Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (89 page)

It was against a background thus still seething with apocalyptic excitement that churchmen began referring to the Church in Rus' by the term previously adopted by the proud merchants and clergy of Novgorod for their own city: the 'Third Rome'. Now the phrase was revived to award the Russian Church a particular destiny ordained by God. The tsars always treated the idea with caution, since it might give clergymen too much power at their expense; by contrast, the Russian Church relentlessly propagated it in sermons and readings in the liturgy, and it had a deep appeal to ordinary folk, some of whom would later reject the tsars' religious policies when they forced innovation on the Church (see pp. 539-41).
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The nature of the 'Third Rome' is most famously expounded in a letter to Grand Prince Vasilii III from Filofei, monk of a monastery in Pskov, written perhaps in the mid-1520s, and the theme is echoed in two of his other letters.

Amid a mixture of flattery and admonition, Filofei reminded his prince of the shape of previous Christian history: the Church of Rome had fallen away into heresy (he specified only the Apollinarian heresy, in a clumsy reference to the
Filioque
controversy), while the Church of the Second Rome in Constantinople had been overwhelmed by unbelievers - Filofei recalled the last tragedy of the Turks breaking down the doors of the churches with their axes in 1453. It was now the destiny of the Church over which the Tsar presided, 'in the new, third Rome, your mighty
tsartvo'
[empire], to shine like the sun throughout the whole universe, and to endure as long as the world endures: you are the only Tsar for Christians in the whole world . . . Two Romes have fallen and the third stands. A fourth will not be'.
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It is worth emphasizing that in none of his letters did Filofei identify the Third Rome specifically with Moscow, the home of the Tsar; it was the whole Church of Rus' within the grand prince's dominions which fulfilled this final role.

What is striking in this letter is its deeply clericalist character. Filofei's threefold scheme of divine providence recalls the theories of Joachim of Fiore, who had also envisaged an enduring third age, which he had seen as dominated by monks (see pp. 410-12). Filofei is unlikely to have known of Joachim: his exposition reflects the tendency of the Trinitarian faith to think in threes, and his recommendations are severely practical in their concern for the protection of monastic wealth and holy life, without much apocalyptic flavour anywhere in the details of his programme.
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He was writing against the background of a conflict among the monks of Rus'. They took for granted that monks should be the leaders of the new society of the grand prince; the quarrel between them centred on the way in which monasticism might best reflect biblical perfection, and how monks might best lead this project. The main issue was the enormous wealth of the greater monasteries: it is not surprising that a critique of such riches developed, since it is likely that by the sixteenth century monasteries led by the Trinity-Sergius Lavra owned around a quarter of Russia's cultivated land.
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'Possessors' defended such monastic wealth, pointing out how monasteries could and did use it for the relief and support of the poor; 'Non-Possessors' pointed to the greater value of monastic poverty in forming the spirituality of monks, and the need for monks to develop purity of heart rather than achieve perfection in the liturgy.

