Sailing from Byzantium (30 page)

After Sergius, the most influential Russian monk was probably his younger friend St. Stephen of Perm, a scholar and missionary. Again, his
vita
was written by Epifan Premudry, who tells us that Stephen had many books in his cell, including Greek ones, which he learned how to read. In a career reminiscent of Cyril and Methodius, and redolent of the second South Slavic ethos, Stephen undertook a famous mission to a remote Finnish people called the Zyrians, for whom he created an original alphabet and translated many religious works.

The literary trends that influenced these monks spilled over most notably into the field of painting, where Byzantine methods and models had long been taken up wholesale by the Russians along with religious culture. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Russian icon and fresco painting reached a peak of artistic quality that is associated with two towering figures, the Byzantine master Theophanes the Greek (Feofan Grek) and his brilliant Russian student Andrei Rublev. Both worked squarely in the monastic milieu inspired by Byzantine Hesychasm and the second South Slavic influence.

A close friend of Epifan Premudry's, Theophanes arrived in northern Russia from Byzantium around 1378, just as Euthymius’ international movement was gathering momentum. While little of his work survives (that which does is exquisite), he is known to have decorated several churches in Novgorod and Nizhni Novgorod before coming to Moscow. There he painted an iconostasis in the Church of the Annunciation, working as well in the Church of the Archangel Michael. Epifan praised his work in terms that leave no
doubt about its spiritual intent and its otherworldly aesthetic, so essential to Byzantine art: while painting he “never looked on worldly models,” but instead “in his spirit, encompassed distant and intellectual realities, while his spiritual eyes contemplated spiritual beauty.”

Andrei Rublev started out as a monk at Sergius’ monastery of the Holy Trinity, but it's thought that by the early years of the fifteenth century he was acting as Theophanes’ assistant during the latter's work in Moscow. Later he painted a number of famous icons, among them the Savior icon and the Trinity icon (for his old monastery), as well as a series of frescoes for the Cathedral of the Assumption in Vladimir. Rublev's distinctive ethereal style inspired a number of imitators, giving rise to an influential school of Russian icon painting. His work also strengthened the idea, already prominent in the writings of Cyprian and others, that the center of the Russian church had moved from Kiev to Moscow.

While owing so much to its Byzantine model, Russian spirituality lacked the defensive polemicism that distinguished Byzantine Hesychasm after Palamas. This argumentative impulse arose in response to the rationalist critiques of humanists such as Barlaam, but in Russia, Hesychasm didn't encounter that sort of hostility. For the moment, at least, Russian mysticism was free to bloom without the withering frost of such unsympathetic scrutiny.

n an early spring day in the year 1516, an envoy from Vasily III, grand prince of Moscow, arrived at Mt. Athos. He brought money for the monasteries, with instructions that the monks were to pray for the souls of Vasily's deceased parents, Ivan the Great and the Byzantine princess Zoe Paleologa. They were to pray also for an heir to be born to Vasily's childless wife, Solomonia.

The envoy brought a further request that the monks send to Moscow a certain Sava, an elderly and learned monk from the Vatopedi monastery, so that Sava might perform some important translation work in Moscow. Once Sava had completed the translations, the grand prince promised the abbot of Vatopedi, “we will release him again to you.”

Sava, it turned out, was too infirm for the rigorous trip north. Instead, the abbot settled upon a younger monk named Maximos. The abbot explained in a letter to the grand prince that Maximos was a suitable replacement, as he was “experienced in the divine scripture and capable of interpreting all
sorts of books, both church and Hellenic, because from his youth he has grown up in them.”

It is interesting that the abbot would mention Maximos’ proficiency with “Hellenic” books, which meant ancient Greek literature, or what Byzantines had also called the Outside Wisdom. Such attainments seem unlikely to have been of much use in Moscow. They were certainly rare among the monks of the Holy Mountain, which may be the reason the abbot mentioned them. The monks’ scholarship generally ran more to Church Fathers and Old Church Slavonic.

But Maximos was a most unusual monk. In his mid-forties when the abbot nominated him for the trip to Russia, he had been born Michael Trivolis (c. 1470) to an aristocratic Greek family in Arta, the capital of Epirus, on the coast of what is now Albania. His parents, Manuel and Irene, had emigrated from Constantinople to Arta, where Manuel may have served as a military governor before the city fell to the Turks in 1449. The family was well connected. The patriarch Callistos, Philotheos’ rival of a century earlier, had been a Trivolis.

More recently, Michael's uncle Demetrius was a well-known scholar and collector of ancient Greek literature. A protégé of Cardinal Bessarion, Demetrius Trivolis was also acquainted with the Byzantine humanist and diplomat John Lascaris, who had settled in Florence probably sometime in the 1470s.
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By the early 1490s, Lascaris held Manuel Chrysoloras’ old chair in Greek studies at the Florentine
studio.
He also worked as Lorenzo the Magnificent's librarian, traveling widely in Ottoman lands in search of Greek manuscripts for his Medici patron. During those travels, in 1491, Lascaris visited Arta, where he stayed with Demetrius Trivolis.

