The Origins of Autocracy

True, there was an ideological breach in the adversary's armor, the old debate about the limits of intervention by the state in the compe­tence of the church. Metropolitan Kiprian in the fourteenth century, as well as Metropolitan Fotii in the fifteenth, had asserted the com­plete independence of the church. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, the elder Akindin had argued for the right of the prince to sit in judgment on the metropolitan himself, if he proved guilty of violating a canon. Kirill of Belozersk, Metropolitan Iona, Iosif of Volokolamsk, Metropolitans Daniil and Makarii, the elder Filofei, and even the teachers of the schism held the same position. The debate was by no means scholastic but profoundly utilitarian. The Russian church, being occupied basically with earthly, secular, not to say economic matters, was never able to cope with heresy in open ideological battle. The sword of the grand prince was needed. The propagandists of the church called down administrative thunder upon the heretics, thereby revealing their own ideological weakness, and at the same time giving the state a legal pretext, recognized by the church itself, for interfering in its internal affairs.

A less perspicacious leader than Ivan III might have sought in heresy a means of reforming the church. Many people at his court did precisely this. Elena Stefanovna, his daughter-in-law and the mother of Crown Prince Dimitrii, headed an influential circle of her­etics. Heretics also held powerful positions in government. One of the men closest to Ivan, his most eminent diplomat, the high secretary Kuritsyn, was a heretic.[92] But though the grand prince might be the patron of heretics, he could not himself become one. He needed, rather, a moderate ideological doctrine which would imply that land- ownership by the church was harmful

to Russian Orthodoxy, and hence itself heresy. Essentially, he needed Protestantism, whose exis­tence he didn't even suspect. He needed a strategy analogous to the one by whose aid he had split Novgorod and was preparing to split Lithuania: two contending factions within the church which he could manipulate. But where was he to get Russian Protestantism?

There existed, independently of the strategy of Ivan III, a modest sect of "Trans-Volga elders"—strict anchorites who had taken ref uge in the forests from the temptations of monastic greed, and preached "intelligent action" [umnoe delanie

]. Teaching that "he who prays only with the mouth, and forgets about the mind, prays to the air: God is listening to the mind," the elders believed that true closeness to God was to be achieved not by fasting, deprivation, and disciplinary mea­sures, but by having "the mind keep watch over the heart" and con­trol sinful passions and thoughts deriving from the world and the flesh.

One can interpret this doctrine as a Russian proto-Protestantism, but in any case it was only a sprout which had not yet had time to put down roots, and so weak that it could easily be smothered (like its ana­log, the proto-bourgeoisie). All of Ivan Ill's persistence was needed simply in order to discover the meek elders, let alone to draw them into the political arena—the orbit of the furious human passions which were precisely what they were fleeing from. Yet they had to be transf ormed into something reminiscent of political party (later to be­come known as the Non-Acquirers).

Of course, Ivan III was not the only factor here. Ecclesiastic up­heaval was at that time common to all of Europe, and the Russian church was no exception. In the 1480s and 1490s, the crisis was in full swing: the church was shaken by heresy. But in order to create a se­rious renovationist movement, personnel were needed who were not available, not to speak of high consciousness of duty, of which the in­habitants of the monasteries of that time—pragmatists and men of affairs like their sovereign—were decidedly incapable. The social and the cultural functions of the church were not carried out. Greed con­sumed discipline; corruption, its spiritual goals. It was a successful usurer, entrepreneur, and landowner, but had ceased to be a pastor of the people and the intellectual leadership of the nation. Though spir­itually stagnant, it grew materially like a cancerous tumor, irresistibly spreading through the body of the country. This was clear to every­one—the heretics and the grand prince, the Non-Acquirers and their opponents alike.

In the well-known questions of the tsar to the assembly of the church of 1551, written for him by the Government of Compromise, the state of things is described as passionately and vividly as though the author were the main propagandist of the Non-Acquirer move­ment himself—the Russian Luther, the monk-prince Vassian Pa- trikeev, of whom we shall speak soon.