Fearful Majesty

by Benson Bobrick

  FROM THE TIME of Vladimir the Saint, the Russian Church had enjoyed semiautonomous status and a number of special privileges. Ironically, that status had increased under the Mongols, who were impartially tolerant of all confessions, and who issued sweeping charters of immunity that protected Church property as inviolable and exempted both clergy and the peasants working Church lands from service and taxation. In return, the Church accepted the obligation to pray publicly for the khans. With the rise of Moscow, the growth of monastic wealth had continued largely unabated, and by the mid-sixteenth century it was cumulatively immense. Where did it come from?

  From the lowliest peasant to the grand prince himself, Russians counted on the power of prayer. As death approached, they bequeathed money, goods, and land to monasteries to finance the liturgical commemoration of their souls. Grants were made with such regularity, in fact, that “if a man died without making a bequest to a religious body it was assumed he had forgotten to do so, and the oversight was remedied by his heirs.” In time, “a fixed scale was worked out so that the testator could know how much clerical assistance for his soul his bequest would purchase.”13 In addition to legacies and gifts, some monasteries increased their assets by investments, loans (typically at an usurious rate of 20 percent), and by foreclosing on mortgages. “Many an impoverished landowner,” we are told, “was forced to sit by and watch his dwindling patrimonial possessions bought up by acquisitive, shrewd and often immensely wealthy abbots”14 – the real estate moguls of the time.

  Other cloisters resembled wholesale-retail establishments, whose brethren were “as great merchants as any in the land of Russia, and doe occupy buying and selling…, and have boats which passe to and fro in the rivers with merchandise.”

  As a result, the holdings of certain abbeys were nothing short of stupendous. The White Lake Monastery, for example, owned seven villages, 241 hamlets, and 145 settlements – about 67,500 acres of arable land. Trinity Monastery owned ten times that much, which made it the largest single landowner excepting the grand prince in Muscovy. Even a tiny community originally inspired by a hermit living in an oak tree had acquired, within a few generations, forty-five hamlets. All this was a far cry from the example set by Russia’s St. Kirill, who wandered barefoot among beasts in the wilds for twenty years, subsisting on a diet of pine bark, roots, and grass, before consenting to live in a hut.

  The growth of monastic “big business” was naturally accompanied by a decline in communal discipline and ascetic ideals. To begin with, the dogma of the efficacy of prayer for the souls of the departed encouraged the idea that repentance was not an urgent matter, while it turned monks into privileged, paid petitioners for the sins of the world. Many large donations even required an annual memorial banquet; and as the calendar grew crowded with festive obligations, fast days yielded to feast. Moreover, a fair number of those attracted to the cloister were looking either for sanctuary, business training, or simply a comfortable life. When a nobleman chose to or was obliged to withdraw from the world, he could, if he wished, often reconstitute within the monastery’s walls the luxurious secular life he had known – with servants, stockpiled provisions, and so forth. Where admission entailed “a suitable donation,” “impecunious aspirants” were accepted only to do menial tasks.15 The result was not a particularly devout brotherhood. “To speak of the life of friers and nunnes,” wrote a visitor, “it needs not to those that know the hypocrisie and uncleannesse of that cloyster broode.”16 In one monastery in Vyatka, an abbot who merely tried to prohibit late-night drinking was beaten senseless and thrown over the wall.

  To add to the scandal, peasants were quite as brutally treated on monastic as other estates and punished as harshly in ecclesiastical as in secular courts. The need for Christian charity was also everywhere apparent – dramatizing Church neglect. Beggars, “so pinched with famine and extreame neede, that they begge after a violent manner,”17 were aswarm in the land, while many others were driven to make bread from straw, or to survive, like St. Kirill, on grass, herbs, bark, and roots. Wrote one observer: “There is no people who live so miserably as do the Russian poor, while the rest care not how many die of famine or hunger in the streets.”18

  The issue was joined. The question was: What was the social mission of monastic wealth? If, as was claimed, “the wealth of the Church belongs to the poor,”19 why was its distribution confined to supplicants who congregated in churchyards? Moreover, by what religious tradition was the accumulation of monastic wealth and property upheld?

