In addition to Eucharistic liturgy, ritual in other forms connected the people with God in Orthodoxy. This was as much a religion of the sign as of the book, not only because Russia's populace was illiterate but also because worship required embodiment (singing, kissing icons, prostrations, signs of the cross), not merely
Figure 12.1 The mosaic and fresco interior of Kyiv's eleventh-century Sofiia Cathedral demonstrates the three layers of church decoration: the uppermost heavenly realm where Christ Pantocrator looks down (not shown); a middle range focusing on the incarnation ofChrist, with imagery of the Mother of God, Christ, and his disciples; at street level images of saints providing models of Christ-like righteousness. The scene of the Annunciation—Archangel Gabriel announces to Mary the virgin birth—is typically included on the arch. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
reading, responding, or listening. Thus holydays were celebrated with processions around the church and through public squares; churches were lined with icons and frescos intended not so much to teach the faith as to open windows to prayer; icons in homes served the same purpose. Inheriting the saints of early Christianity and Byzantium and adding its own, Russian Orthodoxy venerated saints through their icons and relics, often crediting them with "miracle-working" powers.
Orthodoxy lived with a constant tension between inner spirituality—the pursuit of kenosis through liturgy, ritual, and prayer—and the dogmatic, hierarchical, and sacerdotal structure of the Church as institution. This tension burst forth periodically when some felt the Church had fallen into formalism; such outbursts took the form of revivals of mystical, contemplative practice. In the 1300s such a revival swept Byzantium; following Gregory of Palamas, who theorized the presence of God as "uncreated Light," it was called hesychasm after its techniques of meditation, which involved a mantra-like chant of the Jesus Prayer and breath control to achieve states of mystical visions and union with God. Hesychasm reached Russian monasteries by the 1400s but was not fully integrated into practice, as we discuss in this chapter. Similarly, in the second half of the eighteenth century another "hesychast" revival reached Russia, with influences from European Catholicism and Protestantism, as we discuss in Chapter 20.
THE CHURCH AS INSTITUTION
By 1450 the Russian Orthodox Church had a strong presence at the Moscow court, the grand princes leaning on the Church for justification and representation of their power. The metropolitan resided there, as did most of the bishops; major monasteries also kept a presence within Kremlin walls. The Church enjoyed exemptions from secular taxation, administration, and most secular judicial authority save criminal justice, and jealously guarded its right to judge clergy on virtually all issues. It also judged the entire population in religious areas, including family law, marriage, divorce, rape, inheritance and dowry, as well as heresy; it judged its dependent lay peasants and servants in petty crime or other disputes. For all this judicial work the 1551 "Hundred Chapters" (Stoglav) Church Council decreed a system of diocesan courts; when in 1649 the state created a Monastic Chancery to abolish monastic immunities and to try clerics and their dependents for all but religious crime, the Church fought back and in 1669 forced the abolition of the new chancery.
Ostensibly the Church was centrally run and powerful; rejecting the Byzantine Church's agreement with the Vatican to the short-lived Florence-Ferrara Church Union (1438-9), in 1448 the Moscow metropolitanate declared itself independent of Constantinople. That autocephaly was enhanced in 1589 when fellow patriarchs elevated the Moscow metropolitan to the status of patriarch, a move made in anticipation of the 1596 Brest Union of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with Catholicism and in recognition of the fact that Russia was the most powerful political entity in the Orthodox world. Dynamic leaders such as Patriarchs Filaret (1619-33) and Nikon (1652-8) amassed wealth and power for the patriarchate; enterprising bishops did the same for themselves. In reality, the Russian Orthodox Church lacked central institutional control. Each hierarch was sovereign in his vast domains, as were monasteries over their lands. Most of the hundreds of monasteries throughout the realm were small and poor, but a few were economic and cultural powerhouses. The St. Cyril-Beloozero in the north, the Joseph-Volokolamsk and Trinity-St. Sergii near Moscow, and several in Moscow and the Kremlin benefited from generous patronage by elite and tsar. Their vast holdings of peasant villages made them rich, which they reflected in splendid treasuries, architectural ensembles, and cultural production (scriptoria, icon, and fresco workshops). Juridically, monasteries enjoyed immunities not only from the sovereign's courts but also from diocesan courts; they adjudicated cases with in-house panels of elders and tried to avoid even the mandatory criminal jurisdiction of secular authorities when possible. Paralleling this institutional diversity was textual chaos. Virtually each monastery, each cathedral, each parish church used different service books, books that had over time accreted minor variations in rituals or prayers.
Compounding the problem of diocesan and monastic autonomy was the weakness of the church at the parish level. Monasteries could own populated lands throughout the realm and devoted few resources to parish oversight. Dioceses for Orthodox not on monastic land were huge. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Muscovite Church had one metropolitan, two archbishops, and seven bishops; in 1672 there were seventeen such entities, and the Council of 1681/2, recognizing the need for more and smaller dioceses, created four additional ones. But the Church's efforts to further improve the density of church oversight in the 1680s were rebuffed by bishops unwilling to lose lands and resources. Unlike their medieval Catholic counterparts, Russian bishops did not do routine visitations of their dioceses, ruling through minions more renowned for corrupt exploitation than for pastoral solicitude. Parishes were small and scattered; since they elected their own parish priests and supported them with land and goods, they had significant control. Priests had little oversight from their bishops and little leverage against communities' divergences from canonical belief or practice.
VISIONS OF SPIRITUALITY
It is impossible to penetrate the spiritual world ofEast Slavs in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries; one can only observe outward manifestations of spirituality, such as the ideals attributed to a particular saint by his or her hagiographer or the messages conveyed in sermons or history writing. These were, however, remarkably consistent and changed over time in interesting ways.
A major locus of expressions of spirituality was monasticism, so much so that the monastic ideal has been taken by some as the spirituality of the mass of the population. We cannot know that. But it is clear that Russians were drawn to join monasteries in the centuries when Moscow was consolidating its power, from about the late 1300s to about 1500. Whether out of spiritual commitment or for material gain (donors generously supported some monasteries with gifts ofland and treasure), religious leaders founded more than 250 new monasteries in the Russian forest, in addition to many small hermitages of single hermit monks. To the extent that some of the founders associated themselves with the grand princes of Muscovy, Church and state made the most of the association, depicting in hagiography and chronicles Russia's rulers as particularly devoted to pious advisors. Russian historians in turn generalized that Orthodox spirituality particularly characterized early Russia. This is undoubtedly an accident of the sources, since churchmen wrote the histories and saints' Lives, and provided the documentary forms for state documents (such as wills and treaties) that are our principal sources for these centuries. And, as we have said, Moscow's grand princes did patronize the Church as a legitimizing tool. But we must separate the projected image from any claims about personal spirituality.