The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  Bequests and pilgrimages to monasteries increased steadily; and new cloisters, retreats, and churches were built in large numbers. Particularly remarkable were the "one-day churches" (obydennye tserkvi) fashioned OUt of the virgin forests as a penitential offering in times of suffering. A chronicle of the Vologda region tells a typical story of how people reacted to the plague in 1654 with neither blasphemous anger nor medical prudence, but rather gathered together at sunset to build "a temple to our God even as King David commanded." Working by candlelight through the night while women held icons and chanted akathistoi to the Mother of God, they completed the church in time to celebrate the Eucharist inside before sundown of the following day. They prayed, "Take, ? Lord, the plague from

  Israel," and asked for the strength not to curse their "man-loving and long-tolerant God."16

  There were, however, unreal and unhealthy aspects to the rapid growth of religious institutions. The monasteries were burdened with far greater wealth than at the time of the controversy over monastic property- without having acquired the strict discipline on which the original "possessors" had based their case. The monasteries were becoming preoccupied with their role of feudal landowner at precisely the time when serfdom was becoming most oppressive. Bequests were, moreover, increasingly tainted by the institution of "pledging" (zakladnichestvo): a form of tax evasion in which property was nominally donated to a monastery, but the old owner continued to use and profit from it in return for a nominal service charge.

  There was so much activity in and around churches that one might have had the impression of an unprecedented blossoming of religious ardor. In truth, however, it represented more the sagging overgrowth of Indian Summer than the freshness of springtime. The ornate brick churches with Dutch and Persian features, which sprang up at the rate of better than one every two years in Yaroslavl,17 appear today as a kind of unreal interlude between the Byzantine and baroque styles: heavy fruit languishing in the hazy warmth of October, unaware that the stem linking them with the earth had withered and that the killing frost was about to descend. Innumerable icons of local prophets and saints clustered on the lower tier of the iconostases, rather like overripe grapes begging to be picked; and the rapid simultaneous singing of paid memorial services (of which the sorokoust or forty successive services for the dead are the best-known survival) resembled the agitated murmur of autumn flies just before their death.

  The crowds that built and worshipped in the brick and wooden churches of the late Muscovite period were animated by a curious mixture of spirituality and xenophobia. Holy Russia was viewed not simply as suffering purity, but as the ravished victim of "wolf-like Poles" and their accomplices the "pagan Lithuanians" and "unclean Jews." Thus, the political revival and physical expansion of Russia were made possible not only by a common faith, but by an oppressive sense of common enemies. Mounting violence and suppressed self-hatred fed the traditional Byzantine impulse toward apocalypticism. Some of the new wooden churches beyond the Volga became funeral pyres for entire congregations, who sought to greet the purifying flames of the Last Judgment with many of the same hymns that their parents had sung while building these churches. To understand both the tragic end of Russia's "second religiousness" and its subtle links with the religious controversies of the West, one must turn to the two prin-

  cipal factions within the Russian religious revival: the theocratic and the fundamentalist. Each faction answered in a different way one common, central question: How can religion be kept at the center of Russian life in the radically changing conditions of the seventeenth century?

  The Theocratic Answer

  A theocratic solution was favored by many of the "black," or celibate, monastic clergy from which the episcopal hierarchy of the Russian Church was drawn. Partisans of this position sought to strengthen the ecclesiastical hierarchy, increase central control of Russian monasteries, and increase both the discipline and educational level of the clergy by editing and printing systematic catechistic and devotional manuals. In fact, though not in theory, they sought to elevate the spiritual estate over the temporal by greatly increasing the power of the Moscow Patriarch. They continued to speak in Byzantine terms of a "symphony of powers" between the ecclesiastical and temporal realms, but the increased strength of the clergy and continued weakness of the new dynasty offered temptations for establishing virtual clerical rule.

  Although the Metropolitan of Moscow had been elevated to the title of Patriarch only in 1589, the position had almost immediately assumed political as well as ecclesiastical significance. The post was created during a period of weakened tsarist authority-indeed, the first patriarch had been largely responsible for securing Boris Godunov's elevation to the throne. During the troubles of the interregnum, patriarchal authority increased dramatically, largely because Patriarch Hermogenes refused to deal with foreign factions and accepted a martyr's death within the Polish-occupied Kremlin. When, in 1619, the father of the tsar and former Metropolitan of Rostov, Philaret Nikitich, finally returned from Polish imprisonment to become the new patriarch, the stage was set for a great increase in the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Until his death in 1633 he was co-ruler with Tsar Michael, using the title "Great Sovereign" and presiding over more important affairs of state than the Tsar. At the same time he created new sees in the east, increased central control of canonization and ecclesiastical discipline, and determined the form that the first printed versions of some church service books should take.18

