Cyril and Methodius and the Letters for a People Without Any

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A man stands at a table in a long hall in the middle of Europe, and in front of him are several very learned people who have come to tell him that he is wrong. They are not unkind about it. They have simply done the sums. There are three languages in which God may be praised, they say, and they know which three, because they are written on the cross: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. Anything else is barbarous. Anything else is, frankly, rather rude to the Almighty.

And the man at the table, who has been awake since dawn and who is not, at this moment, in the best of health, looks at them for a while. Then he asks them a question about the rain.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us start at the beginning, in a port city on a warm sea.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about two brothers who are saints in both traditions, Cyril and Methodius, and it comes from the old biographies of the two of them, written in Slavonic by their own disciples not long after they died. The main events are history. The conversations, the weather, the food and the jokes are our own invention, told in the spirit of the originals, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us begin in Thessalonica, which is the city we now call Thessaloniki, in the north of Greece, around the year eight hundred and twenty-five.

It was a good city to be born in. It sat at the head of a wide bay with mountains behind it, and it had a harbour full of ships, a market full of everything, and walls that were, even then, very old. It was the second city of the Byzantine empire, which is the name we give to the Greek-speaking Roman empire that went on being the Roman empire, as far as it was concerned, for another thousand years. The people there had Greek names and spoke Greek and said their prayers in Greek. And all around the city, in the hills, there were villages whose people spoke something else.

They spoke Slavonic. We shall come back to that, because it is the whole story.

In those years, Slavic-speaking farmers had been settling across the Balkans for two hundred years, and in the countryside of Macedonia they were the neighbours. So a child in Thessalonica, in a family of any sort of standing, would hear Slavonic at the market stalls, from the people who sold the cheese and the honey and the firewood. It was not a language of books. It was a language for haggling, for songs, for telling children to come in before it got dark. It had no alphabet at all, because nobody had yet thought of writing it down.

Hold on to that. A whole language, spoken by thousands of people, and not a single written word of it.

Now, in this city lived a man called Leo, who held a position of some rank in the army, and he and his wife had a large family. The old Life says seven sons. The youngest was called Constantine, and the eldest of them was called Methodius, and the Life tells us that Methodius was the one who went into government first, and Constantine the one who went into books. They were, as far as anybody could tell, very different people. And as far as anybody could tell, they could not have managed without each other.

Let us do Constantine first, because he is the one the Life tells the most about, and because he was the sort of child that adults talk about at dinner.

The old writer says he was clever from the start. He says that when Constantine was seven years old he had a dream. And I will tell it as the Life tells it, as a story that was handed down about him, and I want to be clear that we have no way of knowing whether the boy dreamed it, or whether he told it later when he was grown, or whether his friends told it for him afterwards because it suited him so well.

In the dream, he said, the governor of the city had gathered all the girls of Thessalonica, every one of them, and told him: choose one of them to be your wife. And the boy looked them over, one by one, and then he picked the loveliest of them all. And her name was Sophia. In Greek, Sophia means wisdom.

You can see why the story was kept. It is a nice story, and it sounds like him, and it is quite possible that nobody would have remembered it if he had grown up to be a cheesemonger. But it is also exactly what a grown man might say, looking back, about a childhood spent hungry for books. So we will call it a dream, and a story, and enjoy it as one.

There is a second story about the boy, and this one the Life gives as a plain fact. When he was still quite young, he read the sermons of Gregory of Nazianzus. Saint Gregory is one of the three great teachers of the Eastern Church, the one they call the Theologian, and his sermons were not light reading. Constantine, the Life says, loved them so much that he adopted Gregory as his teacher. It is a rather splendid thing to say about a boy, that his favourite teacher was a man who had been dead for four hundred years.

When Constantine was about fourteen, his father died. The family had no great fortune, and the boy had no money for school. And that might have been the end of the story, a bright child with a good mind and nowhere to take it. But a man at the court in Constantinople had heard about him. This was Theoktistos, who was a very senior official of the emperor, the sort who in a modern country would have a number of titles and a large desk. He sent for the boy. He took him in and had him educated alongside the young emperor.

So Constantine went up to the Queen of Cities, to the great capital, and there he studied everything. Grammar and poetry. Geometry and arithmetic. Music and astronomy. Rhetoric, which is the art of persuading people, and philosophy, which is the art of finding out what you ought to persuade them of. He studied with some of the finest minds of the age, including a man who would later become patriarch, Photius, who was among the most learned men of his time. And everyone who met Constantine said the same thing: that he took in knowledge the way a sponge takes in water.

