The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  The controversy between the "possessors" and "non-possessors" was essentially a conflict between two conceptions of monastic life. All major participants were monks who conceived of Muscovy as a religious civilization with the grand duke its absolute sovereign. The real issue was the nature of authority in this patriarchal monastic civilization: the physical authority of the hegumen against the spiritual authority of the elder; centralized organization and regular discipline against loosely bound communities of prophetic piety.

  Although Ivan III-like other ambitious state builders of the early modern period-wanted to secularize church holdings, the church council of 1503 decided in favor of the possessors. The successive deaths of Ivan III and Nil shortly thereafter and a series of persecutions against Nil's followers cemented the alliance between the Josephite party and the grand dukes of Muscovy. The monk Philotheus' idea of Moscow as the Third Rome may have been addressed to the Tsar's vanity in an effort to divert

  him from any action against the church hierarchy.46 He addressed the Grand Duke not only as Tsar, but as "holder of the reins of the divine holy throne of the universal apostolic Church."47 As the influence of the Josephite party grew at court, the conception of tsardom itself was given a monastic flavor. All of Muscovy came to be viewed as a kind of vast monastery under the discipline of a Tsar-Archimandrite. The beginning in the sixteenth century of the tradition of "the Tsar's words"-the obligation of all Russians to report immediately under threat of execution any serious criticism of the sovereign--probably represents an extension to the public at large of the rigid obligations to report fully any wavering of loyalties inside Josephite monasteries.

  The close alliance that developed between monks and tsars in the first half of the sixteenth century can, of course, be analyzed as a venal, Machiavellian compact: the monks keeping their wealth, gaining freedom from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and receiving as prisoners prophetic advocates of monastic poverty; the tsar receiving ecclesiastical permission for divorce and propagandists support for the position that "though he be in body like all others, yet in power of office he is like God."48 Yet it is important to realize that the victory of the Josephites and the extension of their influence in sixteenth-century Russia was a direct result of popular reverence for monasteries and the monastic ideal. Men strove for the new wealth but still sought to dedicate it to God. They wanted power, but also monastic sanction for its exercise. If even Cosimo de Medici amidst the worldly splendors of fifteenth-century Florence felt the need of periodic retreats to his monastic cell, it is hardly surprising that the princes and leaders of the primitive religious civilization of Muscovy should at the same time give so much of their worldly goods and services to Russian monasteries.

  The victorious monastic party brought new confusion of authority into Muscovy by blurring the division between the monastery and the outside world. The tsar became a kind of archimandrite-in-chief of all the monasteries, and the monasteries in turn began to serve as prisons for the tsar's political opponents. The asceticism and discipline of the Josephite monasteries began to be applied to civil society; and the corruption and vulgarity of a crude frontier people made ever deeper inroads into the cloisters.

  Although monastic corruption has often been the subject of lurid exaggeration, there is little doubt that the increasing wealth and power of Russian monasteries provided strong temptations to worldliness. The increasing number of monastic recruits brought with them two of the most widespread moral irregularities of Muscovite society: alcoholism and sexual

  perversion. The latter was a particular problem in a civilization that had been curiously unable to produce in its epic poetry a classic pair of ideal lovers and had accepted-in the teachings of the Josephites-an almost masochistic doctrine of ascetic discipline.

  The high incidence of sexual irregularity shocked and fascinated foreign visitors to Muscovy. Nothing better indicates the intertwining of sacred and profane motifs within Muscovy than the fact that the monastic epistle to Vasily III first setting forth the exalted "third Rome" theory also included a long appeal for help in combating sodomy within the monasteries. Continued monastic concern over this practice helped reinforce the prophetic strain in Muscovite thought, convincing Silvester, one of Ivan the Terrible's closest clerical confidants, that God's wrath was about to be visited on the new Sodom and Gomorrah of the Russian plain.49

  Less familiar than the growing worldliness of the monasteries in the sixteenth century is the increasing monasticism of the outside world. The "white," or married, parish priests were often more zealous than the "black," or celibate, monastic clergy in the performance of religious duties. Simple laymen were often the most conscientious of all in keeping the four long and rigorous fasts (for Advent, Easter, the apostles Peter and Paul, and the Assumption); observing weekly days of abstinence not only on Friday, the day of the Crucifixion, but also on Wednesday, the day on which Judas agreed to betray Christ; keeping vigil before the twelve universal feast days of Orthodoxy; and observing private devotions and local feasts. The simple Christian often came from considerable distances to go to a church which offered him neither heat nor a seat. Each visit was something of a pilgrimage, with the worshipper often spending as much time kneeling or prostrate upon the cold floor as standing. Religious processions were frequent and lengthy-the daily services of matins and vespers often lasting a total of seven or eight hours.50

  Behind the elaborate rituals of Russian Orthodoxy there often lay a deeper popular spirituality that was only slightly touched by the new tsarist ideology of the Josephites. Ordinary believers were dazzled by imperial claims and excited by its prophetic pronouncements. But they had no real interest in polemics which were conducted in a language that they could not understand and written in a script that they could not read.

