REGENT COLLEGE

The Relationship of Church and State in Russia: 988 to 1492

AN ESSAY IN

G.S.: ‘History of Russia’ PREPARED

FOR Sarah Williams

BY

Aubrey Driedger

0220032

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

February 25, 2015

Word Count: 11,500

The chronological span of this essay begins with the baptism of

Rus’ under St Vladimir and the rise of the Kievan state (988) and

ends with a centralized, Muscovy State Church under Ivan III in

1492. In this span, Russia’s history reflects a religiously-

oriented society in which the interlocking spheres of politics

and religion, ruler and priesthood, dictated the ideas and

behaviours of Russian society and culture. For ideas – political,

religious, or otherwise – do not arise out of nowhere; they have

a context, a history and a natural progression, and are often

created to answer a particular set of historical problems. Thus,

as the political historian Francis Fukuyama observes, “It is

impossible to develop any meaningful theory of political

development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and

follow distinct development paths.” (Italics added.) 1 This essay seeks to

describe and analyze the function of Christianity as a religious

institution – that is, of its ideas and patterns of behaviour –

in establishing what Fukuyama calls a ‘mental model of reality’

1 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, First edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 442.

2

for Russian society and culture. Here, we will look at the

development of Russia’s socio-political and religious ideologies,

and the effects which Christianity may or may not have had in her

formation of a national identity and conscientiousness.

In order to fully appreciate the shifts and developments

that occurred in the relationship between Russia’s Church and

State, we must first however understand the nature of

institutions and how they emerge over time as a part of the

culture in which they are situated. For institutions are never

entirely static, nor do they just magically appear.2 Instead,

institutions are by their very nature persistent structures or

mechanisms of social order which govern a set of behaviours or a

set group of people.3 Institution therefore are much more than

the material entities which represent them; they provide a

“‘mental model of reality” which, as Fukuyama explains:

“attributes causality to various factors – oftentimes invisible

ones – and their function is to make the world more legible,

predictable, and easy to manipulate.”4 He writes:

In earlier societies, these invisible forces were spirits, demons, gods, or nature; today, they are

2 Ibid., 42.3 Ibid., 6.4 Ibid., 442.

3

abstractions like gravity, radiation, economic social classes, and the like. All religious belief constitute a mental model of reality, in which observable events are attributed to or caused by non- or dimly observable forces… (Italics added)5

Religious institutions, as with the State’s, provide therefore a

necessary set of ideas and practices which makes reality more

palatable for those who acknowledge their authority.

In his book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama observes

that the emergence of an institution – religion, state, or

otherwise – emerge when a ‘set group of people’ invest a greater

level of ‘intrinsic meaning’ into a particular set of ideas and

behaviours than others. He writes, “When norms are invested with

intrinsic meaning, they become objects of what the philosopher

Georg W.F. Hegel called the “struggle for recognition.””6 By

recognition, here, neither Hegel nor Fukuyama is referring to a

material or economic recognition; it is not a resource to be

coerced or consumed. Instead, the institution’s ‘struggle for

recognition’ is one of public acknowledgement, of social

acceptance of its ‘mental model of reality’ – of the intrinsic

worth of its gods, ideas, rituals, and/or customs. Institutions

only truly emerge as a part of the conscious identity of a set

5 Ibid.6 Francis Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 42.

4

group of people, and is, as Fukuyama observes, “an

intersubjective state of mind by which one human being

acknowledges the worth or status of another human being” or

institution.7 As ‘mental models of reality,’ Religious and/ or

State institutions only truly emerge, therefore, when the ideas

and patterns of behaviour they seek to enforce are acknowledged

by a set ‘group of people’ who accept “the fundamental justice

of the system as a whole and are willing to abide by its rules.”

8

There is however a second facet to the emergence of an

institution – namely, the institution’s political and social

acknowledgement of the people for which it seeks to govern. For

in order to emerge in and with the culture and society,

institutions must also establish mechanisms for social

advancement, such as an economic social class, which makes

submitting to an institution economically and socially

advantageous to its citizens. Today we label this kind of

recognition “identity politics,” but as Fukuyama observes:

[E]ven before the rise of the modern world, recognition was a crucial driver of collective behaviour. People struggled not just for individual gain but also on

7 Ibid., 41.8 Ibid., 42.

5

behalf of communities that wanted to have their way of life – their customs and gods and traditions – respectedby others.9

In other words, there requires to one degree or other a quid pro

quo relationship, in which an institution is only recognized

insofar as its ideas and patterns of behaviour acknowledge the

intrinsic worth and dignity of the ‘governed.’ Therefore, as

Fukuyama rightly observes, Institutions are, as with all

political powers, “ultimately based on social cohesion…Political

power is the product not just of the resources and numbers of

citizens that a society can command but also the degree to which

the legitimacy of leaders and institutions is recognized.”10

This essay seeks to study the relationship of Church and

State as two interlocking, but independent, institutions, and

their development in the formation of a Russian national

identity. Here, we must account for the social and political

developments of Russia’s institutions and how their ideas and

patterns of behaviours came to be recognized as a part of the

national consciousness of Russia. This need for political

recognition was crucial in the development of Russia’s

institutions, for it was essentially what motivated the

9 Ibid.10 Ibid., 43.

6

development of a prescriptive set of behaviours and ideas that

sought to apply the Judeo-Christian idea of the kingdom of God in

the formation of Russian society and culture. The rise of the

Muscovy state is particular important in this regard, as it

sought to identify itself as the Kingdom of God on earth, and its

people as God’s ‘Chosen people’, whose ruler chosen by God was

prepared to lead them to salvation.”11 It is thus the contention

of this essay that as long as the “Patrimonial”12 system remained

(i.e., until the end of Tsarist Monarchy), the desire for

political recognition is what essentially drove the developments

of Russia’s political and religious ideas throughout it’s history

and development. It will be the task of this essay to demonstrate

the effects Byzantine Christianity had in developing and

reconceptualising Russian society and culture along Orthodox

Christian ideas as the kingdom of God on earth.

The periodization of Russian History

This essay will be structured according to four major

periods in Russian history. The following four periods reveal 11 Michael S. Flier, “Political Ideas and rituals,” in Maureen Perrie, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 388.12 By “Patrimonial,” here, I am following Max Weber’s definition, which understands the State government as the property of the ruler, and the state bureaucracy as essentially an extension of the Ruler’s household. See Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, 10.

7

significant institutional shifts in political recognition for

both the Church and the State of Russia. The revered Church

historian, and last Ober-Prokurator of the Holy Synod, Anton

Kartashev, argues that Russia’s history can be divided into six

periods. However, for the sake of this essay, we will look only

at the first three periods in which Russia’ grew politically and

institutionally as a nation and as a unified culture and society:

(1) The pre-Mongolian Kievan period (988-1237); (2) The period of

the Tatar (Mongol) Yoke (1238-1480); (3) Russia’s ecclesiastical

break with Constantinople and the subsequent rise of the Muscovy

Stand and autochephalous Church of Russia.13

Period 1: Russian Antiquity

The Franco-Russian historian Eck identifies this period as

the ‘Age of Russian Antiquity.’14 The tenth to the twelfth

centuries is the pre-mongolian kievan period, and is marked by

the expansion of Christianity into Russia by Byzantine monks and

missionaries. This period, Pospielovsky observes, “was marked by

a particularly high status of the Church, her bishops, priests,

13 The structure of my essay follows an outline laid out by Kartashev inPospielovsky’s book: Dimitry Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), 34.14 Ibid., 37.

