The Icon and the Axe
Page 9
The monastic revival of the north took definite form in the 1330's, when Metropolitan Alexis began to build a large number of churches within the Moscow Kremlin, providing a new religious aura to the citadel of power and centers of worship for several new monastic communities. Unlike the carefully organized and regulated monasteries of Western Christendom,
these communities were loosely structured. Although they subscribed to the ritualized communal rule of St. Theodore Studite, discipline was irregular, the monks often gathering only for common meals and worship services. One reason for this relative laxness was the very centrality of the monasteries in Russian civilization. In contrast to most other monasteries of the Christian East, early Russian monasteries had generally been founded inside the leading princely cities, and monastic vows were often undertaken by figures who continued their previous political, economic, and military activities. Thus, the activities of Alexis as monk and metropolitan were in many ways merely a continuation under more impressive auspices of his earlier military and political exploits as a member of the noble Biakont family in Moscow. Yet Alexis' new-found belief that God was with him brought new strength to the Muscovite cause. His relics were subsequently reverenced along with those of the first metropolitan of Moscow, Peter, who had been canonized at the insistence of Ivan Kalita. The most important of the new monasteries built by Alexis inside the Kremlin was named the Monastery of the Miracles in honor of the wonder-working powers attributed to the saintly lives and relics of these early metropolitans.
The central figure in the monastic revival and in the unification of Russia during the fourteenth century was Sergius of Radonezh. Like his friend Alexis, Sergius was of noble origin; but his conversion to a religious profession was more profound and seminal. Sergius had come to Moscow from Rostov, a vanquished rival city to the east. Disillusioned with Moscow and the lax older traditions of monastic life, he set off into the forest to recapture through prayer and self-denial the holiness of the early Church. His piety and physical bravery attracted others to the new monastery he founded northeast of Moscow in 1337. Dedicated to the Holy Trinity and later named for its founder, this monastery became for Muscovy what the Monastery of the Caves had been for Kiev: a center of civilization, a shrine for pilgrimage, and the second Lavra, or large parent monastery, in Russian history.
Certain distinctions between the monastery of St. Sergius and older ones in Kiev and Novgorod point to the new role monasteries were to play in Russian civilization. St. Sergius' monastery was located outside of the political center, and its demands on the individual-in terms of physical labor and ascetic forbearance-were far more severe. This exposed location encouraged the monastery also to assume the roles of fortress and colonizing center.
The monastic revival in Russia depended not only on the heroism and sanctity of men like Sergius but also on important spiritual influences from the crumbling Byzantine Empire. Perplexed by its own misfortunes and
embittered by harassment from the Catholic West, Byzantine monasticism in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth century increasingly turned away from the Studite rule in the monasteries and from the growing influence of Western scholasticism to a new mystical movement known as Hesychasm.6
This movement contended that there was a direct personal way to God available to man through the "inner calm" (hesychia) which came from ascetic discipline of the flesh and silent prayers of the spirit. Darkness, fasting, and holding the breath were seen as aids to the achievement of this inner calm, and the traditional sacraments of the Church and even the verbal prayer of an individual believer subtly came to be viewed as irrelevant if not positively distracting. The Hesychasts believed that such a process of inner purification would prepare man for divine illumination: for a glimpse of the uncreated light from God which had appeared to the apostles on Mount Tabor at the time of Christ's Transfiguration. The Hesychasts sought to avoid the heretical assertion that man could achieve identity with God by insisting that this illumination placed man only in contact with the "energy" (energeia) and not the "essence" {ousia) of the divine. This distinction and the belief that man could gain a glimpse of the divine light were upheld as articles of faith by the Eastern Church in 1351.
The triumph of Hesychasm in the late days of the Byzantine Empire further estranged Orthodoxy from the disciplined and ornately sacramental Roman Church of the late Middle Ages. By challenging authority and encouraging men to seek a direct path to God, Hesychasm represented in some ways an Eastern anticipation of Protestantism.