  If Philaret created the precedent for a strong patriarchate and a disciplined hierarchy, the theological arming of the Orthodox clergy was largely the work of Peter Mogila, the most influential ecclesiastical leader

  in Orthodox Slavdom for the period between Philaret's death in 1633 and his own in 1647. Mogila's career illustrates the way in which non-Muscovite elements were beginning to control the development of the Russian Church. He was the well-educated progeny of a Moldavian noble family and had fought with the Poles against the Turks in the storied battle of Khotin in 1620. Moved by the five pilgrimages he had made to the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, Mogila settled in that Polish-controlled city. He became a monk, then archimandrite of the monastery, Metropolitan of Kiev, and founder of the Kievan academy "for the teaching of free sciences in the Greek, Slavonic, and Latin languages."19

  Under Mogila the theological struggle of the Orthodox brotherhoods with the Catholic Uniats acquired new sophistication and organizational skill. He wrote for his co-religionists a concise Bible of Instruction, a Confession, and a Catechism, which were reprinted after receiving the endorsement of Orthodox synods that he organized in Kiev in 1640 and in Jassy in 1642. Even more important was Mogila's leadership in checking the drift toward a theological rapprochement with Protestantism that had been aided by Cyril Lukaris' patriarchate in Constantinople. He prevented attempts by Calvinists to spread their ideas in the Ukraine in the 1630's. His Confession begins with a direct contradiction of the Protestant position on justification by faith. Although he remained firm in rejecting the authority of Rome, his writings were so deeply influenced by Jesuit theology that his Catechism (originally written in Latin) was approved at the synod of Jassy only after substantial revisions had been made by a Greek prelate.20 Mogila also introduced into the Orthodoxy of the Eastern Slavs a Western element of scorn for superstitious accretions and irrationalism. He particularly challenged the charitable-even indulgent-attitude of the Russian Church toward those possessed, drawing up a purely Western guide for exorcising unclean spirits and preparing believers for proper instruction.21

  Although Mogila was a Moldavian who spent his entire life under the political authority of Poland and the ecclesiastical authority of Constantinople, he properly belongs to Russian history. Most of his pupils either moved to Moscow or accepted its authority in the course of the victorious Muscovite struggle with Poland that began shortly after his death. To the Russian Church he gave priests capable of holding their own in theological discourse wi
th Westerners, and infected the Russian hierarchy with some of his own passion for order and rationality. As early as April, 1640, Mogila had written Tsar Michael to urge the establishment of a special school in a Moscow monastery where his pupils could teach Orthodox theology and classical languages to the Muscovite nobility. Though such an

  institution did not formally come into being until the creation of the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in 1689, considerable informal instruction was conducted in Moscow in the 1640's by Mogila's pupils.

  With the accession to the patriarchate of the energetic Joseph in 1642 (and of the pious Alexis to the throne in 1645) a large-scale program of religious instruction began. The central weapon in this campaign was the patriarchal printing press-the only one in Moscow-which turned out in the first seven years of Alexis' reign (the last seven of Joseph's patriarchate) nearly ten thousand copies of the basic alphabet book in three editions, eight printings of the book of hours, and nine of the psalter.22

  The key figure in this printing program was Ivan Nasedka, a well-educated and widely traveled priest whose Deposition against the Lutherans, written in 1644, was influential in blocking the proposed marriage of Tsar Michael's daughter to the Danish crown prince.23 Nasedka, whose anxiety about the growth of Protestant influences in Russia dated from his first trip as informal emissary to Denmark in 1621, found ready support for his theological position from the pupils of Mogila, who had taken the lead in combating the drift toward Protestantism elsewhere in the Orthodox world.

  Thus, in the mid-forties there began a steady and increasing flow of Ukrainian priests to Moscow. These priests brought with them an emotional opposition to Catholicism and a doctrinal antipathy to Protestantism. Before the end of Joseph's patriarchate in 1652, the Ukrainian priests trained by Mogila had set up in Moscow two centers of translation and theological instruction: that of Fedor Rtishchev in the Monastery of St. Andrew and that of Epiphanius Slavinetsky in the Monastery of the Miracles.24

  The times, however, were hardly favorable for tranquil intellectual activity. In 1648 war and revolution broke out in the east with unprecedented fury. Anti-Polish and anti-Jewish violence in the Ukraine and White Russia was accompanied by an uprising in Moscow itself. The foreign quarter was sacked and leading government administrators literally torn to pieces. Like the plague epidemic that accompanied a second wave of bloodshed in 1653-4, urban violence spread contagiously from city to city. The restive commercial centers of Novgorod and Pskov predictably sought to canalize the general violence into specific demands for greater freedom from central control in the last wave of uprisings in 1650. Basically, however, it was a formless series of rebellions. Bewildered Western observers noted only the blood-lust of the mob combined with a certain hatred of foreigners and reverence for the Church. When one prisoner of the mob in

  Kursk rebuked a hooded cleric who had joined his tormentors by crying "Off with your hood!" the horde screamed back with redoubled fury, "Off with your head!"25

  The fear of a new "Time of Troubles" loomed up before the young Tsar. His own infant son had just died; he was afraid of a new Tatar invasion, and he initially hesitated to support the Cossack insurrectionists, apparently fearing that "the rebellion of the Cossacks and peasants of Russia might spill over into his own country, where sparks had already appeared from the fire sweeping over Poland."26 There was even a pretender waiting in the wings: a thief, arsonist, and sexual pervert, Timothy Ankudi-nov, who had attracted some interest in both Poland and Rome for his claim to be the son of Shuisky and true heir to the Russian throne.27

