Cyril of Turaw - Works

Works

Questions of authorship notwithstanding, a remarkable corpus of works in different genres has been attributed to Kirill of Turov: festal homilies, monastic commentaries, some letters, and a cycle of prayers, other hymnological texts, several versions of a penitential Prayer Kanon, a Kanon of Ol’ga and an abecedarian prayer. These works constitute what came to be known as Corpus Cyrillianium (which at its core has only eleven works which are agreed by the majority to be by Kirill of Turov.) This is a nineteenth-century consensus which is generally assumed but continuously questioned. In manuscript sources, there are 23 prayers attributed to Kirill, as well as an additional 9 unattributed prayers that are regularly copied together as a group. The prayers form a seven-day liturgical cycle. His homilies are also a cycle based on the ecclesiastical calendar from Palm Sunday to the Sunday before Pentecost. His allegorical commentaries are directed at a monastic audience. As a scholar of Kyrill, C.M. MacRobert summarizes the state of scholarship: “Even if further early copies of the texts attributed to Kirill of Turov come to light, it may well not be possible to reconstruct his kanon in the form in which he wrote it—supposing that he did write it—or to determine the original wording of his prayers. The attempt to establish a canon of his liturgical works may ultimately be vain: what we have to deal with is not necessarily the recognizable oeuvre of one man, but rather a devotional tradition, a profoundly penitential spirituality which was cultivated among the East Slavs during the medieval period and taken up by other Orthodox Slavs under the pressure of social and political vicissitudes.”. Another problem that complicates any precise attribution is the traditionalism of the Corpus Cyrillianum and the genre itself. The Kirillic genres themselves are deliberately constructed so as to give an impression of timelessness and universality. Details of contemporary “relevance” yielding specific clues as to time, place, and people (like Kirill’s admonition of Feodorek – Bishop Fedor of Rostov called so in depreciation) are rare and skillfully disguised. Kirill-the author identifies himself as a humble monk (following the tradition of humility topos) who fades before the ultimate author and authority of God. Here is an example of Kyrill’s humility topos taken from "A Tale of a layman, and on monasticism, and on the soul, and on repentance"; by the most sinful monk Kirill, for Vasilij, abbot of the Caves: “(52) And me: I beg you, do not spurn me like a dog, but remember me even here in your prayers, and there throw me scraps from that holy table, and may all Christians be judged worthy of that life, through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom glory with the Father and with the Holy Spirit, now and ever.” And another one from: A Sermon for Low Sunday by the unworthy monk Kirill in praise of the resurrection, and concerning the paschal bread, and concerning Thomas’s resting of the Lord’s ribs: “(1) The Church requires a great teacher and a wise interpreter to adorn the feast. But we are poor in word and dim in mind, and we lack the fire of the Holy Spirit to compose words to benefit the soul. Yet, for the love of the brethren that are with me, I shall say a few words concerning the renewal of the resurrection of Christ.”.