Nowhere was the victory of the new mysticism and the estrangement from Rome more complete than in the newly opened monasteries of the Russian north. The hostility of the surroundings had long required ascetic qualities of resourcefulness and endurance. The political disintegration of Kievan Russia had led some monks like St. Sergius to seek salvation by leaving the cities altogether in imitation of the early desert fathers. Thus, it is not surprising that the new monasteries of these pioneering Russian hermits should prove receptive to the hesychastic teachings which reached the north through pilgrims returning from the Russian monastery on Mt. Athos and through Orthodox Slavs fleeing to Muscovy after the fall of the Balkans to Islam. The separation of Muscovy from classical traditions of rational theology and clear hierarchical discipline rendered the region ripe for a doctrine emphasizing direct contact with God. At the same time, the closeness of the hermit-monks to nature (and to the animistic paganism of non-Christian tribes) led them to dwell in an almost Franciscan manner on the theme of God's involvement in all of creation. Just as the apostles had seen a glimpse of light from God at the Transfiguration of Christ, so could a
true monk in Christ's universal church gain a glimmer of the coming transfiguration of the cosmos. The debilitating bleakness of the environment created a need to believe not just in human salvation but in a transformation of the entire natural world.
The theme of transfiguration was sometimes blended with that of the millennial Second Coming of Christ. Popular "spiritual songs" of the Muscovite period told of the coming of glory to "the communal church all transfigured" atop a mountain-a seeming combination of Tabor and Athos.7 The hermit-monks who founded new monasteries on the northeastern frontier of Europe thought of their new houses not so much as institutions designed to revivify the established Church as transitory places in man's pilgrimage toward the Second Coming. The icons showing St. Sergius calming the wild beasts and preaching to animals and plants8 emphasized the fact that the promised end was not just the resurrection of the dead but the transfiguration of all creation.
In the century following the establishment of St. Sergius' new monastery at Zagorsk, some 150 new monasteries were founded in one of the most remarkable missionary movements in Christian history.9 Most of the founders were strongly influenced by Hesychasm, but they were also, like the Cistercians of the medieval West, hard-working pioneers opening up new and forbidding lands for cultivation and colonization. The outward reach of the monasteries had extended some three hundred miles north of Moscow by 1397, with the founding of the monastery of St. Cyril on the White Lake. By 1436, just a century after the founding of St. Sergius' monastery, the movement had reached yet another three hundred miles north into the islands of the White Sea with the founding of the Solovetsk Monastery by Savva and Zosima. There were more saints from this period of Russian history than any other; and prominent among them were Sergius, Cyril, Savva, and Zosima, whose monasteries became leading shrines because of the miraculous powers accredited to their relics and remains.
Another widely venerated local saint of the fourteenth century was Stephen of Perm, whose career illustrates the civilizing and colonizing function of Russian monasticism. This learned and ascetic figure carried Christian teachings 750 miles east of Moscow to the most distant tributary of the Volga, at the foot of the Ural Mountains. There he evangelized the pagan Komi peoples, inventing an alphabet for their language and translating Holy Scripture into it. Stephen left an enduring impact
on the distant region as its cultural leader and first bishop. He returned to Moscow to be buried in a church appropriately called Savior in the Forest. Thanks largely to Moscow chroniclers the story of his heroic battles with natural elements and pagan sorcerers kindled the awakening imagination of Russian Christians. The
"Life of Stephen of Perm" by the greatest hagiographer of the age, Epi-phanius the Wise, set a new standard for flowery eulogy and became perhaps the most popular of the many new lives of local saints.10
The most influential of Epiphanius' Lives, however, was that of St. Sergius of Radonezh, which he wrote shortly before his death in 1420. Richer than his earlier works in factual material and the use of vernacular terms, Epiphanius' life of Sergius reads like a history of Russia in the fourteenth century and helps explain how this lonely ascetic has come to be known as the "builder of Russia."11 Respect for his selflessness and sanctity enabled Sergius to become a counselor and arbiter among the warring princes of the Volga-Oka region. The links that developed with nearby Zagorsk helped Moscow assume leadership of the region during the preparations for battle with the Mongols in the 1370's. St. Sergius prayed for victory over the Tatars, mobilized the resources of his monastery to support the fighting, and sent two monks to lead the troops in the famous victory at Kulikovo. Because his aid and intercession were widely credited with this decisive turn in the fortunes of Muscovy, his monastery soon became- almost in the modern sense-a national shrine. It was connected not with any purely local event or holy man, but with the common victory over a pagan enemy of a united army of Orthodox Russians.