Young Michael, who had already studied Greek philosophy and rhetoric with a well-known teacher on Crete, was no doubt thrilled to meet the famous Lascaris. And when Lascaris returned to Florence the following year, he brought Michael Trivolis with him.

Through Lascaris, Michael gained immediate access to the highest level of Florence's thriving intellectual life. Lorenzo the Magnificent was an accomplished humanist and poet in his own right, and he had revived his grandfather Cosimo's Platonic Academy, under the guidance of the still-vigorous Marsilio Ficino. Now the grand old man of Renaissance philosophy, Ficino sought above all to demonstrate that Platonic doctrine anticipated Christianity, and that independent reason could confirm the truth of Christian revelation.

Michael met Ficino soon after arriving in Florence, joining the charmed circle of the Platonic Academy. It included Angelo Poliziano (Politian), the poet and philologist who had studied with John Argyropoulos in the 1470s and had nearly been killed defending Lorenzo during the attempt on the latter's life in 1478; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who combined an interest in Plato with an attraction to the thought of Averroës on one hand and the mysticism of the Jewish cabbala on the other; and the brilliant young Michelangelo, still a teenager, whom Lorenzo had taken into the Medici household.

Among the people who most impressed Michael in Florence was an influential Dominican friar from Ferrara named Girolamo Savonarola, whom, with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Michelangelo, Michael frequently went to hear preach. Savonarola had long attacked the blatant corruption in the church, demanding reform. Called by Lorenzo to Florence in 1490, Savonarola had also begun denouncing
the materialism of Florentine society and, provocatively, the tyranny of Medici rule.

Florence changed rapidly in the few years after Michael's arrival. Lorenzo died in 1492 and was succeeded by his less talented son Piero. In 1494 Giovanni Pico della Mir-andola and Poliziano both died, while Michelangelo went to Bologna and John Lascaris left Italy for France. That same year the French army of Charles VIII invaded Italy, overthrowing the now highly unpopular Piero de Medici in Florence. Propped by popular enthusiasm, Savonarola embarked on his turbulent four-year reign over Florence, burning humanistic books and imposing a puritanical severity on Florentine life and art. Finally, having gone too far in opposing the pope, he was excommunicated and burned at the stake before a crowd of disenchanted Florentines.

By then Michael himself had moved on, first to Bologna and then to Venice. There, in early 1498, it is thought that he spent several months working for Aldus Manutius, helping the other Byzantine scholars who were preparing Greek texts for publication by the Aldine Press. That spring he accepted an invitation to come live and work with Gianfrancesco della Mirandola, the nephew of his friend Giovanni, who had succeeded to the family estate at Mirandola on Giovanni's death.

But Michael was restless at Mirandola, and the news of Savonarola's execution that May shocked him deeply. Gianfrancesco's Christianity was more conservative than his uncle's had been, and, working closely with Gianfrancesco, Michael now turned for the first time to a serious study of the Church Fathers. Though broken by periodic trips to the area of his birth, his studies at Mirandola ultimately resulted in his conversion. In 1502 Michael Trivolis renounced humanism, turning away from what he later called an excessive reliance on reason and secular learning, instead joining the
Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence, where Savonarola himself had served as prior.

Michael's conversion had been not to Catholicism but to Christianity, and his entry into San Marco attests more to his respect for Savonarola than to any attachment to Dominican ideals. The Church Fathers he had studied at Mirandola were Greek, not Latin, and his faith was a matter of recovery, not discovery—of rediscovering the faith in which he had been raised, not uncovering a new belief system.

So it comes as no surprise to find him leaving Italy for his homeland sometime around 1505 and settling at Mt. Athos, which despite the Turkish conquest was still the vibrant center of Orthodox monasticism. And given Michael's literary bent, it was natural that he gravitate to Vatopedi, the wealthiest monastery, which boasted an extensive library. John Lascaris had bought two hundred manuscripts from Vatopedi in the 1490s for Lorenzo's library, which was at San Marco, where Michael may have read them.

At Vatopedi Michael Trivolis took the name Maximos. Although we know little about the decade he spent there, we do know that later, in Moscow, he would look back on Athos with great longing. San Marco had been urban, politicized, and Italian. During his time there, the monastery was rife with bickering over the meaning of Savonarola's tumultuous career. Vatopedi was comparatively peaceful—pastoral yet at the same time more cosmopolitan, in that the Greeks there lived, prayed, ate, and worked shoulder to shoulder with Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians, Romanians, Russians, and others from the Orthodox world, some three hundred monks in all. Maximos had a knack for languages. Though he did not learn Russian yet, he would have picked up a smattering of the various Slavic tongues from his brother monks.