I would like to tell you he was also a good dinner guest, but the sources say nothing on the subject, and I have my doubts.

Here is the first thing about the young scholar that surprises us. He was offered everything.

Theoktistos, who was fond of him, wanted him to marry his own goddaughter. It was a very good match. It came with money and rank and a career at the court. And Constantine, the Life says, said no. He did not want it. He wanted to study and to pray. So he accepted a more modest post instead, that of librarian to the patriarch, at the church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, the largest church in the world. If you ask what is the best job for a boy who had once chosen Wisdom out of a crowd of girls, I should say it is the keys to the library of the Holy Wisdom.

He did not stay there long. The old writer says that he went off to a quiet place on the shore of the Black Sea and was lost to his friends for six months, and when they found him he was, according to the Life, simply praying. Then they brought him back, and the emperor made him a teacher of philosophy, and from that time he was known as Constantine the Philosopher. That was his name for most of his life. We call him Cyril, but Cyril was a name he took only on his deathbed, and we will come to it.

And what about Methodius, the elder brother? Methodius had gone another way. He had been a governor, in a region where Slavs lived, of some kind, and he had, as the Life says, learned the Slavonic language there. Then he too had left it all, and gone into a monastery on the slopes of Mount Olympus, the Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, not the Greek one with the gods on it, and become a monk. Years later he would be abbot of a monastery called Polychron, on the Sea of Marmara.

The two of them, in other words, had both walked away from comfortable jobs to do something quieter. And they would, in time, be called back out of the quiet, for something large.

Now we come to a journey, and to a small and rather pleasing adventure.

Somewhere around the year eight hundred and sixty, the emperor sent Constantine on a mission to the Khazars. The Khazars were a people who lived north of the Caucasus, between the Black Sea and the Caspian, and their khagan, who was their king, was curious about the faiths of his neighbours. There were Muslims at his court, and Jews, and there were Christians too. He had asked the emperor to send someone who could explain what Christians believed. And the emperor, looking for the person most likely to come back with all his arguments intact, chose Constantine. And Constantine asked for his brother to come along.

On the way, they stopped at the city of Cherson, on the Crimean coast. There, the Life says, Constantine began learning Hebrew, so he could read the Scriptures to the people he was going to meet, and he took the time to study the language of the Samaritans too. The old writer adds a remarkable detail. He says Constantine found in Cherson a Gospel and a Psalter written in letters he did not know, and a man who spoke the language of those letters, and that within a short time, with the man's help, Constantine could read them.

Scholars have argued for a long time about what this means. Some say the letters were Syriac, or Gothic, or something else. Some think the writer was telling a pleasant story. I only mention it because it fits so well with what comes next. The old Life seems to want us to see that Constantine, already, had a gift for taking an unfamiliar sound and finding its letters.

And the Life also says that at Cherson he found the bones of Saint Clement, the third pope after Peter, who was said to have been exiled to the Crimea and to have died there. Constantine took the relics with him. We shall see them again.

Now, the debate with the Khazars was a long one, and it was, by the account we have, a courteous one. Constantine and the khagan's learned men went back and forth, and there were Jewish scholars and Muslim scholars and the Christian philosopher, and the arguments covered a great deal of ground. The Life gives a number of them and I will not give them here, because we are doing a bedtime story and not a seminar, and because I have a feeling you would drift off in the middle. The result was that the Khazars did not become a Christian nation. But the Life says some of them were baptised, and many captives were set free, and the khagan sent the two brothers home with honour. It was not a failure, and it was not a triumph. It was a useful practice.

And then, in the year eight hundred and sixty-two, a letter arrived at the emperor's court.

It came from far to the northwest, from a prince called Rastislav. Rastislav ruled Moravia, which is roughly the country that today lies in the east of the Czech Republic and the west of Slovakia, and he was in an awkward position. His people had received Christianity over the years, but from missionaries who had come from the west, from the lands of the Franks and the Bavarians. These missionaries had been sincere, and they had preached and baptised. But they said their prayers in Latin, and they preached in Latin or in German. And the Moravian farmers, as farmers will, understood about one word in ten.