The new monasteries were full-time centers of work and prayer, controlling rather than controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Often modeled on the monasteries of Mount Athos, they were organized communally and strongly influenced by the new Athonite tradition of Hesychasm. The "elders" who had attained mastery of their passions and spiritual clairvoyance through long years of prayer and vigilance often commanded greater authority within the monastery than did the hegumen or archimandrite (the nominal head of a small and a large monastery respectively). These elders played a leading role in the "accumulation of spiritual energies," which was the main work of Muscovite monasticism.
Like a magnetic field, this spiritual energy attracted loose elements and filled the surrounding area with invisible powers. This energizing effect has already been noted in the field of icon painting, which received much of its stimulus from the need to decorate new monasteries. Rublev's "Old Testament Trinity" was painted by a monk for the monastery of St. Sergius, depicting the subject to which that key monastery had been dedicated.
Literary culture was stimulated by the monastic revival. About twic as many manuscript books have survived from the fourteenth century a from the three previous centuries combined.12 These manuscripts were embellished with a new type of decoration known as belt weaving, and the style adorned with a new technique known as word weaving.13 Both of these
skills were brought to Russia by many of the same monastic emigrants from Athos, who were bearers of Hesychasm. Both of these "weaving" techniques represented in some ways an extension to literature of principles common to both Hesychasm and the new iconography: the subordination of verbal inventiveness and pictorial naturalism to the balanced and rhythmic repetition of a few simple patterns and phrases designed to facilitate direct links with God.
Even more striking in the new literary activity was the intensification of the previous historical bias of Russian theology. In sacred history as in iconography, Muscovite monks succeeded in "transforming an imitative craft into a conscious national art."14 Increasingly, lives of saints and sacred chronicles tended to identify the religious truth of Orthodoxy with the political fate of Muscovy. This trend was already evidenced in the late thirteenth century in the extraordinarily popular "Life of Alexander Nevsky." The story of the prince who vanquished the Teutonic knights is filled with comparisons to Old Testament figures, military images drawn from Josephus Flavius' Tale of the Destruction of Jerusalem, and details of heroism transferred from legends about Alexander the Great to Alexander Nevsky. This work was also infused with a militant anti-Catholic spirit that was absent from epics of the Kievan period (and probably from the outlook of Alexander himself) and was almost certainly introduced by the Monk Cyril, who had fled his native Galicia after it had entered the Roman orbit, and deepened his anti-Catholicism with a stay in Nicaea just as the Latin crusaders were overrunning nearby Constantinople, in the early thirteenth century.15
Even more exalted than this story of victory over "the Romans" were the tales of combat with the Tatars that became particularly popular after the victory at Kulikovo in 1380, under Dmitry Donskoy. The life of this lay prince was written in purely hagiographic style. He is repeatedly referred to as a saint, and is placed higher in the firmament of heaven than many biblical figures. The cause of Dmitry in the most famous epic of this period, "The Tale from Beyond the Don" {Zadonshchina), is that of "the Christian faith" and "the holy churches"; just as the icon commissioned for Dmitry's grave by his widow was that of the Archangel Michael, the bearer of heavenly victory over the armies of Satan.18 Whereas epics of the Kievan era were relatively hospitable to naturalistic and even pagan detail, the Zadonshchina imparts a new spirit of fanaticism in a new idiom of eulogy and epithet.17
The extraordinary emphasis in the chronicles on the battle of Kulikovo (which was not in itself particularly decisive in turning back the tide of Tatar domination) represents in good measure the echoing by Muscovite chron-
iclers of the call-first sounded in Latin Christendom at the time of its great awakening several centuries earlier-for a Christian crusade against the infidel East. Once again, a people struggling out of darkness and division were invited to unite behind their faith to fight a common foe. The ideological accompaniment for the gradual subordination of all other major Russian princes to Moscow in the course of the fifteenth century was provided by a series of chronicles beginning with that of the St. Sergius Monastery in 1408, and by supporting songs and legends that stressed (in contrast to those of Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver) the importance of the holy war against the Tatars and the need for Muscovite leadership in reuniting "the Russian land."18
The monastic literature of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century moved increasingly into the world of prophecy-developing two interrelated beliefs that lay at the heart of the Moscow ideology: (1) that Russian Christendom represents a special culminating chapter in an unbroken chain of sacred history; and (2) that Moscow and its rulers are the chosen bearers of this destiny.
