Holy Men of God: Kings, Priests, and Monks in Eastern Orthodoxy 1685073379, 9781685073374

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter 1
Iconoclasts and Iconodules
Chapter 2
John of Damascus
Chapter 3
The Paulicians Versus the Empire
Chapter 4
The Beginning of the Great Schism
Chapter 5
Symeon the New Theologian
Chapter 6
Russia Under the Mongol Yoke
Chapter 7
The Philosophy of Hesychasm
Chapter 8
The Possessors
Chapter 9
Archpriest Avvakum
Chapter 10
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain
Chapter 11
The Way of the Pilgrim
Chapter 12
Silouan’s Song
Bibliography
About the Author
Index
Blank Page
Blank Page

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HOLY MEN OF GOD KINGS, PRIESTS, AND MONKS IN EASTERN ORTHODOXY

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HOLY MEN OF GOD KINGS, PRIESTS, AND MONKS IN EASTERN ORTHODOXY

THEODORE SABO

Copyright © 2022 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. DOI: https://doi.org/10.52305/IVZR9071 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. We have partnered with Copyright Clearance Center to make it easy for you to obtain permissions to reuse content from this publication. Simply navigate to this publication’s page on Nova’s website and locate the “Get Permission” button below the title description. This button is linked directly to the title’s permission page on copyright.com. Alternatively, you can visit copyright.com and search by title, ISBN, or ISSN. For further questions about using the service on copyright.com, please contact: Copyright Clearance Center Phone: +1-(978) 750-8400 Fax: +1-(978) 750-4470

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NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers’ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Additional color graphics may be available in the e-book version of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sabo, Theodore, 1973- author. Title: Holy men of God : kings, priests, and monks in Eastern Orthodoxy / Theodore Sabo. Description: New York : Nova Science Publishers, [2022] | Series: Religion and spirituality | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021059143 (print) | LCCN 2021059144 (ebook) | ISBN 9781685073374 (paperback) | ISBN 9781685074708 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Orthodox Eastern Church--Biography. | Orthodox Eastern Church--History. | Byzantine Empire--Church history. | Slavic countries--Church history. Classification: LCC BX390 .S23 2022 (print) | LCC BX390 (ebook) | DDC 281.9--dc23/eng/20220127 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059143 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059144

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York

CONTENTS Chapter 1

Iconoclasts and Iconodules

1

Chapter 2

John of Damascus

13

Chapter 3

The Paulicians Versus the Empire

25

Chapter 4

The Beginning of the Great Schism

29

Chapter 5

Symeon the New Theologian

39

Chapter 6

Russia Under the Mongol Yoke

55

Chapter 7

The Philosophy of Hesychasm

61

Chapter 8

The Possessors

73

Chapter 9

Archpriest Avvakum

85

Chapter 10

Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

95

Chapter 11

The Way of the Pilgrim

101

Chapter 12

Silouan’s Song

109

Bibliography

117

About the Author

125

Index

127

Chapter 1

ICONOCLASTS AND ICONODULES The schism between the Eastern and Western churches stems from the Concilium Quinisextum of 692. Justinian II, one of the worst rulers to disgrace the already disgraceful throne of Byzantium, roused himself from his cantankerous sadism to convene the council. It adopted over one hundred canons, or church laws, many of which were already practiced by the Eastern church. The Roman bishop Sergius refused to sign the acts of the council, and Justinian sent an officer to extradite him to Constantinople. The officer soon found himself in hot water and had to hide in the pope’s bed to protect himself from the Italian soldiery which had risen to the pontiff’s defense. Shortly afterwards Justinian was deposed, deprived of his nose and tongue, and sent into exile. He returned ten years later with a golden nose and enacted a ferocious revenge on his enemies. This included beheadings, hangings, drownings, executions after invitations to imperial banquets, and blindings in which the victims were forced to stare into a heated silver dish filled with vinegar. He had not forgotten the one hundred canons. He sent another copy of the acts to the new pope, John VII, with the demand that he sanction as many of the canons as he could countenance, but the pope returned the copy unsigned.

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Quinisextum means “fifth-sixth” in Latin, showing that the synod thought of itself as a supplement to the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils that had preceded it. The Greeks used the term Penthecton which meant the same thing. It is not difficult to understand why its acts were disliked by the Western church: almost every canon went against Latin taste and custom. The first canon anathematized a previous pope, Honorius. The second canon claimed there were eighty-five apostolic canons instead of fifty. The third canon permitted marriage of the lower clergy. The thirtysixth canon put the patriarch of Constantinople on a par with the bishop of Rome. The fifty-fifth canon prohibited fasting on Sabbaths during Lent. The sixty-seventh canon claimed that the apostolic prohibition against eating blood and things strangled was still valid. The eighty-second canon prohibited depictions of Christ as a lamb and commanded that He be portrayed only in human form. After the council the Eastern and Western churches began to go their separate ways. The Iconoclastic heretics who subsequently plagued the Byzantine Empire were looked on with patronizing amusement by the West: the Latin church had nothing against religious art and in any case revered statues just as much as pictures. *** The earliest pictures of Christ had been based on statues of Apollo, but Christian artists soon realized that their art had to be different from that of the Greeks: it had to be more spiritual and more ascetic. They went back to authentic impressions of the Holy Land and introduced the image by which Christ is known today: a bearded man with long brown hair. In the early eighth century the churches of the Christian East were filled with icons of Christ and the saints, and not only the churches. They adorned prayer books, palaces, private homes, dresses, and furniture. Sometimes they performed miracles and more rarely stood as godfathers for children being baptized and monks being tonsured. At times paint was scraped off old icons and mixed with the Eucharistic elements; on other occasions the priest celebrated the Eucharist on an icon instead of an altar.

Iconoclasts and Iconodules

3

But the days of the icon were numbered, or so it seemed to a peasant turned emperor who took the name of Leo III. There is a legend that when Leo was a young man he was met by a Jewish fortune-teller who promised him that he would become emperor if he abolished idolatry. If the legend is true then Leo was rather ungrateful. In the sixth year of his reign he forced the Jews and the schismatic Montanists to convert to Christianity. The former dissemblingly admitted to baptism; the latter, knowing the Byzantines’ immense capacity for cruelty, set fire to their own churches and died in the flames. Four years later Leo turned on the very bulwark of Orthodox Christianity: the sacred image or icon. He was influenced by a Phrygian bishop named Constantine who was sensitive to the rebuke of the Muslims that icons were a new form of idolatry. Another inducement for Leo was that the power of the church would be lessened: there would be no pictures of Christ, but there would be pictures of him and his heirs. Previously the emperors struck coins with images of themselves in subordination to images of Christ; this changed with Leo who eliminated Christ. He first prohibited the reverence of icons with the lying explanation that he wanted to protect the images from the profane fingers and lips of the multitude; with this in mind he had them raised to higher positions in the churches. Then he ordered their destruction. All icons were to be whitewashed, and Leo set an example by replacing the portrait of Christ in the imperial palace with a cross. The monks and the people reacted violently to Leo’s Iconoclasm, sometimes killing those who were entrusted with the destruction of the icons. The Iconodules, as they became known as, rallied around the patriarch Germanus and the theologian John of Damascus. The Greeks living on the islands revolted against Leo. They proclaimed their own emperor and sent a fleet to capture the capital, but their rebellion was quickly suppressed. Germanus was defrocked, whipped, and replaced with the cleric Anastasius. Germanus had had a hard life. His father was of royal blood and was involved in the assassination of the emperor Constans II. Constans’ son Constantine IV had the father executed and Germanus cruelly abused. Germanus would become a presbyter at the Church of Holy Wisdom and play a prominent part in the sixth ecumenical council. He

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wrote on the church councils and on Origen’s doctrine of universal salvation, but his most enduring legacy was his treatise on the liturgy. His great predecessor Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite had emphasized the realities of which the liturgical trappings were shadows, but Germanus attempted to link the liturgy more closely to salvation history. In this way he hoped to correct the Iconoclastic emphasis on the divinity rather than the humanity of Christ. *** The Iconoclasm of Leo III was not fanatical, but it was so sincere that husbands and wives feared each other during his reign. He died in 741. He was renowned not only for his Iconoclasm but for his revision of Justinian’s legal code, a revision which tells us much about the Byzantine soul: Justinian’s relatively harmless executions were replaced with Leo’s bizarre mutilations. The influence of Sassanian Persia lies behind much of the opulence and violence of medieval Byzantium. Leo was succeeded by his son, Constantine V, whom the Iconodules dubbed Copronymus, Named from Dung. The name was due to his having sullied the baptismal font when he was a baby. Constantine was at once more capable than his father and crueler. The Iconodules credited him with immorality and occultism, but the Iconoclasts praised him for his reputed virtue, and long after his death, when the Bulgarian khan Krum invaded the empire, Iconoclastic soldiers prayed at his tomb. In 754 Constantine convened an ecumenical council in Constantinople. The Iconodules called it the Pseudosyllogus or Pseudosynod. It was attended by three hundred thirty-eight bishops presided over by the bishop of Ephesus. Ironically there was no patriarch of Constantinople at the time and the bishop of Rome defied the order to attend. The delegates made quick work of icons by appealing to three scriptures. In the book of Exodus: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a

Iconoclasts and Iconodules

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jealous God.” In Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man.” And, more moderately, in the Gospel of John: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” The bishops also remembered that Epiphanius of Salamis had once torn down a curtain in a church in Palestine because it bore the image of Christ or a saint. The Council of 754 hinted that all pictures, even of the emperor, were immoral, but most dangerous of all were religious pictures. With his polluted hands the monkish iconographer made what should only be believed in the heart and confessed with the mouth. The council prohibited the public and private worship of icons and promised excommunication in the case of detection. The Iconoclasts were themselves warned against damaging sacred vessels and clothes decorated with figures, but this was solely an economic measure: all religious paintings and sculptures were denounced as pagan and idolatrous. Jesus Christ, the council affirmed, was one person in two natures, but attempts to depict His body emphasized His humanity at the expense of His deity. The bishops emphasized Christ’s divinity to the point of Docetism and lashed out against the use of “common dead matter” in artistic representations. They covered their theological tracks by stating that icons also ran the dangers of mingling Christ’s natures and of separating them. The crass blasphemy of the iconographer, they maintained, was repeated by the worshipper of his icons. If the churchgoer wanted an image of Christ to worship, the Eucharist was there to meet his need. The bishops vilified the ex-patriarch Germanus as a double-minded wood-worshipper and anathematized John of Damascus three times. There was a Platonic method to the Iconoclasts’ madness. They thought that icons were images of their archetype, usually Christ. A true image was of the same substance with its archetype. For instance, Christ was an image of the Father and of the same substance with Him. Since an image was of the same substance with its archetype it was also its own archetype, and who could imagine an icon being an archetype? So icons were not true images of the Son, only the Eucharist was. An unknown

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monk of Studium countered that an icon was an image of Christ in a different way than Christ was an image of the Father. Christ is of the same substance with the Father, but an icon of Christ is not of the same substance with Christ. Therefore it was impossible to worship an icon as one did Christ. Nonetheless an icon was still an image of the archetype Christ. Whoever venerated the image venerated the archetype, and whoever harmed the effect harmed the cause. Constantine was certainly eager to harm the effect and implemented the decrees of the Iconoclastic council with renewed vigor. All sacred images were whitewashed or replaced with pictures of trees, birds, and animals. Icons done in mosaic were dug out, and those painted in waxwork were scraped away. Icon makers were to be stripped of their priesthood if priests and excommunicated if monks or laymen. The clergy submitted to Constantine and did well. They wore perfume and golden girdles and clothes, and the edges of their garments had sentences embroidered in gold. But the monks decried Constantine as a second Muhammad and called his followers atheists and blasphemers; Constantine responded by outlawing monasticism, asceticism, and frequent visits to churches. The new patriarch was ordered to attend the emperor’s coarse banquets. Monasteries were turned into barracks for soldiers, and monks were forced to appear in the hippodrome holding the hands of prostitutes while the people spat at them. The governor of Thrace clothed the monks in white and made them choose between marrying nuns or being blinded. He sold their monasteries and gave the money to the emperor. Other monks were imprisoned, beaten, mutilated, and executed. Iconographers were sewn into sacks and drowned; their heads were shattered against icons; their hands were burned. Three martyrs known to us from this time are Peter Kalabites, John of Monagria, and Stephen of Auxentius. More subtly Constantine honored monks who became laicized and created an imperial guard which was forbidden to worship images or greet monks. The reason for Constantine’s attitude is hard to determine; what we do know is that he alone of the Iconoclastic emperors persecuted monks as a state policy. He called them Unmentionables, condemned them for being clothed in the “raiment of darkness,” and mocked their laziness, a

Iconoclasts and Iconodules

7

new and growing phenomenon which would be corrected by Theodore of Studium. Constantine was much more of a Protestant than his fellow Iconoclasts since he was against the worship of the Virgin Mary and the saints, even against harmless interjections like “Mother of God, help me!” He believed that Mary had been the Theotokos—God-bearer—for only a brief time, and he once filled his purse with gold and emptied it to demonstrate the point. He was also opposed to the reverence of relics and refused to allow churches to be called by the title saint: the Church of St. Sophia was henceforth designated the Church of Sophia. The cathedrals of Constantine’s time resembled those of Puritan England in their spareness. Before he passed away Constantine retracted his blasphemies against the Virgin, but it was too late. Painful ulcers broke out over his body, a foretaste of the life after death. *** Constantine’s persecution was continued with less zeal by his son Leo IV. Iconoclasm had not been a complete success. The Iconodules possessed small icons which could easily be hidden, and small drawings of Old Testament stories were made in illuminated manuscripts by Iconoclasts: the wicked, described so amorphously in the Psalms and Proverbs, were frequently depicted as icon worshippers. Leo’s widow Irene, acting as regent for her son Constantine VI, turned the tables on the Iconoclasts. She first granted toleration to both factions and then removed it from the Iconoclasts who also lost control of the imperial guard. In 787 she convened the Second Council of Nicaea which was attended by three hundred fifty bishops presided over by the patriarch Tarasius. Impossibly, a generation had grown up without knowing icons. Eleven Iconoclastic bishops publicly abjured their heresy. Gregory of Neocaesarea, a former Iconoclast, read the synopsis or epitome of the Council of 754, and a deacon read the Iconodule refutation. The new council interpreted the second commandment forbidding representational art as being directed against idols. The covering of the Ark of the Covenant

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was noted to have had representations of angels: “And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high, covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims be.” Ezekiel’s prophetic temple was likewise filled with carvings of cherubim. There was also the testimony of Gregory of Nyssa that he had read the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac many times without weeping but wept when he saw the story painted. It is not surprising that the council severely condemned the apocryphal Acts of John. In the Acts the apostle heals the wife of the praetor Lycomedes. The grateful man commissions a friend to paint a colored portrait of the apostle from memory. Lycomedes puts candles before the portrait and reverences it, but when John sees him before the portrait he reprimands him for worshipping a pagan god. A mirror is brought to John and he realizes the portrait is of himself, but he nonetheless commands its destruction because it is the dead picture of a dead man. Instead he commissions Lycomedes to paint a picture of his soul and use for his colors faith, meekness, love, and chastity. The Second Council of Nicaea denounced the Iconoclasts as wolves in sheep’s clothing. The bishops claimed that Iconoclasm was the worst of all heresies since it subverted the incarnation of Christ, and they noted that it ran the danger of falling into Docetism. By refusing to allow pictures of Christ the Iconoclasts thought of matter as a garment Christ put on for a brief time, while all the Orthodox knew that Christ still had a resurrection body. But the Iconodules did not flawlessly defend their own orthodoxy. The Council of 754 had emphasized the so-called Chalcedonian Definition: “This one and the same Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son, is acknowledged in two natures without confusion.” The new council quoted this with approval but left out “without confusion.” It thus opened itself up to the Iconoclastic charge that pictures of Christ mingled His two natures. The Iconoclastic council was not as theologically astute as the Council of 754, perhaps because it lasted eighteen days instead of six months. The Iconodules also found that they had acquired strange bedfellows in their pagan ancestors. When the early Christians had attacked pagan sculptures

Iconoclasts and Iconodules

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as idolatrous, the Platonist Celsus had responded, “Who but an utter fool considers them to be gods, and not dedications and statues for the gods?” The Nicene bishops revoked the decrees of Constantine’s synod and encouraged the veneration (proskynēsis) though not the worship (latreia) of icons. They noted that in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the word prosekynēsen was used when David bowed before Jonathan, an instance that could not imply worship. The bishops declared that all pictures were lawful but that religious pictures were the most significant. They defined icons as images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, the angels, and the saints drawn in color or done in mosaic. They could be set in churches, houses, and streets and could be made on walls, tables, and sacred vessels and clothes. The Christian could kiss icons, bow before them, burn incense or candles before them, and say prayers before them if he understood that his honor was not intended for the icons but for what they represented. A priest testified that he had been cured from an illness by an icon of Christ, and an icon was brought in and reverently kissed by the bishops. The erring Iconoclasts were allowed to recant, and those who did not were anathematized. Monastic asceticism was restored, and the deceased Germanus of Constantinople and John of Damascus were both rewarded with eternal memory. Iconodulism triumphed at the Second Council of Nicaea, yet Iconoclasm would influence the subsequent, more stylized way in which icons were produced. Sometimes the Iconoclasts alleged that icons mingled Christ’s two natures, but more often they alleged that by portraying only the human side of Christ icons separated His two natures somewhat like the Nestorians had done and therefore made four persons of the Trinity. The new icons stressed Christ’s deity and steered the Orthodox Church slightly closer to Monophysitism than Nestorianism. In other words, the church emphasized Christ’s single person over His divine and human natures and imbued it with more divinity than humanity. ***

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The Iconodules often had trouble finding patristic support for their reverence of icons and were sometimes forced to argue from absence: no church council had condemned images. Origen had done so, but he had been anathematized by the Second Council of Constantinople. Eusebius of Caesarea, the church historian, was asked by Constantia, the sister of Constantine the Great, for an icon of Christ and had sarcastically replied, “Which icon of Christ do you mean? That which is true and unchangeable and which bears the characteristics of His nature, or that which He assumed for us, the figure which He took in the form of a slave?” Eusebius, the Iconodules were happy to point out, was almost an Arian, and the patriarch Nicephorus quipped that he should have been called Dysebius rather than Eusebius, in other words Irreligious rather than Religious. He also claimed, with rhetorical exaggeration, that Eusebius was the coryphaeus of atheism. The Iconodules made up for their lack of patristic backing by creating an extensive literature justifying the icon. John of Damascus said it was possible to portray God after Christ’s incarnation, and other Iconodules discovered that there could be icons of the preincarnate Christ. Orthodox exegesis maintained that the three men who came to Abraham’s tent in Genesis 18 were the Trinity. John of Jerusalem wrote that angels could be iconic since Old and New Testament saints saw them: Mary and Zacharias had seen Gabriel; the women at Christ’s tomb had seen an angel whose face looked like lightning and whose raiment was as white as snow; Mary Magdalene saw two angels in shining garments; the apostles saw angels in prison; and Moses had allowed representations of the cherubim. However Theodore of Studium cautioned against the outlandish habit of painting crucified angels, a habit which was based on the sophistic argument that since angels could not be portrayed historically they should resemble the historical Jesus. Yet for the Iconodules all the evidence seemed to point that there could be an iconography of both the Incarnation and the Invisible. ***

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A legend says that when the Iconoclastic persecution began under Leo, the Constantinopolitan patriarch removed an image of the Virgin from his church and set it in the sea where it journeyed to Rome in the space of twenty-four hours. The Roman bishop hung up the miraculous image in St. Peter’s. When Iconodulism was restored the icon knew it was time to return. At a church service it was heard to make violent noises, but it managed to free itself and make its way down to the Tiber River and from there to the sea. In twenty-four hours it arrived in Constantinople, and there, at the Church of the Virgin near St. Sophia, it found a new home. A holy brotherhood was formed to protect and care for this engaging and selfwilled object.

Chapter 2

JOHN OF DAMASCUS John of Damascus was the last father of the Eastern church. Because of his eloquence he was called Chrysorrhoas, meaning Gold-pouring. His father Sergius was a Christian, but he was also the treasurer of the caliph Abdulmeled. Sergius had ransomed a Sicilian monk from slavery and made him the mentor of his son, and when Sergius died John was well qualified to succeed him. The monk must have taught John more theology than economics since John took the liberty of having himself ordained a priest while working for Abdulmeled. When the Iconoclastic controversy broke out John wrote three treatises attacking Leo III’s policies. He could not be harmed by the emperor since he lived in Muslim-occupied Syria, but he resigned his treasurership and became a monk at St. Sabas near the Dead Sea. A legend purports to tell us why. Leo sent the caliph a treasonous letter supposedly written by John and in a hand similar but not identical to his own. John denied he was the author of the letter, but the caliph had his right hand cut off. John asked for the hand back, and that night he put it to the stump of his arm and prayed to the Virgin Mary for his arm to be made whole. During his prayer he fell asleep and dreamed that the Virgin told him his prayer had been answered, and when he awoke he found it just as she had said. John was ever afterwards devoted to the Virgin and wrote three homilies on the Dormition, her falling asleep in the

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Lord. The story had it that Mary died surrounded by the apostles but that her body was assumed into heaven a few days after her burial. Here is John in his third homily: “What is sweeter than the mother of my God? She has captivated my mind; she has kidnapped my tongue; I gaze on her in my thoughts, waking and sleeping. She who is the mother of the Word has become the patron of my words.” It was relatively safe for John to attack Iconoclasm, but it was not safe for him to attack Islam which he occasionally did. Peter the metropolitan of Damascus had lost his tongue because of his preaching against the religion, but John was spared. Yet if the legends about him are true his time at St. Sabas was not untroubled. Because of his greatness no one at the monastery would instruct him except for an irascible older monk. The monk forced John to go to Damascus and sell baskets at twice their worth so he would be humiliated by the jeers of the people; one of John’s former servants recognized him and bought the baskets out of compassion for his master. The old monk had John do menial work and forbade him from writing, but the Virgin eventually came to John’s rescue and forced the old monk to desist. Another story about John has more of the earmark of truth: that towards the end of his life he went to Constantinople and agitated against Constantine Copronymus. Even if the story is false we know that he referred to Constantine by such lively epithets as New Muhammad, Christ-fighter, and Hater of the Holy. Constantine repaid him in kind. Since John was of Arabian descent he was sometimes called Mansur, the Redeemed, and that was the name under which he was cursed by the Pseudosyllogus of 754: “Anathema to Mansur, who has an evil name and Saracen opinions! To the betrayer of Christ and the enemy of the empire, to the teacher of impiety and the perverter of Scripture, anathema!” *** In his first Iconodulist treatise John claimed that the second commandment forbade representations of God but not men, and that it forbade the serving but not the honoring of images. Like the Second Council of Nicaea after him he noted that the covering of the Ark of the

John of Damascus

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Covenant had sculptures of cherubim. More than that God had directed Moses’ attention to Bezaleel, the son of Uri, with the words: “And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass.” John believed it was possible to represent God only after the incarnation of Christ. Icons of Christ, like Christ’s body, could be venerated, but neither icons nor Christ’s body could be worshipped: only Christ Himself could be. He duly noted the difference between latreia and proskynēsis, worship and veneration. The former was reserved only for God; the latter was used for Abraham bowing to the Hittites and Jacob bowing to his brother. John hinted that the Iconoclastic claim of the unworthiness of matter was Manichaean and asked, rhetorically, if the thrice-blessed wood of the cross was matter and if icons were any less powerful than the handkerchiefs and aprons the apostles touched in order to heal the sick. In praising icons he accepted Aristotle’s thesis that sight was the most important of the senses. Icons were the sacred books of the illiterate, and not only of the illiterate: John wrote that they had burned God’s image into his own soul. An icon was intended to represent “the invisible God, not as invisible but as having become visible for our sakes.” John did not want to see only the human nature of Christ portrayed in an icon, and he did not want to see Christ’s two natures mingled: he wanted to see both His divine and human natures. In a similar way the veneration of icons did not only involve the senses but also the intellect. John’s second treatise was by far his angriest. It was written in response to Leo’s persecution of the Iconodules and the flogging and exile of the patriarch Germanus. He alleged that the attack against the icons was a piratical attack of the state against the church, similar to King Saul’s tearing the garment of the prophet Samuel. Leo was no better than Jezebel or Herod. In attempting to eliminate icons he was attempting to eliminate the saints, the soldiers of Christ. He believed that Leo was inspired by demons and related the story of a monk who asked a demon what it would take to be free of him; the demon had said, “Get rid of your icon.”

