The Bulgarian kingdom developed during its much longer period of independence from Byzantium a prophetic tradition which was to be taken over directly by Muscovy. Seeking to glorify the Bulgarian capital of Trnovo, the chroniclers referred to it as the New Rome, which had supplanted both the Rome of classical antiquity and the declining "second Rome" of Constantinople.
When the infidel Turks swept into the Balkans, crushing the Serbs at Kossovo in 1389 and overrunning the flaming Bulgarian capital four years later, the messianic hopes of Orthodox Slavdom had only one direction in which to turn: to the unvanquished prince and expanding church of Muscovy. In 1390 a Bulgarian monk from Trnovo, Cyprian, became Metropolitan of Moscow, and in the course of the fifteenth century men and ideas moved north to Muscovy and helped infect it with a new sense of historical calling.21 The Balkan monks had tended to sympathize politically with the anti-Latin zealots in Byzantium and theologically with the anti-
scholastic Hesychasts. They brought with them a fondness for the close alliance between monks and princes which had prevailed in the Southern Slav kingdoms and a deep hatred of Roman Catholicism, which in their view had surrounded the Orthodox Slavs with hostile principalities in the Balkans and had seduced the Church of Constantinople into humiliating reunion. The Southern Slavs also brought with them Balkan traditions of compiling synthetic genealogies to support the claims of the Serbian and Bulgarian kingdoms against Byzantium, and a penchant for ornate and pompous language heavily laden with archaic Church Slavonic forms. Particularly noteworthy and influential was the Tale of the Great Princes of Vladimir of Great Russia, by a Serbian emigre who solemnly connected the Muscovite princes not only with those of Kiev and the legendary Riurik but with the even more fanciful figure of Prussus, ruler of an imaginary ancient kingdom on the Vistula and a relative of Augustus Caesar, who was in turn related through Antony and Cleopatra to the Egyptian descendants of Noah and Shem. This widely copied work also encouraged Russians to think of themselves as successors of Byzantium by advancing the extraordinary fiction that the imperial regalia had been transferred from Constantinople to Kiev by Vladimir Monomachus, who was said to be the first tsar of all Russia.22
Meanwhile, a sense of having superseded Byzantium was subtly encouraged by one of the very few ideological conditions of Tatar overlord-ship: the requirement to pray for only one tsar: the Tatar khan. Though not uniformly observed or enforced among the tribute-paying Eastern Slavs, this restriction tended to remove from view in Muscovy the names of the later Byzantine Emperors. Muscovy found it only too easy to view the collapse of this increasingly remote empire in the mid-fifteenth century as God's chastisement of an unfaithful people.
In the Muscovite view-which was developed retrospectively in the late fifteenth century-the Byzantine Church betrayed its heritage by accepting union with Rome at Lyons, at Rome, and finally at the Council of Florence in 1437-9.
Ill-equipped to evaluate the theological issues, Muscovy equated Rome with the hostile knightly orders of the eastern Baltic and the growing power of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. The Muscovite church refused to accept the decisions of the council, driving into exile the Russian representative who had approved them, Metropolitan Isidore. This Greek prelate became a Catholic in exile, and was replaced as metropolitan by a native Russian at the Russian Church council of 1448.23 The Turkish capture of Constantinople five years later came to be viewed as God's revenge on Byzantium and prophetic confirmation that the Russian church had acted wisely in repudiating the Florentine union. Yet the sense of Russian in-
volvement in the Byzantine tragedy was far greater than nationalistic historians have often been willing to admit. From the late fourteenth century on, Muscovy was sending financial support as well as expressions of sympathetic concern to Constantinople.24 Those fleeing the Turks brought with them the fear that the whole Orthodox world might succumb. When the Khan Akhmet attacked Moscow in 1480, a Serbian monk issued a passionate plea to the populace not to follow
the Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks . . . Albanians, Croatians and Bosnians . . . and the many other lands which did not struggle manfully, whose fatherlands perished, whose lands and governments were destroyed, and whose people scattered in foreign lands.
