Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (88 page)

Behind this political struggle of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an Orthodoxy was consolidating which both emphasized its roots in Byzantium and took on a distinctively local character. Rus' had virtually no centres of learning or scholarship to pursue its own answers to the puzzles raised by the Christian proclamation. What it did have were complex sets of rules and conventions in worship imported from Byzantine Christianity, the longing of ordinary folk to find ways to reach God amid the frequent harshness of their lives, and the capacity of the human imagination to range freely in solitude over a spiritual inheritance. It was inevitable that a Christianity formed in the sunshine of the Mediterranean and rooted amid very obvious remains from the cultures of Greece and Rome should assume a different complexion when it was adopted in Russia. This version of Orthodoxy was now the basis for Christian belief among a people with no reason to take an interest in Classical culture. They lived amid the long darkness of winter cold, followed by spring seasons suddenly bringing life to the empty plains and great forests of north-eastern Europe, stretching towards the ferocious landscapes of the far north towards the Arctic Circle. Communities here could be tiny, vulnerable and widely separated; loneliness was part of everyday experience even more than is normal for human beings. Russian Christianity drew on the features of imported Orthodoxy which seemed valuable in such conditions.

The emphasis of Orthodoxy on corporate life, expressed in its liturgy and sacred music, appealed to medieval Russian society, for here people needed to cooperate to survive at all. Individualism was not a virtue unless it was in the celebratory, counter-cultural form exemplified by the Holy Fool, who could only exist because he knew which aspects of the strongly rule-bound society to overturn and mock, and thereby to reaffirm. Russian Orthodoxy was not a spirituality which valued new perspectives or original thoughts about the mysteries of faith: it looked for deepening of tradition, enrichment of the existing liturgy, enhanced insight through meditation. Reform meant recalling the life of the Church to previous standards. That was of course also the consistent rhetoric of the Western Latin tradition, but in the West the language of restoration disguised much more the steady creation of radical innovation, in a fashion which for Orthodoxy everywhere virtually ended with the acceptance of Hesychasm in the fourteenth century.

One sign of the way in which radical structural initiative now proved unwelcome in the Muscovite Church came in the Church's deliberate reshaping of a mission eastwards which was begun by the priest and monk Stefan (Stephen) Khrap. Galvanized by his conviction that the world would come to an end with the completion of a seventh millennium since Creation - dangerously near his own time - Stephen felt a call to spread the Christian message beyond the eastern frontier of the Muscovite lands, to within sight of the Ural Mountains. In 1376 he set out to establish his mission among the Komi people of the Perm' region, and achieved enough success for the Metropolitan to make him bishop (at the same time, significantly, his mission resulted in the Grand Prince of Muscovy replacing Novgorod as the overlord of that area). Like Cyril and Methodios, Stephen of Perm' created an alphabet for his converts and translated the Bible and liturgical texts for them, but times had changed. Despite the reverence which Stephen's memory inspired, the authorities in Moscow eventually decided that it was unhelpful to sanction another ecclesiastical language. After the region had been brought more firmly under the political control of the grand prince in the late fifteenth century, Church Slavonic replaced the local vernacular in Church life, and the use of Stephen's alphabet faded away.
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The dominant personality in the spiritual life of the Church in Rus' during the fourteenth century was not a metropolitan or a grand prince but the monk Sergei (Sergius) of Radonezh, a small town outside Moscow. Following the general impulse after the Mongol invasions to find refuge and found monasteries in remote forested areas, he created the Monastery (Lavra) of the Holy Trinity at a place later named after him, Sergiev-Posad, a couple of hours' walk from Radonezh. Like Antony in the Egyptian desert, Sergei had become a hermit, though in his case it was through circumstance: his brother abandoned their joint venture in monastic life, unable to endure the solitude, and left for Moscow. Sergei was content with his isolation, but again like Antony he found himself attracting many others to his forest clearing, hoping to imitate his way of life. In the end he took on the office of abbot and adopted the discipline used in the Stoudite monastery of Constantinople (see p. 451), which represented a much more rigorous and structured life than the rather loosely organized monastic foundations of Rus' in the Kievan era. Trinity Lavra was the inspiration for a renewal of Russian monastic life in a 'desert' mould.