8

and especially monastic holy fathers. Their moral status and

authority were undoubtedly higher than those of the secular

rulers.”15 Here, moreover, we have the emergence of the Kievan

state and the establishment of the Riurikid dynasty. However,

after Russia’s conversion, the Rus’ state in Kiev forfeited its

autonomy for political recognition by the Byzantine Roman Empire,

replacing its own customs and laws, with the laws, religious

rites and practices, and political system of the Byzantines,

which Church and Emperor jointly upheld. This created what

Obolensky calls an “imperial hegemony,” which gave the Byzantine

state unprecedented political power and recognition in foreign

lands, and forcing peripheral rulers such as Vladimir into

subjugation to the Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople.

The rise of the Kievan State.

While the ‘baptism of Rus’ did not occur until the time of

St. Vladimir in 988, there is enough evidence to suggest that

Rus’, at least in the south-west region (i.e., the Balkan

peninsula) had at least known about Christianity since the fourth

century. There were, for instance, a number of Greek colonies and

15 Ibid., 15.

9

churches that existed along the Black Sea coast, from the early

fourth century.16 There even existed a Diocese on the Crimean

peninsula, in the town of Surozh (now known as Sudak) from the

third century. There were also major Greek settlements throughout

much of Georgia and Armenia – in fact, the Armenian kingdom, as

Pospielovsky states, “was the first nation in the world to adopt

Christianity as its official religion – in the early fourth

century, even before the Roman Empire.”17 Thus, by the ninth and

tenth centuries, it is fair to assume that Russia had some

working knowledge of Christianity, even if it were only

peripheral.

Tenth-century Russia, moreover, formed a central link

between Europe and Asia. Its rivers: the Dnieper and the Volga

provided safe passage for international trade. Greeks, Arabs,

Franks and Scandinavian merchants all traded within Russian

lands, stopping at major cities – Kiev in the south and Novgorod

in the north – bringing their religion along with them. In Kiev

especially, as Nicolas Zernov suggests, “the Russians became

familiar with the greatest religions of the world: the Arabs were

Mahometans (i.e., Muslims); the eastern neighbours of the

16 Ibid., 16.17 Ibid.

10

Russians, the Khazars, professed Judaism; the Greeks belonged to

the Eastern Orthodox Church; the Franks and the Scandinavians

were Latin Christians.”18 These two cities would thus both play

major roles in the conversion of Rus’ to Christianity and in its

later formation as the intellectual centres of Russian culture

and society.

According to the early Russian Primary Chronicle (RPC), in 882 an

army of northern Russians from Novgorod, the Varangian

Slovenians, led by Prince Oleg, descended upon Kiev and killed

the kievan rulers Askold and Dir. Prince Oleg and his successors

– Igor’, Olga, Sviatoslav and Vladimir – would establish Kiev as

their new capital – the ‘mother of all Russian cities,’ as Oleg

put it.19 Kiev had the advantage of a number of natural defences;

its ground was bountifully fertile, with a mixed woodland of oak,

elm, birch, ash, maple and pine, with trees up to 90 metres high.

This provided Kiev with a level security that was conducive for

establishing economic trade and state-building without the fear

of major raids.

Until Vladimir’s conversion in 988, the Riurikid (male)

rulers were undoubtedly all passionate pagans – likely a mixture

18 Nicholas Zernov, Russians and Their Church. (New York, N.Y: The Macmillan Company, 1945), 7.19 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 19.

11

of Norse theology and Slavonic ritualism as seen in the Rus’ god

of Perun.20 Christianity, nevertheless, was gradually making

headway in Kiev, the Riurikid rulers permitted many Byzantine

missionaries such as Cyril (i.e., Constantine the philosopher)

and his brother Methodius to travel to live within Russian lands,

and to evangelize local tribal chieftains of the middle Dnieper.

In fact, by the mid-tenth century, according to Pospielovsky,

“there were at least two Christian Churches in the city of Kiev

alone.”21 According to the RPC, moreover, the most famous of

Kievan nobility to have converted to Christianity in this time

was the widow of Prince Igor’, Princess Olga, who converted to

Byzantine Christianity around 955. The RPC portrays her as a wise

and cunning stateswoman, who averted a series of propositions

both by the Emperor Constantine VII himself, and by local tribal

chieftains, such as prince Mal of the Derevlians – the tribe

which had originally killed her husband, and attempted to kidnap

her son and future heir, Sviatoslav.22

The early period of the Kievan state was marked by

20 Mark Yoffe, Perun: The God of Thunder, Studies in the Humanities, v. 43 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).21 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 19.22 Nestor, Samuel H Cross, and Olgerd P Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle. (Cambridge, Mass.: Mediaeval Academy of America, 2012), 78.

12

persistent political and social instability, and often prevented

Rus’ from forming into unified, cohesive nation. Rus’ was still

very much in its primitive stages; political recognition required

a number of tribal alliances, the pacifying of recalcitrant

tribes in order to secure trade and commerce along both the Volga

and Dnieper trade routes, as well as treaties with major

international players such as Byzantium and Khazaria (911 and

944). The Riurikid dynasty, however, still remained a major power

along the Russian Steppes; they expanded the state territory,

secured major trades cities, and brokered more import and export

than Russia had ever seen in its history. However, the political

recognition of the Kievan state within and by Russian tribes was

extremely fragile, existing only insofar as tribal alliances

remained in tact. Any sign of political instability almost always

resulted in a series of violent attacks upon Kiev. In this

regard, the greatest enemy to the political and social cohesion

of Rus’ was the Pechenegs, a violent and highly effective

military tribe that lived between Kiev and Byzantium. Politically

speaking, an alliance with the Pechnegs was an economic necessity

for both Kiev and Tsar’grad (Constantinople). In fact,

Constantine VII’s De Administrado Imperio, spells out a containment

policy by utilizing the Pechnegs as a buffer to keep Rus’ from

13

entering the ‘imperial city of the Romans'. The emperor explains:

the Rus’ cannot reach the city “either for war or for trade, unless they are at peace with the Pechenegs, because when the Rus’ come with their boats to the barrages of the river and cannot pass through unless they lift their ships off from the river and carry them past by portaging them on their shoulders, then the men of this people of the Pechenegs set upon them and, as they cannot do two things at once, they are easily routed and cut to pieces.23

The aforementioned quote reveals three fundamental issues

concerning the early development of the early Kievan State:

First, that the Kievan state’ was initially only politically

recognized by countries outside of Rus’, by countries who wished

to trade with her (i.e., Khazars, Bulgarian Arabs, Franks and

Scandinavians, and the Greeks).’ In Russia, on other hand, tribes

only joined together if there was financial gain to be won.

Secondly, no matter how strong or powerful the Kievan state had

become, political recognition of Kiev by the local chieftains

would not be won over by acts of coercion. Thirdly, yet not

unrelated with the latter two: as long as alliances remained

insecure and unstable amongst the tribes of the Dnieper the

Kievan state would remain both economically and politically

inferior and unable to progress in developing as a state and 23 Constantine, De Administrando Imperio, New, rev. ed, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, v. 1 (Washington, D.C: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967), 216–23.

14

nation. Strictly coercive means of recognition were not going to

hold Rus’ together, Kiev and the Riurikid rulers were in need of

some kind of other mechanism of social order to do this –

something that Vladimir would find in a centralized religion and

place of worship.

The Baptism of Rus’.

