The worldly corruption of the Russian clergy was furthered by its ignorance. The church language in Russia was old Slavonic, a bookish language created in the ninth century by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius on the basis of the Slavic spoken in their native Macedonia. While not identical with Russian, it was close enough to it to be mastered with a minimum of education. Neither Greek nor Latin was taught at the Russian monasteries, and little literary work was carried out except for some rudimentary chronicle-writing and hagiography. The Russian clergy was unbelievably ignorant. Unless we assume that all foreign visitors to Muscovy conspired to tell lies, the picture which emerges from their accounts of religious life there is appalling:
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Foreigners state that ordinary laymen knew neither the story of the Gospels, nor the symbol of the faith, nor the principal prayers, including 'Our Father' and 'Virgin, Mother of God', naively justifying their ignorance on the grounds that all this was 'very subtile science fit only for the tsar and the patriarch, and altogether lords and clergy who did not have to work'. But the same foreigners give also the most devastating evidence against those who did have the leisure and even a special leisure to acquire this knowledge. Olearius... writes that in his time hardly one [Russian] monk in ten knew 'Our Father'. At the end of the seventeenth century Wahrmund mentions a monk begging for alms in the name of a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, who turned out to be St Nicholas. After this, it is not surprising to read in Fletcher... that the Bishop of Vologda was unable to tell him from which book of the Holy Scriptures he had just finished reading aloud at Fletcher's request and how many evangelists there were; nor to learn from Olearius and Wickhart (seventeenth century) that the patriarchs of their time were extremely ignorant in matters of faith and could not engage in theological arguments with foreigners.*
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Russian church immersed itself so deeply in secular affairs that it ceased to uphold Christianity in any but the most primitive magic-ritualistic sense. And even in this respect it found it difficult to resist shortcuts. Thus, for instance, to compress their interminable services, Muscovite churches and monasteries adopted the practice of mnogopenie which had several priests or monks chanting successive parts of the liturgy at the same time, with resultant bedlam.
This worldliness in time produced the inevitable reaction which, for all its superficial resemblance to the western Reformation, was an event sui generis with an entirely different outcome.
Russian frontiers were never as hermetically sealed as the government wished, and in the late Middle Ages foreign reform movements succeeded in penetrating Muscovy. One of these, the StrigoVnik heresy, spread in the middle of the fourteenth century in Novgorod, the Russian city in closest contact with the west. Though little authentic information is available about this movement because its adherents were eventually extirpated and their writings destroyed, it appears to have been a typical proto-Reformation heresy similar to the Catharist (Albigensian). Preaching on street corners, its adherents castigated the ordained clergy and monks for their corruption and worldliness, denied the validity of most of the sacraments, and demanded a return to the 'apostolic' church. In the 1470s a related heresy of the so-called 'Judaizers' emerged in Novgorod. Its adherents also attacked the church for its materialism, especially its ownership of great landed wealth, and called for a simpler, more spiritual religion. The Judaizing heresy became very dangerous to the established church because it gained converts among priests close to the tsar and even members of his immediate family.
THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE
But the gravest challenge to the established church came from within its own ranks, from elements whose doctrinal and ritualistic orthodoxy was beyond suspicion. The roots of this particular reform movement lay in Greece. In the latter part of the fifteenth century among the monks living at Mt Athos, the centre of Orthodox monasticism, there spread talk of an imminent end of the world. Some monks left their abbeys to settle in hermitages. Here, living in utmost simplicity, they prayed, studied and meditated. This so-called 'hesychast' movement was imported to Russia by the monk, Nil Sorskii, who had been to Mt Athos. Around 1480, Nil moved out of his monastery and dug himself a pit in the marshy forest wilderness north of the upper Volga, where he henceforth lived in solitude praying and studying the scriptures and patristic writings. Other monks followed his example, settling in the vicinity of Nil's hermitage or pushing on further north. These 'Transvolga Elders', did not at first seem to threaten the interests of the established church because the kind of life they advocated was too rigorous to attract many followers. But in time Nil became involved in a debate concerning the principle of monastic landholding, and when that happened, the church was thrown into a crisis.
By the end of the fifteenth century, its claim to monocratic authority well established, the Muscovite monarchy required much less urgently the worldly favours of the church. In fact, it was beginning to cast a greedy eye on the church's properties to whose growth it itself had made major contributions, as these yielded neither taxes nor services and could be put to better use by being carved up for distribution as pomestia. Ivan in indicated his attitude clearly enough when in conquered Novgorod he confiscated most of the ecclesiastical holdings on his own behalf. The friendly reception accorded the Judaizing movement at his court may have had something to do with this heresy's outspoken opposition to monastic wealth. His son, Basil in, began to supervise closely monastic revenues and occasionally even helped himself to them. He probably also issued some kind of an order prohibiting monasteries from acquiring additional land without royal approval because a decree to this same effect issued early in the reign of Ivan iv (1535) made reference to a previous law. Many boyars also sympathized with the vision of a spiritual church, partly to deflect the crown's attention from their own holdings, partly to help it acquire more land for distribution to servitors. There are suspicions that it was either the tsar or boyars close to his court who prevailed on Nil Sorskii to leave his anchorage and denounce the monasteries for owning land. This occurred in 1503 when Nil suddenly made his appearance at a synod to urge that the church renounce its wealth and resort to alms. His appeal threw the assembly into panic. The synod unanimously rejected the proposal, passing a resolution which
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reconfirmed the inalienability and sacredness of ecclesiastical holdings. But the issue would not die quite so easily. Nil's speech was only the opening shot in a war between two clerical parties later labelled 'anti-property' (nestiazhateli) and 'pro-property' (liubostiazhateli) which went on until the middle of the sixteenth century.
The quarrel was not, in the first instance, over politics; at issue were differing conceptions of the church. Nil and the other Transvolga Elders envisaged an ideal church, unencumbered by worldly responsibilities, serving as a spiritual and moral beacon in a dark and evil world. One of the leading figures in Nil's party was Maxim the Greek, a native of Corfu who had studied in Italy and there fallen under the influence of Savonarola. Having come to Russia to help translate Greek books, he was appalled by the debased quality of the clergy. Why were there in Russia no Samuels to stand up to Saul and no Nathans to tell the truth to erring David, he asked; and the answer, given by Kurbskii or whoever it was that wrote the epistles to Ivan iv credited to him was: because the Russian clergy were so concerned with their worldly possessions that they 'lay motionless, fawning in every way on authority and obliging it so as to preserve their holdings and acquire still miore'.6 There was implied in this argument a clear political message, namely that only a poor church could look the tsar straight in the eye and serve as the nation's moral conscience. The conservative, 'pro-property' party, on the contrary, wanted a church which collaborated intimately with the monarchy and shared with it responsibility for keeping the realm truly Christian. To be able to do that, it needed income, because in fact only financial independence freed the clergy for excessive concern, with worldly affairs. Each party could draw on historic precedent, the former with reference to early Christian practices, the latter by appeals to the Byzantine tradition. The monarchy's stand in this dispute was ambivalent. It did want to reclaim the church's land, and with that in mind it encouraged at first the 'anti-property' group. But it preferred their opponents' political philosophy which viewed the church as the collaborator of the state. Allusions to Nathan and Samuel certainly could not appeal to patrimonial rulers who desired no independent institutions in their realm, least of all a church which took it upon itself to act as the nation's conscience. In the end, by skilful manoeuvring, the monarchy got the best of both worlds: it first supported the 'pro-property' faction; then, having with its help liquidated the proponents of an independent, spiritual church, reversed itself and, adopting the recommendations of the defeated 'anti-property' faction, proceeded to sequester church lands.