Peter the Great (144 page)

Beyond what might be called the innocent ignorance of the Russian clergy, there was another failing which drove the Tsar into a rage. This was the widespread superstition of the Russian people and the playing on this trait by certain unscrupulous people, including members of the clergy. The common people believed in everyday miracles—believed that by the intercession of a specific icon of Christ, the Virgin Mary or one of the special Russian saints, a miraculous personal advantage might be obtained. Unquestioning belief made fertile ground for charlatans. When Peter came upon this kind of unscrupulous priest, his anger flared. One priest in St. Petersburg, for example, persuaded the people that a picture of the Virgin Mary which he kept in his house could work miracles, but only those who could pay were allowed access. "Though he carried on this trade with great circumspection in the night
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time and took all imaginable care in recommending secrecy to his customers, yet the Tsar got information of it," said Weber. "The priest's house was searched and the miraculous image fetched away, which the Tsar caused to be brought to him in order to see whether it could perform miracles in His Majesty's presence. But the priest, at the sight of it, threw himself at the Tsar's feet and confessed his imposture, for which he was carried to the fortress and suffered heavy corporal punishment, and was afterward degraded from his office in order to be made an example to his brethren."

Not surprisingly, the impostures which angered Peter most were those which challenged or threatened his own will. On one occasion, a peasant who disliked being forced to live in St. Petersburg prophesied that the following September the Neva would flood so high that it would cover an ancient and lofty ash tree which stood near a church. People immediately began to move themselves and their belongings to higher ground. Peter, furious at this interruption of his plans for the city, ordered the tree cut down and the peasant imprisoned until September. At the end of that month, when no sign of the threatened inundation had appeared, the population was summoned to the site of the tree stump, on which a scaffold had been built. The rustic seer was brought, lifted onto the scaffold and given fifty lashes with the knout while the crowd was lectured on the foolhardiness of listening to false prophets.

A more sophisticated religous hoax simultaneously provoked Peter's wrath and stimulated his curiosity. In 1720, an icon of the Virgin Mary in a church in St. Petersburg was said to be shedding tears because she was obliged to live in so dismal a part of the world. Chancellor Golovkin heard the report and went to the church, forcing his way through a dense crowd which had gathered to marvel at the phenomenon. Golovkin immediately sent for Peter, who was a day's journey away, inspecting the Ladoga Canal. Peter came at once, traveling all night, and went directly to the church. The priests took him to the miraculous icon, which at that moment was dry-eyed, although numerous spectators assured him that they had seen tears. Peter stared up at the icon, which was covered with paint and thick varnish, and decided that something about it looked suspicious. He ordered it lifted down from its elevated position and brought to his palace, where in the presence of the Chancellor, many noblemen, the leaders of the clergy and the priests who had been present when the icon was taken down, he proceeded to examine it. He soon found several tiny holes in the corners of the eyes which the shadows created by the curve of the eyes made invisible from below. Turning the icon around, he stripped away the cloth that covered it behind. A little cavity had been hollowed out of the wooden plank, and in it was a small residue of congealed oil. "Here is the source of the miraculous tears," Peter declared, summoning everyone present to come close and see for themselves. The congealed oil remained solid as long as the icon was in a cold place, he explained, but during a service, when the surrounding air was heated by the burning candles placed before the icon, the oil became fluid and the Virgin "wept." Peter was delighted with the ingenuity of the mechanism and kept the icon for his Cabinet of Curiosities. But he was extremely angry at the charlatan who had invoked supersition to threaten his new city. The perpetrator was found "and so severely chastised that no one afterward thought proper to attempt anything of a similar nature."

Along with tightening discipline among the priesthood and stamping out charlatanism and superstition, Peter set himself to bring piety and utility to Russian monasteries. The Tsar himself was not opposed to the monastic ideal of poverty, scholarship and devotion to God. As a young man, he had paid a respectful visit to the great Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea, and in 1712 he had founded the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg. What distressed him was the extent to which Russian monasteries had strayed from their ideal. There were more than 557 monasteries and convents in Russia in Peter's day, housing more than 14,000 monks and 10,000 nuns, and some of these institutions possessed great wealth. In 1723, the 151 monasteries in the vicinity of Moscow owned 242,198 male serfs—Troitskaya Sergeeva, the richest of them, owned 20,394 peasant houses—and the number was constantly growing, as Russian noblemen and wealthy merchants competed to give money and land to monasteries in order to assist their own salvation.

