This is spoken not out of political calculation but by the troubled medieval conscience itself. Something has to be done about the church; otherwise there will be no forgiveness for us even in this world, let alone in the next.
Such was the challenge to which the Russian church responded with two opposed solutions, which we may arbitrarily call reformation and counter-reformation. And this was also a response common to all the developing European nations.
5. The Arguments of the Counter-Reformation
To the Non-Acquirers, led by the famous monk and writer Nil Sor- skii, the secularization of church lands meant the liberation of the church to fulfill its natural function as the intellectual and spiritual staff of the nation. For the first time in centuries, Russian Orthodoxy was offered a chance to cleanse itself of the mire of the Tatar heritage. The Non-Acquirers were not, of course, concerned about the political necessity of secularization which preoccupied their royal patron, and still less about the economic need to protect the interests of the f ragile Russian proto-bourgeoisie. For them, the reformation began and ended with the reform of the church. They spoke against the execution of heretics; they were outraged by the exploitation of peasants on monastery lands; they were, in general, proponents of, shall we say, "Orthodoxy with a human face," and as such defended all the aggrieved and persecuted. But their ideas, particularly at the beginning, lacked any clear political articulation.'4 Their opponents, on the other hand, led by the head of the Volokamansk monastery, Iosif, were openly and clearly politicized from the outset.
As early as 1889, M. D'iakonov called attention to the fact that it was precisely Iosif who put forward the "revolutionary thesis" that it is necessary to resist the will of the sovereign if he deviates from the norms of piety. In the heat of the struggle against the secularizing plans of Ivan III, the Josephites advanced the doctrine of the legitimacy of resistance to state power, as V. Val'denberg noted in 1916. Their arguments, the first such in Russian literature, were substantial and serious.
They by no means disputed that the church was in disarray, and they did not deny the need for reforms. They just claimed the role of genuine reformers for themselves. Yes, Iosif agreed, money grubbing is pernicious for monks as individuals subject to moral corruption— but not for monasteries as religious institutions. "It is true that monks sin, but the church of God and the monasteries commit no sin at all."[93] The monk retreats from the world and returns to it no longer as an individual, but as a part of the holy corporation, a tool of its collective will. Hence the reforms proposed by Iosif—the revival of the true norms of monastic life, the dissolution of individuality in the church, and fundamental purification of the monastic collective thereby. Just as the Non-Acquirer movement bore within itself elements of proto-Protestantism, so the Josephite apologia for collectivism had a pronounced Catholic tinge.
But Iosif not only spoke and wrote; he acted. This Muscovite Loyola was not only a brilliant ideologist, but a talented administrator. He transformed his Volokolamsk monastery into a model monastic establishment, a preserve of ecclesiastical culture, and a political academy from which several generations of high Russian prelates came. Who could have known at the time that this monastery would remain an isolated ideal, owing its flourishing condition only to Iosif's charismatic leadership? In any case, the Josephites were a serious and formidable foe, and for this reason the Non-Acquirer movement became, for the grand prince, not merely a justification for secularization, but also a political ideology.
6. Before the Assault
Ivan prowled around the idea of secularization for a long time, and prepared for it slowly, as he did everything. Let us not forget that he did not have at his disposal the historical experience of secularization. The German, Scandinavian, and English reforms belonged to the following generation."' In his time they were still only maturing in the minds of Europeans—minds to which Ivan III did not have access. He came to this idea independently; he invented it himself; it was dear to him, and he bequeathed it to his successors as the pearl of his political experience.
In 1476—78, in the course of the great confiscations in Novgorod, Ivan III took away from the Novgorod clergy a part of its lands, "since those lands from time immemorial belonged to the grand prince, and [the archbishop and the monasteries] had themselves seized them." Although the standard reference to the "old ways" is again present, as we see, this measure could be—and was—interpreted as political repression. But twenty years later we suddenly read in the chronicle that again "the grand prince took over the patrimonial estates of the church in Novgorod and gave them out to the boyars' children as service estates . . . with the blessing of Metropolitan Simon.'"7 This time the "old ways" were not invoked, and the confiscation could not be interpreted as a political act: there was nothing for which the Novgorodian church should be punished. It was rather an attempted frontal attack, without any ideological provisioning. And although the grand prince made several such attempts (by limiting the expansion of the monastery of Saint Cyril at Be- loozero, by suggesting to the bishop of Perm' that he return "to the people, the land and forests and pastures which the prelate had taken from them," and by forbidding the thirty families of princes of Suzdal' to bequeath their lands to the monasteries "for masses"), it soon became obvious that matters would not go forward this way. The hierarchy started worrying: attacks on the grand prince became open; the matter went so far that he began to be cursed from the pulpit and pamphlets began to be written against him. In short, the fortress of the church, Toynbee's categorical assertion notwithstanding, appeared not to be vulnerable to a frontal attack. Having found this out, Ivan III, as always, retreated.
But, as always, he did so only in order to try to gain his ends by an indirect route. As early as the i480s, he had turned his attention to the Non-Acquirers, and now he tried to place "his people" in the highest ranks of the church. Nil Sorskii's teacher, the humble hermit of Beloozero, Paisii Yaroslavov, was suddenly appointed to the post of abbot of the Troitsa Monastery. Elevated to the peak of the Orthodox hierarchy, the elder was inevitably caught up in a political campaign.
One after another, over the course of the pre-Oprichnina century, four generations of Non-Acquirers emerged into the political arena, until they were destroyed or implicated as heretics or fled the country under Ivan the Terrible. We will meet some of them later, and see them grow and mature before our eyes. What Ivan the Terrible did to them constitutes the first act in the drama of the Russian intelligentsia.
The post of abbot of the Troitsa was to be only the first step in the political career of the hermit of Beloozero, according to Ivan Ill's plan. As soon as Metropolitan Gerontii fell ill, Paisii was at once recommended by the grand prince for the metropolitan's chair—that is, for the very helm of church policy.
The metropolitan recovered, however, and, worse, Paisii refused.IB Ivan III had called on him to struggle against the entire hierarchy. But the Non-Acquirer generation of 1480 was obviously not prepared for this. It was necessary to turn to the heretics.
In 1480, while in Novgorod, Ivan had received denunciations of two heretical priests, Dionisii and Aleksei. Instead of punishing them, he took these seditious persons with him to Moscow, where both of them were suddenly raised to dizzying heights: they became the arch- priests of the Uspenskii and Arkhangel'skii cathedrals respectively. Then, after Gerontii died, the grand prince approved the appointment to the metropolitan's chair of the Archimandrite Zosima, who was suspected—apparently not without reason—of being in sympathy with the heretics.