a total change in the substance of the elements (transubstantiation) took place at the time the priest repeated Christ's original words of institution: "This is my body .. . This is my blood"; and (3) that only the purely "accidental" aspects of the bread and wine remain unchanged.5
In the course of the seventeenth century the Orthodox Church also felt the challenge of the reformers and adopted the Catholic term "transubstantiation" as "the only possible word to deny Protestant heresy and at the same time affirm the Orthodox belief."6 The Russian church hierarchy, which was especially fearful of divisive heresies, played a leading role in the general hardening of doctrinal positions and the increased use of dialectic method and scholastic casuistry in dogmatic writing. Catholic, and more specifically Jesuit, theological technique and terminology is evident in the two small efforts of the Orthodox Church of the Eastern Slavs to provide a systematic catechism for its communicants: Mogila's catechism of 1640 and the catechism of 1670 of Simeon Polotsky, Crown of the Catholic (Kafolkheskaia) Faith. Medvedev was, thus, only continuing the tradition begun by his teacher Polotsky in speaking of transubstantiation and echoing other aspects of Roman Catholic teachings about the eucharist in his long dogmatic dialogue Bread of Life and in a second more polemic work, Manna of the Bread of Life.
Medvedev's exposition of the Catholic position offended Russian Orthodox sensibilities in two important ways. First of all, the distinction between accidents and substances introduced a kind of terminological hair splitting into something which the Orthodox considered a holy mystery (literally, "secret," tainstvo). It was celebrated behind the closed doors of the sanctuary during the third, most hallowed part of the Orthodox mass, the liturgiia vernykh, or "service of the believers." Second, it specified the exact time at which God comes down to man through the transformed elements.
On this latter point Medvedev was challenged and eventually anath-emized; for it related to an issue that had been at the heart of the original split between the churches: the Eastern refusal to accept the Western version of the Nicene Creed, in which the Holy Spirit was said to descend from the Father and Son. A certain awesome if mysterious primacy within the unity of the Trinity was reserved for the Father in the East, and this primacy seemed once more jeopardized by Medvedev's position. Insofar as one can define the precise moment at which God becomes present in the elements, Medvedev's critics insisted that it came after the priest's call for the descent of the Holy Spirit, following the repetition of Christ's words of institution. In other words, the miracle of God's presence in the sacra-
ment was not assured by a priest's re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, but rather by the "common work of the believers" in supplicating God for the descent of His Holy Spirit.7
Thus, behind all the venality of intrigue which eventually doomed Medvedev lay the reluctance of the Russian Church to accept fully the detailed doctrinal formulations of post-Reformation Roman Catholicism, however much they were to borrow from its language and methods of instruction. The Russian Church displayed a stubborn determination to reassert the uniqueness of its doctrinal position even at a time when it was losing its independence from the state and rejecting its original orientation toward Greek culture.
On one point the Latinizers and Grecophiles had been in agreement: their opposition to the Western churches. Medvedev had inveighed against the heretical ideas he had found among foreign book correctors in Moscow; the Likhudies had written a series of tracts against Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.8
The xenophobia of the Russian Church, which they helped thus to fortify, was to claim two foreign victims in the waning years of the seventeenth century: Quirinus Kuhlmann and Yury Krizhanich. Each came from the western borderlands of European Slavdom to Moscow with high expectations of the role Russia could play in the religious regeneration of Europe. Each was a prophet without honor in his own country, who was to be rejected as well in Russia. From a purely Western point of view they represent only curious distant echoes of the Reformation and Counter Reformation respectively. Yet in Russia they stand as harbingers of important new ideas and developments. Each bears witness to the extent to which "uniquely Russian" movements and ideas can be traced to Western, or at least non-Russian, origins.