For all their wealth, little that Peter found useful emerged from these retreats. No notable scholarship or learning was being produced in monasteries in Peter's time, and the charity dispensed under their walls simply attracted swarms of army deserters, runaway serfs, "hale and lazy beggars, enemies to God and useless hands," in Peter's scornful words. The Tsar considered many of the monks to be parasites, sunk in sloth and superstition, whose growth in number and decline in holiness threatened the state.

Peter began to restrict the role of Russian monasteries soon after the death of the Patriarch Adrian in 1700. Administration of these institutions was turned over to a new state office, the Monastery Office, headed by a layman, Boyar Ivan Musin-Pushkin. All money and property belonging to the monasteries were to be managed by this office "in order to enable the monks and nuns to better fulfill their religious duties." The number of new monks was drastically limited by forbidding the taking of holy vows by noblemen, officials of the government, minors and anyone who could not read or write. In time, any person desiring to take holy orders had to receive permission from the Tsar. Simultaneously, all monasteries containing fewer than thirty monks were closed and converted into parish churches or schools. The monks from these small institutions were transferred to larger houses.

As ruler of the state, Peter was basically concerned with the structure and role of the church as an institution and the relation of that institution to the state. Despite the blow at church independence struck by Tsar Alexis when he removed the Patriarch Nikon, the Patriarchy still wielded considerable autonomous power when Peter came to the throne. It possessed its own administrative, judicial and fiscal offices. It taxed the inhabitants of its immense landholdings. It judged all questions of marriage, adultery, divorce, wills and inheritance, as well as disputes between husbands and wives, parents and children, laity and clergy. The Patriarch Adrian, who took office when Peter was eighteen, was not as strong a personality as Nikon, but as an arch-conservative he was constantly interfering in Peter's personal life: protesting the time he spent with foreigners, demanding that Peter change the Western clothes he preferred, insisting that he spend more time with Eudoxia. Not surprisingly, the young Tsar wished that he might somehow be rid of both the personal irritation and the conservative policies which the Patriarch embodied.

As it happened, Adrian died suddenly in October 1700 while Peter was with the army besieging Narva. The Tsar had given no thought to the choice of a successor; he knew only that he wanted a man who could not challenge his own supreme power and who would support the changes he might wish to make in the structure and authority of the church. No such candidate seemed available, and he lacked time to make a search. Rather than appoint the wrong man, and unwilling to risk confusing and dividing the country by doing away with the office, Peter compromised. He preserved the office of Patriarch, but declared the throne "temporarily vacant." To provide the church with interim leadership, he appointed a "temporary" guardian whose indefinite status would not permit him to become a true focus of power. Then, satisfied with this arrangement, he simply let the matter drift. Whenever the clergy urged, as it did strongly and repeatedly, that a new Patriarch be appointed, Peter replied that he was too busy with the war to give the choice the deep thought necessary.

Peter had chosen as temporary Guardian Exarch the forty-two-year-old Metropolitan of Ryazan, Stephen Yavorksy, a Ukrainian monk trained in the Jesuit-inspired Orthodox academy in Kiev, where the level of church scholarship and general culture was higher than among the purely Muscovite Orthodox clergy. As professor of theolgoy at the academy and a frequent orator in the city's great Santa Sophia Cathedral, Yavorsky made an impressive figure. His deep, sonorous voice, his dramatic gestures, his skillful blend of scholarship and anecdote moved his large audiences easily from laughter to tears. Peter had never heard such oratory in a Russian church, and whenever possible—at church ceremonies, public dedications or military triumphs—he asked that Yavorsky preach. But in giving office to Yavorsky, Peter did not equip him even temporarily with all the authority formerly held by the Patriarch. The actual administration of church properties, as well as the taxing of all inhabitants of ecclesiastical lands, was turned over to the new Monastery Office headed by Musin-Pushkin. Thereafter, most church income went directly into the state Treasury, which, in turn, paid the salaries of church officials.

