The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  About a hundred representatives from various parts of Russia accompanied Metropolitan Isidore on his Italian journey. Some had previous contact, and some may have sympathized with Isidore's ill-fated endorsement of union with Rome. Though the Russians recoiled from the secular art and culture-of- the high Renaissance-two monks frorif Suzdal left a rather unflattering description of an Italian mystery play which they saw in

  1438 in the Cathedral of §an Marco21-contact withItaly increased there-afterT Gian-Battista delfa Volpe was put in charge of coinage in Muscovy. Through his intermediacy, the Italian influx reached a climax in the i47o's, with the arrival of a large number of Venetian and Florentine craftsmen in the retinue of Sophia Paleologus, Ivan Ill's second wife. These Italians rebuilt the fortifications of the Moscow Kremlin and constructed the oldest and most beautiful of the churches still to be found there and in the monastery of St. Sergius.22

  Sophia came to jluisia^ after „long residence in Italy as the personal, ward of the Roman pontiff and a vehicle for bringing the "widowed" Russian Church into communion with Rome. The persecution of the Judaizers was a cooperative effort on the part of Sophia (and the court supporters of hex sonVasily's J?!aim to the succession)23 and the leaders of the Novgorod hierarchy. Both parties were acquainted with the stern methods of dealing with heretics that had been adopted by the Latin Church in the high Middle Ages. Joseph of Volokolamsk, whose grandfather was a Lithuanian, leaned heavily on the writings of a Croatian Dominican living in Novgorod to defend his position on monastic landhold-ing, just as Gennadius of Novgorod had set up a kind of Latin academy in Novgorod to combat the heretics. Gennadius' leading consultants were two Latin-educated figures whom he brought to Russia for what proved to be long and influential years of service at the imperial court: Nicholas of Liibeck and Dmitry Gerasimov. Gennadius' entourage produced the first Russian translations of a number of books from the Old Testament and Apocrypha; and the model for. the "Bible of Gennadius," which later became the first printed bible in Russia, was, significantly, the Latin Vulgate.24 In the early sixteenth century, moreover, the Josephites supported ecclesiastical claims" to'vast temporal wealth with the spurious document that had long been used by "Western apologists for papal power: the Donation of Constantine.25

  If the apprentice inquisitors of Muscovy can be said to have borrowed from the Latin West, the same is even more clear in the case of their victims. "The trouble began when Kuritsyn [the diplomat and adviser of Ivan III] arrived from Hungarian lands," Gennadius wrote.26 The rationalistic heresy which he sponsored and protected in Moscow was only part of a many-sided importation of ideas and habits from the secular culture of the high Renaissance. Indeed, the Josephites-like Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor-conceived of their mission as a service to the people. Ljke_Jhe_. original mquisitorsjof_flie_mediexaLWest, the Russian clergy was faced with appalling ignorance and debauchery in the society they were attempting to hold togetheETTf the ignorance was part of the Russian heritage, the de-

  bauchery was at least partly Western in origin. For vodka and venereal disease, two of the major curses of Russia in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, appear as part of the ambiguous legacy of the Italian Renaissance to early modern Russia.

  Venereal _disease first came to Moscow along the trade routes froir, Italy, apparently by way of Cracow in the 1490% and a second wave 0{ infection was to come in the mid-seventeenth century (along with the blac]^ plague) by way of mercenaries from the Thirty Years' War.27 The designa^ tion of the disease as "the Latin sickness" is one of the first signs of growing anti-Latin sentiment.28 x

  Vodka came to Russia about a century earlier, and its history illus-. trates several key features of the Renaissance impact on Muscovy. This clea* but powerful national drink was one of several direct descendants of aqu^ vitae, a liquid apparently first distilled for medicinal purposes in Wester^ Europe at the end of the thirteenth century. It appears to have reaches Russia by way of a Genoese settlement on the Black Sea, whence it was brought north a century later by refugees fleeing the Mongol conquest of the Crimea.29