The Croatian Catholic priest, Yury Krizhanich, was the first to come to Russia, arriving with a Polish diplomatic mission in 1647 and returning in the guise of a Ukrainian war refugee in 1659.9 Throughout his long second stay in Russia, which lasted two decades, Krizhanich sought to advance both an old and a new idea. The old idea was the conversion of Russia to Catholicism; the new was the development of Russia as the center of a new united Slavdom. Only such unity could, in Krizhanich's view, counter the growing strength of the Protestant Germans on the one side and the infidel Turks on the other. The ideal that Russia rather than Poland should serve as the anchor of Catholic hopes in Eastern Europe had been favored in Vatican circles during periods of demonstrated Muscovite strength under the two Ivans. The idea was particularly popular with certain Croatian Catholics who had participated in the Vatican-sponsored lllyrian move-
ment and whose strategic imagination may have been captured by the idea of Slavic unity,10 which had already been set forth in 1601 by an Italian priest, Mauro Orbini, in his // regno degli Slavi, hoggi corrottamente detti Schiavoni: the first over-all history of the Slavic peoples ever written.11 The official recognition of the Romanov dynasty by the Holy Roman Empire in 1654 cleared the way for the resumption of close ties with Russia and the dispatching of embassies which regularly included Catholic clergy.
Special interest in Russia was also shown by the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was founded in 1622 largely to open lines of communication with Eastern Christians. The Congregation was a useful vehicle for Catholic activities inside Russia, because it was not identified with Polish expansion, as was the Society of Jesus. However, the Congregation also lacked the Jesuits' semi-military structure and could not exercise binding authority over those who went to Russia in its name. Ligarides, for instance, was educated by, and loosely affiliated with, the Congregation, but soon discarded his allegiance as he began to carve out a career for himself in the Orthodox world.12 Krizhanich, however, appears to have remained a dedicated Catholic throughout his much longer stay in Russia. Because of the incomplete records surviving, the extent of his proselytizing activities in Russia cannot be determined. But it is clear that he became a librarian and cataloguer within the Kremlin shortly after his second arrival and refused to collaborate in the formation of the new state church. Probably for this reason, he was sent early in 1661 to distant Tobol'sk, in Siberia, where he remained until after Alexis' death. During this exile Krizhanich wrote some of the most perceptive and profound essays in pre-Petrine Russia, returning to Moscow only in 1677 in an unsuccessful bid to gain the support of the new tsar.
Of his many works on different subjects-all written in a strange melange of Croatian, Latin, and Russian-much the most interesting is his "Political Thoughts," or "Conversations on Power," an argument for absolute monarchy based largely on classical and Renaissance authorities.13 Even though Krizhanich is the first writer in Russia to quote extensively from Machiavelli, his argument is essentially moralistic. The monarch derives his authority from God, who has decreed objective natural laws for all the world. The Russian people, who are still superstitious and lacking in moderation, are in particular need of a strong monarchy. All of Eastern Europe is, in turn, dependent on Russian leadership. The Ukraine should cease its political intrigues and subordinate itself to Russia. The Russian monarch must not permit his authority to be diluted either by a Polish type of aristocratic diet or by the German merchants who cover the land "like a swarm of locusts devouring all the fruit of the earth."14 Russia has unique
advantages for effective absolute rule because neither of the two classic sources of palace intrigue (women and traditional noblemen) are of any real importance in Muscovy.
To realize its d
estiny, however, Russia had to rid itself of many of its myths, and of its subservience to the Greeks in theology and the Germans in practical affairs. The idea that Kievan Russia was dependent on Varangian princes for political order was rejected by Krizhanich more than a century before native Russian historians began to question the predominant role of the Normans in early Russian history. Krizhanich also rejected the mythical descent of Russian imperial authority from Prus and the anti-Catholic idea of a Third Rome. Krizhanich's political recommendations were embellished with detailed commentaries on the language, history, economy, and geography of Russia. The cumulative effect of his prolific writings was to suggest that a great destiny lay before the Russian nation. To realize it, however, Russia would have to unify the oppressed Slavs, accept Roman Catholicism, and be the bearer of its mission to heathen lands east and south.
