San Clemente di Ocrida e la Bibbia

The article makes a general characteristic of the use of the Bible as a literary source in the sermons and the eulogies of the Old Bulgarian Saint Clement of Ohrid. The use of multiple biblical ideas, images and texts is a direct result of the general approach to Church Slavonic literature where the Holy Scripture is assigned the main role in the construction of the theological system, reproduced by the analyzed works. At the level of ideas, St. Clement presents the whole history of the divine providence from the Creation to the Last Judgment, putting in the center the doctrine of the salvation of the world and man. In most cases Clement of Ohrid writes for the neophyte Slavs and therefore relates the sacred story in such a way that his congregation would find the positive and negative behavior models in the biblical examples, in order to obtain the set of virtues necessary for salvation and to recognize the vices leading to hell. Clement offers a typical New Testament value system, in the center of which stand the virtues of humility, faith and hope, which are typical of the Christianity, and of Eastern Christianity in particular. All relations between man and God, and among people themselves, are characterized by the feeling of love, from which evolve all other virtues, including social ones. On the pages of the sermons of St. Clement we see a different approach to the biblical source, sometimes an artistic one (amplifications, remodeling), sometimes expanding the canon with motifs existing only in the Tradition. But the main task of the saint was to build a system of moral values based on the Bible as an indisputable authority.