The Icon and the Axe
Page 17
The Jesuit order had long tried to interest the Vatican in the idea that losses to Protestantism in Western and Northern Europe might be at least partially recouped in the east by combining missionary zeal with more flexible and imaginative tactics. They had encouraged the formation in the Lithuanian" and White Russian Orthodox community of the new Uniat Church-which preserved Eastern rites and the Slavonic language while accepting the supremacy of the Pope and the Latin formulation of the creed-and helped secure its formal recognition by the Vatican in 1596.
In the late years of Ivan the Terrible's reign, the Jesuit statesman Antonio Possevino had entertained the idea that Russia might be brought into union with Rome; and this suggestion was frequently echoed throughout the seventeenth century, particularly by uprooted Eastern European Catholics and leaders of the newly formed Society for the Propagation of the Faith. But by the beginning of the century, the Jesuits had succeeded in committing Vatican policy in Eastern Europe to a close working partnership with Sigismund III of Poland. Since Sigismund exercised full control over Lithuania and had a strong claim on Sweden, he seemed the logical bearer
of the Catholic cause in Northeast Europe; and he sealed his allegiance to the cause of Rome with two successive Hapsburg marriages.
One of the most eloquent and strategy-minded Jesuits, Peter Skarga, was responsible for capturing the imagination of Sigismund and his court in his "Sermons to the Diet" of the late 1590's.100 Capitalizing ohthe knightly and apocalyptical cast of Christian thought in the still-embattled East, Skarga inspired Sigismund's entourage with that mixture of gloomy premonition and crusading romanticism which was to become an essential part of the Polish national consciousness. Capitalizing on the confused Muscovite hopes that "a ''true Tsar" was still somewhere to be found, the Jesuits helped the Poles ride to power in the retinue,of the pretender, Dmitry. Capitalizing on the nsing"powif of the press in the West, thfTaged Possevino, under a pseudonym, printed pamphlets in support of Dmitry in a variety of European capitals.101 Capitalizing on the religious reverence accorded icons in Muscovy, pictures of Dmitry were printed for circulation to the superstitious masses. Anxious to secure the claims of the new dynasty, a Catholic marriage for Dmitry was staged within the Kremlin.
The combination within the Polish camp of proselyting Jesuit zeal at « the highest level and crude sacrilege at the lowest led to the defenestration^?^ and murder of Dmitry by a Moscow mob in 1606, The pretender who had entered Moscow triumphantly amidst the deafening peal of bells on midsummer day of 1605 was dragged through the streets and his remains shot from a cannon less than a year later. However, the Polish sense of mission was in no way diminished. A Polish court poet spoke of Cracow in 1610 as "the New Rome more wondrous than the old,"102 and Sigismund described his cause in a letter to the Catholic king of Hungary as that of "the Universal Christian republic."103 Despite the coronation in Moscow of Michael, the first Romanov, in 1613, there was no clear central authority in Muscovy until at least 1619, when Michael's father, Patriarch Philaret Nikitich, returned from Polish captivity. Pro-Polish factions continued to be influential inside Muscovy until the 1630's, and Polish claimants to the Muscovite throne continued to command widespread recognition in Catholic Europe_ until the_i65q's.
The identification of the Catholic cause with Polish arms weakened |?
whatever chance thTTKoTn^^huTch might have had to establish its au
thority peacefully over the Russian Church. The military defeat of Poland
became the defeat of Roman Catholicism among the Eastern Slavs-
though not of Latin culture. For in rolling back the Polish armies in the
course of the seventeenth century, and slowly wresting from them control
of the Latinized Ukraine and White Russia, Muscovy absorbed much of
their literary and artistic culture.104L-J
. ?,. .the depiction of the Virgin Mary in Christian art.
*The famed early-twelfth-century "Vladimir Mother
plates i-ii°f God" (Plate I) has long been the most revered of
Russian icons: and the restoration of the original composition (completed in 1918) revealed it to be one of the most beautiful as well. Originally painted in Constantinople, the icon was believed to have brought the Virgin's special protective power from the "new Rome" to Kiev, thence to Vladimir, and finally to Mpscow, the "third Rome," where it has remained uninterruptedly since 1480.
