But the gravest challenge to the established church came from within its own ranks, from elements whose doctrinal and ritualistic orthodoxy was beyond suspicion. The roots of this particular reform movement lay in Greece. In the latter part of the fifteenth century among the monks living at Mt Athos, the centre of Orthodox monasticism, there spread talk of an imminent end of the world. Some monks left their abbeys to settle in hermitages. Here, living in utmost simplicity, they prayed, studied and meditated. This so-called 'hesychast' movement was imported to Russia by the monk, Nil Sorskii, who had been to Mt Athos. Around 1480, Nil moved out of his monastery and dug himself a pit in the marshy forest wilderness north of the upper Volga, where he henceforth lived in solitude praying and studying the scriptures and patristic writings. Other monks followed his example, settling in the vicinity of Nil's hermitage or pushing on further north. These 'Transvolga Elders', did not at first seem to threaten the interests of the established church because the kind of life they advocated was too rigorous to attract many followers. But in time Nil became involved in a debate concerning the principle of monastic landholding, and when that happened, the church was thrown into a crisis.

By the end of the fifteenth century, its claim to monocratic authority well established, the Muscovite monarchy required much less urgently the worldly favours of the church. In fact, it was beginning to cast a greedy eye on the church's properties to whose growth it itself had made major contributions, as these yielded neither taxes nor services and could be put to better use by being carved up for distribution as pomestia. Ivan III indicated his attitude clearly enough; when in conquered Novgorod he confiscated most of the ecclesiastical holdings on his own behalf. The friendly reception accorded the Judaizing movement at his court may have had something to do with this heresy's outspoken opposition to monastic wealth. His son, Basil IlI, began to supervise closely monastic revenues and occasionally even helped himself to them. He probably also issued some kind of an order prohibiting monasteries from acquiring additional land without royal approval because a decree to this same effect issued early in the reign of Ivan IV (1535) made reference to a previous law. Many boyars also sympathized with the vision of a spiritual church, partly to deflect the crown's attention from their own holdings, partly to help it acquire more land for distribution to servitors. There are suspicions that it was either the tsar or boyars close to his court who prevailed on Nil Sorskii to leave his anchorage and denounce the monasteries for owning land. This occurred in 1503 when Nil suddenly made his appearance at a synod to urge that the church renounce its wealth and resort to alms. His appeal threw the assembly into panic. The synod unanimously rejected the proposal, passing a resolution which reconfirmed the inalienability and sacredness of ecclesiastical holdings. But the issue would not die quite so easily. Nil's speech was only the opening shot in a war between two clerical parties later labelled 'antiproperty' (nestiazhatcli) and 'pro-property' (liubostiazhateli) which went on until the middle of the sixteenth century.

The quarrel was not, in the first instance, over politics; at issue were differing conceptions of the church. Nil and the other Transvolga Elders envisaged an ideal church, unencumbered by worldly responsibilities, serving as a spiritual and moral beacon in a dark and evil world. One of the leading figures in Nil's party was Maxim the Greek, a native of Corfu who had studied in Italy and there fallen under the influence of Savonarola. Having come to Russia to help translate Greek books, he was appalled by the debased quality of the clergy. Why were there in Russia no Samuels to stand up to Saul and no Nathans to tell the truth to erring David, he asked; and the answer, given by Kurbsky or whoever it was that wrote the epistles to Ivan IV credited to him was: because the Russian clergy were so concerned with their worldly possessions that they "lay motionless, fawning in every way on authority and obliging it so as to preserve their holdings and acquire still more." There was implied in this argument a clear political message, namely that only a poor church could look the tsar straight in the eye and serve as the nation's moral conscience. The conservative, 'pro-property' party, on the contrary, wanted a church which collaborated intimately with the monarchy and shared with it responsibility for keeping the realm truly Christian. To be able to do that, it needed income, because in fact only financial independence freed the clergy for excessive concern with worldly affairs. Each party could draw on historic precedent, the former with reference to early Christian practices, the latter by appeals to the Byzantine tradition.

