Abstract:
Recent scholarship on the historical development of the Slavic liturgy in its early
stage has shown that one of the important prerequisites for its practical implementation
was the establishment, under the guidance of a bishop, of a church organization
which was entitled to use Church Slavonic as a liturgical language.
Research has also demonstrated that the methodological approach linking the history
of the Slavic liturgical texts with the development of the Slavic ecclesiastical structures
administered by bishops offers valuable insights. The first Slavic corpus of liturgical
books of Byzantine rites (the so-called Corpus of Clement, CC) came into being in the Slavic ethnic eparchy and then in the Slavic territorial dioceses which were to be integrated into the church organization of the First Bulgarian Empire. The core part of the CC, to which the complex of original Slavic hymnographic writings belongs, was created in the years between 893 and 916 in the Slavic ethnic eparchy of St. Clement of Ohrid in the western part of the First Bulgarian Empire (in the region of southern Albania, northwestern Greece, and southwestern Macedonia). The supplementary part of the CC, which contains the complex of the word-by-word translations of hymnographic writings, originated in the mid-10th century in Slavic territorial dioceses located at that time in the
western part of the First Bulgarian Empire. This two-stage formation of the CC
was due to the two-stage development of the Slavic church organizations, and it
was thus neither linguistic nor literary in nature. Having special features characteristic
of the western Byzantine liturgy, the CC differed from both its preceding and subsequent corpora of Slavic liturgical books in its liturgical, textological, and linguistic character. Every subsequent corpus of Slavic liturgical texts, however, built upon the preceding one, and this ensured the continuity of the Slavic liturgical and, consequently, linguistic tradition as a whole.