The issues under contest were comparable to the unease about monastic wealth in late-twelfth-century Latin Europe, where they had been to some extent resolved by the formation of the orders of friars (see pp. 401-12). In Muscovy, there was no such compromise. The opposing sides adopted as their symbolic champions Nil Sorskii and Iosif Volotskii, two leading fifteenth-century monks. We have to reassess them by filtering out much later polemical rewriting of their story: Russian liberals attributed to Nil an openness and tolerance of religious dissidence for which there is no actual evidence, while Russian Marxists saw the 'Non-Possessor' admirers of Nil as the 'progressive' party, on the grounds that the Muscovite princes eventually sided with their opponents, the 'Possessors', who honoured Iosif. In both interpretations, Iosif became a symbol of the monarchical autocracy which absorbed official Russian religion up to 1917. The two men do not in fact seem to have clashed during their lives; they were both advocates of Hesychasm, devotees of the great exponent of monasticism Sergei of Radonezh and firm advocates of the repression of religious dissidents, up to and including the death penalty.
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Among the scanty facts recoverable about Nil are that he visited Mount Athos in the late fifteenth century, and that on his return he founded a hermitage in the classic Russian style amid the swamps and forests of the Sora river in the far north-east; later his Non-Possessor admirers would be styled 'Trans-Volga Elders' in allusion to this location. Those writings which can be definitely attributed to him show him to be exceptionally learned for his time and deeply committed to the stillness of Hesychasm, about which he could write eloquently in ways whose appeal endured through later political storms. It was some of his later devotees who emphasized his championing of a hermit's life as best placed to achieve profound spiritual experience. They singled out Abbot Iosif as their opponent because one of Iosif's major achievements had been to create a new Rule to give a more rigorous structure for monastic community life. In reaction to attacks on Iosif, the defenders of monastic wealth in the mid-sixteenth century increasingly identified Nil as the inspiration for the movement which they now characterized as subversive of the good order of the Church, the Trans-Volgan group of monks and hermits. It is certainly true that Iosif's reputation was likely to appeal to the consolidating Church establishment, given his celebration of the value of the ordered liturgy and his renown as a gifted liturgical singer.
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Once more, there are worthwhile comparisons with the history of the medieval Western Church, where between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries a hierarchy intent on asserting clerical power and uniformity of practice and doctrine did its best to destroy any rivals or to define them as heretics. The sixteenth-century Muscovite Church came to treat the 'Non-Possessors' as dissidents when they were not, because it was in the process of condemning a wide spectrum of religious opinion, much of which similarly only challenged the Church once the Church met it with repression. Another and distinct late-fifteenth-century movement in eastern Europe was termed by later commentators 'the Judaizing heresy', and as so often in Russian history, most of what is known about it comes from those who opposed and suppressed it. Those who adhered to it apparently denied the reality of the Trinity, opposed icons and were critical of the existing clergy: three different grounds for the 'Judaizer' label. In the time of Grand Prince Ivan III, the movement had sympathizers in Court circles, including the Grand Prince's own daughter-in-law, the Moldavian princess Elena; caught up in the dynastic struggles after his death, she died in prison in 1505.
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During the sixteenth century, the 'Judaizers' seem to have interacted fruitfully in Lithuania with those Reformation dissidents coming from the Western Latin tradition who also had doubts about the Trinity (see pp. 642-3).

One reason why Grand Prince Ivan and his successor at first resisted pressure from the metropolitan to persecute the 'Judaizers' may have been that the Court saw this rival party as allies in plans to trim the wealth of the monasteries, a plan which would have strengthened the monarchy at the expense of the Church's independent power. The same thought had, a hundred years before, led an English prince and his fellow noblemen to protect the dissident academic John Wyclif from the Western Church's anger, when he condemned the temporal wealth of the Church (see pp. 567-9). Soon it was also to be one motive in the promotion of the Protestant Reformation in western Europe. Indeed, the later stages of the dispute between Possessors and Non-Possessors may have been fuelled by knowledge that in the West from the 1520s onwards wholesale dissolutions of monasteries were taking place (see p. 628). At least one prominent monk among the Non-Possessors, Nil's disciple Vassian Patrikeev, urged that bishops should be put in charge of all Church lands, including those of the monasteries, which would have made Church wealth more readily available assets for the grand prince. Unlike his hero Nil Sorskii, Vassian really did argue for tolerance for religious dissidents.
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Given that conjunction of ideas, it is not surprising that there were such bitter cries of heresy among the Possessors against both Judaizers and Non-Possessors; it was a convenient emphasis which may have helped to pull the grand princes into line behind their cause. The Possessors were naturally also careful to stress their reverence for the God-given power of the monarch.

Much of what the sixteenth-century Muscovite Church leadership condemned was simply the energy of popular devotion, creatively extending or modifying the liturgy to suit local needs, or experiencing its own unregulated encounters with the divine. This undergrowth of religious life could never wholly be contained by official weeding. After the mid-sixteenth century, the Church hierarchy deliberately restricted the number of those newly officially canonized as saints, and the candidates whom they chose tended to be drawn safely from the upper ranks of society. Into the vacuum poured a myriad of local cults, some of which became much more than local; so in 1579 it was the daughter of an ordinary soldier who discovered the hiding place in the newly Muscovite city of Kazan of an icon which became one of Russia's most revered images of the Mother of God.
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And still the Holy Fools postured and agreeably shocked society with their consecrated antics. A sixteenth-century example of the breed, Vasilii (Basil) the Blessed, has been so centrally honoured in Russian devotion that the image of Moscow now most familiar worldwide is that of the church in Red Square containing his shrine, the Cathedral of the Intercession, now commonly known as St Basil's Cathedral. Appropriately it is an extraordinary culmination of Russian architectural posturing, and in it also lie the bones of a second and rather more obscure Holy Fool, Ioann 'Big Cap', whose speciality apart from his outsize head was apparently intimidating people with gnomic innuendoes.
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IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE NEW PATRIARCHATE (1547-98)

