The Icon and the Axe

There were, however, unreal and unhealthy aspects to the rapid growth of religious institutions. The monasteries were burdened with far greater wealth than at the time of the controversy over monastic property- without having acquired the strict discipline on which the original "possessors" had based their case. The monasteries were becoming preoccupied with their role of feudal landowner at precisely the time when serfdom was becoming most oppressive. Bequests were, moreover, increasingly tainted by the institution of "pledging" (zakladnichestvo): a form of tax evasion in which property was nominally donated to a monastery, but the old owner continued to use and profit from it in return for a nominal service charge.

There was so much activity in and around churches that one might have had the impression of an unprecedented blossoming of religious ardor. In truth, however, it represented more the sagging overgrowth of Indian Summer than the freshness of springtime. The ornate brick churches with Dutch and Persian features, which sprang up at the rate of better than one every two years in Yaroslavl,17 appear today as a kind of unreal interlude between the Byzantine and baroque styles: heavy fruit languishing in the hazy warmth of October, unaware that the stem linking them with the earth had withered and that the killing frost was about to descend. Innumerable icons of local prophets and saints clustered on the lower tier of the iconostases, rather like overripe grapes begging to be picked; and the rapid simultaneous singing of paid memorial services (of which the sorokoust or forty successive services for the dead are the best-known survival) resembled the agitated murmur of autumn flies just before their death.

The crowds that built and worshipped in the brick and wooden churches of the late Muscovite period were animated by a curious mixture of spirituality and xenophobia. Holy Russia was viewed not simply as suffering purity, but as the ravished victim of "wolf-like Poles" and their accomplices the "pagan Lithuanians" and "unclean Jews." Thus, the political revival and physical expansion of Russia were made possible not only by a common faith, but by an oppressive sense of common enemies. Mounting violence and suppressed self-hatred fed the traditional Byzantine impulse toward apocalypticism. Some of the new wooden churches beyond the Volga became funeral pyres for entire congregations, who sought to greet the purifying flames of the Last Judgment with many of the same hymns that their parents had sung while building these churches. To understand both the tragic end of Russia's "second religiousness" and its subtle links with the religious controversies of the West, one must turn to the two prin-

cipal factions within the Russian religious revival: the theocratic and the fundamentalist. Each faction answered in a different way one common, central question: How can religion be kept at the center of Russian life in the radically changing conditions of the seventeenth century?

The Theocratic Answer

A theocratic solution was favored by many of the "black," or celibate, monastic clergy from which the episcopal hierarchy of the Russian Church was drawn. Partisans of this position sought to strengthen the ecclesiastical hierarchy, increase central control of Russian monasteries, and increase both the discipline and educational level of the clergy by editing and printing systematic catechistic and devotional manuals. In fact, though not in theory, they sought to elevate the spiritual estate over the temporal by greatly increasing the power of the Moscow Patriarch. They continued to speak in Byzantine terms of a "symphony of powers" between the ecclesiastical and temporal realms, but the increased strength of the clergy and continued weakness of the new dynasty offered temptations for establishing virtual clerical rule.