The monarchy's stand in this dispute was ambivalent. It did want to get hold of the church's properties, and with that in mind it encouraged at first the 'anti-property' group. But it preferred their opponents' political philosophy which viewed the church as the collaborator of the state. Allusions to Nathan and Samuel certainly could not appeal to patrimonial rulers who desired no independent institutions in their realm, least of all a church which took it upon itself to act as the nation's conscienee. In the end, by skilful manoeuvring, the monarchy got the best of both worlds: it first supported the 'proproperty' faction; then, having with its help liquidated the proponents of an independent, spiritual church, reversed itself and, adopting the recommendations of the defeated 'anti-property' faction, proceeded to sequester church lands.

The leader and chief ideologist of the conservatives was Joseph, abbot of the Volokolamsk rnonastery His was a very unusual monastic establishment, quite different from any then in existence. Volokolamsk operated on communal principles, which permitted the monks no private property: all the possessions of the abbey were institutionally owned. Its brethren were required to reside in the monastery, where they were subject to strict disciplinary codes drawn up by its abbot.

Volokolamsk had property and yet it was not corrupt. Joseph's innovations showed that it was possible to combine ownership of land with the ascetic habits demanded by the church, that wealth did not necessarily lead to the abdication of moral responsibilities, as the Transvolga Elders were charging. It was for this reason that the clergy, shaken by Nil's speech, turned to Joseph to lead the counterattack. In upholding the principle of monastic landholding, Joseph had a powerful argument in his favour. Orthodox canon law requires the parish priests to marry but the bishops to remain celibate - a rule which forces the church to draw its bishops from the ranks of the monastic clergy. Referring to this rule, Joseph argued that it was unreasonable to expect Orthodox monks to spend all their time supporting themselves; for if they did so, they would have no time left to acquire the knowledge and the experience that they would need when called upon to administer a diocese. Further harm resulting from this practice would: be the likelihood that the better sort of people, namely boyars, on whom the church heavily depended to manage its abbeys and bishoprics, would stay away from monasteries should they be required to perform menial labour.

The argument was practical, almost bureaucratic, in nature. Joseph did not stop here but went on to question the motives of the Transvolga Elders. He was a rabid foe of the Judaizers, preaching that they be rooted out by sword and fire, without even being granted the opportunity to recant. Nil and his followers, while in no w_se sympathetic to heresy, preferred excommunication to the death penalty. Exploiting the more tolerant attitude of the 'anti-property' group, Joseph assailed their orthodoxy. In his principa1 work, a collection of essays gathered by his pupils in book form
and inappropriately titled The Enlightener (Prosvetite1'), he piled citation upon citation from the scriptures and patristic writings to prove his points, intermingling arguments with diatribes against the Judaizers and any who had for them the least tolerance. In his opinion, the Russian church as it then stood was the purest and most perfect in the world: 'In piety,
the Russian land now surpasses all the others.'. The implication of this view was that any reform would debase the country's religious standing and diminish its inhabitants' assurance of eternal salvation.

Joseph reinforced his arguments with ruthless intrigues at the-court designed to turn the tsar against the reformers and their supporters among the courtiers and boyars. An advocate of the 'church militant', during his early career he had occasionally run foul of the crown; but now that church properties were in danger, he became an extravagant apologist of royal absolutism. In arguing the divinity of tsars -- an idea he was the first to introduee into Russia -- Joseph relied on the authority of Agapetus, a sixth-century Byzantine writer. From him he borrowed the central thesis of his political theory: 'Although an Emperor in his physical being is like other men, yet in his authority [or office] he is like God.'7 To curry favour with the crown, in 1505 or 1506 he took a step, for which there was no precedent in Russian history; he withdrew his abbey from the patronage of its local appanage prince (and incidentally, its generous benefactor) a younger brother of Ivan IlI, and placed it under the personal protection of the tsar. Thus, skilfully combining censure of heresy with eulogies of absolutism, and all the time reminding the crown of the church's utility to it, Joseph managed to turn the tables on the Transvolga Elders. The small band of hermits which strove for a spiritual church was no match for the conniving abbot. After Joseph's death (1515), the most important ecclesiastical position went to members of his party, and many Russian monastenes were reorganized on the model of Volokolamsk. A decisive event in the conflict occurred in 1525 when Metropolitan Danil, one of his disciples, in contravention of canon law, authorized Basil III to divorce his childless wife and remary, offering to assume the sin, if such it was, on his own conscience. Henceforth, the grateful tsar completely backed the Josephites, to the extent of allowing them to imprison their opponents, among them Maxim the Greek. The Josephite party attained the apogee of its influence under Metropolitan Macarius. It was this ecclesiastic who planted in the mind of Ivan IV the idea of crowning himself tsar.

