The Icon and the Axe

Although the Metropolitan of Moscow had been elevated to the title of Patriarch only in 1589, the position had almost immediately assumed political as well as ecclesiastical significance. The post was created during a period of weakened tsarist authority-indeed, the first patriarch had been largely responsible for securing Boris Godunov's elevation to the throne. During the troubles of the interregnum, patriarchal authority increased dramatically, largely because Patriarch Hermogenes refused to deal with foreign factions and accepted a martyr's death within the Polish-occupied Kremlin. When, in 1619, the father of the tsar and former Metropolitan of Rostov, Philaret Nikitich, finally returned from Polish imprisonment to become the new patriarch, the stage was set for a great increase in the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Until his death in 1633 he was co-ruler with Tsar Michael, using the title "Great Sovereign" and presiding over more important affairs of state than the Tsar. At the same time he created new sees in the east, increased central control of canonization and ecclesiastical discipline, and determined the form that the first printed versions of some church service books should take.18

If Philaret created the precedent for a strong patriarchate and a disciplined hierarchy, the theological arming of the Orthodox clergy was largely the work of Peter Mogila, the most influential ecclesiastical leader

in Orthodox Slavdom for the period between Philaret's death in 1633 and his own in 1647. Mogila's career illustrates the way in which non-Muscovite elements were beginning to control the development of the Russian Church. He was the well-educated progeny of a Moldavian noble family and had fought with the Poles against the Turks in the storied battle of Khotin in 1620. Moved by the five pilgrimages he had made to the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, Mogila settled in that Polish-controlled city. He became a monk, then archimandrite of the monastery, Metropolitan of Kiev, and founder of the Kievan academy "for the teaching of free sciences in the Greek, Slavonic, and Latin languages."19

Under Mogila the theological struggle of the Orthodox brotherhoods with the Catholic Uniats acquired new sophistication and organizational skill. He wrote for his co-religionists a concise Bible of Instruction, a Confession, and a Catechism, which were reprinted after receiving the endorsement of Orthodox synods that he organized in Kiev in 1640 and in Jassy in 1642. Even more important was Mogila's leadership in checking the drift toward a theological rapprochement with Protestantism that had been aided by Cyril Lukaris' patriarchate in Constantinople. He prevented attempts by Calvinists to spread their ideas in the Ukraine in the 1630's. His Confession begins with a direct contradiction of the Protestant position on justification by faith. Although he remained firm in rejecting the authority of Rome, his writings were so deeply influenced by Jesuit theology that his Catechism (originally written in Latin) was approved at the synod of Jassy only after substantial revisions had been made by a Greek prelate.20 Mogila also introduced into the Orthodoxy of the Eastern Slavs a Western element of scorn for superstitious accretions and irrationalism. He particularly challenged the charitable-even indulgent-attitude of the Russian Church toward those possessed, drawing up a purely Western guide for exorcising unclean spirits and preparing believers for proper instruction.21

Although Mogila was a Moldavian who spent his entire life under the political authority of Poland and the ecclesiastical authority of Constantinople, he properly belongs to Russian history. Most of his pupils either moved to Moscow or accepted its authority in the course of the victorious Muscovite struggle with Poland that began shortly after his death. To the Russian Church he gave priests capable of holding their own in theological discourse with Westerners, and infected the Russian hierarchy with some of his own passion for order and rationality. As early as April, 1640, Mogila had written Tsar Michael to urge the establishment of a special school in a Moscow monastery where his pupils could teach Orthodox theology and classical languages to the Muscovite nobility. Though such an

institution did not formally come into being until the creation of the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in 1689, considerable informal instruction was conducted in Moscow in the 1640's by Mogila's pupils.