Nevertheless, Sergei's preference for the life of a hermit was not forgotten, and encouraged others to follow his first example, to the extent that hermits remained much more common in the Russian Church than in the West. Their way of life was generally not much fenced in by a rule: the ordered monastic discipline of the Lavra became one end of a polarity in which, at the other extreme, wandering holy men represented a spirituality hardly in touch with the Church hierarchy. Such maverick figures had a personal charisma which, like that of prophets in the first days of the Christian Church (see pp. 131-2), gave them their own authority, and the institutionally ordered Church in Russia treated them with similar suspicion. Yet often encounters with such holy wanderers were the most intimate contacts with the Church experienced by the poor, not to mention by a wide variety of women in general across the social spectrum. One twentieth-century example of the type, Grigorii Rasputin, was to captivate no less a person than the Empress of All the Russias, to disastrous effect (see pp. 917-18). Russian Orthodoxy was in the course of time to develop some surprising identities, in which ordinary people reinterpreted their faith and worship in ways which made perfect sense to them, but took them further and further from the spiritual order and liturgical correctness envisaged by bishops and abbots. That trend was already perceptible in the fifteenth century, as the monastic movement inspired by Sergei began to grow and diversify.
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The pattern exemplified by Sergei's own life - the transition from hermit to abbot of a large community - was repeated all over Rus'. It had a practical utility in a perpetual frontier society which over several centuries saw settlements steadily expand north and east into remote areas: a hermit built his hut in a lonely place and made the place holy, later to be joined by others who created a monastery under some variant of a Stoudite rule. In turn, monks who felt ill at ease in that sort of communal discipline and life were likely to leave, to become hermits in an even more remote area, and perpetuate the cycle once more.
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Thus did the monastic life spread - and with it also the political control which was increasingly monopolized in eastern and northern Rus' by the Grand Princes of Muscovy. The greatest of all monasteries, Sergei's Trinity Lavra (which in the course of time took on his name beside that of the Trinity as Sergiev-Posad), became enormously wealthy through its alliance with the grand prince. It became one of a ring of monasteries around Moscow which doubled as fortresses for him in case of foreign invasion or internal challenge.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also set the art of Rus' and Muscovy in patterns for the Russian future, particularly the fact that it was almost exclusively the art of the Church. Artists took their models from the Church art of Byzantium, and showed virtually no interest in the rediscovery of pre-Christian Greek and Roman art which was at the same time transforming culture in the Latin Western Renaissance. Originality was not prized; genius was measured by the painterly eloquence and moral fervour with which the tradition could be presented. By the sixteenth century, a long-dead monk, Andrei Rublev (
c
. 1360-
c
. 1430), came to be seen as the greatest exponent of the style in fresco and in icon-painting - in 1551 his work was named in the Church legislation of the 'Council of a Hundred Chapters' (see p. 529) as definitive for Russian religious art. In view of that affirmation, it is unfortunate that only one of Rublev's various surviving works in Vladimir and Moscow can now definitively be said to be his, but it is a quite exceptional piece. This is an icon of the Trinity, now in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, but up to the 1920s an eponymous icon at the Trinity Lavra at Sergiev-Posad, where it was regarded as second only in importance to the relics of St Sergius himself. In this work, monks of the Trinity Lavra could contemplate the dedication of their house to the Trinitarian mystery, refracted by Rublev in traditional Christian fashion through the three mysterious angel-visitors to whom the Patriarch Abraham had offered hospitality under the groves of Mamre. The Russian Orthodox Church declared Rublev a saint amid the millennium celebrations for the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 1988. It was a proclamation of the centrality of sacred art to Russian Orthodox spirituality.
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MUSCOVY TRIUMPHANT (1448-1547)

The final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 had an ambiguous resonance in Moscow. To lose the holy places of Constantinople was a bitter blow, but the catastrophe did leave a useful vacuum in Orthodox leadership, for which the Muscovite leadership had been preparing over the previous century. Church and Court cooperated very closely in an increasingly autocratic system which presented the Grand Prince as the embodiment of God's will for the people of Rus'. The Grand Prince was effective in disposing of competitors: in 1478 he annexed the city-state of Novgorod, which had the effect of eliminating the model of a merchant republic from Russian society. The Hanseatic League regarded this annexation as a watershed in its relations with the East: it permanently withdrew the credit facilities which it had long extended to Novgorod and Pskov, for it did not trust the arbitrary rulers of Muscovy to be reliable financial partners. In a land where resources were perpetually scarce and the urge of the monarch to expand his dominions and power was consistently strong, the grand princes sought to gain as much control as they could over exploitable assets of manpower and finance. The Church hierarchy aided them by preaching the holiness of obedience to the prince with a thoroughness and zest which had little precedent in Byzantium, let alone Western Latin Christendom; but bishops and abbots did not forget that the Church had its own view of its destiny and purpose. The tension between these two agendas had a long future within Russian Orthodox Christianity.

