The Icon and the Axe

The central figure in the monastic revival and in the unification of Russia during the fourteenth century was Sergius of Radonezh. Like his friend Alexis, Sergius was of noble origin; but his conversion to a religious profession was more profound and seminal. Sergius had come to Moscow from Rostov, a vanquished rival city to the east. Disillusioned with Moscow and the lax older traditions of monastic life, he set off into the forest to recapture through prayer and self-denial the holiness of the early Church. His piety and physical bravery attracted others to the new monastery he founded northeast of Moscow in 1337. Dedicated to the Holy Trinity and later named for its founder, this monastery became for Muscovy what the Monastery of the Caves had been for Kiev: a center of civilization, a shrine for pilgrimage, and the second Lavra, or large parent monastery, in Russian history.

Certain distinctions between the monastery of St. Sergius and older ones in Kiev and Novgorod point to the new role monasteries were to play in Russian civilization. St. Sergius' monastery was located outside of the political center, and its demands on the individual-in terms of physical labor and ascetic forbearance-were far more severe. This exposed location encouraged the monastery also to assume the roles of fortress and colonizing center.

The monastic revival in Russia depended not only on the heroism and sanctity of men like Sergius but also on important spiritual influences from the crumbling Byzantine Empire. Perplexed by its own misfortunes and

embittered by harassment from the Catholic West, Byzantine monasticism in the late thirteenth and the fourteenth century increasingly turned away from the Studite rule in the monasteries and from the growing influence of Western scholasticism to a new mystical movement known as Hesychasm.6

This movement contended that there was a direct personal way to God available to man through the "inner calm" (hesychia) which came from ascetic discipline of the flesh and silent prayers of the spirit. Darkness, fasting, and holding the breath were seen as aids to the achievement of this inner calm, and the traditional sacraments of the Church and even the verbal prayer of an individual believer subtly came to be viewed as irrelevant if not positively distracting. The Hesychasts believed that such a process of inner purification would prepare man for divine illumination: for a glimpse of the uncreated light from God which had appeared to the apostles on Mount Tabor at the time of Christ's Transfiguration. The Hesychasts sought to avoid the heretical assertion that man could achieve identity with God by insisting that this illumination placed man only in contact with the "energy" (energeia) and not the "essence" {ousia) of the divine. This distinction and the belief that man could gain a glimpse of the divine light were upheld as articles of faith by the Eastern Church in 1351.

The triumph of Hesychasm in the late days of the Byzantine Empire further estranged Orthodoxy from the disciplined and ornately sacramental Roman Church of the late Middle Ages. By challenging authority and encouraging men to seek a direct path to God, Hesychasm represented in some ways an Eastern anticipation of Protestantism.

Nowhere was the victory of the new mysticism and the estrangement from Rome more complete than in the newly opened monasteries of the Russian north. The hostility of the surroundings had long required ascetic qualities of resourcefulness and endurance. The political disintegration of Kievan Russia had led some monks like St. Sergius to seek salvation by leaving the cities altogether in imitation of the early desert fathers. Thus, it is not surprising that the new monasteries of these pioneering Russian hermits should prove receptive to the hesychastic teachings which reached the north through pilgrims returning from the Russian monastery on Mt. Athos and through Orthodox Slavs fleeing to Muscovy after the fall of the Balkans to Islam. The separation of Muscovy from classical traditions of rational theology and clear hierarchical discipline rendered the region ripe for a doctrine emphasizing direct contact with God. At the same time, the closeness of the hermit-monks to nature (and to the animistic paganism of non-Christian tribes) led them to dwell in an almost Franciscan manner on the theme of God's involvement in all of creation. Just as the apostles had seen a glimpse of light from God at the Transfiguration of Christ, so could a

true monk in Christ's universal church gain a glimmer of the coming transfiguration of the cosmos. The debilitating bleakness of the environment created a need to believe not just in human salvation but in a transformation of the entire natural world.