  Two parties holding opposed views formed within the Church; and because the Russian Church was a state church, they also represented two political parties or camps. One group, which championed the status quo, was called the “Josephians,” after Joseph Sanin of Volokolamsk, their original spokesman; the other, the “Non-Possessors” or the “Trans-Volga Elders,” supported monastic divestiture and had their strongest following among the hermitages of the north. Their original, chief spokesman was Nil Sorsky.

  The first great clash between the two parties, which had come at the turn of the century, had shaped the whole character of the ensuing debate.

  Nil Sorsky (1430-1508), an alumnus of St. Kirill’s White Lake Monastery and a Hesychast ascetic who had studied on Mt. Athos, believed monastics should return to their original profession of poverty and once again feed themselves by the sweat of their brow. He emphasized fasting, prayer, and breathing exercises as conducive to hesychia or “inner calm,” preparatory to mystical illumination; and advocated the skit or small-group hermitage as a middle way between the large cenobitic communities and the solitude of the anchorite. He sought to reform the Church in spirit and pressed for the distribution of alms.

  Nil’s adversary, Joseph Sanin (1439-1515), was more preoccupied with the ceremonial aspects of piety, with the observance of Church ritual and the regulations that governed everything from seating arrangements to dress in the monastic community. In this, he was a product of the Borovsk Monastery south of Moscow and its austere abbot Pafnuty, who taught “obedience without reasoning.”20 Joseph eventually succeeded Pafnuty as abbot before founding his own stern cloister in the forests of Volokolamsk. Whatever else may be said about him, he was not a hypocrite. Having forbidden his brethren contact with women, he refused even to see his own mother.

  With regard to Church property, the Josephians emphasized the practical role of the Church in the accumulation of riches for the sake of organized public charity (seldom manifest), and the importance of monasteries as a training ground for hierarchs. Joseph wrote: “If the monasteries are deprived of the villages they own, how will it be possible for an honorable and noble man to take orders? And if there are no honorable monks, where will we find candidates for the metropolitanate, the archbishopric, the bishopric, and other offices? And if there are no honorable and noble monks, the faith itself will be undermined.”21 In other words, the management of property was indispensable training for high office, and only a prosperous monastery could hope to attract suitable upper-class trainees.

  The state naturally looked with favor on the Josephian stress on obedience to authority, while a preoccupation with ritualistic externals gave monastic life a certain kinship with the hieratic etiquette of court. Josephians were indeed staunch supporters of the growing autocracy, and helped elaborate the Church-State ideology on which the monarchy was coming to rest. But they opposed any attempt to secularize Church property. On this issue, the Non-Possessors were the state’s obvious allies, as were many boyars who found themselves unable to compete with abbots for peasants and land.

  The split within the Russian Church therefore bore some resemblance to the contemporary confrontation between the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church and the apostles of the Reformation in the West.

  Both Ivan III and Vasily III had wavered in choosing sides. There is no doubt that either monarch would have been happy to secularize Church property if he could have gotten away with it; but the Josephians were
the more powerful faction – they had the land – and they were aroused.

  In the beginning, Ivan III had welcomed broad criticism of the Church on property and other issues, and accordingly had lent covert support to the so-called Judaizers, a varied group of dissidents who attacked Church corruption, in some cases espoused the dogma of Judaism, disputed the efficacy of the sacraments or denied the Trinity, disparaged icons, took a forbidden interest in astrology and astronomy, and employed the scholastic method of argument in defense of their beliefs. Some among them also disputed a widespread, apocalyptic conviction that the world was destined to end in 1492. Basing their own calculations on an astronomical work called the Shestokryl, the Judaizers confidently predicted the world’s survival, and of course they were right. And because they were right many of their ideas gained immeasurably in prestige. Joseph of Volokolamsk wrote to the Bishop of Suzdal: “Now in homes, along the road, and in the market places, monks and laymen are all in doubt and anguish concerning the faith.”22

  The Russian Church establishment therefore faced a triple crisis at the end of the fifteenth century: first, how to preserve its property as inviolate; second, how to accurately predict the end of the world and the Second Coming of Christ; and third, how to refute the Judaizers. All three were intertwined, for the Judaizers were also severe critics of monastic wealth.