  Faced with this threat of disintegration, Alexis rallied support by summoning one zemsky sobor of 1648-9 to draw up, approve, and print a uniform national law code, and another in 1650 to assure the pacification and reabsorption of rebellious Novgorod and Pskov. For all its deference to hierarchy and tradition, the law code of 1649 represented an important stage in the rationalization and secularization of Russian culture. The power of the annotated sovereign was fully invested in his appointed bureaucrats to punish "without any mercy" almost anyone challenging the "sovereign honor" of the "Muscovite state." The monasteries were hurt economically by the outlawing of any new tax-exempt pledging of wealth and property, and politically by the creation of a government bureau to administer their affairs.

  The monopoly of Church Slavonic as the written language of Muscovite culture was also broken by the large-scale reprinting and dissemination of a law code written in a language close to the contemporary vernacular. This Ulozhenie remained the basic code of the land until 1833, and played a role in the development of the modern Russian language that has been compared with that of Luther's Bible in the making of modern German. Indeed, the language of the Ulozhenie was in some ways "closer to the contemporary Russian literary and conversational language than the language not only of Karamzin, but of Pushkin."28

  Alexis, however, was not prepared to build his rule on laws rather than autocratic authority, or to speak in the language of the chanceries rather than the chronicles. Having conceded a code to the rebellious city dwellers, he turned to a program of xenophobic distraction-discriminating against foreign merchants and convening in 1651 and 1653 zemsky sobers to sanction mobilization against Poland, then the protectorate over the Ukraine, which made war inevitable. At the same time, Alexis turned in ¦!' I"' iiiim for administrative support and spiritual guidance to a monk

  named Nikon, in whom the theocratic answer to Russian disorder found its last and greatest exponent.

  Nikon was an ascetic from the trans-Volga region who awed his contemporaries with both spiritual intensity and physical presence. Shortly after arriving in Moscow as head of the New Monastery of the Savior (Novospassky), this six-foot six-inch monk cast his spell over young Tsar Alexis, who began to have regular Friday meetings with him. The decisive event in Nikon's career appears to have been the arrival in Moscow in January, 1649, of Patriarch Paissius of Jerusalem. He was impressed by Nikon and helped secure his appointment as Metropolitan of Novgorod, the second highest position in the Russian hierarchy. Nikon for his part appears to have been dazzled by Paissius' retinue of priests and scholars, who brought with them tales of the Holy Land and of the lost splendors of the Greek Church.

  Paissius told of the horrors he had seen in the Balkans and the Ukraine, pleading for "a new Moses" who would "liberate pious Orthodox Christians from unclean hands, from wild beasts-and shine like a sun amidst the stars."29 The call for deliverance was addressed to the Tsar, but he-like his father before him-felt the need amidst widespread social unrest and intrigue to lean upon die Patriarch. Thus, in November, 1651, the Tsar began pairing his own name with that of Patriarch Joseph in official charters, while commencing a theatrical transfer of the remains of past patriarchs to the Moscow Kremlin for reburial. The remains of Patriarch Hermogenes were exhumed and venerated; and Alexis sent Nikon to Solovetsk to bring back to the Cathedral of the Assumption the remains of Metropolitan Philip, whose murder by Ivan the Terrible had given an aura of holy martyrdom to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. While Nikon was still gone, Patriarch Joseph died; and within a few weeks Alexis wrote Nikon a long, half-confessional letter of grief addressed to "the great sun" from "your earthly tsar."30 Clearly Nikon was some kind of higher, heavenly tsar, and it is hardly surprising that he was appointed Joseph's successor as Patriarch in July. For six years, Nikon became the virtual ruler of Russia, using the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the printing press to extend the program of ecclesiastical discipline he had developed at Novgorod.

  In the far-flung see of Novgorod, Nikon dealt not only with a rebellious, Westward-looking city, but also with the chaotic and primitive northern regions, where he had previously served as a monastic administrator. There Nikon became attached to ecclesiastical splendor and magnificence as a kind of compensation for the bleakness of the region and the asceticism of his personal life. As Metropolitan of Novgorod, he was able to extend and even tighten central control over the monasteries of the north
by securing

  from the Tsar complete exemption from subordination to the new governmental department created by the law code of 1649 to regulate monasteries.

  As patriarch, Nikon not only shared with the Tsar the title "Great Sovereign," as had Philaret, but in fact exercised sole sovereignty when the Tsar went off to lead the battle against Poland. Nikon used this position to set up a virtual theocracy in Moscow with the aid of visiting Greek and transplanted Ukrainian and White Russian prelates. Not just the Patriarch, but the entire episcopal hierarchy was given a new aura of majesty. Theatrical rituals were introduced, more elaborate vestments and miters required, and elaborate church councils held with foreign Orthodox prelates participating. The traditional Palm Sunday procession, in which the Tsar led the Patriarch on a donkey through Red Square in imitation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, was instituted in the provinces, where local civil authorities were encouraged also to humble themselves in this way before local metropolitans and bishops.31