The Icon and the Axe

The transfer of Orthodox hopes to Muscovy had already been dramatized by the elaborately staged marriage in 1472 of Ivan III to Sophia Paleologus, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and by the introduction into Russia a few years later of the former imperial seal of the two-headed eagle.27

Russians were encouraged to view change in apocalyptical terms by the

purely fortuitous fact that the old Orthodox Church calendar extended only to the year 1492. The 7,000 years that began with the creation in 5508 B.C. was drawing to a close, and learned monks tended to look for signs of the approaching end of history. The close advisers of the Tsar who showed sympathy at the Church council of 1490 with the rationalistic "ludaizing" heresy were denounced as "vessels of the devil, forerunners of the Antichrist."28 An important issue in the subsequent persecution of the Judaizers was their sponsorship of an astrological table for computing the years, "The Six Wings" (ShestokryV), which seemed to suggest that "the years of the Christian Chronicle have expired but ours lives on."29 In combating the Judaizers, the Russian Church unwittingly kept historical expectations alive by translating into readable Russian for the first time much of the apocalyptical literature of the Old Testament, including such apocrypha as the apocalypse of Ezra.30

By the turn of the century, expectations were raised that God was about to bring history to a close; but there was uncertainty as to whether one should look immediately for good or evil signs: for Christ's Second Coming and thousand-year reign on earth or for the coming reign of the Antichrist. Philotheus believed that "Russian Tsardom is the last earthly kingdom, after which comes the eternal kingdom of Christ," but another Pskovian saw the conquering Tsar as a harbinger of the Antichrist.31 This uncertainty as to whether disaster or deliverance was at hand became characteristic of Russian prophetic writings. In later years too, there was an unstable alternation between anticipation and fear, exultation and depression, among those who shared the recurring feeling that great things were about to happen in Russia.

The rise of prophecy in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Muscovy is evidenced in the growth of extreme forms of Christian spirituality, such as "pillar-like immobility" (stolpnichestvo) and the perpetual wandering of "folly for Christ's sake" (iurodstvd). Though both traditions have Eastern and Byzantine origins, they acquired new intensity and importance in the Muscovite north.

Pillar-like immobility came to be regarded in the non-communal monasteries as a means of gaining special sanctity and clairvoyance. This tradition received popular sanction through the fabulous tales of Ilya of Murom, who allegedly sat immobile for thirty years before rising to carry out deeds of heroism.

The holy fools became revered for their asceticism and prophetic utterances as "men of God" {bozhie liudi). Whereas there had never been more than four saint's days dedicated to holy fools in all of Orthodox Christendom from the sixth to the tenth century, at least ten such days were

celebrated in Muscovy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.32 Churches and shrines were dedicated to them in great numbers, particularly in the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, when this form of piety was at its height.83

Holy fools often became the norm, if not the normal, in human life. Renunciation of the flesh "for Christ's sake" purified them for the gift of prophecy. The role of the holy fool at the court of the princes of Muscovy was a combination of the court confessor of the Christian West and the royal soothsayer of the pagan East. They warned of doom and spoke darkly of the need for new crusades or penitential exercises, reinforcing the already marked tendency of Slavic Orthodoxy toward passion and prophecy rather than reason and discipline.

Those who became holy fools were often widely traveled and well read. It was, after all, the learned figure Tertullian who had first asked the Church, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" and asserted that "I believe because it is absurd." Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the most learned of Renaissance humanists, also sang "in praise of folly"; and his essay of that name became appropriately widely read by Russian thinkers.34 Troubled Russian thinkers in later periods-Dostoevsky, Musorgsky, and Berdiaev-would feel tempted to find the true identity of their nation in this undisciplined tradition of holy "wanderers over the Russian land."35 But the prophetic fools provided a source of anarchistic and masochistic impulses as well as strength and sanctification.