The belief in a special destiny for Orthodox Christianity was not new. Orthodoxy was heir to the earliest sees of Christendom, including all the regions in which Christ himself had lived. Chiliastic teachings from the East entered early into Byzantine thinking. When Jerusalem was falling to the Moslems in 638 the true cross and other sacred relics were transferred to Constantinople, and the thought arose-particularly under the Macedonian dynasty at the time when Russia was being converted-that Constantinople might in some sense be the New Jerusalem as well as the New Rome.19
Just as the Eastern Church claimed to be the only truly apostolic church, so too the Eastern Empire claimed a specially sanctified genealogy through Babylonia, Persia, and Rome. From the end of the fourth century, Constantinople began to be thought of as the New Rome: capital of an empire with a destiny unlike that of any other on earth. Byzantium was not a but the Christian Empire, specially chosen to guide men along the path marked out by the chroniclers that led from Christ's incarnation to His Second Coming.
Following Clement and Origen rather than Augustine, Orthodox theology spoke less about the drama of personal salvation than about that of cosmic redemption.20 Whereas Augustine willed to Latin Christendom a brooding sense of original sin and of pessimism about the earthly city, these Eastern fathers willed to Orthodox Christendom a penchant for believing that the Christian Empire of the East might yet be transformed into the
final, heavenly kingdom. Hesychast mysticism encouraged the Orthodox to be-
lieve that such a transformation was an imminent possibility through a spiritual intensification of their own lives-and ultimately of the entire Christian imperium.
In times of change and dislocation, the historical imagination tended to look for signs of the coming end of history and of approaching deliverance. Thus, the growing sense of destiny in Muscovy was directly related to the anguish among Orthodox monks at the final decline and fall of Byzantium.
The flight into apocalyptical prophecy began in the late fourteenth century in the late-blooming Slavic kingdoms of the Balkans, and spread to Muscovy via a migration of men and ideas from the Southern Slavs. Unlike the Southern Slav influx of the tenth century, which brought the confident faith of a united Byzantium, this second wave in the fifteenth infected Russia with the bombastic rhetoric and eschatological forebodings that had developed in Serbia and Bulgaria as they disintegrated before the advancing Turks.
The Serbian kingdom, during its golden age under Stephen Dushan, ???1-^. represented in many ways a dress rehearsal for the pattern of rule that was to emerge in Muscovy. Sudden military expansion was accompanied by a rapid inflation of princely pretensions. With speed and audacity Dushan assumed the titles of Tsar, Autocrat, and Emperor of the Romans; styled himself a successor to Constantine and Justinian; and summoned a council to set up a separate Serbian patriarchate. He sought, in brief, to supplant the old Byzantine Empire with a new Slavic-Greek empire. To sustain his claim he leaned heavily on the support of Mt. Athos and other monasteries that he had enriched and patronized.