Church Slavonic (Russian Recension)

Old Church Slavonic was created in the ninth century by Cyril and Methodius to carry Christian scripture and worship into a Slavic language, and it is the first literary Slavic language. What is used in Russian churches today is its descendant rather than itself. Over centuries of copying, the language absorbed the pronunciation and part of the vocabulary of the East Slavic scribes who transmitted it, producing a Russian recension distinct from the Serbian, Bulgarian and Croatian recensions that developed in parallel, and that recension was fixed in the printed service books of the seventeenth century and standardised further under the Synod. It is not and has never been anybody's mother tongue. It is a register held for a purpose: the liturgy, the psalter, the scripture read aloud in church, and the technical religious literature that surrounds them, including the icon painters' manuals called podlinniki, whose surviving manuscripts move between Church Slavonic and the Russian chancery language of their period depending on the copyist. Its relation to Russian is close enough that a Russian speaker catches much of a service and misconstrues some of it, which is a recurring pastoral argument rather than a settled convenience.

In the middle of the seventeenth century Patriarch Nikon ordered the Russian service books corrected against Greek models, on the view that Russian practice had drifted from the sources. The corrections were small in themselves. The spelling of the name of Jesus gained a letter, the number of alleluias changed, processions were to go against the sun rather than with it, and the sign of the cross was to be made with three fingers rather than two. The reaction was not small. A large body of clergy and laity refused the new books, holding that the old ones carried the faith as Russia had received it and that the corrections implied the Russian church had been in error for centuries, and the resulting schism, the raskol, produced the Old Believers, who kept the pre-Nikonian texts and were persecuted for generations, some communities burning themselves rather than submit.

The episode is the clearest demonstration in Slavic Christianity that a liturgical language is not a neutral vehicle: the disputed items were orthographic and gestural, carrying no doctrine that either side would state differently, and they split a church. Old Believer communities still use the pre-Nikonian books and the two fingered sign today.