Then, almost in the form of a prayer:
May your eyes never see the bondage and ravaging of your holy churches and homes, the murder of your children and the defiling of your wives and daughters-sufferings such as the Turks have brought to other great and revered lands.25
In such an atmosphere, the psychological pressures were great for the comforting belief that the Christian Empire had not died with the fall of Byzantium and the other "great and revered" Orthodox kingdoms of the Balkans. The site of empire had merely moved from Constantinople to the "new Rome" of Trnovo, which became, by simple substitution, the "third Rome" of Moscow. This famous image originated with Philotheus of the Eleazer Monastery in Pskov, who probably first propounded it to Ivan III, though the earliest surviving statement is in a letter to Vasily III of 1511:
The church of ancient Rome fell because of the Apollinarian heresy, as to the second Rome-the Church of Constantinople-it has been hewn by the axes of the Hagarenes. But this third, new Rome, the Universal Apostolic Church under thy mighty rule radiates forth the Orthodox Christian faith to the ends of the earth more brightly than the sun. … In all the universe thou art the only Tsar of Christians. . . . Hear me, pious Tsar, all Christian kingdoms have converged in thine alone. Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be. . . .2ti
The transfer of Orthodox hopes to Muscovy had already been dramatized by the elaborately staged marriage in 1472 of Ivan III to Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and by the introduction into Russia a few years later of the former imperial seal of the two-headed eagle.27
Russians were encouraged to view change in apocalyptical terms by the
purely fortuitous fact that the old Orthodox Church calendar extended only to the year 1492. The 7,000 years that began with the creation in 5508 B.C. was drawing to a close, and learned monks tended to look for signs of the approaching end of history. The close advisers of the Tsar who showed sympathy at the Church council of 1490 with the rationalistic "ludaizing" heresy were denounced as "vessels of the devil, forerunners of the Antichrist."28 An important issue in the subsequent persecution of the Judaizers was their sponsorship of an astrological table for computing the years, "The Six Wings" (ShestokryV), which seemed to suggest that "the years of the Christian Chronicle have expired but ours lives on."29 In combating the Judaizers, the Russian Church unwittingly kept historical expectations alive by translating into readable Russian for the first time much of the apocalyptical literature of the Old Testament, including such apocrypha as the apocalypse of Ezra.30
By the turn of the century, expectations were raised that God was about to bring history to a close; but there was uncertainty as to whether one should look immediately for good or evil signs: for Christ's Second Coming and thousand-year reign on earth or for the coming reign of the Antichrist. Philotheus believed that "Russian Tsardom is the last earthly kingdom, after which comes the eternal kingdom of Christ," but another Pskovian saw the conquering Tsar as a harbinger of the Antichrist.31 This uncertainty as to whether disaster or deliverance was at hand became characteristic of Russian prophetic writings. In later years too, there was an unstable alternation between anticipation and fear, exultation and depression, among those who shared the recurring feeling that great things were about to happen in Russia.
The rise of prophecy in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Muscovy is evidenced in the growth of extreme forms of Christian spirituality, such as "pillar-like immobility" (stolpnichestvo) and the perpetual wandering of "folly for Christ's sake" (iurodstvd). Though both traditions have Eastern and Byzantine origins, they acquired new intensity and importance in the Muscovite north.
Pillar-like immobility came to be regarded in the non-communal monasteries as a means
of gaining special sanctity and clairvoyance. This tradition received popular sanction through the fabulous tales of Ilya of Murom, who allegedly sat immobile for thirty years before rising to carry out deeds of heroism.
The holy fools became revered for their asceticism and prophetic utterances as "men of God" {bozhie liudi). Whereas there had never been more than four saint's days dedicated to holy fools in all of Orthodox Christendom from the sixth to the tenth century, at least ten such days were
celebrated in Muscovy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.32 Churches and shrines were dedicated to them in great numbers, particularly in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, when this form of piety was at its height.83
Holy fools often became the norm, if not the normal, in human life. Renunciation of the flesh "for Christ's sake" purified them for the gift of prophecy. The role of the holy fool at the court of the princes of Muscovy was a combination of the court confessor of the Christian West and the royal soothsayer of the pagan East. They warned of doom and spoke darkly of the need for new crusades or penitential exercises, reinforcing the already marked tendency of Slavic Orthodoxy toward passion and prophecy rather than reason and discipline.