Krizhanich anticipated a number of different movements in modern Russian thought. He was one of the first to appeal on moralistic grounds for enlightened despotism as the best means of civilizing Eastern Europe. Indeed, it is interesting to note that the status and intellectual influence of Catholic priests in Russia was at its highest precisely during those periods when reforming despots were on the throne: Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander I. Even Krizhanich, despite his exile, was not nearly so badly treated under Alexis as most other religious dissenters. Technically, he was not even under compulsion, having been officially sent on "government business." He was given a pension and freedom to write, and devoted much of his time to tasks that might conceivably have been assigned him by the central government: the gathering of historical and geographic material on Siberia and the refutation of the schismatics.
Krizhanich is most important, however, as the forerunner of two widely contrasting currents of thought that would reappear in nineteenth-century Russia with far greater strength: Catholic proselytism and militant Pan-Slavism. The fate which eventually met Krizhanich after his last sad departure from Russia was one worthy of veneration by either movement -and suitably heroic for the romantic temperament of the nineteenth century. Krizhanich remained in the Slavic East, drifting about Poland, taking monastic vows, and finally dying outside Vienna in 1683 with the army of Jan Sobieski as it turned back the last great Turkish assault on European Christendom.
If the visionaries of the Counter Reformation were to be rejected in
late-seventeenth-century Russia, extreme prophets of the Reformation were to fare no better. Just as Krizhanich sought to have Russia revitalize for Europe the strategic hopes of a revived Catholicism, so Quirinus Kuhlmann sought to realize through "the unknown people of the north" the fading messianic expectations of the radical Reformation.
Kuhlmann was born in Silesia, the heartland of European mysticism which lies along the ill-defined border between the Slavic and German worlds. His mother was Polish, his father German; the city in which he was brought up bears the dual names of Wroclaw and Breslau; and his own strange life was equally divided between East and West.
He was less interested in his formal studies at Breslau and Jena than in a personal quest for religious understanding. He set forth his ideas in mystical poems with that "alchemy of speech" based on hypnotic repetition which was so characteristic of the German baroque. Coming from a part of Europe particularly devastated by the Thirty Years' War, he sought to further a "cooling down" of passions, considering his own name an indication of divine selection for this Verkiihlung. He wrote a "cooling psalter" (Kiihl-psalter) and was briefly associated with a literary-patriotic fraternal order, "The Fruit-bearing Society," in which each member took a new name from the vegetable kingdom and swore to defend the florid peculiarities of German vernacular culture.15
Kuhlmann soon drifted to Amsterdam, where he became fascinated by the theosophical treatises of an earlier Silesian mystic, Jacob Boehme. Standing at the end of the Reformation, Boehme had rehabilitated the ancient Gnostic belief that esoteric inner secrets of the universe could be discovered both within and beyond the traditional source of revelation for older Protestantism: the Holy Bible. Boehme's gnosticism was particularly appealing to those who shared both the religious concerns of the age and the new taste for intellectual speculation freed from traditional authority. There was, after all, no higher goal for the mind to aspire to than "the wisdom of God"-the literal meaning of the word "theosophy," which Boehme used to describe his system of truth.
Boehme's speculations had been used by his followers as the basis for prophetic predictions about the coming of a new order. Just as man was to recapture the lost perfection of Adam before the fall, so was the whole world on the eve of a new millennium, according to many prophetic Protestants in the mid-seventeenth century. Jan Comenius, the brilliant educator and long-suffering leader of Czech Protestantism, had died in Amsterdam in 1671, predicting that the millennium would come in 1672. In his last great work, Lux e Tenebris, Comenius gathered together the writings of a
number of recently martyred East European Protestants and spoke in a Manichean manner of the coming struggle of light and darkness. Kuhlmann was much influenced by this work, which was published and widely discussed in Amsterdam (and perhaps also by Jewish Sabbataianism, which claimed Amsterdam as one of its centers). In his treatise of 1674, Boehme Resurrected, Kuhlmann announces his own expectation that the thousand-year reign of righteousness is about to begin on earth:
Jesus Christ, the King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords is coming with his Lily and Rose to bring back Adam's forgotten life of paradise on Earth.16
Kuhlmann sought to recruit various rulers of Europe as leaders of the righteous remnant, instruments of the New Jerusalem. His preaching took him progressively farther East: to Liibeck and Rostock on the Baltic in the mid-seventies, to Constantinople and the court of the Sultan in the late seventies. By the 1680's he had become a political extremist, urging the rulers of Europe to abdicate from power in preparation for the coming "Jesuelite" kingdom, implying at times that they should hand over power during the interim to the custody of the inspired prophet himself. Kuhlmann provided his own devotional literature of mystical songs and hymns. In his Kuhlpsalter the word "triumph" occurs several hundred times. His works circulated together with those of Boehme throughout the Baltic region and became known among German merchants as far afield as Archangel and Moscow. Sympathizers among the foreign colony in Moscow urged Kuhlmann to come to discover for himself the spiritual potential of this new land, and when Kuhlmann arrived in Moscow by way of Riga and Pskov in April, 1689, there was already a nucleus of sympathizers quick to respond to his preachings.