The growing power of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the immense reverence paid to Sergei in the pilgrimage cult which began very shortly after his death in 1392 were not unconnected with the close ties which Sergei had developed to the Grand Prince of Muscovy, ties which were later strategically magnified by his hagiographers. It was said that he had blessed Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi when the Prince decided to attack his Tatar overlord; a victory in battle followed for Muscovy at Kulikovo in 1380. The reality of the blessing is dubious, and the victory was not such a turning point as it looked in subsequent Muscovite chronicles, but such doubts do not diminish the part that the narrative of the events played in constructing a new history for the Muscovite principality. During the fifteenth century, narratives of great saints of the Church lent their subjects' authority to the growing concentration of power in the hands of the grand princes.
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Moscow's subservience to the Tatars was quietly forgotten: gone were the prayers for a Tatar khan which Muscovite coins had once borne, and in a wholesale rewriting of history, Muscovy's clerical chroniclers recast the Tatars as perpetual enemies of Muscovy. Two years after the annexation of Novgorod, Grand Prince Ivan III formally announced an end to the tribute which he and his predecessors had paid to the khans for two centuries. This was part of a wider appropriation of Byzantine pretensions: Ivan married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor and adopted the double-headed eagle once the symbol of Byzantine imperial power. Occasionally he would even use the title 'Emperor' -
Tsar
in Russian, in an echo of the imperial 'Caesar'.
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There was an urgent purpose to this hasty donning of imperial clothes. Measures needed to be taken to prepare for the end of the world, at a time when God had seen fit to destroy the former empire in Constantinople. In both Byzantium and West Asian Islam, much faith was placed in calculations that the seventh millennium since creation was about to be completed; this meant that the Last Days were due in the year equivalent to mid-1492-3 in the Common Era. It was such a firm conviction in educated Muscovite circles that the Church did not think to prepare any liturgical kalendars for the years after 1492; these kalendars were essential guides to knowing when the movable feast days of Orthodoxy should be celebrated in any given year. Given the absence of any end to the world in 1492, the task had to be hastily undertaken by Metropolitan Zosima himself. But as is usually the way with the non-appearance of the End Times, the disappointed made the best of their disappointment. God's mercy in sparing Muscovite society confirmed that he approved of the arrangements which Church and emperor were making for its future governance; it strengthened Muscovites in their sense of a divine imperial mission specifically entrusted to their polity.
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Church-building flourished as it had done in western Europe in the wake of that successfully negotiated millennium End Time in 1000 (see p. 365): more stone churches were built in Russia during the sixteenth century than in the whole of the previous history of Rus'.
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This festival of church-building spanned complementary impulses. On the one hand, there was a gleeful reassertion of tradition. The grand princes encouraged their architects to scrutinize what survived from the pre-Tatar Kievan past and reproduce it, as in the rebuilt Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin, actually designed in the 1470s by an Italian, but on the strict orders of his patron, Ivan III, conscientiously looking to the models of the already venerable Dormition cathedrals in Kiev and Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma. On the other hand, architects struck out in new directions, to emphasize the triumph of Orthodoxy in what was now the only major Orthodox Church not under an alien yoke, either Muslim or Western Catholic. Exuberant adaptations of the Byzantine style emerged - in the same era during which churches in the captive Greek Orthodox world ceased to dominate the landscape of their now Ottoman environment, Russia's churches aggressively bristled with gables and domes. The gables were named
kokoshniki
because of their resemblance to peasant women's headdresses - a metaphor which identified the Church with its humblest people. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the domes took an 'onion' form which had previously only been seen in Orthodox manuscript pictures and small models of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The onion dome was a fantasy improvement on the reality of that iconic domed building, but one which was to have far-reaching visual consequences for the Russian skyline, suddenly full of symbols of the New Jerusalem to come.
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