The Origins of Autocracy

For the first time the state acted in direct concert with the intel­ligentsia. (The second time was long delayed: not until 350 years later, in the 1850s, at the time of the Great Reforms, was this alliance renewed.) Nevertheless, the position of the grand prince had one serious flaw—the immaturity of the second generation of Non-Ac­quirers, who should have more accurately appraised the resistance of the hierarchy and foreseen its arguments. They were responsible for the intellectual side of the operation, so to speak, and they suffered a defeat.[100]

Attacked from all sides, the metropolitan and the assembly nev­ertheless did not despair, but took counsel and decided to refuse the grand prince's request. A long epistle, replete with quotations from the Bible and the Levitical Books, from the Holy Fathers and the Tatar yarlyks, was written and sent to the grand prince by the secretary Levash. Ivan rejected this: neither the Levitical Books nor the Tatar yarlyks

sufficed to convince him. The assembly again took counsel, prepared a second reply, adding further quotations from the Bible, and went in a body to read it to the sovereign. The Biblical texts once again left the grand prince cold. A. S. Pavlov, the author of a study of the secularization of church lands published in Odessa in 1881, which is in my opinion still unsurpassed, conjectures as to why it was neces­sary for the assembly to prepare a third response, and why this third reply worked, compelling Ivan to retreat. "Probably the grand prince requested certain additional clarifications; at any rate, the assembly once again sent the secretary Levash to him with a new report literally confirming the content of the first," Pavlov writes. Contradicting him­self, he adds that the third version "only gives a considerably more detailed discussion of the Russian princes who gave the church dis­tricts and villages."[101]

This was precisely the gist of the matter: the "old ways." The lam­entations and accusations of Nil Sorskii could not compete with the iron canons of tradition. And the second generation of the Non- Acquirers had nothing more to offer the grand prince: warriors and politicians they were not, merely moralists. Here is what was said in that fateful addition to the assembly's reply, by which the hierarchy with great inventiveness—one must admit—turned back the first sec­ularizing assault:

Thus, in our Russian lands, under thy forefathers, the grand princes— under Grand Prince Vladimir and his son Grand Prince Iaroslav, and after them, under Grand Prince Vsevolod and Grand Prince Ivan, the grandson of the blessed Aleksandr . . . the prelates and the monasteries held cities, regions, settlements, and villages, and received tribute for the church.[102]

A decade later, a third branch of the Non-Acquirer movement arose, and the caustic, tocsinlike preaching of Nil Sorskii's famous pupil, Vassian Patrikeev, with which not even Iosif himself could cope, thundered out over Muscovy. It contained precisely what was needed for a new assault on the fortress of the church. Vassian was a cothinker of the grand prince and a consistent conservative. "Think and reflect," he preached,

who, of those who radiated sanctity and built monasteries, took care to acquire villages? Who entreated the tsars and the grand princes for privileges for themselves, and for offense to surrounding peasants? Who brought suit against another person in a dispute over property lines, or tormented human bodies with whips or placed them in chains, or took away estates from their brothers ... as do those who now give themselves out as wonder-workers? Neither Pakhomii or Evfimii or Gerasim or Afanasii of Athos—not one of them lived by such rules, or taught his disciples anything of the kind.

There followed a detailed enumeration of "our Russian . . . found­ers of monastic life and wonder-workers, Antonii and Feodosii Pe- cherskii, Varlaam of Novgorod, Sergius of Radonezh, and Dimitrii Prilutskii," who "lived in extreme need so that they often did not even have their daily bread; but the monasteries did not fall into ruin from poverty but grew and flourished in all things, being filled with monks who worked with their own hands and earned their bread in the sweat of their brows.'""'