We can identify several trends in spirituality promoted by literate churchmen who wrote hagiography or led monasteries. One was overtly political, but the more dominant was moralistic, and focused on finding paths to God. The political trend we have encountered in discussions of the "imperial imaginary": the Russian Orthodox Church promoted itself and its secular partners through hagiography and history writing. In the fifteenth century several diocesan and political centers (Novgorod, Tver', Rostov, Suzdal') and Moscow promoted themselves by compiling chronicles and promoting cults of saints that bolstered their own claims to local power. Although the chronicle genre was unwieldy, its compilation of events from biblical times to the present allowed a given princely family or bishop to depict their lands as part ofGod's providential design. Each regional chronicle assembled earlier chronicles from Kyiv Rus', which themselves began with a swift passage through biblical history; they became thicker with local events toward the time of composition, and made sure to include encomia to rulers, bishops, and other notables whose piety and patronage of the faith (the authors, after all, were churchmen) demonstrated God's blessing on their realms. Principalities such as Novgorod, Rostov, and Tver' constructed pantheons of local saints, often founders of local monasteries. After conquest by Moscow most of this regional chronicle writing declined, save for Novgorod, while Moscow inaugurated vast compilations of "all- Rus'" history that put it at the apex of historical time.
In the fifteenth century Church and state also used hagiography to promote grand-princely power, focusing on cults of three sainted bishops who were closely tied to the ruling family. Called the "Moscow miracleworkers," they included Metropolitan Peter (d. 1326), revered for bringing the metropolitancy to Moscow; Metropolitan Aleksii (d. 1378), mentor to the young Grand Prince Dmitrii Donskoi, who ruled 1359 to 1389 and came to the throne at age 9; and Metropolitan Iona (d. 1461), honored for rejecting the Florence-Ferrara Church Union of 1448. The great iconographer Dionisii painted large matching icons of Petr and Aleksii, replete with scenes from their Lives, for Moscow's newly constructed Dormition Cathedral; hagiographies with extensive cycles of their miracles were compiled. Chronicles describe grand princes venerating shrines to these miracle workers on their way out to battle.
Other church writings focused on monastic and by extension lay morality, although most likely the authors had in mind an elite audience, namely monks, their elite patrons, and the court elite to whom bishops sermonized. Here, two trends developed over the fifteenth century from within monasticism. One was a trend to promote a morality focused on public behavior—drunkenness, sexual license, disorder. Church leaders such as Metropolitan Daniil (d. 1547) fulminated on these topics in sermons that were widely reproduced, while monastic leaders such as Joseph Sanin (d. 1508), founder of the Trinity Monastery in Volokolamsk, embedded such concerns in advice to monks. Joseph of Volokolamsk (sainted regionally in 1579 and for the whole Russian Church in 1591) composed a Rule for proper monastic life in communal (cenobitic) monasteries, which he believed offered the discipline and pastoral oversight needed to keep monks focused on God. His Rule became common for Russian monasteries for the next two centuries; it prescribed a life of labor, prayer, abstinence, humility, and self-discipline for monks while their monasteries accumulated property, wealth, and lands, in Joseph's view, all to better serve God.
