Constantine of Kiev
Our Father among the Saints Constantine, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus
Bishop · d. 1159
Commemorated 5 June — Repose at Chernigov in 1159
Constantine, a Greek sent from Constantinople, was Metropolitan of Kiev from 1156 to 1158 in the bitterest crisis the young Church of Rus had yet known: the see had been filled without Constantinople's consent by Clement Smolyatich, and Constantine's task was to undo that irregular tenure — which he did with a severity that scandalised many, annulling Clement's ordinations and pronouncing anathema on the dead Grand Prince who had procured them. Driven from Kiev in 1158 by the son of the prince he had anathematised, he died at Chernigov in 1159, having first written a testament requiring that his body be flung out unburied as a penance for the disorder of which he held himself the cause. What followed — the storm over Kiev and the calm over Chernigov, the pillars of fire above the corpse, and the honourable burial on the third day — turned a broken man into a venerated one. He is commemorated on June 5.
The vacancy and the schism over Clement Smolyatich
After the departure of Metropolitan Michael II from Kiev in 1145 the metropolitan see stood empty. In 1147 the Grand Prince Izyaslav Mstislavich, unwilling to wait on Constantinople, had a council of Russian bishops elect the learned monk Clement Smolyatich — a genuinely remarkable man, the first native Russian writer to be called a philosopher — as metropolitan, consecrating him, by the account the chronicle gives, with the relic of the head of St Clement of Rome in place of a patriarchal blessing. It was a defensible act of necessity and an indefensible breach of canonical order, and it split the episcopate: Nifont of Novgorod and others refused to concelebrate with Clement, and the Patriarchate did not recognise him.
Metropolitan of Kiev, 1156–1158
When Yuri Dolgoruky of Suzdal took Kiev in 1155 he expelled Clement and applied to Constantinople for a lawful metropolitan. The Patriarch sent Constantine, a Greek, who reached Kiev in 1156 and was received as metropolitan.
His measures were canonically defensible and pastorally disastrous. He declared Clement's consecration void and, with it, all the ordinations Clement had performed — requiring the affected clergy to be re-ordained and, initially, suspending those who had served under him. Worse, he pronounced an anathema upon the memory of Izyaslav Mstislavich, who had died in 1154 and who was remembered in Kiev as a good prince. It is at this point that the sources begin to distinguish between the rectitude of his cause and the temper of his administration: he was, they suggest, a man who could see what the canons required and could not see what his people could bear.
Flight to Chernigov and repose
In 1158 Izyaslav's son Mstislav Izyaslavich took Kiev, and the anathematiser of his father could not remain. Constantine fled to Chernigov, to the protection of Prince Svyatoslav Olgovich — the same prince who eight years earlier had brought home the relics of his brother Igor — and there, in 1159, he fell ill and died.
The testament and the signs
Before his death Constantine sealed a written testament and gave it to Antony, Bishop of Chernigov, binding him by an oath to execute it and not to open it until he was dead. Opened, it required that the metropolitan's body should not be given burial, but should be dragged out of the city with a rope about the feet and left in the open field for the dogs and the birds — a self-imposed sentence for the strife he believed he had brought upon the Church, in the tradition of the great penitents who ask to be treated as criminals.
Bishop Antony, bound by his oath, told Prince Svyatoslav, and the body was carried out and left in a field outside Chernigov. What the chronicle records of the next three days is the reason the Church remembers him. Over Kiev there broke a darkness and a storm of extraordinary violence — three days of tempest, with lightning that killed several men in the prince's own household, and a shaking of the earth — while over Chernigov the air stood perfectly still and clear, and for three nights three pillars of fire were seen standing above the place where the metropolitan lay. On the third day Prince Svyatoslav had the body taken up and buried with honour in the cathedral of the Saviour at Chernigov, and at that hour the storm over Kiev ceased. Prince Mstislav in Kiev, understanding the sign, gave orders for the metropolitan to be commemorated as a bishop of the Church.
Veneration
Constantine is called blessed (blazhennyi) rather than sviatitel' in most Russian usage, and his veneration is local to Chernigov, where he lies in the same cathedral of the Saviour as the passion-bearer Igor — so that the two men, both commemorated on June 5 and both buried in the same church, are joined in the Chernigov synaxis by more than coincidence of date. What the Church honours in him is not his policy but his repentance: a hierarch who, having applied the canons without mercy, judged himself by them more harshly still.
Feast and commemoration
June 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 18), a Russian and Ukrainian commemoration kept also by the Orthodox Church in America; it does not appear in the Greek or Antiochian menaia. He is commemorated in the synaxis of the saints of Chernigov and among the hierarchs of Kiev. The day is shared, in Russian usage, with the translation of the relics of Igor of Chernigov and the repose of Theodore Yaroslavich, and, in the universal calendar, with Dorotheus of Tyre.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
Thou wast a rule of faith and a guardian of the canons, O hierarch Constantine, and having judged others hardly thou didst judge thyself more hardly still, asking for thy body the portion of the condemned. But God glorified thee with pillars of fire, and gave thee an honourable burial. Entreat Him that our souls be saved.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
Constantine is written as a hierarch of the Russian rite: in sakkos and omophorion, or in phelonion, with the white metropolitan's klobuk, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left; he is given a dark beard of middle length, as befits a Greek who died not many years after coming to Rus. His proper narrative subjects are the two scenes of his death: the sealed testament handed to Bishop Antony, and the three pillars of fire standing over the body in the field outside Chernigov while the storm breaks over Kiev in the distance — a striking composition which appears occasionally in Chernigov-region icons and in printed illustrations of the Russian Lives of the Saints. Where he appears in the synaxis of the saints of Chernigov he stands among the hierarchs, near the princely passion-bearers of the same city.
No pre-1900 icon of Metropolitan Constantine has been located for this collection. As a June commemoration he cannot appear in the Menologion of Basil II, and as a twelfth-century Russian saint of purely local cult he is not among the subjects of the widely digitised Greek and Cretan panels.
Disputed questions
- Date and year of repose. 1159 is the received year; June 5 is the calendar day, and it is not certain whether it marks the death, the burial on the third day, or the later commemoration established at Chernigov.
- The extent of the annulments. The chronicles differ on how far Constantine went against Clement's clergy — whether he re-ordained them all, or only suspended and then restored them on submission. The harsher account is the more widely repeated.
- Whether the see was vacant or contested at his death. Clement Smolyatich was still alive and was reasserted by Mstislav Izyaslavich after Constantine's flight; the Patriarchate eventually resolved the matter by sending a third man, Theodore, in 1160, on the agreement of the princes that neither Clement nor Constantine should hold the see. Constantine died still regarding himself as the lawful metropolitan.
- Not to be confused with the many other Constantines of the calendar — the emperor Constantine the Great (May 21), Constantine of Murom (May 21), and the later Russian and Greek saints of the name.