  It was fateful for Russian morals that this deceptively innocuous, looking beverage gradually replaced the crude forms of mead and beer which had previously been the principal alcoholic fare of Muscovy. The ta^ fifn vodka became a major source of princely income and gave the civjj ^m^prjJyliTvested interest in the intoxication of its citizens. It is both sa^ and comical to find the transposed English phrase Girni drenki okovite^ ("Give me drink aqua vitae": that is, vodka) in one of the early ????. script dictionaries of Russian. A Dutch traveler at the beginning of the seventeenth century saw in the Muscovite penchant for drunkenness an‹j debauchery proof that Russians "better support slavery than freedom, for in freedom they would give themselves over to license, whereas in slavery they spend their time in work and labor."30

  The factjthat vodka apparently came into Russia by way of the medical profession points to the importance of Western-educated court doctors as channels for the early influx of Western ideas and techniques.4 The fact that vodka was popularly believed to be a kind of elixir of life wit^ occult healing qualities provides a pathetic early illustration of the way in which tbe_Ru_ssian_muz/uA: was to gild his addictions and idealize his boncL age. This naive belief also indicates that the initial appeal of Wester^ thought to the primitive Muscovite mind lay in the belief that it offered some simple key to understanding the universe and curing its ills. If one were to resist the overwhelmingly traditionalist Muscovite ideology it could best bg

  in the name of another way to truth outside of tradition: some panacea or "philosopher's stone."

  Together with the works of Galen and Hippocrates, which began to appear in Russian translation in the fifteenth century, doctors in Muscovy- and throughout Eastern Europe-began to incorporate into their compendia of herbs and cures extracts from the Secreta Secretorum. This work purported to Jje the secret revelation of Aristotle to Alexander the Great about the true nature of the world, contending that biology was the key to all the arts'aHd sciences, and that this "science of life" was ruled by the harmonies and confluences of occult forces within the body.32 This book held a key place among the works translated by the Judaizers and was destroyed during the Josephite persecution of heretics in the early sixteenth century, alongjsdjh_tiieJewjsh doctors who presumably either translated or possessed the work.

  The interest in alchemistic texts continued, however, and became a major preoccupation of the translators in the foreign office, who soon replaced the doctors as the major conveyor of Western ideas. Fedor Kuritsyn, the first man effectively to fill the role of foreign minister in Russia, was accused of bringing back the Judaizing heresy from the West. One of the earliest surviving documents from the foreign office was a memorandum written by a Dutch translator at the beginning of the seventeenth century, "On the Higher Philosophical Alchemy."33 Later in the century Raymond Lully's 350-year-old effort to find a "universal science," his Ars magna generalis et ultima, was translated and made the basis of an influential alchemistic compilation by a western Russian translator in the same office.34

  Hardly less remarkable was the Russian interest in astrology. Almost every writer of the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century was taken at one time or another with "delight in the laws of the stars" (zvezdoza-konnaia pretest'). Archbishop Gennadius was himself fascinated with the astrology he felt called on to destroy;35 and after his death, Nicholas of Liibeck, his original protege, became an active propagandist for astrological lore in Muscovy. Known as a "professor of medicine and astrology," he had come to Moscow by way of Rome to help draw up the new church calendar. He stayed on as a physician, translating for the imperial court in 1534 a treatise written in Liibeck on herbs and medicine, The Pleasant Garden of Health, and campaigning actively for unification of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He produced astrological computations which lent urgency to his pleas for reunion by purporting to show that the end of the world had been merely postpon
ed from 1492 to I524.36 Maxim the Greek devoted

