Originally published 1038 | ||
 | ||
Similar Primary Chronicle, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, Russkaya Pravda, Ostromir Gospels, Domostroy | ||
The Sermon on Law and Grace (Old Church Slavonic: Слово о законѣ и благодѣти, Slovo o zakone i blagodeti) is a sermon written by the Kievan Metropolitan Hilarion. It is one of the earliest Slavonic texts available, having been written several decades before the Primary Chronicle. Since Hilarion was considered to be a writer worthy of imitation, this sermon was very influential in the further development of both the style and content of Kievan Rus' literature.
Contents
The Sermon was an important event to be mentioned in the Primary Chronicle, and by matching against other events from the Chronicle it was concluded that the Sermon was written somewhere between 1037 and 1050.
Title
Although commonly called the Sermon on Law and Grace, the work bears a much longer title:
Summary
The sermon is divided into two distinct parts.
The first part presents the Grace of the New Testament surpassing and replacing the Law of the Old Testament. Hilarion retells the Old Testament account of Hagar, the handmaiden of Abraham, and Sarah, his wife. He likens Isaac, "the free son of a free mother", to the followers of Christianity, and Ishmael, "a servant (not a truly free man)", to the Jews. Hilarion emphasizes that the Law came first, and then came Grace, just as Ishmael came before Isaac. He then explains that the Gospel now spreads over the whole earth, while the "lake of the Law" has dried up.
The second part serves as a eulogy to Vladimir, the grand prince of Kiev, and baptizer of Rus'. It is written in a highly rhetorical panegyric, possibly for the purpose of presenting Vladimir as a candidate for canonization.
Analysis
According to the text, Russian people is better than Jewes, because the Grace that Russian received, is superior than that Jewes' one which has been infused by Moses's Laws. Church slavonic language is a sacred language here, because of the references to the Bible. The book should not be an oratorical essay, but simply a narrative play.
Audience
While the sermon was most likely composed for the Christian elite of Kievan Rus' and given at the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev, scholars are still uncertain of many details pertaining to the presentation of the sermon. Some scholars suggest that the two parts of the sermon were presented on different occasions and were brought together only during later compilation.