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John denies that Epiphanius of Salamis was an Iconoclast since the church of Salamis was filled with icons until it had been stripped by the “wild and savage Leo” who made the people of God drink polluted waters. John accepts that there is little patristic evidence for icons, but there remains the oral tradition which is not to be trifled with. It is because of the oral tradition that we practice threefold immersion in baptism, that we pray in the direction of the rising sun, and that we venerate the cross. John no longer hints that the Iconoclasts are Manichaeans, and he brings up the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in order to ask whether there will someday be a Gospel of Leo. That the emperor calls himself a Christian does not faze him: “I know that Valens was called a Christian emperor and persecuted the orthodox faith, as well as Zeno and Anastasius, Heraclius and Constans who died in Sicily, and Bardanes Philippicus.” John’s third treatise would be the most influential for the Nicene council, especially its anthology of quotations and stories from the fathers. We are reminded that Chrysostom had an icon of St. Paul and that Chrysostom’s enemy Theophilus could not die until an icon of Chrysostom was brought to his bedside. We hear the legend of the Muslims who raided a Christian village and took up lodging at a church. They shot an arrow through the icon of St. Theodore, and his right shoulder began to bleed, to their utmost amusement. But all the Muslims in the church, and only those in the church, died. John also gives the anecdote, from Gregory of Nazianzus, about a licentious Christian youth who invited a prostitute into his chambers. On seeing the young man’s icon of St. Polemon she was overcome with shame and fled. And he quoted Leontius of Neapolis’ statement against the Jewish iconoclasts, that icons helped him do good works and receive eternal life. *** The book for which John is best known is his Fountain of Wisdom which was later translated into Latin and appended with a concordance. It influenced Scholastics like Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas. But John was less of an Aristotelian than Aquinas and ridiculed certain

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Monophysites who had called Aristotle the thirteenth apostle. He was also indebted, as Maximus the Confessor had been, to the Neoplatonic utterances of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. The Fountain was dedicated to Cosmas, a bishop of Maiuma who was once John’s fellow monastic and sufferer at the hands of the old monk of St. Sabas. It was an epitome of all previous Greek theology and was divided into three volumes: a section on logic, a history of Christian heresies, and a systematic theology. The first volume was the first major Christian study of Aristotle and would blaze the trail for future studies of the Stagirite by Muslim scholars. It sought to set out, in John’s own words, the best contributions of the philosophers of the Greeks, by which he meant the logical contributions of Aristotle. But it was Aristotelian dialectic filtered through a Christian lens. The illustrations are no longer of Socrates and Plato but of Peter and Paul, though Socrates’ snub nose is still there. There are angels instead of daemons, St. Basil is quoted, and key emphasis is given to philosophical terms that were important in patristic theology: hypostasis, prosōpon, enhypostaton, henotēs, and physis. The second volume of the Fountain relied on the work of Epiphanius of Salamis and other heresiologists, but John added chapters on Iconoclasm and Islam. The section on Islam shows him to be wellacquainted with the Qur’an and the hadiths, the written traditions of Muhammad. The Arabs before Muhammad used to worship Aphrodite whom they called Khabar and symbolized by the morning star. The head of Khabar’s statue was the Black Stone housed in the Kaaba. The Arabs argued that the Black Stone was either the bed on which Abraham and Hagar slept, or the rock to which Abraham tied Isaac before he prepared to sacrifice him to God. The problem with the last hypothesis for John was that the biblical description of Isaac’s sacrifice was of a partially wooded area, and there was only desert in Mecca. In turning the Arabs from idolatry Muhammad had been influenced by the Bible and encouraged by a Nestorian monk (John calls him an Arian monk). The Qur’an presents Jesus as the virgin-born son of Mary. The Jews wanted to crucify Him but only succeeded in crucifying His shadow. God then took Him to heaven where Jesus denied ever claiming to be God or God’s Son.

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John believed that Muhammad had no divine authority. He did not prophesy as Christ did, and he received his book in a dream rather than from the top of a holy mountain as Moses had. Muhammad’s attitude toward women also distressed John as did the Muslims’ mockery of Christian veneration of the cross while they themselves worshipped a rock. The last volume of the Fountain, “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” was based on the work of Gregory of Nazianzus. The Western church divided the “Exposition” into four books, dealing with God, the creation, the Incarnation, and miscellaneous topics. Interestingly, John called the Holy Spirit the Fountain of Wisdom. He said that the Holy Spirit proceeded only from the Father rather than from the Father and the Son as the Western church taught, but the Holy Spirit was communicated to man through the Son. The whole creation shares in the Spirit’s work through the Son, but the Spirit by Himself creates, molds, sanctifies, and binds all creation together. John’s teaching on the Holy Spirit would be accepted by both the Orthodox and the Eastern Catholics. John followed St. Anthony on the prophecies of demons: they can make predictions only because they see what is happening at a distance. (St. Anthony had given the illustration of a river beginning to flood.) In regard to the creation John considered the possibility of a fifth element, ether, which Aristotle had added to the traditional four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. He thought that the earthly paradise, where Adam and Eve were created and fell, was a combination of mind and matter. John strove to equally balance Christ’s deity and humanity but stressed His deity. He accepted only two sacraments—baptism and the Eucharist— and rejected the Apocrypha though he added the eighty-five apostolic canons to the New Testament. He believed that virginity was better than marriage but that marriage was good because it prevented unchastity and propagated the race. The resurrection body would be like our bodies except that it would be changeless, passionless, spiritual, and not in need of food. In the last times the demons, the Antichrist, and the sinful would be cast into hell which was composed of a fiery substance known only to God. But John’s book did not close on a despairing note: “Those who have done

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good will shine forth as the sun with the angels into life eternal, ever seeing Christ and being in His sight and deriving unceasing joy from Him.” *** The bishops at the Second Council of Nicaea had given the empress Irene the masculine name Christophoros, Christ-supporting. Not long afterwards she proved her virility by forcing her son to marry a woman of her own choosing. Constantine’s subsequent eagerness to rule resulted in a cautionary slapping, but the young man revolted and removed his mother from power. Later he recalled her and at her insistence married his mistress. Irene encouraged her son in cruel acts which alienated him from his people and then had him blinded with such violence that he died. There was darkness in the sky for seventeen days after his blinding. In one of the last acts of her reign Irene had her brothers-in-law, the four sons of Constantine Copronymus, blinded, and the brothers were kept alive and imprisoned in various monasteries by each subsequent emperor. Irene’s final exile precipitated a tug-of-war between the Iconoclasts and the Iconodules. The soldiers were Iconoclasts and the monks and the people Iconodules. Irene’s successor Michael persecuted the Iconoclasts, and when a hermit scraped paint off an icon of the Virgin he ordered his tongue cut out. The patriarch Nicephorus and the abbot Theodore of Studium, who had quarreled over the worthiness of the priest who solemnized Constantine VI’s second marriage, renounced their enmity and banded together during the persecution of Leo V who decreed that icons could be painted only on the roofs and higher walls of the churches, away from the hands and lips of the pious rabble. At first Leo was devious in his campaign against icons, claiming that he took down an icon of Christ that soldiers had pelted with mud in order to protect it, and reverently kissing a cruciform icon when he met with the patriarch. As the persecution progressed monks and nuns were whipped, and two monks of Studium died from their flogging. ***

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Theodore of Studium was born during the dark reign of Constantine V. He became a monk at Saccudion under the leadership of his uncle Plato. The two eventually switched roles and moved to the monastery of Studium in Constantinople which Theodore helped to make the most prestigious of all Orthodox monasteries before Mount Athos overtook it in the thirteenth century. Theodore and his monks pioneered in the use of minuscule handwriting which would become universal in the copying of old Greek manuscripts and which made the innovation of separating words. He was exiled three times, the first two times for opposing the emperor’s remarriage and the third time for Iconodulism. Theodore took the offensive against the Iconoclasts and refused communion to Iconoclastic monks unless they were dying. He was the most famous Iconodule confessor; he was dragged from prison to prison and beaten so severely that some of his flesh rotted and needed to be removed with a knife by one of his disciples. Like John Theodore wrote three Iconodulist treatises. The second treatise addressed moderate Iconoclasts who believed that images of Christ could be made but not venerated and that Christ could be portrayed only before the Resurrection. Against the latter belief he pointed out that Christ appeared as a man, ate fish, and was touched by Thomas after His resurrection and that before His resurrection He had done such otherworldly deeds as walk on water and be transfigured before His disciples. As to the claim that icons of Christ could not be venerated, he quoted Basil the Great that the honor given to an image also went to its prototype, though Basil was referring to Christ and the Father rather than to icons of Christ and Christ Himself. The infamy dealt to an image also went to its prototype, as a legend from Pseudo-Athanasius revealed. Some Jews had apparently chanced upon a picture of Christ and extravagantly mistreated it, finally striking it in the stomach with a spear, but to their astonishment blood and water flowed from it. Theodore contended that the allegation the church father Epiphanius was an iconoclast was based on later interpolations since after Epiphanius’ death his disciple Sabinus built a church in his honor which was decorated with religious images. Theodore presented his second treatise as a debate between an Iconodule and an Iconoclast, or an orthodox and a heretic as

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he called them. He made the Iconodule ask whether Christ or the cross was greater. The Iconoclast replied that Christ was greater, and the Iconodule asked whether the image of Christ was not therefore greater than the image of the cross which alone was venerated by the Iconoclasts. *** Byzantium generally prospered better against its foes during the reigns of Iconoclastic emperors, and no one pondered this fact more seriously than the emperor Theophilus, the most savage persecutor of the revived Iconoclasm. Once after a race at the hippodrome he produced the candelabrum which Leo V had used to defend himself against his assassins and then had the assassins brought out and executed. Theophilus had picked out his wife from two rows of women who were lined up before him. He was to give an apple to the most beautiful and was about to give it to Icasia when he remarked that a woman had been the source of evil in the world. Icasia replied that a woman had also been the source of good in the world, but her independent streak did not please the emperor and he gave the apple to the second most beautiful woman there: Theodora. Theophilus thought his new wife greedy and once had a ship filled with her belongings burned. Theophilus’ jester reported that he had seen the empress kissing an icon. Theodora denied the report and came to no harm, but the rest of the emperor’s subjects were not as fortunate. The persecution was masterminded by the patriarch John the Grammarian. John dabbled in the occult and predicted the future for Theophilus. So did the Iconodule prophet Methodius whom Theophilus released from prison for this purpose. Theophilus was also impressed by the scholar and astrologer Leo the Mathematician and incongruously appointed him archbishop of Thessalonica. In one of his sermons Leo discoursed on the Pentecost in relation to the properties of the numbers one, seven, eight, forty-nine, and fifty. Like Harun ar-Rashid, Theophilus often wandered through the streets of his capital in disguise. In his palace were two golden lions and a golden tree with artificial singing birds. Gold was woven into the robes of the

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emperor and empress, and his throne room contained twenty thousand pounds of gold in all. Between his and his empress’ bedrooms were five flights of stairs. Theophilus built a semicircular hall called the Sigma since it was shaped like the Greek letter in its early medieval form. A whisper at one end of the Sigma could be heard at the other. In the center of the hall was a golden throne with bronze lions whose mouths spouted water. At the far end was a bronze fountain with a golden pine cone which gushed forth spiced wine during receptions. Towards the end of Theophilus’ reign he learned that his stepmother was teaching his daughters to venerate icons in secret. He flew into a rage, forbade them to see their grandmother again, and increased the persecution of the Iconodules. The icon painter Lazarus’ hands were branded with hot iron plates, and the brothers Theodore and Theophanes were tattooed on their foreheads with twelve verses that declared they were heretics. Theodora restored Iconodulism after Theophilus’ death, aided by the fabrication of his tardy conversion. She continued to revere her husband and did not blind her son, but she showed her Byzantine side by pursuing a hundred thousand heretics and Iconoclasts to death. “Blood was shed in torrents,” writes the Iconoclast sympathizer Previté-Orton who shows that there was little to chose from between Iconoclastic and Iconodulist rulers. Theodora removed John the Grammarian and commuted his sentence of blinding to two hundred lashes. He was replaced with the Iconodule prophet Methodius. The Iconoclasts alleged that Methodius was the empress’ paramour, and he was obliged to publicly strip and so reveal the atrophy of his genitals in response to an ascetic prayer of his youth. Theodora then convened a synod which anathematized the Iconoclasts and stated that the anathematization be repeated on the first Sunday of every Lent. On February 19, 842 the icons were brought back to St. Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. It was the first Sunday of Orthodoxy, an annual event which celebrated the defeat of all heresies. The new patriarch did not want to alienate the Iconoclasts and therefore won the enmity of the hard-line Iconodulist monks of Studium. He excommunicated the monks, but he was succeeded by Ignatius who excommunicated the moderates. Theodora’s son, Michael the Drunkard,

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pushed the Iconoclasts further into obsolescence by burning the bones of Constantine Copronymus.

Chapter 3

THE PAULICIANS VERSUS THE EMPIRE Leo III, the first Iconoclastic emperor, had been influenced not only by the Muslims but by the equally iconoclastic Paulicians. The Paulicians were admirers of the apostle Paul, and their clergymen changed their names to those of Paul’s associates Silvanus, Titus, Timothy, Tychicus, and Epaphroditus. They called themselves Christians and referred to their congregations by New Testament names like Corinth and Philippi. They called the Orthodox Romans and believed they were the ones in Christ’s parables who expected a place in the kingdom but were denied. The Paulicians were indebted to the Manichaeans, followers of Mani of Abrumia. Mani had added a healthy dislike of rules and rituals to Gnosticism. He was reacting against early Jewish Gnostics such as Dositheus, the reputed disciple of John the Baptist, who said that one should remain in the same garment and in the same position in which he was overtaken on the Sabbath. The Paulicians believed that God created the spiritual world, and the Demiurge the evil material world. They worshipped God while the Orthodox worshipped the Demiurge. Christ had no body and emerged from His mother’s womb like water from a pipe, in other words without owing any of His substance to her. He suffered only in appearance and began the liberation of spirit from matter. The Mother of God was not the Virgin Mary but the heavenly Jerusalem from which

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Christ came and to which He returned after His illusory passion. The Paulicians rejected the Old Testament and the epistles of Peter, but they would come to throw out the entire Bible except for the Gospels of Luke and John and the epistles of Paul which they interpreted allegorically. They disowned pictures and all rituals including baptism and the Eucharist, but they made the sign of the cross in cases of severe illness. They had pastors, missionaries, and scribes instead of priests, and oratories instead of churches. The Paulicians thought that apostasy during times of persecution was forgivable. They were ascetic but did not condemn marriage or the eating of meat. Their only licentious representative was Baanes the Filthy. *** The first Paulician was Constantine, a Syrian and a Manichaean. He once entertained a Manichaean deacon who gave him a New Testament, and after he saw the light he changed his name to Silvanus. For thirty years Silvanus spread his teachings throughout Armenia, Pontus, and Cappadocia. Then, in 684, the emperor Constantine IV sent the officer Simeon to Pontus to deal with Silvanus. Simeon commanded all of Silvanus’ disciples to throw stones at him in exchange for their lives. None of the disciples complied but for Justus who killed his master. Simeon, for all his brutality, was impressed by Silvanus’ courage and humanity. He changed his name to Titus and became a Paulician. One imagines him begging Justus to forgive him for having him murder Silvanus, but it was not wisely done. Three years later Justus quarreled with Simeon over the interpretation of Colossians 1:16, a verse which described Jesus as the Pantokrator, the Almighty and the All-Powerful: “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.” Justus, not liking Simeon’s exegesis, reported him to the authorities, and Simeon was burned alive with his followers. Sometimes, but not always, the Paulicians flourished during the reigns of Iconoclastic emperors. The patriarch of Constantinople accused the

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Paulician Gegnesius of denying the cross, the Virgin, the body and blood of Christ, the apostolic church, and baptism; but Gegnesius, doing some mental reinterpretation, said he believed all these things and was spared by Leo III. He nonetheless felt it prudent to go eastward and live with the Arabs. The Paulicians did not stay in Arab territory for long because of the oppressive tax on non-Muslims, and they again risked the intolerance of the Byzantine Empire. They were received back with joy by the Paulicians who had never left, and the pastor Joseph was greeted with lighted lamps when he came to the town of Episparis. Paulicianism continued to spread and branched off into two sects: the Baanites and the Sergiots. The Baanites were followers of Baanes the Filthy, and the Sergiots were followers of Sergius who changed his name to Tychicus. Baanes claimed he alone was faithful to the teachings of Joseph and said to Sergius, “You are a newcomer who has never seen any of our teachers or kept company with them.” Yet Sergius became the second founder of the Paulicians. He began life as a Christian boy, but he was taken in hand by a zealous and kindly Paulician woman who soon converted him. He was an indefatigable proselytizer and is reported as saying, “From the east to the west, in the north and in the south I have journeyed, proclaiming the gospel of Christ, walking on my own two legs.” He was so charismatic that married people violated their marriage vows to follow him, monks their monastic vows, priests their clerical duties, and children their obedience to their parents. Leo V sent the exarch Parakondakes to Armenia to persecute the Paulicians. Together with Thomas, the patriarch of Neocaesarea, Parakondakes was killed by Sergius’ nervy followers who subsequently fled eastward. Sergius reluctantly went with them. Some of his followers became known as Astatoi, a word whose meaning now escapes us. He watched with sadness as the Astatoi embraced violence and opulence. He himself continued to live peaceably and simply. He was murdered in 835 while engaged in carpentry in his mountain home. His assassin, it turned out, was a Baanite, and the Astatoi massacred the Baanites without quarter until Sergius’ disciple Theodotus got them to stop.

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Paulician and Orthodox relations remained sour throughout the ninth century. Finally Carbeas, the son of a Paulician martyr, led five thousand of his people to form an alliance with the Muslims. His son-in-law Chrysocheir sacked Ephesus and awoke the angry savagery of the Byzantines. His head was given to the emperor, Basil the Macedonian, who transfixed it with three arrows. The remaining Paulicians were converted or tolerated, and the crusaders would encounter some of them in Constantinople in the thirteenth century. *** There were other heretics besides the Paulicians such as the Athinganoi, the Euchites, and the Bogomils. The Athinganoi were Jews who avoided circumcision but practiced Christian baptism. They were succored during a famine by the abbess Athanasia, and Theodore of Studium, in one of the brightest moments of Eastern Orthodoxy, argued for their and the Paulicians’ freedom of worship. The Euchites were monks who believed that a demon indwelled every man from the moment of his birth and could be exorcised only by continual silent prayer. Their name in fact stemmed from euchē, the Greek word for prayer. They owed many of their beliefs to the Messalians of the fourth century. The Bogomils were similar to the Euchites and were primarily an Eastern European phenomenon, but they would come into Germany as Cathars and into France as the ill-fated Albigensians.

