Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (91 page)

One of Mohyla's most important and lasting achievements was the foundation of a new academy in Kiev, in the year before he became metropolitan. This was the equivalent of a Western university and was based on the institutions which the Jesuits had so successfully created throughout Catholic Europe as vehicles for their mission (see pp. 665-6). It had a brilliant future in giving Orthodox clergy the possibility of as good an education as anything in the West. Significantly, at the core of the foundation was a library of books mostly in Latin but also in German and other western European languages, many of which Mohyla presented himself; the foundation was unprecedented in eastern Europe (and alas, nearly all its books were destroyed in a fire in 1780). The aim was not to create a fifth column for Latin transformation of Orthodoxy, but to open up faltering Orthodox intellectual life to new possibilities.
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The authorities in Rome, so hostile to the Articles of Pacification, recognized the quality of the new metropolitan, and Mohyla was able to promote serious though highly secret negotiations for a renewed union of Catholicism and Ruthenian Orthodoxy in Poland-Lithuania. They were proceeding promisingly even despite Mohyla's death in 1647, when all was abruptly ended by a political explosion in the Ukraine, the Kmel'nyts'kyi (Chmielnicki) rebellion of 1648. The future of all Orthodoxy was transformed, and we must take up the story of Muscovy once more to see how this unlikely turn of events took place.

FROM MUSCOVY TO RUSSIA (1598-1800)

The eventual triumph of Moscow in the northern Orthodox world can be described as unlikely because at the end of the sixteenth century, while the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania seemed uniquely powerful in eastern Europe, it was conceivable that Muscovy would disappear altogether as a political unit. On the death of Ivan IV's son, Tsar Feodor I, in 1598, there was no obvious heir to the throne and civil war reduced the country to its 'Time of Troubles'. After a dozen years of fighting and opportunistic invasions by neighbouring states, the country had virtually ceased to exist: there were Swedish armies in the north and Polish armies penetrating as far east as Moscow. But from 1610 a movement of anger coalesced around princes of the Romanov family, cousins of the previous dynasty, and the occupying forces were painfully beaten back. In 1613 the teenaged Mikhail Romanov was declared tsar, the first in the dynasty which ruled until 1917. His father, Feodor Romanov, had been a victim of that old Byzantine political ploy of being forced to take irrevocable monastic vows, assuming the name in religion of Filaret. Rather than repudiate his vows and take the crown himself, Filaret was made patriarch once released from Polish imprisonment in 1619. Since the Patriarch then became the real ruler of Muscovy through a decade and a half of his son's reign, there could hardly have been a closer union of Church and throne. Deeply anti-Catholic after his Polish captivity, Filaret made sure that no innovation such as Mohyla was promoting in Kiev sullied the Church of Moscow, and he also steadily promoted the imposition of an even tighter autocracy on Muscovite society.

