The Icon and the Axe

The holy fools bore many points of resemblance to the prophetic hermit-saints that became common in Muscovy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, the term for holy wanderer (skitalets) is related to the one used to describe the isolated hermit communities: skity. The most famous ascetic hermit and defender of these small communities was Nil Sorsky, through whom the spiritual intensity of the Hesychasts was brought from Greek to Russian soil.36 A monk from St. Cyril's monastery on the White Lake, Nil traveled to the Holy Land and to Constantinople in the years just after its fall and thence to the "holy Mountain" of Athos. There he acquired the deep devotion to an inner spiritual life free from external discipline and constraint, which he brought back to Russia and used as the basis of his model skit in the wilderness along the Sora River beyond the White Lake. In his devotional writings there is a kind of primitive Franciscan love of nature and indifference to things of this world. There were to be no more than twelve "brothers" in any skit, all living in apostolic poverty and close communion with the natural world. The gospels and a few other "divine writings" were to be the only sources of authority.

Nil saw the skit as the golden mean of monastic life, combining the

communal type of monastery with the cellular type. Within the individual cell there was to be a kind of apprentice system with an experienced "elder" tutoring one or two apprentice monks in spiritual prayer and holy writings. All the various cells were to gather together for Sundays and other feast days, and each skit was to support itself economically but resist all temptations of wealth and luxury. Externals were irrelevant to this apostle of the inner spiritual life. He was not deeply concerned with the observance of fasts or the persecution of heretics. Nil preached rather the power of spiritual example, and sought to find the means of producing such examples in monasteries. Spiritual prayer was in Nil's metaphorical language the running wind that could lead man across the turbulent seas of sin to the haven of salvation. All externals-even spoken prayer-were only tillers, means of steering men back into this wind of the spirit which had first blown on the apostles at Pentecost.

Nil's life and doctrine had a profound effect in the new monasteries of the expanding northeastern frontier. His followers, known as trans-Volga elders, came chiefly from the dependent cloisters of St. Sergius and from the lesser-known "Savior in Stone" monastery and its nine monastic colonies in the Yaroslavl-Vologda region. When this monastery came under the direction of a Greek Hesychast in 1380, it became a center of training for "inner spirituality," offering counsel not only to monastic apprentices but to a variety of tradesmen, colonizers, and lay pilgrims.87

Nil's teachings had the disturbing effect of leading men to think that direct links with God were possible-indeed preferable-to the ornately externalized services of Orthodoxy. The belief that God had sent inspired intermediaries directly to His chosen people outside the formal channels of the Church lent a kind of nervous religious character to life.

Muscovy at the time of its rise to greatness resembled an expectant revivalist camp. Russia was a primitive but powerful religious civilization, fatefully lacking in critical sense or clear division of authority. It had, of course, always been incorrect to speak even in Byzantium of "church" and "state" rather than of two types of sanctified authority (sacerdotium and imperium) within the universal Christian commonwealth.38 In Muscovy the two were even more closely intertwined without any clear commitment to the theoretical definitions and practical limitations that had evolved in the long history of Byzantium.

In the civil sphere there were no permanent administrative chanceries (even of the crude prikaz variety) until the early sixteenth century.39 In the ecclesiastical sphere, the lack of any clear diocesan structure or episcopal hierarchy made it difficult for leading prelates to provide an effective substitute for political authority during the long period of political division. Nor

was there even a clear line of precedence among the monasteries. In contrast to the medieval West, where compendia of Roman law were waiting to be discovered and where the Moslem invader brought the texts of Aristotle with him, distant Muscovy had almost no exposure to the political and legal teachings of classical antiquity. At best they read some version of Plato's arguments for the closed rule of a philosopher-king-but only to fortify their conclusion that a good and holy leader was necessary, never as an exercise in Socratic method.