The purpose of Kuhlmann's visit was to prepare Russia for transformation into the apocalyptical fifth monarchy: the place on earth where Christ would come again and launch a thousand-year reign on earth together with his chosen saints. Before leaving England for Moscow, Kuhlmann had set forth such a program in a collection of writings addressed jointly to the young Peter the Great and his ill-fated co-ruler, Ivan V. It was similar to appeals that he had unsuccessfully addressed to the rulers of France, Sweden, and Brandenburg Prussia, and reflected an attempt to carry over to the continent the ideas he had picked up from yet another prophetic group: the rejected "Fifth Monarchy men" of the English Revolution.
Kuhlmann quickly established a following within the German suburb of Moscow. He appears also to have won supporters at the imperial court and to have written a memorandum for his Russian followers.17 He taught
that the Jesuits had taken over the world and that Lutheranism had betrayed the true Reformation, which was provided by the teaching of Boehme and the witness of the persecuted East European Protestants whom Co-menius had praised. Such views frightened the leading Lutheran pastor of the German community, who pleaded for help from the Tsar in silencing this disruptive prophet. Translators in the Russian foreign office advised that his teachings were, indeed, "similar to those of the schismatics."18 Probably fearing that he might gain influence over the impressionable young Tsar Peter, who was an habit
ue of the German quarter, Sophia designated Kuhlmann and his followers as bearers of "schism, heresy, and false prophecy." In October, 1689, just six months after his arrival, Kuhlmann was burned in a specially built thatched hut in Red Square together with his writings and his principal local collaborator. The English mercenary colonel in the Tsar's service, whose family had sponsored Kuhlmann's trip to Moscow, was placed in prison, where he committed suicide. Orders were distributed to provincial voevodas for the suppression of his ideas and destruction of his writings.19
Like the Catholic Krizhanich, this lonely Protestant prophet had little direct impact on the Russian scene. Russia in the late seventeenth century was in the process of rejecting all purely religious answers to its problems.20 The West to which Russia had turned was not moving from one religion to another but from all religions to none at all. This was the time of the "crisis of the European consciousness," when faith suddenly became nominal and scepticism fashionable.21 Russia was deeply affected. Grecophiles and Latinizers within the Orthodox Church were rejected as decisively as theocrats and fundamentalists had been earlier; and Russia refused to accept either a purely Catholic or radical Protestant solution to its problems. Thus, from one point of view Krizhanich and Kuhlmann represent two final, foredoomed efforts to provide a religious solution for Russia. From another point of view, however, they represent early examples of an important future phenomenon: the Western prophet who looks to Russia for the realization of ideas not given a proper hearing in the West. Though unre-ceptive to such prophets in the late seventeenth century, the rulers of Russia were to lend increasingly sympathetic ears to prophetic voices from the West: Peter the Great to Leibniz, Catherine the Great to Diderot, Alexander I to De Maistre. But these were a new breed of prophets; and they brought their messages not to the chaotic religiosity of a city on the upper Volga but to the geometric new secular capital on the Baltic. It was not to Moscow but to St. Petersburg that the new Western prophets were to bring their ideas.
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