Ivan IV however, working with a new favourite, Artemii, had in mind more radical reforms. Artemii was from Pskov, a city touched by reformation currents in Poland-Lithuania. Ivan summoned him from a northern hermitage and compelled the Trinity-Sergius monastery to accept him as hegumen. Simultaneously, he convened the Stoglav Council inJanuary 1551. In his opening address Ivan said monasticism, founded to save souls, had become worldly; people became monks and nuns to live comfortably and to carouse with laity to the disregard of their calling. Ivan reminded the council that the acceptance of gifts and villages had brought monasteries to such a state. This caused Makarii and the Iosifite majority to answer that, since Constantine, Byzantine emperors, Church fathers and councils, Russian princes and Tatar khans had respected Church property. In the end no one was satisfied. The Iosifites conceded many points: the council recognised the government's right to inventory monastic lands; it promised to obey the provision in the Law Code of 1550 ending the issuance of immunity charters; it agreed to limitations of its right to acquire estates and to reductions in state subsidies for monasteries; and it recognised the tsar's decree of 15 September 1550 which re-established state taxation and jurisdiction in Church suburbs of Russian towns and banned the creation of new ones.[176] But the monasteries retained their considerable autonomy and the right to acquire property.
The council also committed itself to improving the behaviour of parish clergy and laity. To deal with human failing, it admonished people to attend church and open their hearts to God by confession. Decrying the ignorance or disregard of marriage laws, it repeated relevant canons. The clergy was to hold services and requiems regularly andput the fear of God into parishioners. So the laity would have no excuse to evade observances, it forbade the clergy to charge unreasonable fees for sacraments; parishioners who ignored admonitions to behave and disrupted or failed to attend services might be excommunicated. So the clergy understood its obligations, the council ordered seminaries be established in towns and reminded clerics of their mentoring duties. Unworthy clerics might be dismissed. The reforms were of little consequence, primarily because the Church failed to found seminaries or upgrade its administration. Ivan told the council that 'tenth men' were venal and that their levies impoverished parishioners, leaving the churches empty. Its answer was to replace them with senior priests (popovskie starosty) chosen from among and by local clergy. With their parishes, they were responsible for paying tithes.[177] Whether it produced more revenue is unclear; as a means to enhance the moral and theological acuity of the clergy and its ability to minister to parishioners, it was a step backward. Senior priests, autonomous of eparchial supervision, were hardly better educated than their juniors.
Artemii's tenure as a reformer ended with flight to the northern hermitages in July 1551. Retribution followed when Makarii in 1553-4 convened councils to hear charges tying him to heresies of serviceman Matvei Bashkin, runaway servant and monk Feodosii Kosoi and the official Ivan Viskovatyi. Viskovatyi was convicted of lesser charges, the others found guilty of heresy and excommunicated. In i555 and i556-7 courts convicted their disciples. Bashkin was sent to the Iosifo-Volokolamskii monastery, the others to the Solovetskii monastery whence they fled to Lithuania. Feodosii became an anti-trinitarian preacher; Artemii remained an Orthodox monk.[178] Official sources said the accused, apart from Viskovatyi, believed Jesus was less than God, and denied the efficacy of religious rites, symbols and the worship of saints and relics. It is difficult to know what Feodosii Kosoi espoused in the early 1550s, because refutations of his theology appeared after his flight and addressed his preaching in Lithuania where, according to one critic, he told crowds the Church was a union of all believers; before God, Tatars and Germans, and Christians were equal. The court heard testimony that Bashkin had enquired why believers owned slaves while professing to love others as they would have others love them. Although not unaware of reformation currents, Artemii's theology was in the Non-possessor tradition. He denied doubting the efficacy of requiems and symbols of faith, urging Ivan to expropriate monastic lands, that he 'wrote like aJew' or refused to curse the Novgorod heretics, saying only that salvation depended primarily on living righteously, and that the heretics' punishment had been unjust. This criticism of Iosif's Enlightener caused an uproar when
Bishop Kassian of Riazan', the only non-Iosifite on the court, agreed. Ivan and Makarii endorsed the book and removed Kassian from office.[179]
There was no mass movement for religious reform. Most believers were attached to rituals and institutions the heretics criticised. Moreover, sources circulated only in handwritten copies. The lack of a print culture, and a concomitant information revolution such as that sweeping Western Europe, guaranteed that Maximos's translations, sermons and polemics, the Church's pedagogical mission or the teachings of its critics would reach but a small number of people. The only press was that founded by Ivan IV and Makarii in 1553 and run by Kremlin deacons Ivan Fedorov and Petr Mstislavich. It printed six anonymous scriptural texts, and Fedorov's 'The Acts and Letters of the Apostles' (1564) and 'Book of Hours' (1565). Fedorov left in 1568 for Lithuania, one report saying that a mob, incited by clergy, burnt his press. However, that press produced thirteen more works either of Scripture, liturgical books or menologies between 1568 and 1606.[180]
Church and state
Soon after 1504 Iosif Volotskii exalted Moscow's ruler, utilising the double- edged maxims of the deacon Agapetus to Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. A familiar text within Orthodoxy, it taught that a ruler deserved the obedience of his subjects if he upheld Orthodox notions of virtue and justice. Iosif was the first to celebrate Moscow's emergence in a way that explored its implications for the relationship between Church and state. In 1519 Maximos referred Vasilii III to Justinian I's view that the spiritual power of the Church and the political power of the state must be in harmony.[181] Makarii reiterated this principle in crowning Ivan IV tsar in 1547. Modelled on Byzantine rites, the rite proclaimed the ruler's office divine, meaning that it involved sacerdotal obligations and the duty to uphold the faith. In 1561 the patriarch of Constantinople recognised Ivan's title and Fedor's imperial coronation in 1584 ended with a procession through Moscow. Like the Palm Sunday and Epiphany processions, its imperial imagery was steeped in Christian humility. To restore harmony between ranks of ruler and head of Church, Boris Godunov, acting for Tsar Fedor, in 1586 importuned Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, then visiting Moscow for alms, to arrange a synod to elevate Metropolitan Iov of Moscow to the rank of patriarch. Nothing happened, so when Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople came to Moscow for alms in 1589, Boris detained him until he consecrated Iov as patriarch and proclaimed the Russian tsarstvo the third Rome. In May 1590 a synod, including all the Eastern patriarchs, confirmed Iov's ordination.[182] The reality of Iov's dignity was more tenuous. In 1448 Grand Prince Vasilii II had initiated Iona's installation as metropolitan. His successors also decided who became metropolitan or patriarch, oversaw his choice of prelates and often intervened to elevate or depose them. They proceeded more cautiously in ecclesiastical matters. In 1479 Metropolitan Gerontii retired to the Simonovskii monastery and refusedto hold services, to protest against Ivan III's interference in the consecration of the Dormition cathedral. Ivan had to come to him before he would return. But when Gerontii repeated the tactic in 1483, it failed to evoke the same response. Subsequently, rulers intervened more boldly in internal affairs of the Church, Ivan IV especially so, but such acts still resembled Byzantine notions of a harmony of spiritual and secular power. Ivan IV shattered this image when in 1569 he had Metropolitan Filipp killed. It was then remarkable that in 1590 a monk of the Solovetskii monastery wrote a life of Filipp proclaiming him a saint, and used Agapetus's words to condemn Ivan for martyring him.[183]
177
Emchenko,
178
179
i439-40.
180
A. S. Zernova,
181
Iosif,
182
183
Paul Bushkovitch, 'The Life ofSaint Filipp: Tsar and Metropolitan in the Late Sixteenth Century', in Flier and Rowland (eds.),