Those who became holy fools were often widely traveled and well read. It was, after all, the learned figure Tertullian who had first asked the Church, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" and asserted that "I believe because it is absurd." Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the most learned of Renaissance humanists, also sang "in praise of folly"; and his essay of that name became appropriately widely read by Russian thinkers.34 Troubled Russian thinkers in later periods-Dostoevsky, Musorgsky, and Berdiaev-would feel tempted to find the true identity of their nation in this undisciplined tradition of holy "wanderers over the Russian land."35 But the prophetic fools provided a source of anarchistic and masochistic impulses as well as strength and sanctification.
The holy fools bore many points of resemblance to the prophetic hermit-saints that became common in Muscovy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, the term for holy wanderer (skitalets) is related to the one used to describe the isolated hermit communities: skity. The most famous ascetic hermit and defender of these small communities was Nil Sorsky, through whom the spiritual intensity of the Hesychasts was brought from Greek to Russian soil.36 A monk from St. Cyril's monastery on the White Lake, Nil traveled to the Holy Land and to Constantinople in the years just after its fall and thence to the "holy Mountain" of Athos. There he acquired the deep devotion to an inner spiritual life free from external discipline and constraint, which he brought back to Russia and used as the basis of his model skit in the wilderness along the Sora River beyond the White Lake. In his devotional writings there is a kind of primitive Franciscan love of nature and indifference to things of this world. There were to be no more than twelve "brothers" in any skit, all living in apostolic poverty and close communion with the natural world. The gospels and a few other "divine writings" were to be the only sources of authority.
Nil saw the skit as the golden mean of monastic life, combining the
communal type of monastery with the cellular type. Within the individual cell there was to be a kind of apprentice system with an experienced "elder" tutoring one or two apprentice monks in spiritual prayer and holy writings. All the various cells were to gather together for Sundays and other feast days, and each skit was to support itself economically but resist all temptations of wealth and luxury. Externals were irrelevant to this apostle of the inner spiritual life. He was not deeply concerned with the observance of fasts or the persecution of heretics. Nil preached rather the power of spiritual example, and sought to find the means of producing such examples in monasteries. Spiritual prayer was in Nil's metaphorical language the running wind that could lead man across the turbulent seas of sin to the haven of salvation. All externals-even spoken prayer-were only tillers, means of steering men back into this wind of the spirit which had first blown on the apostles at Pentecost.
Nil's life and doctrine had a profound effect in the new monasteries of the expanding northeastern frontier. His followers, known as trans-Volga elders, came chiefly from the dependent cloisters of St. Sergius and from the lesser-known "Savior in Stone" monastery and its nine monastic colonies in the Yaroslavl-Vologda region. When this monastery came under the direction of a Greek Hesychast in 1380, it became a center of training for "inner spirituality," offering counsel not only to monastic apprentices but to a variety of tradesmen, colonizers, and lay pilgrims.87
Nil's teachings had the disturbing effect of leading men to think that direct links with God were possible-indeed preferable-to the ornately externalized services of Orthodoxy. The belief that God had sent inspired intermediaries directly to His chosen people outside the formal channels of the Church lent a kind of nervous religious character to life.
Muscovy at the time of its rise to greatness resembled an expectant revivalist camp. Russia was a primitive but powerful religious civilization, fatefully lacking in critical sense or clear division of authority. It had, of course, always been incorrect to speak even in Byzantium of "church" and "state" rather than of two types of sanctified authority (sacerdotium and imperium) within the universal Christian commonwealth.38 In Muscovy the two were even more closely intertwined without any clear commitment to the theoretical definitions and practical limitations that had evolved in the long history of Byzantium.