Another trend in spirituality paralleled Joseph Volotskii's emphasis on cenobitic life; it was related to the influence of hesychasm in Russian monasticism in the fifteenth century. As noted above, hesychasm was a fourteenth-century Byzantine revival of contemplative spirituality; Paul Bushkovitch has shown that when Russia received hesychasm in the fifteenth century, it developed its own "regional variant" that excluded some key elements of hesychast theology (Gregory of Palamas's theory of uncreated light) and practice (mystical visions), although they knew about them. Rather, hesychasm had a more generalized impact of sparking a revival ofcontemplative life in monasteries, modeled on age-old Christian prescriptions for silence, prayer, and ascetic disciplines. Great spiritual leaders were memorialized by great writers: Epifanii Premudryi wrote the Life of St. Sergii of Radonezh (d. 1392), while Pakhomii Logofet authored the Life of St. Cyril of Beloozero, both depicting their subjects as ascetic ideals living lives of discipline, hard labor, humility, and prayer, denying worldly passions in a generally solitary setting to pursue a connection with God. Nil Sorskii, founder of a small hermitage at Sora in the late fifteenth century, integrated hesychastic theology more faithfully in his writings: while writers of the school of Joseph of Volokolamsk took the hesychast concept of "absence of passion" to mean control of sexual desire, for example, Sorskii understood the original Greek meaning of subduing inner turmoil such as greed, pride, and anger. Thus, Sorskii represents a more inward morality than that preached by Joseph and Metropolitan Daniil; his works were revered in monastic circles through the Muscovite period. The goal of hesychasm as ethereal union with God was hauntingly depicted in some of the greatest works of Russian religious art in the fifteenth century—the other-worldly spirituality of icons and frescos by Theo- phanes the Greek in Moscow, Novgorod and the Ferapontov Monastery near Beloozero, and of Andrei Rublev in Vladimir, Zvenigorod, and Moscow.
It was not obligatory that a monk seeking to pursue a life of contemplation live in an eremitic, solitary hermitage, but Nil Sorskii makes clear the challenges posed by the alternative—large monasteries that balanced worldly wealth with inner spirituality (Figure 12.2). Nil argued that too easily such cenobitic communities slip into worldly vices, such as living off the labor of others and indulging in luxurious clothing, treasures, and architectural ensembles. Joseph of Volokolamsk, on the other hand, felt that only the discipline of a large communal monastery governed by a strict Rule would provide the setting for prayerful contemplation. The idea that these two men had a spirited debate about whether monasteries should own land has been dismissed; such debates emerged later, at mid-sixteenth century. Both Joseph and Nil were committed to the same goal—contemplative monastic life—and supported different environments to achieve it. Robert Roman- chuk has detailed how assiduously the monks of the St. Cyril-Beloozero Monastery practiced contemplative spirituality in two forms—one based on pietistic reading modeled on the "desert fathers" (spiritual ancestors of hesychasm) and the other a more scholastic emphasis on study, learning, and analysis. The monastery's wealth made possible its rich library and educational program. To navigate this tension, Russian spiritual leaders developed codes of spiritual discipline, such as Volotskii's Rule, and persistently campaigned against the most egregious of sins of public morality.
Figure 12.2 Outside of Moscow, the Trinity-St. Sergii Monastery was patronized by the royal family and great boyars, and grew wealthy with extensive landholdings. Its thick walls withstood siege in the Time of Troubles and protected the ruling family during disturbances of 1682 and 1689. Photo: Jack Kollmann.
Whether these ideals and moralistic messages penetrated to laymen almost cannot be known. They were embodied in hagiography, icons, and sermons; collections of sermons, from great Byzantine saints such as John of Chrysostom to Moscow's Metropolitan Daniil, were available to be read. But that eliminated the illiterate masses. In principle hagiography was a good medium for promoting lay or religious messages, since saint's lives were read aloud in daily church services. In addition to ascetic saints, promoted by the founder's monastery, Russians also patronized cults of other kinds of holy figures, evidence perhaps of popular spirituality. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, tales of "holy fools," such as St. Michael Klopskii or St. Basil (of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow), circulated widely. Following the ancient Christian model of a "fool in Christ," holy fools lived outlandish lives of extreme poverty, deprivation, and irrational, often theatrical, behavior. Feared and shunned, they were also revered for their willingness to speak truth to power, whether in scolding people who humiliated them or exposing corrupt public officials. The popularity of such saints would suggest that their extreme humanity and vulnerability spoke to people, perhaps in ways that the ascetic saintly model could not. Icons within reason modeled ideal spirituality; icons of holy fools showed them disheveled, while the ascetic saint was presented in modest robes, thin and gaunt, reinforcing the message of both the hesychast and the cenobitic monastic ideals.