Rastislav also had a political problem, which was that the Franks to his west were large, and he was small, and the clergy who came from the Frankish side were very ready to remind him of whose kingdom he lived beside. So he made a choice. He wrote to Emperor Michael in Constantinople and he said something that I think is one of the finest requests in the history of the Church. The Life gives it, more or less, in his own words. He said: our people have rejected paganism and keep the Christian law, but we do not have a teacher who can explain the true faith to us in our own language. Send us such a man.

In our own language. That was the request.

And the emperor, who was a young man with a reputation for caring more about horses than about theology, was nonetheless moved by it, and he turned to Constantine and said something like this, and I give you the Life's own sense: you are the one to go. No one else can do this as you can. Take your brother. You are both from Thessalonica, and all the people of Thessalonica speak good Slavonic.

Which was true. And which was the sort of thing that a lot of history depends on: two brothers, who happened to have grown up on the right street.

Constantine's answer, according to the Life, was that he was tired, and he was not well, and he would go on foot if he had to, but there was one condition. He needed an alphabet. A people cannot be taught to read, he said, or to pray from a book, without letters of their own. And the emperor, who was probably used to having the people he asked say that sort of thing, said: well, my uncle and my ancestors looked for letters and did not find them. How are you to find them?

And Constantine answered, with that dry courage which I think is the thing I most like about him: who can write speech on water, or win a name for himself as a heretic? That is to say, he knew perfectly well that people would call him one. But he would do it anyway, because God could give him the letters, if God wanted the thing done.

So now there are two brothers in a monastery, with a problem.

I want you to imagine this, because it is the part of the story that I find most beautiful. There is a language. It has been spoken for centuries. It is full of sounds that Greek has no letters for, because Greek has never needed them. It has the sound that we write in English as sh, and the sound we write as ch, and the sound of a soft, hissing zh, and the sounds that are, in Slavonic, nearly vowels but are not quite, and there are nasal sounds that come out through the nose, a bit like a French vowel. It is a language that sounds like water running over small stones. And you have to find, for every one of those sounds, a small shape that can be written with a pen.

How do you begin?

I do not know how Constantine began. The Life does not say. It says only that he gathered his helpers, and that he made the letters, and that when the letters were ready he sat down and started to translate. And I can imagine it, because it is the sort of work that people still do today when they write down a language for the first time. You listen. You ask a person to say a word. You write down what you hear. You ask them to say another word that sounds nearly the same. You find out which differences matter. And slowly, over months, you find out how many sounds the language actually uses, and then you find the smallest set of signs that can show them.

Constantine, who had spent his life with words, and whose brother knew the speech of the Slavs from daily life, did exactly this. And the alphabet that came out of it is the one scholars call Glagolitic. It is a lovely thing, full of loops and curls, a little like a very elegant knitting pattern. Many of the letters have a rounded body with a tail or a hook. The name comes from an old Slavonic word, glagol, which means word.

Now I want to be careful about one thing. Many people think Cyril invented the alphabet we call Cyrillic, which is used today in Russia and Ukraine and Bulgaria and Serbia and many other countries. It is named after him. But that is not how the history goes, as far as scholars can tell. The Cyrillic alphabet seems to have been made a generation later, probably in Bulgaria, by his pupils, who took a good deal from Greek capital letters and added a few of Constantine's shapes for the sounds that Greek could not do. It was named in his honour. So it is, in a sense, his, but it is his by way of his students, and I would be telling you a tidier story than the sources allow if I said he wrote it himself.

What he did write was the older one, and the first thing he translated with it, the Life says, was the opening of the Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Think about that for a moment. In the beginning was the Word. And the first word that a people ever read in their own language, in their own letters, was that sentence.

Methodius and Constantine, and the helpers they had gathered, worked at the translating for a while, and then, in the year eight hundred and sixty-three, they set out for Moravia. It was a long road, up through the Balkans and along the Danube, and the Life does not describe it. We can guess that they went with a small party, and that there were books in the baggage, and that the books were perhaps the first of their kind. I hope that someone had thought to bring a very large waterproof bag.

Rastislav received them with great honour. The Life says that he gathered his nobles and his people to hear them. He gave them pupils, and the brothers began teaching them at once, how to read, how to write, and above all how to pray. The Life says that in a few years they trained a whole body of men for the Church. And the Gospel was read in Slavonic, and the Divine Liturgy was served in Slavonic, and the psalms were sung in Slavonic, and the people understood.