Such a regime was not likely to appeal to the Orthodox noble class of Lithuania, enjoying the remarkable political freedom of action which the Commonwealth had fostered, but there was a fatal flaw in their constitutional arrangements. One of the conditions of the Union of Lublin was a transfer of most of what is today the Republic of the Ukraine from Lithuania into the kingdom of Poland, including the city of Kiev itself. It confirmed existing political privileges to the nobilities of Poland and Lithuania, but did not so effectively grant rights to peoples of the Ukraine. They included the warlike people known as Cossacks, few of whom enjoyed noble status. Cossack political discontents combined with their fury both at what they saw as the violation of their Orthodox faith in the Union of Brest and at the steadily more aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism of the Polish monarchy, especially under King Sigismund III (reigned 1587-1632). Patriarch Jeremias on his great visit of 1588-9 had encouraged lay activism by giving his blessing to religious gilds of Orthodox laymen, and these remodellings of medieval urban gilds proved very important in strengthening Orthodox consciousness and maintaining religious life in the virtual absence of an episcopal hierarchy. It was not a good idea for the monarchy to alienate the Cossacks, who provided one of the most effective fighting forces available to the Commonwealth.
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The situation boiled over in 1648, after five years during which fatally the Commonwealth had failed to pay its Cossack fighters. A bitter personal grievance led to the devoutly Orthodox Cossack Bohdan Kmel'nyts'kyi rallying a revolt against Polish rule. He proved an inspired leader in a struggle with both the Commonwealth and fellow Cossack leaders who sought some variety of renegotiation of the Union of Lublin. In the course of the fighting, Kmel'nyts'kyi came to ally directly with Muscovy in 1654: a move of huge significance for the future. Nearly two decades marked by exceptional atrocities left the Commonwealth shattered, perhaps a third of its population dead; it was the beginning of its long decline towards eighteenth-century partition and oblivion, and also the beginning of a long identity crisis between East and West for the Ukrainian people. By a treaty with the Tsar at Andrusovo in 1667, the Ukraine experienced its first partition, and Kiev was finally in the hands of Muscovy - the rest of the Ukraine followed a century later. From 1686, an extremely reluctant Oecumenical Patriarch had little choice but to accept the transfer of allegiance by the Metropolitan of Kiev to the Patriarch of Moscow. This in turn stimulated the Orthodox in Polish lands who could not stomach the link with Muscovy to declare a renewed allegiance to the Union of Brest: a move much encouraged by the authorities in Warsaw. With the important exception of this rejuvenated Greek Catholic Church, the Church of the Third Rome now dominated all Orthodoxy in northern Europe.
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The Ruthenian Orthodox people of Kiev who did not join the Greek Catholics still came from a very different cultural background to the Orthodox faithful of Moscow. They needed to adapt to a regime which abhorred the religious pluralism of the Commonwealth, and it must be said that they did so with some speed. The intellectual resources of the Mohyla Academy and other schools in the Ukraine were now at the service of the Tsar, and the academy was virtually the only long-term institute of higher education then available in Russia. Its scholars creatively rewrote history, so that now the standard accounts of Russian origins talked of the 'transfer' of Kievan rule to Moscow, and the Ukraine could be seen as 'Little Russia', alongside the 'Great Russia' of Muscovy and the 'White Russia' of Belarus.
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At the same time, within Muscovy itself, the situation was far from static. A contest was taking place which was to deliver the Church into the hands of the Tsar, as well as causing lasting schism within Russian Orthodoxy.

The source of the conflict lay in a tsar and patriarch who both sought reform in the Church and initially cooperated in it: Tsar Aleksei (reigned 1645-76) and Nikon (Patriarch 1652-8). Even before Muscovy's military successes against Poland-Lithuania, Nikon was promoting a vision of Moscow as leader of Orthodox Christians throughout the world, a vision which would inevitably involve Church reform. Much of this was the type of tightened discipline for both clergy and laity that one might expect from a man who combined great energy with a thoroughly authoritarian temperament, but two other elements in his programme made for trouble. First, Nikon built on the clerical vision implicit in the 'Third Rome' ideology and extended it in a way that would have drawn sympathy from that eleventh-century bishop of the First Rome, Gregory VII. Indeed Nikon constructed his claims round that venerable Western forgery the Donation of Constantine (see p. 351): he proposed that the patriarch and not the tsar should be the chief power in the state, assuming the title
Veiki Gosudar
(Great Lord), which previously only tsars had used. It is not surprising that this near-suicidal self-assertion brought Nikon's patriarchate to a premature close and eventually led to his long-term imprisonment.
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His defeat showed where the balance of power in Church and State was really going to lie between patriarch and tsar. This was about to be demonstrated all the more emphatically in the reign of Peter the Great.

Yet during Nikon's exercise of his patriarchate, he took a second initiative in liturgical reform which struck at the very heart of Russian tradition. In Russia, the details of Christian doctrine mattered much less to people than the details of Christian practice in worship. Popular religion based itself on the sacred drama which was the liturgical round controlled by the Church's kalendar, but Nikon was conscious that in many respects this drama had departed from the script set by the contemporary Church in Constantinople. Moreover, it was mixed up with a good deal of local ritual which he strongly suspected predated the arrival of Christianity, particularly since most of it seemed designed to enhance the gaiety of everyday life. He therefore announced reforms which he claimed were based on deep research into the most venerable of liturgical texts; in reality what he did was to take the most recent editions of Greek liturgical texts printed in Venice and have them translated into Church Slavonic.
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This was enough to outrage many of the faithful, who were accustomed to thinking of the liturgy as an unchangeable ordinance of God.