  The self-appointed savior of the situation was Archbishop Gennady Gonzo of Novgorod (1484-1504), a brilliant, literate, dedicated, but ultimately corrupt and sadistic hierarch whose enthusiastic sale of high ecclesiastical offices eventually led to his own downfall. Long before that, however, he had a profound impact on Russia’s cultural life.

  In meeting the challenge, Gennady turned (as Russia has so often done) to the West for “technical” assistance. His chief agent was Dmitry Gerasimov, a translator and interpreter in the ambassadorial service who had previously undertaken missions to Sweden, Denmark, and the imperial court in Vienna. In 1490, before the Doomsday date arrived, Gennady dispatched him to Rome to acquire polemical and other works that might assist the Church in its defense.

  Gerasimov returned with a trunkload of books, including an exemplary selection of Catholic apologetics, and the Tale of the White Cowl, which he claimed to have translated from documents in the Vatican archives but had actually composed himself. He had also recruited a number of intellectuals, including Nicholas Bulev, the Renaissance magus who was later physician to Vasily III; and “the shadowy Croation Dominican priest, Benjamin, ‘Slav in nationality but Latin in faith,’ ”23 who helped compile the first complete Slavic Bible, based on the Latin Vulgate.

  Now, Gennady was out to get the Judaizers any way he could. But in Russia persecution for heresy was rare. There was little precedent for it in Byzantium, where the usual punishment for witchcraft had been exile; and the Mongols hadn’t known what heresy was. In the 1370s in Novgorod certain Strigolniki or “shorn ones” who had spoken out against simony had been drowned as heretics in the Volkhov River. But it was not until news of the Spanish Inquisition reached Muscovy that Gennady felt he knew what he was supposed to do. He wrote at once to the Metropolitan, Zosima: “See how the King of Spain has cleansed his own land!”24 and urged the adoption of a Russian Inquisition. “Our people are simple,” he said. “They are unable to talk in the manner of books. Thus, it is better not to engage in debates about the faith. A council is needed in order that heretics be judged, hanged and burned.”25 Such a council was convoked at his prompting late in 1490, but Ivan III (whose own metropolitan and secretary for foreign affairs were both Judaizers) did not countenance the vicious verdicts for which Gennady campaigned. No one was executed, though some of the accused were turned over to him for discipline, which gave him an opportunity to experiment with Spanish methods. As the party approached Novgorod, his victims were seated backward on their horses, with their clothing turned front to back, and crowned with pointed birch-bark hats and bast cockscombs bearing the inscription: “Behold the army of Satan!”26 As they passed through Novgorod, crowds spat in their eyes and screamed: “Here are the foes of God, the blasphemers of Christ!” and their hats were set on fire.

  Most Non-Possessors wanted no part of this, but Joseph of Volokolamsk, Gennady’s staunch ally, spread the alarm and not only managed to portray Judaizing as a threat to national security (by tracing it to a Lithuanian Jew by the name of Zakhar), but sought to link the Non-Possessors themselves to the “subversive” movement in order to stamp their views as heretical. This was not difficult to do because anyone who criticized the established Church could be called a Judaizer whether his convictions were Russian Orthodox or not.

  A first test of strength came at a Church Council of 1503, when Nil Sorsky and Joseph Sanin clashed. Joseph demanded the execution of even repentant heretics. Nil replied: “Unrepentant heretics should be imprisoned, but the Church should receive the repentant with open arms, because Christ came to discover and save the lost ones.”27 Joseph reminded Nil that the Apostle Peter had “struck Simon Magus blind with prayer”28 and that St. Leo the bishop had tied a sorcerer to himself and stood with him unharmed in the fire until he expired. Nil replied tactfully: “Do understand that there is a difference between the Apostles and yourself.”29

  Nil won the debate but lost the case. The Non-Possessors were shown to be “soft” on heresy, and fear of being tarred with the same brush alarmed Ivan III and his allies. The move to secularize Church property was reluctantly abandoned, and after a Church Council in the following year several dissidents were burned at the stake.

