The Origins of Autocracy

People go into monasteries not in order to save their souls, but in order to carouse all the time. Archimandrites and abbots buy their positions without knowing either the divine service or brotherhood . . . they buy villages for themselves and some are always asking me for land. Where are the profits, and who gains any advantage from them? . . . Such is the disorder and complete indifference to God's church and the struc­ture of the monasteries. . . . Who is responsible for all this sin? And how are the souls of laymen to gain advantage and to be turned away from all evil? If there [in the monasteries] everything is done not ac­cording to God, what good can our worldly flock expect from us? And who are we, to ask for God's mercy?^1:1

This is spoken not out of political calculation but by the troubled medieval conscience itself. Something has to be done about the church; otherwise there will be no forgiveness for us even in this world, let alone in the next.

Such was the challenge to which the Russian church responded with two opposed solutions, which we may arbitrarily call reforma­tion and counter-reformation. And this was also a response common to all the developing European nations.

5. The Arguments of the Counter-Reformation

To the Non-Acquirers, led by the famous monk and writer Nil Sor- skii, the secularization of church lands meant the liberation of the church to fulfill its natural function as the intellectual and spiritual staff of the nation. For the first time in centuries, Russian Orthodoxy was offered a chance to cleanse itself of the mire of the Tatar heritage. The Non-Acquirers were not, of course, concerned about the political necessity of secularization which preoccupied their royal patron, and still less about the economic need to protect the interests of the f ragile Russian proto-bourgeoisie. For them, the reformation began and ended with the reform of the church. They spoke against the execu­tion of heretics; they were outraged by the exploitation of peasants on monastery lands; they were, in general, proponents of, shall we say, "Orthodoxy with a human face," and as such defended all the ag­grieved and persecuted. But their ideas, particularly at the begin­ning, lacked any clear political articulation.'⁴ Their opponents, on the other hand, led by the head of the Volokamansk monastery, Iosif, were openly and clearly politicized from the outset.

As early as 1889, M. D'iakonov called attention to the fact that it was precisely Iosif who put forward the "revolutionary thesis" that it is necessary to resist the will of the sovereign if he deviates from the norms of piety. In the heat of the struggle against the secularizing plans of Ivan III, the Josephites advanced the doctrine of the legit­imacy of resistance to state power, as V. Val'denberg noted in 1916. Their arguments, the first such in Russian literature, were substantial and serious.

They by no means disputed that the church was in disarray, and they did not deny the need for reforms. They just claimed the role of genuine reformers for themselves. Yes, Iosif agreed, money grubbing is pernicious for monks as individuals subject to moral corruption— but not for monasteries as religious institutions. "It is true that monks sin, but the church of God and the monasteries commit no sin at all."[93] The monk retreats from the world and returns to it no longer as an individual, but as a part of the holy corporation, a tool of its collective will. Hence the reforms proposed by Iosif—the revival of the true norms of monastic life, the dissolution of individuality in the church, and fundamental purification of the monastic collective thereby. Just as the Non-Acquirer movement bore within itself ele­ments of proto-Protestantism, so the Josephite apologia for collectiv­ism had a pronounced Catholic tinge.