Chapter 4

THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT SCHISM Christ had said, “By this all men shall know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” But His followers in the East and the West were unwilling to reconcile themselves to one another’s customs and the battle lines were drawn. The first open split between the churches centered around the immensely learned Photius of Constantinople. Photius, the nephew of the patriarch Tarasius, was born into an Iconodule family in 820. Both of his parents had suffered at the hands of the Iconoclasts, and his father wrote a history of the Iconoclastic persecution. Photius himself would become a university teacher and a civil servant. He was once entrusted by Caesar Bardas with a mission to the Arabs to secure the release of Greek prisoners. Bardas was the real power behind the throne of his nephew Michael the Drunkard who spent much of his time in his cups. His drinking sprees led to violent outbursts of temper and to death sentences which were sometimes carried out. In these moments he conducted blasphemous parodies of church rites and killed any of his courtiers who refused to participate in them. Michael was the man who would not be king. He once saw a woman, whose son’s godfather he had been, carrying a pail from the public baths to her home. He dismissed his attendants and, together with his lowlife

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companions, approached her, taking her pail and asking her if she could serve him bread and cheese at her home. The woman was dumbstruck and indecisive, but Michael emptied her cupboards and cooked and served food to her and his cronies, claiming that in so doing he was following the example of Christ. On his way home with his companions he roundly denounced his imperial predecessors for their stupidity and pompousness. Photius was a close friend of Michael’s and was rumored to have beaten him in a drinking competition. His successful mission to the Arabs impressed the emperor’s uncle who chose him to replace the patriarch Ignatius. Ignatius was the son of a previous emperor and had been mistreated by his father’s usurper Leo V and shut up in a monastery. He was a formidable and impeccable figure and had excommunicated Bardas for living with his son’s widow, hence the need for his removal. Photius was a layman and had to be put through his ecclesiastical paces over five days. On the first day he was a monk, on the second day a lector, on the third day a subdeacon, on the fourth day a deacon, and on the fifth day a presbyter. On the sixth day he was consecrated patriarch by George of Syracuse, an enemy of Ignatius. Yet Photius and Ignatius themselves remained on good terms. Ignatius had been a popular patriarch, but Photius was able to gain his congregants’ support during a time when the Russians were sacking the suburbs of Constantinople. In company with Michael the Drunkard he proceeded to the Church of Blachernae and then brought the Virgin’s robe to the edge of the sea where he dipped it in the water. A storm almost immediately welled up and destroyed the Russian ships. Photius’ campaign against the Iconoclasts, who had not yet been eliminated despite the empress Theodora’s heroic efforts, was also politic. He encouraged the production of psalters whose illustrations put the heretics in the harshest light, and in 861 he presided over a council condemning their movement. The papal legates to the council recognized Photius’ patriarchal authority, but two years later the pope, Nicholas I, reversed their decision and demanded the return of Ignatius. Although Photius received Nicholas’ ambassadors with more courtesy than Ignatius, who treated them with

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scorn and wore his pallium even though he had been forbidden to, Nicholas had decided that Photius was to go. Bardas, however, stood behind him. The growing schism was complicated by the interference of the Catholic Church in the Orthodox conversion of Bulgaria. This, and Nicholas’ doubts about Photius’ legitimacy, gave Photius the opportunity to attack Rome on a wide variety of issues: fasting on Saturdays during Lent, abridging Lent by a week, partaking of dairy products during the Quadragesimal fast, enforcing celibacy on the lower clergy, and maintaining the Filioque which concerned the procession of the Holy Spirit. It is not certain when Photius’ treatise against the Filioque was written, but a scholar sympathetic to Photius has described it as the irate work of an irritated angry man. The question of the Spirit’s procession remains to this day the main doctrinal difference between the Eastern and Western churches. It has to do with a metaphysical relationship, not with the Holy Spirit’s being sent by Christ on the Day of Pentecost. The controversy goes back to Jesus’ words in John 15:26: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.” Jesus did not explicitly say that the Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son as the Western church taught, but He did not say that He proceeded solely from the Father as the Eastern church taught. The Western church wanted to affirm the deity of the Son against the Arian heretics, and the Eastern church wanted to give the Spirit more honor since in being derived solely from the Father’s fount of deity the Spirit and the Son would have equal status. The augmented Nicene Creed read at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 had stated, “We believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father.” In 589 the Third Synod of Toledo added “Filioque,” “and the Son,” and the East never forgave the West. With Photius Eastern Orthodoxy shifted from Christology to Pneumatology, from controversies about Christ’s nature to theories about the Holy Spirit’s procession from the Father and His dwelling in mankind. ***

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Caesar Bardas supported Photius’ anti-Western propaganda. In 866, together with Michael the Drunkard and his liege Basil the Macedonian, he partook of the Eucharist from Photius. Michael and Basil dipped their fingers in the wine, crossed themselves, and swore to Bardas that if he went on an expedition with them they would view his life as sacred. It was during this expedition that Basil and his associates hacked Bardas to death while Michael looked on. Being a normal Byzantine Basil could not resist a repeat performance of Bardas’ murder. Michael had forced Basil to divorce his wife and had given him his mistress Eudocia Ingerine for his second wife. All three dined together, and afterwards Michael caroused with his former mistress as was his custom. Basil put the inebriated Michael to bed and kissed his hand, but later in the evening he broke into his room and supervised his assassination. When he came to power Basil deposed Photius and restored Ignatius. Photius was criticized for having blindly supported Michael, a somewhat foolhardy thing in a religious leader. He was placed in prison where he was denied access to books and was brought before a synod that aimed at reconciliation with Rome. He responded to his interrogators either by silence or by quoting Christ’s words before Caiaphas and Pilate. His only mark of office was a staff, and even that was taken from him by the legates. The document condemning him was signed in ink mingled with Eucharistic wine. This awesome practice had come into use two centuries before when Pope Theodore anathematized the Monothelite heretics. Although Basil was glad to be rid of Photius he felt he had been bullied by the pope. Government agents broke into the lodgings of the papal legates and stole the acts of the council. They were pressured into returning them, but on the return trip to Rome the legates’ ship was hijacked by Slavic pirates who, in plundering the ship, took the documents; the pirates were disguised Byzantine sailors. Photius’ deposition was a hollow victory for Rome: Ignatius resented Roman interference in Bulgaria even more than Photius had. The expatriarch was soon released from prison and allowed to become the tutor of the emperor’s son Leo. He alleged a plot against Basil by Leo and was

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subsequently forced to plead for the young man’s eyesight. Leo was imprisoned for three years in a palace apartment called the Pearl and nursed his vengeance in secret. Basil was so grateful to Photius that he urged the dying Ignatius to accept him as his successor, and Photius visited his rival on his sickbed. After Ignatius died Photius canonized him and placed a mosaic of him on the wall of the Church of Holy Wisdom. The new pope, John VIII, declared that Photius was acceptable, and Photius refrained from sending Greek missionaries to Bulgaria. His biggest challenge was to come not from Rome but from hard-line Ignatians like Metrophanes of Smyrna. He invited Metrophanes to a meeting, but Metrophanes pretended to be ill and declined the invitation. The Ignatians were elated when Basil’s son Leo ascended the throne and made his own teenage brother patriarch, leaving Photius to end his days as a monk. Years after their deaths Ignatius and Photius were honored in church services throughout Byzantium as “the most holy orthodox and famous patriarchs, eternal in memory.” *** There has been some question as to whether Leo was Basil’s son. If he was actually Michael the Drunkard’s son this would make the most populous Byzantine dynasty, the Macedonian, a continuation of the Amorian dynasty. Strangely one of the first acts of his reign was to have Michael’s body moved from its lowly grave to the Church of the Apostles in Constantinople. Leo’s second marriage to Zoe Zaoutzaina was opposed by the clerics, among whom was his spiritual father, the abbot Euthymius. One night after Zoe’s death Leo came unannounced to Euthymius’ monastery when his monks were drinking wine mixed with warm water, and he shared their potations with them. The wine, however, struck him as of inferior quality, and he peremptorily donated a vineyard that had been owned by Zoe to the monastery, expressly so that Euthymius would always remember her. Leo’s son Constantine VII was scholarly, amiable, timid, given to drink, and brutal in his meting out of punishments. The Western bishop

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Liudprand visited Constantinople twice, the second time, disastrously, during the reign of Nicephorus II. His first visit was more to his liking, and this was thanks to Constantine’s kindness toward him. Constantine was solicitous that Liudprand enjoy the feats of his acrobats and asked the bishop what he thought of a ceremony in which he dispensed robes and money to his courtiers. The bishop replied that he would have enjoyed the ceremony if he had been a recipient, and with some embarrassment Constantine gave him a robe and a pound of coins. In Constantine’s day, as before him, the palace was filled with golden lions, golden singing birds, and a throne that could be hoisted to the ceiling. The emperor’s main interests were classical studies, imperial protocol, and geography. Two of his books, On Ceremonies and On Imperial Administration, are little more than unorganized files and reveal the slipshod nature of his mind. Constantine’s conflicted personality is nowhere more evident than in his last project. He had promoted the blameless monk Polyectus to patriarch. Thereafter Polyectus urged him to address grievances committed by his one-time regent Romanus, which earned him the enmity of Constantine’s in-laws. For the rest of his life the emperor schemed to eliminate Polyectus. He finally set out for the hermitages of the Mysian Olympus in order to meet with the bishop of Cyzicus and have Polyectus removed, and it was on this journey that he died. *** In the eighth century the Georgian monk Gregory, who had read the church fathers from an early age, studied the anchorites of his native land and noticed how they slept on the bare ground or in a seated position. He was particularly taken by the hermit Khuedios who lived near the dangerous crags of Khandzta, and with his permission he built a nearby monastery. During Lent Gregory ate only dried cabbage. Although he allowed his monks wine their cells were to be empty of everything except for a jug of water each. They read and prayed in the day and sang psalms at night. Sometimes Gregory meddled in politics. He was incensed when he learned that his benefactor Ashot took a concubine, and when the prince

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was away he forcibly inducted her into a nunnery. Ashot’s stoic comment on his return was, “Happy is the man who is no longer alive.” Gregory was said to be filled with the ineffable riches of the New Testament and gathered a host of godly men about him. The monk Zacharias, a protégé of his cousin, was sitting under his grape vines one day when he noticed a blackbird eating them. He made the sign of the cross over the bird and it died; conscience-stricken he crossed the bird again and it came to life and flew away. *** The conversions of Bulgaria and Russia were unique triumphs for the Eastern church. We get a glimpse of pre-Christian Bulgar society when we read that the khan Krum planned to take Constantinople with magic, human sacrifice, and the sprinkling of his troops with seawater. In 864 his descendant Boris I converted to Orthodoxy, thanks largely to a terrifying painting of the Last Judgment. After Boris’ conversion he savagely suppressed a pagan uprising. He entered into communion with Photius, but when he realized that the Greek church wanted power over the Bulgarian church he opened up dialogues with Rome. He sent Pope Nicholas one hundred theological questions and a request for evangelists. The pope sent German missionaries and, among other things, exhorted Boris that heathen rites taken before battle should be replaced with Christian liturgies and that the cross rather than the horse’s tail should be the Bulgarians’ military standard. But the Western church was as grasping as the patriarch, and Boris worked out a compromise with Byzantium whereby the Bulgarian patriarchate would be autonomous and its liturgy Slavonic. Boris eventually abdicated to become a monk. He handed the reins of government to his oldest son Vladimir, but Vladimir led a pagan revival and he emerged from his monastery to blind him and replace him with his younger brother Simeon. Simeon died in 927, and Bulgaria was torn between the Orthodox and the Bogomils. The sect of the Bogomils was founded by the Bulgarian priest Bogomil. It was opposed to Byzantine culture and religion and

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represented a fusion of Paulicianism and Euchitism. According to the Bogomils God had two children: Satan and Jesus. Satan was evil, and his creation—matter—was also evil; but spirit was good. Birth was the imprisonment of spirit in matter as a result of preexistent sin. The Bogomils hated the Old Testament and condemned marriage, icons, and the worship of the cross. They also rejected baptism and the Eucharist, but they practiced a spiritual baptism which involved laying the Gospel of John on the heads of the baptized and chanting the Lord’s Prayer. The Bogomils were like Protestants in that they were against ritual, but they were unlike Protestants in that they were Gnostics and did not accept baptism and the Eucharist. They manfully held their own in Bulgarian religious life but died out in the fifteenth century. *** Someone has written that all Russian history reads like the lives of the saints. If that is true it should begin with Jesus’ disciple Andrew, the first missionary to Russia according to the Russian monk Nestor. Andrew planted the first cross on the hills of Kiev and prophesied that divine grace would shine on them. He also prophesied the existence of the city itself and said that it would have many churches. History knows nothing of St. Andrew in Russia, but it does know of the Viking grand duke Rurik, the founder of the Russian empire. In Rurik’s time, in the late ninth century, Christianity began to spread throughout Russia, and though Photius lied when he said that Russia was Christian in his day, it was not a complete lie. A hundred years later there was a peace treaty between Russia and Byzantium. Some of the Russians took their oath in the name of Christ, but most took it in the name of Perun, the thunder god who was portrayed with a golden mustache in his silver statues and who was worshipped with human sacrifices. That would soon change. Already there was a Church of Elijah in Kiev, the Russian capital, but more importantly the grand duchess Olga was baptized. She had begun her career by having her husband’s murderers buried alive. Now she was encouraging her son to convert to Christianity,

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but he liked the mother of his childhood better than the mother of his manhood. Sviatoslav, the first Russian Viking to have a Slavic name, was gloomy and savage. He had a shaved head with one long strand of hair on the side and a golden earring adorned with two pearls and a ruby. He wore bearskin, slept on the ground with a saddle for a pillow, and ate horse meat cooked directly on the coals. He successfully fought against the Bulgars and the Khazars, but he met his match in the Byzantines and on his way home from his defeat was ambushed and killed by members of the Turkish Pecheneg tribe. Olga’s grandson Vladimir was more amenable to Christianity and would gain the title of Isapostolos, Equal to an Apostle. He began as an ardent pagan but soon grew weary of the old gods and received proselytizers from the Muslim Volga Bulgars, the Jewish Khazars, the Germans, and the Byzantines. He then sent wise men to investigate the religions of the respective peoples. They found that the Muslims regrettably abstained from alcohol, that the Jews were disowned by their own God, and that the Germans were spectacularly unimpressive. But the Church of Holy Wisdom in Constantinople had beautifully ornate services and a stunning painting of the Last Judgment. Vladimir was convinced by his wise men. He promised the Byzantine emperor Basil II that he would convert to Orthodox Christianity if the emperor gave him his sister Anna in marriage. If Basil did not comply he would sack Constantinople as he had already sacked Cherson in the Crimea. Basil complied, and Vladimir was baptized on his wedding day in 988. Magnanimously he returned Cherson but for its bronze gates which became the gates of the first church in Novgorod. He also sold Basil six thousand of his soldiers. These would form the basis for the Varangian guard, perhaps the only formidable warriors the crusaders would face when they fought the Byzantines during the Fourth Crusade. Anyone who knew Vladimir guessed that the process of Christianization would not end with his conversion. The grand duke ordered a wooden image of Perun to be dragged through the countryside and clubbed by twelve of his soldiers before they dumped it into the Dnieper. Then the men, women, and children of Kiev descended into the

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river to be baptized while the priests read prayers from the cliffs. Vladimir’s conversion was so sincere that the poor were invited to come to his palace and receive food and money at his hands. Even criminals were released from prison, but this policy soon had to be abandoned. Vladimir was succeeded by his pagan son Sviatopolk who had his Christian brothers Boris and Gleb assassinated. Boris was run through with spears in a church; Gleb was murdered on a boat in the river. Sviatopolk was overthrown by his brother Yaroslav under whom the conversion of Russia was almost completed. Many churches were built, and translations of Greek theological books ensured the persistence of Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia. In the eleventh century the monk Anthony founded the Monastery of the Caves outside Kiev. He had sojourned on Mount Athos where his master Theoctistus had a vision that the Russian people needed him, and he accepted the divine calling. His monastery was the greatest of all Russian monasteries before St. Sergei founded the Monastery of the Holy Trinity.

Chapter 5

SYMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN The Orthodox Church has given the name of theologian to only three men: John the Evangelist, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Symeon the New Theologian. By theologian the church meant less a religious academic than a praying man who communicated his experience of God to others. Symeon the New Theologian was born to a Byzantine nobleman in 949. His admiring uncle wanted to present him to the brother emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII, but Symeon baffled his relatives by his refusal to pursue a higher education. This was because of his meeting, at the age of fourteen, with the monk Symeon the Pious. The elder Symeon had given him the writings of Mark the Monk and Diadochus of Photike, who would one day find their way into the Philokalia, the Bible of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the younger man was never the same afterwards. He wanted to follow the Pious’s example, but the older man counseled him to be patient. Symeon embarked on a political career but spent his evenings in prayer and meditation. In one of his earliest visions, which he believed came in answer to the prayer of his master, he saw a light and was lifted up into heaven where he saw a greater light and near it Symeon the Pious who was still in his body on earth. This oddity would not have surprised Plotinus who could be in the body and yet, while united with the One, ensure the well-being of the universe.

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Symeon the Pious was more than a mystic: he was a holy fool, practicing exhibitionism and seeking out the company of prostitutes and tax collectors, though never in concert. His student was, if anything, even more suspect. He called himself a profligate fornicator, one whose past sins were more repulsive than those of all humans, one who from his mother’s lap had failed God immeasurably, a man of impure embraces and shameful practices. In his Hymns he wrote, “I have been a murderer, but in what way I will not say. I have also been an adulterer in heart and a sodomite in deed and desire. I have been a lecher, a magician, a slayer of infants, swearer and perjurer, greedy thief, liar, shameless, grasping, insulting.” Some scholars theorize that many of these sins were committed by Symeon after he had fallen from grace during the time he held political office while others were illusory, an attempt at a humility so flamboyant it was a manifestation of arrogance. At the age of twenty-seven Symeon became a monk at Studium. He was under the nominal direction of an abbot but under the actual supervision of Symeon the Pious. His unusual seriousness nettled the abbot, and he was compelled to move into the monastery of St. Mamas. In three years he became head of the new monastery, but there was antipathy towards his rigorous rule. At one time rebellious monks planned to lay hands on him while he was preaching, but they fell backwards at the evident power surrounding him and ran out of the church, breaking its windows on their way. The rebellious monks complained to the patriarch Sisinnios who took Symeon’s side and expelled them. An epilogue to the story states that Symeon, overflowing with forgiveness, sought out the wretches and brought them back to the monastery. Though Symeon’s enemies were put in their place he himself had been discredited, and his troubles were not over. The patriarchal chancellor Stephen of Nicomedia, finding something suspicious in his work, asked him to vindicate his orthodoxy, namely whether the three persons of the Trinity were to be distinguished in thought (epinoia) or fact (pragmati). Symeon replied with an abrasive hymn insultingly addressed “to a monk” and concluding with the observation that the chancellor’s proper attitude was not presumption but humility and mortification, a thought the writer

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himself could have found much to chew on. Stephen then tried another tack, bringing the clerical hierarchy’s attention to Symeon’s unauthorized canonization of his mentor. He divulged unsettling stories about Symeon the Pious, and the patriarch Sergius ordered the destruction of his icon and the exile of the New Theologian. In 1009 Symeon founded a monastery around the ruined chapel of St. Marina. As at the first monastery he ruled, he organized his monks and then retreated into his cell to write and pray. Threats from his friends resulted in a retrial in which the patriarch vindicated him and offered him a bishopric, but Symeon chose to live out his days as an abbot. *** Symeon had a disciple named Nicetas who edited his writings. Nicetas was a monk at Studium and sometimes visited St. Marina. Sixteen years after Symeon’s death he had a vision that Symeon urged him to finish editing his work, and he duly obeyed the command. A cloud of controversy continued to hang over Symeon. He was, it appeared, a wild man with his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Theodore of Blachernae and Constantine Chrysomallus were anathematized for their sympathy with his beliefs, and Gregory Palamas, though influenced by his works, would refrain from quoting them directly. *** A saint is one who sees evil in himself and rejects it. It is because Symeon did not have this gift that he was not a saint. His insistence that Christians who have not had visions are suspect shows how far Christianity had sunk since the days of the church fathers. His arrogance and divisiveness came to the fore in his claim that priests were not worthy to be confessors: they could only celebrate the sacraments, and even then only on probation. Yet his attitude can partly be blamed on the depraved energy of his foes, and his books contain startling insights.

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Symeon did not believe that Adam’s sin was shared by the human race and claimed that every man was free to choose for himself between right and wrong. This set him against Western theologians like Augustine, though he believed, with Augustine, that God was the one who initiated the salvation process. If predestination were true, he asks, why would the Creator command us to repent? There would be no reason for Him to say anything other than, “Do not repent, for I will not accept you” or, “Repent, because I knew you beforehand.” He pictures the parishioners of the predestinationists lying on their beds of pleasure and glibly quoting the apostle Paul: “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate.” His reply is harsh in the extreme: “Indeed He truly knew you beforehand as inattentive and disobedient and lazy, but this is certainly not because He ordered or foredained it that you should have no power to repent yourself nor get up and obey.” Symeon avers that man’s fall from paradise was cataclysmic. The sun, the moon, and the stars did not want to shine. Springs of water did not want to well up, rivers to flow, or the air to provide sustenance. The sky yearned to fall on Adam, and the beasts turned against him. But the Christian can, in a small way, get back to paradise. Symeon thinks in terms of three worlds: the fallen world, Israel, and the church. Israel was in many respects an improvement on paradise: instead of the Garden of Eden it had the Promised Land and instead of the Tree of Life the jar of manna. But the church was more precious still: it had the Theotokos and Jesus Christ. Symeon was heavily indebted to the Neoplatonists and especially Plotinus, but all of his borrowings were indirect and came through the medium of earlier Christian theologians. His analogy of the prison cell is similar to Plato’s analogy of the cave. He asks us to imagine a man raised in a dark prison from birth. If a lamp illuminated a few things in the prison he would know a little more of the real world than he does, and he would know still more if the roof were taken off his prison. The prison is the material world, and the real world is the spirit world. He was also indebted to the fourth-century ascetic Pseudo-Macarius in his emphasis on the heart. This is how he interprets Christ’s parable of the mustard seed: the field is the heart of man, the seed is the Holy Spirit, and

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the tree is the kingdom of God. Many of his stories remind one of PseudoMacarius. To illustrate the soul’s longing for God he asks us to imagine a pauper who loves a princess. When he comes to her chamber she opens her door for him and extends her hand which he covers with kisses while he thinks of her beauty and of the fact that they will one day reign together, but when the princess withdraws her hand he is inconsolable. Another story is similar to the parable of the prodigal son. An emperor urged the servant of his enemy to change sides and receive honors from him, but the servant continued to work against him. Finally he thought better of it and came before the emperor, but instead of demanding honors as he thought he would, he embraced the emperor’s feet and wept with contrition. The emperor raised him up and ordered that a crown, a robe, and sandals be brought for him. Symeon thought, like the Platonists, in terms of a “golden chain” running from the church fathers to his own day, and no link was more resplendent than that of Symeon the Pious. Symeon often turned to him to illustrate the ascetic life, and it was with him in mind that he wrote that the saint in his own lifetime is like the evening sky and his heart like the moon. We are assured that Symeon the Pious was so holy he could do what most monks could only dream of doing. He spoke with prostitutes and embraced anyone who came to him in distress, a practice which led to ugly rumors. Symeon’s ideal monk knows that gold is only something that comes from the earth, that precious stones are clay, that silk robes are the dung of worms. He pities those who desire wealth and seek honor. He lives in a great city as though alone in the world. He lives with men as if he were living in a wilderness and knew no one. He sees beautiful women and remembers their end or at least the deft work of their Imaginer. The soul of the saint glancing at “the swamp of passions and ugliness” is not sullied. Symeon maintains that the saint cannot be soiled by associating with other men any more than the sun can be soiled by shining in a swamp. And then he takes the plunge: “Even if such a man were to be confined with tens of thousands who were unbelieving and impious and debauched, and his naked body were to be in contact with their naked bodies, he would not be

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injured in his faith, nor estranged from his Master, nor forgetful of His beauty.” Yet in spite of all this Symeon counsels us to look down even when speaking to an older man lest one notice his rudimentary comeliness and his mind stray to other comely things. He is also paradoxical in condemning anger while writing bitterly against his opponents, but this is because they have slandered his teacher. The Pious’s enemies had directed the same slander against him that the Pharisees had directed against Jesus. They accused him of being a glutton, a drunkard, and a friend of sinners. But Symeon saw in him the early church, and more, an angel instead of a man. Symeon cannot urge us to forgive our enemies strongly enough. For him there are three levels of forgiveness, each higher than the next. The first is the act of forgiveness; the second is tranquillity about the wrong done to one; the third is non-remembrance of the wrong and the treatment of one’s enemy as though he were his friend. The true monk must learn to cultivate virtues such as forgiveness. Merely taking vows of poverty will do him no good if he does not make a complete break with evil. He would then be like an emperor who had smeared his face with soot before giving his money to the poor. Symeon was mystical in his approach to salvation. Like Plotinus he emphasized union with God, not only in eternity but also in time. This idea, sometimes called theōsis, was strong in Eastern Orthodoxy and can be traced back to St. Peter, Irenaeus, and Athanasius. Symeon believed that the Christian could attain unity with God but could not share His nature. He contrasted God’s uniting with us essentially with His remaining God superessentially. In this way he did not confuse the being of God with the being of man. Gregory Palamas would later make a more accurate distinction: man can participate in God’s energies (energeiai) but not His essence (ousia). Symeon was both a dark mystic and a light mystic, that is he not only emphasized God’s unknowability as did Gregory of Nyssa but His role as Uncreated Light, a light which the Christian could partake of with both his body and his soul. He describes the Uncreated Light as the tree of life, the