  most of his early writings to a refutation of Nicholas' arguments but revealed in the process that he too had been fascinated by astrology while in Italy. Maxim's follower, the urbane diplomat Fedor Karpov, confessed that he found •astrology "necessary and useful to Christians,'' calling it "the art of arts."37 The first Russians sent to study in England at the turn of the sixteenth century were particularly interested in the famous Cambridge stud*ent of astrology, magic, and spiritism, John Dee.38 The rapid spread of fortune-telling, divination, and even gambling in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals in part a popularization of astrological ideas current throughout Renaissance Europe.39 /*" Thus, during this early period of Western contact, Russians were fate- fully conditioned folook to the West noffor piecemeal ideas and techniques ft but for a ?????? ???? inner secrets of the universe. Early diplomats were / intergstedjnot in thejetails of economic and political developments abroad U bu^ m^asteolegic^l^angLalc^emistic^y^tems. These Renaissance sciences held out the promise of finding either the celestial patterns controlling the movements of history or the philosopher's stone that would turn the dross of the northern forests into gold. Thus, secular science in Russia tended to be Gnostic rather than agnostic. THere is, indeed, a kind of continuity of tradition in the all-encompassing metaphysical systems from the West that fascinated successive generations of Russian thinkers: from the early alchemists_andastrologers to Boehme's occult theosophy (literally, "divine knowledge") and the sweeping totalistic philosophies of Schelling, Hegel, and Marx.40

  The most consistent opponents of astrology and alchemy in Muscovy were the official Josephite ideologists. In a formulation which, again, seems closer to Roman Catholic than Orthodox theology, Joseph's principal disciple, Metropolitan Daniel of Moscow, argued that "man is almost divine in wisdom and reason, and is created with his own free power"; and again "God created the soul free and with its own powers."41 The individual was, thus, responsible for working out his salvation without reference to the humors of the body or the movements of the stars. The good works evidenced in the disciplined and dedicated life were as important to the Josephites as to the Jesuits. But this emphasis on human freedom and responsibility was a lonely voice in the Christian East-never fully developed by the Josephites and totally rejected by others as threatening the social order.42

  Not all early Russian writings about the heavenly bodies can be dismissed as occult astrology. The Six Wings of the late-fifteenth-century Judaizers provided an elaborate guide to solar and lunar eclipses and was, in effect, "the first document of mathematical astronomy to appear in

  Russia."43 Such_a__dijcjurrieritJ5fas‹J^^ver, jieeply suspect to Josephite ideologists; forj^jva^jhe^ translated work of a fourteenth-century Spanish Jew based on Jewish and Islamic authorities who seemed to propose that a logic ofthe stars replace that of God. Throughout the Muscovite period there was an enduring fear that "number wisdom" was a challenge to divine wisdom-although mathematics was-as a practical matter-widely used and even taught in monasteries.44

  The Josephite^ feared that Russian thinkers would make a religion of science if left free of strict ecclesiastical control. To what extent the Judaizers and other early dissenters actually intended to do so will probably never be known. But it is clear that the fear of the Russian Church gradually became the hope of those who resented its authority-and the supreme reality for the revolutionary forces that eventually overthrew that authority.

  A final aspect of the early Latin impact was the muffled echo of Renaissance humanism that was heard in Muscovy. Early-sixteenth-century Russia produced a small band of isolated yet influential individuals that shared in part the critical spirit, interest in classical antiquity, and search "for a less dogmatic faith which were characteristic of Renaissance Italy. It is, of course, more correct to speak of randomjnfluences and partial reflections than of any coherent humanist movement in Russia; but it is also true that this is generally characteristic of humanism outside the narrow region stretching up from Italy through Paris and the Low Countries into southern England.

  A critical attitude toward religion became widespread among the civilians in the tsar's entourage who traveled abroad on diplomatic missions in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century. Both Fedor Kuritsyn, who headed the foreign office under Ivan III, and Fedor Karpov, who headed the much larger one under Ivan IV, became thoroughgoing sceptics; and the perspectives of Ivan IV's most trusted clerk, Ivan Viskovaty, and his leading apologist for absolutism, Ivan Peresvetov, appear to have been predominately secular.45 Sacramental worship-and even the unique truth of Christianity-was implicitly questioned in the mid-fifteenth century by a literate and sophisticated Tver merchant, Afanasy Nikitin. In the course of wide travels throughout the Near East and South Asia, he appears to have concluded that all men were "Sons of Adam" who believed in the same God; and, although he continued to observe Orthodox practices in foreign lands, he pointedly wrote the word "God" in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish as well as Russian in his Journey over Three Seas.*6