The rise of a national religion within Rus’ arose as a

result of Vladimir’s need for recognition, both within Rus’, by

local tribes and chieftains, and outside Rus’, by the countries

surrounding its borders. From the outset Vladimir I’s ascension

to the throne was never entirely secure; his lack of military and

material resources made him and the kievan state weak and

susceptible to attack from local hordes along the Dnieper,

particular from those whom he had traded promises of wealth and

land for military support against his brother Yaropolk. In the

beginning years of his reign, moreover, the religious character

of Rus’ was still very much individualistic; local tribes

worshipped local gods, and performed ethnic rituals and practices

according to local customs. There was thus no central place of

worship, no common ideology, and no resources in which to unite

the tribes of the middle Dnieper. Vladimir, therefore, knew that

15

if he was going to unite Rus’ as a nation under his rule, and to

develop a national identity that was subservient to the Kievan

State, he would have to find some new “mental model of reality”

that would unite the tribes both ideologically and socially as a

nation with a common Rus’ heritage.

As very much a pagan himself, Vladimir saw an opportunity to

unite the tribes of the Dnieper by centralizing all the tribal

gods, their worship, and practices into one specific location.

The RPC explains that Vladimir’s first step was to construct a

pantheon of gods in Kiev: on “the hills outside the castle: one

of Perun, made of wood with a head of silver and a mustache of

gold, and others of Khors, Dazh’bog, Stribog, Simar’gl, and

Mokosh.”24 The six-god pantheon was thus designed to appeal to the

various peoples under his rule, and, as one historian observes,

“seems to represent an attempt by Vladimir to identify himself

(and the Kievan state) with the cults known and associated along

the Dnieper. ”25 Here, we can observe the emergence of a new

‘mental model of reality’ in which the spheres of politics and

religion were progressively uniting on ideological and social

24 Nestor, Cross, and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle., 93.25 Simon Franklin, The Emergence of Rus, 750-1200, Longman History of Russia (London ; New York: Longman, 1996), 106.

16

lines, creating what Pospielovsky calls a ‘national unified

ideology.’26 Vladimir understood that if was going to unite the

Rus’ tribes into a single people it would have to be through a

new “model of reality” in which all the gods of each tribe would

be included and recognized as a part of a national ideology.27 The

RPC presents Rus’ pre-Christian worship as a collective action:

“The people sacrificed to them, calling them gods, and brought

their sons and their daughters to sacrifice them to these devils.

They desecrated the earth with their offerings, and the land of

Rus' and this hill were defiled with blood.”28 According to the

church historian Pospielovsky, moreover, the early period of

Vladimir’s reign was the only period of Russian history when

“human sacrifices were made to pagan gods and Christians were

actively persecuted.”29

The degree to which Vladimir succeeded in uniting the tribes

of the Dnieper is however another question entirely. Indeed, the

very fact that he converted Rus’ to Christianity only a few

years’ later reveals how ineffective the pantheon ‘mental model’

was in uniting the tribes along ideological and social lines. It

26 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 20.27 Ibid., 19.28 Nestor, Cross, and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle., 93.29 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 19.

17

appears, therefore, that Vladimir’s hopes for national

recognition through a centralized place of worship did not create

the social change he was hoping for. In fact, it couldn’t. The

Kievan state had spread itself out too far, and the Rus’ tribes

did not have a clerical class in which to propagate the new

patterns of behavior. In the end, therefore, where Rus’ paganism

had failed in uniting Rus’ tribes with a common heritage,

Christianity would eventually succeed.

The RPC portrays the conversion of Rus’ to Christianity as

a two-stage process. First, Vladimir invited a number of

representatives from various monotheistic faiths. He is first

confronted by Bulgarian Muslims, who exhorted him: “Though you

are a wise and prudent prince, you have no religion. Adopt our

faith, and revere Mohomet (Mohammed)!”30 Vladimir sought to

inquire further into their religion and practices, but decided

ultimately that the religious restrictions of Islamic faith were

unsuitable to the Rus’ way of life. To the Jewish

representatives, Vladimir’s is alleged to have inquired into the

reason they had no homeland? The Jews explained that God had

become angry with their forefathers and expelled them to live

30 Nestor, Cross, and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, The Russian Primary Chronicle., 96.

18

among the Gentiles “on account of our sins. Our land was then

given to the Christians.” For which Vladimir responded, "How can

you hope to teach others while you yourselves are cast out and

scattered abroad by the hand of God? If God loved you and your

faith, you would not be thus dispersed in foreign lands. Do you

expect us to accept that fate also?"31 He thus chose Christianity.

But which expression – Latin or Greek?

Vladimir decided to then send emissaries to the Germans and

to the Greeks, to experience their versions of Christianity.

According to the RPC, the emissaries were looking for a particular

experience or encounter, a mystical event of beauty and glory of

some sort which could not otherwise be experienced here on earth:

Then we went among the Germans, and saw them performing many ceremonies in their temples; but we beheld no glorythere. Then we went to Greece, and the Greeks led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.32

And so, Vladimir decides to be baptized, as with his princes, and

the whole nation to the Greek expression of the still undivided

31 Ibid., 97.32 Ibid., 111.

19

Christianity. Vladimir is said to have converted at the Church of

St Basil, along with his entire retinue. After, the residing

priest explained the tenets of the faith, including the teachings

of the seven councils and the creeds, and is warned of the

viciousness of the Latins and their teachings. Once he arrived

home, he directed that the idols be torn down and burned or

beaten, and that a church be built upon the pagan place of

worship.

The effects of conversion and its consequences on Russian society

In this section, we will not investigate so much Vladimir’s

strategy for converting Russia as to the extant to which

Byzantine Christianity and culture reshaped the character and

life of Russian society. This early period of Christianity (988-

1237) was marked by an unprecedented level of power and

recognition in favor of the Church and its See in Constantinople.

What is more important here is the measure of influence the ideas

and practices of Byzantine Christianity had in reshaping the

social and political spheres of Rus’ culture, in its policies and

the statutes of its leaders, and in the life of specific Russian

20

Christians such as Vladimir Monomakh and Metropolitan Illarion.

Here, therefore, we will attempt to demonstrate the extent to

which Rus’ society and culture adopted the Byzantine ‘mental

model of reality’ of Christianity.

The RPC portrays Vladimir as the new “Constantine of mighty

Rome, who baptized himself and his subjects, for the Prince of

Rus’ imitated the acts of Constantine himself.”33 To the degree

this is actually true, however is another question entirely. For

as Pospielovsky righty observes, Vladimir’s Church Statutes and

initiatives “reflected a society that was quite different from

Byzantium which, with its concept of symphony, had known no

division between the secular and the ecclesiastic spheres, even

at the level of legal court.”34 St. Vladimir instead established

two courts, an ecclesial court and secular court. However,

unbeknown to him at the time, the establishing of an ecclesial

court in Rus’ inevitably resulted in a decrease of political

power and recognition for the Kievan state. The former court

oversaw all moral transgressions by the laity: “matrimonial and

divorce matters, polygamy, blasphemy, foul language, matters

relating to dowry, kidnapping of brides, rape, property disputes

33 Ibid., 124.34 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 25.

21

between husband and wives, adultery, assaults and physical fights

within family.”35 In fact, as Vladimir’s Church Statute dictates,

“the princes as with the boyars were forbidden to interfere with

the ecclesial courts, and to “not hold court without the

Metropolitan Representative.”36

The secular court, on the other hand, in modern political

terms, served as the executive wing of the ecclesial court.

Vladimir’s court thus exacted ‘justice’ in accordance with what

the Church had decided as “just” punishment. For a time, in fact,

Vladimir even refused to punish guilty parties, believing any

punishment to be in direct contradiction to Christ’s command,

“Thou shalt not judged.” It was the Greek clergy who remained in

his court, however, who demanded that a death penalty be imposed.