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flowers of paradise, the crown which Adam lost in Eden, the shimmering pool of water, the ineffable sea of glory, and the infinite ocean. God is so bright that the novice cannot even look at Him but, overcome with fear and trembling, must look down at his own feet. Symeon’s visions of the Uncreated Light began when he was twenty and left him wanting to hide deep in the earth, removed from the world and seeing only his Creator. Here is how he describes one of them: “The walls of my cell melted away and the whole world vanished. I think it was fleeing before God’s face. I remained alone in the presence alone of the light. And I do not know if I was still in my body or carried outside it. I completely forgot that I even had a body. I felt such great joy within me, and it is still with me now, great love and also great longing, and I wept streams of tears.” Symeon’s phrase “alone in the presence alone of the light” was an echo of Plotinus’ sixth Ennead: “There is no vision, no union, for those handling or acting by anything other; the soul must see before it neither evil nor good nor anything else, that alone it may receive the Alone.” Also Plotinian is his prayer, “Come, the Alone to the alone, because I am alone, as you see.” Symeon gives five illustrations of the mystical union: the disciples seeing the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor, Moses seeing the back of God on Mount Sinai, the Eleven meeting Christ in the Upper Room, the sinful woman washing Jesus’ feet, and Thecla listening to the apostle Paul for days on end. He calls this union the raindrop, the pearl, the mustard seed, the mystical cup, the fatted calf, the living bread, the drink of life, the lamb without spot, and the manna of the intellect. During such unions the soul becomes a flame and its radiance spreads even to the body so that the body is to the soul what molten iron is to fire. It is not only the mystical vision that assures one of his salvation. Symeon owes much to Isaac of Nineveh’s theology of tears. Isaac wrote that tears were on the frontier between this life and the life to come, but he did not emphasize their importance as much as Symeon who believed that only those who have wept can be truly repentant. The Russian monk Silouan echoed his thought: “My soul yearns after the Lord, and I seek Him in tears.” ***

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Byzantium reached its glory during the reign of the unwashed, asexual soldier emperor Basil II, best known for his blinding of an entire Bulgarian army. Basil’s empire stretched from the Danube to Syria and included a third of Italy, and his treasury had a reserve in excess of two hundred million monetary units. In the thirty years that transpired after his reign the empire was torn by internal struggles, harassed by enemies, and embittered by the Great Schism which severed the Eastern and Western churches. The schism began with the attempt of Pope Leo IX to form an alliance with the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires in order to expel the Normans from southern Italy. The Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachus was so eager to help the pope that he was willing to give him churches, but Michael Cerularius, the popular patriarch of Constantinople, overruled him. Constantine and Cerularius were completely opposed personalities. Cerularius wore the purple buskins generally reserved for the emperor and had the eunuch John blinded in prison. Constantine, however, prevented his empress from issuing blindings. He had won the enmity of Symeon’s disciple Nicetas for his affair with his mistress Sclerena, although he had the excuses that he had married the empress only to gain power and that she was much older than he was. Constantine took no precautions for his personal safety and slept with his bedroom doors open. He was unaffected by flute or organ music but was immensely entertained by courtiers who mangled words, and he promoted them to high positions in his government. The historian Michael Psellus compared the Byzantine political machine of this time to a monstrous body with many heads, no neck, innumerable hands and feet, and diseased entrails. In 1052 the patriarch decreed that Latin practices and liturgy could not be used in any church in Constantinople. The Latin churches and monasteries resisted him and were shut down. Pope Leo replied with an arrogant affirmation of papal supremacy. Cerularius countered with a circular letter which was coauthored by a Bulgarian metropolitan. He condemned the Western church for employing unleavened bread in the Eucharist, for fasting on Saturdays during Lent, for eating blood and things strangled, and for not singing the Hallelujah during the Lenten fast.

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Leo sent Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and two legates to Constantinople. The pope was not as ill-disposed to Cerularius as Humbert was, and Humbert was not as ill-disposed to him as the pro-Western soldier Argyros. Argyros had previously given Cerularius lip about the use of leavened bread and was now meeting with Humbert. When Cerularius received Pope Leo’s letter he noticed that its seal had been broken and replaced, and he had good reason to suspect that its personal invective was the work of Humbert and Argyros rather than the pope. Humbert also charged that the Greeks rebaptized Latins, permitted marriage of the lower clergy, did not baptize their children before the eighth day, and did not acknowledge the Filioque. Leavened and unleavened bread loomed large over the burgeoning schism. The Greeks followed the Gospel of John which seemed to portray Christ as celebrating the Last Supper on the day of preparation for the Passover, while the Romans followed the Synoptics which presented Christ eating the Passover meal itself. Passover meals always involved unleavened bread, or azyma, which is what the Romans used, but they had only been doing so for three hundred years. There was also a dispute about the remains, the unconsumed portion of the Eucharist. Since the bread and the wine became the body and blood of Christ after consecration, the Eastern and Western churches feared the remains would be stolen by the faithful and used for talismanic purposes. In the West the clerics either consumed the remains or stored them in locked sacristies for future Masses; the Eastern clerics buried the remains or dropped them into wells. The papal legates were cordially received by the emperor and waited for a similar invitation from the patriarch, but none came. The pope’s death in 1054 made Humbert move, fast and uncanonically. On July 16 the legates went to the Church of Holy Wisdom and placed on the altar an edict excommunicating the patriarch and his supporters and condemning the usual practices, among them the refusal to baptize babies dying within a week of birth and the barring of menstruating women from the Eucharist. Humbert pronounced the anathema on Cerularius in the name of a dead man and to his excommunication added the words, “Let God see and judge.”

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The patriarch responded by calling a synod which anathematized the legates and termed the West a land of darkness. It vilified all Western church customs, including the shaving of the beard, single immersion in baptism, the withdrawal of the Eucharistic cup from the laity, the exclusion of infants from the Eucharist, and the unrepeatability of extreme unction. Cerularius further vented his spleen in a letter to Peter of Antioch: in the West two brothers were allowed to marry two sisters, the bishops wore rings and fought in battles, salt was put into the mouths of the newly baptized, images and relics were not honored as they should be, the Eastern fathers were not accounted saints, and Mary was called Holy Mary rather than Theotokos, Mother of God. Unfortunately Peter did not share Cerularius’ anti-Western attitude though he objected to the Filioque and clerical celibacy. He noted that even after the Photian schism the church of Antioch had honored the pope and that Jerusalem and Alexandria used unleavened bread in their Eucharists. In short, he said, “we ought not to expect barbarian races to attain the same level of accuracy that we ask of our own people.” Nonetheless a rift had arisen between the two churches, and their complete separation followed with the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204. *** Alexius I Comnenus, of possible Walachian ancestry, is best known for his ambiguous relationship with the crusaders of the First Crusade, but the pressure he was put under by them is undeniable. His daughter Anna alleged that the riffraff of the People’s Crusade, intent on Constantinople, was as numerous as the sands of the shore and the stars of heaven. The leaders of the crusade, she thought, were brave, daring, handsome, and vile. Only Raymond of Toulouse escaped her censure, and he was the only crusader who refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Alexius, an oath which the other crusaders soon broke. Despite the fact that he mistreated vagrant monks Alexius was a friend of the Byzantine monks but not the bishops, and his palace resembled a monastery. A monk once attended him during an illness, rearranged his

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bedcovers, and was surprised when he nodded his thanks. Alexius often sought out the wisdom of the hegumen Cyril Phileotes who urged him to delay a campaign against the Turks. Some of Symeon the New Theologian’s light and fire mysticism brushed off on the emperor who is reported as saying in a mural, “A river of fire swirls around me, a sleepless worm is within me. Only by fire shall I be saved.” The mural also reveals his guilty conscience. Alexius had his clerical enemy Leo of Chalcedon exiled. Ever the politician he sent Leo a letter telling him that he had great trust in him and that the scandal was the work of evil men. Leo claimed the letter made him laugh. Alexius wanted to pose as the defender of orthodoxy, and in 1082 he had the humanist scholar John Italos tried, even going so far as to permit false testimony that he had stoned an icon of Christ. Italos was an iconoclast, a Neoplatonist, and a believer in metempsychosis. He was bearded and had a large, expressive face. He was known for his violent temper and sometimes struck those with whom he debated, though he afterwards felt guilty and wept. Since he was of Italian origin and never thoroughly mastered Greek he was considered vulgar. His temper additionally made learning difficult for his pupils. After his first trial he retracted the eleven heretical propositions he had been accused of. He soon went back to his old errors, was condemned again, and then to all appearances repented, striving to reinterpret the transmigration of souls in an orthodox way. With the condemnation of Italos, and at Alexius’ suggestion, a new anathema was added to the anathemas of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, namely philosophers who followed the Hellenistic disciplines, especially those who accepted Plato’s Forms as truly existing and those who believed in the eternity of matter. One of Italos’ disciples, Eustratius, would ironically become Alexius’ religious adviser. Towards the end of his career Eustratius was suspected of drifting into Nestorianism. His clerical opponents howled for his blood, and the ailing Alexius was unable to prevent his excommunication. According to Nicetas Choniates, Alexius was a dissembler who never said much about what he was going to do. This stood him in good stead

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against the nagging of his empress who wanted their son-in-law to succeed Alexius rather than the prince John. With Alexius’ approval John entered his bedchamber while he lay dying and received the imperial ring from his hand. *** Alexius’ emperorship witnessed an insurgency of Bogomilism in Byzantium. There are similarities to Bogomilism in the cult of Eleutherius of Paphlagonia who founded a monastery in Lycaonia. His followers honored him as a saint after his death and had his icon painted. Eleutherius said the Holy Spirit and the devil tried to control the human soul and that the path to overcoming the devil was continual prayer. His monkish followers had two wives each, were sexually active, and flourished for a hundred years after him. The most prominent Byzantine Bogomil was Basil. In his youth he had met an old man in a deserted place who had an original copy of the Gospels which the Bogomils believed had been corrupted by John Chrysostom. Basil wore a monastic habit but was actually a doctor who walked among the aristocracy. Anna Comnena describes him as tall and with an austere face and thin beard. He possessed a number of female disciples and twelve Apostles who were called theotokoi. They did not die but were transported to heaven in their sleep as was the Virgin Mary, their bodies dissolving into dust and ashes. Basil taught that God had two sons, the devil and Michael. The devil was the creator of the material world and the seducer of Eve in the form of a snake. Michael, in attempting to right the universe, entered the Virgin Mary’s ear. Mary was oblivious to this as she was to the birth of her son Jesus whom she discovered in a cave wrapped in swaddling clothes. Jesus’ ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection really happened, but His suffering was illusory. Basil believed the Orthodox saints were empowered by demons, hence the miracles attributed to them and the potency of their relics. The biblical warning to beware of false teachers was taken to refer to the Cappadocian fathers and John Chrysostom. Basil’s followers

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rejected water baptism and the Old Testament but not the Psalms and prophets. In their initiation ceremonies they placed a copy of the Gospel of John on the heads of the initiates. Ineluctably the Byzantine tide turned against Basil. The Apostles were rounded up and imprisoned; the torture of one of them, Diblatius, led to the unmasking of Basil who was interviewed by the supposedly sympathetic emperor and his brother Isaac while a secretary hiding behind a curtain took down Basil’s incriminating statements. The patriarch wanted him burned at the stake, and the emperor offered no resistance. There are two accounts of Basil’s end, both from Orthodox sources. In the first account he was tortured and was taken to his pyre barely able to stand. The second account continues: In order to prevent a miracle his executioners threw his cloak onto the fire before him and Basil cried out, “Look, my cloak ascends to heaven!” He was then thrown onto his pyre and consumed, a line of smoke being visible in the midst of the flames. Despite the will of the populace Alexius prevented further autos-da-fé. *** St. Hilarion was more irenic in his struggle with the Bogomils of Moglena. They stoned him, but he prevented the Christians from taking revenge on them. He heard rumors that the immoral and astrologically minded emperor Manuel I was planning to convert to Bogomilism and secured a meeting with him. Manuel allayed these rumors and urged him to fight the heresy, and Hilarion founded a Church of the Apostles where the Bogomils had once held prayer services. An unnamed Thracian cleric was somewhat less successful than Hilarion. He set out to persecute the Bogomils of Thessaly. They knew he was coming because of a Bogomil holy man who had prophesied his arrival, even down to the Thracian’s physical appearance. On arriving in the Thessalian town of Elasson the Thracian heard of the holy man and had him brought before him. The holy man revealed that he could foretell the future ever since he had been inducted by a wandering Libyan. He also prophesied that the Thracian would suffer physical illness for his

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persecution of the Bogomils, and in fact the Thracian later confessed he almost died in Elasson. *** Manuel I had a German empress who was virtuous and wore no makeup but was unbending and opinionated. He was unfaithful to her but grieved bitterly at her death. Manuel was hero worshipped by the historian John Kinnamos. According to John he once encountered, while hunting, a ferocious beast that was part lion and part leopard, and while his retinue fled from the animal he ran it through with his sword. Manuel fancied himself a theologian and tried to lift the Orthodox anathema against the God of Muhammad who he felt was identical to the God of the Christians. The bishop of Thessalonica responded that he would never cease to curse the God of Islam, a pederast who was as brutish as a camel and the teacher of every abominable act; but the bishops eventually obliged and had the anathema replaced by one against Muhammad and his teachings. *** In the thirteenth century the writings of Symeon the New Theologian influenced St. Sava, the first leader of the autocephalous church of Serbia. Sava’s father Nemanya was the first ruler of united Serbia, but his youngest son had an inclination for the monastic life and fled Serbia before his parents could wed him. He took up at the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos, a peninsula off the Greek mainland that was the heart of Orthodox spirituality. Mount Athos had been seen by the Virgin Mary as she was sailing in a boat with the apostle John, and she was so impressed by the place that she asked God to give it as a refuge to those seeking salvation. Gregory Palamas said it was the homeland of virtue, situated at the boundary of the world and what lay beyond the world. No woman could ever come there. At Vatopedi Sava learned Greek, studied the writings of the New Theologian, and practiced the unceasing prayers of the Athonite mystics.

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Sava’s parents attempted to convert him from monasticism, but it was he who converted them and they became cenobites. Stephen abdicated and entered the Serbian monastery of Studenitza which he had once built. Here he took the name Simeon, while his wife took the name Anastasia and entered a convent. Eventually Simeon joined his son on Mount Athos and together they founded the Serbian monastery of Hilandari. After Simeon’s death Sava entered a hēsychastērion, or house of stillness, where he lived like the oldest Christian hermits. He soon left Athos to give his father’s relics to Serbia and reconcile his quarreling brothers. He planned to return to the sacred mountain when his mission was over, but seeing the spiritual decrepitude of the Serbians, who had proven susceptible to Bogomilism, he stayed and reforged the country into a holy nation. The church’s subservience to the Byzantine Empire was doing it no good, and he traveled to the Byzantine court in order to obtain its independence. The emperor and the patriarch acceded to Sava’s request and convinced him to take the helm of the new church. Sava’s religious interests would imbue Serbia, for the next six centuries, with Symeon the New Theologian’s brand of mysticism. His coffin was burned by the Ottoman Turks in 1595 because of its cultic status, but there survives a wall portrait of him which may be from the life: it depicts a balding wrinkled man still youthful in appearance.

Chapter 6

RUSSIA UNDER THE MONGOL YOKE The Byzantine religious system cannot be overpraised, but its secular system left much to be desired. In 1195 the eyes of the emperor Isaac II were gouged out by his brother who took the throne as Alexius III. Isaac’s son, also named Alexius, requested the crusaders to come to his aid, and they made him emperor. Alexius was not ready to rule. According to Nicetas Choniates he slapped his cronies on the buttocks and was slapped by them in return. A third Alexius, Alexius Ducas, took power from the unpopular youth, imprisoned him, and personally murdered him in his cell. Ducas’ eyebrows hung over his eyes, hence his surname Mourtzouphlus. He had a deep but hoarse voice, and when he rebuked his relatives they turned away from him as they would from the taste of raw octopus, Nicetas said. Mourtzouphlus’ assistant was his father-in-law who was feeble-minded and claimed to have gout, “as if his brain had flowed down into his feet.” Two months after Alexius’ murder the crusaders sacked Constantinople, and much loot was taken to the West, even the Shroud of Turin which reappeared in the fourteenth century. During the siege of the city Mourtzouphlus fled. He later sought refuge with the deposed Alexius III who welcomed him cordially, and then had him blinded. Mourtzouphlus managed to escape from Alexius but ran straight into the

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arms of the crusaders. After a show trial he was executed by being thrown from a high column. Nicetas was startled that no portents had heralded the destruction of Constantinople. Two hundred years earlier the Western bishop Liudprand had been repulsed by the food the Byzantines ate. Now Nicetas claimed to be disgusted by the crusaders’ fare. He described them as gluttonous, greedy, and violent, but they were not as ruthless to the Constantinopolitan populace as has been alleged. Nicetas records that a crusader abducted a girl, the fair-haired daughter of a judge, from the Church of Mokios intending to misuse her. The father’s pleas were of no avail and Nicetas himself approached the crusaders’ comrades. They followed the ruffian to his temporary lodging where he had locked the girl before confronting his enemies. Nicetas reminded him of the Western knights’ vows to abstain from rape and urged his comrades to remember their own wives and daughters. The ruffian was still obstinate, but his comrades were convinced by Nicetas and ordered him to release the girl or his life would be in danger. *** As restrained as the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople may have been, one cannot sympathize with their attack on the Russia of Alexander Nevsky. It came at a time when Russia was already reeling from assaults by the Mongols and their Tartar allies. Genghis Khan devastated southern Russia in 1223. The Russian dukes were unprepared for the Mongols’ military tactics: their swift attacks and retreats, their torrents of arrows, and their final lethal encirclements. Genghis’ grandson Batu defeated the Volga Bulgars, destroyed the cities of Ryazan and Vladimir, and sent envoys ordering Kiev to surrender. When the Kievans imprudently murdered the envoys, Batu burned the city and massacred its inhabitants. Six years later Kiev was a small town of two hundred cottages surrounded by a terrain of skulls. Batu ruled his realm from Sarai on the lower Volga. His empire was called the Golden Horde, after the nomads’ ornate tents. By paying an exorbitant tax the Russians kept the Tartars from direct interference in their

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affairs. The conquerors for their part made friends with the Russian Orthodox Church and gave the clergy tax exemption. This led to the church’s acceptance of Tartar rule and to the aspiration of many Russians to the monastic rather than the military life. Russia under the Mongol yoke was more religious than it had been before or since, and this was because of men like Stephen of Perm and Sergei of Radonezh. Batu’s need to be present at the election of the Great Khan in faraway Karakorum prevented him from capturing Novgorod, but the Novgorodians knew they faced an invincible enemy. At the time of the Golden Horde Novgorod was so large it was called Lord Novgorod the Great. The city exported furs, fish, falcons, amber, and silver and was regarded with desire by its northern neighbors. The Swedes launched an offensive against the city, but the young duke Alexander defeated them on the Neva River and so earned the surname Nevsky. During this battle the martyr princes Boris and Gleb were seen rowing in a boat to come to his aid. Alexander’s mother was a member of the Turkish Cuman tribe; his father was poisoned by the Mongols whom he kowtowed to. In 1241 Pope Gregory sanctioned a crusade of Livonian Knights from Pskov against Orthodox Novgorod, in part to ensure that the recently converted Estonians would remain Catholic. He exhorted the Knights to buckle their swords upon their thighs like Moses before them and to put on the armor of the Lord. Nevsky and his Russians fought the crusaders near and on the frozen Lake Chud which, in one description, was so covered with blood that the ice could not be seen through it. The Russians had four thousand more men and won the day, but Nevsky gave the Knights generous terms and allowed them to keep Pskov. He could not defeat the Golden Horde. He became a vassal of Batu Khan and an anda or sworn-brother of his son Sartaq. During the ceremony the two exchanged gifts, cut their hands, mixed their blood with milk, drank it, and swore an oath. Sworn-brotherhood was closer than bloodbrotherhood and was considered one soul inhabiting two bodies. Nevsky proved good to his word. He betrayed his brother Andrei to Sartaq and entered Vladimir with his and Sartaq’s troops. He was rewarded with the grand dukedom of Vladimir, and he would waste most of his reign

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traveling to and from the Mongol capital to placate his new lords. As grand duke he led the Mongols to rebellious Novgorod and allowed them to brutally execute his son who had called him a traitor. On a second expedition to Novgorod he performed mutilations and impalings from which even the Mongols refrained. He assisted in suppressing uprisings in Rostov, Vladimir, Suzdal, and Yaroslavl, but these bloody affairs were causing too much loss of Mongol life and Nevsky was summoned to the Mongol capital by Sartaq’s uncle Berke Khan. While there he was poisoned, and he died on the return journey. *** The northeastern forests of Russia were the new desert for Orthodox ascetics striving to walk in the footsteps of their forebears in late antique Egypt. The monks were frontiersmen of sorts, and their bravery would lead even non-ascetics to move into the forests and build towns. But the monks were more than frontiersmen; they were scholars and iconographers, and their icons were so highly regarded that no Russian would walk into the house of his host without first honoring his icons. St. Sergei was the greatest of Russia’s monks. In the remote forests of Radonezh he built a chapel in honor of the Trinity. There he befriended a bear and taught it to eat from his hand. His disciple Epifany stated that the wild beasts were attracted to him because the Holy Spirit dwelled in him and made him like Adam before the Fall. Many monks followed Sergei’s example, and his chapel became the center of the famous Troitskaya Laura, the Monastery of the Holy Trinity. Alexei the metropolitan of Moscow ordered Sergei to be ordained and appointed abbot, and he reluctantly acquiesced. When he returned from Moscow his monks bowed before him, but he ignored them and entered the monastic church, prostrating himself before the icon of the Trinity. He then delivered a sermon and asked the monks to pray for him since he lacked gentleness and wisdom. Sergei’s rule was that of Feodosy of Kiev with some relaxations. He urged the monastic candidate to refrain from saying vows for awhile, only bidding him wear dark clothing and live with the other monks. During a

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long episode without bread his monks threatened to leave his monastery. Sergei tried to get them to change their minds and promised that God would provide them food. While he was still speaking there was a knock at the monastery gate and, with it, two cartloads of bread, a gift from a nobleman to the monastery. To Sergei’s half-starved monks the bread seemed as though it had been made of butter and honey. Sergei’s older brother Stephen, an abbot, came to live at Troitskaya Laura. One day he spoke bitter words against Sergei, claiming that he had been an abbot longer than his brother. Sergei therefore departed from the monastery and built a new monastery on the banks of the Kirzhach River where he lived for four years until the metropolitan commanded him to return to his old monastery; he appointed his disciple Romany his successor at the new monastery. He had wanted to appoint Isaac, but Isaac refused and asked Sergei to give him the gift of silence. When Sergei blessed him the latter saw a flame leap from Sergei’s hand and surround him. Isaac had attended a Eucharist served by Sergei and Sergei’s brother and nephew. There was also a fourth priest, glowing with light and seen by Isaac and the monk Makary. They later asked Sergei who it was and learned it was his guardian angel. Once the second greatest monk of his age, Stephen of Perm, had to hurry past Radonezh without meeting Sergei. Yet he stopped his horse ten miles outside the monastery and greeted him in spirit. Sergei’s disciples were astonished when he arose during the common meal and returned Stephen’s unheard greeting. On many occasions Sergei acted as a peacemaker between the quarreling Russian dukes. He also encouraged Dmitri, the grand duke of Moscow, to resist the Tartars. Moscow was becoming an important city in Russian life. The metropolitan of Kiev moved his residence to Vladimir in 1300 and to Moscow in 1325. Before the move the metropolitans had been mostly Greek, but now they were mainly Russian. Dmitri’s grandfather, Ivan I, was the third grand duke of Moscow. He was the chief tax collector for the Tartars, but he kept some of the money for himself and so won the surname Kalita, Money Bag. He nonetheless satisfied the Tartars, and at the end of his life he abdicated and went into a monastery. Dmitri was not as submissive as his grandfather. Emboldened by St. Sergei he refused

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payment to the khan Mamai, and Mamai marched with his Tartars and Genoese mercenaries towards Moscow. Dmitri met the host at Kulikovo on the Don River, defeated it, and was thereafter named Donskoi. But his victory was not complete. Two years later the khan Tuqtamish, in a surprise attack, burned Moscow and massacred many of its inhabitants; the city was rebuilt and remained in subjection to the Tartars. Five years later its metropolitanate was offered to Sergei, but he turned it down and died, as he had lived, a monk.

