Heresy
While Iosif and Nil refined their ideals, others were criticising traditional beliefs, rituals and institutions. In 1467 Metropolitan Filipp wrote to Archbishop Iona of Novgorod about popular animosity in Iona's eparchy towards the Church and its wealth. Archbishop Gennadii told Metropolitan Zosima that a Jew in the entourage of Mikhail Olel'kovich, who came from Kiev to be Novgorod's prince in 1471, had caused the unrest. He warned prelates that it had infected priests, deacons, officials and simple people. In 1487 Gennadii charged four men with heresy and sent them to Moscow for judgement. Ivan III and
Metropolitan Gerontii exonerated one, found the others guilty of execrating icons and had them whipped. Gennadii thought this lenient and complained to Zosima that Gerontii (d. 1489) had allowed heretical priests Gavrilko and Denis to serve in Moscow, the latter at the Kremlin church of Michael the Archangel, and that Ivan's diplomat Fedor Kuritsyn protected them. Mobilising other bishops, Gennadii drove Aleksei from his church and compelled Zosimato convene another council. It met 17 October 1490, convicting some of desecrating icons and of the 'judaising' denial of Christ's divinity, and the monk Zakarii as a strigol'nik, referring to a Pskov heresy that denied the authority of simoniacal prelates. The council excommunicated and anathematised the heretics and sent them to Novgorod for punishment.[159] As long as Ivan favoured the governing faction that included Kuritsyn, freethinkers were immune from punishment in Moscow.
Gennadii and IosifVolotskii were alarmed. By Gennadii's account, heretical preachers had reached credulous Christians throughout the eparchy. Moreover, Ivan appointed Kuritsyn's confederate Kassian archimandrite of Novgorod's Iur'ev (St George) monastery. The Moscow heretics were few in number, but influential. Grand Princess Elena was reputed to be one. It must have galled Gennadii and Iosiftoo that the heretics were literate clerics and laymen whose views were not supposed to count in religious affairs. It is certain they preached that it was idolatry to worship man-made symbols of the faith, that venerating relics was superstition and monasticism unnecessary. Gennadii also likened their beliefs to those ofheretics who had denied the Trinity, saying they prayed like Jews. In their arguments, he complained, they cited passages from the Old Testament and texts called 'The Logic' (Logika) and 'The Six Wings' (Shestokril) unknown to him. 'The Logic' was informed by a rationalist approach to theology; the latter, an astronomical work, became important as the year 7000 approached, by our reckoning 1491/2. In eschatological lore, because the Lord created the world in seven days, it would be followed by 7,000 years of faith, after which Christians might expect chaos, Christ's second coming and a day of judgement. Its approach caused unease; when it passed without a stir, free thinkers ridiculed religious authority. Kuritsyn's version of a pseudo-letter of St Paul to the Laodicians, one of few surviving heretical writings, expressed a humanist Christianity.[160] Other heretics may have shared Kuritsyn's conviction that Christian piety derived from an individual conscience that privileged human rationality. But most of the accused were clerics, so it is wrong to think of the heresy as a secular critique of Orthodoxy.
To confound the heretics Gennadii recruited bookmen, including two Greeks, the Dominican Veniamin, and two Lubeckers, printer Bartholomaus Ghotan and doctor Niklaus Billow. Their great achievement was assembling the first complete Slavonic Bible in Muscovy in 1499. It was the source of later editions and the first printed Bible of Ivan Fedorov in West Bank Ukraine in 1580/1. Bulow translated Latin calendars and astronomy texts to compute a new paschal canon reaffirming Christ's second coming, and a translation of a medieval Latin refutation of Judaism.[161] Iosif Volotskii was the scourge of Moscow freethinkers. In the 'Book about the New Heresy' or 'Enlightener' (Prosvetitel'), which he wrote between 1502 and 1504 from reconstituted sermons, Iosif accused Ivan of abetting the heresy and said Zosima treated heretics lightly because he was a heretic. It was exceptional in equating the heresy with Judaism, an evil external to Orthodoxy. Gennadii said that Kuritsyn became a heretic after an embassy to Hungary in 1482-6.[162] Iosifs charge that the heretics proselytised Judaism under the guise of reforming Orthodoxy long has caused controversy because of its implication of unsavoury Jewish influences in Russia and counter-charges of Russian anti-Semitism. Ia. S. Lur'e has argued against Jewish influences, but Moishe Taube makes the case that the Shestokril and the Logika were translated from medieval Hebrew texts, identifies Gennadii's Kievan Jew as Zacharia ben Aharon and argues that Kuritsyn relied on a translation from Hebrew of the Secretum secretorum in the first section of the Laodicean Letter. No one disputes that the heretics solicited translations out of very Christian concerns.[163]
Having removed the court faction that included Kuritsyn, jailed his co-ruler Dmitrii and Dmitrii's mother Elena, and recognised Vasilii as sole heir in April 1502, Ivan III summoned Iosif to discuss what to do about heresy. According to Iosif, Ivan asked forgiveness for shielding heretics. In December 1504, Vasilii, Ivan and Metropolitan Simon convened a council that condemned Ivan-Volk Kuritsyn (sources last mentioned brother Fedor in i500) and two others as heretics and burnt them at the stake. In Novgorod heretics were burnt or imprisoned. Nil Sorskii's hostility to the heresy is documented. But Nil's disciple Vassian Patrikeev wrote that monks of the northern hermitages believed that, while the irreconcilable should be imprisoned, the Church should forgive the repentant. One disciple said Nil shared this view.[164] Nil probably concurred with Iosif about trying heretics, but parted company with him over the punishments.
Iosifites and non-possessors
In 1499 Ivan raided Novgorod's eparchial treasury. Blaming Ivan's heretical advisers, Archbishop Gennadii prepared a sinodik anathematising all who seized Church property and commissioned Veniamin's 'Short Sermon' (Slovo kratka) which used the legend that Roman Emperor Constantine I had issued a charter to the Pope that made Church lands sacrosanct.[165] Then, in August- September 1503 Ivan apparently convened a Church council and placed before it the question of Church lands. Ivan hardly contemplated anything as drastic as his Novgorod confiscations. The hierarchy was a necessary ally and his servicemen, by reason of grants to monasteries for memorial prayers, had a stake in the existing order. Replying to Ivan's purported agenda, Metropolitan Simon cited Constantine's charter and claimed that Ivan's 'ancestors' Grand Princes Vladimir (d. 1015) and Iaroslav (d. 1054) of Kiev had upheld it. The anonymous 'Other Sermon' (Slovo inoe), written then or soon after ostensibly to defend the Trinity-Sergius monastery's jurisdiction over the village of Ilemna, provides a gloss on the 'reply', saying Ivan sought to make the Church dependent on the state treasury and granaries. Towards this end, it said, Ivan summoned Nil Sorskii who testified that 'it is not becoming to monks to own villages'. Most likely the anonymous 'Quarrel with Iosif Volotskii' had it right, saying Ivan ordered Nil and Iosif to be present and that they took opposing sides.[166] The lack of an official record, the late provenance of sources mentioning a council and their tendentiousness, has troubled historians.[167] Yet, the council certainly took place. In the absence of a record, one must conclude that the Church's opposition caused Ivan to draw back. Given the stakes, it is understandable why contemporaries treated the abortive council with silence, and why Iosif s disciples and Nil's, with their own agendas, provided biased accounts of it.
159
162
Ibid., pp. 320-73, 377, 391-414, 427-38, 466-77; Iosif Volotskii,
163
Kazakova and Lur'e,
164
Kazakova and Lur'e,
165
166
Zimin and Lur'e (eds.),
167
Pliguzov,