At first Vladimir refused, but later succumbed to the pressures

of increasing State revenue, and thus established a series of

monetary fines according to what the Clergy saw as ‘just’

payment.37 Vladimir made it clear that the secular power was

derivative from the norms of Christian moral teaching, and that

35 Daniel H. Kaiser, trans., The Laws of Rus’ - Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, vol. 1,The Laws of Russia Series 1 (Salt Lake City: Charles Schlacks Publisher,n.d.), 43.36 Ibid., 1:42.37 Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth; Eastern Europe 500-1453 (New York, N.Y: Praeger Publishers, Inc, 1971), 316.

22

all secular powers in Rus’ was limited by the Church and its

“seven ecumenical councils.”38 However, the Church Statute also

states that these limitations on the secular powers related only

to Christian subjects; pagans, on the other hand, were outside

the purview of the Church, and thus could be treated in such ways

as local lords and princes saw fit. The Statute also states that

the secular court were to “keep nine parts [of fees collected]

for [the prince's] court, and [to give] the tenth part to the

holy church”39—something that had not been seen in Eastern

civilization, not even in Byzantine.

Post-conversion Rus’ therefore marked an unprecedented level

of political recognition in favour of the Church, and in doing

so, to the “Byzantine imperial hegemony of the Emperor and

Patriarch of Constantinople.”40 In converting to the Byzantine

expression of Christianity, Vladimir, therefore, in effect, had

handed over the power and recognition of the Kievan State to the

Church of Byzantium – something Ivan III and subsequent Tsars

would seek to gain back in centuries to come. One of the reasons

38 Kaiser, The Laws of Rus’ - Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries, 1:44.39 Ibid., 1:43.40 Jonathan Shepard, “The Byzantine Commonwealth 1000-1550,” in Michael Angold, ed., Eastern Christianity, The Cambridge History of Christianity, v. 5 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 6.

23

for this radical imbalance of power and recognition is put

forward by Dimitry Pospielovsky, who argues that the Byzantine

“package” – its laws, religious ideas and practices, and

political system – was too sophisticated for the primitive

country of Rus’ to digest all at once.41 Thus, as Pospielovsky

observes,

In Russia, the entire complex Byzantine legacy, with itsminutely developed legal system with codes and rules, its welfare system of hospitals, hospices, its sophisticated education, poetics, oratory, philosophizing and, most of all, its complex theology – was all at once pushed down the throat of the infantile nation.42

Rus’ was thus slowly yet forcibly being reshaped according

to the better and more sophisticated ‘mental model of reality’ of

the Byzantines. Obolensky, moreover, argues that there were four

major reasons why Russia acclimated to the Byzantine model: The

first of these was for practical reasons: In primitives states

such as Rus’ “the growing complexity of social and economic

relations created legal problems which could no longer be solved

by recourse to traditional customary laws.”43 The second reason

was political: The Roman-Byzantine political and law system

41 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 34.42 Ibid.43 Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth; Eastern Europe 500-1453, 314.

24

provided a means to increased power and security for the state.

Third was for religious reasons: adoption of Christianity made it

also necessary to follow a prescriptive moral code of Christian

discipline and behaviors. “The ‘reception’ of Roman law was thus

bound up with the adoption of canon law.” 44 Finally, the fourth

was cultural. According to Obolensky, primitive justice codes

such as existed in Kiev “could not compete…with the wisdom and

perfection ascribed to by the Byzantine law books, especially to

those of Justinian whose authority in legislative matters was

regarded as sacred both in Byzantium and in the lands of its

commonwealth.”45 In his magisterial work The Byzantine Commonwealth,

Dimitri Obolensky observes that this imbalance of power and

recognition formed a pattern of sublimation that “resulted in the

transplantation of the Christian Tradition of Byzantium to the

countries of Eastern Europe.” 46 Nowhere is this more evident,

however, than in the testimony of fourteenth century Byzantine

historian, Nicephorus Gregoras. In the thirty-sixth book of his

Byzantine History, he deals with the history of the Russian Church,

writing:

44 Ibid.45 Ibid., 315.46 Ibid., 294–95.

25

From the time when this nation (i.e., Rus’) embraced holy religion and received the divine baptism of the Christians, it was laid down once for all that it be under the jurisdiction of one Bishop…; and that this primate would be subject to the See of Constantinople, and would receive from it the laws of the spiritual authority.47

This ‘transplantation’ of Byzantine politics, laws, and religion

would inevitably create a mental model of reality which forced

peripheral rulers such as Vladimir to accept the overlordship of

the Byzantine Empire, of its courts, lawyers, and clergy, who

would continue to remain eternally loyal to the Emperor and

Metropolitan in Constantinople while in Rus’.48

But let us now return to specific instances of Russian

Christianity as exemplified in the life of particular Russians.

As it stands there are very few historical accounts of Russian

Christians in this period. However, the ones that do exist

provide us with a clear picture of the degree to which

Christianity had clearly transformed the Russian way of life. The

RPC reports, for instance, with obvious exaggeration that before

his conversion Vladimir had over 800 wives and concubines, for

which he had all released after his conversion save the Emperor’s47 Nicephorus Gregoras, “Historiae Byzantinae,” xxxvi, cap. 22-3, ed. I. Bekker (Bonn. 1855) III, pp. 512-13; translated in Dimitri Obolensky,“Byzantium, Kiev, and Moscow: A Study in Ecclessiastical Relations,” Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University 11 (1957): 24. 48 Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth; Eastern Europe 500-1453, 295.

26

sister, Anna, who he had received at his conversion as a price

for returning the Crimean peninsula to Byzantium. 49 Historians

such as Dimitri Likhachev, moreover, have also looked at

Vladimir’s preoccupation with “Christian education, and with

building churches,” citing such material investments as a clear

sign of the religious sincerity of Vladimir’s personal

conversion.50

Another early remarkable document that arose out of this

time was the Sermon On Law and Grace by the first “Russian native

Metropolitan” – a position originally intended only for Greeks –

about a decade after the construction of the St. Sophia

Cathedral, during the reign of Vladimir son, Yarsolav the Wise.51

And as Pospielovsky observes: “Taking into consideration that it

was written a mere half-century after the introduction of

literacy (in Rus’), its richness of expression has no parallels

in the vernacular writings of Europe of the period.”52 The Sermon

presents a philosophy of history which incorporates the history

of Rus’ within the general history of Judeo-Christianity – that

is from the historical vision of Creation in Genesis to the reign

49 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 21.50 Ibid.51 Ibid., 28.52 Ibid., 29.

27

of Yaroslav the Wise. The Sermon is divided into four parts, in

which he sees a dialectical process of law and grace: in the

relationship between Abraham’s wives, Hagar and Sarah; the law of

Moses which leads to slavery and the grace of Christ which brings

freedom; and in the third part, when, as Ellen Hurtz observes,

“the people of Rus’ converted (from paganism) to Christianity

under the tutelage of Vladimir, the imitator (podobnik) of

Constantine and the apostle of the Russian land;” and finally, in

the fourth part, he describe the progress of Christianity in Rus’

as contingent upon the faithfulness of the Tsar, and ends with a

prayer seeking God’s “help to ensure that Yaroslav and all Rus’

will reach the final goal of eternal salvation.”53 According to

Pospielovsky, Illarion’s Sermon envisages an “independent

Christian Russian state, thus implicitly rejecting Byzantine

claims of suzerainty over Russia.” He adds:

He claims a global missionary (or messianic) importance of the conversion of Rus’, thus foreshadowing the “ThirdRome” and the “Holy Russia” ideologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.54

That Illarion saw Kiev and Byzantium in competition with one

another can, and certainly has been, disputed on a number of 53 See Ellen Hurwitz, “Metropolitan Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace: Historical Consciousness in Kievan Rus’,” Brill Publications, Russian History, 7, no. 1 (1980): 324.54 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 29.

