The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  The finest representative of Renaissance culture in early-fifteenth-century RussiaTanrhthe teacher of KurhsKy, Karpov, and Ermolai-Erazm, wasTKTrFrrTaflcable figure of Maxim the Greek. Through him humanism acquired" aii OrthlidoTOnstiar^cqSrafion and made its strongest efforts to modify thirTTncntlcai fanaticism of the Muscovite Jdeology.55 An Orthodox Greekbrought up in Albania and^Corfu, he spent long years studying in Renaissance Italy before becoming a monk and moving to Mount Athos. From there, he was called in 1518 to Russia, where he remained-at times against his will-for theThirty-eight remaining years of his life. Summoned by the Tsar to help translate holy texts from the Greek and Latin, Maxim proceeded to write more than 150 surviving compositions of his own, and attracted a large number of monastic and lay students. He was the first to bring news to Russia of Columbus' discovery of America, and he called atteritiorTas welrto"undiscovered areas of classical antiquity.56

  Maxim illustrates the humanist temperament not only in his knowledge of the classics and interest in textual criticism, but also in his concern for style and his inclusion of poetry and a grammar among his works. He delighted in the favorite humanist pastime of refuting Aristotle57 (even though this hero of the medieval scholastics was barely known in Russia),

  and had a typical Renaissance preference for PlatoJHeJreguently.wrote in dialogue form, and idenfflieTl~reason closely withgoodness and beauty:

  True Godly reason not only beautifies the inner man with wisdom, humility and all manner of truth; but also harmonizes the outer parts of the body: eyes, ears, tongue and hands.58

  Florence, the home of the Platonic Academy of the cinquecento, infected

  Maxim not only with neo-Platonic idealism, but also with the authoritarian

  and puritanical passion of Savonarola, whose sermons he admired as a

  young student,59 His admiration for this famed prophet may hold a key to

  his fate in Russia. Like Savomu-oTF,~1vlaxim^ccWmWded attention for his

  passionate opposition to tKelmmorality and secularism of his day, and was

  liohlze'd "f^prbphetic" and "apocalyptical elements. Like the Florentine,

  MaxmPiuttered martyrdom-though both his ordeal and his influence

  lasted longer than Savonarola's.

  ›Unlike Savonarola, Maxim retained the style and temperament of the

  humanist, even in prophecy. There is a poetic quality to his denunciation of the three evil passions: "love of sweets, praise and silver" (slastoliubie, slavoliubie, srebroliubie).™ He defends his efforts to correct faulty translations in Russian churchbooks, and pleads with those who have placed him in monastic imprisonment at least to let him return quietly to his library: "If I am wrong, subject me not to contempt, but to correction, and let me return to Athos."61 Maxim always felt close to this center of the contemplative life and of Hesychast spirituality. Opposition to clerical wealth and ' dogmatism forged a link between his early humanist teachers from Italy and his later monastic followers from the upper Volga. ¦jf* Mj^om opposed the Josephite defense of monastic wealth not only for f bringmg_^a_MaspJiemous, servile, Jewish love of silver"62 into holy places, I but jSscTforJ^ J In the course of hliTsustained" Hebate^wTth tffiTTosiphite Metropolitan /f Daniel of JMoscow, Maxim voicesThe fear that the church is coming under J the authority of ^??????????^??^?^???? than "just rules" (pravila) -thus . anticipatmgjthe_ opposition between "crook^dn£sXLand^4nith"-(krivda-pravda) which was to become so important in Russian moral ^pjlilosoghy.63 In a sEllful dialogue, Maxim likens the Josephite argument that monastic property is a common trust to a group of sensualists' justifying their relations with a prostitute on the grounds that she "belongs to us all in common."64

  Maxim gradually turned to political writings denouncing Tsar Vasily Ill's divorce, ancTunsuccessfully attempting to make young Ivan IV "the just" rather than "the terrible." Maxim's political philosophy was moralistic

  •? /? rv

  and conservative: a kind of moral rearmament program designed by a sympathetic foreigner for the less-educated leader of an underdeveloped area. All ponflict can be resolved without changing" the social order. The firstTask is to infuse the prince with moral fervor. "Nothing is so necessary to those rulingon earth as justice";65 but no prince can ultimately be just without the accompanying virtues of personal purity and humility.66