  Thus, along with the militant prophetic ideology of Muscovy went the cult of humility and self-abnegation: the attempt to be "very like" the Lord in the outpouring of love and the acceptance of suffering in the kenotic manner of Russia's first national saints: Boris and Gleb.51 The persecuted followers of Nil Sorsky "beyond the Volga" were closer to this tradition than the victorious Josephites and enjoyed greater popular veneration to-

  gether with all those willing to suffer voluntarily in the manner of Christ: as a propitiation for the sins of others and a means of purifying God's sinful people.

  The contrast between active militarism and passive kenoticism is more apparent than real. Hatred to those outside a group with a sense of destiny is often combined with love to those within it: and both the compulsion and the compassion of early Russian spirituality resulted from the over-all prophetic, historical bias of its theology. Soldiers followed images of the saints into combat, while dedicated figures at home followed the image of Christ into the battle with sin. Each was performing a podvig (glorious deed) in history and earning a small place in the great chronicle which would be read back at the Last Judgment. Podvizhnik, a word which more secular subsequent ages have tended to use pejoratively in the sense of "fanatic," still carries with it the meaning of "champion"-whether in sports, war, or prayer.52 Ephrem the Syrian, the very same fourth-century saint from whom Russian iconographers derived their graphic and terrifying image of the coming apocalypse and judgment, provided the ordinary believer with his most familiar call to repentance and humility in a prayer recited with prostrations at every Lenten service:

  ? Lord and Master of my life! the spirit of vanity, of idleness, of domination, of idle speech, give me not. But the spirit of chastity, of humility, of patience, of love, do Thou grant to me, thy servant.

  Yes, ? Lord and King, grant me that I may perceive my transgressions and not condemn my brother, for Thou art blessed forever and ever, Amen.

  Muscovite soldiers were not primarily mercenaries nor were Muscovite saints basically moralists. The Russian ideal of kenotic sainthood does not correspond exactly with the "imitation of Christ" advocated by Thomas a Kempis and the "new devotion" of late medieval Eu
rope. Muscovites spoke of "following" or "serving" rather than "imitating" Christ, and put greater stress on the suffering and martyrdom which such service entailed. They dwelt on Christ's mission rather than his teachings, which were in any case not widely known in the absence of a complete Slavonic New Testament. Man's function was to enlist in that mission: to serve God by beating off his enemies and by following Christ in those features of his earthly life that were fully understood-his personal compassion and willingness to suffer.

  In general practice, however, the monastic civilization of Muscovy was dominated more by fanaticism than kenoticism, more by compulsion than

  compassion. This emphasis is illustrated vividly by Ivan the Terrible, the first ideologist to rule Muscovy, the first ruler to be formally crowned tsar, and the man who ruled Russia longer than any other figure in its history.

  Ascending the throne in 1533 at the age of three, Ivan reigned for just over a half century and became even in his lifetime the subject of fearful fascination and confused controversy that he has remained till this day.53

  In some ways Ivan can be seen as a kind of fundamentalist survival of Byzantium. Following his Josephite teachers, he used Byzantine texts to justify his absolutism and Byzantine rituals in having himself crowned in 1547 with the Russian form of the old imperial title. His sense of imperial pretense, formalistic traditionalism, and elaborate court intrigue all seem reminiscent of the vanished world of Constantinople. Yet his passion for absolute dominance over the ecclesiastical as well as the civil sphere represented caeseropapism in excess of anything in Byzantium, and has together with his cruelty and caprice led many to compare him with the Tatar khans, with whom he grappled so successfully in the early years of his reign. The leading contemporary apologist for Ivan's ruthlessness, Ivan Peresvetov, may have infected the tsar with some of his own admiration for the Turkish sultan and his Janissaries.54 Some of Ivan's more famous acts of cruelty seem lifted from the legends of Dracula, which were popular in early sixteenth-century Russia, with their tales of a cruel yet gallant fifteenth-century governor of Wallachia, an exposed Balkan principality between the Turkish and Catholic worlds.55

  Worldly Western contemporaries often expressed admiration for his forceful rule. Many entered his service, and one visitor from Renaissance Italy used terms reminiscent of Machiavelli's Prince in hailing Ivan for le singulare suoi virtu.™ Then as now, there has been a tendency to see in Ivan merely another example of the strong ruler struggling to centralize power and build a modern nation at the expense of a traditional, landhold-ing aristocracy. From this perspective the men of his famed oprichnina, or "separate estate," appear not so much as oriental Janissaries but as builders of the modern service state. They were the first group to swear allegiance not just to the sovereign (gosudar') or the "sovereign's business" (gosuda-revo delo) but to the sovereign state (gosudarstvo).5'

  There are, however, far too many differences between Ivan and his Tudor or Bourbon contemporaries to permit his name to be quietly buried in some anonymous list of modernizing state builders. His cruelty and pretension were regarded by almost every contemporary Western observer as more extreme than anything they had ever seen.58 His very innovations, moreover, appear on closer examination to stem not from some new secular perspective but from his very desire 10 preserve tradition. The man who

  placed Russia irrevocably on the path toward European statehood was at the same time the supreme codifier of the Muscovite ideology. Much of the confused ambivalence that Russians came to feel toward modernization and Europeanization resulted from this unresolved tension between the highly experimental policies and the fanatically traditional explanations of Ivan IV.