One can only guess at what that first morning was like. You have been attending a church where, for years, you have heard solemn words go by, beautiful and strange, and you have known roughly when to stand and when to kneel and nothing more. And one morning, someone stands up, and reads, and every word is plain. The word is about love. It is about forgiveness. It says that God has not forgotten you. The Life says, in a phrase I find rather lovely, that the ears of the deaf were opened, to hear the words of the book, and the tongue of the dumb became clear.

I will confess I have been a little carried away. The old writer was writing to praise his masters. But I think the picture is right, and I do not think there is any exaggeration in saying that something remarkable had happened.

Now, if it had stopped there, it would be a fine story. But it did not stop there. Not everyone was pleased.

The clergy of the Franks and the Bavarians, who had been working in Moravia before the brothers came, were not delighted to see two Greeks arrive and to find the churches filling up with people who preferred to pray in a language they could follow. Some of them had real objections. Some of them had what we might call professional ones. But the main objection, the one that people put into words, was the one that I started this evening with: that there were only three languages in which the liturgy might lawfully be said.

The reasoning went like this. Pilate had written the title on the cross in Hebrew and in Greek and in Latin. Therefore, those were the languages of the Gospel, and therefore these were the languages in which it should be proclaimed. Anything else was a dangerous novelty. Some of the clergy called the idea the heresy of the three languages, or, rather, the Life says, the brothers' opponents were called that by Constantine, because they were the ones who had invented it. It is a bit like a man who has only ever eaten at one restaurant, and has begun to say that there is nowhere else to eat.

Constantine gave an answer, and the Life preserves it. This is the answer about the rain.

God sends the rain on all alike, he said. The sun shines on all alike. We all breathe the same air. And are you not ashamed to say that there are only three languages for God, and that all the other peoples and tribes should be blind and deaf? Tell me, is God so poor that He can only give a gift to three peoples, or is He so jealous that He would not wish it for the rest? And then he quoted the Scriptures, which say that every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And, according to the Life, he added that the Gospel itself says that on the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles, they spoke, and each person who was there heard them in his own language.

I think that is, quite simply, the best argument anyone has made for translation. It is not complicated. It says that the Gift is for everyone, so it ought to be given to everyone in a form they can take.

For several years they worked. Three and a half, says the Life, or a little more than that, in Moravia. They taught, they translated, and they trained pupils. They were harried by the German clergy, who wrote to Rome to complain. And at last, with the whole question hanging in the air, the brothers decided to go and ask the pope himself.

There was another reason. They had not been ordained by a bishop who was near. Their pupils, the young men they had trained, needed to be made priests, and there was no friendly bishop in the neighbourhood who would do it. The nearest ones were just those who disapproved. So they set out with a company of disciples, to go to Rome, and to carry with them the relics of Saint Clement, which Constantine had found at Cherson.

On the way they came to Venice, and there another meeting took place. The Life says that a good number of clergy, bishops and priests, gathered round, and they raised the old objection once more, the three languages, and again Constantine answered it. I will not go through it a second time, because you have heard the argument and it was the same. But I will tell you the thing the Life says about Venice, and it is that when they had asked their questions, and he had answered them, they had nothing more to say. The old writer says he left them in silence. I would not stake my life on every detail. But it is a nice end to an argument.

Meanwhile, the Pope, who at that moment was Nicholas the First, had heard that they were coming. And he had heard that they were bringing the bones of one of his own predecessors, a pope who had been lost and was now found. There is a story that makes you want to hurry. By the time the brothers reached Rome, Nicholas had died, and a new pope had been chosen, Adrian the Second. And Adrian, the Life says, went out of the city to meet them, together with his clergy, carrying candles, to welcome the relics of Saint Clement. It was a procession, a long walk through the Roman evening, with the lamps going before.

Imagine being those two brothers. You have been called heretics for years. You have been thrown out of rooms. And on the road, outside the walls of Rome, there is the Pope, in his best vestments, coming to meet you with a lit candle.

What happened next in Rome is the part of the story that comes closest to a victory, and it deserves to be told plainly.