28

accounts. 55 However, Illarion’s national pride is apparent in the

potential optimism of Kiev as the continuation of Christ’s

mission, which spread throughout Judea by the apostles, and

throughout the Graeco-Roman world by the Emperor and Patriarchate

of Constantinople, and thus has now been passed down to the Tsar

and the Russian people to continue Christ’s mission until his

return.56 It would thus be more accurate to describe Illarion’s

Sermon as appropriating an Eastern eschatology and applying it

the Russian socio-religious life. Either way, Illarion’s Sermon is

a clear example of the typical Russian pattern of appropriating

the Byzantine heritage and applying it the Russian way of life.

The final document we will look at here is a remarkable

example of Russian piety, by the Kievan Prince Vladimir Monamakh

to his children written in the 12th century. His Instruction, as

Pospielovsky sees, “is remarkable in its deep appreciation of

Christianity and its sense of true Christian humility.”57 Vladimir

exhorts his children to not follow “ the Russian tendency to

avenge each case of personal insult, to subdue our enemies by the

sword,” and explains that only way to overcome one’s enemies, “is

55 Hurwitz, “Metropolitan Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace: HistoricalConsciousness in Kievan Rus’,” 331.56 Ibid., 332.57 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 30.

29

repentance, tears, and charity…I beg you in the name of God,

remember these three, however hard it may be to abide by them.”58

He then reminds them to never to forget to pray; whether in

church or at home, “even while riding a horse… and if no other

prayer comes to you, then secretly, in your mind, repeat

constantly: “Lord, have mercy” for that prayer is so much better

than all sorts of ungracious thoughts.”59 “Most of all” Monamakh

continues, “don’t ignore the poor and, as much as you can give

alms to orphans and give protection to widows.”60 This reveals a

small, but rich, way Eastern Christianity had become so embedded

in Russian culture and society.

Period 2: The Tatar (Mongol) Yoke, and Russia’s ‘Age of Silence.’

Francis Fukuyama argues that one of the major motivators in

Russia’s institutional development and history was her need to

wage war.61 And while this is certainly an element for which

considering Russia’s history is a valid assumption. But, in many

respects, this is like looking at the glass as half-empty. For

58 Ibid.59 Ibid.60 Ibid.61 Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 389.

30

the history of Russia also reveals a picture of foreign

oppression, both politically by the Byzantine Emperor and

Patriarchate and militarily by the Tatar Yoke. It has been the

contention of this essay that Russia’s institutional development

and history was essentially driven by the desire for political

recognition both within Rus, by local princes and duke, and by

foreign empires, such as the Mongols. The Mongol Yoke, which

lasted from 1238 to 1480, was, as George Fedotov states, “the

most fateful catastrophe suffered by Russia during her entire

history.” Lasting as long as the U.S.A. has been a country, he

argues that the Tatar Yoke was a deep and ineradicable “blow to

Russia’s national pride.”62 Thus, out from beneath rubble of

foreign oppressors, Russia was to slowly rebuild itself again, to

establish its identity once more by reconceptualising her self

along Orthodox Christian ideals and patterns of behaviour.

The so called “Dogs of War”: Batu and Subutai Khan, were

direct descendent of Genghis khan (d. 1227) and after his death

became leaders of a branch of the Mongols known as the Tatars.

Their father, Chingiz Khan (1155-1227) was not only a strong

warlord, but also effective statesman; he succeeded in uniting

62 Georgil Petrovich Fedotov and John Meyendorff, The Russian religious mind. vol.2, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1966), 1.

31

the Mongolian tribes and forming them into an efficient war

machine. The Mongols were remarkably effective raiders, and

succeed in defeating all national powers from Central Asia,

China, Turkestan, Persia, Asia Minor, Russia, Central and

Southern Europe; all were defeated one after the other by the

Tatar hordes. 63 In 1237 the Tatar Mongols fell upon Kiev with a

vengeance. Like bolts of lightning, they struck the city

destroying the one single and undisputed source of political

recognition in all of Rus’. The Tatars were vicious raiders; not

only did they attack other armies, but entire villages, burning

every town and city as they passed through, and the people were

either massacred or enslaved. Kiev was utterly devastated;

houses, castles, and churches were all destroyed and, as the

papal legate, Archbishop Carpini discovered as he passed through

the city: “We found lying in the field countless heads and bones

of dead people; for this city had been extremely large and very

populous, whereas now it has been reduced to nothing: barely two

hundred houses stand there, and those people are held in the

harshest slavery.”64

63 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 29.64 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 8th ed (New York : Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79.

32

The Mongols greatest blow, however, was not the utter

destruction of Kiev, nor of the Rurik dynasty which they

installed as local princes throughout Russian lands rather than

executed. No, in fact, as many historians can attest, it was the

utter eradication of the hope of a national state and common

Russian heritage that inflicted the most damage to Russia’s

history and development.65 66 Over the next two-and-half centuries,

the political and social life of Rus’ therefore disintegrated

into three major principalities. These were the south-western

provinces of Galicia and Volynia; the north-western corner

dominated by the city republics of Novgorod and Pskov; and the

north-eastern towns of Vladimir (150 kms east of Moscow, a local

trading outpost at the time), Rostov, Iaroslavl, and Susdal. 67

Except for the republics of Novgorod and Pskov in the North-West,

Russian urban life became proliferated by a series of independent

appanages, who spent their time fighting amongst themselves.

Pospielovsky, moreover, argues that one of the main reasons for

the centuries of foreign oppression was due to the “lack of

interprincely solidarity and cooperation amongst the local

65 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 37.66 Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 387.67 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 21.

33

Princes and Dukes.”68 Over time, particularly in the early

fifteenth century after the defeat of the Mongols at Kulikovo

field in 1380, these regions started to form their own political

and religious ideologies and, in fact, at one point, by the

endorsement of Byzantine, acquired their own separate

metropolitans, in the provinces of the South-west (i.e., Galicia-

Volhynia), and in Vladimir-Moscow.69 These petty rivalries would

continue to persist until the Grand dukes of the Muscovite state

(i.e., Ivan I, II, III.) finally swallowed them up.70

Francis Fukuyama argues that the Mongol invasion of Kiev and

of all Rus’ radically influenced the subsequent history of

Russia’s political development in a number of negative ways.

First, it cut Russia off from the Byzantine ‘imperial hegemony,’

and thus all trade and intellectual contact which had originally

fed Russian culture and religion had been drastically cut off.

Second, Fukuyama points out: “The Mongol occupation greatly

delayed Russian political development, which essentially had to

start over again after the destruction of Kievan Rus’… The

conquest confirmed the dispersion of political authority into a

68 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 37.69 Ibid., 39.70 Stella Rock, ‘Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture,’ Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, 255.

34

myriad of small appanages ruled by petty princes.”71 And finally,

the Mongols, he argues also undermined the legal tradition it had

once received from Byzantium; “Mongol rulers saw themselves as

pure predators whose avowed purpose was to extract resources from

the populations they dominated. They were a tribal-level people who had no

developed political institution or theories of justice to transmit to the populations they

conquered.” (Italics added.)72

With the collapse of the centralize state in Kiev, and the

oppressive conditions within which the Russian peasantry were

subjugated, the idea of nationally unified Rus’ state was

practically lost from memory. Exiled in their own lands, the

Russian people lived simply to survive, thus the dream of an

independent Rus’ for the general populace remained nothing more

than a failed dream which had burned-up with the Kievan State.