  Ivan was steeped in Muscovite traditionalism by his monastic tutors, corresponded extensively with monastic leaders, and made frequent pilgrimages to monastic shrines-including at least one 38-mile penitential procession in bare feet from Moscow to the monastery of St. Sergius. He sometimes spoke of himself as a monk, and personally defended Orthodoxy in theological debates with Western thinkers who ranged from the left wing of Protestantism (the Czech Brethren) to the new right wing of Catholicism (the Society of Jesus).

  Under Ivan the monastic conception of the prince as leader of an organic Christian civilization was translated into reality. Rival centers of potential political power-traditional landholding boyars, proud cities like Novgorod, and even those friends who sought to formalize conciliar limitations on autocracy-all were subjected to humiliations. The power and potential independence of the Church hierarchy was checked by the imprisonment and murder of the ranking metropolitan: Philip of Moscow. Dissident religious views were expunged by anti-Jewish pogroms in western Russia and by the trial and execution of early Protestant leaders from the same region.

  The justification for his rule was rooted in the historical theology of Muscovy. The massive Book of Degrees of the Imperial Genealogy, drawn up by his monastic advisers, carried to new extremes the blending of sacred and secular history. Hagiography was applied wholesale to the descriptions of tsars, and imperial ancestries were traced to miracle-working saints as well as emperors of antiquity. Ivan was as diligent in gathering in for Moscow the historical legends and monastic ideologists of Novgorod and other principalities as he was in crushing their independent political pretensions.

  In all of his activities, Ivan conceived of himself as head of a monolithic religious civilization, never simply as a military or political leader. His campaign against the Tatars at Kazan in 1552 was a kind of religious procession, a storming of Jericho. The great Kazan Cathedral was built in Red Square, and came to be named for the holy fool, Vasily the Blessed, to whom the victory was credited. Its nine asymmetrical tent roofs, exotically gilded and capped by onion cupolas, represent in many ways the climax of Muscovite architecture, and form a striking contrast with the balanced Italo-Byzantine cathedrals built in the Kremlin under Ivan

  III. Many other churches arose in this high Muscovite style, and more than ten were named for holy fools under Ivan.69

  Ivan's legislative council of 1549-50-which provided some precedent for later parliamentary "councils of the land" (zemskie sobory)-was conceived as a religious gathering.60 The Church code enacted in 1551 known as the hundred chapters was designed only to "confirm former tradition," and prescribed rales for everything from icon painting to shaving and drinking. Every day of the calendar was covered and almost every saint depicted in the 27,000 large pages of the encyclopedia of holy readings, Cheti Mnei.el Every aspect of domestic activity was ritualized with semi-monastic rules of conduct in the "Household Book" (Domostroy). Even the oprich-nina was bound together with the vows, rules, and dress of a monastic order.

  The consequence of this radical monasticization of society was the virtual elimination of secular culture in the course of the sixteenth century. Whereas Russia had previously reproduced a substantial number of secular tales and fables-drawn both from Byzantium and the West through the Southern and Western Slavs respectively-"there did not appear in Russian literature of the sixteenth century a single work of belles lettres similar to those already known in the fifteenth. . . . There cannot be found in Russian manuscripts of the sixteenth even those literary works which were known in fifteenth century Russia and were subsequently widely disseminated in the seventeenth."62 The chronicles and the newly embellished genealogies, hagiographies, military tales, and polemics of the age were purged of "useless stories." Nil Sorsky, no less than Joseph of Volokolamsk, favored this form of censorship; and the "hundred chapters" of 1551 extended these prohibitions on secular culture to music and art as well. By the time of Ivan the Terrible, Muscovy had set itself off even from other Orthodox Slavs by the totality of its historical pretensions and the religious character of its entire culture.

  The peculiarities of Muscovite civilization as it took finished shape under Ivan IV invite comparisons not only with Eastern despots and Western state builders but also with two seemingly remote civilizations: imperial Spain a
nd ancient Israel.

  Like Spain, Muscovy absorbed for Christendom the shock of alien invaders and found its national identity in the fight to expel them. As with Spain, the military cause became a religious one for Russia. Political and religious authority were intertwined; and the resultant fanaticism led both countries to become particularly intense spokesmen for their respective divisions of Christianity. The introduction into the creed of the phrase "and from the Son," which first split East and West, took place at a council