  The fall of Byzantium was a moral warning to Muscovy against pride

  and complacence in high places rather than an_assurance that Moscow was

  now the "third Rome^Tn a letter ?6~ young Ivan TV Maxim implies that

  adherence to the~true faith will not in itself guarantee God's favor to an

  unjust prince, because evil Christian kings have often been struck down,

  and a just pagan like Cyrus of Persia enjoyed God's favor "for his great jus

  tice, humility, and compassion."orMaxim juxtaposed the classical Byzantine

  idea of a symphony of power between imperial and priestly authority to the

  Muscovite arguments for unlimited tsarist power. Like his friend Karpov,

  Maxim explicitly said that the tsar should not interfere^rf the ecclesiasticaO^

  sphere, and implfedjthat he was ?????^^??????^by a higher

  moral la£

  This foreign teacher was revered, however, not for the logicjrfJiifL

  arguments or the beauty of his style but for the depth of his piety. In his early~yeaTTTfe argued for a crusade to liberate Constantinople and for a preventive war against the Crimean khan;68 but as time went on, the simple Pauline ideals of good cheer, humility, and compassion dominate his writings. In and out of monastic'prisons, confronted with false accusations, torture, and near starvation, Maxim underscored with his own life his doctrine of love through long-suffering. Far from showing bitterness toward the ungrateful land to which he had come, he developed a love of Russia, and an image of it different from that of the bombastic Josephite monks in the Tsar's entourage.

  Maxim shows almost no interest in the mechanics of rule or the possibilities of practical reform, but he feelscompassion for the oppressed and sorrow,.fpr the wealthy in Muscovy, He is convinced thaT"the heart of a mother grieving for her children deprived of the necessities of life is not so full as the soul of a faithful Tsar grieving for the protection and peaceful well-being of his beloved subjects."69 Whatever its faults, Russia is not a tyranny like that of the Tatars. She bears the holy mission of Christian rule in the East, through alt her harassment from without_and corruption from within.

  Toward the end of his life and during the early years of Ivan the Terrible's reign, Maxim transposes the image of the fallen church in Savonarola's De ruina ecclesiae into that of a ruined Russian empire.

  Maxim describes how in the midst of his travels he noticed a woman in black weeping by a deserted path and surrounded by wjld animals. He begs to learn her name, but she refuses, insisting that he is powerless to relieve her sorrow and would be happier to pass on in ignorance. Finally, she says that her real name is Vasiliia (from the Greek Basileia, "Empire"), and that she has been defiled by tyrants "unworthy of the title of Tsar" and aban-donedjjyherown children foQhe love of silver and sensual pleasure. Prophets have ceased to speak of her, and saints to protect her. "And thus I sit here like a widow by a desolate roadlh a cursed age."70

  Here, liTessence, is the idea of "Holy Rus' ": humiliated and suffering, yet always compassionate'¦¦: a wife and mother faithful to her "husband" and /'children," the ruler and subjects of Russia, even when mistreated and deserted by them. Although the idea has been traced to Maxim's pupil Kurbsky,71 and shown to have first acquired broad popularity during the troubles of the early seventeenth century,72 the concept of "Holy Rus' " as an ideal opposed to the mechanical and unfeeling state finds its first expression in Maxim.

  At the same time, Maxim linked the Hesychast ideal of continual prayer outside established worship services to the humanist ideal of a universal truth outside the historical truths of Christianity. He implored his read
ers to pray without ceasing that Russia would "put away all evil, all untrutrTTjind^embrace the truth."73 "Truth" (pravda) already carried for Maxim some of that dual meaning of philosophic certainty and social justice which the word carried for later Russian reformers. Like many of these figures, Maxim was frequently accused of sedition, and died a virtual prisoner^

  After his death, Maxim (like Nil Sorsky before him) gradually came to be officially revered for the very pious intensity which the official church had feareu^^rKt^vTghrtcrdiseipline difring"bis lifetime?4 But his efforts to leaven the Muscovite ideology with riumanistic ideals failed. Archimandrite Artemius of the monastery of St. Sergius, who had been a learned follower of Nil and a devoted patron of Maxim, was banished to Solovetsk for heresy by the council of 1553-4. Artemius later fled to Poland like Maxim's pupil, Kurbsky-both of them remaining faithful to Orthodoxy, but despairing of any further attempt to blend humanist ideals with the Muscovite ideology.

