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.
The victorious monastic party brought new confusion of authority into Muscovy by blurring the division between the monastery and the outside world. The tsar became a kind of archimandrite-in-chief of all the monasteries, and the monasteries in turn began to serve as prisons for the tsar's political opponents. The asceticism and discipline of the Josephite monasteries began to be applied to civil society; and the corruption and vulgarity of a crude frontier people made ever deeper inroads into the cloisters.
Although monastic corruption has often been the subject of lurid exaggeration, there is little doubt that the increasing wealth and power of Russian monasteries provided strong temptations to worldliness. The increasing number of monastic recruits brought with them two of the most widespread moral irregularities of Muscovite society: alcoholism and sexual
perversion. The latter was a particular problem in a civilization that had been curiously unable to produce in its epic poetry a classic pair of ideal lovers and had accepted-in the teachings of the Josephites-an almost masochistic doctrine of ascetic discipline.
The high incidence of sexual irregularity shocked and fascinated foreign visitors to Muscovy. Nothing better indicates the intertwining of sacred and profane motifs within Muscovy than the fact that the monastic epistle to Vasily III first setting forth the exalted 'third Rome' theory also included a long appeal for help in combating sodomy within the monasteries. Continued monastic concern over this practice helped reinforce the prophetic strain in Muscovite thought, convincing Silvester, one of Ivan the Terrible's closest clerical confidants, that God's wrath was about to be visited on the new Sodom and Gomorrah of the Russian plain.49
Less familiar than the growing worldliness of the monasteries in the sixteenth century is the increasing monasticism of the outside world. The 'white,' or married, parish priests were often more zealous than the 'black,' or celibate, monastic clergy in the performance of religious duties. Simple laymen were often the most conscientious of all in keeping the four long and rigorous fasts (for Advent, Easter, the apostles Peter and Paul, and the Assumption); observing weekly days of abstinence not only on Friday, the day of the Crucifixion, but also on Wednesday, the day on which Judas agreed to betray Christ; keeping vigil before the twelve universal feast days of Orthodoxy; and observing private devotions and local feasts. The simple Christian often came from considerable distances to go to a church which offered him neither heat nor a seat. Each visit was something of a pilgrimage, with the worshipper often spending as much time kneeling or prostrate upon the cold floor as standing. Religious processions were frequent and lengthy-the daily services of matins and vespers often lasting a total of seven or eight hours.50
Behind the elaborate rituals of Russian Orthodoxy there often lay a deeper popular spirituality that was only slightly touched by the new tsarist ideology of the Josephites. Ordinary believers were dazzled by imperial claims and excited by its prophetic pronouncements. But they had no real interest in polemics which were conducted in a language that they could not understand and written in a script that they could not read.
Thus, along with the militant prophetic ideology of Muscovy went the cult of humility and self-abnegation: the attempt to be 'very like' the Lord in the outpouring of love and the acceptance of suffering in the kenotic manner of Russia's first national saints: Boris and Gleb.51 The persecuted followers of Nil Sorsky 'beyond the Volga' were closer to this tradition than the victorious Josephites and enjoyed greater popular veneration to-
gether with all those willing to suffer voluntarily in the manner of Christ: as a propitiation for the sins of others and a means of purifying God's sinful people.
The contrast between active militarism and passive kenoticism is more apparent than real. Hatred to those outside a group with a sense of destiny is often combined with love to those within it: and both the compulsion and the compassion of early Russian spirituality resulted from the over-all prophetic, historical bias of its theology. Soldiers followed images of the saints into combat, while dedicated figures at home followed the image of Christ into the battle with sin. Each was performing a podvig (glorious deed) in history and earning a small place in the great chronicle which would be read back at the Last Judgment. Podvizhnik, a word which more secular subsequent ages have tended to use pejoratively in the sense of 'fanatic,' still carries with it the meaning of 'champion'-whether in sports, war, or prayer.52 Ephrem the Syrian, the very same fourth-century saint from whom Russian iconographers derived their graphic and terrifying image of the coming apocalypse and judgment, provided the ordinary believer with his most familiar call to repentance and humility in a prayer recited with prostrations at every Lenten service:
? Lord and Master of my life! the spirit of vanity, of idleness, of domination, of idle speech, give me not. But the spirit of chastity, of humility, of patience, of love, do Thou grant to me, thy servant.
Yes, ? Lord and King, grant me that I may perceive my transgressions and not condemn my brother, for Thou art blessed forever and ever, Amen.
