"Life of Stephen of Perm" by the greatest hagiographer of the age, Epi-phanius the Wise, set a new standard for flowery eulogy and became perhaps the most popular of the many new lives of local saints.10
The most influential of Epiphanius' Lives, however, was that of St. Sergius of Radonezh, which he wrote shortly before his death in 1420. Richer than his earlier works in factual material and the use of vernacular terms, Epiphanius' life of Sergius reads like a history of Russia in the fourteenth century and helps explain how this lonely ascetic has come to be known as the "builder of Russia."11 Respect for his selflessness and sanctity enabled Sergius to become a counselor and arbiter among the warring princes of the Volga-Oka region. The links that developed with nearby Zagorsk helped Moscow assume leadership of the region during the preparations for battle with the Mongols in the 1370's. St. Sergius prayed for victory over the Tatars, mobilized the resources of his monastery to support the fighting, and sent two monks to lead the troops in the famous victory at Kulikovo. Because his aid and intercession were widely credited with this decisive turn in the fortunes of Muscovy, his monastery soon became- almost in the modern sense-a national shrine. It was connected not with any purely local event or holy man, but with the common victory over a pagan enemy of a united army of Orthodox Russians.
The new monasteries were full-time centers of work and prayer, controlling rather than controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Often modeled on the monasteries of Mount Athos, they were organized communally and strongly influenced by the new Athonite tradition of Hesychasm. The "elders" who had attained mastery of their passions and spiritual clairvoyance through long years of prayer and vigilance often commanded greater authority within the monastery than did the hegumen or archimandrite (the nominal head of a small and a large monastery respectively). These elders played a leading role in the "accumulation of spiritual energies," which was the main work of Muscovite monasticism.
Like a magnetic field, this spiritual energy attracted loose elements and filled the surrounding area with invisible powers. This energizing effect has already been noted in the field of icon painting, which received much of its stimulus from the need to decorate new monasteries. Rublev's "Old Testament Trinity" was painted by a monk for the monastery of St. Sergius, depicting the subject to which that key monastery had been dedicated.
Literary culture was stimulated by the monastic revival. About twic as many manuscript books have survived from the fourteenth century a from the three previous centuries combined.12 These manuscripts were embellished with a new type of decoration known as belt weaving, and the style adorned with a new technique known as word weaving.13 Both of these
skills were brought to Russia by many of the same monastic emigrants from Athos, who were bearers of Hesychasm. Both of these "weaving" techniques represented in some ways an extension to literature of principles common to both Hesychasm and the new iconography: the subordination of verbal inventiveness and pictorial naturalism to the balanced and rhythmic repetition of a few simple patterns and phrases designed to facilitate direct links with God.
Even more striking in the new literary activity was the intensification of the previous historical bias of Russian theology. In sacred history as in iconography, Muscovite monks succeeded in "transforming an imitative craft into a conscious national art."14 Increasingly, lives of saints and sacred chronicles tended to identify the religious truth of Orthodoxy with the political fate of Muscovy. This trend was already evidenced in the late thirteenth century in the extraordinarily popular "Life of Alexander Nevsky." The story of the prince who vanquished the Teutonic knights is filled with comparisons to Old Testament figures, military images drawn from Josephus Flavius' Tale of the Destruction of Jerusalem, and details of heroism transferred from legends about Alexander the Great to Alexander Nevsky. This work was also infused with a militant anti-Catholic spirit that was absent from epics of the Kievan period (and probably from the outlook of Alexander himself) and was almost certainly introduced by the Monk Cyril, who had fled his native Galicia after it had entered the Roman orbit, and deepened his anti-Catholicism with a stay in Nicaea just as the Latin crusaders were overrunning nearby Constantinople, in the early thirteenth century.15
Even more exalted than this story of victory over "the Romans" were the tales of combat with the Tatars that became particularly popular after the victory at Kulikovo in 1380, under Dmitry Donskoy. The life of this lay prince was written in purely hagiographic style. He is repeatedly referred to as a saint, and is placed higher in the firmament of heaven than many biblical figures. The cause of Dmitry in the most famous epic of this period, "The Tale from Beyond the Don" {Zadonshchina), is that of "the Christian faith" and "the holy churches"; just as the icon commissioned for Dmitry's grave by his widow was that of the Archangel Michael, the bearer of heavenly victory over the armies of Satan.18 Whereas epics of the Kievan era were relatively hospitable to naturalistic and even pagan detail, the Zadonshchina imparts a new spirit of fanaticism in a new idiom of eulogy and epithet.17
The extraordinary emphasis in the chronicles on the battle of Kulikovo (which was not in itself particularly decisive in turning back the tide of Tatar domination) represents in good measure the echoing by Muscovite chron-
iclers of the call-first sounded in Latin Christendom at the time of its great awakening several centuries earlier-for a Christian crusade against the infidel East. Once again, a people struggling out of darkness and division were invited to unite behind their faith to fight a common foe. The ideological accompaniment for the gradual subordination of all other major Russian princes to Moscow in the course of the fifteenth century was provided by a series of chronicles beginning with that of the St. Sergius Monastery in 1408, and by supporting songs and legends that stressed (in contrast to those of Novgorod, Pskov, and Tver) the importance of the holy war against the Tatars and the need for Muscovite leadership in reuniting "the Russian land."18
The monastic literature of the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century moved increasingly into the world of prophecy-developing two interrelated beliefs that lay at the heart of the Moscow ideology: (1) that Russian Christendom represents a special culminating chapter in an unbroken chain of sacred history; and (2) that Moscow and its rulers are the chosen bearers of this destiny.
The belief in a special destiny for Orthodox Christianity was not new. Orthodoxy was heir to the earliest sees of Christendom, including all the regions in which Christ himself had lived. Chiliastic teachings from the East entered early into Byzantine thinking. When Jerusalem was falling to the Moslems in 638 the true cross and other sacred relics were transferred to Constantinople, and the thought arose-particularly under the Macedonian dynasty at the time when Russia was being converted-that Constantinople might in some sense be the New Jerusalem as well as the New Rome.19
Just as the Eastern Church claimed to be the only truly apostolic church, so too the Eastern Empire claimed a specially sanctified genealogy through Babylonia, Persia, and Rome. From the end of the fourth century, Constantinople began to be thought of as the New Rome: capital of an empire with a destiny unlike that of any other on earth. Byzantium was not a but the Christian Empire, specially chosen to guide men along the path marked out by the chroniclers that led from Christ's incarnation to His Second Coming.