Chapter 7

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HESYCHASM The Byzantine emperor at Nicaea, Michael Palaeologus, regained Constantinople from the crusaders in 1261, a feat which he celebrated by blinding his young predecessor. The boy, who was eleven, was blinded on Christmas Day and sentenced to life imprisonment. The patriarch excommunicated Michael, and Michael replaced him with a patriarch who was willing to lift the excommunication. Michael, who knew that all things obeyed money, has been called the most Machiavellian of the Byzantine emperors. He was able to prevent a Sicilian invasion of Byzantium by conspiring with Aragon and Genoa against the kingdom. He also presided over a union between the Eastern and Western churches which resulted in the ill will of his populace. During this time he mutilated monks, imprisoned his sisters, and had his friend Kotys fatally tortured. For all of Michael’s energy the restored Constantinopolitan empire would find itself being slowly strangled to death by the Ottoman Turks who had arisen in northeastern Asia Minor in the thirteenth century and by the end of the next century controlled the Balkans. It was fitting, considering the Turks’ nomadic heritage, that every Byzantine thought of them in apocalyptic terms: “The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run. Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that

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devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in battle array.” But there was an Indian summer left for Constantinople, and one last theologian: Gregory Palamas. Palamas was born to a senator and friend of Andronicus II. The older Palamas was the tutor of the emperor’s grandson Andronicus who was the same age as his own son. The emperor had one of the longest beards of a Byzantine emperor, and it was cut completely horizontally so that it resembled a shovel. When his grandson was born he became known as old Andronicus even though he was only thirty-eight. Gregory’s father is said to have practiced intellectual prayer, and for this reason he did not hear a question the emperor once posed to him during a political session. He died when Gregory was a child, and Gregory was brought up with the prince. He went to the Imperial University and studied with the famed Theodore Metochites. At the age of seventeen he delivered an interpretation of Aristotle before Andronicus and his court which Metochites claimed would have earned the plaudits of the Stagirite himself. Three years later, inspired by Constantinopolitan monks he had met, Palamas became a monastic and convinced his mother and siblings to follow his example. He went to Mount Athos and ultimately picked its oldest community, the Great Lavra. He prayed to the Virgin, “Illuminate my darkness” and received the gift of theology. Palamas stayed at Athos for eight years when Turkish attacks forced him to leave for Thessalonica. At Thessalonica he was ordained a priest, but he chose to live as a hermit on a mountain near Berea. He saw his fellow hermits only on weekends and spent the rest of the week praying the uninterrupted Jesus Prayer. In five years he returned to Athos because the Serbs had captured Berea, and here he began to expound his Hesychastic mysticism. The Calabrian monk Barlaam, who was sympathetic to Catholicism, came to Constantinople around this time in the hope of uniting the Eastern and Western churches. He also visited Thessalonica and acted as though everyone there was a bumpkin. For Barlaam the Filioque controversy was not an issue because God cannot really be known. Palamas wrote to counter his relativism, and Barlaam replied with an attack on the Hesychasts in which he mocked their breathing techniques, their

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repetitious prayers, and their bodily posture: sitting cross-legged with their beards touching their chests and gazing at their stomachs, techniques that may have ultimately been derived from Sufism. Barlaam called the Hesychasts the Omphalopsychoi, the Belly-soul People, and requested for them to be condemned as heretics. The patriarch of Constantinople, John Calecas, decided in the Hesychasts’ favor, but Barlaam accused Palamas of being a follower of Theodore of Blachernae, a reputed Bogomil, and asked for a formal council. This was presided over by Andronicus III, Palamas’ childhood friend. Some years before, Andronicus was the restless heir to the Byzantine throne. He had been accidentally responsible for the death of his brother and, indirectly, his father; and his grandfather Andronicus II loathed him intensely, forcing him to remain standing in his presence even when his courtiers were allowed to sit down. But the emperor’s days were numbered. Portents of doom were evident in the summer of 1327: the moon was eclipsed, and a pig got into the Church of Holy Wisdom and ran amok. The commander of the armed forces, John Cantacuzene, helped the younger Andronicus overthrow his grandfather, and the grandfather became a monk while continuing to live in a private house with his widowed daughter. He was becoming increasingly blind; he wore a fur coat in winter and drank Egyptian sherbet for his health. One evening his friend, the historian Nicephorus Gregoras, visited him and they talked for hours. To Gregoras’ surprise Andronicus died later that same night. At the Hesychast council Gregory Palamas was again vindicated and his enemy Barlaam returned to the West, eventually becoming Petrarch’s Greek tutor. His attack on the Hesychasts had been a repetition of Stephen of Nicomedia’s attack on Symeon the New Theologian. In both cases a capable but overconfident Christian humanism had gone up against an obdurate Christian mysticism and had been defeated. Despite his theological victory Palamas’ troubles were only beginning. A week after the council Andronicus died, leaving a young son, John V, in the protection of John Cantacuzene. While Cantacuzene was away from Byzantium on military affairs the patriarch produced a forged letter of Andronicus’s declaring that he himself was regent. Palamas bowed to

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Calecas’ regency, but he was not fond of Calecas and Calecas knew of his dislike. He imprisoned Palamas in a monastery and excommunicated him, but on Cantacuzene’s return to Constantinople Palamas was freed. Calecas’ abortive bid for power led Cantacuzene to have himself crowned John VI. He installed Palamas as bishop of Thessalonica, but Palamas could not immediately take up his duties since the city was hostile to the new emperor. In company with the rightful sovereign, John V, Cantacuzene visited Mount Athos. There the emperors sought out the wisdom of Maximus Kapsokalyvis, Hut-burner, who had, in his desire for extreme solitude, burned every hut he lived in after it had been discovered. Kapsokalyvis urged the two men to remember that there was a heavenly emperor who ruled over them. He prophesied that John V would become emperor and John VI a monk, and when they departed he sent after the latter a package of dry bread, garlic, and an onion. Three years later John V led an uprising against Cantacuzene’s government. John was based in Thessalonica and found Gregory Palamas sympathetic to his cause. At his urging Palamas set sail for Byzantium in order to work out a peaceful solution to the political morass, but his ship was blown off course to Gallipoli which was controlled by the Turks. The Turks allowed Palamas to travel in Asia Minor, and he was granted an audience with the sultan Orkhan. Orkhan was interested in Christianity and arranged a meeting between Palamas, the Muslims, and certain Christians who had become Jews as a compromise between Christianity and Islam. During the debate one of the Jews became so angry with Palamas that he struck him, but the theologian enjoyed his time in Asia and stayed there for a year before the Serbs ransomed him. *** Palamas, as we have seen, was a Hesychast. The Greek word hēsychia means silence or tranquillity, and in the fourth century it began to be applied to the hermits of the desert. The Nestorian bishop Isaac of Nineveh was a precursor of Hesychasm. Following Evagrius he defined prayer as the purity of the intellect which is produced with dread only from the light

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of the Trinity. Symeon the New Theologian, with his emphasis on the Uncreated Light, was another forerunner. By Palamas’ time Hesychasm consisted of the continual repetition of the Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me.” The Jesus Prayer went back to much older traditions. Hesychius had written in the ninth century, “The name of Jesus should be repeated over and over in the heart as flashes of lightning are repeated over and over in the sky before rain.” The Hesychasts uttered the first half of the Jesus Prayer with inhalation of breath and the second half with exhalation of breath, but there was more than one way to pray it: Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain prayed the Jesus Prayer mentally between breaths. The prayer is still used in the Orthodox Church, but the Hesychast bodily posture has been abandoned. The breathing techniques were codified by Nicephorus the Monk who said that one should inhale as though inhaling his mind and pushing it into his heart. The union of mind and heart resulted in the same kind of joy a man on a long journey has when he returns home to his wife and children. It is somewhat of a paradox to think of mystics maintaining a high view of the body, but the Hesychasts did so, and in this they were the complete obverse of Barlaam. If all Orthodox theology is a series of footnotes to Origen, as has been suggested, Barlaam was the footnote the most heavily imbued with Origen’s distaste for the body. Palamas, however, went so far as to argue that men are superior to angels because of their bodies: it is their bodies that give men dominion over the earth, and it is their bodies as well as their souls that Christ divinized when He became incarnate. Against Barlaam’s condemnation of the Hesychasts as the Belly-soul People he adduced the example of the prophet Elijah who had prayed while bent down to the ground with his face between his knees. During their mystical visions the Hesychasts partook of God’s nature and were at one with the Uncreated Light, the same light that Christ had burned with when He stood with His disciples on Mount Tabor. For this reason they sometimes called the Uncreated Light the Taboric Light. Palamas wrote nine treatises against Barlaam which would be collected in one volume called the Triads. His replies to Barlaam were more courteous than Barlaam’s attacks on the Hesychasts, a fact which

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absolves him over Barlaam in the modern eye. Barlaam condemned the Hesychasts not only for their doctrines and their breathing techniques but for their ignorance of philosophy. Palamas responded by censuring scholarly monks who measured the celestial cycle, studied the opposing motions of the stars, and theorized about how they were related to similar motions of the mind. He averred that philosophy was a dangerous mixture of hemlock and honey and likened Greek philosophy to serpents that needed to be killed and dissected before useful pharmaceuticals could be extracted from them. He found Satan’s angels consistently motivating the philosophers: the daemon of Socrates, the snake which left Plotinus at his death, and the oracle of Delphi that was given to Plotinus’ pupil Amelius. Barlaam did not press his point on the question of monkish ignorance, but he refused to renege on his comparison of the Hesychasts to the Messalians, a comparison which Palamas denied. Barlaam was referring to a phenomenon that has been termed Byzantine Messalianism, in distinction to the earlier heresy Messalianism. Byzantine Messalianism was a variation of Bogomilism. The new Messalians were synesthetes: they said that God was white and the powers of evil yellow. They were opposed to the Bible but not to prayer which drove away the evil spirits that had become intermingled with man’s very being. Such was their understanding of the apostle Paul’s “old man” which dwells in one’s members and wages war against the law of the mind. The Byzantine Messalians said they saw God with their material eyes through prayer, and this was the closest thing they had in common with the Hesychasts, only the Hesychasts said they saw God’s energies with immaterial sight. While Barlaam denied that God could directly reveal Himself to the Christian Palamas pointed out that the Creator might choose to communicate with a man just as an emperor sometimes speaks with a common soldier. Also, the Old Testament stated that God spoke to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend. Nonetheless Hesychastic mysticism was adventurous theology, and Palamas needed to ensure its orthodoxy. He was helped by the writings of Dionysius the PseudoAreopagite who said that God transcends all earthly ways of thinking and is therefore unknowable. Palamas affirmed the former but denied that God

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could not in some sense be known. Our experience of God is both apophatic and cataphatic: God is beyond knowing, but He is also beyond unknowing. The Christian might not know God’s essence, but he could know His energies. The anti-Hesychasts accused Palamas of Logos speculation, that is of making a second God between God and man, but Palamas did not intend for God’s energies to be a person or a hypostasis. When he spoke of God’s energies he only spoke of Him acting. We know God through His actions, not His essence. Essentially the Holy Spirit proceeds from only the Father, yet energetically He proceeds from both the Father and the Son. In other words, the Spirit proceeds from the Father metaphysically but the Son still sends us the Spirit at Pentecost. Palamas believed that God did not create His energies, and he had patristic backing for this belief: Maximus the Confessor wrote that there never was a time when virtue, goodness, holiness, and immortality did not exist, because God had always possessed them. Barlaam, however, said that God was identical only with His essence and that man could not communicate with Him except through the angelic hierarchies of Dionysius, hierarchies which were similar to the daemonical hierarchies between God and man in Neoplatonism. Palamas’ interpretation of Dionysius was different. Dionysius had spoken of the angels moving in a circular motion, united with illuminations of the Beautiful and the Good. According to Palamas the illuminations were God’s energies, and they were the closest man could ever get to participating in God’s superessential essence. *** The Hesychasts maintained the Uncreated Light could be seen but not with material eyes, hence only Christ’s disciples saw it on Mount Tabor and not the Jews who were gathered at the foot of the mountain. Palamas said that even blind Hesychasts could see it. The light was spiritual, divine, distinct from all creatures, insensible, unintelligible, without beginning or end. It illuminated all things, even the ears, hence the disciples heard the Father’s words on the mountain and Saul of Tarsus heard Jesus’ words on

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the road to Damascus. The one who saw the light reflected it like a mirror or a sheet of water reflected the sun. Paul saw the light when he was caught up into the third heaven. There he beheld “a light without limit, depth, height, or lateral extension, a sun infinitely brighter and greater than the universe, with himself standing in the midst of it, having become all eye.” This was not much different from the union with the divine recorded by Plotinus: “Many times it has happened: lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentred; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.” But for all the similarities between Hesychasm and Neoplatonism Palamas believed there was an inseparable gulf between Christian and nonChristian experiences of the light. The first involved the Taboric Light, the second something else. More than that, the Taboric Light could not be experienced by all Christians, and it could not be used for evil purposes since it immediately forsook anyone with a propensity for evil. Another champion of Hesychasm besides Palamas was the monk Joasaph. When John Cantacuzene abdicated he entered a monastery where he took just such a name. He wrote books defending the Hesychasts and his own reign and died in 1383, twenty years after Palamas. Hesychasm had triumphed to such a degree that when the anti-Hesychast Nicephorus Gregoras died his body was dragged through the streets by the savage and indignant populace of Constantinople. *** A Western traveler who visited Byzantium in the twelfth century said that every Byzantine wore purple and gold and looked like a prince. Robert

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of Clari, who fought in the Fourth Crusade, wrote, “If anyone should recount to you the hundredth part of the richness and the beauty and the nobility that was found in the abbeys and in the churches and palaces and in the city, it would seem like a lie and you would not believe it.” But after this crusade the city consisted of thirteen villages separated by fields. At Cantacuzene’s coronation the crown jewels were of glass and the banqueting plates of clay and pewter; Nicephorus quipped that the imperial treasury contained nothing but air and dust. When the grand duke of Moscow sent Cantacuzene money to repair the damaged Church of Holy Wisdom he had to give it to his Turkish mercenaries instead. And during his reign the Black Death came and wiped out a third of the city’s inhabitants. Cantacuzene was the champion of the new orthodoxy of Hesychasm, but John V renounced the Orthodox faith for Catholicism and, it was hoped, Western aid against the Ottoman Turks. John’s son Andronicus revolted against him, and the Turkish sultan, for all practical purposes John’s suzerain, ordered him to blind Andronicus and his grandson. In deliberately incomplete operations they were blinded by the use of hot basins, and Andronicus was incarcerated in the windowless tower of Anemas, a creation straight out of Maeterlinck. He was later transferred to the monastery of Kauleos from where he escaped and renewed his rebellion. The rebellion so far succeeded that John and Andronicus’ brother Manuel were themselves imprisoned in the windowless tower. Manuel later wrote that the prison cut off the rays of noon just as night cut them off from those in the outside world. The emperor and his son were imprisoned for three years but managed to escape, and the Turks put John back on his throne. Andronicus, however, had taken valuable hostages including his mother, aunts, and grandfather whom he imprisoned in a fortress where there had been deaths from the plague. The hostages were released when John concurred that Andronicus would inherit his throne. Fortunately Andronicus died a few years later, and Manuel succeeded his father. His years in the windowless tower had done nothing for his appearance, and to his subjects he looked as old as John. Manuel visited Western cities to solicit aid against the encroaching

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Turks and wore only white, the Byzantine color of mourning. The West was sympathetic to his plight but unwilling to help. The emperor’s fruitless travels had ironically been foreshadowed by those of the last Latin emperor of Constantinople. During the reign of Manuel and his son John ambassadors from Castile visited Byzantium and were shocked by the physical decrepitude of the once great and lavish city. It was filled with ruined houses and churches, and cornfields and vineyards flourished in what had been the heart of the city. The palace was unkempt except for the cramped living quarters of the emperor, and his subjects were dejected and ill clad. Byzantium would not be hard for the Turks to defeat. They already possessed the Balkans, and Mehmet II, who ascended the Ottoman throne in 1451, was more ambitious than any of his predecessors. The Turks were like vampires: they took young Christian boys, converted them to Islam, and turned them into Turks. The boys grew up and became Janissaries, the elite fighting troops of the sultan’s army. They were forbidden to wear beards but could have mustaches and in later days came to wield much power in the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet and his Janissaries needed only a pretext for war; this was given by Constantine XI, the last emperor of Constantinople. While he was despot of the Morea under his brother John VIII, Constantine had repaired the Hexamilion, the six-mile wall that protected southern Greece. The Turks besieged it for five days and scaled the ramparts. Constantine and his brother Thomas escaped; three hundred Greeks surrendered to the Turks and were massacred, the pine trees around them being drenched with their blood. Constantine’s other brother was Andronicus, the ruler of Thessalonica, the second city of the Byzantine Empire. The fact that he was a leper only served to reflect the empire’s increasing degradation and despair. After the Hexamilion massacre Constantine, who was twice widowed, spent most of his time in the palace of the despot. Two years later he became emperor. He had the Ottoman pretender Orkhan under his protection and received money from the Turks to ensure that Orkhan was not set at large.

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Imprudently he demanded that the bribe be doubled, and Mehmet responded by making plans to conquer Constantinople. Constantine sent ships throughout the Aegean islands foraging for wheat, wine, olive oil, and figs. The city would be defended by the Greeks, the Venetians, and the Genoese, yet Constantine needed more help. During the reign of his brother there had been a brief union between the Eastern and Western churches. Constantine ratified the union in the hope that the West would fight for him, but the union was unpopular with his Greek citizens. One of his enemies said he was an emperor without a crown and ruled an empire without a faith. On the day celebrating the union worshippers at the Church of Holy Wisdom partook of the Eucharist with unleavened bread, but afterwards they avoided the building and sought out non-unionist churches. Constantine gained little from the union, and the impulsive Orthodox monk Gennadius was vindicated. The Hungarians sent messengers to the Turks bluffing that they would help the Byzantines, but they also gave them advice on cannon firing. The pope at least sent three Genoese merchant ships with food and weapons. The Turks later sank a Genoese ship, and Mehmet had all forty crewmen impaled on the shore; eight years later the Walachian prince Vlad III would impale twenty-five thousand of Mehmet’s soldiers. The story of the fall of Constantinople has contributed to the Western world’s vision of impending doom more than any other story save the Passion. As cannons bombarded the city many of its inhabitants worried about the immorality of the union with Rome. Icons were seen to sweat in the churches, and there were worse omens: a child saw an angel leave off its post of guarding the city, and gathered oysters dripped blood. Although it was springtime there was hail and snow but also bright sunsets and weird optical illusions. May 28, 1453 was the last day Byzantium stood. Two years earlier George Sphrantzes, a friend of the emperor, had a dream while he was away from the capital: “It seemed to me that I was back in the city. As I made a motion to prostrate myself and kiss the emperor’s feet he stopped me, raised me, and kissed my eyes. Then I awoke and told those sleeping by me: ‘I just had this dream. Remember the date.’”

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Byzantium fell on May 29. It was so thoroughly pillaged that Mehmet reneged on his promise of giving his troops two additional days of plunder. The details of Constantine’s end are not known. The Greeks thought he was killed fighting near the Gate of St. Romanos, the Turks near the Golden Gate. When he heard the news of the city’s fall the Holy Roman emperor, Frederick III, wept. A Cretan monk wrote that nothing as bad had ever happened in the world nor would ever happen again. Those who survived could quote John the Evangelist: “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.”

Chapter 8

THE POSSESSORS Byzantine religiosity passed effortlessly to Russia. Herberstein, the Western diplomat, observed that if anyone asked a Muscovite a question which he was unable to answer he would reply, “Only God and the czar know,” and if anyone asked the czar a question relating to public policy he would answer, “If it be God’s will.” One incident illustrates the sincerity of the Russians’ religious convictions. In fourteenth-century Novgorod the heretics called Strigolniki, or Barbers, arose. They mocked the clergy and icons, but the irate populace hurled their leaders into the icy waters of the Volkhov River. In many ways the Russian church was more Orthodox than the Byzantine. It had not accepted John VIII’s union with Rome, and as a result when the metropolitan of Kiev was elected in 1448 he was elected without any deference to Constantinople. The metropolitanate of Moscow continued to grow in importance, and by 1510 the Pskovan monk Philotheus noised abroad the theory of Moscow as the third Rome: “The apostolic church stands no longer in Rome or Constantinople but in the blessed city of Moscow. She alone shines in the whole world brighter than the sun. Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands and a fourth there will not be.” The Russians, suffering an inferiority complex in relation to the West, called Moscow the New Israel, the New Jerusalem, and the New Constantinople.

