Iosif's comrade-in-arms was the ferocious Gennadii, archbishop of Novgorod, who literally every month discovered new nests of heretics in his archdiocese, and constantly called for an antiheretical campaign throughout Russia. The grand prince now forbade him to come to Moscow for the installation of the new metropolitan, who was himself—Gennadii did not doubt for a minute—a heretic. This was an open scandal. Could Gennadii keep silent, when in his letter to the church assembly of 1490 he had declared that it was criminal even to argue about the faith with heretics? ("One has only to convene the assembly in order to execute them, by burning or hanging," he wrote.)[94] Inspired by the example of Spanish Catholicism, Gennadii had praised the way the Catholics had "cleansed their earth."[95] Could Iosif himself be silent, for that matter, after writing to the bishop of Suzdal' that,
From the time when the sun of Orthodoxy rose over our land, we have never had so much heresy: in houses, on the streets, in the marketplace, everyone—both monks and laymen—is dubiously discussing the faith, basing themselves not on the doctrine of the prophets, the apostles, and the Holy Fathers, but on the words of heretics, apostates from Christianity; they make friends with them, learn Jewishness from them. And the heretics never leave the metropolitan's house, and even sleep there.2'
New ideas were advanced, disputed, rejected, and advanced again—and not only within closed circles of scholars or government officials. None of the conflicting factions were officially embraced by the government. An open struggle of ideas permeated the air of Muscovy. To me this picture alone certifies beyond any doubt that the government of Ivan III recognized ideological limitations on power.
Well, one might argue that the state did not persecute the heretics because heresy was to its advantage. This is true. But neither did it persecute their opponents. Just after the first confiscations in Novgorod, Gennadii, on his own initiative, included in the ritual of the church a special anathema on those who "offend against the sacred things of the church.'"[96] Everyone understood perfectly whom Novgorod's priests were cursing from the pulpits of the churches. And nothing happened: Gennadii was not ousted, and the anathema was not even forbidden. In the 1480s, Gennadii's cothinkers published a tract with a title six lines long, which for some reason is known in the literature as "A Short Word in Defense of Monastery Property." The authors of the "Short Word" by no means briefly, and quite openly, took to task tsars who "allowed violations of the law."[97] And the circulation of the tract was not prohibited. Iosif fearlessly pronounced anathema on the grand prince in numerous letters and pamphlets, stating that "if he who wears the crown begins to follow the same sins . . . may he be cursed in this age and in the future one."[98]
Does this boiling Muscovite Athens sound like the voiceless desert of the "service state" ?
With the memories of the Tatar heritage still fresh, and national feelings high, Russia argued, harangued, denounced, and preached. There was no official monologue by the state; there was open, ferocious ideological dialogue. And all this was, moreover, on the threshold of the expected end of the world. In a few years, according to the Orthodox calendar, the seventh millennium since the creation would come to an end, and at its conclusion the Messiah was supposed to appear anew before the eyes of an amazed humanity. Passions were heated to the boiling point; the hierarchy was in open revolt. Ivan III did not let matters come to an explosion, however. Once again, he was the first to retreat, turning over to Gennadii several heretics from Novgorod who had fled under his protection to Moscow.
But an antiheretical campaign throughout the nation did not follow. This gambit of the grand prince's was intended, no doubt, to buy off the hierarchy—to let some steam out of the boiling kettle of Jose- phite passions, and at this price to preserve Kuritsyn, Elena Stefa- novna, and his grandson and heir Dimitrii. But it seems, too, that under the influence of the events in Novgorod, the grand prince evolved the treacherous and cynical political scenario which was played out a few years later at the church assembly of 1504—a plan to trade heresy for the church lands.
7. The First Assault
A letter sent by Iosif to the Archimandrite Mitrofan, the grand prince's personal chaplain, relates an unexpected scene, in which Ivan III invited Iosif, who had until quite recently been a disgraced monk, to visit him, and held a long conversation with him about church affairs. In the course of this, the sovereign suddenly revealed "to what heresy the archpriest Aleksei adhered and to what heresy Fedor Kuritsyn adhered," and even denounced his daughter-in-law, Elena, admitting that "he knew about their heresies" and asking forgiveness. What could be the meaning of this abandonment of friends and advisors whom he had supported for many years, this humble request for pardon on the part of a mighty ruler, addressed to a morose and implacable nonconformist who pursued goals which were extremely dubious from the grand prince's point of view? What, if not an offer of a political deal? Apparently, however, Iosif remained unmoved. It is true that the grand prince did not hasten to fulfill his pledge to carry out the national campaign which Gennadii and Iosif had been seeking for more than a quarter of a century and "hunt out and uproot the heretics." A year after the meeting, Iosif complained bitterly in the same letter to Mitrofan of Ivan's failure to dispatch the promised witch-hunters: "I hoped that the sovereign would send them immediately, but it is already more than a year since that great day, and he, the sovereign, has not sent them.'"[99]
Instead of an antiheretical campaign, in fact, the grand prince prepared an unexpected blow at the hierarchy. It came in 1503, at what was perhaps the most dramatic church assembly in the history of Russian Orthodoxy. The assembly had been called to consider a purely practical question—whether widowers were to be permitted to serve in the priesthood. The prelates assembled, spoke, adopted a decision to forbid widowed priests. Matters of third-rate importance remained to be dealt with. Suddenly, in the half-empty hall, the grand prince himself appeared. His speech was entirely unambiguous. As one of the documents describing this dramatic event has it: "The Grand Prince Ivan Vasil'evich wished to take from the metropolitan and the other church dignitaries, and from the monasteries, their villages, and unite them with his own, and to give all the metropolitan and other dignitaries money from his treasury and grain from his granaries."2e In other words, he wanted to transfer the ecclesiastical businessmen to the state service and put them on salary. The matter did not end there. The sovereign was followed onto the podium by his sons, Vasilii and Dimitrii, then by the Tver' boyar, Vasilii Borisov, then by the high secretaries, the heads of the Muscovite government departments, and, finally—and this was certainly the nucleus of the plan—by the dissidents, led by the leader of the second generation of Non-Acquirers, Nil Sorskii. This time they were not timid, as Paisii had been. They attacked the hierarchy in heated speeches, denouncing monastery landholding as a deviation from Christ's law, a sin, and an injustice. Note that until now the "accusers" (of the grand prince, the metropolitan, and the heretics) had been exclusively Josephites. To use modern language, this had been a critique from the right: the hierarchy attacked the state for deviating from the norms of piety. Now the attack came from the left. The church was finally split. The state now appeared in the role of guardian of the purity of Orthodoxy—the situation for which Ivan III had waited so long in the matter of Novgorod, in the struggle against Lithuania, and in the war with the hierarchy. According to some sources, the Non-Acquirers demanded the secularization not of all the church lands, but merely of those of the monasteries. If this is true (and the attempt to divide the opposition was certainly in the spirit of Ivan III), then this was precisely the compromise path which the English state took three decades later in its struggle with the church. Along with all the other facts, it indicates a well-prepared and organized assault on the fortress of the church.