Real progress in what Gregory Freeze calls the "re-christianization" of the Russian Orthodoxy started in the mid-eighteenth century and continued for at least a century, as discussed in Chapter 20. Enlightened bishops addressed issues of parochial education, policing saints' cults, making sermons regular in the liturgy, standardizing texts, improving parish priests' education, and other familiar issues. Progress was slow: Elise Wirtschafter argues that not until the 1770s did the Church really accomplish Nikon's goal of disseminating standard liturgical books around the realm. Lacking widespread literacy, means of communication, and lay education, well into the eighteenth century Orthodox laymen integrated, adapted, and embraced pagan, folk, or non-canonical behavior and belief in constructing Christianity.
"CHRISTIANIZATION WITHOUT CONVERSION"
A final word might be said about the relationship of the Orthodox Church to other religions in the Muscovite period. On the one hand, despite the state's colonial policy of "tolerating" difference (ethnic, religious, cultural, linguistic, administrative), neither state nor Orthodoxy ever espoused a policy of "religious toleration." As Gary Hamburg has chronicled, Russian religious writers rarely raised the issue well into the eighteenth century. A lively discourse on this theme developed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ukraine in the face of Protestant and Catholic conversion campaigns, but Muscovy faced no such direct challenge to its status as established Church. When confronted with Christian freethinking, Church and state had no compunction about labeling it as heresy, and in the spirited polemics surrounding the Schism, neither side (Polotskii, Avvakum) argued for toleration of religious belief and practice, but rather declared the superiority of their own beliefs.
On the other hand, religious diversity characterized the empire through the Muscovite period for two reasons. First, the Russian Orthodox Church itself, drawing inspiration from the Byzantine Church that was its origin, practiced what might be called a religious version of "politics of difference" when it came to conversion. Paul Bushkovitch points out that, while modern scholars often take the Catholic Church (particularly the post-Tridentine Counter-Reformation) as normative, that modern norm was not what shaped Russian Orthodoxy's attitude towards other faiths. It followed Byzantium's more pragmatic aversion to imposing conversion on non-believers or trying to create confessional unity across the empire. Examining church writings on Islam, Bushkovitch observed that the Russian Church did not develop a vocabulary or tradition of holy war or crusades against Muslims; its rhetoric against Islam was based on tropes about fighting for the faith. Far more virulent were Byzantine writings against Judaism.
Second, state policy allowing colonial subjects to maintain their religions was practical politics. Michael Khodarkovsky makes the opposite argument (that conversion was "an integral part of the government's policies"), but admits that conversion efforts rarely succeeded and were generally balanced by pragmatic tolerance, especially on the borderlands. When Moscow conquered Kazan, it seized Muslim religious property and transformed the city center into Christian space; it welcomed those who wanted to convert and gave them land, military roles and status. But it did not forcibly convert en masse. Russia did the same in Siberia, an impulse that Valerie Kivelson calls "Christianization without conversion": they seized lands and built churches to demonstrate the glory of the tsar's Christian rule, "Christianizing the land and landscape in ways that did not necessarily rely on conversion of the pagan populations." Conversions were often superficial and the whole process was shaped by instrumentalist state policy: across the sensitive borderlands, the state directed governors not to antagonize the iasak-paying natives with abuse, corruption, or interference of the sort that conversion campaigns represented. Through the seventeenth century Russian Orthodoxy was not a highly
missionary Church, and state policy of allowing religious and cultural differences
gave the empire stability.
On the concept of confessionalization, see Alfons Bruning, "Confessionalization in the Slavia Orthodoxa (Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia)? Potential and Limits of a Western Historiographical Concept," in Thomas S. Bremer, Religion and the Conceptual Boundary in Central and Eastern Europe: Encounters of Faiths (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 66-97. An Orthodox theologian on the spirituality of Orthodoxy: John Anthony McGuckin, Standing in God's Holy Fire: The Byzantine Tradition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 2001).
On hesychasm: Paul Bushkovitch, "The Limits of Hesychasm: Some Notes on Monastic Spirituality in Russia 1350-1500,"Forschungen 38 (1986): 97-109; Nil Sorsky: The Authentic Writings, trans., ed., and introd. David M. Goldfrank (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2008); Robert L. Nichols, "The Orthodox Elders (startsy) of Imperial Russia," Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 1 (1985): 1-30.
On church politics and spiritual trends, see John Meyendorff, Byzantium and the Rise of Russia: A Study of Byzantino-Russian Relations in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Robert Romanchuk, Byzantine Hermen- eutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North: Monks and Masters at the Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, 1397-1501 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
On holy fools, see S. A. Ivanov, Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Policing of heresy and cults: David Goldfrank, "Theocratic Imperatives, the Transcendent, the Worldly, and Political Justice in Russia's Early Inquisitions," in Charles E. Timberlake, ed., Religious and Secular Sources in Late Tsarist Russia (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1992), 30-47; Isolde Thyret, "Muscovite Miracle Stories as Sources for Gender-Specific Religious Experience," in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollmann, eds., Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997), 115-31.
On Orthodox revival in Ukrainian lands: David A. Frick, Meletij Smotryc'kyj (Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1995); David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750-1850 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, 1985); Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and his The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
On conversion and attitudes to other faiths: Paul Bushkovitch, "Orthodoxy and Islam in Russia 988-1725," Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte 76 (2010): 117-43; Valerie A. Kivelson, Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth- Century Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Michael Khodarkovsky, "The Conversion of Non-Christians in Early Modern Russia," in Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky, eds., Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 115-43; Gary M. Hamburg, "Religious Toleration in Russian Thought, 1520-1825," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (2012): 515-59.