The only Russian institution that survived through the Mongolian

oppression was the Church, and as Pospielovsky argues, “it was

only the Church that remembered the term Rus’.” He writes,

Only her chief bishops bore the tile of “metropolitan ofKiev and all Rus’”, which the metropolitans retained even after having moved their de facto residence to the Northeast. Therefore the “capital” of what remained of the country was not where a great prince or grand duke

71 Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 388.72 Ibid.

35

sat, but were the metropolitan of All Rus’ resided.73

The Church remained thus the last beacon of hope in Rus’,

preserving the last remnant of an idea for a common heritage. Out

beneath the rubble of the Tatar yoke, however, Russia formed a

number of outstanding representatives, such as Prince Alexander

Nevski, the metropolitans Cyril, Peter and Alexis, and the

“father of Russian monasticism” St. Sergius of Radonezh, all of

whom remained a vital force in preserving the identity of a

defeated and oppressed nation alive, and therein preserving what

little dignity Rus’ had.74 These representatives worked tirelessly

as Church leaders and as local statesman –sometimes both –

exhausting most of their efforts in mediating between the Khan and

the local lords, and “often calling for national unity in the

Russian land in the hope of one day achieving freedom from

foreign domination.”75

Out from beneath the rubble.

Serving as both politicians and as church leaders, the

church metropolitans fell inevitably into a series of “mediatory

functions, double-dealings, hypocrisy, cunning, flattery, and

73 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 37.74 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 22.75 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 38.

36

deceptions.”76 In this regard, there was no one better than the

metropolitan Cyril II (or III, according to some historians).

Cyril was a Galician (west Ukraine) Archimandrite, who was chosen

for metropolitan by the Galician-Volynian prince Daniel

Romanovich. Under the leadership of Daniel, the south-west

appanages were becoming a centre of national revival. Unbeknown

to the still archimandrite Cyril, Daniel had decided through a

number of secret letters to the Roman Catholic Pope, to liberate

Rus’ from the Tatar yoke. The Pope had initially promised to send

aid, on the obvious condition that Daniel and his people submit

to Rome. Cyril, returning home from his consecration in

Constantinople in 1248, discovered much to his own dismay

Daniel’s plan. After just returning from Constantinople, and

having seen the carnage of the papal “promises to provide so-

called aid,” the metropolitan sought earnestly to convinced

Daniel to reconsider – which he indeed did. For as Pospielovsky

observes, “He realized that, whereas the Tatars respected the

Church and left the infrastructure of Russia basically in-tact,

the westerners sought to destroy the Orthodox Church and impose

76 Ibid.

37

conversion to Roman Catholicism.”77 For Cyril, in other words, it

was safer to live with the devil he knew, than the one he didn’t.

Cyril’s resistance to Daniel’s plan with the papacy was not,

however, a resistance to the liberation of Rus from the Tatar

Yoke. Indeed, Cyril and his metropolitan successors, played a

crucial role in the rise of a muscovite state, as the religious

and secular centre of a desecrated and oppressed Rus’. Cyril was

moreover a politician’s ‘politician’; through a series of letters

and underhanded double-dealings, he sought tirelessly to unite

the Russian princes and to convince them of his hope for

liberation from the Tatar yoke, while all the time, continuing to

assure the Khanate of his own unflinching fealty to the Golden

Horde.78 The metropolitan convinced the Khanate of the economic

importance of a centralized principality within Moscovy, and in

freeing the Church from the Baskaks. There is no evidence to

suggest that he converted the khanate to Christianity, but in 1279

the Khanate Mangu-Temir granted the Church immunity from all

forms of taxation and duties. This was, in part, the influence of

Cyril’s rapport with the Khan. The Church’s lands thus became

off-limits to local tax collectors and their retinue of

77 Ibid.78 Ibid.

38

cavalrymen. His example would be followed by his successors,

Peter and Alexis; both of whom would continue to travel as

peripatetic ministers, visiting local towns and cities,

encouraging the local populace to persist, to restore what had

been destroyed by the Baskaks. Under Metropolitan Peter, the See of

the Church would finally move in-land, to the city of Vladimir

(150 kms from Moscow), where they would be less vulnerable to the

Mongolian raiders. Peter took up residence in the city of

Vladimir, and often visited Moscow, whose prince Ivan ‘Kalita,’

or the “the money bag” was the first Rus’ prince to receive the

khanate title of Grand Duke.79 A number of historians argue that

the overlord of Russia at the time, Oz Beg (or Uzbeck d. 1341)

was the first Khanate to convert to Islam, and was thus a “much-

dreaded” ruler to the Christians within Russian lands.80 However,

this is not necessarily the case. For instance, the fact that Oz

Beg married one of his sisters to Daniel Romanovich’s son, Yuri,

an ‘infidel’ makes this belief suspect. And in 1313, at the

beginning of his reign, the Khanate also relieved Russian Orthodox

clergy from any further tribute.81 Thus the alliance between the

79 Ibid., 39.80 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 34.81 Daniel H. Shubin, A History of Russian Christianity (New York: Algora Pub, 2004), 97.

39

Golden Horde and the Muscovite principality was growing and

expanding, alliances were beginning to form and to be recognized

within Rus’. Indeed, the Muscovite principality grew, according

to one historian, “from six hundred square miles at the time of

Ivan I (1288-1340), to fifteen thousand square miles under Basil

II (1415-1462), to fifty-fifty thousand square miles by the end

of Ivan III’s reign (1440-1505).”82

The rise of the Muscovy State

While the rise of the Muscovy principality can be attributed

to the tirelessly efforts of such Metropolitans as Cyril and

Peter and Prince Alexander Nevski, it was indeed the Metropolitan

Alexis (1354-78), who secured Moscow as the central source of

religious authority in Rus’.83 Allegedly, he won the confidence of

the Tatar Khan by miraculously curing his wife from her

blindness. After this, allegedly, the Khanate promised that he

never again inflict injuries upon Christians. Russians, according

to Pospielovsky, believed this to have been a miracle by God, and

thus this event remained so embedded in the minds of the Russian

people that it “solidified Moscow’s position as the ecclesiastic

82 Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, 116.83 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 34.

40

capital of Russia.”84 The Church, in other words, preserved the

Russian dream of a national identity alive, and assisted in

turning the Muscovy principality into the centre of Russia’s

secular and religious authority. The Muscovite Grand princes

would over the next centuries swallow up the independent

appanages of Rus’, and form once more a national Russian state

religion. With the centralization of political and religious

authority in Muscovy, moreover, we see the beginnings of what is

general called a the rise of a “national consciousness” in

Russia.85 This period, Stella Rock explains,

represents the spiritual, cultural, and political transformation of a disparate collection of warring principalities forming mobile alliances with their Catholic, pagan and Muslim neighbors and overlords for economic or political gain, into an Orthodox nation, unified under tsar and patriarch and self-consciously promoting both a national faith and an ideology of a faithful nation. 86

The socio-political revival of a national cultural identity in

Muscovy would prove to be one of the most significant periods in

Russian history. Over the next two centuries, Muscovy had evolved

from a mere outpost on the edge of Vladimir to the national

84 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 39.85 Stella Rock, “Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture: 1380-1589,” inPerrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, 253.86 Ibid.

41

centre of Russia’s spiritual and secular authority. Beginning

with the battle of Kulikovo and the defeat of their Mongol

overlords in 1380, the ideas and patterns of behavior of the

Russian religious identity began to gradual drift away from the

imperial hegemony of the Byzantine emperor and patriarch to form

their own national piety. The gradual shift began as a monastic

movement which spread from the Balkans to the far edges of the

Russian lands.

