lands, even moving into the heart of the
Permian lands, notably Ust-Vym,76which Stefan had established as the capital of the
Great Perm bishhopric, and where he had founded the Annunciation of the Holy Virgin
Church and the Archangel Michael Monastery. Barely a century after the death of
Stefan, with the conquest of Novgorod by the rising power of Moscow, much of
Stefan’s work was undone. The autonomous bishopric of Perm was united with the
larger centre of Vologda, and the land of Perm was marginalised in the new predomi-
nantly Russian bisphopric with its capital squarely in the ‘Russian land’. Though there
were major migrations of populations (during this period starting in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, there were also movements of Komi-Zyrians to the north and east),
the idea of nationhood did not disappear with the rise of Moscow.
The writings of Epiphanius challenge us to reconsider some of the assumptions upon
which our understanding of nationhood and nation are founded, notably the concept
of the medieval ‘sacred language’ that underlies Benedict Anderson’s theory of
nationalism. Clearly, in the fourteenth century there was no sacred language in Russia.
As I will explain, a sacred liturgical language only emerged in Russia during the modern
period. This being the case, then the assumption that nations were ‘imagined’ in the
modern period is disputed.
How Church Slavonic Became a Sacred Language
Contrary to what is presented in Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Church Slavonic
did not become a sacred language in Russia until the modern period. Up to the
sixteenth century, we cannot speak of a distinct written script and vernacular; rather,
the language of the Church by the twelfth century onward was increasingly an extension
of the language of Rus’. This is exemplified by the writings of Epiphanius; Stefan is a
Rusin speaking a Russian language.77By the sixteenth century, the liturgical language
had become somewhat archaic, but it would have been entirely comprehensible to any

Page 15

Imagined Community and Presumed Sacred Languages
17
speaker of the ‘simple language’: the vernacular Russian of the Eastern Slavs. The
Slavonic liturgical language emerged in the modern period as a consequence of
modernisation and westernisation. Two factors contributed to the divergence of
Church Slavonic and the Russian language: the seventeenth-century influence of
foreign clerics that sought to ‘correct’ the church texts, and the eighteenth-century
imposition of Latin as a language of theological study.
An example that runs counter to Benedict Anderson’s ‘print-capitalism’ theory is the
printing press; this device led to the emergence of Church Slavonic, a language
divorced from the vernaculars of all Eastern Slavs. The first printed Slavonic Bible was
produced due to the patronage of the Orthodox Prince Konstantyn Ostrozky and
countered the efforts of translating the Bible into the local Ukrainian vernacular. As
Chizhevskii notes: ‘From the theological point of view, the text of the Ostrih Bible was
a great success, but from a literary point of view, it succeeded only in cementing the rift
between the Church (Slavonic) and literary (semi-vernacular) languages. But most
important, this Church Slavonic text could never become the norm for the literary
language of Ukraine.’78The Ostrog Bible79and other such works divorced from the
vernaculars came to influence Russia in the seventeenth century, as this Bible and other
old works of the Ostrog printing press were reproduced with minor changes in Moscow
in the first half of the seventeenth century. Together with the Ukrainian scholars in
Moscow and the reforms of the Patriarch Nikon, these texts led to the predominance
of a modern Church Slavonic that replaced the older written literary language: Old
Russian. In the final decades of the seventeenth century, the metropolitan of Kiev was
integrated under the Moscow patriarchate, and in the eighteenth century the indepen-
dent Ukrainian Orthodox Church was absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Church;
however, the Ukrainian influence ultimately changed the Russian Orthodox Church. As
was the case in Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church adopted the revised Church
Slavonic, which could never be the norm for the literary language of Russia and ensured
that Church Slavonic would be a ‘sacred language’.
The incorporation of Kiev and the western lands of Rus’ into the Polish Kingdom
and the Grand-Duchy of Lithuania led to an increasing divergence of what were to
become the Russian and the Ukrainian languages. Though regional differences existed,
there was a great deal of linguistic uniformity in the Slavic language throughout Kievan
Rus’. Written Church Slavonic was not that much different from the colloquial
language. However, with Kiev and the neighbouring territories being politically cut off
from what had been the eastern and northern territories of Rus’, a linguistic divergence
occurs. Part of this is due to the linguistic evolution of what was to become Russian,
Belorussian and Ukrainian. In Kiev, a new force is felt, namely the South Slav influence
from Bulgaria. These changes are tied to the rupture within the lands of Rus’.
After the devastation wrought by the Mongol invasions, the Metropolitan of the
Orthodox Church in Rus’ moved; in 1299, the Metropolitan Cyril relocated, along with
all his clergy, to Vladimir, and in 1326 the Metropolitan’s seat was transferred to
Moscow.80In spite of this relocation, successive generations of metropolitans laid claim
to ‘all of Rus’’ – a phrase invoked by the metropolitan’s of Rus’ as early as the turn of
the thirteenth century, and adopted much later by the Grand Prince of Moscow. Cut
off from the West by the Mongol invasions, the Orthodox Church under the rule of the
metropolitans based in Moscow became increasingly independent, and in 1448, follow-
ing the failed attempts of Metropolitan Isidore to unify the Catholic and Orthodox
Church, the Russian bishops elected their own metropolitan independently of Con-
stantinople; the Russian church thus became autocephalous. In the next century, in