The Icon and the Axe

The activity of the critical secular intellectuals was even more feared by the monastic establishment than that of republican political leaders. For the monks were more interested in lending mythologized sanctity to a Christian emperor than in defining concrete forms of rule. Their fascination with Byzantine models'led them to conclude that ideological schisms and heresies had done far more to tear apart the empire than differences in political and administrative traditions. Accompanying the extraordinary reverence for whatgver^irwritten" within the monastic tradition was an inordinate fear of anything written outside. In the early modern period, the phrase "he hj›s gone into books" was used to mean "he has gone out of his mind"; and "opinion is the mother to all suffering, opinion is the second fall" became a popular proverb.15 As Gennadius of Novgorod wrote during the ideological ferment prior to the church council of 1490:

Our people are simple, they are unable to talk in the manner of books. Thus, it is better not to engage in debates about the faith. A council is needed not for debates on the faith, but in order that heretics be judged, hanged and burned.16

The ecclesiastical hierarchy sought-and gradually obtained-the help of princes in stamping out the rationalistic tendencies of the "Judaizers" through" procedures strangely reminiscent of the show trials of a later era. Though little can beTcnown for certain about the "heretics," their ideas clearly came in through the trade routes into Novgorod as had those of the anti-eccTesiastrcaP'shofn heads" of the previous century. The "Judaizers" were anti-trinitarian, iconoclastic, and apparently opposed to both monas-ticism and fasting. Linked in some ways with the European-wide phenomenon of late medieval heresy, they nevertheless differed from the Lollards and Hussites of the West by appealing not to popular sentiments with emotional revivalism, but rather to the intellectual elite with radical rationalism. Revulsion at the anti-rational histencal theology of the xenophobic masses thus led cosmopolitan intellectuals into the diametrically opposite thought worTd of TaTionaT~alrfirhistorical philosophy. Whether or not the Judaizers were as interested-in "the cursed logic" of Jewish and Moslem thinkers as their persecutors insisted,17 that very accusation served to suggest that the logical alternative to Muscovite Orthodoxy was Western rationalism. This

became the alternative when St. Petersburg succeeded Novgorod as the cosmopolitan adversary of Moscow, and gradually gave birth to a revolution in the name of universal rationalism.

The initial crippling of Novgorod under Ivan III was accompanied by sorqejrf'TEe same~^MeTslveTeaForthe^West that was to recur under Ivan IV and Stalin. The ideological purge of cosmopolitan intellectuals was ^accompanied by massive deportations east-the first of the periodic depopulations of the more advanced Baltic provinces by the vindictive force of Muscovy.18 The pretext for this first fateful move on Novgorod was that Novgorod had gone over to the "Latins." Although probably untrue in any formal political or ecclesiastical sense, the accusation does highlight the unsettling effect produced by the first of the "Wests" to confront Muscovy in the early modern period: the Latin West of the high Renaissance.

"The Latins"

Italian influences in Russia may have been far more substantial han is gener3TjT realized even in the early period of the Renaissance, ian products and ideas came to Russia indirectly through Baltic ports and direjitlythrough the Genoese trading communities in the Crimea in the late^ thirteenth and the fourteenth century. By the mid-fourteenth century there was a permanent colony of Italian tradesmen in Moscow, and Italian paper had come into widespread usage in Russia.19 The only example of Russian church architecture from the mid-fourteenth century to survive down to modern times contains frescoes that were closer to the style of the early Renaissance than to that of traditional Byzantine iconography- including animation and realism that would have been advanced even in Italy and purely Western compositions, such as a pieta.20 How far this Italian influence might have persisted in the decor of churches is*one of the many no doubt" insoluble mysteries of early Russian history. Subsequent Russian iconography does not appear to have been affected by these frescoes, however; and the next clear point of Italian cultural impact occurred nearly a century Tater, at the Council of Florence.

About a hundred representatives from various parts of Russia accompanied Metropolitan Isidore on his Italian journey. Some had previous contact, and some may have sympathized with Isidore's ill-fated endorsement of union with Rome. Though the Russians recoiled from the secular art and culture-of- the high Renaissance-two monks frorif Suzdal left a rather unflattering description of an Italian mystery play which they saw in