For fifty years these factions contested what constituted Orthodox tradition. Monks from Iosif s monastery and other large houses defended monastic property rights and autonomy, shared Iosif s hatred of heresy and extended its definition to include their rivals. Most defenders of Nil's heritage were from northern hermitages. Known as Non-possessors (nestiazhateli) for their dedication to vows of poverty, they were willing to forgive heretics who repented. Their leader was Vassian, whom Ivan III tonsured and sent to the Kirillo- Belozerskii monastery when he disgraced his father Ivan Patrikeev in 1499. Vassian became Nil's disciple and returned to Moscow in i509-i0 when Vasilii III's officials re-examined monastic immunities. For contemporaries he interpreted the meaning of the councils of 1503 and 1504. A monk, he argued, should empty himself of material burdens to cultivate piety, Nil's inner way. Neither Greek saintly monks, Saints Antonii and Feodosii ofthe Kiev Pecherskii (Caves) monastery, nor Saints Varlaam Khutynskii, Sergius Radonezhskii and Kirill Belozerskii, he said, acquired property. Vassian's compilation of canon law (kormchaia kniga) was also hostile to landed monasticism.[168]
In 1518 Vassian found an ally in Maximos 'the Greek' (Maksim Grek), whom Vasilii recruited as a translator. Maximos was born Michael Tivolis into a noble family in Epirus. About 1492 Michael joined Greek emigres in Italy. He knew John Lascaris and Marsilio Ficino, studied with Pico della Mirandola, helped Aldus Manutius print Greek classics, saw Savonarola in power and became a Dominican monk. Returning to Orthodoxy, Michael became the monk Maximos at the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos in 1505-6. Vasilii III refused to allow Maximos to return to Mount Athos. Subsequently, with a learning previously unknown in Russia, Maximos carried on a wide correspondence, wrote treatises on translation, onomastics and grammar, sermons about astrology, prophecy and apocryphal works, monographs on governance and polemics against other faiths. Iosifites viewed his learning with a suspicion reinforced by reports that he found Russian services provincial and liturgical books full of errors, and because of his association with Vassian. Also, Max- imos's descriptions for Vasilii and Vassian of monasteries on Mount Athos and of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, favourably reported that they supported themselves and owned no villages.[169]
In 1525 the Iosifite Metropolitan Daniil convened a court that on the slenderest evidence convicted Maximos of heresy and treasonous relations with the Turks. He was excommunicated and put in irons in the Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastery. Daniilbrought Maximos to trial again in 1531 on charges designed to entrap Vassian. His jailers said Maximos and Vassian had denigrated Muscovite liturgical innovations and that he doubted the sanctity of Pafnutii of Borovsk and other monks who owned villages. The council also detected 'Jewish' passages in Maximos's translation of Simeon Metaphrast's 'Life of the Mother of God'. Maximos's copyist, the monk Isak Sobaka, said he gave Vassian the translation; others attributed the errors to Vassian. The council excommunicated Vassian and confined him at the Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastery, where he died. It sent Maximos to the Otroch' monastery in Tver'. Although the Iosifites equated Non-possessors with 'judaisers', they could not isolate them. Bishop Akakii of Tver' removed Maximos's irons and allowed him books and to write. Ioasaf Skripitsyn, hegumen ofthe Trinity-Sergius monastery, replaced Daniil as metropolitan in 1539, lifted Isak's excommunication and made him hegumen of the Simonovskii monastery, then of the Kremlin Chudovskii (Miracles) monastery. But in 1542 a court faction replaced Ioasaf with Makarii. From a Moscow clerical family related to Iosif Volotskii, like Iosif, tonsured at the Pafnut'ev monastery, and Daniil's archbishop of Novgorod, Makarii abhorred heterodoxy. In 1549 he informed Vasilii III of Isak's complicity in Maximos's and Vassian's heresy and convicted him again.[170]
Reform
Maximos, judged by diplomat Ivan Beklemishev, his intimate and co-defendant in 1525, a 'wise man, able to assist us and enlighten us when we inquire how a sovereign should order the land, how people should be treated, and how a metropolitan should live', was the progenitor of a new literature exploring how to live a Christian life.[171] Addressing the interest in astrology generated by court doctor Niklaus Bulow, Maximos warned that man-made science offered the seductive delusion that external forces determined one's fate. It was dangerous because it relieved the believer of the God-given gift of free will. In a Sermon on Penitence he counselled that 'neither withdrawal from the world, donning a monk's habit . . . are so pleasing to God as a pure faith, an honest life and good works'.[172] Clerics, so diverse in their beliefs as the Non-possessor monk Artemii and Metropolitan Daniil, also addressed this theme. Artemii, like religious radicals in Poland-Lithuania, told correspondents Scripture was a better guide than miracles to living virtuously, stressing that the onus was on the seeker to let Scripture shape his or her existence. Daniil's sermons were more conventional; yet, he was the first Muscovite hierarch to write in this vein. His sermons, like Artemii's, privileged moral instruction along with ritual and devotional practices.[173] The Domostroi usually is cited to demonstrate that servicemen, state functionaries and townspeople valued moral instruction. Sil'vestr, a priest and icon painter in the Kremlin church of the Annunciation, dedicated a copy of this anonymous work to his son Anfim, telling him that a Christian household would shine in the esteem of others. Orthodoxy supplied the rituals structuring a system of deference defining the sexes, parents and children, master and slave. In chapters on child-rearing the father's role was protector of children and mentor in behaviour and trades to sons, his wife so educating daughters. They quoted Scripture to counsel against spoiling with kindness.[174] In Novgorod Makarii took reform in a different direction, the production by i538 of an encyclopedia organised as a menology, that is, with texts celebrating saints on their feast days. Organised in twelve books, one for each month, it was called a 'great menology' (velikie minei chetii) because it contained full biographies of saints, and because it appended other writings to the calendar. As metropolitan Makarii sponsored an expanded edition with biographies of those he had canonised and materials from his archive. Thus, to selections for July and August were appended the final edition of Iosif s 'Enlightener', a partial translation from Greek of Ricoldus of Florence's hostile account (c.1300) of Muslim beliefs, the Sermon compiled from Holy Writings (c.1462), excoriating those who had accepted union with Rome and praising Grand Prince Vasilii II for saving Muscovy, the earliest epistle by Filofei of Pskov (in 1524 to Misiur' Munekhin) describing Moscow as the third Rome, and letters of Russian prelates. Claiming he had preserved every sacred writing, Makarii retained a copy and presented the other to Ivan IV in 1552 as a reference book of authoritative texts.[175]
168
Kazakova,
253-7.
169
Dimitri Obolensky, 'Italy, Mount Athos, and Muscovy: The Three Worlds of Maximos the Greek (c. 1470-1556)',
170
N. N. Pokrovskii,
pp. 207-52.
171
173
175
V A. Kuchkin, 'O formirovanii Velikikh Minei Chetii mitropolita Makariia', in A. A.
Sidorov (ed.),