In particular, Nikon courted disaster by insisting on an alteration in that most powerful of Christian visual sacramental actions, and that most frequently performed by clergy, the manual blessing. In 1667 a synod of the Church backed up earlier directives of Nikon ordering all Orthodox, clergy and laity alike, to make the sign of the cross with three fingers, symbolizing the Trinity, rather than with two, symbolizing the two natures of Christ.
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Amid a welter of reforms which antagonized both clergy and congregations, this apparently trivial but salient symbol of change became the rallying point for a movement of resistance to centralized interference in personal devotion. The opposition drew on centuries of less than reverent obedience to the commands of the hierarchy, and popular lay dissidence combined with clerical outrage. In the matter of liturgical reform, Tsar Aleksei was at one with the deposed patriarch despite their otherwise complete breach, and he persisted in enforcing the changes. Intellectual leadership in the Church increasingly went to clergy trained in the Ukraine and to those who had visited Greece; both these groups were irredeemably tainted by Roman Catholic deviance in the perspective of traditionalist-minded clergy. Non-compliance was led by the priest Avvakum (Habbakuk), whose remarkable autobiography does not underplay his own saintly qualities.
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Avvakum possessed as formidable a will as Patriarch Nikon, and like Nikon he had started as a close friend of the Tsar. His talents and connections had brought him promotion as archpriest (dean) of a cathedral. After initially supporting the reforms - indeed personally smashing up carnival tambourines and masks and abducting two dancing bears - he took up the cause of tradition. He suffered for his leadership: for years on end he was imprisoned in a cellar, and eventually in 1682 he was burned at the stake.
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This ghastly revival of a form of religious discipline by then obsolete in western Europe had a political rationale: in that year the Moscow military garrison allied with sympathizers of Avvakum briefly to seize the capital and humiliate the government of Princess Sophia, regent for her young son Peter. She soon ordered those who followed Avvakum to be punished in the same way, and over the next decade many others among them showed their defiance of heretical authority by setting fire to themselves. The movement of outrage and protest was coalescing into a series of sects which all saw themselves as the pure version of an official Church which had betrayed the faith; they came to be known as the Old Believers, a movement which gained vastly from protests against further changes in the Church during the eighteenth century, and which has survived all subsequent persecution to the present day.

Romanov autocracy was completed by Tsar Aleksei's son Peter I 'the Great', who defeated the rival northern power of Sweden, and humiliated and subverted the now declining Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1721 Peter proclaimed himself Emperor of All the Russias, setting patterns for Russian expansion which through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created one of the largest empires the world had seen, stretching from eastern Europe to the Pacific. The transformation of Muscovy into a newly conceived empire was accomplished not merely by military conquest but by Peter's obsessive pursuit of Western skills and information, which he used to remould the culture of the governing elite. He saw to it that the pool of available knowledge was massively expanded. Before 1700, no more than about five hundred printed books had been published in Muscovy, most of them devotional works. By the time he died in 1725, there were around thirteen hundred more, 80 per cent of them on secular subjects. A large proportion of these were translations of foreign texts, and the Russian which emerged as the language of these books had a much expanded vocabulary - a significant portion of it being terms necessary for Peter's pride and joy, his newly founded Russian navy.
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The brand-new capital which he designated to supplant Moscow, St Petersburg, was placed so that it was accessible to the sea routes west, and although it was full of churches, their architectural style, and that of the whole monumental stone-built city, was that of the Baroque of northern Europe, whose visual impact was becoming familiar from Dublin and Amsterdam to Stockholm and Vilnius.

Peter was one of the most secular of tsars. He demonstrated his lack of conventional piety by fashioning for himself a Court whose life was punctuated by revels featuring drink and debauchery which frequently spilled over into churches, misusing sacred vessels and poking fun at the liturgy.
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He did not reject the whole of the Muscovite past: he bequeathed to his successors a conundrum of how they might balance and value a distinctive Russianness which united them with the vast majority of their subjects against their grasp on Western culture. Peter placed principal value on two inheritances: first, the ideology of unquestioning obedience to the tsar as the foundation of Russian identity, and second, the institution of serfdom, which he intensified and extended, just when the Western society which he so admired was undermining the premises on which it was based. Otherwise, the Church was in his eyes as much of an obstacle to the changes he was making as the Muscovite nobility whom he intimidated and forced to adopt Western ways and Western dress. With the memory of Patriarch Nikon's extravagant claims for power in his father's reign, he determined that never again would a tsar face a similar challenge from an ecclesiastical rival; the Church should concentrate on its preaching of obedience.