  Maxim_had£efused to participate in the church council of 1553-4, just as Nil hud opposed the condemHation ???^???????? of the Judaizers.

  ?

  When Maxim expired in 1556 in the monastery of St. Sergius, the last influentiai^advocate of a tolerant Christian humanism vanished from the Muscovite scene. A many-sided assault against foreign cultural influence ""was under way. A severe peftanee' wasTrnposed on»the Tsar's closest lay

  J

  adviser, Ivan Viskovaty, for opposing a strict prohibition on alien influences in iconography. The brief fljcker of^ interest in Renaissance art shown by Ivan's priestly conffdant, Silvester (who had" ordered Pskovian artists to provide Moscow with copies of paintings by Cimabue and Perugino), was also extinguished.75 Interest in the ornate polyphonic music of Palestrina (which had been awakened by Maxim's friend and collaborator in Latin translations Dmitry Gerasimov, during his diplomatic visit to Rome in 1524-5) was also snuffed out by Ivan's decision to codify the prevailing system of church chant as the sole form of musical "right praising" for Russian churches.76 Finally^and most important, the work of reproducing . sacred texts was takeji_jiway fromJffitical and linguistically gifted figures like Maxim and put in the hands of more ignorant but dependable imperial servantsTThe Josephite monks around Ivan preferred vast compendia to a rational ordering of ideas. The objection to textual criticism extended even to the use of printing as a mean^for propagating the faith and reproducing holy books. The brief and unproductive effort to set up a state printing shop in Moscow under the White Russian Ivan Fedorov ended in disaster in ?5?5, when the press was destroyed by a mob and the printers fled to Lithuania.77 This was the year of Kurbsky's flight and the establishment of the"oprichnina. A new xenophobia was in the air, and the period of rela- – tively harmonious srnSFs^e*c^facTwtth the many-sided culture of Renais- | ^ sance Italy was giving way to the broader and more disturbing confronta- -J tioiTwhich began in the late years of Ivan's reign.

  main resuTt~oTa century of fitful Italian influences was to arouse ""› suspicion of theWest. These feelings were strongest among the monks whose 1 v/ influence was: on theorise, and were increasingly channeled into animosity j toward the Latin church. This anti-Catholicism of official Muscqyvjs^ puzzling, since the aspects of Renaissance ????_?^?^?????-_?? the Josephite^^ifrolOgr,_"alchemy, Utopian social ideas, philosophical scepti-cisrn/iaTlff^filJ-trinitarian, anti-sacramental theology-were also opposed by theTixfflaSTThurch: In part, of courseT anti-Catnolieism was merely an extension of the earlier Hesychast protest against the inroads of scholasticism wiffiiii the late ByzantifieTfmpire: Maxim the Greek1"wasfaithful to his Athonite teachers in tellm^theTKussians that "the Latins have let themselves be seduced not only by Hellenic and Roman doctrines, but even by Hebrew and Arab books . . . attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable cause trouble for all the world."78

  To understand fully, however, why resentment was particularly focused on the Roman Church, one must keep in mind both the nature of Muscovite culture and the perennial tendency to conceive of other cultures in one's own image. Since Muscovy was an organic religious civilization, Western

  Europe must be one. Sir^e all culture in eastern Russia was expressive of the Orthodox Church, the bewildering cultural variety of the West must be expressions of the Roman Church, whatever that Church's formal position on ffieTmatterT'Latinstvo, "the Latin world," became a general term for the West, and the phrase "Go to Latinstvo" acquired some of the overtones of "Go to the devil." By the mid-sixteenth century prayers were being offered for the Tsar to deliver Russia from Latinstvo i Besermanstvo: the Latin and the Moslem worlds; and the terms used to contrast Russians and Westerners were "Christian" (krest'ianin) and "Latin" (latinian).n Since political rule in the Christian East was now concentrated in the tsar of the "third Rome," it was assumed that such rule in the West was concentrated in the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor (Tsezar'). Other princely authorities in the West were equated with the lesser appanage princes of Russia. Their diplomatic communications were translated into the new vernacular "chancery language," which provided the basis for modern Russian, while the predominantly Latin communications from the Emperor were translated into Church Slavonic.80