The Pope examined the matter. He looked at the books. He heard the brothers. He had them explain what they had done. And the Life says he welcomed the Slavonic books and laid them on the altar of the church of Saint Mary, the one they now call Santa Maria Maggiore, and had the liturgy sung over them in Slavonic, and so, in the old writer's words, he approved them. Then he had the Slavonic books placed in the church, and ordered the brothers' disciples to be ordained. Adrian ordained them, and they celebrated the liturgy in Slavonic in several of the Roman churches, including Saint Peter's. So, whatever the Franks thought, the Bishop of Rome had said that it could be done. Praise God in your own language. It is fine.

There is a letter, years later, from another pope, John the Eighth, which says the same thing. It is called Industriae tuae, and it was written in the year eight hundred and eighty. It allows the use of the Slavonic language in the liturgy, and it gives a reason that I like very much, which is that He who made the three principal languages also made the others, for His own praise and glory.

That, I think, is the sentence I would put on the tin.

And now we have to come to the sad part, or what ought to be the sad part, though I think it is really a peaceful one.

All this time, Constantine had been unwell. The Life tells us he had been ill for a long time, since before the journey. The travelling had worn him out, and the arguing had worn him out more, and the years of translation, which is a demanding sort of work, had done the rest. In Rome, in the days after the Pope's welcome, he fell seriously ill. The Life says that God showed him that his time was near. He took the monastic habit, which in his tradition is the mark of a person who has chosen to give his life wholly to God. And with the habit he took a new name. It was Cyril.

So the name by which we know him was one he wore for about fifty days.

The Life gives us what happened then, and it is so quiet that I do not think I can improve on it. He was in bed. His brother Methodius was with him. And Cyril turned to Methodius and said something that the old writer remembered. He said: brother, you and I have pulled the same plough, one team, and I am now falling in the furrow at the end of the day. You love your mountain, your monastery, but do not leave the work for your mountain. For how else are you going to be saved?

I have changed the words a little, to make them easier to say aloud. But I think the sense is as it was. He was asking his brother to see it through. Do not go back to the quiet. The work is not finished, and I will not be here to do it. And Methodius, who in the Life is a man of few words and the kind of person who keeps his promises, did not forget.

Cyril died in Rome on the fourteenth of February, in the year eight hundred and sixty-nine. He was about forty-two. The Life tells us that he prayed his last prayers aloud, gave thanks to God, and then, as the old writer puts it, he went to the Lord. I think of a lamp being carried into a different room.

Methodius asked the Pope to let him bury his brother at home, in the monastery on the Olympus. But the Pope, and the Roman clergy, said that Cyril had been a great man, that his body should stay in Rome, and they buried him in the church of Saint Clement, with the relics he had brought. And he is still there. If you go to the basilica of San Clemente in Rome today, there is a chapel for him, and the little carved panels of his life.

Methodius, then, was alone, and fifty-ish, and a monk who had been about to go home. What would you have done?

He did not go home. The Pope, Adrian, made him an archbishop, with authority over Pannonia and Moravia, so that he would have a proper position and could ordain priests for the Slavonic church. And he set out again, with the books and the disciples, and went north.

For the next sixteen years, almost, he carried on his brother's work, and I would be giving you the wrong impression if I said it was easy. It was not. The Bavarian bishops, whose territory the new archbishopric rather overlapped, were furious. They said he had no right. They put him on trial, at a synod in the year eight hundred and seventy, and the Life says they treated him roughly. They sent him into exile, in a monastery in Swabia, and held him there for something like two and a half years. It was cold, and the Life says he suffered, and I will not say more than that, for a bedtime story. It was, in simple terms, a long and unjust imprisonment of a good man whose only offence was that he said the liturgy in a language that the people could follow.

Eventually Pope John the Eighth heard about it and was angry, and ordered him freed. And Methodius went back to Moravia, and went on with it. By then, Rastislav was gone, and his nephew Svatopluk ruled, who was less friendly, and there was a lot of politics, which I shall spare you. There were more complaints. He was accused of heresy to Rome and cleared. He was a patient and unhurried man. If it was possible to answer an accusation, he answered it. If it was possible to translate another book, he translated it.

And the Life says that toward the end he did something wonderfully practical. He took two of his priests, who were fast writers, and in six months, working from March to October, they translated the whole Bible into Slavonic, except for the books of the Maccabees. Then he also translated a book of church law, and a collection of the Fathers' writings. Whether the details are exact I cannot say, and the old writer was fond of his master. But the picture is of an old man at a table, with two quick copyists, working against time.

It is time to slow down now. The lamps are low.