This icon was one of a relatively new Byzantine type emphasizing the relationship between mother and child; it was known and revered in Russia as "Our Lady of Tenderness." Characteristic of this general type was the "Virgin and Child Rejoicing" (Plate II), a mid-sixteenth-century painting from the upper Volga region. The downward sweep of the Virgin's form conveys in visual terms the spiritual temper of the icon's place of origin: combining physical exaggeration with a compassionate spirit. The liberation and semi-naturalistic portrayal of the infant's arms are designed to heighten the rhythmic flow of sinuous lines into an increasingly abstract, almost musical composition.
'*Sm**:,*
PLATE I
PLATE III
LATE II
PLATE IV
icons of the Virgin and Child were the various repre-
sentations of the Virgin on the icon screens of °
Muscovy. The third picture in this series shows the plates ?-iv
Virgin as she appears to the right of Christ on the
central tryptich (deesis) of a sixteenth-century screen.
The richly embossed metal surface, inlaid with jewels,
that surrounds the painted figure is typical of the
increasingly lavish icon-veneration of the period. This
icon, presently in the personal collection of the Soviet
painter P. D. Korin, bears the seal of Boris Godunov,
who presumably used it for private devotions.
The picture to the left illustrates the survival of the theme of Virgin and Child amidst the forced preoccupation with socialist themes and realistic pofmntare~ amp;f~th~eSoviet era. This painting of 1920 (popularly known as "Our Lady of Petersburg" despite its official designation of "Petersburg, 1918"), with its unmistakable suggestion of the Virgin and Child standing in humble garb above the city of Revolution, continues to attract reverent attention in the Tret'iakov Gallery of Moscow. It is the work of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who had studied under Leonid Pasternak, illustrator of Tolstoy and father of Boris Pasternak. Petrov-Vodkin turned from painting to teaching for the same reason that the poet Pasternak turned to translating-to keep his integrity during the oppressive period of Stalinist rule; both men attracted talented young followers and quietly passed on to later generations some sense of the older artistic traditions and spiritual concerns of Russian culture.
I
/ "" The Vatican-supported Polish offensive against Orthodox Slavdom
I served mainly to stimulate an ideological and national rising in Muscovy
| which drove out the Poles and gradually united Russia behind the new
/ Romano^Jynasty. Fotjnore^Jhanthree… hundred years the Romanovs
reignei^yen if they did notjdways rule or ever fully escape the shadows
cast by the dark times in which they came to power. From early ballads
through early histories into the plays and operas of the late imperial period,
the Time of Troubles came to be thought of as a period of suffering for the
sins of previous tsars and of foreboding for tsars yet to come. The name of
Marina Mnishek, Dmitry's Polish wife, became a synonym for "witch" and
"crow": the Polish mazurka-allegedly danced at their wedding reception
in the Kremlin-became a leitmotiv for "decadent foreigner" in Glinka's
Life for the Tsar and later musical compositions. The anti-Polish and anti-
"Catholic tone of almost all subsequent Russian writing about this period
faithfully reflects a central, fateful fact:
that Muscovy achieved unity after
the~Tfoubles of the early seventeenth century primarily through xeno-
, phobia, particularly toward the Poles.
Operatic romanticism about the national levee en masse against the Polish invader has, however, too long obscured the fact that the price of Russian^ictory was increased dependence on Protestant Europe. The subtle stream "of Protestant influence flowed in from three different sources: beleaguered Protestants in nearby Catholic countries, militant Sweden, and the more distant and commercially oriented "Germans" (England, Holland, Denmark, Hamburg, and so on).