St Sergius of Radonezh and the Rebirth of the nation.

The re-formation of a national Russian identity began as monastic

movement known as Hesychastic spirituality, a mystical movement

which began in the Balkans a century before it reached Russia,

and had inspired an array of art, iconography, and a reanimation

in education and writing.87 Historical accounts of Hesychastic

spirituality reveals that this movement was international, and

its spread was in part responsible for the rapid expansion of

monasticism that we encounter in fourteenth and fifteenth century

Russia. This monastic revival was linked with Gregory of Sinai

and Gregory of Palamas, the former having the greater impact on

87 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 46.

42

the Russian monasticism in the late fourteenth century.88 Hesychia

in Greek means silence, quietude, and was a spiritual practice

which rose in response to the secularism of Eastern monasteries.

It’s basic goal was to induce a vision of God as a divine light

by centering the body and mind, “through ceaseless prayers,

repetition, special movements of the body (i.e., naval gazing),

an even system of breathing, dividing the prayer, “God be

merciful to me a sinner,” between inhaling and exhaling, making

it a psychosomatic process.”89

One of the greatest Russian saints, St. Sergius of Radonez

was the first to introduce hesychastic spirituality to Russia, a

prayer which had by then become widespread throughout the

Balkans, especially on Mount Athos. Fedotov describes St Sergius

as “father of Russian mysticism,” and indeed he was; his legacy

was unprecedented in Russia religious history. 90 The impact of

St. Sergius on Russian culture cannot be understated, and as

Zernov observes, “no one illustrates better than he the new

religious outlook which made possible the cultural growth and

expansion of the Russian nation.”91 The monastery that he had

88 Dirk Krausmuller, “The Rise of Hesychasm,” in Angold, Eastern Christianity,101.89 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 42.90 Ibid., 47.91 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 38.

43

founded (now called The Trinity-St. Sergii) was that the central

hub of all intellectual and cultural life throughout the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. According to some estimates,

around a 150 monasteries were founded by St. Sergius and his

followers in the fourteenth centuries, “250 or more in the

fifteenth century and over 330 in the sixteenth century.” 92After

St. Sergius’s death, this monastic tradition continued to

influence Russian culture, but as two distinct traditions, which

separated under two of St. Sergius’s best disciples: St. Nilus of

Sorka and St. Joseph of Volotsk. In many respects, this division

arose not as a result of a conflict between these two leaders,

but rather out of the exceptional leadership and versatility of

their leader St. Sergius. Thus, where Nilus focused on the inner

life of devotion as exemplified in St. Sergius, St Joseph

reflected the intellectual and cultural activism of his. These

two would form to major factions of Russian monasticism, the non-

possessors and the Possessors. The former focused less on the cultural

and social milieu for a more reclusive, Hesychastic spiritual

pursuit of God. The latter conversely sought to be active in the

cultural and political spheres of Russian society.

92 Stella Rock, “Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture,” in Angold, Eastern Christianity, 266.

44

The central importance of monasticism and of St Sergius’s

importance in the re-formation of national identity in Russia is,

however, best exemplified by the events which lead to

emancipation of Russia from the Tatar Yoke, when Dmitri, the son

of Ivan II of Moscow, for the time united a Russian force of over

150,000 warriors, “led by over twenty princes under Dmitri’s

command, routed a Tatar force of 200,000.”93 According to the RPC,

on an early autumn day in August, Dmitri, in the company of the

other princes, paid a visit to St Sergius in order to seek his

blessing for the battle which awaited him. The latter is alleged

to have inquire first whether Dmitri had exhausted all means to a

peaceful settlement. Assuring him that he had, St Sergius agreed

to bless him. Thus, on the eve of battle, St Sergius sent word to

Dmitri, expressing the following: “Be in no doubt, my Lord; go

forward with faith and confront the enemy’s ferocity; and fear

not, for God will be on your side.” 94 The follow September day,

Dmitri and his warriors were victorious over their enemies,

establishing the beginning of what Stella Rock calls the rise of

“national consciousness” in Russia.95 The Russian people had

93 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 40.94 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 41.95 Stella Rock, “Russian Piety and Orthodox Culture,” in Angold, Eastern Christianity, 253.

45

finally a reason to take pride in their nation, to bathe in its

freedom, and behind all of this remained a prophet, a man of

great humility, who inspired all of Russia to embrace the

inspiring ideal of a Christian society. This ideal, as Zernov

observes, was rooted in the Christian principles of Family and

community:

The miraculous victory over the superior forces of the Tatars so stirred the imagination of the Russians that anew sense of messianic vocation flared up in their midst. The first part of the fifteenth century was therefore a period when the new Russia of Moscow was spiritually born, when the foundations on which the Moscow Tsardom was erected, in the course of the next two centuries, were laid. 96

Period 3: The rise of an independent Russia and autocephalous State Church.

After Dmitri’s death, beginning especially with Ivan III

(1440-1505), the Muscovy state began to reconceptualized itself

along Orthodox terms. The most remarkable sign of this

“reconceptualization” of Russian society and culture comes in the

Presentation of the Easter tables for the Eighth Millenium, written by

Metropolitan Zosima by order of Grand prince Ivan III in 1492.

The Presentation represents three major ways in which Russia would

appropriate their national identity using Orthodox ideologies

96 Zernov, Russians and Their Church., 43.

46

from the Byzantine Greeks: as the historical “third Rome” and last

‘guardians of Orthodoxy’; socio-politically: in the adoption of the

eastern “caesaropapism”; and theologically as the “embodiment of

God’s Chosen people, whose ruler chosen by God was prepared to

lead them to salvation.”97

The Presentation sets forth in no uncertain terms that Russia

was in the eschatological end of days. The ruling and

intellectual elite believed that apocalypse was going to occur in

1492, “the so-called portentous 7000 in the Byzantine

reckoning.”98 This evoked a deep-sense of religious and social

responsibility amongst the Grand Dukes of Moscow. They believed

themselves to be the final guardians of Orthodoxy. This was

intensified by the lapse of Byzantine Roman Empire, which had

ceased to exist in 1453. By the mid-fifteenth century, Moscow

began to adjust its political and ecclesial position in relation

to the rest of Eastern Orthodox. Rejecting the Council of

Florence (1438-39) after discovering that the Greek metropolitan

of Moscow, Isidore, returned from the council as a Roman Cardinal

– the Muscovites began to see themselves as the last frontier of

the Church in the world, as the ones who in the last days have

97 Michael S. Flier, “Political ideas and rituals,” in Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, 390.98 Ibid.

47

become heir of the “Second Rome” (i.e., Constantinople). But, as

Pospielovsky observes:

this all had to be “rationalized” in historical-ideological concepts of that period. And this “rationalization” first appeared in the form of The Tale of the White Cowl, a legendary account on how a while cowl worn by the Roman popes was first transferred to the New Rome(Constantinople) after the popes fallen into heresy. Then, because of the sins of the Greeks, it abandoned Byzantium and appeared in Russia to be worn by the archbishops eventually in Moscow.99

The Muscovite rulership sought to see itself within greater

geneology of kings, ranging all the way back to Kieven Rulers,

and even further still to the Emperor Augustus. In this regard,

the Grand Duke Ivan III was particular motivated; he saw himself

as the legal king. The legendary and extremely fictitious Tale of

the Prince of Vladimir (c. 1510), provided the muscovite king with as a

part of the Roman genealogy that traced the Rurikid dynasty back

to a Prussian prince, who was believed to be a kinsman of

Augustus Caesar.100 Michael S. Fliers argues, that this “’legend’

may have been included in order to assure Europeans that the use

of the term “tsar” for the Muscovite ruler was legitimate.”101 The

Presentation thus attempts to create a ideological-historical bridge

99 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 45.100 Michael S. Flier, “Political ideas and rituals,” in Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, 390.101 Ibid.