  The Josephian triumph had incalculable consequences for every aspect of Russian life.

  At the Council of 1504, Joseph and his allies had assembled voluminous documentation in support of their position, including quotations from a document known in the West as the Donation of Constantine. Supposed to be the testament of Constantine the Great, by which he had bequeathed imperial rank and dominions to the pope, it established the first Christian emperor as the legal source for all temporal possessions and privileges of the Church. For seven centuries (until Renaissance philologists proved it a forgery) it was used by the Catholic Church in its struggles with secular powers. Ironically, just as it was being repudiated in the West, it was discovered and embraced by Russian Church apologists. And it would remain a powerful force in Russian history until Peter the Great.

  Now, both the Tale of the White Cowl and Filofey’s Third Rome Epistle – core documents in the mythology of the Russian Orthodox Tsardom – owed much to the Donation, and had originally arisen less as propaganda about Russian national destiny than as expedient fictions in the campaign mounted by the Josephians to protect Church property and privileges from the state. The cowl “of dazzling white representing the Lord’s resurrection” symbolized the inviolability of such holdings, and was said to be “more honorable than an imperial crown.”30 Filofey’s epistle likewise admonished the sovereign: “Do not transgress against the precepts established by your predecessors – Constantine the Great… and other beatified saints of the same root as you.”31

  For half a century thereafter the Josephians had dominated the Church. Though some Non-Possessors (like Vassian Patrikeyev in the reign of Vasily III) had achieved prominence, Vasily’s own flirtation with the idea of secularizing Church holdings had been discarded in exchange for Josephian support for his divorce.

  But now Ivan IV had come of age. Though Makary was a Josephian, Sylvester and Adashev were not, while the tsar’s personal interest in the growth of his military had begun to take precedence over what he had been taught about the inviolability of ecclesiastical estates.

  To guide him, of course, Ivan had many inspiring examples from the Reformation – for example, in Sweden (an antagonist closely watched by the Kremlin) where on December 8, 1539, the king had promulgated “out of the plenitude of his royal power” Church statutes modeled on those of Henry VIII. Although in a sense it was unnecessary for Ivan to follow Henry’s lead because “Makar
y had already nationalized the Church for him,” it cannot have escaped his attention that although the Russian Church was perhaps the State Church par excellence, he was neither the declared head of it, nor had the State itself benefited from the arrangement in the customary way.

  Therefore (in a measure also ominous to his nobles), in the autumn of 1550 Ivan commissioned a broad inventory of Muscovy’s resources, including the registration of all classes of landholders and types of property, and in two articles of the new Law Code he sought to revoke all permanent tax immunity charters, and to regulate the alienation of ancestral estates so that monasteries could not acquire them with such ease. A third article restricted the establishment of new Church suburbs.

  Makary vehemently dissented from these provisions and mustered his forces to thwart their enactment. His ire can well be imagined. He had orchestrated Ivan’s coronation as “Orthodox tsar,” and had since been laboring mightily for the spiritual glorification of the state. To begin with, in January 1547 and again in February 1549 he had convoked major Church Councils for the mass canonization of new saints on a scale without parallel in the history of Christianity. Russia had previously claimed just twenty-two saints in the five centuries since her conversion. In 1547, that number was doubled; and in 1549, increased again by seventeen. Many local saints were adopted as national saints to bring their adoration under central control, and some of the newly canonized were princes, preeminently Alexander Nevsky. At the same time holy relics and icons from throughout the realm were deposited in Moscow’s Cathedral of the Assumption to endow the capital with an aura of sanctity. In this the Third Rome was but emulating the Second (Constantinople), which had been revered in the eyes of the whole Orthodox East not only as the seat of emperor and patriarch, but for the “supernatural forces abundantly present within its walls.”