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It was not only the metropolitanate of Moscow that was growing in importance. Ivan III was the creator of the Muscovite state. In 1480 he threw off the Tartar yoke, and if the Russians ever afterwards gave the Tartars anything it was solely gifts and not tribute. Ivan married Zoe Palaeologa, the niece of Constantine XI, and adopted the two-headed eagle, the coat of arms of the Palaeologi, the last rulers of Byzantium. Amusingly, the two-headed eagle symbolized a rupture in the house of the Palaeologi rather than, as was often assumed, a bird of prey looking vigilantly to the east and to the west. Zoe must have been a formidable woman since Ivan’s eyes were said to fill women with dread and lead to their losing consciousness. Paradoxically Ivan himself was afraid of the dark. The church of Ivan’s time was composed of metropolitans and the white and black clergy, the former the priests and the latter monastic priests. The black clergyman Joseph Volotsky forever sullied his name by his campaign against a court movement called Judaism, which was actually a mixture of Judaism, Gnosticism, Arianism, and Protestantism. The religion was growing at an alarming rate: Ivan’s daughter-in-law Elena of Moldavia was a convert, and Ivan himself was interested. The Novgorodian metropolitan Gennady asked for advice on the heresy from the starets, or elder, Paisy Yaroslavov and his apprentice Nil Sorsky. He wanted to know whether the monks were familiar with certain books the heretics had and was puzzled by the apocalyptic sentence “as soon as three years shall have come the seven thousand will terminate,” a reference to the end of the world, seven thousand years after the creation, in 1492. Paisy and Nil’s reply is not known. They did sanction the imprisonment of one heretic, which turned out to be fatal, as well as the burning of the Judaizers’ writings. Yet Ivan Kuritsyn, the leader of the Judaizers, was an acquaintance of Nil’s diplomat brother, and two of Nil’s disciples, Vassian Patrikeev and German Podolnyi, were opposed to the persecution of heretics. In any case the authorities agreed with Joseph’s fire and blood and had a number of Judaizers burned at the stake. Whether or not Nil and Joseph clashed on the issue of heresy they were certainly at odds on the proper attitude to take toward monastic

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possessions. Joseph accepted the grand duke’s nominal control of the church, but he was adamant that the monasteries keep their riches. Ivan did not want the monks to own property, and not because he was interested in furthering their spiritual life as Nil was. The conflict between Joseph and Nil was one between Stiazhateli and Nestiazhateli, Possessors and NonPossessors. The Non-Possessors believed the monks could own nothing and that their monasteries were theirs solely on trust; the Possessors maintained that monks could own property, although only in a communal sense. It must be admitted that the Possessors often used their wealth for good ends, burying the homeless and establishing sick houses and orphanages. They also challenged the Muscovite state more than the NonPossessors did. Nonetheless one tends to sympathize with Nil over Joseph, not so much because one is against monks having property but because of the nature of the two men—one a mystic, the other a religious fanatic. But Nil was not so mystical that he refused to act as a copyist for Joseph’s treatise The Illuminator which contains the interesting suggestion that icons are windows through which the saints look into us, and Joseph himself admired Nil’s writings and sent two of his disciples to study with him. *** The rulers of Byzantium were cruel as the clerics were not, but in Russia both rulers and clerics could be cruel, a phenomenon which the heritage of Joseph Volotsky illustrates. Joseph himself gives us a one-sided portrait of Sergei of Radonezh, concentrating on the sterner aspects of his personality rather than the humane; but if Sergei could be accused of not playing hardball the same could not be said of the successors of Kirill of the White Lake. One of these tried to moderate his rule and when he was opposed by a monk he threw the unfortunate off the refectory balcony. The monk almost died but told the abbot that he would not cease to rebuke him. Another moderate Kirillian monk used a rod to strike his underlings who wanted Kirill’s severe rule reinstated. A third abbot managed to run off the disaffected monks, but they agitated and got the secular powers to expel

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him. When moderate elders took over the Simonov Monastery the lame administrator Varfolomei and the future metropolitan Iona proved to be a thorn in their side. None of this implies that the severe abbots were more moderate than the lax abbots. Savva stood ready with an iron rod to beat those who talked during church services, and one of his favorite punishments was to send monks to the dungeons. Once when he was upbraiding a monk into whose window he was leaning his head the monk, “incited by some demon,” pulled his beard out to the roots. Savva, however, was full of surprises, and when the rebellious and trembling monk was hauled out before him and Savva’s obedient monks asked what punishment they should administer he replied, “I beat with the iron and send to the dungeon on account of monastic disorder and injuries to the brotherhood; it is not proper for me to avenge my own injuries but to endure everything.” When, during a plague, Savva visited his monastery and administered to the sick, he was often told that another monk was more in need of his care since he was at death’s door. Savva would send word that the monk should wait for him since it was not his time to die, and the dying monk was able to hold on until Savva gave him the last rites. After Savva himself died he appeared in a dream to one of his negligent successors and beat him so severely with his rod that he could not get up from his bed. Savva’s brother Varsonofy was no less an imposing figure, though in a different way from Savva. He lived alone in a hermitage where he did not own even a coin, but he was once called to the Savvin Monastery where he deposited books with a prayer that the Mother of God would watch over them. Later a monk tried to leave the monastery with the books and was struck dead. When Varsonofy arrived he knew the brother had died because of his prayer and taxed himself with murder. He wept so copiously by the dead monk’s coffin that the ground was covered with tears, but when the monks were about to kiss their dead comrade he stirred. He was unbound and sat up but had no memory of the time he had been dead. Varsonofy’s miracle was not unique. Daniel, the iconographer of the Andronikov Monastery who spent Easter in rapt contemplation before the holy icons, saw a vision of his former student Andrei Rublev before he

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died. Joseph also knew an elder named Efrosin, a prince by birth, who lived at the Savvateev Hermitage. Because he was often troubled with visitors he fled to an island on Lake Ladoga, and then back to the hermitage when his new haunt was discovered. When he returned he was able to restore a dying princess to health by his prayers and so reconciled two dukedoms. *** Joseph Volotsky began his career at the Savvin Monastery but refused to eat with the lay guests because of their foul language. Savva’s brother Varsonofy directed him to the Pafnutiev Monastery near Borovsk where he was tonsured by its abbot. Pafnuty was a tyrannical monk of Tartar descent. No one, it is said, could look him in the eye and conceal a sin; his cell was built so as to have a view of all his monks’ cells. Because of Pafnuty’s support of the political rebel Shemiaka, the grand duke Vasily II, through his military commander Vasily Yaroslavich, sent raiding parties against his monastery, and Pafnuty’s reputation was such that he was suspected of jinxing the operations. Vasily had blinded Shemiaka’s brother, and Shemiaka responded by blinding him. When Shemiaka was poisoned by one of Vasily’s agents and the metropolitan Iona refrained from granting Shemiaka a memorial service, Pafnuty refused to acknowledge Iona’s clerical authority and was punished, by the metropolitan himself, by being placed in an ice chamber. The KirilloBeloozersky Monastery sided with Vasily; the older Troitskaya Laura sided with Shemiaka. It was Pafnuty’s support of Shemiaka that made him a national holy man and one who was, paradoxically, respected by the Muscovite royal family. At the Pafnutiev Monastery Joseph shone as a cantor and also wrote an impressive tract defending icons of the Old Testament Trinity, of which Andrei Rublev’s paintings were a prime example. He was also introduced to psychic divination by Pafnuty. This would result, a year before his death, in his prediction that the Muscovite army would be defeated by the Poles and the Lithuanians at the Battle of Orsha. Although he was not in attendance with Pafnuty at his death, he was selected by Ivan III to succeed

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his mentor. A few months later he left the monastery with seven comrades who took with them, and technically stole, fourteen of the monastery’s books. He had left to study the phenomenon of monastic communal property in Tver and northern Russia. When he returned to Pafnutiev a hostile monk who had been divinely judged with sickness was healed. Joseph’s return was not long thanks to his disgust with the grand duke who, as part of his campaign to extend the power of Moscow, had been seizing peasants who lived on monastic lands. Joseph repaired to his native Volokolamsk. One day he and his guide, a hunter, were transported by a whirlwind to a remote place where lightning had once flashed on a clear day and church bells rang out. Here he built a monastery dedicated to the Immaculate Mother of God. The new monastery was sponsored by the duke Boris who helped build it with his own hands and who had contemplated treason against Ivan. The monastery initially possessed fifteen books and seven icons, three of them by Andrei Rublev. One of the monks, the former archer Kassian, never wore shoes in summer or winter, and another monk prophesied the day of his own death, saw a dying comrade’s soul leave his body, had a vision in church as Joseph was carrying the shroud of Christ, and beheld the dead Joseph in heaven. Joseph soon came into open conflict with Ivan, whose tolerance toward heresy may have been his only redeeming quality, after the latter installed two Judaizing priests in the Kremlin. The persecution of the Judaizers was Joseph’s pet project. He called them “the devil himself and his entire army.” The Muscovite metropolitan Zosima who protected them was “the new, deadly Judas,” “the traitor and partner of the demons,” “the deadly serpent and advocate of darkness,” “the forerunner of the Antichrist, and the first apostate among our bishops.” He accused him of sodomy and the denial of heaven and the resurrection of the body. To forestall his own anathematization he made it published that the anathema of a heretic bishop meant nothing. For his forthcoming battle with the grand duke, Joseph read up on the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition. During this time he wrote that when a ruler is blasphemous the populace should not obey him. In actual practice

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he was a flatterer, but he did accuse Ivan of murdering his brother Andrei, an act for which the grand duke was forced to perform public penance. Joseph was able to get Ivan on his side in part by enabling the transfer of the Ruza principality to him rather than his nephew whose it was by right. He had another weapon against Ivan: in addition to his fear of darkness the grand duke was worried about losing his salvation. Joseph gave him no quarter and bullied Ivan’s confessor into withholding absolution from him until the heretics were destroyed. Joseph’s greatest victory was the Council of 1504 which condemned a score of Judaizers to life imprisonment or death by fire. He opposed monks who wanted to free repentant Judaizers whom he called oath-breakers, and he believed the story that a speciously repentant Judaizing priest had emptied the chalice into a stove after serving the Eucharist and that the Christ child appeared to him and indignantly proclaimed that since he had delivered Him to temporal flames he himself would burn eternally. Joseph’s responsibility for the horrors of these years cannot be defended, but the motive behind them was to direct the satanic energy of the Russian state against a select group of heretics rather than the Russian populace as a whole. Ivan III died a year after the council. The hearts of the people were not with the persecutors. Their feelings can be summed up by the statement of the Non-Possessor Artemy: “I don’t know that heresy: they burned Kuritsyn and Rukavyi, and now they don’t know why they burned them.” Joseph’s master had once been the holy man of Russia, but that honor was now reserved for Serapion the bishop of Novgorod who was seen as a welcome relief from the politicking of the Possessors and their shameless leader. Serapion excommunicated Joseph for an unrelated offense and accused him of having left the heavenly kingdom for the earthly. Joseph responded by framing his own bishop, and the metropolitan Simon imprisoned Serapion. Eventually Ivan’s successor Vasily III removed Simon, freed Serapion from prison, and forbade Joseph to defend himself against the pamphlets of his enemy Vassian Patrikeev. ***

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Joseph’s most enduring work was his two monastic rules, the Long Rule and the Short Rule. While Nil Sorsky, following John Climacus, praised the skete, the small community of one monk living with a few disciples, Joseph was much more of a cenobite and his rules would be more influential in the development of subsequent Russian monasticism. He urged his readers to flee “as if from a stench” individualism and insubordination. His rules for vespers were predictably stringent. The monk was to arrive on time, not leave before the dismissal, not talk, not stand in a negligent way, not sing too loudly, not sing out of turn, not refuse to sing, and not look at anything but his lection. Laughing or talking about non-religious subjects during church services was to be punished with one day of dry meals. Like Nil, Joseph forbade women and boys from mingling with his monks though he allowed women to worship briefly in the monastic church if they were accompanied by two brothers. Meals in the refectory were to be taken in silence since pigs grunted and cats purred when they ate. Monks who sat in different seats on different days were shameless and unruly. While the older rules allowed wine Joseph, in view of the Russian tendency towards drunkenness, outlawed all alcohol except kvass. As far as he was concerned Russians could not drink in moderation. They would not stop at one or two cups but would drink until they did not know who they were. The brothers could gather for communal, and silent, drinking of kvass at table, but wine was allowed only to relieve the sufferings of the sick and the aged. Joseph was technically in favor of communal property, but he gave the abbot leave to grant special blessing to certain possessions of the monks, a blessing which his successor Daniel tried to take from them. They were allowed to keep books, icons, candles, food, utensils, and clothing in their cells. One monk lived in each cell, but sometimes an elder and a novice shared a cell. Because of the danger of fire the monks could not heat their cells when they were absent. Joseph permitted them to wear boots, undershoes, fur coats, and winter caps and provided a symbolic interpretation of their garb. The sleeveless mantle represented the absence of mischievous hands, the girdle protected the monk from lust, the cowl

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taught him humility, the cap symbolized divine protection, the scapular the shield of salvation, and the schema the cross. Joseph was more influenced by the church fathers than the Bible, but he sometimes defied even them. He assures us that it is permissible for the abbot to be savage and haughty, and he annuled the apostolic canon which forbade a priest from striking people who talked in church. His Christ was not the man of sorrows but the wrathful rabbi who drove money changers from the Temple, and He did not fill him with comfort. He describes His face as terrifying and shining more brilliantly than the sun and He Himself as granting eternal torments to the wicked. “What,” he asks, “is more wretched than this?” But in other moods he could speak of Christ’s indescribable light. We get a feel for Joseph’s intensity in his portrait of the disobedient monk: “If his service is with evil, deceit, and stupidity, grumbling, troubles, sorrows, any lack of generosity with food, more than necessary laziness in prayer, solitary eating, satiation in sleep, dissipation without fear, neglect of the entrusted brothers, rejection of elders, revilement of novices, reproach of the great, desire of the worldly and readiness to eat and drink with them—such a servitor is a friend of vainglory, a disciple of pride, a fisher of praise; he does what is forbidden by the leader, nor is he a counselor of the superior but does all by himself and, concealed from the superior, he wanders, gladdens the devil, kills himself, is a friend of Achan of Israel, a companion of Gehazi, a disciple of Judas the betrayer, and a brother of Ananias and Sapphira.” Joseph was obsessed with these biblical thieves and blasphemers. What, one may ask, of the monk who is not evil but who nonetheless does not accept Joseph’s rule? His answer is clear and to the point: “If someone does not wish to receive or hold these, he himself shall answer for himself at the terrible tribunal of Christ.” But Joseph’s good monk is nothing to mock. He is like Mark, the disciple of the abbot Silvanus, who was writing calligraphy when his superior called him. He was in the process of writing an omega when he was called and immediately left off his exercise so that it appeared he had written an upsilon. Joseph singled out the Kaliazin Monastery for special praise. A Russian monk who lived on Mount Athos for nine years passed

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through and only then realized that it was possible to be saved even in Russia. *** Nil Sorsky was more humble than Joseph and referred to himself as a rustic, but he was born in Moscow of a well-to-do family. He was already admirably educated when he entered the monastery of KirilloBeloozersky—St. Kirill of the White Lake—whose elder taught him to love the church fathers. He excelled as a copyist as Joseph excelled as a cantor. For a time he sojourned, in the company of his friend Innokenty, with the Hesychasts on Mount Athos. There had been Russian Hesychasts before Nil, but he was the first to popularize the pristine Athos variety in Russia. He returned to his homeland dissatisfied with the type of monastery he had known before his time in Greece and began his own hermitage, a series of log cabins surrounding a monastic church. In each cell lived a starets and one or two disciples who saw their neighbors only on weekends. The hermitage was located in a forest of spruce trees near the Sora River across the Volga, and Nil and his followers were therefore called the Trans-Volga Elders. The monastic church was dedicated to the presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple. It is astonishing that it housed pillar decorations, cotton sheets, wax, incense, sand, fir-tree gum, rope, an altar, soap, tree oil, wine, myrrh, holy water mixed with herbs, and sponges. Nil was no great originator. He compared his work to that of a dog picking up crumbs that fell from the table. His writings combined two traditions: the tradition of the desert fathers and the tradition of the Hesychasts. This included Isaac of Nineveh, Gregory of Sinai, and the intermediary figure Nikon of the Black Mountain. The desert fathers had aimed at apatheia, passionlessness, while the Hesychasts aimed at hēsychia, tranquil contemplation of God. Nil translated the word hēsychia with the Russian word bezmolvie which contained the idea of no disturbance or agitation.

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For Nil the main goal of the monk was spiritual perfection. He would have agreed with these words of Plotinus: “Withdraw into yourself and look, and if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work.” In writing his rule Nil followed the advice of an ascetic who recommended prayer for an hour, reading for an hour, and chanting for an hour. But the one who had progressed far in the Jesus Prayer should not waste his time chanting or reading the lives of the fathers. Nil does not seem to have had visions of the Uncreated Light, but he wrote of the all-consuming joy he felt while praying the Jesus Prayer. The monk praying this prayer was to empty his mind of everything when he prayed, of good thoughts and evil thoughts, of everything but union with the Trinity. One observes here how much the Hesychasts might have had in common with the Eastern mystics but for the fact that the mind was to be emptied primarily to prevent the entrance of sinful thoughts. Nil accepted the view that there were eight passions, or vices, which led to other vices. These were gluttony, fornication, covetousness, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride. He was mostly worried about fornication and gluttony while Joseph was worried mainly about pederasty and drunkenness. Nil was against overeating but said that all food, even dessert, was acceptable: he was concerned that the monks would appear too selective when accepting and rejecting food offered to their monasteries. As for anger, Nil quotes a church father who said that if an angry man were to raise the dead he would still be displeasing to God. He warns us against angry looks, angry words, and angry deeds. If Christ forgave His executioners we should forgive our enemies. We should love our neighbors as ourselves and stretch out our love toward those who are far away, driving all evil opinions of them from our hearts. Nil spends more time on acedia, spiritual torpor, than any other sin. The monk succumbing to acedia is prone to blasphemy and ingratitude, but his condition can be remedied by a variety of techniques: seeking out an elder, spiritual reading, manual labor, and the recitation of psalms. Nothing works better in overcoming vice than the remembrance of death, especially sudden and

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unexpected deaths in which the victims were unable to say even the final prayers for forgiveness. In addition to his Rule Nil wrote a collection of twenty-four lives of ancient and medieval saints as well as letters to monks plagued by lustful and blasphemous thoughts. No biography of him survives. Joseph Volotsky’s successor Daniel, the metropolitan of Moscow, burned the homes and writings of his followers. Yet his last will and testament remained. He asked that his body be thrown into the forest to be devoured by the wild beasts because of his sins, but knowing that this would not be done he asked to be buried in the monastery grounds without honor.

Chapter 9

ARCHPRIEST AVVAKUM One of Nil’s disciples was Vassian Patrikeev. Vassian was an aristocrat forced into the monastic life by Ivan III. Influenced by Nil’s belief in God’s mercy he urged the government to show lenience to the Judaizers, but he himself was not immune from the fanaticism that characterized Joseph Volotsky and, with the permission of Vasily III, he tortured a Josephite monk to death. This was in the days when Vassian was in Vasily’s favor. Later Vassian, together with the monk Maxim Grek and the metropolitan Varlaam, opposed Vasily’s intended remarriage. Varlaam was deposed and replaced by Daniel, and Vassian and Maxim were imprisoned. The birth of Vasily’s son Ivan IV was commemorated by drought, storms, and three comets. Three years after his birth his father was wounded in a hunting accident, became a monk on his sickbed, and died, abandoning his country first to seven regents and then to Ivan. After his minority came to an end Ivan was crowned the first czar of all Russia. He wore the crown of Monomakh—half jeweled crown, half Mongolian fur cap—and held the royal scepter and cup of chalcedony. He also married the noblewoman Anastasia. He chose her at a bride show, as the Byzantine emperor Theophilus had chosen his empress, but he had likely decided whom he was to marry beforehand. Anastasia, together with the priest

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Sylvester, kept Ivan a human being for as long as they could. Before Anastasia’s death and the exile of Sylvester, Ivan did no evil other than to throw animals from the tops of towers and to have one of his regents beaten to death. Often he went on hunting expeditions which doubled as pilgrimages to monasteries, and his brother Yuri and his cousin Vladimir went with him. Yuri had thrown coins in Ivan’s path at his coronation but died at an early age; Vladimir would be forced to drink poison when the czar’s paranoia became all-consuming. Ivan’s pilgrimages to the monasteries left an indelible mark on him: in his subsequent letters he quoted from the Bible and John Climacus more than any other book. In the monasteries he also came across stories of Vlad the Impaler. He would regrettably reenact them, and one of his victims would sing hymns in his last agony. *** The Russian church, now that the Mongol yoke had been thrown off, had grown smaller at the expense of the military. Ivan called a national assembly which proposed putting church money into the hands of the state. The proposal was rejected, but some land was taken from the church, gifts to the church during the time of Ivan’s minority were canceled, and monasteries were allowed to acquire property only with the czar’s permission. None of this was, at the time, anti-clerical. Ivan in fact thought of himself as a theologian king like Justinian, but, if the truth be told, the death of Anastasia freed up other careers for him. There were various church councils in Ivan’s early reign which were meant to reform the church and which, among other things, canonized seven Russian saints, mostly political figures like Alexander Nevsky and Dmitri Donskoi. They culminated in the Council of 1551 over which the czar himself presided. The clerics produced a document called the Stoglav, in one hundred chapters. In the Stoglav the white clergy was encouraged to take up the task of spreading literacy. Honorable priests and deacons were enjoined to take children into their homes and teach them to read and write with the aid of psalm singing and Scripture lessons. The Muslim

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skullcap could not be worn in a church, nor were churches deemed suitable places for drinking and feasting. The clergy was commanded to be bearded, but even laymen were urged not to shave since shaving was conducive to sodomy. Men could be married at the age of fifteen, women at the age of twelve, and neither could marry more than twice. The reestablishment of monastic discipline was high on the council’s agenda, and the Stoglav took for its inspiration Joseph Volotsky’s Long Rule to which its own rule was similar except that it allowed wine and gave dispensations to aristocratic monks. Monks and nuns were still prohibited from living under the same roof or from wandering out of their monasteries to beg, but Russian monasticism slowly deteriorated after the Stoglav. With the arrival of the new Hesychasm in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century monasticism experienced a rebirth, and the heritage of Nil Sorsky rather than Joseph was its model. The Stoglav also addressed the issue of iconography. A great fire in Moscow had led to an increased demand for icons. Many of the iconographers came from Pskov and Novgorod, and their icons betrayed Western and even heretical influence. The Stoglav prohibited representations of God the Father in the mildest way possible and added that iconographers, whether monks or laymen, were to be of impeccable morality. Two years later the traditionalist Ivan Viskovaty criticized icons which depicted Christ as an angel or Christ on the cross wearing armor, but he was condemned by a new synod. After the close of the Council of 1551 the monk Maxim Grek and the metropolitans Makary and Pimen urged Ivan to wage war against the troublesome Tartars of Kazan. It was not an easy undertaking since the Tartars used magic. Old witches and old wizards stood on the fortress of Kazan chanting and shaking their garments. They awoke the wind and the rain and caused the rain to fall only on the Russian troops. Ivan had fragments of the True Cross brought from Moscow; the priests carried the fragments in a solemn procession around the czar’s army, and the Tartar magic was broken. The sack of Kazan followed, but Ivan spent the first part of the sack praying in a nearby church. After the victory he built the

