If this is a genuine tradition it describes a wonderful case of open-minded truth-seeking, justly rewarded with success.
On their return to Kiev the commissioners presented the report of the results of their investigations to Vladimir. They were not attracted by the Mohammedan worship of the Bulgarians, nor did they take to the Latin rites they witnessed in Germany. But they brought back a glowing account of what they had witnessed in the great cathedral at Constantinople, saying, "When we stood in the temple we did not know where we were, for there is nothing else like it upon earth: there in truth God has His dwelling with men; and we can never forget the beauty we saw there. No one who has once tasted sweets will afterwards take that which is bitter; nor can we now any longer abide in heathenism."[1] This was before the sack of Constantinople by the Frankish and Venetian brigands in the so-called fourth Crusade. St. Sophia was still in its pristine glory before the barbarians had stripped it of its most magnificent decorations. These astonished ambassadors from the rude north found themselves in what was probably the finest building in the world and certainly the richest product of Byzantine art. Wherever they turned their eyes they saw gold, silver, precious stones, mosaic pictures, covering the whole surface of its walls and its wonderful soaring domes, while the elaborate brocaded vestments of the priests and the slow moving pomp of the service harmonised with the scene of surpassing magnificence. They were completely conquered.
It would seem then that where argument had failed ceremonial had succeeded, that what the monk had not been able to effect by his verbal exposition of doctrine the patriarch had triumphantly accomplished by the pomp and ceremony of a sumptuous ritual. Perhaps it would be more just to say that the emotional impression of the solemn service at Constantinople confirmed the intellectual conclusions which had preceded it at Kiev. Be that as it may, the fact is not a little significant that a religion which
- ↑ Ibid.