Methodius was old, by now, and tired. The Life says that when he knew he was close to the end, he asked that his disciples gather, and that he name a successor, a man called Gorazd. The Life says he blessed his people in the church, and then he went away to be with the Lord, on the sixth of April, in the year eight hundred and eighty-five. It was a Tuesday. The funeral was held in three languages, Slavonic, Greek and Latin. And I find that touching, that in the end, the church of the brothers who had been told that God had only three languages was a church where all three were used, together with a fourth.

After his death the troubles came. Svatopluk, and the German clergy, and a new archbishop who did not care for the Slavonic way, drove the disciples out. They were arrested, some of them, and sold, or exiled, or made to leave the country. The Moravian church fell apart. That is the sad part, and the Life does not hide it.

But look at what happened to the pupils. Some of them made their way south, to Bulgaria, where Prince Boris, who had himself recently been baptised, welcomed them. And there, in schools set up at places like Pliska and Ohrid, the disciples carried on. They taught. They translated more. And it was in that country, in those schools, within a generation, that the Slavonic books were copied and spread, and the Cyrillic letters were made, and from Bulgaria it all went north and east. To Serbia. To Kiev. To Russia. The Liturgy in a tongue people could understand. When a Slav in a church today hears the Gospel in his language, he is hearing it because two brothers who knew Slavonic from the market stalls of Thessalonica were sent, a thousand years ago and more, to a prince who wrote them a letter.

In the Catholic Church, the brothers are remembered together on the fourteenth of February, which is the day that Cyril died. In the Orthodox Churches, the two of them are remembered on the eleventh of May, and Methodius also has his own day on the sixth of April. The calendars differ a bit, and the old and the new styles differ too, so check your own. In the year nineteen hundred and eighty, Pope John Paul the Second, who was himself a Slav, named the two of them, with Saint Benedict, patrons of Europe. And he called them, in a letter, the apostles of the Slavs.

I rather like that title. It does not say that they were conquerors. It does not say that they brought a foreign religion to a conquered land. They brought a book, and they made sure that the people who got it could read it.

Some notes for the curious.

The main source for everything we have said is two old biographies, the Life of Constantine-Cyril and the Life of Methodius, both written in Old Church Slavonic, and probably by disciples of the brothers, not long after they died. They are among the oldest works of Slavonic literature, and for that reason they are precious. They are also, as biographies of saints always are, written to praise. They record speeches that the writers could not have heard word for word. They give speeches and debates in shapes that are probably tidied. So we have told the main events as the Lives and the papal letters of the time report them, and we have been careful to say where we are reporting the old writers' words and not an independent record.

Three things deserve a careful word. First, the dream of Sophia. The Life tells it of the boy at seven, and I have told it as the old writer's report, and as a story. Second, the alphabet. Constantine made the Glagolitic script. The Cyrillic script, named for him, was almost certainly made a generation later by his pupils, in Bulgaria. It is called Cyrillic in his honour. Third, the Khazars and Cherson. The details of the debate in the Life are given at length, and historians treat them with caution, and the finding of the Gospel and Psalter at Cherson, in strange letters, is a matter that scholars still argue about. I have mentioned it, and I have said it is disputed.

The conversations between the brothers, the table talk, the weather, the food, the long jokes and the small observations, are mine, which is to say they are an AI's, and they should be taken as the colour of the story and not its content.

And one more thing, said with care. The two traditions honour Cyril and Methodius together, and the two traditions have, over the centuries, disagreed about a number of things on which the brothers stood in the middle. We have stayed off all of that. The brothers were servants of the Church in Constantinople who were received with honour by the Pope in Rome, and who served the people of Moravia in the language of their hearts. They belong, I think, to both houses.

That's the story of Cyril and Methodius for tonight. The Catholic Church keeps their feast on the fourteenth of February, and the Orthodox Churches on the eleventh of May. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you be given words you can understand, tonight, for the things that matter most. May someone who loves you be patient enough to find the letters for what you cannot yet say. May you never be told that God can only be spoken to in some other language than your own. May the rain fall on you and the sun shine on you, and the air be the same for you as for everyone. May you have, at the end of your long day, a brother or a sister, a friend, who will say to you, do not go back to the quiet, and who will mean it kindly. And may the Word who was in the beginning, and who is spoken in every tongue under heaven, be with you tonight, and always.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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