Adidag, who enjoyed his special trust, was obliged by his clergy, familiar with missionary duties from their relations with the north-eastern Slavs and Danes, to select a particularly reliable missionary for Rus' and ordain him as a bishop in Rus'. Ldaldag's choice fell on Libutius, a monk at the monastery of St. Alban, a man of honest behavior, as the annalist Saxo notes, and a strong believer in Catholicism *), who was ordained bishop of Rus'. Western leaders were not too willing to preach the Gospel for the sake of apostleship alone. (In the West, long ago, almost since the time of the British preachers and Boniface, the spirit of purely apostolic asceticism became impoverished; there was no shortage of preachers when it came to preaching to peoples conquered or allied with the empire, when a preacher could travel with a detachment of soldiers and when a tangible reward was promised for a feat in a newly converted country. But to go to a distant country, unknown, not standing in any relation to the empire, to go without the support of secular power, without any worldly plans, in the name only of the Gospel - very few representatives of the then Western Church were capable of such a journey. Libutius, due to some circumstances (tspibpzbash (Shaiopibiv zizrenzis), hesitates too long to set off on a long journey, and finally dies. Adalbert, a monk of the Trier monastery of St. Maximgaa, is elected to replace Libutius. That Libutius’s slowness in relation to his missionary post was simply due to reluctance, this is clear from the circumstances of the choice a successor to him. Adalbert was appointed to the mission due to intrigue; both contemporaries and acquaintances of the new missionary (they considered this appointment as a punishment. The successor of Reginova, a monk of the same monastery and a friend of Adalbert, says: Adalbert was made the successor of Libutius to be sent to a stranger but nitrites and slander (shasipaiiope her sotsiio) Archbishop William (Trier), although Adalbert was most devoted to him and never sinned against him in anything." Apparently, Adalbert’s new and apparently high appointment was high
*) Ibid.
A. D. VORONOV,
It was not joy that called, but regret. Nevertheless, however, a year and a half had already passed since the ambassadors arrived from Olga, and the new bishop was soon sent to Rus'. Emperor Otto, the chronicler notes, sent him with honor and supplied him with his usual generosity with everything he needed. The bishop probably sent with him quite a number of lower clergy, assistants in the work of preaching. What did the Western bishop missionary and his companions encounter in Rus'? The chronicle says briefly: “Adalbert, the consecrated bishop of Rugi, unable to accomplish anything for which he was sent and seeing that he had labored in vain, returned, and while some of his (companions) were killed on the way back, he himself barely escaped. What was the reason for such complete failure? Adalbert was undoubtedly a zealous missionary in the Catholic sense. Upon his return from Rus', he was placed at the head of the Slavic mission - he was appointed Archbishop of Magdeburg, with the subordination to his jurisdiction of all the converted and those about to be converted countries beyond Laba and Sala. Pope John XIII himself testified about him that he failed in Rus' not due to his negligence (pop zia i#paiya, iiiogit-pefiiia) 1). But it was precisely the fact that he was a zealous Catholic missionary, the very character and spirit of his preaching that were the main reason for his failure. If fears of political dependence on Constantinople prompted Olga to ask for a bishop and preachers from the West, then her hopes of separating the cause of faith from the interests of politics, with religious ties to the empire, turned out to be even more incorrect. The German sermon, naturally, with the name of faith, Christ, brought to Rus', as well as to the Western Slavs, the name of the pope and emperor, and made them feel the inevitability of the well-known ecclesiastical and political dependence of Rus' on the Holy Roman Empire. The preaching of the Western missionary threatened Rus' with a double yoke - both ecclesiastical from the pope and political from the German emperor. Could such a sermon appeal to a people who did not know any subordination, who were proud of their heroic deeds and who were leading; fear of Byzantium itself? Could a saint accept such a sermon!
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
N Rus' OF Kyiv.