That anarchic fools should be honoured in Red Square is remarkable, because the Church of the Intercession was commissioned by the man who came to symbolize the dismal extremity of what Muscovite autocracy might mean: Ivan IV, known to anglophone history as 'the Terrible'.
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Even by the poisonous standards of the Muscovite Court, few rulers have had an experience of brutality in their formative years appalling enough to equal Ivan's. A puppet ruler at the age of three on the sudden death of his father, Vasilii III in 1533, he experienced the probable death by poisoning of his mother when he was eight, after she had imprisoned, tortured and murdered a variety of dynastic rivals; at the age of thirteen he managed to secure the beating to death of the prince who had seized power after his mother, and who had humiliated him and his handicapped but much-loved younger brother. This was the beginning of a lifetime of exercising power through terror which intensified when the years of regency ended and Ivan assumed full power in 1547.
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It was not surprising that Ivan graduated from childhood sadism towards animals to the bestial treatment of anyone who might be regarded as getting in his way, and of many who were entirely innocent of any such possibility. The only countervailing influence during his unlovely upbringing was the Metropolitan Makarii, a 'Possessor' monk and a noted painter of icons, who did his best to recall the boy to the meaning of the Christian faith which he practised. As a result of the Metropolitan's intervention, and Ivan's frequent visits to the great holy places of Muscovy, the Grand Prince's career of tyranny, murder and power-seeking was shot through with an intense and justified concern for the welfare of his soul. It was also probably Makarii who prompted Ivan to be crowned in 1547 as Tsar, in a now permanent augmentation of the title of Grand Prince, although naturally Ivan retained the old title to emphasize his place as heir to all Rus'. Now there was a self-promoted Christian emperor in the East to rival the seven-centuries-old self-promotion of Charlemagne and his successors in the West.

For the first dozen or so years of his reign, the new tsar was intent, like many of his fellow European monarchs, on building up his personal power against any other power base in his dominions, but he ruled with the assistance of a competent set of advisers and set about a rational reordering of the temporal and Church government of Muscovy, codifying laws, reorganizing the army and presiding over that major reforming Church council 'of the Hundred Chapters' in 1551 which, among its other measures, elevated the art of Andrei Rublev into a universal standard (see pp. 521-2). One can only speculate how Ivan, after taking such an active role in Church affairs, would have reacted to Pope Pius IV's invitation to him in 1561 to send representatives to the Pope's parallel contemporary reforming Council at Trent; the Tsar never got to hear about it. The Catholic Poles, horrified at the prospect that their Muscovite enemies might receive any sort of hearing at Trent, blocked two successive papal envoys from travelling on to Moscow, to the extent of leaving the second of them in a Polish jail for two years.
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Ivan IV won decisive victories over the remaining Tatar khanates in the 1550s, and it was to commemorate these, in particular the capture of the Tatar city of Kazan in 1552, that he ordered the building of the Red Square Cathedral of the Intercession. It is an extrovert symbol of the Tsar's joy in victory and his gratitude to Mary, the Mother of God, the Trinity and the various saints whose intercession he had successfully invoked against the Tatars. Ivan's eightfold victories provided a convenient historical accident which was imposed on all the biblical symbolism of the number eight and eight-plus-one already being exploited in the church architecture of Muscovy. So the building centres on an eight-sided church which becomes its own spire. This is surrounded by eight completely separate lesser churches, so that the ensemble is an eightfold star, or a pair of squares superimposed on each other - double the four corners of the earth or the four evangelists. In plan it seems rational and symmetrical, but no one except the architect and patron would ever have thought of it in terms of its plan. The exterior, so insistent in its monopoly on the viewer's attention, is intimidatingly original: each lesser church bears an onion dome in extravagantly contrasting decoration, all threatening to throttle the central spire which catapults above them. The effect would have been inconceivable in Byzantium. Inside, nothing could be further from the congregational space of either the early basilica or the Protestant architecture about to develop in the West than this intricately clustered honeycomb of shrines of thanksgiving. Sudden soaring interiors in their verticality assault the Heaven to which the insistent eightfold design is pointing the worshipper. They are capable of arousing both claustrophobia and vertigo.