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Church of St. Basil in Moscow, the most famous Orthodox church after the Church of Holy Wisdom. Anastasia’s death, as we have intimated, led to a decline in Ivan. He expressed his personality chiefly through sadism and devil worship. The priest Sylvester was exiled to a monastery. Makary, the metropolitan of Moscow, foreknew the coming evil and successfully prayed that God would grant him an imminent death. The only effective opposition to Ivan came from the clergy. They interceded for his enemies and condemned the oprichniki, his secret police who were terrorizing the Russian nobles or boyars. The oprichniki, in a perverted imitation of a monastic order, wore robes of black cloth. Makary was succeeded by Afanasy, but he proved too stubborn and Ivan replaced him with Filipp. Unfortunately for Ivan, Filipp lashed out against the oprichniki in several church services. His outbursts were not surprising: the oprichniki were defiling St. Sergei’s holy land. Sometimes Ivan and his police would come to territory owned by the boyars and leave nothing alive. Filipp was exiled to a monastery which was more of a prison than a monastery, and many of his priests were killed. For all his love of the Bible Ivan did not notice that it was King Saul’s murder of the priests that turned the Hebrew chroniclers against him. Their words are uncannily descriptive of Russia under the oprichniki: “And the king said to Doeg, Turn thou, and fall upon the priests. And Doeg the Edomite turned, and he fell upon the priests, and slew on that day fourscore and five persons that did wear a linen ephod. And Nob, the city of the priests, smote he with the edge of the sword, both men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen, and asses, and sheep.” In 1569 Ivan asked Filipp if he would agree to be reinstalled as metropolitan. Filipp refused unless the oprichniki were disbanded, and he was strangled in his cell. The oprichniki, surviving this request to have them eliminated, killed thirty-six thousand people in the city of Tver and went on to pillage Novgorod. Ivan acquired thirteen thousand rubles’ worth of treasure from desecrated churches. His personal confessor, hardly worthy of the name confessor, supervised the looting of the churches; but

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a holy fool called Nikola warned Ivan to return to Moscow or the horse on which he rode to Novgorod would not carry him back. Ivan returned to Moscow exhausted from his endeavors and forced a Lithuanian embassy visiting the capital to wait for two months before he received it. Among the ambassadors was the Hussite elder Jan Rokyta who challenged Ivan to a friendly theological debate. Afterwards Ivan asked Rokyta for a transcript of the debate and replied to it with a letter partially written by Orthodox clerics. The letter rejected Rokyta’s beliefs in predestination and salvation by faith alone and ended, “You are not only a heretic but also a servant of the Antichrist. In the future you shall not preach your teaching in our country. And we will faithfully pray to our Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of all, to preserve us, the Russian people, from the darkness of your unbelief.” Nine years later Ivan ordered the only two Protestant churches in Moscow burned to the ground. *** Ivan was possibly strangled by two former oprichniki. Five years afterwards the metropolitanate of Moscow became a patriarchate. It was the Muscovite patriarch who, in the seventeenth century, instigated the last liturgical crisis of the Russian church. The Time of Troubles, the anarchic period between Ivan’s successor Boris Godunov and the first Romanov czar, had given birth to the religious movement of the Lovers of God. The Lovers of God were lower white clergyman, generally ignorant and uncouth, but opposed to the secular world and the privileged aristocratic world of the higher clergy who frequently hailed from the monasteries. Their models were John Chrysostom and Maxim Grek. They did not advocate the personal salvation of the monk but the salvation of all Russia through Orthodoxy. Prominent among the Lovers of God were the archpriests Neronov and Vonifatiev. A vacancy in the patriarchate of Moscow resulted in the names of Vonifatiev and Nikon, the ambitious metropolitan of Novgorod, to be put forward. Vonifatiev humbly withdrew his name, and Nikon acceded to the

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patriarchal throne. Nikon continued the reforms the Lovers of God had been working in the church. He closed taverns, limited the sale of alcohol, enforced monastic discipline, and leveled restrictions against the Catholics. The Lovers of God had wanted to bring the liturgy into conformity with the oldest Slavonic traditions. Nikon went further and brought the liturgy into conformity with the Greek liturgy of his day, and he promulgated it without consulting a church council. No longer was the sign of the cross to be made with two fingers but three. No longer was Jesus to be called Isus but Jisus. No longer was genuflection in prayer to be made twelve times but four. Ironically the old Russian liturgy was closer to the ancient liturgy than the Greek was. Those who upheld the old liturgy became known as either Raskolniki or Staroveri, Schismatics or Old Believers, and they gathered themselves around the archpriest and Lover of God Avvakum. Metropolitan Filipp, who had defied Ivan the Terrible to his peril, was his hero. Avvakum was the son of a drunken priest and a pious mother. As a child he saw a dead cow which filled him with sadness and impelled him to pray every night. He married a blacksmith’s daughter and was ordained a priest and ultimately an archpriest. While confessing an immoral woman he was seized with lust and punished himself by burning his right hand in three candle flames. That night he had a dream of a chaotic boat with red and white sails that was steered by a radiant youth who told him it was his boat and invited him to embark on it with his wife and children. The boat would prove to be a faithful metaphor for his life. Avvakum denounced Nikon as a womanizer in front of one of his own priest’s cathedrals. Never one to mince words he later wrote, “I saw through this son of a bitch before the pestilence of 1654, this great deceiver and son of a whore. The wife of the priest Maxim, who was living with me, was in the prelate’s bedroom and drank vodka with him. I know other trifling details of this kind; one must spit on them all. Word for word, such will be the Antichrist.” Patriarch Nikon believed his reforms would make him the unchallenged leader of the Eastern church. He had abandoned holy Russia for a generalized orthodoxy and the secular power of the Muscovite

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patriarchate, just as the Non-Possessors, while abandoning wealth, had advanced the Muscovite state at the expense of Russia. This helps explain why many of the Old Believers came out of the milieu of the Possessors rather than the Non-Possessors. Nikon persecuted the Old Believers without quarter. Two gardeners from Rostov objected to the new sign of the cross and to the Latin-style crosses that were appearing on Eucharistic loaves. They were detained and tortured. But Nikon also attempted to appease the Old Believers by condemning the new Western way of making icons. He had the eyes of the Western icons gouged out and paraded through Moscow. Then he had more icons brought to his church and condemned them as unacceptable. He took each icon in his hands, stated whose house it had come from, broke it, and threw it onto a pile marked for destruction. While Nikon was smashing icons Avvakum was deriding them with more of a sense of humor. He especially disliked icons which made Christ seem, in his own words, a puffy-faced, red-lipped, curly-haired German. Nikon’s violence and arrogance alienated many of the Orthodox, and the czar Alexis pressured him to step down, though without revoking his reforms. The Old Believers prophesied the coming of the Antichrist in 1666. That year the czar convened the Great Council of Moscow which banned new icons, not only Western-style icons but controversial icons of the archangel Michael dressed like a monk, Jesus Christ wearing episcopal clothes, the Virgin Mary dressed as a queen, and John the Baptist wearing a wingèd crown. Badly painted icons had been causing an uproar in Russia for decades, but the council stated that these icons were less dangerous than Western and heretical icons. The council forbade images of the Trinity. Icons of the Old Testament Trinity, based on the story of the three men who had come to Abraham’s tent in Genesis 18, had portrayed its mystery, but there was also something dangerously heretical about these wingèd beings: the Bogomils—at least the ones who were not iconoclasts—had created anthropomorphic depictions of the Trinity, sometimes even as a three-headed man. The Great Council forbade depictions of God the Father on the strength of John 1:18: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son,

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which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” The painters of God the Father had countered with the prophet Daniel’s depiction of the Ancient of Days: “whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and its wheels as burning fire.” Orthodox exegesis maintained that this was the preincarnate Christ, but if that was true what was one to make of these words a few verses down: “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and they brought him before him”? Orthodox exegesis again maintained that Daniel was being vouchsafed two visions of Christ: Christ as Judge and Christ as incarnate Savior. The situation could have perhaps been cleared up by interpreting John 1:18 to read, “No man hath at any time seen God with his physical eyes.” But as it was, icons of God the Father could no longer be made, the Holy Spirit could be portrayed only as a dove at Christ’s baptism, and Christ could be portrayed only as a man. More ominously for the Old Believers the Great Council condemned their ancient rituals, and Avvakum and three of his followers were imprisoned in the Arctic village of Pustozersk. The Old Believers were drawing closer to the Gnostic-like Forest Elders. While not in complete agreement with the Elders they came to believe the established church was satanic. The most notable Forest Elder was Kapiton who carried two large stones on his chest and back, slept while hanging from a hook, and wore no leg coverings in winter. Despite their heretical tendencies the Forest Elders were absorbed by the Old Believers, and it was the Forest Elders in their midst who urged them to perform mass self-immolations. Avvakum, bowing to the inevitable, did nothing to prevent these spectacles. Four years after the Great Council, Czar Alexis launched a campaign against the Old Believers more violent than anything that had been attempted by Nikon. Hundreds were tortured and murdered, Avvakum’s family was imprisoned in a pit, the holy fool Fyodor was hanged, Avvakum’s three companions were mutilated, and they and he were placed in a frozen pit. Solovetsky Monastery, which was filled with Old Believing monks, held out for six years but then fell to Alexis’ troops who massacred them.

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Avvakum frequently wrote the czar and sometimes played the fool. He alleged he had a vision that his own tongue and teeth began to expand and then his entire body until God put heaven, earth, and the entire universe into his stomach. This was a metaphor for his theory that God had placed the czar and all Russia in his womb, in other words under his protection. If this was a prank no one deserved it more than Alexis. More pertinently Avvakum wrote Alexis that Nikon would answer for his crimes at the Last Judgment and that he had been vouchsafed a vision of a gaping wound in the czar’s back and stomach. The czar’s death a week after the fall of Solovetsky Monastery was widely seen as God’s judgment for his sins. The Old Believers thought the Antichrist was either Alexis or Nikon. Avvakum’s associate Fyodor the Deacon disagreed and held the Antichrist was Satan himself who in 1666 had entered the bodies of his two servants. Some of the Old Believers maintained that Satan indwelled all the czars from 1666 onward; others would make an exception for Catherine the Great’s husband Peter who proposed toleration for them and whom they called the Lawful Ruler. From Pustozersk Avvakum wrote his autobiography, the first great work of Russian literature: artless, confident, violent, paradoxical, and scatological. It begins with an examination of the writings of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, culminating in an eclipse he saw at the time of the Crucifixion. From there Avvakum switches to an eclipse seen by the archbishop Simeon who was sailing along the Volga River when Nikon was desecrating Russia. Avvakum reveals himself as a contradictory and humorous character, quoting the Gospels, following their command to forgive others, and lambasting his enemies. He is completely certain of the rightness of his way but at the same time continually belittles himself as a sinner. Afflicted by violence he had an intense need to reply in kind but kept himself under control. For all his primitive religiosity he was almost a Stoic sage. In the autobiography’s natural depictions there is no sunlight; the only reference to light is to Christ. Czar Alexis was cursed with a physically ill son and a mentally incompetent son. After Fyodor, the first of these, succeeded him Avvakum wrote to him that he had seen his father burning in hell. In response to this

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he and his three fellow prisoners were condemned to death by a new church council. Avvakum distributed his possessions, and an Old Believer gave the martyrs new clothes. They were then tied to the four corners of a log pit which was set on fire. Avvakum’s death was followed a month later by that of Fyodor. After his execution an icon was made of Avvakum: the saint with long dark hair and beard stands in a robe to the right while Christ and the saints gaze at him from the upper left.

Chapter 10

NICODEMUS OF THE HOLY MOUNTAIN The Ottoman Turks, who controlled Constantinople and Greece after the fifteenth century, gave the Christians freedom of worship but burdened them with heavy taxes and occasionally massacred them. The Greeks could not serve in the military and had to wear black clothing while the Muslims wore white clothing. A patriarch was free to rule at Constantinople, but twenty-seven patriarchs abdicated, six were violently murdered, and only twenty-one died while in office. Many Christians responded by converting to Islam, and they were helped by a dervish who proclaimed that there was a secret kinship between Christianity and Islam. Those who converted and had a change of heart were almost always martyred. To the Greeks they were known as neomartyrs because they were the first martyrs since the time of Maximin Daia, whose cruelty was less ingenious than that of the Turks. All the countries inside the pale of the Ottoman Empire were prone to persecution, but the Greeks suffered the most. For four centuries they were oppressed by the Ottomans, and while the empire shrank the martyrdoms grew. Martyrdoms resulted either from a Christian convert to Islam returning to his faith or from the impossibility of a Christian defending himself in court. A Christian could be slandered by a jealous Muslim as having converted to Islam and lapsed, or he could be tricked into converting to Islam as with the Greek who wanted to learn Arabic and

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was made to read the formula, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Not all the neomartyrs were completely exemplary; one exulted in the stabbing of a large Jew who had picked up a Christian and carried him for awhile; but all were courageous, often to the point that the Muslims themselves were impressed. Sometimes the Orthodox priests encouraged Christians seeking death not to attack Islam since witnessing to Christ was the martyr’s main goal. In prison the martyrs were frequently tortured; beatings with bull whips were the mildest form of punishment they could expect. On their way to their martyrdoms they asked the forgiveness of the Orthodox Christians who had gathered to see their end, and they were often described as going to their death like a bridegroom to his marriage feast. The martyrs in Serbia had to carry the poles on which they would be impaled to their place of execution. At times compassionate Muslims would kill Christians prematurely, such as when a Muslim ended the life of a martyr condemned to impalement with a sword thrust to his heart. It was into such a world that Nicholas Kallivourtsis was born on the island of Naxos. A fellow student wrote that Nicholas could remember everything he read and needed only to read a book once to remember it for the rest of his life. He read ancient and modern philosophy, economics, medicine, astronomy, poetry, history, and theology. He was familiar with the Greek philosophers and contemporary philosophers like Locke, Spinoza, and Voltaire. In a similar way to Locke he would refer to the imagination as the wax on which things were imprinted. After receiving his earliest education on Naxos, Nicodemus went to the evangelical school of Smyrna and studied under Hierotheus Voulismas for five years. When the Russians burned Turkish ships at Tsesme in 1770 and the Turks responded by massacring the Greeks, Nicholas returned to Naxos and served as assistant to the metropolitan of Paros and Naxos. During his time there he met three monks of Athos: Gregory, Niphon, and Arsenius. They were not only Hesychasts but members of a new sect, the Kollyvades. The Kollyvades believed that the Kollyva, a memorial service of boiled wheat, should be observed not on Sundays but on Saturdays as it had been in the early church. They also advocated frequent communion,

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another early church practice. In the last days of the Byzantine Empire and its aftermath most Greeks celebrated the Eucharist only at Christmas, Easter, and the Dormition of the Virgin Mary in August. The Kollyvades’ enemies vilified them as heretics, but they were absolved by the Constantinopolitan patriarch Theodosius II. The Kollyvades wanted to return to the Hesychast tradition, and to further this end they published new editions of patristic texts. The greatest of the Kollyvades was Macarius of Corinth who was forced out of his bishopric by the Turks. Nicholas Kallivourtsis met Macarius on the island of Hydra, and at the age of twenty-six he was inspired to imitate his holy life. He went to Mount Athos where he became a monk and changed his name to Nicodemus. Two years later Macarius visited Athos, and the two ascetics began work on the Philokalia, the most important book of the Eastern Orthodox Church after the Bible. Nicodemus went from monastery to monastery on Athos. He planned to go to Romania and meet the Russian starets Paisy Velichkovsky who was living there, but a storm on the Aegean made him turn back. He practiced hēsychia under the guidance of Arsenius the Peloponnesian. They sailed to the barren island of Skyropoula and lived in extreme asceticism for one year. When Nicodemus returned to Athos he traveled to the monastery of the Pantokrator and took as his disciple the monk Hierotheus who lived with him for six years. Nicodemus’ usual diet was rice, honey, olives, fava beans, and bread. He seemed an angel to everyone, but he called himself a monster, a dead dog, and a nonentity. Because of his holiness Nicodemus was sought out by religious and secular leaders, including John Capodistrias who would become the first president of Greece. All who visited him were shocked to see a toothless man dressed in rags and worn out by age, but his eyes were fiery and his mind unbroken. Often he would say, “Fathers, let us go to a barren island so that we may be rid of the world.” In 1809 Nicodemus suffered a stroke at the monastery of Skourtaioi and began to speak the Jesus Prayer aloud. He asked for the relics of Macarius and Parthenius and prayed that the saints would take him to the glory of the Lord; the next day he died. One of his admirers said it was better for a thousand Christians to die than

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Nicodemus, a hyperbolic expression which conveyed some of the greatness and sweetness of the man. *** Nicodemus’ work forms an epilogue to the age of the Hesychasts. He is best known for his Philokalia, meaning Love of the Beautiful. There had been an earlier Philokalia, compiled by Basil the Great and Gregory of Nazianzus as a testimony to their fascination with Origen, but Nicodemus’ Philokalia would excel it in fame. The Philokalia was essentially an anthology of the writings of the Orthodox fathers and took for its theme the apostle Paul’s advice to the Thessalonians: “Pray without ceasing.” Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas were some of the most extensively anthologized, but many other fathers were represented, including John of Karpathos, a Greek monk who tells us that when we pray, “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” God always answers, “Son, thy sins are forgiven thee.” Nicodemus prefaced the Philokalia with a prologue and included biographies of the fathers and notes on the texts. He accepted whatever good he could find in the Orthodox and Catholic churches. He liked Western icons and produced a new edition of Unseen Warfare by the Italian priest Lorenzo Scupoli, adding much that was his own. His Handbook of Spiritual Counsel was undertaken in response to the request of his bishop cousin and was written on the barren island of Skyropoula. Nicodemus, who reveals himself as more gullible and more dated than the Hesychasts, includes many apocryphal stories about Alexander the Great which make him out to be a wise and noble ruler and not a violent and lecherous hedonist. The Handbook begins with a long discussion of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Nicodemus follows Nil the Ascetic in comparing the senses to the five kings of Sodom who were rescued by Abraham. He agrees with St. Syngletike that one should overcome his lust for women by means of the most morbid physiological thoughts. If he is to speak with a woman he should look down or keep his eyes closed. This

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habit should be extended to more activities than conversing with women; he tells us the story of the desert father Isidore who left his monastery to meet the Alexandrian patriarch Theophilus. When his monks asked him what the world was like Isidore replied that he had seen no man’s face but the patriarch’s. Nicodemus cautions against even looking at oneself in a mirror unless it is to follow Plato’s advice and do so only when he is angry. There is, however, much that is salutary to look at: the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, mountains, fields, valleys, meadows, the sea, icons, and churches. All of this will remind the Christian of his Creator, as it did the sage who struck down flowers with his staff because they were shouting too loudly of God’s existence. From the sense of sight Nicodemus passes on to the senses of sound and smell. The saint will be especially careful not to listen to bird songs. He takes birds as his starting point for a diatribe against those who revere pets and trees more than their fellow human beings, like the emperor Honorius who was more concerned for his parrot Rome than the city of Rome. Perfumes, such as the Iconoclastic bishops are said to have used, are likewise to be avoided: St. Arsenius soaked the palm branches with which he wove baskets in foul-smelling water in order to punish himself for having surrounded himself with good smells in his previous life. Nicodemus condemns only one foul smell—tobacco—and can think of nothing as scandalous as smoke issuing from the mouth of a clergyman. While John Climacus viewed touch as the most dangerous of the senses Nicodemus reserves this distinction for the sense of taste. Taste needs to be taken in hand since it is related to gluttony which leads to obesity, gout, paralysis, and homosexuality. There are four degrees of eating: temperance, sufficiency, satiety, and gluttony. Without scriptural proof he alleges that Job’s sons were destroyed because of their feasting and goes so far as to exult in God’s permitting them to be crushed to death “in the house of their cohorts.” The tongue is responsible not only for gluttony but for a host of other sins. The elder Agathon kept a stone in his mouth for three years to avoid hurting anyone with his tongue. As for the foolish vice of laughter, the Evangelists do not record Jesus as indulging

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in it, and the book of Sirach proclaims, “A fool lifteth up his voice with laughter; but a wise man doth scarce smile a little.” The sense of touch is the most deceitful of the senses. Nicodemus urges men not to touch themselves when going to the privy; luxuriant clothing should also never be worn. We should instead remember that St. Anthony bequeathed old garments to Athanasius and Serapion, that Elijah wore a garment of sheepskin and a belt of animal hair, that Isaiah went about barefoot and almost naked, that Jeremiah wore a simple linen tunic, and that Christ dressed simply. His mentor Macarius of Corinth wore only humble black clothing at the end of his life. To those immersed in worldly concerns he recommends one to two hours a night of praying the Jesus Prayer which he defines as a natural method of returning the mind to the heart. He does not believe that only the senses need to be controlled but, as he explains in a chapter devoted to it, the imagination as well. He closes the chapter with a pearl for moralist and aesthete alike: “Know that if you impress upon the board and chart of your imagination beautiful and appropriate images, you will be praised on the day of judgment; but if you allow inappropriate and evil images to be recorded and to dwell in your imagination, you will be condemned.”

