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| The invasion of the Mongols also known in this part of the world as the Tatars had been devastating, but their rule was relatively benign and strengthened the church enormously. Their empire was known as the empire of the golden horde. |
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| Clergy and Public Behavior-"Christianizing the Russians" |
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| Christianization of the Russian area coincided with the emergence of a loose confederation of principalities, known as Rus, ruled by princes claiming descent from a common ancestor, Riurik. Kiev was the main hub of Christianity. The extent of christianization was greater the closer people dwelt to cities and the closer to Kiev these cites were located. Moreover the south half of Rus was christianized more thoroughly and sooner than the north half because there had been scattered Christian believers and churches in that region a full century before Vladimir. While Prince Vladimir played the historic role of baptizer of the Russians, his son Yaroslav 'the wise' was their Christianizer. Church administrations was organized in at least five dioceses with bishops for supervision of priests and parishes. In Kiev the metropolitan emerged as chief bishop. Monasteries promoted the Christian presence the most important of these was the Kiev's cave monastery. Yaroslav advanced christianization by recruiting Greek scribes to translate ancient Christian documents into Slavonic, building churches, establishing schools to train clergy and ordering priests to give instruction in basic literacy. Yaroslav issued a church code that made clergy supervisors of public behavior. Christian priests and monks gave the populace of Rus better training in Christian piety than societies of contemporary western Europe had. Recent scholarship rejects the idea that the people of Rus possessed a dual faith one of Christianity and Pagan. Orthodoxy became the national religion of the eastern Slavs and played a decisive role in the development of Russian culture. |
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| In Russia, more or less all the land was owned by either the church or the boyars (the landed aristocracy) or the city's prince. |
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| some concluded that the ecclesiastical hierarchy should be dismantled altogether. The most famous and most persistent were the Strigolniks (or Barbers since one of their most prominent figures was Karp the Barber). The Strigolniks, who first appeared at Novgorod in the middle of the fourteenth century, were rather like extreme early Protestants, but their protest was a combination of theological disagreement and social dissatisfaction. They criticized pretty much everything to do with the established church, including corruption and greed, but also the role of the priesthood and the efficacy of the sacraments. The Strigolniks believed that faith should be approached rationally, and so they rejected the Eucharist as an intrinsically irrational act, and also argued that the Bible and other sources of authority should be questioned or used critically. Some went still further and denied the possibility of resurrection or life after death. |
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| Teutonic Knight's Crusade |
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| In 1210 Swedish troops invaded the territory of Novgorod. The invaders were led by the Teutonic Knights who were a major crusading order in the Baltic region. They ruled much of Prussia and devoted a lot of energy to trying to invade Lithuania, a Slavic region on the Baltic coast, which was still pagan. |
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| The conquests of Alexander Nevsky had meant that the centre of gravity of the Russian state had moved north, first to Novgorod, but then to the emerging power base of Moscow. Moscow had been founded in the twelfth century and it grew quickly being situated on major trade routes. Its rise in power corresponded with the decline of the power of the Tatars. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a number of attempts by successive grand princes of Moscow to throw off the rule of the Tatars for good, but this was not achieved until 1480, under Ivan III. He united the cities around Moscow and finally refused to pay tribute to Saray. |
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| It began in Novgorod, where, in 1470, Michael Olelkovich, prince of Kiev, came to visit. He brought with him a Jewish doctor named Skharia. Skharia met two priests of Novgorod, Alexis and Dionysius, and converted them to Judaism: he convinced them them that the doctrines of the Trinity and of Jesus' messianic and divine status were false, and that salvation could be secured only by becoming a Jew. This they did. More priests became converted, even Gabriel, dean of the cathedral of St. Sophia but all this was done in secret. |
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| A new feature of church design, the iconostasis (or icon stand) appeared. This was a development of the screen which traditionally separated the nave of a church from the sanctuary, but it would now be covered in icons, most often in five rows. |
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| This Ivan came to the throne at the age of 3 (1533). At sixteen he had himself crowned tsar which represented Ivan's claim to be the true successor of the Roman emperors. He governed with the help of a kind of parliament known as the zemsky sobor or assembly of the land, with which he set oout a new legal code of Russia; he also extended the borders of his domain eastwards, launching a crusade against the Tatars in which he slaughtered them mercilessly. He created a huge empire but was increasingly unstable. He was convinced that he was appointed by God to rule and therefore anyone who opposed him was a heretic and deserved death. He ordered purges of the Russians, killing thousands, including many priests and representatives of the church, and sending many more into exile in remote parts of his vast realm. He however repented of his sins before his death and took on the life of a monk. |
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| He also set up a kind of religious secret police, known as the Oprichniki. By 1572 there were 6,000 members of this society, all chosen for their loyalty to the tsar, and their appearance and activities have become stuff of legend; dressed solely in black, bearing the sign of the broom(for sweeping away heresy) and the dog's head(for snapping at their enemies' heels) the Oprichniki had a free reign throughtout Ivan's territory and were able to imprison, torture or kill whomever they liked. |
