METHODIUS OF THESSALONICA

(c. 815-885 A.D.)--Greek chronicler of the Khazar polemic, one of the Slavic apostles and the enlightener of Eastern Christianity, elder brother of Constantine of Thessalonica, Cyril. Hailing from the family of the Byzantine commander of Thessalonica, Drungar Leo, Methodius tested his talents as administrator of a Slavic region, in all likelihood in the area of the Strumica (Strymon) River. He knew the language of his Slavic subject, who had bearded souls and in winter carried birds inside their shirts to keep warm. In the year 840 A.D., after a brief period, he left for Bithynia, near the Sea of Propontis, but for the rest of his life he rolled the memory of his Slavic subjects in front of him like a ball. The books cited by Daubmannus say that he studied there under a monk, who once told him: "When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly black out the thoughts of others, for there is not enough room in us for two scents at one time. Those under the sign of the Holy Trinity, a masculine sign, take in only the odd sentences of their books when they read, whereas we, under the sign of the number four, a feminine number, take in only the even sentences of our books. You and your brother will not read the same sentences from the same book, since our books exist only as a combination of masculine and feminine signs . . . ." Indeed, there was another person from whom Methodius learned--his younger brother, Constantine. At times, he would observe that this younger brother of his was more intelligent than the author of the book he was currently reading. Then Methodius would realize he was wasting his time, close the book, and converse with his brother. Methodius became a monk on the Asia Minor coast in a colony of ascetics called Olympus, where he was joined by his brother. They watched the sand, swept by the Easter wind, reveal on each holiday yet another ancient desert temple at a new site, showing only enough for them to make the sign of the cross over it and read out the "Our Father", before it was buried again forever. It was then that he began dreaming two parallel dreams, and this lead to the legend that he would also have two graves. In the year 861 A.D. he departed with his brother to see the Khazars. This was nothing new for the two brothers from Thessalonica. They had heard of these powerful people from their teacher and friend Photius, who had contacts with the Khazars, and they knew that the Khazars preached their faith in their own language. On orders from the capital, Methodius now participated in the Khazar polemic at the Khazar court, both as a witness and as Constantine's associate. The 1691 Khazar Dictionary notes that on this occasion, the Khazar kaghan told his guests something about the sect of dream hunters. The kaghan despised the sect, which was loyal to the Khazar Princess Ateh, and he compared the futile work of the dream hunters with the Greek story of the skinny mouse who slipped easily through the hole into a basket of wheat, but when he had eaten his fill could not get out on his full stomach: "You cannot get out of the basket when you are full. You can do so only when you are hungry, as when you entered. And it is the same with the swallower of dreams; he easily slips through the narrow chick between reality and dream when he is hungry, but when he has caught his prey and picked his fruit, he can no longer return with his fill of dreams, because to leave you must be the same as when you entered. So he must leave his pickings or else forever remain in dreams. Either way, he is of no use to us . . . ."

After their Khazar journey, Methodius once again retreated to Olympus in Asia Minor; when he saw the same icons for the second time, they looked tired. He became head of the Polychron Monastery, of which nothing was known for centuries except that perhaps been built at the juncture of three measures of time--Arab, Greek, and Hebrew--whence its name.

METHODIUS OF THESSALONICA (FROM A 9TH-CENTURY FRESCO)

In the year 863 A.D. Methodius returned to the midst of the Slaves. He wanted to establish a Slavic school under Greek influence, with its own students, a Slavic alphabet, and book translated from Greek into Slavonic. He and his brother had known since childhood that birds in Thessalonica and birds in Africa do not speak the same language, that swallows from Strumica and swallows from the Nile do not understand one another, and that only albatrosses speak the same language everywhere in the world. With these thoughts in mind, they set out for Moravia, Slovakia, and Lower Austria, gathering around them young men who looked at their tongues rather than listened to what they said. Methodius decided to present a finely decorated stick as a gift to one of the men he and his brother taught. They all hoped he would present it to the best pupil and waited to see who that would be. But Methodius gave it to his worst pupil, saying : "A teacher spends the least time teaching his best pupils and remains the longest with the worst, because the quick ones quickly move on. . . ."

It was in a room with a rotting floor, the kind that nips at bare feet, that Methodius first heard he and his brother had been attacked. Their clashes began with the Trilinguists, German defenders of the concept that worship could be offered in only three languages (Greek, Latin, and Hebrew). In Pannonia, on Lake Balaton, where one's hair freezes in the winter and one's eyes become in the wind like a tablespoon and a teaspoon, Methodius and his brother spent some time in the capital of the region's Slav Prince Kotsel. In battle the prince's soldiers bit as well as any horse or camel; they forced snakes out of their skin with the blows of a rod; their women gave birth in the air, hanging from a holy tree. They tamed fish in the mud of the Pannonian marshes and showed newcomers an old man who prayed by removing a fish from the mud and letting it fly off the palm of his hand like a falcon. And it would actually rise up in the air and fly, shaking off the mud and using its fins as wings.

