On Muscovite towns: J. Michael Hittle, The Service City. State and Townsmen in Russia, 1600-1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1979); Denis J. B. Shaw, "Towns and Commerce" and "Urban Developments," in Maureen Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 298-316, 579-99. On the phenomenon of small towns: Vera Bacskai, "Small Towns in East Central Europe," in P. Clark, ed., Small Towns in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Judith Pallot and Denis J. B. Shaw, Landscape and Settlement in Romanov Russia, 1613-1917 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Among Samuel H. Baron's many important articles on the Muscovite economy and merchants are "The Town in 'Feudal' Russia'," "The Weber Thesis and the Failure of Capitalist Development in 'Early Modern' Russia," "Who Were the Gosti?," "The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Russia: A Major Soviet Historiographical Controversy," and "Vasilii Shorin," in his Muscovite Russia: Collected Essays (London: Variorum Reprints, 1980) and Explorations in Muscovite History (Hampshire: Variorum, 1991). See also Paul Bushkovitch, The Merchants of Moscow, 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Profiles of Shorin and Nikitin: Baron, "Vasilii Shorin"; Erika Monahan, "Gavril Romano- vich Nikitin (?-1698)," in S. M Norris and W. Sunderland, eds., Russia's People of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 46-56. On Cossacks and others as traders in Siberia, see Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) and Christoph Witzenrath, Cossacks and the Russian Empire. 1598-1725 (London: Routledge, 2007).
12
Varieties of Orthodoxy
Empires project supranational ideologies to legitimize their power, often deriving their "imperial imaginaries" from an established religion. For Russia, that was Orthodoxy. Imperial rulers use their dominant religion circumspectly, shaping their message around it but not excluding other religious groups from a sense of loyalty to the state or from practice of their faiths. Chapters 3-5, and 19 discuss the religions of the empire's subject peoples; in Chapter 6 we explored how Muscovite rulers projected an image of themselves as pious defenders of the faith. Since Orthodoxy was the religion of the majority of the empire's population (East Slavic Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarus'ans) and provided the cultural package of ideas and visual expression for political power, here we explore Orthodoxy and its varieties, as faith and institution.
PATHS OF SPIRITUALITY
Christianity came to the East Slavs definitively in 988 when the grand prince of Kyiv, Vladimir, accepted the faith from Byzantium in a pragmatic political alliance, rejecting overtures with Latin Catholicism, Judaism from the Khazars on the lower Volga, and Islam from the Middle Volga Bulgars. There is ample evidence of Christian presence in Kyiv before then, but this conversion lasted. The Greek Church, as typical in eastern Christianity, allowed new converts to practice the faith in their native language. Liturgical and pietistic works, translated into Old Church Slavonic (a South Slavic language dating back to Bohemian Christianization efforts in the ninth century), were sent to Kyiv and to the archbishopric at Novgorod. A centuries-long process of converting the East Slavs began.
Institutionally eastern Orthodoxy is organized as individual churches roughly reflecting political entities or ethnic groups—Syrian, Coptic, Greek, Bulgarian, Georgian, Russian, each with a sacerdotal hierarchy of consecrated priests, bishops, archbishops, and metropolitans. Unlike the Catholic Church (with which Orthodoxy broke by 1054), eastern Christianity did not evolve a single ruler like the Pope; of the four patriarchs (Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem), Constantinople's was respected as senior, but he did not have formal juridical, administrative, or sacerdotal authority over the others. Within national Churches bishops conferred on issues of practice, but eastern Orthodoxy considered the first seven Ecumenical Church Councils (to 787) as an unchangeable foundation of Christian doctrine and did not summon councils for issues of dogma thereafter.
On the one hand, eastern Orthodoxy is a quintessential religion of the book. It regards its task as preserving established dogma and tradition, "changing nothing." It was guided by the works of the early Church—Old and New Testaments, canons, councils and writings of church fathers until approximately the eighth century, hagiography—and practiced a faith that was sacramental, liturgical, and hierarchical. At the same time, eastern Orthodoxy preserved an enduring emphasis on the contemplative side of Christianity dating back to desert father monks of the earliest Christian centuries. Contemplation was always a purpose ofmonastic life in Christianity, but medieval Catholic monastic orders also evolved an activist tradition, reaching outward to do good works—teaching, tending the sick and elderly, missionizing. But in Russia monastic life remained focused on prayer. Monks lived lives of quiet contemplation, founding small eremitic outposts of men living in single cells or larger cenobitic communities guided by rules of common life (generally following Rules from fifth- and sixth-century Constantinople or Jerusalem). Laymen participated in prayerful contemplation even in the liturgy.
Fundamentally Latin Christianity and eastern Orthodoxy preserved the same Eucharistic liturgy, divided into the Liturgy of the Word (readings from Old and New Testaments, hagiography) and Liturgy of Communion. But in Latin Christianity in medieval centuries the Liturgy of the Word took on a didactic character with sermons and art; Pope Gregory the Great's decree around 600 underscored the goal of teaching the faithful by mandating that religious painting should be done in a representational style to instruct the illiterate. In eastern Orthodoxy, by contrast, visual expression (icons, frescos) was done in a two-dimensional style representing "God's reality" rather than profane life; espousing such an ethereal approach to the visual was one of the ways in which the Church secured a victory over opponents of religious imagery (iconoclasm) in the eighth century. In Orthodoxy images and Eucharistic liturgy were used to create a mystical union of believer with God called "theosis." Contemplation and veneration (not worship) of images opened up conduits of God's grace and connection with the sublime. In liturgy, all the human senses were drawn into the pursuit of theosis: the aroma of beeswax and incense, the splendor of priestly robes and gold-leafed icons, the flickering of candlelight, the soaring voices of choirs and celebrants, the touch of kissing icons, the physical exertion of prostrations and repeated signs of the cross, even the fatigue of intentionally long service and repetition of prayers and supplications. The three-fold interior imagery successively unfolded the story of Christ's incarnation (see Figure 12.1). Scripture was read in the first half of the service, but sermons were not a regular practice throughout the early modern centuries; liturgy was repetitive prayer, chant, and ritual. As theologian John Anthony McGuckin argues, all these sensory and kinetic elements were designed to physically exhaust the body in order to place the worshipper in a space of inner calm, emptiness, and readiness to connect with the Divine.