For the first time the state acted in direct concert with the intelligentsia. (The second time was long delayed: not until 350 years later, in the 1850s, at the time of the Great Reforms, was this alliance renewed.) Nevertheless, the position of the grand prince had one serious flaw—the immaturity of the second generation of Non-Acquirers, who should have more accurately appraised the resistance of the hierarchy and foreseen its arguments. They were responsible for the intellectual side of the operation, so to speak, and they suffered a defeat.[100]
Attacked from all sides, the metropolitan and the assembly nevertheless did not despair, but took counsel and decided to refuse the grand prince's request. A long epistle, replete with quotations from the Bible and the Levitical Books, from the Holy Fathers and the Tatar yarlyks, was written and sent to the grand prince by the secretary Levash. Ivan rejected this: neither the Levitical Books nor the Tatar yarlyks sufficed to convince him. The assembly again took counsel, prepared a second reply, adding further quotations from the Bible, and went in a body to read it to the sovereign. The Biblical texts once again left the grand prince cold. A. S. Pavlov, the author of a study of the secularization of church lands published in Odessa in 1881, which is in my opinion still unsurpassed, conjectures as to why it was necessary for the assembly to prepare a third response, and why this third reply worked, compelling Ivan to retreat. "Probably the grand prince requested certain additional clarifications; at any rate, the assembly once again sent the secretary Levash to him with a new report literally confirming the content of the first," Pavlov writes. Contradicting himself, he adds that the third version "only gives a considerably more detailed discussion of the Russian princes who gave the church districts and villages."[101]
This was precisely the gist of the matter: the "old ways." The lamentations and accusations of Nil Sorskii could not compete with the iron canons of tradition. And the second generation of the Non- Acquirers had nothing more to offer the grand prince: warriors and politicians they were not, merely moralists. Here is what was said in that fateful addition to the assembly's reply, by which the hierarchy with great inventiveness—one must admit—turned back the first secularizing assault:
Thus, in our Russian lands, under thy forefathers, the grand princes— under Grand Prince Vladimir and his son Grand Prince Iaroslav, and after them, under Grand Prince Vsevolod and Grand Prince Ivan, the grandson of the blessed Aleksandr . . . the prelates and the monasteries held cities, regions, settlements, and villages, and received tribute for the church.[102]
A decade later, a third branch of the Non-Acquirer movement arose, and the caustic, tocsinlike preaching of Nil Sorskii's famous pupil, Vassian Patrikeev, with which not even Iosif himself could cope, thundered out over Muscovy. It contained precisely what was needed for a new assault on the fortress of the church. Vassian was a cothinker of the grand prince and a consistent conservative. "Think and reflect," he preached,
who, of those who radiated sanctity and built monasteries, took care to acquire villages? Who entreated the tsars and the grand princes for privileges for themselves, and for offense to surrounding peasants? Who brought suit against another person in a dispute over property lines, or tormented human bodies with whips or placed them in chains, or took away estates from their brothers ... as do those who now give themselves out as wonder-workers? Neither Pakhomii or Evfimii or Gerasim or Afanasii of Athos—not one of them lived by such rules, or taught his disciples anything of the kind.
There followed a detailed enumeration of "our Russian . . . founders of monastic life and wonder-workers, Antonii and Feodosii Pe- cherskii, Varlaam of Novgorod, Sergius of Radonezh, and Dimitrii Prilutskii," who "lived in extreme need so that they often did not even have their daily bread; but the monasteries did not fall into ruin from poverty but grew and flourished in all things, being filled with monks who worked with their own hands and earned their bread in the sweat of their brows.'""'
As for Iosif's dialectical mysticism relating to the individual and the collective, Maxim the Greek replied to it devastatingly: "What you say is ridiculous—being no different than if many persons were living in sin with one harlot, and being found out in this, each of them would say: 'I have committed no sin whatever, for she belongs to all of us equally."""
The arguments advanced by Vassian and Maxim depicted the contemporary disorders in the church as divine punishment for betrayal of the ancient traditions and desecration of "our Russian old ways." Yes, Ivan III could have answered the Josephite majority in the assembly, had he had Vassian Patrikeev at his back, our pious ancestors, the grand princes of Muscovy, did donate "cities, regions, settlements, and villages" to the monasteries. We do not deny this. But
what use can it be to the pious princes who offered all this to God, if you use the offerings unjustly and extortionately, completely contrary to their pious intention? You live in abounding wealth, and eat more than a monk needs, and your peasant brothers, who work for you in your villages, live in dire poverty. . . . How well you repay the devout princes for their pious gifts! . . . They offered their property to God in order that his devotees . . . should practice prayer and silence, unhindered, and spend the excess from their yearly income with love in supporting the poor and the pilgrims. . . . You either turn it into money to lend out in interest, or else keep it in storehouses, in order later to sell it at a high price during times of famine.[103]
We have quoted above Ivan IV's questions to the assembly of 1551, written for him by the fourth generation of Non-Acquirers—the pupils of Vassian Patrikeev and Maxim the Greek, who had by then come to exercise a direct influence on the government of Russia. The Non-Acquirers had grown from hermits and moralists into political fighters and statesmen (and, incidentally, magnificent pamphleteers, with whom neither Herzen nor Dostoevsky would have been ashamed to associate). From the timid Paisii Iaroslavov, who was frightened by the monks of the Troitsa, to Vassian Patrikeev, to whom even Iosif gave in, to Artemii, the tsar's counsellor during the assembly of 1551, Ivan III had summoned into being an intelligentsia capable of interpreting the history of the country as he himself could not. This could have proved to be the beginning of a European course for Russia. But fate decreed otherwise. On July 28, 1503, Ivan III was almost incapacitated by a stroke which "took from him a leg, a hand, and an eye."
Half-paralyzed, he tried to carry on the struggle. At the assembly of 1504, a large group of heretics was handed over to the Josephites, and many of them were burned. But there immediately followed an unexpected event, not yet understood by historians: Archbishop Gen- nadii, the Russian grand inquisitor, who had reached the summit of his power and had just returned from the assembly as a triumphant victor, was suddenly deposed. How are we to explain this?
The grand prince seems to have been preparing a counterblow. In the 1490s, when a group of heretics was also turned over to the inquisitors, there followed not the expected antiheretical campaign throughout the nation, but the first secularization campaign of 1503.