In 867 A.D. the brothers set out with their followers and disciples on one of those journeys where every step is a letter, every path a sentence, and ever stop a number in a large book. In 867 A.D., in Venice, they entered into another debate with the Trilinguists, and then they arrived in Rome, where Pope Adrian II acknowledged the legitimacy of the Thessalonican brothers' teachings and ordained the Slavic disciples in the Basilica of St. Peter. For this occasion, the Slavonic liturgy was sung in a language only recently tamed; it had been bound and brought from the Balkan expanses to the capital of the world like a small animal in a cage of Glagolthic letters. There in Rome, one evening in the year 869 A.D., while his Slav followers were spitting into one another's mouths, Methodius' brother, Constantine, died as St. Cyril; Methodius returned to Pannonia. He was in Rome a second time, in 870 A.D., when the Pope conferred upon him the title of Archbishop of Pannonia and Sirmium, whereupon the Salzburg Archbishop was forced to leave Lake Balaton.

When he returned to Moravia in the summer of 870 A.D., Methodius was imprisoned by the German bishops and locked up for two years, during which he could hear nothing but the sound of the Danube. He was brought to trial before a synod is Regensburg, then tortured and exposed naked to frost. While they whipped him, his body bent over so low that his beard touched the snow, Methodius thought of how Homer and the poet Elijah had been contemporaries, how Homer's poetic state had been larger than the state of Alexandria of Macedonia, because it had stretched from Pontus to beyond Gibraltar. He thought of how much Homer could not have known all that moved through and was to be found in the seas and cities of his state, just as Alexander the Great could not have known all that was to be found in his own state. He also thought of how Homer had at some point written into his work the name of Sidon and with it, unknowingly, that of the prophet Elijah, fed by birds according to God's will. He thought of how Homer had seas and towns in his vast poetic state, not knowing that in one of them, in Sidon, sat the prophet Elijah, who was to become an inhabitant of another poetic state, one as vast, eternal, and powerful as Homer's own--an inhabitant of the Holy Scriptures. And finally he wondered whether the two contemporaries had ever met, Homer and St. Elijah, the settler of Galaad--both immortal, both armed only with words, one blind and gazing into the past, the other clairvoyant and obsessed with the future, one a Greek who sang of water and fire better than any poet, the other a Jew who rewarded with water and punished with fire, using his cloak as a bridge. There is a tight pass on earth--thought Methodius finally--one no wider than ten camel deaths, where two men missed each other. This space between their strides is narrower than any gorge in the world. Never had two greater things been so near each other. Or are we mistaken, like all those whose sight serves the memory rather than the ground beneath us?

After the Pope interceded, Methodius was released, and in 880 A.D., for the third time, he argued in Rome for the legitimacy of his work and the Slavonic liturgy; once again the Pope issued a missive confirming the correctness of the Slavonic Mass. Along with the story of Methodius' beating, Daubmannus also tells how Methodius bathed three times in Rome's Tiber river, as in birth, marriage, and death, how he took Communion there with three enchanted breads. In 882 A.D. Methodius was received with highest honors at the court in Constantinople and then at the patriarchate, at whose head sat his childhood friend the Patriarch and philosopher Photius. Methodius dies in Moravia in 885 A.D., leaving behind him the Slavonic translation of the Holy Scriptures, the Nomocannon, and the sermons of the Holy Fathers.

In his capacity as an eyewitness and an associate of Constantine the Philosopher in the Khazar mission, Methodius appears twice as a chronicler of the Khazar polemic. He translated Cyril's "Khazar Orations" into Slavonic and, judging by the words of Cyril's hagiography, he edited the texts (dividing them into eight books). Since Cyril's "Khazar Orations" have not been preserved in either the Greek original or Methodius' Slavonic translation, the most important Christian source concerning the Khazar polemic remains the Slavonic hagiography of Constantine the Philosopher (Cyril), completed under the supervision of Methodius himself. Here the date of the polemic (861 A.D.) has been preserved, along with a detailed description of Constantine's speech and those of his unnamed opponents and interlocutors--the Hebrew and Moslem representatives at the Khazar court. Daubmannus gives the following opinion of Methodius: "The hardest to plow are someone else's field and one's own wife"--he notes--"but since every man is stretched on his wife, as on a cross, it devolves that it is harder to bear one's own cross than another's. So too was it with Methodius, who never bore the cross of his brother . . . . For his younger brother was his spiritual father."