The diaspora of the once-flourishing Protestants of Poland (and of many in Hungary, Bohemia, and Transylvania) remains a relatively obscure chapter in the complex confessional politics of Eastern Europe. It is fairly clear that the Counter Reformation zeal of the Jesuits combined with princely fears of political disintegration and social change to permit an aggressive reassertion of Catholic power throughout East Central Europe in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. But it seems implausible to assume that these relatively extreme communities of Calvinists, Czech brethren, and Socinians simply vanished after military defeat and passively accepted Catholicism. To be sure, many regions were totally exhausted by the end of the fighting, and had no alternative to capitulation. But in eastern Poland, where Protestantism had some of its strongest supporters and the power of the Counter Reformation had come relatively late, the anti-Catholic cause was strengthened by the Orthodox community of White Russia ??????? proximity of Orthodox Muscovy. Forced Catholicization tended to make defensive allies of the large Protestant and Orthodox minorities under Polish rule. It seems probable that the Orthodox community
absorbed some of the personnel as well as the organizational and polemic techniques of the Protestants as they were hounded into oblivion.^Thus, when the anti-Catholic Orthodox clergy of White Russia and the Ukraine eventually turned to Muscovy for protection against the dnrushing Counter Reformation^ they~brought with them elements" of~a fading Polish Protestantism as well as a resurgent Slavic Orthodoxy.
The formation of the Uniat Church accelerated this chain of developments by securing the allegiance to Rome of most of the Orthodox hierarchy in the Polish kingdom. The union with Rome was not accepted so readily at the lower levels of the hierarchy or among local lay leaders anxious to maintain their historic liberties and autonomy. In organizing for their resistance to Catholicization, Orthodox communities leaned increasingly on regional brotherhoods, which took on a Protestant tinge. Their origins, though still obscure, appear to lie in contact with the neighboring Czech dissenters who had also helped steer Polish Protestants into the closely knit "brotherhood" form of organization.105 The initial strength of the Orthodox brotherhoods was concentrated in many of the same semi-independent cities in eastern Poland, where Polish Protestants had made their most spectacular gains a half century earlier. The anti-hierarchical bias, close communal discipline, and emphasis on a program of religious printing and education in the vernacular among the Orthodox brotherhoods are reminiscent of both Hussite and Calvinist practice.
Sigismund helped further the sense of identification between non-Uniat Orthodox jmd Protestants by lumping them together as "heretical," and thus denyingjhejOrtho^oxjfte somewhat preferred status of "schismatic",, traditionally accorded in Roman Catholic teaching. Protestants and Orthodox began the search for a measure of common action against Sigismund's poUcie^at_ajneeting of leaders from both communities in Lithuania in the summer of I595.106 During the decade preceding this meeting, the Orthodox had formed at least fourteen brotherhood organizations and a large number of schools and printing shops.107 During the years that followed, Protestant communities were often forced into the protective embrace of the more established Orthodox communities as Sigismund's persecution of religious dissenters increased. At the same time, the Orthodox opponents of Catholicism adopted many of the apocalyptically anti-Catholic ideas of Protestant polemic writings and absorbed into their schools harassed but well-educated Polish Protestants as well as Slavic defectors from Jesuit academies. "
The brotherhood schools and presses of White Russia were the first broad media of instruction to appear among the Orthodox Eastern Slavs. The first two brotherhood presses-those of Vilnius and Lwow-made particularly great contributions to enlightenment. The former published the
first two Church Slavonic grammars (in 1596 and 1619), and the latter published more than thirty-three thousand copies of basic alphabet books {bukvar') between 1585 and 1722.los The school at Ostrog taught Latin as well as Greek, and sponsored the printing in 1576-80 of the first complete Slavonic bible.109 The brotherhood schools continued to multiply in the early seventeenth century, and spread to the east and south as the Orthodox communities in those regions sought to combat the spread of Catholic influence. The Kiev brotherhood played a particularly important role, setting up (while still under Polish control inj632) the first Orthodox institution of higher education ever to appear among the Eastern Slavs: the Kiev Academy.