  The search fan a more rational and universal form of faith appears to have attracted considerable interest in cosmopolitan western Russia, where a syncretic, unitarian offshoot of the Protestant Reformation had to be

  anathemized by a special church council of 1553-4. Like the Judaizers who were condemned by a-eouncil just a half century before, this movement is shrouded in obscurity. Once again, some connection with Judaism seems probable in view of the importance that the leader, Fedor Kosoy, attached to the teaching of the Pentateuch and his later marriage to a Lithuanian JewessT^Kosoy insisted eloquently at the council oi 1553-4 that "all people are as one in God: Tatars, Germans and simple barbarians."48 It seems reasonable to assume that this movement like that of the Judaizers continued to have sympathizers after official condemnation; and that the rapid subsequent flowering of anti-trinitarian Socinianism in Poland continued to attract attention in western Russia.

  Four influential Russians of the mid-sixteenth century, Andrew

  Kurbsky, Fedor"Karpov, Ermolai-Erazm, and Maxim the Greek, repro-

  , duced ofrRussian soil the philosophic opposition to both superstition and

  "scholasticism that was characteristic ofWestern humanism. Each of them

  had a vital interest in classical antiquity-particularly Ciceronian moralism

  and Platonic idealism.

  Despite his traditional, Muscovite view of politics and history, Kurbsky was the most deeply enamored with the classical past and was the only one to leave Russia to soak up the Latinized culture of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Having acquired a direct knowledge of Platonic and early Greek thought from Maxim the Greek, he added an even more extensive knowledge of the Latin classics during his long stay abroad. Informally associated with a coterie of Latinized White Russian noblemen, Kurbsky visited the easternmost Latin university of medieval Europe at Cracow and sent his nephew to Italy. In the later stages of his correspondence with Ivan the Terrible, he included a long translation from Cicero as a means of proving that forced flight cannot be considered treason.49

  An even deeper absorption of classical culture is evident in the writings of Karpov, a Latin interpreter and leading official for more than thirty years in the Russian foreign office. He consciously strove to write with "Homeric eloquence" in a pleasing, grammatical "non-barbaric" way,50 His few surviving compositions reveal subtlety of intellect as well as considerable style and a sense of irony and concern for moral order."1 This latter quality bordered on the subversive in Muscovy, for it led him tb conclude that *fnoral laws were Higher than the will of the sovereign. Almost alone in his day he contended that civil.and ecclesiastical affairs,should be separated, and that justice is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity for human society. The monastic virtue of "long suffering" is not sufficient for civil society, which will be ruined if law and order are absent. Law is, however, not bracketed with terror as it was in the writings o
f Peresvetov. To-

  gether with justice must go mercy, because "mercy without justice is faintheartedness, but justice without mercy is tyranny."52

  In keeping with the spirit of the time, Karpov invokes a providential theory of history; but his style is ironic and his conclusion pessimistic. Man has progressed frornlTprimitive law of nature through the Mosaic law to the Christian law of grace; but the men who live under this law do not live by^ it. Greed and lust prevail, so that even the first of the apostles would be denied a hearing in contemporary Muscovy without money for bribery. ArTequally pessimistic view of Muscovite life is propounded in the writings of the monk Ermolai-Erazm, who echoes another favorite theme of Western reformers: the dream of a pastoral Utopia, of aTTeturri to a naturaTecoffiJiny and true Christian love. The source of all the world's ills is pride and estrangement from the land; peasants should be freed of all duties save" a single donation of a fifth of each harvest to the tsar and nobility. Other exactions should be taken from parasitic merchants and tradesmen; gold and silver exchange should be eliminated; knives should be made unpointedTo discourage assassins-such are some of the often naive ideas"containedTri his handbook of the 1540's: On Administration and Land-measurement.53 The number mysticism and cosmic neo-Platonic theologizing of the high Renaissance is also apparent in Ermolai's efforts to vindicate the doctrine of the trinity by finding triadic patterns hidden in almost every natural phenomenon.54