In the civil sphere there were no permanent administrative chanceries (even of the crude prikaz variety) until the early sixteenth century.39 In the ecclesiastical sphere, the lack of any clear diocesan structure or episcopal hierarchy made it difficult for leading prelates to provide an effective substitute for political authority during the long period of political division. Nor
was there even a clear line of precedence among the monasteries. In contrast to the medieval West, where compendia of Roman law were waiting to be discovered and where the Moslem invader brought the texts of Aristotle with him, distant Muscovy had almost no exposure to the political and legal teachings of classical antiquity. At best they read some version of Plato's arguments for the closed rule of a philosopher-king-but only to fortify their conclusion that a good and holy leader was necessary, never as an exercise in Socratic method.
Lacking any knowledge of political systems in the past or much experience with them in the present, the Muscovite vaguely sought a leader on the model of the divinized sun-kings of the East and the princes and saints of popular folklore. The victory in the Christian East of Platonic idealism, which was exemplified by the veneration of ideal forms in the icons, led Russians to look for an ideal prince who would be in effect "the living icon of God."40
Unlike the Platonic ideal, however, the ideal Russian prince was to be not a philosopher but a guardian of tradition. The highest good in Muscovy was not knowledge but memory, pamiaf. Where one would now say, "I know," one then said, "I remember." Descriptions, inventories, and administrative records in the prikazes were all known as pamiati; epic tales were written down "for the old to hear and the young to remember." There was no higher appeal in a dispute than the "important, good and firm memory" of the oldest available authority.41
Thus, Muscovy was bound together not primarily by formal codes and definitions or rational procedures, but by an uncritical and unreflective collective memory. Special authority tended to devolve on those local "elders" whose memory went back furthest toward the apostolic age and whose experience made them most knowledgeable in Christian tradition: the ascetic starets in the monastery, the respected starosta in the city, and the epic stariny (tales of old) for the popular imagination. Rarely has a society been more attached to antiquity, but Muscovy looked to the past for tales of heroism rather than forms of thought, rhetoric rather than dialectic, the "golden-tongued" sermons of St. John Chrysostom rather than the "cursed logic" of Aristotle.42 Even the princes had to trace their genealogies and heraldic seals back to a sacred past in order to gain respect in the p
atriarchal atmosphere of Muscovy.43
An essential element in making Muscovite authority effective throughout Russia was monastic support. The monasteries had reunified Russia by lifting men's eyes above the petty quarrels of the appanage period to a higher ideal. The Muscovite grand dukes made innumerable pilgrimages to the leading cloisters; corresponded with monks; sought their material aid
and spiritual intercession before undertaking any important military or political action; and were quick to bestow on them a large share of newly gained land and wealth. In return, the monasteries provided an all-important aura of sanctity for the Grand Duke of Muscovy. He was the protector of monasteries, the figure in whom "the opposition between the principle of Caesar and the will of God was overcome."44
The ideology of Muscovite tsardom, which took shape in the early sixteenth century, was a purely monastic creation. Its main author was the last and most articulate of the great monastic pioneers, Joseph Sanin, founder and hegumen of Volokolamsk. Like the others, Joseph established his monastery out of nothing in the forest, whence he had fled in despair of existing cloisters and in the hope of creating the ideal Christian community. A man of striking appearance and ascetic personal habits, Joseph insisted on absolute obedience to detailed regulations covering dress, seating precedence, and even bodily movements. His central conviction that acquired, external habits have internal, spiritual effects placed him in diametric opposition to his contemporary and rival, Nil Sorsky; and their fundamental philosophic conflict came to a head in the famous controversy over monastic property. Against Nil's doctrine of apostolic poverty, Joseph defended the tremendous wealth which had accrued to his growing chain of cloisters through the bequests of the brother of Ivan III and other wealthy patrons and novices. Joseph was neither an advocate nor a practitioner of luxurious living. He insisted that monastic possessions were not personal wealth but a kind of sacred trust given in thanks for the sanctity and intercession of the monks, and in the hope that their holiness would radiate out into society.45 ,
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