Nil's teachings had the disturbing effect of leading men to think that direct links with God were possible-indeed preferable-to the ornately externalized services of Orthodoxy. The belief that God had sent inspired intermediaries directly to His chosen people outside the formal channels of the Church lent a kind of nervous religious character to life.
Muscovy at the time of its rise to greatness resembled an expectant revivalist camp. Russia was a primitive but powerful religious civilization, fatefully lacking in critical sense or clear division of authority. It had, of course, always been incorrect to speak even in Byzantium of "church" and "state" rather than of two types of sanctified authority (sacerdotium and imperium) within the universal Christian commonwealth.38 In Muscovy the two were even more closely intertwined without any clear commitment to the theoretical definitions and practical limitations that had evolved in the long history of Byzantium.
In the civil sphere there were no permanent administrative chanceries (even of the crude prikaz variety) until the early sixteenth century.39 In the ecclesiastical sphere, the lack of any clear diocesan structure or episcopal hierarchy made it difficult for leading prelates to provide an effective substitute for political authority during the long period of political division. Nor
was there even a clear line of precedence among the monasteries. In contrast to the medieval West, where compendia of Roman law were waiting to be discovered and where the Moslem invader brought the texts of Aristotle with him, distant Muscovy had almost no exposure to the political and legal teachings of classical antiquity. At best they read some version of Plato's arguments for the closed rule of a philosopher-king-but only to fortify their conclusion that a good and holy leader was necessary, never as an exercise in Socratic method.
Lacking any knowledge of political systems in the past or much experience with them in the present, the Muscovite vaguely sought a leader on the model of the divinized sun-kings of the East and the princes and saints of popular folklore. The victory in the Christian East of Platonic idealism, which was exemplified by the veneration of ideal forms in the icons, led Russians to look for an ideal prince who would be in effect "the living icon of God."40
Unlike the Platonic ideal, however, the ideal Russian prince was to be not a philosopher but a guardian of tradition. The highest good in Muscovy was not knowledge but memory, pamiaf. Where one would now say, "I know," one then said, "I remember." Descriptions, inventories, and administrative records in the prikazes were all known as pamiati; epic tales were written down "for the old to hear and the young to remember." There was no higher appeal in a dispute than the "important, good and firm memory" of the oldest available authority.41
Thus, Muscovy was bound together not primarily by formal codes and definitions or rational procedures, but by an uncritical and unreflective collective memory. Special authority tended to devolve on those local "elders" whose memory went back furthest toward the apostolic age and whose experience made them most knowledgeable in Christian tradition: the ascetic starets in the monastery, the respected starosta in the city, and the epic stariny (tales of old) for the popular imagination. Rarely has a society been more attached to antiquity, but Muscovy looked to the past for tales of heroism rather than forms of thought, rhetoric rather than dialectic, the "golden-tongued" sermons of St. John Chrysostom rather than the "cursed logic" of Aristotle.42 Even the princes had to trace their genealogies and heraldic seals back to a sacred past in order to gain respect in the patriarchal atmosphere of Muscovy.43
An essential element in making Muscovite authority effective throughout Russia was monastic support. The monasteries had reunified Russia by lifting men's eyes above the petty quarrels of the appanage period to a higher ideal. The Muscovite grand dukes made innumerable pilgrimages to the leading cloisters; corresponded with monks; sought their material aid
and spiritual intercession before undertaking any important military or political action; and were quick to bestow on them a large share of newly gained land and wealth. In return, the monasteries provided an all-important aura of sanctity for the Grand Duke of Muscovy. He was the protector of monasteries, the figure in whom "the opposition between the principle of Caesar and the will of God was overcome."44
The ideology of Muscovite tsardom, which took shape in the early sixteenth century, was a purely monastic creation. Its main author was the last and most articulate of the great monastic pioneers, Joseph Sanin, founder and hegumen of Volokolamsk. Like the others, Joseph established his monastery out of nothing in the forest, whence he had fled in despair of existing cloisters and in the hope of creating the ideal Christian community. A man of striking appearance and ascetic personal habits, Joseph insisted on absolute obedience to detailed regulations covering dress, seating precedence, and even bodily movements. His central conviction that acquired, external habits have internal, spiritual effects placed him in diametric opposition to his contemporary and rival, Nil Sorsky; and their fundamental philosophic conflict came to a head in the famous controversy over monastic property. Against Nil's doctrine of apostolic poverty, Joseph defended the tremendous wealth which had accrued to his growing chain of cloisters through the bequests of the brother of Ivan III and other wealthy patrons and novices. Joseph was neither an advocate nor a practitioner of luxurious living. He insisted that monastic possessions were not personal wealth but a kind of sacred trust given in thanks for the sanctity and intercession of the monks, and in the hope that their holiness would radiate out into society.45 ,
The controversy between the "possessors" and "non-possessors" was essentially a conflict between two conceptions of monastic life. All major participants were monks who conceived of Muscovy as a religious civilization with the grand duke its absolute sovereign. The real issue was the nature of authority in this patriarchal monastic civilization: the physical authority of the hegumen against the spiritual authority of the elder; centralized organization and regular discipline against loosely bound communities of prophetic piety.
Although Ivan III-like other ambitious state builders of the early modern period-wanted to secularize church holdings, the church council of 1503 decided in favor of the possessors. The successive deaths of Ivan III and Nil shortly thereafter and a series of persecutions against Nil's followers cemented the alliance between the Josephite party and the grand dukes of Muscovy. The monk Philotheus' idea of Moscow as the Third Rome may have been addressed to the Tsar's vanity in an effort to divert
him from any action against the church hierarchy.46 He addressed the Grand Duke not only as Tsar, but as "holder of the reins of the divine holy throne of the universal apostolic Church."47 As the influence of the Josephite party grew at court, the conception of tsardom itself was given a monastic flavor. All of Muscovy came to be viewed as a kind of vast monastery under the discipline of a Tsar-Archimandrite. The beginning in the sixteenth century of the tradition of "the Tsar's words"-the obligation of all Russians to report immediately under threat of execution any serious criticism of the sovereign--probably represents an extension to the public at large of the rigid obligations to report fully any wavering of loyalties inside Josephite monasteries.
The close alliance that developed between monks and tsars in the first half of the sixteenth century can, of course, be analyzed as a venal, Machiavellian compact: the monks keeping their wealth, gaining freedom from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and receiving as prisoners prophetic advocates of monastic poverty; the tsar receiving ecclesiastical permission for divorce and propagandists support for the position that "though he be in body like all others, yet in power of office he is like God."48 Yet it is important to realize that the victory of the Josephites and the extension of their influence in sixteenth-century Russia was a direct result of popular reverence for monasteries and the monastic ideal. Men strove for the new wealth but still sought to dedicate it to God. They wanted power, but also monastic sanction for its exercise. If even Cosimo de Medici amidst the worldly splendors of fifteenth-century Florence felt the need of periodic retreats to his monastic cell, it is hardly surprising that the princes and leaders of the primitive religious civilization of Muscovy should at the same time give so much of their worldly goods and services to Russian monasteries.