When Christianity came to medieval Rus with the baptism of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in A.D. 988, a tide of religious art flowed into Russia from Byzantium. The central role that art was to play in the spiritual life of Russia is indicated by the story that it was the beauty of the great imperial city and its churches that precipitated the conversion of the Kievan prince. The Primary Chronicle, the earliest historical record of the Kievan period, explains that Vladimir's emissaries, seeking a religion suitable to unite his people, found Moslem worship "frenzied and foul-smelling," and in the ceremonies of Western Christians, they "beheld no glory"; but Constantinople entranced them:
The Greeks led us to the buildings where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations.
In the cathedrals that sprang up throughout their expanding realm, Kievan princes sought to re-create this experience of exalted spiritual beauty, of the community of the faithful dwelling together with God in the magnificence of ritual and visual splendor that presaged the coming Kingdom of Heaven. It was not abstract ideas or the logic of theology that drew the early Russians to the new faith. Rather, it was the concrete beauty of liturgy, image, and sound that enthralled them and conveyed to them the essence of the Christian message.
This passion for beauty, for seeing spiritual truth in tangible form, has always been a distinguishing characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy. No complete versions of the Bible and few theological treatises seem to have existed in Rus in the first few centuries after its conversion; the icon therefore came to be the most revered expression of theology: the word of God in concrete form.
As James H. Billington points out in his seminal book The Icon and the Axe, "Whereas Western and Northern Europe had inherited a still primitive and uncodified Christianity from the crumbling Roman Empire of the West, Russia took over a finished creed from the still-unvanquished Eastern Empire." Grateful to have joined Christianity at the "eleventh hour" just before the end of the world was to take place, Kiev accepted unreservedly the Byzantine claim that Orthodox Christianity had solved all questions of belief and worship. All that was needed was pravoslavie, "right praising." Orthodoxy, developing its distinctive outlook from such church fathers as Clement and Origen, focused more on cosmic redemption than on individual sin and the personal struggle for salvation, which were basic concerns in the Augustinian West. The celebration of the Orthodox Liturgy was seen as the joyful participation of the faithful in the divine, prefiguring their assembly together before the throne of God at the final Deification of the world.
This unquestioning acceptance of a finished creed, whereby the Kievans inherited, as one scholar put it, "the Byzantine achievement ... without the Byzantine inquisitiveness," had a fateful impact on Russian art and culture. Byzantine forms of art and worship, integral to "right praising," were welcomed wholeheartedly and devotedly adhered to. Artists from Constantinople, with the help of Russian apprentices, decorated the early churches of medieval Rus. Even in icons from the
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