He also had a knack for timing. Traveling with a small
party, Maximos broke the journey north with sojourns in Constantinople and the Crimea, arriving in Moscow in March 1518. And just as had happened earlier in Florence, he unknowingly landed himself in a political and religious cauldron that was on the point of boiling over. This time, however, he would find himself not on the periphery but at the dangerous center. From this point, Maximos is properly called by the Russian version of his name, Maxim Grek— “Maxim the Greek,” Michael Trivolis’ third and final incarnation. It was as Maxim Grek that he became embroiled in the controversy that would seal his fate.

For some time, a dispute had been going on between two factions in the Russian monastic world. Since the time of Cyprian, a powerful new group of monks had arisen in many of Russia's most densely settled areas. They were called Josephites after their leader, Joseph, abbot of the large and influential Volokolamsk monastery, which was their stronghold not far from Moscow. They were also known as Possessors, since their monasteries comprised extensive feudal estates on which the land was owned by the monks and worked by the peasants, with the monks receiving the income. The monks lent money to peasants at exorbitant rates, driving them further into poverty while growing wealthier themselves.

As the riches of the Possessors accumulated, they were increasingly opposed by monks who lived very differently, building small, isolated hermitages for themselves in patches of cleared land deep in the northern forests. These were the Non-Possessors, and it was they who represented the conservative Hesychast tradition as established by such figures as Cyprian and St. Sergius of Radonezh.

Cyprian himself had preached strongly in Russia against the monastic possession of large estates. After his death, the
opposition had been led by Nil Sorsky, later St. Nil, who had visited Mt. Athos and was the first Russian to write about mystical contemplation. When Maxim arrived, the Non-Possessors’ leader was Vassian Patrikeyev, a monk of noble birth and a dynamic advocate who wasted no time enlisting Maxim in the cause. The two eventually became close friends as well as collaborators.

Joseph died a few years before Maxim's arrival, and with the support of the metropolitan Varlaam, Vassian and Maxim enjoyed a period of seeming ascendancy. They did battle with the Josephites on a number of issues, only one of which was the possession of extensive estates and exploitation of the peasants, which Maxim—like Cyprian long before him—was able to affirm went quite against the Byzantine tradition. Not only that, but he also placed it in sharp contrast with the practices of the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose poverty and asceticism he had seen firsthand. While the example of Savonarola remained always before his eyes, Maxim was careful to conceal his erstwhile membership in a Dominican monastery
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But Vassian's strength was illusory. The Non-Possessors had the past on their side, but the Possessors had the future. Joseph had earlier struck a deal with Vasily III, who (like his contemporary Henry VIII of England) coveted the great monastic estates of his realm. Vasily would let the Possessors keep their vast estates, and in return they would support his bid for absolute control over the church. Despite the continued opposition of figures such as the metropolitan Varlaam, who struggled to maintain the church's independence from secular authority, the logic of this alliance proved irresistible.

Another aspect of the situation (and another parallel with Henry VIII) was the grand prince's failure to produce an heir. Backed by Vassian and Maxim, the metropolitan Varlaam refused to sanction the grand prince's uncanonical divorce from the still-barren Solomonia, on behalf of whose fertility the Athonite monks’ prayers had themselves been barren.

In 1522 Varlaam was deposed and Daniel, the new leader of the Possessors, was chosen to replace him as metropolitan. Daniel was Joseph's disciple and his successor at Volokolamsk before being elevated to the metropolitanate. Now he went after Maxim, who had overreached himself by criticizing Vasily III. Daniel used Maxim's indiscretions to win Vasily over. During the winter of 1524-25 Maxim was arrested, and that February he was tried before a court presided over by the metropolitan Daniel and grand prince Vasily.

The list of charges was long. It included accusations such as sorcery and heresy, along with more substantive— and truer—ones including criticizing Vasily, maintaining that the Russian church's separation from the patriarchate of Constantinople was uncanonical, and railing against the corrupt abuses of the Possessors. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Maxim was excommunicated, clapped in irons, and imprisoned deep within the walls of Volokolamsk. There, in solitary confinement, he remained for six years, deprived not only of freedom, communion, and companionship but also of books, pens, ink, and paper. Later that year Vasily got his divorce, and in 1530 an heir, the future Ivan IV (“the Terrible”), was born.

The year after that, Maxim was hauled out and tried again, this time together with Vassian, who would seem to be the main target of this second round of persecution. Now Vassian himself was sent to Volokolamsk, while Maxim was moved to a different monastery, where his treatment gradually improved.
He was allowed books and writing equipment, and after a time was permitted to take communion. The double trial and condemnation of Vassian and Maxim effectively marked the end of the Non-Possessor movement as a political force.