Spiritual Work — The Novgorod Reformation of the 15th-16th Centuries
These two centuries, the fifteenth and sixteenth, represent the peak of spiritual asceticism in Rus’, what was then called “spiritual doing.”
Historically, this was the era of Ivan III and Ivan IV the Terrible. The Bible had always been a rare book among us, but in the period described, interest in it was extraordinary: it was precisely the Bible that gave rise to all the reform movements linked to an evangelical understanding of what the church should be, what spiritual pastors should be, and to attempts to create communities that would be truly Christian.
These movements began in Novgorod and Pskov, where the literacy level was highest and there were direct ties with the religious life of the West. Jerome of Prague, a companion of Jan Hus who shared his martyr’s death in 1415, visited Lithuanian and Russian lands in 1412–13 and preached in Pskov and Vitebsk. Maurus the Gascon, from the Moravian Brethren, visited Russia in 1474.
But our reformers did not keep silent either: forced to flee persecution to Lithuania, the brothers Foma and Feodosy Kosoy organized prayer houses there and preached ideas that were astonishing to the official church. Developed earlier by the Novgorod Strigolniki of the fourteenth century, these ideas amounted to the following: “Icons are nothing but idols… Christianity does not consist in the observance of rites, but in the fulfillment of Jesus’ commandments about love for one’s neighbor… All people are one before God: Tatars, Germans, and other pagans alike.”
The small-landed boyar Matvei Bashkin rose up against indentured servitude as contrary to the teaching of Christ, tore up bondage contracts, and set his own serfs free. He called for the study of the Gospel, saying that knowledge is not hostile to God and that the need to know was implanted by God himself in human nature. Fyodor Kuritsyn, a diplomat of Ivan III, called for a turn from church tradition to primitive Christianity—“the original prophecy.” “The soul is self-governing,” he asserted; he regarded education and knowledge as the embodiment of this “self-government,” and faith as its safeguard, faith that curbs the soul’s dangerous inclinations and directs it onto the path of salvation.
The camp of “guardians” of tradition was led by the abbot of the Volokolamsk Monastery, Joseph Volotsky. He held that all misfortunes came from reading the Bible “with one’s own mind”: “The mother of all passions is opinion. Opinion is the second fall.” To his pen belongs a vivid characterization of the era: “Today, in homes, on roads, and in marketplaces, monks and laypeople alike all doubt, all inquire about the faith… and not from the prophets, but from heretics… The heretics have deceived so many that it is beyond counting.”
None of these disputes bypassed the tsar’s court. Ivan III took great interest in the new views—that no mediators are needed between God and man, that venerating icons is a sin, that pastors must possess moral authority… But most of all he liked the denunciation of the priesthood’s greed and the acquisitiveness of the monasteries, which in Novgorod, for example, owned a fifth of all the land. He liked the meek and hardworking “non-possessors”—the prayerful men of another renowned monastery, the Kirillo-Belozersky, headed by Nil Sorsky and the elder hegumen Artemy.
This confrontation reached its apogee at the end of the fifteenth century, when Moscow sent the imperious Archbishop Gennady to subdue Novgorod. The Novgorodians would not even listen to him. They were literate, educated people, with rich libraries containing books of the Bible unknown to the archbishop, and he was opposed by the abbot of the Nemtsov Monastery in Pskov, the monk Zakhary. Their friction lasted three years. Zakhary maintained his independence, defending his own Orthodoxy and accusing Gennady himself of heresy. Gennady—and this is highly noteworthy—branded Zakhary a “Strigolnik” for accusing the clergy of venality (“simony”), for refusing to venerate icons (“uttered blasphemy against them”) on the basis of the Law of Moses, which Gennady dismissed as the “Jewish Decalogue,” considering that it did not apply to Christians. Zakhary read texts from books of the Bible that Gennady did not have.
No victory was won in the debate, so Gennady resorted to extra-ecclesial means: “Do not multiply any talk with them about the faith; call a Council only in order to execute them—to burn and to hang.” The reprisals began in 1490. At that time, the Novgorod priests Denis and Aleksei, previously elevated by Ivan III for their intelligence, morality, and deep knowledge of the Bible, were tortured to death. Zakhary was imprisoned. Ivan Kuritsyn was burned. Foma Kosoy was drowned. But the main reprisal lay ahead—for many hundreds of years they were all hounded by the label given them by Joseph Volotsky: “Judaizers.” And secular historians repeat it, though they themselves admit that there are no grounds whatsoever for this nickname.
The Novgorod and Moscow reformers came as close as ever—neither before nor since—to reforming the Russian Orthodox Church in conformity with the Bible, to abandoning pagan ritual, enlightening parishioners with the light of God’s Word, and to renouncing greed, bribe-taking, and cruelty.
This movement is an essential link for understanding the development of the evangelical direction in the history of Russia’s Christianization—a link from the first Novgorod Strigolniki to the underground evangelical church in the time of Ivan the Terrible. We have testimony from a captive Lutheran pastor (1559) about meeting Russian co-believers in Pskov who came to encourage him. The fundamental theological views worked out in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries have come down to us and become our heritage: our brothers resolutely rejected paganism in the church, immorality, and greed; they exalted the calling of a good, teaching pastor; and they even affirmed the view that the church is a union of co-believers, people “not of this world,” into whose relationship with God no third party may dare to intrude.
Matvei Bashkin was burned for these views under Ivan the Terrible. What were our brothers not accused of! Anti-trinitarians, Bogomils. No one knew what these accusations meant, which made them only easier to repeat. One needs to know both history and theology to refute them.
In Orthodox theology, Christ is God, equally distant and incomprehensible. The Reformers emphasized His human nature, that God gave Christ to bring us near to Himself—and this is the evangelical view. That is precisely why the Reformers so categorically rejected the veneration of icons, because the man Jesus was nearer to them! So too the anti-Trinitarians.
And accusations of Bogomilism go back to 12th-century Byzantium, but we have the reply of a certain Chrysomilus, accused of Bogomilism. He speaks of the triumph of spirituality over ritual: “All rituals are insufficient without inner rebirth, which frees us from the power of the evil spirit… Good works in themselves have no power without ‘disposition,’ that is, faith. It is not enough to do good, even to please God, unless one attains a spiritual sense of the divine Spirit present within oneself, doing good in us without compulsion.” So too Bogomilism.
All the Reformers knew from the Gospel that Christ dwells in believers. “The church is not in logs, but in ribs,” they said. Gratitude to God for our predecessors.
Marina KARETNIKOVA
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