We are still far from lay spirituality, however. It is difficult to see how these ideas emanating from monasticism could filter down to the populace. But in the seventeenth century, new emphases in icons, saints' cults, hagiography, and sermons suggest some changes in popular belief. After the Time of Troubles (1605-13), spirituality seems to have moved towards a more personalized faith, as Paul Bushkovitch argued. In response to enserfment, rising taxes and more aggressive state intervention in society, new saints' Lives showcased saints who represent normal people living lives of piety and good works in home and community. Iuliana of Murom earned saintly status not as a nun, but as a wife, mother, and local benefactor, caring for the ill and poor. The semi-mythical Life of Sts. Peter and Fevroniia became quite popular, with folk elements of female power, magic, and conjugal love. Both these Lives celebrated women's spiritual role and depicted a more inner and more personal piety than seen in the Lives of sixteenth-century saints. Where St. Sergii was depicted advising princes and performing large public miracles for large groups of people, Iuliana's good works were domestic and individual. A similar piety is evoked in a new profusion of cults of local saints unremarkable in worldly achievement but revered for their ability to heal. Their shrines became the sites of posthumous miracles and cycles of miracles done in their time and posthumously were added to their Lives. People flocked to these shrines, finding these saints accessible and human compared to the strict and aloof ascetic saintly model.
The Church responded to this pious enthusiasm by policing sainthood as best it could, given that the Church lacked the sort of formal procedures for canonization that the Latin West enjoyed. On the one hand, periodically the Church recognized new saints, affirming many new cults in the mid-sixteenth century (as a way of embracing conquered lands into the Muscovite state) and in the mid-seventeenth (to nationalize, as it were, some of the local cults). On the other hand, in the seventeenth century the Church, with reformist zeal, also embarked on widespread review of local claims to saintliness and miracle working: they rejected many local cults as more reflective of a town's or monastery's desire to profit from pilgrims than evidence of the revered person's sanctity. They declared some "miracle-working icons" fraudulent, all to the discontent of locals.
New ways of thinking about self, God, and society, and new ways of depicting the spiritual, came from Ukraine to Russia in the second halfofthe seventeenth century, with impact on elite and lay religious life. As we have seen, from the late sixteenth century the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been under siege, first by successful Protestant missionaries and then by even more successful Counter-Reformation Jesuit proselytizing. Many Orthodox magnates converted to Catholicism (pushed by the Polish Vasa kings' refusal to award high office to non-Catholics); Ukrainian Orthodox clergy, townsmen, and some lesser nobles responded by meeting the Jesuits with sophisticated polemics and reviving their Church pastorally. They published vernacular service books, catechisms, and pietistic works to rally the faithful, in the process introducing new ideas, texts, and artistic imagery from the Catholic West. In the first half of the century Ukrainian clerics and Cossack leaders, eager for Russia's aid, regularly traveled to Moscow, bringing with them a reformed faith. After the Cossack Hetmanate of Left Bank Ukraine agreed to become a protectorate of Russia in 1654, cultural contacts multiplied.
At the tsar's court in the 1670s-80s, Ukrainian, Belarus'an, and Russian churchmen (Semeon Polotskii, Karion Istomin, Epifanii Slavinetskii, Sylvestr Medvedev) preached to the tsar's family (including future regent Sofiia and the future Peter I) and boyar elite new concepts of spirituality and self that derived from the Jesuit- based curriculum of Ukrainian schools. As Bushkovitch details, they called people to a more personal morality, replacing the sixteenth century's condemnation of public displays of excess with a focus on vices such as avarice, pride, and lack of charity. In the political realm, they introduced Aristotelian ideas such as the ruler's duty to serve "the common good" and Renaissance concepts of civic virtue; they validated change and social improvement.
At least in major urban centers, visual expression reflected a more activist, "humanist" emphasis that also came from the west through Ukraine. A more realistic, three-dimensional painting style with true perspective and lifelike visages modeled on baroque Catholic painting appeared in icons and frescos. Church architecture sported exuberant baroque external ornament and vibrant colors; donors made their tastes and patronage known, including the tsar's Naryshkin in-laws.
While courtly art and philosophy probably had little impact beyond the Kremlin elites, the more personal and domestic spirituality preached in seventeenth-century hagiography might well have resonated broadly. But one should not assume that all subjects of the tsar were aware of all these innovations; after all, most parishioners lived so far away from their parish church that they rarely attended services. In the absence of parochial schools for the layman and seminary education for parish priests, parishioners might not have understood the faith well to begin with. But those that did, or that observed cross processions and other rituals, were exposed to a dynamic message about faith—one that promoted loyalty to Church and state, one that militated against moral excess, one that turned inward for spirituality, one that saw saintliness in mundane good works, and one that alleviated their anxieties about sickness, death, and the mysteries of life.
POLICING THE FAITH INTO SCHISM
The Church was constantly concerned that laymen did indeed not understand the faith well nor practice it accurately. It policed the faith in two ways in these centuries: judicial processes against those deemed heretics and reform programs to improve religious life. Freethinking tended to enter the trading cities ofNovgorod and Pskov from their contacts with Europe, and "heresies" are recorded there since the fourteenth century. Although some of these ideas spread to Moscow elites, they were not broad popular movements. Some persecuted "heretics" challenged the Church's sacramental claims (strigol'niki), others criticized secular claims to power over the Church, others earned the epithet "Judaizers" for anti-Trinitarian, rationalist and anti-clerical beliefs and others opposed changes in iconography. For trials of heretics, hierarchs met in council, often with secular rulers, and they did not hesitate to execute serious offenders. But David Goldfrank argues that the Church became less harsh in punishing heretics in the sixteenth century, preferring, for example, corrective, penitential monastic exile for religious offenders. That pattern continued through the far more turbulent seventeenth century, as we will see in this chapter, when the Church did not hesitate to execute those who refused to recant, but preferred to offer forgiveness to those willing to accept spiritual rehabilitation.