???^???????? of the Judaizers.
?
When Maxim expired in 1556 in the monastery of St. Sergius, the last influentiai^advocate of a tolerant Christian humanism vanished from the Muscovite scene. A many-sided assault against foreign cultural influence ''was under way. A severe peftanee' wasTrnposed on»the Tsar's closest lay
J
adviser, Ivan Viskovaty, for opposing a strict prohibition on alien influences in iconography. The brief fljcker of^ interest in Renaissance art shown by Ivan's priestly conffdant, Silvester (who had' ordered Pskovian artists to provide Moscow with copies of paintings by Cimabue and Perugino), was also extinguished.75 Interest in the ornate polyphonic music of Palestrina (which had been awakened by Maxim's friend and collaborator in Latin translations Dmitry Gerasimov, during his diplomatic visit to Rome in 1524-5) was also snuffed out by Ivan's decision to codify the prevailing system of church chant as the sole form of musical 'right praising' for Russian churches.76 Finally^and most important, the work of reproducing . sacred texts was takeji_jiway fromJffitical and linguistically gifted figures like Maxim and put in the hands of more ignorant but dependable imperial servantsTThe Josephite monks around Ivan preferred vast compendia to a rational ordering of ideas. The objection to textual criticism extended even to the use of printing as a mean^for propagating the faith and reproducing holy books. The brief and unproductive effort to set up a state printing shop in Moscow under the White Russian Ivan Fedorov ended in disaster in ?5?5, when the press was destroyed by a mob and the printers fled to Lithuania.77 This was the year of Kurbsky's flight and the establishment of the'oprichnina. A new xenophobia was in the air, and the period of rela- – tively harmonious srnSFs^e*c^facTwtth the many-sided culture of Renais- | ^ sance Italy was giving way to the broader and more disturbing confronta- -J tioiTwhich began in the late years of Ivan's reign.
main resuTt~oTa century of fitful Italian influences was to arouse ''› suspicion of theWest. These feelings were strongest among the monks whose 1 v/ influence was: on theorise, and were increasingly channeled into animosity j toward the Latin church. This anti-Catholicism of official Muscqyvjs^ puzzling, since the aspects of Renaissance ????_?^?^?????-_?? the Josephite^^ifrolOgr,_'alchemy, Utopian social ideas, philosophical scepti- cisrn/iaTlff^filJ-trinitarian, anti-sacramental theology-were also opposed by theTixfflaSTThurch: In part, of courseT anti-Catnolieism was merely an extension of the earlier Hesychast protest against the inroads of scholasticism wiffiiii the late ByzantifieTfmpire: Maxim the Greek1'wasfaithful to his Athonite teachers in tellm^theTKussians that 'the Latins have let themselves be seduced not only by Hellenic and Roman doctrines, but even by Hebrew and Arab books . . . attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable cause trouble for all the world.'78
To understand fully, however, why resentment was particularly focused on the Roman Church, one must keep in mind both the nature of Muscovite culture and the perennial tendency to conceive of other cultures in one's own image. Since Muscovy was an organic religious civilization, Western
Europe must be one. Sir^e all culture in eastern Russia was expressive of the Orthodox Church, the bewildering cultural variety of the West must be expressions of the Roman Church, whatever that Church's formal position on ffieTmatterT'Latinstvo, 'the Latin world,' became a general term for the West, and the phrase 'Go to Latinstvo' acquired some of the overtones of 'Go to the devil.' By the mid-sixteenth century prayers were being offered for the Tsar to deliver Russia from Latinstvo i Besermanstvo: the Latin and the Moslem worlds; and the terms used to contrast Russians and Westerners were 'Christian' (krest'ianin) and 'Latin' (latinian).n Since political rule in the Christian East was now concentrated in the tsar of the 'third Rome,' it was assumed that such rule in the West was concentrated in the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor (Tsezar'). Other princely authorities in the West were equated with the lesser appanage princes of Russia. Their diplomatic communications were translated into the new vernacular 'chancery language,' which provided the basis for modern Russian, while the predominantly Latin communications from the Emperor were translated into Church Slavonic.80
It would be a mistake to read back into this early period the systematically cultivated anti-Catholicism that developed in the following century of struggle with Poland. During this earlier century, relations were relatively cordial with the Vatican despite the Muscovite rejection of union. There was a Catholic church in Moscow in the late fifteenth century,81 numerous Catholic residents throughout the sixteenth, and several occasions when dynastic marriages nearly enabled Rome to parallel in Great Russia the proselyting success it was enjoying in White and Little Russia. Nevertheless, the basis for Russian anti-Catholicism was already being established in the neetTfor a lightning* rod to channel off popular opposition to the changes which the triumphant Josephite party was imposing on Russian society. One did not dare challenge the newly exalted figure of the tsar and his ecclesiastical entourage; but many conservative elements in Russian society felt a profound if inarticulate repugnance at the increase in hierarchical discipline and dogmatic rigidity which the Josephites had brought^ . loJlussia.,Accordingly, there was a growing tendency to attack ever more bitterly the distant Roman Catholic Church for the very things one secretly j
hated in oneself.-*--¦- _ '•J
Thus, eveir while borrowing ideas and techniques from the Roman Catholic Church, the Josephite hierarchy found criticism of that Church a useful escape valve for domestic resentments. A Western scapegoat was also sought for the inarticulate opposition to the concentration of power in the hands of the Muscovite tsars. At precisely the time when autocracy was crushing out all opposition in Muscovy a new genre of anti-monarchical
pantomime appeared in Russian popular culture. The name of the play- and of the proud, cruel king who is eventually smitten down-was Tsar Maximilian, the first Holy Roman Emperor with whom the Muscovites had extensive relations.82
Distrust of Rome thus had from the beginning in Russia a psychological as well as an ideological basis. During this first formative century of contact from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century 'the West' was for Russia the urbane Latin Church and Empire of the high Renaissance. Fascination mixed with fear, however; for the Russian Church had begun its fatefuTseries of partial borrowings from the West, and the small literate elite, its gradual turn from Greek to Latin as the main language of cultural pression.
'The Germans'
Muscovite contact with the West changed decisively during Ivan IV's reign from indirect and episodic dealings with the Catholic 'Latins' to a direct and sustained confrontation with the Protestant 'Germans.' It is doubly ironic that the pojjjLaf no return in opening up Russia to Western influenceioccurred under this mSst ostensibly xenophobic arid traditionalist of tsarst_and???? the 'West' into7wnose hands he unconsciously committed Russia wasffiaUrf the' Protestant innoy||ors^vriom he professed to hate even moreJJmn_Cathorics. It was Ivan who suggested that Luther's name was related to the word liuty ('ferocious'); and that the Russian word for Prqjestant preacher (kaznodei) was really a form of koznodei ('intriguer').83
¦
i
tet it was Ivan who began the large-scale contacts with the NorW^European i Protestant nations, which profoundly influenced Russian thought from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.
Eve!i~airTvah-?weprffie icons and banners of Muscovy past Kazan
