Orthodox Christianity would determine the character of Russian culture until the eighteenth century and in some ways beyond it. For the Western observer, it has always presented a problem, seeming familiar, but actually not. Most Westerners know more about Buddhism than about Orthodoxy, as the latter forms no part of daily experience nor is it encountered in the course of a normal education. Analogies do not help much. Orthodoxy is not Catholicism with married priests.
The differences between Orthodoxy and the Western Catholic church that emerged during the Middle Ages were of a different order than those that later divided the western church at the time of the Refomation. Theological issues were not central, and were to some extent exaggerated to provide more convincing explanations for the hostilities. The difference over how the doctrine of the Trinity should be expressed in the Nicene Creed, that is, the Catholic addition of the words filioque (“and the son”) to the mention of the “Holy Ghost, which proceedeth from the father” does not signify any important difference in the actual understanding of the Trinity. The main issue in 1054 was one of church governance. The eleventh century was the time of the gradual emancipation of the papacy from the power of the Holy Roman emperors, and the path chosen was the centralization of ecclesiastical power in the person of the pope. The traditions of the eastern patriarchs were those of a conciliar church. Only the assembled patriarchs and the rest of the higher clergy could determine doctrine or matters of church government. The Patriarch of Constantinople was not a pope. The papacy also managed to assert its independence from the emperors and other rulers in matters of church government and certainly in doctrine, whereas the Eastern Church operated with the more nebulous notions of “symphony” of emperor and patriarch. Lesser matters, like the celibacy of the parish clergy in the west, flowed from these basic decisions. A celibate clergy was free of the entanglements of secular powers; a married priest was part of his local society.
Many differences between the eastern and western churches arose in matters that are hard to pin down and included differences of culture and attitudes rather than dogma and basic belief. The notion of the church building and the liturgy as the meeting points of the divine and human worlds, of spirit and matter, was and is central to Orthodox life and devotion. Preaching and the minute examination of behavior in sermons and in the confessional were not central, even if practiced to some extent. Orthodox monasticism was much less organized, as the monasteries did not form orders with a recognized head and the rules were much less detailed and specific. At the same time, Orthodox monasticism had a prestige and charisma in the east that even the most revered Catholic orders did not approach. For most of the history of Rus until the sixteenth century, we know far more about monasteries than bishops, many of whom are only names to us. By contrast, the western medieval church’s annals are filled with saintly and powerful bishops. Finally, the Eastern Church had a rather different attitude toward learning. For the Catholic church of the Middle Ages, the great intellectual enterprise was the interpretation of Aristotle’s corpus of writings in the light of revelation and the teachings of the church. The Orthodox, save a few late Byzantine imitators of the West, did not bother with philosophy or Aristotelian science. These were exterior knowledge, not bad in itself but not the final truth. The truth was in Christianity, best studied by monks in isolation from the world, not only from its temptations but also from its secular writings. This attitude fit well into Byzantine society, with its flourishing secular culture, but less so in Rus. In Rus, and later in Russia, there was no secular culture of the Byzantine type, so it was only the Christian monastic culture that flourished.
DRUZHINAS AND PRINCES
Vladimir’s son Iaroslav “the Wise” ruled Kiev Rus from 1016 until his death in 1054 after a contentious and violent beginning in which two of his brothers, princes Boris and Gleb, perished at the hand of their elder brother, Iaroslav’s rival. They became the first Russian saints. Iaroslav’s state was no longer the primitive band of warriors of the previous century ruling over distant tribes. Kiev had become a substantial town with a princely palace and Iaroslav ruled over the land with his retinue, the druzhina and various “distinguished men,” his boyars. All of them lived in Kiev, though they seem to have had lands around it and elsewhere. The druzhina, the old warrior band, seems to have become more organized and settled down and behaved more like an army and a group of advisors than simple warriors. They were not alone on the political landscape, for the people of Kiev occasionally played a part as well, assembling on the town’s main square to form a veche, or popular assembly.
We know a certain amount about the society and legal system of Kiev Rus because shortly after Iaroslav’s death his sons put together a list of laws and regulations called “Rus Justice,” a brief but illuminating document. Most of the provisions seem to have reflected existing traditions, but in the first articles Iaroslav’s sons began with an innovation: they banned blood revenge in cases of murder. Instead they substituted an elaborate system of payments. The murderer was to pay a certain amount if he killed a boyar or man of distinction, less for a member of the druzhina, still less for an ordinary person or a peasant, and least of all for a slave. Generally, for killing a woman the criminal had to pay half of the fine for killing a man of the same status. The laws gave much space to listing the payments for insults of all kind, ranging from slandering a woman’s virtue to harming a man’s beard. The judges of these and other cases were to be the administrators of the princely estates who thus took on a much larger role than that of simple economic administrators. The “Rus Justice” must have been written for them, as much of it was taken up with complex rules for debt-slavery, various forms of temporary or limited bondage, and relations with the village community. This was a law code entirely appropriate for Rus society, one that, needless to say, bore no relationship whatsoever to Byzantine law. Nor did the Kievan state establish a hierarchy of administrators relying on written documents in imitation of Byzantium. In Rus the basic laws might be written down, but administration was in the hands of a tiny group of servants of the prince’s household relying on oral communications, tradition, and only a very few written texts like the “Rus Justice.”
Iaroslav’s reign represented a high point of stability in Rus. Norwegian princes took refuge with him from civil wars in their homeland, and one of his daughters married the king of France. In the 1030s he inflicted a decisive defeat on the Pechenegs that kept the steppe frontier quiet for a generation. He was patron of the building of the Saint Sophia cathedral and the Caves Monastery, as well as other foundations. His sons and nephews ruled distant territories without much contention. Relations with the Greeks were regular, if occasionally unharmonious. The first (and last for a long time) native metropolitan of Kiev, Ilarion (1051–1054), praised him as a new Constantine and a new David. The apparently idyllic calm would not last for long.