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| Markay's effort to create a Russian national church culminated in his convening and orchestrating a council of unprecedented importance for Russia. Called the Hundred Chapter Council because the written record of its actions comprised one hundred sections, the assembly provided answers to sixty-nine questions placed by the document into Ivan's mouth, identifying diverse topics for the council to give definitive instructions for comprehensive reform concerning moral and spiritual matters in private, public and church life. The council made up of all bishops, monastery superiors and many clergy and nobles of Muscovy, issued opinions on a broad range of matters, including: prohibitions on games of chance, fortune tellers, monastic drunkenness and other vices; shaving men's beards, and directions for church administrations and discipline of clergy, organizations of popular elementary education and catchetical instruction, and proper forms for painting icons and especially for representing persons of the Holy Trinity. The purport of the council's responses was that monasteries should reform themselves into model communities from which the rest of society would learn to live in accordance with Christian values. |
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| Strangely as the monastery grew the monks decided that they liked their troglodyte lifestyle, and so they excavated more caves until a huge warren of passages, tunnels, crypts and chapels had been created. This was the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra - the 'Kiev cave monastery' one of the wonders of the Christian world. Even after the centre of gravity in Russia switched from Kiev to Moscow the Kiev Pechersk Lavra continued to be a major site in Russian Christianity. |
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| In particular, the monks who lived beyond the River Volga-known reasonably, as the Trans-Volga Elders-were deeply influenced by Nilus. But all was not as calm as the hesychast ideal called for: after Nilus's death the Trans-Volga Elders were persecuted for heresy. They made the mistake of opposing new features of Russian religious and political life: they did not approve of monasteries owning property, and they did not like the increasing centralization of the Russian state. |
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| One rather unusual form of spirituality was that of the Yurodivi the holy fools. They were rather like the mendicant friars of Catholic Europe, although they appeared two centuries later. Taking to extremes Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 1:27. All monks did that to some extent, of course, but the Yurodivi did not retreat from society: they were highly visible within it, as a kind of critical commentary upon it. They deliberately sought the scorn or ridicule of society and acted bizarrely or insanely. |
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| One of the leading representatives of this movement was Basil the Blessed a cobbler's apprentice from Moscow who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Haggard in appearance, wearing only a loincoth despite the Muscovite climate, Basil would steal from shops and give to the poor, and he was apparently in the habit of scolding Ivan IV not normally a recipe for a long life. Basil however would always escape persecution. Basil was deeply venerated in his lifetime and after his death in 1552 was buried by the new Cathedral of the Protection of the Mother of God in Moscow. |
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| Fredor's death in 1598 left a power vacuum in the centralized state that his father had created, and for fifteen years Russia was rent by dynastic squabbling, civil war and famine in what became known as the Times of Troubles. The Boyars, the noble landowners, fought each other for the tsar's throne, and pretenders to the throne appeared and were murdered in swift succession. Poland invaded and captured Moscow and tried to impose its rule on the country. There were endemic poverty and many peasants fled east to set up autonomous communities of their own. The authorities tried to stop this by banning peasant relocation, but the Cossacks, as these groups were known, throve. The state's response was more repression: by the end of the seventeenth century, serfs had regressed to little more than slaves able even to be bought and sold. As Europe was beginning the Enlightenment Russia was stuck in a medieval time warp with an oppressive feudal system and very low levels of education. Throughout this time, the Orthodox Church provided the only source of unity and strength for the beleagured Russian people. The Times of Trouble ended in 1613 with the election of Michael Romanov. |
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| One of the most influential of these groups were the Khylsty, a name meaning whips, referring to their supposed habit of self-flagellation. Little is really known about the Khylysty a group surrounded by myth and heresy. The group was apparently founded at the start of the eighteenth century by a man named Danila Filippovich, who proclaimed himself a new messiah. No doubt Filippovich was tapping into an already-existing stream of charismatic tendencies in Russian religion, among those who emphasized the contemporary revelation of the Holy Spirit and rebelled against the imposition of the state church. The Khylsty were a secret society within the Orthodox church, for Filippovich taught his followers to keep their views to themselves and not stand out. They believed that rituals, doctrines and hierarchies of the established church were all right for the common run of believers, but members of their brotherhood had gone beyond this. They alone knew the truth path to God. God, they believed was eternally incarnating in a series of messiahs. Indeed the spirit of God could be invoked by any believer and made manifest in their bodies through ecstatic prayer, and in this way all participants could become Christs. The Khylysty therefore engaged in ecstatic mysteries and rites. It was also said that the Khlysty zealous in their search for the spirit of Christ, would whip themselves and even that the babies resulting from their wild orgies would be sacrificed. Certainly it is reasonable to suppose that the Khylsty were simply the best known representatives of an extremist Spirit-based movement which took many forms in early modern Russia. |
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| The Skoptsy movement found by a peasant from Oryel named Kondraty Selivanov. He also claimed to be the Messiah, but in this case he was the only one, and the Skoptsy did not share the Khlysty's belief in perpetual divine incarnation. Instead they believed that the way to God was through castration. Selivanov had little success at first, being attacked by both the religious authorities and the Khylsty among whom he first preached. He gained an audience with Tsar Paul I by pretending to be Tsar Peter III (the husband of Catherine the Great). He tried to convince Paul I to castrate himself, but instead was thrown into a asylum. He was released in 1802 and won many disciples. There was more then just castrating oneself in the Skoptsy movement. They also led industrious and rather earnest lifestyles, working hard and avoiding drunkenness. However, their numbers declined throughout the nineteenth century, and after 1850 they were less significant in the Russian region. |
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