The Icon and the Axe

A critical attitude toward religion became widespread among the civilians in the tsar's entourage who traveled abroad on diplomatic missions in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century. Both Fedor Kuritsyn, who headed the foreign office under Ivan III, and Fedor Karpov, who headed the much larger one under Ivan IV, became thoroughgoing sceptics; and the perspectives of Ivan IV's most trusted clerk, Ivan Viskovaty, and his leading apologist for absolutism, Ivan Peresvetov, appear to have been predominately secular.45 Sacramental worship-and even the unique truth of Christianity-was implicitly questioned in the mid-fifteenth century by a literate and sophisticated Tver merchant, Afanasy Nikitin. In the course of wide travels throughout the Near East and South Asia, he appears to have concluded that all men were "Sons of Adam" who believed in the same God; and, although he continued to observe Orthodox practices in foreign lands, he pointedly wrote the word "God" in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish as well as Russian in his Journey over Three Seas.*6

The search fan a more rational and universal form of faith appears to have attracted considerable interest in cosmopolitan western Russia, where a syncretic, unitarian offshoot of the Protestant Reformation had to be

anathemized by a special church council of 1553-4. Like the Judaizers who were condemned by a-eouncil just a half century before, this movement is shrouded in obscurity. Once again, some connection with Judaism seems probable in view of the importance that the leader, Fedor Kosoy, attached to the teaching of the Pentateuch and his later marriage to a Lithuanian JewessT^Kosoy insisted eloquently at the council oi 1553-4 that "all people are as one in God: Tatars, Germans and simple barbarians."48 It seems reasonable to assume that this movement like that of the Judaizers continued to have sympathizers after official condemnation; and that the rapid subsequent flowering of anti-trinitarian Socinianism in Poland continued to attract attention in western Russia.

Four influential Russians of the mid-sixteenth century, Andrew

Kurbsky, Fedor"Karpov, Ermolai-Erazm, and Maxim the Greek, repro-

, duced ofrRussian soil the philosophic opposition to both superstition and

"scholasticism that was characteristic ofWestern humanism. Each of them

had a vital interest in classical antiquity-particularly Ciceronian moralism

and Platonic idealism.

Despite his traditional, Muscovite view of politics and history, Kurbsky was the most deeply enamored with the classical past and was the only one to leave Russia to soak up the Latinized culture of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Having acquired a direct knowledge of Platonic and early Greek thought from Maxim the Greek, he added an even more extensive knowledge of the Latin classics during his long stay abroad. Informally associated with a coterie of Latinized White Russian noblemen, Kurbsky visited the easternmost Latin university of medieval Europe at Cracow and sent his nephew to Italy. In the later stages of his correspondence with Ivan the Terrible, he included a long translation from Cicero as a means of proving that forced flight cannot be considered treason.49

An even deeper absorption of classical culture is evident in the writings of Karpov, a Latin interpreter and leading official for more than thirty years in the Russian foreign office. He consciously strove to write with "Homeric eloquence" in a pleasing, grammatical "non-barbaric" way,50 His few surviving compositions reveal subtlety of intellect as well as considerable style and a sense of irony and concern for moral order."1 This latter quality bordered on the subversive in Muscovy, for it led him tb conclude that *fnoral laws were Higher than the will of the sovereign. Almost alone in his day he contended that civil.and ecclesiastical affairs,should be separated, and that justice is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity for human society. The monastic virtue of "long suffering" is not sufficient for civil society, which will be ruined if law and order are absent. Law is, however, not bracketed with terror as it was in the writings of Peresvetov. To-

gether with justice must go mercy, because "mercy without justice is faintheartedness, but justice without mercy is tyranny."52