The Icon and the Axe

The theme of transfiguration was sometimes blended with that of the millennial Second Coming of Christ. Popular "spiritual songs" of the Muscovite period told of the coming of glory to "the communal church all transfigured" atop a mountain-a seeming combination of Tabor and Athos.7 The hermit-monks who founded new monasteries on the northeastern frontier of Europe thought of their new houses not so much as institutions designed to revivify the established Church as transitory places in man's pilgrimage toward the Second Coming. The icons showing St. Sergius calming the wild beasts and preaching to animals and plants8 emphasized the fact that the promised end was not just the resurrection of the dead but the transfiguration of all creation.

In the century following the establishment of St. Sergius' new monastery at Zagorsk, some 150 new monasteries were founded in one of the most remarkable missionary movements in Christian history.9 Most of the founders were strongly influenced by Hesychasm, but they were also, like the Cistercians of the medieval West, hard-working pioneers opening up new and forbidding lands for cultivation and colonization. The outward reach of the monasteries had extended some three hundred miles north of Moscow by 1397, with the founding of the monastery of St. Cyril on the White Lake. By 1436, just a century after the founding of St. Sergius' monastery, the movement had reached yet another three hundred miles north into the islands of the White Sea with the founding of the Solovetsk Monastery by Savva and Zosima. There were more saints from this period of Russian history than any other; and prominent among them were Sergius, Cyril, Savva, and Zosima, whose monasteries became leading shrines because of the miraculous powers accredited to their relics and remains.

Another widely venerated local saint of the fourteenth century was Stephen of Perm, whose career illustrates the civilizing and colonizing function of Russian monasticism. This learned and ascetic figure carried Christian teachings 750 miles east of Moscow to the most distant tributary of the Volga, at the foot of the Ural Mountains. There he evangelized the pagan Komi peoples, inventing an alphabet for their language and translating Holy Scripture into it. Stephen left an enduring impact on the distant region as its cultural leader and first bishop. He returned to Moscow to be buried in a church appropriately called Savior in the Forest. Thanks largely to Moscow chroniclers the story of his heroic battles with natural elements and pagan sorcerers kindled the awakening imagination of Russian Christians. The

"Life of Stephen of Perm" by the greatest hagiographer of the age, Epi-phanius the Wise, set a new standard for flowery eulogy and became perhaps the most popular of the many new lives of local saints.10

The most influential of Epiphanius' Lives, however, was that of St. Sergius of Radonezh, which he wrote shortly before his death in 1420. Richer than his earlier works in factual material and the use of vernacular terms, Epiphanius' life of Sergius reads like a history of Russia in the fourteenth century and helps explain how this lonely ascetic has come to be known as the "builder of Russia."11 Respect for his selflessness and sanctity enabled Sergius to become a counselor and arbiter among the warring princes of the Volga-Oka region. The links that developed with nearby Zagorsk helped Moscow assume leadership of the region during the preparations for battle with the Mongols in the 1370's. St. Sergius prayed for victory over the Tatars, mobilized the resources of his monastery to support the fighting, and sent two monks to lead the troops in the famous victory at Kulikovo. Because his aid and intercession were widely credited with this decisive turn in the fortunes of Muscovy, his monastery soon became- almost in the modern sense-a national shrine. It was connected not with any purely local event or holy man, but with the common victory over a pagan enemy of a united army of Orthodox Russians.

The new monasteries were full-time centers of work and prayer, controlling rather than controlled by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Often modeled on the monasteries of Mount Athos, they were organized communally and strongly influenced by the new Athonite tradition of Hesychasm. The "elders" who had attained mastery of their passions and spiritual clairvoyance through long years of prayer and vigilance often commanded greater authority within the monastery than did the hegumen or archimandrite (the nominal head of a small and a large monastery respectively). These elders played a leading role in the "accumulation of spiritual energies," which was the main work of Muscovite monasticism.