Chapter 11

THE WAY OF THE PILGRIM The persecution of the Old Believers continued with Czar Fyodor’s sister Sophia who prescribed a threefold torture for the heretics and whose reign witnessed the greatest number of their self-immolations. The German traveler Schleissing saw a gray-haired Old Believer lay his head on the execution block as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The schism tended to weaken the Russian church and left it vulnerable to the anti-religious reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. When Peter came to power in 1698 he forbade the wearing of beards and long coats. Those who resisted having their beards and coats cut were beaten without mercy. There was such an uproar to the new law that the czar allowed beards if those who wore them paid a tax and wore a medal proving they had paid: a hundred rubles a year for a nobleman and a kopeck for a commoner. The edict against beards seemed heretical to most Russians, and there were other controversial laws during Peter’s reign. A man could not take monastic vows before the age of thirty, and a woman could not take final monastic vows before the age of fifty. To the Old Believers Peter was the Antichrist. He would prove himself worthy of their calumny by arresting their leaders, whipping them, banishing them, imprisoning them for life, and burning them at the stake. Peter made the Old Believers pay double taxes and forced them to wear special clothes

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which bore the Russian acronym for heretic, schismatic, and apostate. Some of the Orthodox weren’t certain the Old Believers were wrong about Peter being the Antichrist: he called their bishops Long Beards and never forgave his son for embracing their teachings. In 1721 Peter suppressed the Russian patriarchate and created the Holy Synod which could be more easily controlled by the state. He put a layman, Ivan Zarudnev, in charge of the iconographers. Certified painters were to be divided into three categories, and they were commanded to write their category, their name, and the date on their icons. The Holy Synod followed the Great Council of Moscow in prohibiting images of God the Father though not His name written in Hebrew letters; it also forbade the popular depiction of the four Evangelists as animals. During the reign of the empress Anna the Holy Synod came under the control of enlightened, Western-minded clerics who promoted humanism and Western icons. The unenlightened bishops were tortured, executed, and exiled, but the ascension of Anna’s successor Elizabeth gave the faithful a reprieve, a reprieve which ended with Catherine the Great. It is surprising to encounter such figures as Paisy Velichkovsky and Tikhon of Zadonsk in a land harassed by the secular propaganda of Peter and Catherine. Tikhon was a monk who was appointed bishop of Voronezh but could not cope with his ecclesiastical duties and asked to resign. He retired to the monastery of the Transfiguration northwest of Voronezh. Here he found himself dying of enervation; but when he was invited to become abbot of another monastery he suddenly decided to stay. He wrote in the morning, read the church fathers in the afternoon, went for a walk, and then received visitors. Tikhon was the inspiration for Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima. Dostoevsky was haunted by the story that after a landowner struck him in the face Tikhon knelt humbly before him and asked for his forgiveness. As in the case of Zosima sunsets gave Tikhon deep religious feelings. The power of Russian Orthodoxy during the reign of Alexander I can be illustrated by the icon of the Virgin Mary which had been burned during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. This Black Virgin of Smolensk was carried by the Russian soldiers in Kutuzov’s army who gave it credit for their

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subsequent victories. In the following decades intense spirituality reawoke in Russia. It traveled from Athos through the intermediacy of Romania, and everything fell before it. Paisy Velichkovsky translated Nicodemus’ Philokalia into Old Church Slavonic. A religious school, which published translations of the church fathers, was created at Optina Pustyn. Hesychasm informed the thought of theologians like Philaret and Khomiakov, and writers like Gogol and Dostoevsky caught the flame. It was at this time that one of the strangest incidents in all of Eastern Orthodoxy occurred: St. Seraphim was transfigured before his disciple Motovilov. Seraphim was associated with the monastery of Sarov but spent much of his time as a hermit in the forest. Three ruffians came to his hermitage thinking he had hidden treasure and beat him so severely that his skull and ribs were fractured and he was forced to walk with a staff for the rest of his life. His attackers were apprehended, but he did not press charges against them. “Learn to be peaceful,” he told his followers, “and thousands of souls around you will find salvation.” It was while Seraphim was discoursing in the forest on the Holy Spirit that he was transfigured. He explained to Motovilov that he saw the transfiguration only because he himself was participating in it to a certain extent. Motovilov, in recounting the experience, reported that it was like looking at the sun and seeing in its center the face of a man speaking to one. During the vision Seraphim asked him, “What do you see? What do you smell? What do you feel?” To his astonishment Motovilov realized that the sights, smells, and heat he was experiencing had no corollary in the world he knew and could not be described. But Seraphim knew times without grace, and when he felt abandoned by God after a spectacular vision during the liturgy he stood a thousand days and nights on bare stone imploring Him for mercy. *** The Way of a Pilgrim was written by an anonymous Russian traveler in the mid-nineteenth century who claimed he liked to hear and talk about

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prayer more than anything else. The pilgrim was in his thirties, had a withered arm since childhood, and carried nothing with him but a sack of dry bread, a Bible, and the Russian Philokalia. In the book he travels as far as Siberia, and when we leave him he plans to visit the monastery on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea. The pilgrim had commenced his wanderings after the death of his wife which so distressed him that he often lost consciousness. His wife, three years his senior, was skilled in sewing clothes, and while she sewed he had read his Bible to her. At church he heard the exhortation, “Pray without ceasing,” and he began to ask everyone he met how this could be done. He found a starets who taught him to mentally pray the Jesus Prayer: first three thousand times a day, then six thousand times a day, then twelve thousand times a day, and finally without ceasing. At first it was difficult for the pilgrim to say the prayer, but he developed a need for it and it eventually filled him with unspeakable joy. At night he dreamed he was saying the prayer, and in the day he avoided speaking with people even though everyone he saw seemed dear to him. The prayer strengthened his spiritual life, and church services no longer bored him. When his starets died the pilgrim asked for his rosary and resumed his wanderings. He sometimes walked forty miles a day, and saying the prayer made the time go by faster. It kept him warm when he was cold, satisfied when he was hungry, happy when he was sick, and forgiving when he was wronged. Soon his heart prayed the Jesus Prayer automatically and took five beats to go through the prayer once. When two soldiers stole the pilgrim’s Bible and his copy of the Philokalia he was miserable for days, and that was no surprise: Chrysostom had said that even a room in which a copy of the Gospels was kept held the spirits of darkness at bay; but the soldiers were caught, and his books were returned to him. Once he dreamed that his departed starets wanted him to read a section in the Philokalia by Callistus of Constantinople and marked his book with a charcoal. When he awoke the book was opened to the page marked with the charcoal and the charcoal was sitting on the table.

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Throughout his journeys the pilgrim encountered many religious types, one of whom had cured himself of alcoholism by reading the New Testament in Old Church Slavonic even though he could not understand a word of it. He taught a girl to say the Jesus Prayer, but when she ran away from home to escape marrying a man her father had chosen for her, the pilgrim was blamed for it and flogged. He taught a blind man to say the prayer and the man was afterwards aware of a fire burning in a village to which they were walking, but the pilgrim warned him that even nonChristians experienced such visions and they were not necessarily from God. In a room at an inn the pilgrim chanced upon a monk from Athos, and they fell to talking about the Jesus Prayer. The monk told him that some people stressed “Lord,” some “Jesus,” some “Son of God,” and others “have mercy upon me.” This was because the Holy Spirit directed each person which word or phrase to emphasize based on his peculiar gift, whether praise, love, faith, or humility. Another religious pilgrim came to them and decried the Jews in vociferous language. One gets the impression that this was the pilgrim himself because only six pages earlier he had complained about the Jewish villages he had to pass through. In any case the Athonite warned him that he hated the Jews because he was not grounded in the love of God and referred him to a quotation of PseudoMacarius, which he incorrectly attributed to Mark the Monk: “The soul which is inwardly united to God becomes, in the greatness of its joy, like a good-natured, simple-hearted child and condemns no one—Greek, heathen, Jew, or sinner—but looks at all alike with sight that has been cleansed, finds joy in the whole world, and wants everyone—Greek and Jew and heathen—to praise God.” At length the pilgrim made his way to the Monastery of the Holy Footprint in Pochaev. There, in the thirteenth century, the Virgin Mary surrounded by the saints appeared in a blaze of light to a group of shepherds, and the rock on which she stood recorded her footprint. At the monastery the pilgrim took up with a Russian professor who believed that teaching on prayer in the New Testament is progressive, with each book adding a thought to that of the previous book. The professor told him a

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strange story. A French colleague of his requested that he remove his copy of the Gospels from the room in which they were conversing so they could speak of immoral things with greater ease. The Russian professor, trying to convince the Frenchman of the harmlessness of the Gospels, touched him with the book. The Frenchman disappeared, and the professor fell into a state of shock for a year. By the time the pilgrim met him the professor had developed a fascination for the monks of Solovetsky and convinced the pilgrim to travel with him to their monastery. For all his high hopes the professor was the victim of despondency, but he was rebuked by a Moldavian monk who reminded him that even if one sinks to the depths of hellish evil he is not to despair but turn to God. After a conversation with the starets of the monastery the pilgrim and the professor headed north, strengthened with the benediction that closes the Epistle to the Hebrews. *** John Sergiev of Kronstadt was born to peasants not far from Arkhangelsk in 1829. As a child he was sickly and almost died from smallpox. In seminary he had no close friends and strove to follow Christ. There he dreamed about the very church of which he would become priest, that of his future father-in-law in Kronstadt. John was married but lived in chastity with his wife and taught high school to supplement his meager income. He was the spokesman for the poor but was often repulsed by them, for which he experienced guilt. He reminded himself that when performing communion at the houses of the poor God and the angels were there no less than at the houses of the wealthy. He worked hard at making the poor feel welcome to approach him, and although it cost him much strain his kindness seemed effortless. John’s prayers soon gained the reputation of healing people. Catholics, Protestants, and Jews wrote to him for advice. He became a subject of legends in his own lifetime: a large icon was presented to the czar by two students, but John urged him not to bow before it and to instead have it shot. A Tartar, hidden within the icon and holding two knives, fell out dead.

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Russians came by the thousands to Kronstadt to be blessed by John and prayed over by him. Although icons of the living could not be venerated many of the faithful prayed before postcards bearing his image. The highpoint of his career was in 1894 when he was called to the bedside of the dying Alexander III who told John that the Russian people loved him because they knew who he was and what he was. John was a saint, a commodity, a representative of Christianity in a godless age, and the stress became unbearable. He was opposed to the exploitation of the poor by the rich, but in later life, reacting to the violence of the Russian revolutionary movement, he allowed himself to become aligned with the far right and urged the execution of the revolutionaries whom he compared to the Jews who rebelled against Moses. He was obsessed with Tolstoy, especially as the two began to take up opposite sides of the political arena. Tolstoy was the son of perdition who exalted himself above God; he deserved to have a millstone hung around his neck and be cast into the depth of the sea. The only reason God had allowed him to live so long was so He could punish him more severely in the afterlife. The largest challenge to John’s credibility, however, arose not in his political views but in the Ioannite sect which preached the coming of the end of the world and which clung fiercely to him even though he renounced them. The Ioannites believed John was Jesus Christ and that he would soon be revealed in his glory. Kronstadt was the heavenly Jerusalem, and a trip there meant obtaining the bridegroom Christ. A peasant composed a hymn to John, addressing him as the Trinity and calling him God made visible. The leader of the Ioannites was Porfyria Kiseleva, a former prostitute who was known as the Mother of God. Other souls quickly gathered about the movement, styling themselves Solomonia, the Archangel Michael, and John the Theologian. After John’s death, in the confused period before the October Revolution, the Ioannites flourished, prophesying the impending reign of the Antichrist in the person of Leo Tolstoy or Count Witte. Some of them preached vegetarianism and free love. The peasant Lobodin used a book blessed by John to cast out demons. And there were new Christs: Chursikov in Petrograd, Koloskov in Moscow, and Podgorny in the

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Ukraine. Despite the fact that John had disowned the Ioannites the Soviets would associate them with his name in order to discredit Orthodoxy, but the force of John’s personality won out and he was canonized by the Russian church in 1990.

Chapter 12

SILOUAN’S SONG The Way of a Pilgrim was a favorite book among the Russian monks of Mount Athos. Mount Athos is a peninsula that climaxes in a sixthousand-foot cliff overlooking the sea. No woman can come there, and no church can be dedicated to a female saint, although there are three churches dedicated to the virgin martyrs and the mountain itself is called the Garden of the Panaghia, a reference to the Virgin Mary. There is also, as there was in the old Byzantine monasteries of Saccudion and Studium, a ban on all female animals except cats. The abbot Athanasius, a friend of the Byzantine emperor Nicephorus II, founded the Great Lavra, its first cenobitic monastery, in 963. Nicephorus had begun his career as a general, but he fell in love with the femme fatale Theophano and became emperor after the death of her husband. When he heard of his friend’s carnality Athanasius rushed to Constantinople to denounce Nicephorus to his face, and Nicephorus prostrated himself on the floor and raved that he would someday resign from the emperorship and join the monks of Athos. Athanasius was mollified and returned to Athos, but Nicephorus was murdered by Theophano and her new lover, John Tzimisces. Both Nicephorus and Tzimisces are honored today on Athos because they gave so abundantly to its monasteries.

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There are more trees on Mount Athos than anywhere else in Greece, and in the desert highlands between the monasteries lizards run from the cry of the jackals. Where the monasteries are there are stone pavements, but grass has grown between the stones. When monasticism was still new to the peninsula the monks caught in their fishing nets not only fish but the debris left over from the destruction of King Darius’ fleet fifteen hundred years earlier. The mountain would achieve its heyday in the eleventh century when many nobles, wearying of the world, took up the monk’s habit. After the fall of Constantinople the monks, who had depended on the Greek emperors for their livelihood, came to rely almost solely on the generosity of the hospodars of Walachia and Moldavia. One of them, Peter Rareş, lived out his days as a monk on the holy mountain. Today there are fifteen hundred monks and twenty monasteries on Athos: seventeen Greek, one Russian, one Bulgarian, and one Serbian. The monasteries are mostly cenobitic, but there are eight idiorrhythmic monasteries which follow a less austere way of life. There are twelve sketes, which are smaller and more ascetic than the monasteries, and there are also hermits and religious beggars. Some of the monks choose to live in the caves of the cliff from which they draw up provisions in baskets. Despite its holiness there has been much infighting on Mount Athos. The Russian skete of St. Andrew began to decline in the early part of the twentieth century because of a controversy involving the Worshippers. The Worshippers were monks who prayed the Jesus Prayer but were wrongfully accused of worshipping the name of Jesus rather than Jesus Himself. The Worshippers sank so low as to murder non-Worshipping monks, and a Russian synod sent an archbishop with troops; the Worshippers fled to the woods and many of them were gunned down. Today there are a handful of religious bigots on Mount Athos who believe that the violence done throughout the world by Orthodox Christians is pardonable. They, more than any increased secularism in the West, are the greatest danger facing Orthodoxy today. Yet against them there are men like the patriarch of Serbia who denounced the Serbian crimes against the Bosnians in the 1990s and stated that if such atrocities were what was needed to create a Greater Serbia, such an entity should not exist.

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If the truth be told, there is more eccentricity than bigotry on Athos. The old men do not often have the money to repair their broken windows, and when one of their fellows was swallowed and killed by a shark they caught the shark using a goat as the bait and said holy rites over the shark and the imprisoned monk before burying it. Mount Athos was until recently dying, but the fall of Communism has lifted the ban on monkish emigration from Eastern Europe to Mount Athos, and the revitalization of Orthodoxy, which can ultimately be traced back to Paisy Velichkovsky, continues to energize its religious life. The mountain’s holiness is illustrated by an anecdote of Constantine Cavarnos. Cavarnos met the Romanian monk Stephen in 1965 and was impressed by his humility, serenity, and dispassion. As a youth Stephen had visited Athos with his grandfather. His grandfather returned to his homeland but he himself stayed, having been permitted to do so by his father. When they met Stephen, Cavarnos and another tourist related to him the apostasy and wickedness that existed in the world and even the church, but Stephen spoke no words of condemnation. The metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos came at sundown to an Athonite cell to discuss the Jesus Prayer with a renowned elder and was greeted by a young monk who lived with two other monks and the elder. The elder himself soon appeared, and his face seemed as bright as the sun or lightning. Vlachos bent low to kiss his hand, but the elder bent lower and kissed his hand instead. During Vlachos’ discussion with the elder one of the monks brought him water and Turkish delight. The elder said that he was not worthy of his monks whom he preferred to think of as angels rather than monks. The elder called the Jesus Prayer a golden mantle. He noted that there was more than one way to pray it, one of them being to pray “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me” for each inhalation and exhalation of breath. The Jesus Prayer alters time or at least our perception of it. A monk prayed the Jesus Prayer for six hours, and it seemed that only fifteen minutes had passed. The same monk was once praying the Jesus Prayer when wild birds came to the window of his cell and began pecking at it. They had not been stirred up by the devil to distract him but were

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instead attracted to his cell by the prayer. The Athonite monk, especially if he sees the divine light, is a god by grace. Sometimes the devil will fill him with fear because hell itself comes with him. Sometimes he will attack five or ten monks simultaneously. And yet the monk loves God, the Virgin, and the saints, but also sinners, nature, animals, and even the devil himself. The elder warned Vlachos that there was demonic as well as divine light and that the two needed to be distinguished, as vinegar and wine, which look the same but taste differently, need to be distinguished. God’s light brings humility, the devil’s pride. God’s light is certain, the devil’s uncertain. God’s light is white, the devil’s reddish. God’s light is shapeless or spherical, the devil’s descriptive. The anti-Hesychast Gregory Akindynos visited Athos, and while he was praying he saw a light split in two with a human face visible within it. He told Gregory Palamas what he had seen, and Palamas replied that it was a deceit or mockery of the devil. *** In 1892 the Russian peasant Simeon entered the monastery of St. Panteleimon on Mount Athos. When he was a child of four a bookseller had come to his father’s house and asked him scornfully where God was. The boy afterwards took his father to task for making him say his prayers, but his father replied that he had let the bookseller into his house thinking he was a wise man only to find out that he was a fool. Simeon was disturbed until one day in his teens he heard of the miracles being worked at the tomb of the hermit Ivan Sezenov and realized that God was not far off. However he would soon fall into dissolute living, culminating in a night spent with a girl he was planning to marry. The next day, while helping his father with his carpentry work, his father asked him, “Where were you last night, son? My heart was troubled for you,” and Simeon was touched to the quick. His father often waited for months to reprove him for wrong things he did, and then only gently. He would have made, Simeon reflected later, an ideal starets. During this time Simeon dreamed that a snake was in his throat and he heard the voice of the Virgin Mary telling him that just as he found it loathsome to swallow the snake so she found his deeds ugly to look at.

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This was a turning point in Simeon’s life, and though he did military service afterwards, as his father requested, he spent his time at the taverns pensive and silent, wondering what the monks of Athos were doing at that hour. When his military career was over and he had made up his mind to become a monk, Simeon went to see John of Kronstadt. He had earlier watched him serve the Eucharist and had observed his plain face lit up as though it were divine. John was not at home when Simeon called and Simeon left a simple note, begging him to pray for the steeling of his resolve. Not long later, in answer to John’s prayer, the fires of hell began to roar around Simeon and did not cease even after he came to Mount Athos. At Athos Simeon took the name Silouan. He prayed the Jesus Prayer and it entered his heart, but he did not feel contrite and began to be plagued by devils: John of Kronstadt’s prayers had apparently been answered too effectively. The devils would always tell Silouan one of two contradictory things, that he was a holy man now or that he would never be saved. One day, while Silouan was at his prayers, Jesus suddenly appeared to him and Silouan experienced His love so fully that he would have died had the vision gone on a little longer. The fires of hell now ceased, but no further visions came. Among the monks this phenomenon is called falling from grace and is said to be among the worst human experiences. Silouan wrote a poem about Adam’s expulsion from paradise which expressed some of his despair. He explained that it was as though an eagle’s wings had been clipped and it was left to yearn hopelessly for the blue sky and the desert crags. Besides falling from grace Silouan had encounters with the supernatural which he was certain did not come from God: a strange light flooded his cell one night and lit up his whole body, and the demon apparitions grew worse. One obscene individual managed to get, or appear to get, between him and the icon before which he prayed so that if he continued praying it would seem as though he were worshipping the devil. Silouan arose from his knees and sat down, overcome. In response to his prayer for deliverance Christ spoke to him: “The proud always suffer from

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devils. Keep your mind in hell and despair not.” From then on Silouan began a lifelong struggle against pride, a struggle from which, even on his deathbed, he did not believe he had emerged completely victorious. Silouan would learn that even speaking too much about God to others can lead to pride, and he would have another vision—of King David singing God’s praises in heaven—that he would vainly disclose to four elders only to realize its falsity when it was followed by a renewed period of apparitions. Whenever pride attacked him Silouan voluntarily returned to the hell in which John of Kronstadt’s prayers had placed him, and one of his favorite quotes was that of St. Poemen who had said that wherever Satan was he himself would be also. *** Silouan wrote that if all the classics of Orthodox spirituality were lost the monks of Athos could produce comparable books. His own writings were published after his death by his associate Sophrony, and they may be the last classic of the Eastern church. They emphasize almost more than anything else the authority of the starets. One can learn spiritual things from a book, but only a starets can teach him holiness. The monk must not think he knows more than his starets and need not be ashamed of confessing everything to him, and he of course owes all obedience to him because the starets is the image of Christ to the monk. Silouan once begged his abbot to relieve him of his duties as steward so he could go to Old Russikon, one of the most desolate places on Mount Athos. His abbot agreed, though with reluctance, and Silouan returned the victim of headaches for the rest of his life. Nonetheless his time at Old Russikon was not unprofitable. He met many monks of exemplary holiness: Serapion who lived on only bread and water, Onesiphorus who was so righteous and gentle that he had only to look at a man to get him to mend his ways, Sabinus who had not lain down in seven years, Anatoly who was renowned for his humility, and Israel who had seen Seraphim of Sarov in his youth.

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An acquaintance told Silouan that evil should be fought with force, but Silouan did not find the spirit of Christ in that statement. He believed that while one should hate sin one should not judge the sinner, even in his heart, because the sensitive man would sense even this judgment. He was fond of the life of Passius the Great. Passius struggled fruitlessly against anger until God taught him how to control it: by desiring nothing and by judging and hating no man. Passius learned the lesson so well that he prayed for a monk who had denied Christ. Christ asked him why he prayed for one who had denied Him, but Passius continued praying and Christ told Passius that he had become like Him in love. Silouan thought that one should love all men and all animals, though, like Nicodemus, he was against the keeping of pets. He sympathized with trees when their leaves were torn, but he did not view it a sin to pluck them. Once he killed a fly and saw the mangled creature crawl away to its death, and he wept for days. He even pitied devils, a phenomenon also known to Isaac of Nineveh and one of the most difficult aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy for a Western Christian to accept. In his final years Silouan quoted Jesus’ words to His disciples: “I ascend unto my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” A few days before the end he complained to Sophrony that he had not yet learned humility. With Silouan’s permission, Sophrony had him moved to a cubicle in the infirmary overlooking the sea, but he felt that Silouan would want to be left alone during his final moments, and we do not know anything about his death other than that he asked a monk in the early hours of the morning if matins were being sung. Among his papers Silouan left a poem, set to wordless music by one of the greatest of contemporary composers, which describes the thought that more than any other haunted him throughout his life and so aptly characterizes the spirit of the Orthodox Church: “My soul yearns after the Lord, and I seek Him in tears. How could I not seek Him? He revealed Himself to me in the Holy Spirit, and my heart loved Him. He drew my soul to Himself, and she yearns for Him. The soul is like a bride, and the Lord the Bridegroom; and they love each other, and yearn for one another. The Lord in His love longs for the soul, and grieves if there is no place in

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her for the Holy Spirit; while the soul, having come to know the Lord, yearns after Him, for in Him lie all life and joy.” Washington State 2005-2013

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Theodore Sabo is a resident of Washington State and a research professor at North-West University of South Africa. He has published in Acta Classica and the Journal of Early Christian History.

INDEX

A Avvakum, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 117, 119

B Byzantium, 1, 4, 21, 33, 35, 36, 46, 50, 61, 63, 64, 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 117, 119, 120, 121, 123

I Iconoclasm, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 21 Iconoclasts, 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 29, 30 Iconodules, 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 15, 19, 22

J John of Damascus, 3, 5, 9, 10, 13, 119

E Eastern church, 1, 13, 31, 35, 90, 114 Eastern Orthodoxy, 28, 31, 38, 44, 103, 115

G

M Mongol yoke, 57, 86 monks, 2, 3, 6, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34, 40, 41, 43, 48, 58, 61, 62, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 83, 84, 87, 92, 96, 99, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114

Great Schism, 29, 46

N H Hesychasm, 61, 64, 68, 69, 87, 103

Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, 65, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 115

128

Index O

Old Believers, 90, 91, 92, 93, 101 Ottoman Empire, 70, 95

P Paulicians, 25, 26, 27, 28 persecution, 7, 11, 15, 19, 21, 22, 26, 29, 52, 74, 78, 95, 101 priests, 6, 26, 27, 38, 41, 74, 78, 86, 87, 88, 96

R Russia, 35, 36, 38, 55, 56, 57, 58, 73, 75, 78, 79, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 102, 119, 120, 122, 123

Russian saints, 86

S sadism, 1, 88 Silouan, 45, 109, 113, 114, 115, 122 Symeon the New Theologian, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 52, 53, 63, 65, 98, 122

W Way of a Pilgrim, 103, 109, 123 Western church, 1, 2, 18, 31, 35, 46, 47, 48, 61, 62, 71