Yavorsky was never really happy in his office. He was not ambitious, and soon he was looking back wistfully on the calmer, more reclusive life he had led in Kiev. In 1712, he begged Peter to release him from his assignment. "Where shall I go from your spirit and how shall I flee from your face?" he wrote despairingly to the Tsar. "I will not go to a foreign realm, for your power is given to you by God. In Moscow or in Ryazan—everywhere your sovereign power reigns over me. It is impossible to hide from it." Peter, having no one to replace him with, always refused Yavorsky's appeals until, with the passage of time, Yavorsky began to grow stronger in his office; he began to support his fellow churchmen in their confrontation with civilian authorities; he began to protest the extent to which church revenues were being diverted from religious purposes to support the army and the war. Even his sermons began to take a turn which Peter did not like: He preached against husbands who had persuaded their wives to enter a convent so that the husbands could re
marry—a thrust whose most promin
ent target was obvious to all. In 1712, Y
avorsky used the occasion of
the Feast of St. Alexis to speak of the Tsarevich Alexis as "our only hope." Peter was not present, but a copy of the sermon was brought to him. He read it carefully, annotating it with his pen. Unwilling to make Yavorsky a martyr, he did not retaliate, but sent word to the churchman that he should not admonish in public before doing so in private. Yavorsky apologized, "writing with tears, not with ink," and remained in office, although for a while Peter forbade him to preach.

Thereafter, Peter found a new instrument with which to reform the church. This was another Ukrainian monk from Kiev, much younger than Yavorsky, more sophisticated, more practical and infinitely more forceful. Feofan Prokopovich was a modern eighteenth-century man who happened to be a cleric. He was an administrator, a reformer, a polemicist, even a propagandist, and he concurred completely in Peter's desire to modernize and secularize the Russian church. For a Russian churchman, Prokopovich was a man of extraordinary learning—he had read Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Ga
lileo, Kepler, Bacon, Machiavel
li, Hobbes and Locke. An orphan in childhood, Prokopovich was educated by his uncle, a learned monk and rector of the academy in Kiev, and went on to Jesuit colleges in Poland and then to a special college in Rome. There, he studied theology, took Catholic orders and, in 1700 at the age of twenty-two, witnesses the coronation of Pope Clement XI. The effect of his three years in Rome, however, was to instill in Prokopovich a permanent dislike of the Papacy and the Roman church. Returning to the Kiev academy, he taught philosophy, rhetoric, poetics and literature, lecturing to his students in Latin. He pioneered in introducing arithmetic, geometry and physics into the curriculum. While still in his twenties, he wrote a five-act play in verse, dramatizing the theme of the bringing of Christianity to Russia in the tenth century by Vladimir, Prince of Kiev. In 1706, Peter visited Kiev and heard Prokopovich preach in Santa Sophia. In the crisis of 1708, when Mazeppa betrayed the Tsar in favor of Charles XII, Prokopovich quickly took Peter's side. Prince Golitsyn, Governor of Kiev, responded to Peter's question about the loyalty of the higher clergy in the city by saying, "All the monks avoid us. In all of Kiev I have found only one man, the prefect of the academy [Prokopovich], who is well disposed toward us." In 1709, following the Russian victory at Poltava, the Tsar returned to Kiev, where Prokovich welcomed him as "His Most Sacred Majesty, the Tsar of All the Russias" and preached a sermon filled with superlatives. In 1711, Prokopovich accompanied Peter on the disastrous campaign on the Pruth, and later that year, at the age of thirty-one, he was appointed rector of the Kiev academy. In 1716, the Tsar summoned him to St. Petersburg, and Prokopovich left Kiev, never to return.

Unlike Yavorsky, Prokopovich firmly supported Peter's attempts to subordinate the church to the state. Vockerodt, secretary to the Prussian minister Mardefelt, commented that he found in Prokopovich, apart from wide learning, "an ardent concern for the good of the country, even at the expense of the clergy's interests." Prokopovich's antagonism toward the "beards of the church" was further stimulated by their support of the Tsarevich Alexis, and on Palm Sunday, April 6, 1718, as the leaders of the church were being asked to judge the Tsarevich, Prokopovich thundered from the pulpit on the power and glory of the tsar and the holy duty of all subjects to obey the temporal power. "The supreme authority is established and armed with the sword of God, and to oppose it is a sin against God himself," he cried. He dealt harshly with the idea that the clergy was exempt from loyalty and service to the sovereign: "The clergy, like the army, the civil administration, doctors and artisans, is subject to the state. The clergy is another order of rank of the people and not a separate state." Naturally enough, the rest of the clergy accused Prokopovich of sycophancy, opportunism, hypocrisy and ambition. When Peter nominated him as Archbishop of Pskov and Narva, the Moscow clergy accused him of heretical Protestant leanings.