  It would be a mistake to read back into this early period the systematically cultivated anti-Catholicism that developed in the following century of struggle with Poland. During this earlier century, relations were relatively cordial with the Vatican despite the Muscovite rejection of union. There was a Catholic church in Moscow in the late fifteenth century,81 numerous Catholic residents throughout the sixteenth, and several occasions when dynastic marriages nearly enabled Rome to parallel in Great Russia the proselyting success it was enjoying in White and Little Russia. Nevertheless, the basis for Russian anti-Catholicism was already being established in the neetTfor a lightning* rod to channel off popular opposition to the changes which the triumphant Josephite party was imposing on Russian society. One did not dare challenge the newly exalted figure of the tsar and his ecclesiastical entourage; but many conservative elements in Russian society felt a profound if inarticulate repugnance at the increase in hierarchical discipline and dogmatic rigidity which the Josephites had brought^ . loJlussia.,Accordingly, there was a growing tendency to attack ever more bitterly the distant Roman Catholic Church for the very things one secretly j

  hated in oneself.-*--¦- _ '•J

  Thus, eveir while borrowing ideas and techniques from the Roman Catholic Church, the Josephite hierarchy found criticism of that Church a useful escape valve for domestic resentments. A Western scapegoat was also sought for the inarticulate opposition to the concentration of power in the hands of the Muscovite tsars. At precisely the time when autocracy was crushing out all opposition in Muscovy a new genre of anti-monarchical

  pantomime appeared in Russian popular culture. The name of the play- and of the proud, cruel king who is eventually smitten down-was Tsar Maximilian, the first Holy Roman Emperor with whom the Muscovites had extensive relations.82

  Distrust of Rome thus had from the beginning in Russia a psychological as well as an ideological basis. During this first formative century of contact from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century "the West" was for Russia the urbane Latin Church and Empire of the high Renaissance. Fascination mixed with fear, however; for the Russian Church had begun its fatefuTseries of partial borrowings from the West, and the small literate elite, its gradual turn from Greek to Latin as the main language of cultural pression.

  'The Germans"

  Muscovite contact with the West changed decisively during Ivan IV's reign from indirect and episodic dealings with the Catholic "Latins" to a direct and sustained confrontation with the Protestant "Germans." It is doubly ironic that the pojjjLaf no return in opening up Russia to Western influenceioccurred under this mSst ostensibly xenophobic arid traditionalist of tsarst_and???? the "West" into7wnose hands he unconsciously committed Russia wasffiaUrf the" Protestant innoy||ors^vriom he professed to hate even moreJJmn_Cathorics. It was Ivan who suggested that Luther's name was r
elated to the word liuty ("ferocious"); and that the Russian word for Prqjestant preacher (kaznodei) was really a form of koznodei ("intriguer").83

  ¦

  i

  tet it was Ivan who began the large-scale contacts with the NorW^European i Protestant nations, which profoundly influenced Russian thought from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

  Eve!i~airTvah-?weprffie icons and banners of Muscovy past Kazan

  down the Volga to the Caspian Sea in the early 1550's, he granted ex

  tensive extra-territorial rights and economic concessions to England in the

  White Sea port of Archangel far to the north. The English became Ivan's

  most eager collaborator in opening up the lucrative Volga trade route to the

  Orient. The Danes simultaneously jmpplied technologists ranging from key

  artilbristsTrTT£ebattle_jo^^to appear in

  Muscovy (wJia_^as_iiL4act a disguised Lutheranjnissionary). The best mercenaries for Ivan's ????? expanding army came largely from the Baltic German regions that were among the first to go over to Protestantism. Other Germans gained places in the new service nobility through