Two leading Orthodox personalities of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century illustrate the Protestant influence on the beleaguered Russian Orthodox community during this period. Stephan Zizanius, the White Russian author of the first Slavonic grammar in 1596, followed the Lutheran practice of inserting catechistic homilies and anti-Catholic comments into his instructional material. His Book of Cyril, a gloomy, anti-Uniat compilation of prophetic texts, incorporated many of the polemic arguments used against the Roman Church by Protestant propagandists. Just as the Kiev Academy became the model for the monastic schools and academies that began to appear in Muscovy in the late seventeenth century, so Zizanius' arguments that the reign of Antichrist was at hand became the basis for the xenophobic and apocalyptical writings of the seventeenth-century Muscovite Church.110
Even more deeply influenced by Protestantism was Cyril Lukaris, the early-seventeenth-century Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who had served as a parish priest and teacher in the brotherhood schools of Vilnius and Lwow during the 1590's. Deeply influenced by their anti-Catholicism, he was one of the two representatives of the Orthodox hierarchy to vote against the final acceptance of the union at Brest in 1596. In the course of his subsequent career, Lukaris became a close friend of various Anglicans as well as Polish and Hungarian Calvinists, and became doctrinally a virtual Calvinist. After his elevation to the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1620, he "attached himself to the Protestant powers,"111 and was called by the Hapsburg ambassador to the Porte "the archfiend of the Catholic Church."112 Through his close links with Patriarch Philaret, Lukaris was instrumental in bringing Russia into the anti-Hapsburg coalition in the second half of jheJTJrirly Years' War.
A final link between the Orthodox and Protestant worlds that was forged by a common Slavic and anti-Catholic association may be found in the great seventeenth-century Czech writer and educator, Jan Comenius.
Though distressed at the low educational level of the Eastern Slavs, Comenius wrote, after the destruction of the Czech Protestant community in 1620, that Muscovy offered the only hope of defeating the Catholic cause in Europe.113 Subsequently, as an emigre among the Protestant communities of Poland, Comenius became interested in the Orthodox brotherhoods and was probably influenced by their curricula and pedagogical theories while drawing up his own famous theories of education and public enlightenment.114
Hardly less important than the influx of Protestant influences by way of the anti-Uniat movement in western and southern Russia was the direct // impact of Sweden, the powerful Protestant rival and northern neighbor of ^pMuscovy.
The Swedish presence began to be felt in the 1590's with the Swedish sack and occupation of the northernmost Russian monastery, at Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean,115 and the movement of Swedish colonists and evangelists into the region of Lake Ladoga. The real influx began, however, with the Swedish efforts to curb the Polish advance into Russia during the Time of Troubles. S
igismund's Protestant uncle, Charles IX of Sweden, launched a campaign to stiffen the resistance of the new tsar Shuisky to Catholic Poland in the name of "all Christianity."116 In 1607 Charles sent the Russians the first treatise to appear in Russia on the burgeoning new European art of war;117 and „in the following year addressed the first of three unprecedented propaganda appeals directly to "all ranks of Russia" to rise up against "the Polish and Lithuanian dogs."118 In the ensuing months, the Swedes began a large-scale intervention that extended from Novgorod through Yaroslavl and involved the occupation of the venerable Orthodox monastery of Valaam on islands within Lake Ladoga and the issuance of anti-Catholic propaganda to the Solovetsk monastery and other centers in
the Russian north.',
?
.-? The Swedes were, indeed, the unsung heroes of the liberation of Mos-
^*l5ow from Polish occupation. Intervention against Poland in 1609 was followed by the dispatch to Muscovy of money and of a Dutch-trained general in the Swedish service, Christernus Some, who helped organize the army of Skopin-Shuisky for the critical campaigns of 1609-10, which expelled Sigismund from without and suppressed Cossack insurrection within.119 The non-noble militia of Minin and Pozharsky which drove the aristocratic Polish legions from Moscow for the second and final time in 1612-13 was in some respects a rudimentary version of the revolutionary new citizen type of army with which the Swedes were shortly to crush the aristocratic Hapsburg armies in the Thirty Years' War. At the high point of the Polish penetration in 1612, a zemsky sobor convened at Yaroslavl entered into negotia-