Fear for its properties, of course, was not the only motive behind the Russian church's drive to build up a powerful and unlimited monarchy, There were also other considerations; the need for state assistance in extirpating heresy, protecting Orthodox Christians living under Muslim and Catholic rule, and reconquering those parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which had once formed part of Holy Rus. The threat of secularization was only the most pressing factor, the one which made collaboration with secular powers especially urgent. Traditionally partial to strong imperial authority, in the first half of the sixteenth century, under threat of expropriation, the Russian Orthodox Church placed its entire authority behind the Muscov_te monarchy, filling its mind with ambitions which on its own it was incapable of conceiving. The entire ideology of royal absolutism in Russia was worked out by clergymen who felt that the interests of religion and church were best served by a monarchy with no limits to its power. This ideology consisted of the following principal ingredients:

1. The idea of the Third Rome: the Romes of Peter and Constantine
had fallen as punishment for heresy; Moseow has become the Third Rome; as such it would stand for all eternity because there shall be no Fourth. This idea, formulated some time in the first half of the sixteenth century by the monk Philotheus of Pskov, became an integral part of official Muscovite political theory. Related to it was the belief that Muscovy was the purest, most pious Christian kingdom in the world;

2. The imperial idea: the rulers of Moscow were heirs of an imperial line which extended all the way back to the Emperor Augustus: theirs was the most ancient and therefore the most prestigious dynasty in the world. A genealogy to fit this scheme was worked out by clerics working under the supervision of Metropditan Macarius and given official sanction in the tsarist Book of Degrees (Stepnnaia Kniga)

3. The rulers of Russia were universal Christian sovereigns: they were emperors of all the Orthodox people in the world, i.e. they had the right to rule and protect them and, by implication, to bring them under Russian suzerainty. One of the occasions at which this was asserted was at the church synod held in 1561. In some writings, claims were made on behalf of the Russian tsar as the ruler of all the Christians, not only of those professing the Orthodox faith;

4. Divine authority of kings: all authority was from God, and the Russian tsar, in the exercise of his office, was like God. His authority extended over the church in all but doctrinal matters; he was the church's temporal ruler and the clergy had to obey him. Introduced into Russia by Joseph of Volokolamsk, the theory was subsequently confirmed by several church synods, including that convened in 1666.

By throwing its weight so fully behind royal absolutism, the Russian church achieved its immediate objectives: it uprooted dangerous heresies and saved (for the time being, at any rate) its properties. But it bought these victories at a terrible price. The refusal to adopt the reforms advocated by the antiproperty clergy had a doubly negative effect: it progressively ossified the church within and forced it into increased dependence on the state. In effect, in the first half of the sixteenth century the Russian church placed itself voluntarily under the tutelage of secular authority. It was an exceedingly short-sighted policy that the leaders of the Russian church adopted at this critical juncture in its history. The results were not slow in making themselves felt as the church administration rapidly slipped under control of state organs. In the course of the sixteenth century it became customary for tsars to make on their own appointments of bishops and metropolitans, to decide who would attend church synods, and to interfere with church justice. In 1521 Basil III removed a metropolitan who had displeased him; the first time this had ever happened in Russia. He also appropriated moneys belonging to the church.

By the end of the sixteenth century there was precious little left of the Byzantine ideal of harmony. Just how subservient the church had become during this time can be seen from its support of government measures aimed at limiting its right to make further land acquisitions. A synod convoked in 1551 approved tsarist orders forbidding monasteries to make new acquisitions without royal approval, and another synod in 1584 reconfirmed them. These were the first steps towards ultimate expropriation of clerical land. In the end the Russian church forfeited its autonomy without by this surrender salvaging its wealth.

from Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, pp. 228-234