48

linking the first glorified ruler of Orthodox Christianity (i.e.,

Constantine) through to a second Constantine (Saint Vladimir), to

the new and final Constantine (Ivan III).102 In this context,

therefore, as Fliers observes, “the city of Moscow itself was

reconceptualised in Orthodox Christian terms as the New

Jerusalem.”103

The second major way in which Russia appropriated was in the

political system that she had received along with Byzantine

Christianity. The Byzantine’s political framework “would give the

ruler absolute political authority over the state. Following the

tradition of the sixth century monk and political theorist

Agapetus, the Muscovite rulers saw themselves as Emperors of the

“Third Rome”. Agapetus defined the moral parameters of the ruler

in the following words:

Though an emperor in body be like all others, yet in power of his office he is like God…for in earth he has no peer. Therefore, as God, be he never chafed or angry;as man, be he never proud. For though he be like God in face, yet for all that he is but dust, which thing teaches him to be equal to every man.104

102 Michael S. Flier, “Till the End of Time: The Apocalypse in Russian Historical Experience Before 1500,” in Valerie A Kivelson and Robert H Greene, Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice under the Tsars (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 154.103 Michael S. Flier, “Political ideas and rituals,” in Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, 390.104 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 6.

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It was the ninth century imperial law theory of the Ecumenical

Patriarch Photius: the Epanagôgê, however, that would have the

most influence on Russian society and politics, particularly from

the fifteenth century (i.e., Ivan III) onwards. The Epanagôgê was

a precise and sophisticated civil code that sought to define the

responsibilities of both the Church and State, as co-partners “in

preserving the faith and in building a society based on charity

and human dignity.”105 As the Patriarch of Constantinople, Antony

IV explained to the Grand prince of Moscow, Basil II, “It is not

possible for Christians to have the Church and not have the

Empire; for Church and Empire form a great unity and community;

it is not possible for them to be separated from one another.”106

This adopted political system, Daniel Wallace observes, “aimed to

see the world as a whole and to make no separation between the

secular and the sacred, the material and the divine, but to view

them as continuous, as a symphony, in which Church and State

participated in building a society based on charity and

humaneness.” 107 The Epanagôgê was particular important in this

105 Fedotov and Meyendorff, The Russian religious mind. vol.2, 215.106 Ibid., 214.107 Wallace L. Daniel, The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia, 1st ed, Eugenia and Hugh M. Stewart ’26 Series on Eastern Europe (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 12.

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regard as it sought to balance the political recognition between

the institutions of the Church and State. During this time, “The

interests of the Church and State coincided” and, as Fukuyama

observes: “the latter gave the former patronage and power, while

the former promoted the latter’s legitimacy as the seat of the

“Third Rome.”108

Another major way in which the Muscovy state appropriated

the Eastern Orthodox tradition was theologically – that is in the

formation of society as a reflection the kingdom of God on earth.

In this regard, the Muscovy state came to be “understood as the

embodiment of the Chosen People, whose ruler chosen by God was

prepared to lead them to salvation.”109 The shape of Russian

society was to be seen as the embodiment of a single people,

whose mother remained as the Church, and its Father was the Tsar.

Here, we begin to see the language of Byzantine Caesaropapism, an

ideology which was model on Byzantine belief that the ruler’s

office was divine, which meant, according to David Miller, “that

it (the divine office of the ruler) involved sacerdotal

obligations and the duty to uphold the faith. ” continued to be

108 Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 392.109 Michael S. Flier, “Political ideas and rituals,” in Perrie, The Cambridge History of Russia, 390.

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popularized within Moscow.”110 This idea of Society, Church,

State, as son, mother and father was propagandized by a series of

prominent cesaropapist idealist such as Joseph of Volotsk in

1504; Maximos in 1519; and Markarii when crowning Ivan IV in

1547. In other words, the theological/ideological vision of

Russian society under the Muscovy state and ruler can best be

described as a family, with the Father Tsar leading the nation,

along side mother Church, who were to nurture the Russian

peasantry as their own child. All people, therefore, whether high

or low in society, had a moral responsibility to the rest of the

family. Some scholars have argued that it was this theological

vision of Russian society as a Family, which ultimately led to

the failure of the nobility class to limit the power of the

central state. 111 In the centuries to come, the entire people of

Russia, high and low, Clergy and the nobility would be

progressive enslaved to the Muscovy State. The Russian church in

particular became fully caesaropapist with the deposing of

Metropolitan Nikon in 1667, and under Peter the Great and Feofan

Prokopovich’s Spiritual Regulation of 1721, the office of the

patriarchate would be completely abolished and replaced by a Holy

110 David B. Miller, “The Orthodox Church” in Ibid., 358.111 Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order, 391.

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Synod who, though indirectly, be controlled and governed by the

Tsar.

Conclusion

In this brief history of the relationship between Church and

State, we have attempted to show that the formation of a Russian

identity was expressed along Eastern Orthodox terms and ideas.

Here, we have shown that the nature and trajectory of Russian

history, in the formation of both the Kievan state and Muscovy

state, was essentially driven by the need for political

recognition by the Church and the State, both within Russia, by

local chieftains and Princes, and internationally, by countries

such as Byzantine and/or the Tatar Mongols. This need for

political recognition drove the subsequent ideas and patterns of

behaviour through its history, provided therein a source of hope

while under foreign oppression, and in the reformation of a

national consciousness in Muscovy. Thus the historical, socio-

religious, and theological ideas that formed within Muscovy were

crucial in the re-formation of a cultural and intellectual

identity, rooted in the notion of Russia being the kingdom of God

on earth. This, moreover, provided her with “mental model of

reality” in which to make sense of the world of oppression that

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they had only known and experience. However, over the next number

of centuries, especially under Peter the Great’s “westernization”

project, the Church would make a gradual shift away from this

initial harmony between Church and state and succumb to the

western absolutism which ultimately led to the subjugation of the

church by the State. Thus, as Father Alexander Schmemann argues

from observing the difference between “Russo-Byzantine Autocracy

and the western secular absolutism introduced by Peter”112– he

writes the following:

However far the reality might have digressed from the syphony ideal, [the digressions] were always perceived as digressions…because the state [of the Byzantine-Romanautocratic tradition] recognized that above its authority stood the Church [as] the guardian of Christian Truth. Western absolutism, having developed from the duel between the State and the Church, left forthe latter only the function of “serving the spiritual needs,” as defined, however by the state, which also defined how these needs are to be served. 113

Whereas in the centuries leading to Peter the Great, Russian

society was oriented around the vision of a family, Peter the

Great and Feofan Prokopovich would lead Russia into a direction

in which all levels of Russian society, from high to low,

nobility, clergy, and peasants were all progressively enslaved to

112 Pospielovsky, The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia, 107.113 Ibid.

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the state and ruler in Moscow. In Peter’s own words, then, the

Church became his ““religious team,” i.e., her role from then on

was to be an ideological tool used by the state to mobilize the

nation.”114 This form of oppression would continue on right up

unto the Russian revolution. However, this vision is still not

lost, and has been preserved by the Russian Orthodox church. And

thus a hope still remains!

114 Ibid.

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