The church of ancient Rome fell because of the Apollinarian heresy, as to the second Rome-the Church of Constantinople-it has been hewn by the axes of the Hagarenes. But this third, new Rome, the Universal Apostolic Church under thy mighty rule radiates forth the Orthodox Christian faith to the ends of the earth more brightly than the sun. … In all the universe thou art the only Tsar of Christians. . . . Hear me, pious Tsar, all Christian kingdoms have converged in thine alone. Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be. . . .2ti
The transfer of Orthodox hopes to Muscovy had already been dramatized by the elaborately staged marriage in 1472 of Ivan III to Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and by the introduction into Russia a few years later of the former imperial seal of the two-headed eagle.27
Russians were encouraged to view change in apocalyptical terms by the
purely fortuitous fact that the old Orthodox Church calendar extended only to the year 1492. The 7,000 years that began with the creation in 5508 B.C. was drawing to a close, and learned monks tended to look for signs of the approaching end of history. The close advisers of the Tsar who showed sympathy at the Church council of 1490 with the rationalistic "ludaizing" heresy were denounced as "vessels of the devil, forerunners of the Antichrist."28 An important issue in the subsequent persecution of the Judaizers was their sponsorship of an astrological table for computing the years, "The Six Wings" (ShestokryV), which seemed to suggest that "the years of the Christian Chronicle have expired but ours lives on."29 In combating the Judaizers, the Russian Church unwittingly kept historical expectations alive by translating into readable Russian for the first time much of the apocalyptical literature of the Old Testament, including such apocrypha as the apocalypse of Ezra.30
By the turn of the century, expectations were raised that God was about to bring history to a close; but there was uncertainty as to whether one should look immediately for good or evil signs: for Christ's Second Coming and thousand-year reign on earth or for the coming reign of the Antichrist. Philotheus believed that "Russian Tsardom is the last earthly kingdom, after which comes the eternal kingdom of Christ," but another Pskovian saw the conquering Tsar as a harbinger of the Antichrist.31 This uncertainty as to whether disaster or deliverance was at hand became characteristic of Russian prophetic writings. In later years too, there was an unstable alternation between anticipation and fear, exultation and depression, among those who shared the recurring feeling that great things were about to happen in Russia.
The rise of prophecy in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Muscovy is evidenced in the growth of extreme forms of Christian spirituality, such as "pillar-like immobility" (stolpnichestvo) and the perpetual wandering of "folly for Christ's sake" (iurodstvd). Though both traditions have Eastern and Byzantine origins, they acquired new intensity and importance in the Muscovite north.
Pillar-like immobility came to be regarded in the non-communal monasteries as a means of gaining special sanctity and clairvoyance. This tradition received popular sanction through the fabulous tales of Ilya of Murom, who allegedly sat immobile for thirty years before rising to carry out deeds of heroism.
The holy fools became revered for their asceticism and prophetic utterances as "men of God" {bozhie liudi). Whereas there had never been more than four saint's days dedicated to holy fools in all of Orthodox Christendom from the sixth to the tenth century, at least ten such days were
celebrated in Muscovy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.32 Churches and shrines were dedicated to them in great numbers, particularly in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, when this form of piety was at its height.83
Holy fools often became the norm, if not the normal, in human life. Renunciation of the flesh "for Christ's sake" purified them for the gift of prophecy. The role of the holy fool at the court of the princes of Muscovy was a combination of the court confessor of the Christian West and the royal soothsayer of the pagan East. They warned of doom and spoke darkly of the need for new crusades or penitential exercises, reinforcing the already marked tendency of Slavic Orthodoxy toward passion and prophecy rather than reason and discipline.
Those who became holy fools were often widely traveled and well read. It was, after all, the learned figure Tertullian who had first asked the Church, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" and asserted that "I believe because it is absurd." Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the most learned of Renaissance humanists, also sang "in praise of folly"; and his essay of that name became appropriately widely read by Russian thinkers.34 Troubled Russian thinkers in later periods-Dostoevsky, Musorgsky, and Berdiaev-would feel tempted to find the true identity of their nation in this undisciplined tradition of holy "wanderers over the Russian land."35 But the prophetic fools provided a source of anarchistic and masochistic impulses as well as strength and sanctification.
The holy fools bore many points of resemblance to the prophetic hermit-saints that became common in Muscovy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, the term for holy wanderer (skitalets) is related to the one used to describe the isolated hermit communities: skity. The most famous ascetic hermit and defender of these small communities was Nil Sorsky, through whom the spiritual intensity of the Hesychasts was brought from Greek to Russian soil.36 A monk from St. Cyril's monastery on the White Lake, Nil traveled to the Holy Land and to Constantinople in the years just after its fall and thence to the "holy Mountain" of Athos. There he acquired the deep devotion to an inner spiritual life free from external discipline and constraint, which he brought back to Russia and used as the basis of his model skit in the wilderness along the Sora River beyond the White Lake. In his devotional writings there is a kind of primitive Franciscan love of nature and indifference to things of this world. There were to be no more than twelve "brothers" in any skit, all living in apostolic poverty and close communion with the natural world. The gospels and a few other "divine writings" were to be the only sources of authority.
Nil saw the skit as the golden mean of monastic life, combining the
communal type of monastery with the cellular type. Within the individual cell there was to be a kind of apprentice system with an experienced "elder" tutoring one or two apprentice monks in spiritual prayer and holy writings. All the various cells were to gather together for Sundays and other feast days, and each skit was to support itself economically but resist all temptations of wealth and luxury. Externals were irrelevant to this apostle of the inner spiritual life. He was not deeply concerned with the observance of fasts or the persecution of heretics. Nil preached rather the power of spiritual example, and sought to find the means of producing such examples in monasteries. Spiritual prayer was in Nil's metaphorical language the running wind that could lead man across the turbulent seas of sin to the haven of salvation. All externals-even spoken prayer-were only tillers, means of steering men back into this wind of the spirit which had first blown on the apostles at Pentecost.
Nil's life and doctrine had a profound effect in the new monasteries of the expanding northeastern frontier. His followers, known as trans-Volga elders, came chiefly from the dependent cloisters of St. Sergius and from the lesser-known "Savior in Stone" monastery and its nine monastic colonies in the Yaroslavl-Vologda region. When this monastery came under the direction of a Greek Hesychast in 1380, it became a center of training for "inner spirituality," offering counsel not only to monastic apprentices but to a variety of tradesmen, colonizers, and lay pilgrims.87