The Testing of the Faiths

The chronicle's most famous passage sends envoys from Vladimir to inspect the religions on offer. They visit Muslims among the Volga Bulgars and object to the prohibitions, hear the Latin Christians and find nothing in their worship, question Jews and ask where their homeland is, and then reach Constantinople, where the liturgy in the great church leaves them unable to say whether they were on earth or in heaven. The report decides the matter.

As history the account has obvious difficulties. It arranges the alternatives in a sequence that leads to the conclusion the compiler wants, gives each rejected faith a single memorable failing, and turns a political and dynastic decision, negotiated with an empire and sealed by a marriage, into an aesthetic judgment. Comparable conversion narratives elsewhere use the same device. As a document of what the tradition wanted to say about itself, it is one of the most consequential passages in Slavic literature. It supplies the founding scene for Christianity in the East Slavic lands, and its authority has been claimed repeatedly since, in ecclesiastical argument and in national narrative, by more than one modern state with a stake in the inheritance. The atlas records the narrative and its literary character together, because the passage has done most of its work as a story.