METHODIUS, the apostle of the Slavs, was a native of Thessalonica, and was born about the year 825. His nationality is unknown, but most probably he was a Graecized Slav; the family of which he was a member appears to have been one of considerable social distinction, and he himself had already attained high official rank in the government of Macedonia before he determined to abandon his secular career and embrace the monastic life. His younger brother Constantine (better known as Cyril, the name he adopted at Rome shortly before his death) had also distinguished himself as a secular “philosopher” in Constantinople before he withdrew to the cloister and to solitude. Constantine about 860 had been sent by the emperor Michael III. to the Khazars, in response to their request for a Christian teacher, but had not remained long among them; after his return to within the limits of the empire, his brother and he laboured for the instruction of the Slavonic or Slavonicized population, especially by means of translations of the Scripture lessons and the liturgical books used in Christian worship. About the year 863, at the invitation of Rastislav, king of “Great Moravia,” who desired the Christianization of his subjects, but at the same time that they should be independent of the Germans, the two brothers went to his capital (its site is unknown), and, besides establishing a seminary for the education of priests, successfully occupied themselves in preaching in the vernacular and in diffusing their religious literature. After four years they seem to have received and accepted an invitation to Rome from Pope Nicholas I., who had just been engaged in his still extant correspondence with the newly converted Bulgarian king; his death occurred before their arrival, but they ...were kindly received by his successor Hadrian II. Constantine died in Rome, but Methodius, after satisfying the pope of his orthodoxy and obedience, went back to his labours in “Moravia” as archbishop of Pannonia. His province appears to have been, roughly speaking, co-extensive with the basins of the Raab, Drave, and Save, and thus to have included parts of what had previously belonged to the provinces of Salzburg and Passau. In 871 complaints on this account were made at Rome, nominally on behalf of the archbishop of Salzburg, but really in the interests of the German king and his Germanizing ally Swatopluk, Rastislav’s successor; they were not, however, immediately successful. In 879, however, Methodius was again summoned to Rome by Pope John VIII., after having declined to give up the practice of celebrating mass in the Slavonic tongue; but, owing to the peculiar delicacy of the relations of Rome with Constantinople, and with the young church of Bulgaria, the pope, contrary to all expectation, ultimately decided in favour of a Slavonic liturgy, and sent Methodius (880) back to his diocese with a suffragan bishop, and with a letter of recommendation to Swatopluk. This suffragan, a German named Wiching, unfortunately proved quite the reverse of helpful to his metropolitan, and through his agency, especially after the death of John VIII. in 882, the closing years of the life of Methodius were embittered by continual ecclesiastical disputes, in the course of which he is said to have laid Swatopluk and his supporters under the ban, and the realm under interdict. The date of the death of Methodius is variously given; the most trustworthy tradition says that it took place on April 6, 885. He was buried at Welehrad (probably Stuhlweissenberg). The Greek Church commemorates St Cyril on February 14 and St Methodius on May 11; in the Roman Church both are commemorated on March 9.
See Schafarik’s Slawische Alterthiimer, where the original authorities are fully referred to. The subject of the present notice is most probably not to be identified with the Methodius, a painter and monk, who, according to a well-known legend, converted Boris of Bulgaria by means of a picture of Christ’s second coming.
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