The title of this chapter gives us a starting point for understanding the development of the Russian Orthodox Church. Its homeland covers several different countries today that was called the lands of the Rus’. The political and social organization were formed by the Norse from Scandinavia. From Rurik to St. Vladimir the Great, they ruled over the Slavic and some Finnic peoples of Northern Russia and Ukraine. That would make the Normans, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Scandinavians cousins with the modern Russian peoples as well as through royal intermarriage much later in European history. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans and a separated Roman Catholic Church in Italy and in the rest of Europe created the space for Russia to control more of its own interests and spiritual development. Russian history in this chapter is divided into Kievan and then Muscovite Orthodoxy. It indicates a change in the political and religious center of the Rus’ territory.
We’ve also learned before about the importance of the ancient cities of the lands of the Rus’ and Prince Vladimir’s Baptism of the Slavs with Kiev as an important political and spiritual center. The first section of this chapter outlines the political and spiritual background of the metropolia of Kiev. Metropolia means etymologically the mother city. The first metropolitan of Kiev was Michael in the 10th c. We know that Prince Vladimir married into the Byzantine monarchy through Anna. There were parish schools, growing cities, and about 400 churches built by the end of St. Vladimir’s rule with episcopal seats in the cities of Novgorod and Polotsk. The Cathedral of Holy Wisdom was built in Novgorod as well as in Kiev. The process and details of how the Rus’ became Christian is covered in the famous literary works of the Tale of Bygone Years and Metropolitan Hilarion’s Sermon on Law and Grace. Just as many nations before had done, the rulers of the Rus’ reinterpreted past history to show how God’s providence ruled and ordered events in favor of one’s kingdom, people, and Christianization. In a time when freedom of religion, democratic elections, and human rights didn’t exist as a concept, “mass baptisms” in ancient Russia is recorded as a success and gift from God. It is the near total replacement of Slavic paganism with Orthodoxy. Even in the 12th c. most of the metropolitans “of Kiev and all the Rus’” were Greeks. Over time, Greek hierarchy were replaced by native Russians.
In the 13th c. Batu Khan and the Golden Horde moved west into Russian lands and cities sacking towns and ushering in the period called the Mongol-Tatar Yoke. The steppe lands of Eastern Europe and Central Asia have seen this pattern over millennia, and it’s in fact from the very same source that the Indo-Europeans of ancient times entered Europe and changed the indigenous cultures already there. In the west, the Catholic Teutonic knights, being an extension of the Pope’s hand, posed another threat to Russia, a physical and spiritual danger of converting to Rome’s faith and forgetting Orthodoxy .The reason Russia has always needed a strong ruler is that it’s always poised to handle threats from either its western or eastern flank. So, Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod decided not to prolong a war with the Tatars but to maintain a diplomatic relationship with them. There was a crusade ordered by Pope Gregory IX against the Russians and Finns carried out by the Swedish monarchy. Alexander defeated the Swedes and the Livonian order at Lake Peipus. He also rejected offers to conversion from Pope Innocent IV through letters and cardinals sent in person to persuade his kingdom to become incorporated under the Pope and western powers. It seems from this chapter that Metropolitan Hilarion describes the rule of the Mongol-Tatars as devastating but overall less intrusive into the religious life of Russian Christians than would be the direct control of Roman Catholicism and other European monarchs who constantly had an interest in converting Russians just as they had in the councils of Ferrrara-Florence and Lyons. The Golden Horde seemed to have more interest in collecting taxes than reforming Russian churches or converting them like the Ottomans or the Teutonic orders. But both princes and metropolitans were required to obtain a yarlyk (permission) through the Mongol bureaucracy before acting in ecclesiastical or governmental offices.
In the 14th c., Metropolitan Peter and his successors moved to Moscow, and it became “de facto” center of metropolia. The shift from Kiev to Moscow was largely due to the city’s growth and importance when Grand Prince (a Tatar title) Ivan I Kalita ruled. It was also a strong city to begin the fight against Mongol-Tatar rule. Also, spiritual figures such as holy Prince Dimitry Donskoy, St. Alexei and St. Sergius of Radonezh lived during the Muscovite period. They represent in Russian fashion the holy ruler of the state, the rudder of the Church, and the ascetic visionary of the deep forests of Moscow. But Constantinople in the 14th c. still exerted much influence on the Russian Church in its patriarchs and metropolia. Moscow really attained its independence when Constantinople fell in the 15th c. But the Greeks still held control over Kievan metropolia. They set up Patriarch Gregory Mamas in 1458, for example. Moscow became independent from Constantinople while Kiev remained in the hands of the Greeks as distinct metropolia until 1685 when Kiev was incorporated into the Moscow patriarchate. There seems to be both a good precedent for both the right of the Greeks in Kiev to keep it separate as well as the cultural connection Moscow has with the metropolia of the Kievan Rus’. The rest of the chapter deals with very specific cultural and religious controversies in Russia in the 16th -17th c. One of them is particularly bloody that involved the debate about whether monastics or the monarch should own lands. Also important to note is that when Fedor replaced Ivan the Terrible in the 16th c., the patriarchate was established according to the canons of the Church whereas the earlier autocephalous actions were done without the approval of Constantinople. This idea of Church independence may seem odd to western Christians. But it isn’t much different than the interactions and desires of Christian kings and princes in Europe who had to politick with the Pope to gain the influence they sought over their lands and people, and that pattern culminates in violence and schisms in the 16th , 17th and 18th c. Europe, which we call the Enlightenment — a movement so anti-thetical and hostile to monarchy as a legitmate and stable form of government and focal point of religious exemplitude. The expectation in previous centuries was that a ruler lived upto the moral standards of the majoritiy religion. In our time, however, it’s entirely the opposite. We can keep our religious convinctions and faith private in our jobs and offices. That’s not anyone’s fault except the very structure of the government that has been established. One revolutionary basis of this foundation is the separation of church and state, public and private life. As long as that religion wasn’t Roman Catholic, that separation was favorable to most Americans. Clovis and Charlemagne set the example of kings ruling more by individual charisma and military leadership. Byzantium had a long imperial lifespan not only because it inherited what Rome conquered before but because people were loyal to an idea, a philosophy, and the Orthodox faith, not charismatic individuals or military might alone. It didn’t matter if a king was heretical or not because the people weren’t loyal to individuals but to the ideas themselves. To appreciate how many Christians used to think up until recently, we should consider that the kingdom was part of the fabric of one’s identity, a completely strange concept to us. Not because it was about politics, since the royal families were above politics, though not above immorality, intrigue and violence. But no one bought the throne, but they were born into it; wise rulers have huge potential that other systems just cannot produce. The Enlightenment, which deserves to be beaten like a dead horse, started the process of dechristianization, actually persecuting many Christians with mockery, at the same time as it was on its path of demonarchizing European cultures with its ultimate bloody victory over Christian monarchs in the world wars and revolutions. It’s worth noting too that Orthodox history may seem capricious like we tend to think of medieval history since it’s largely a monarchical or imperial world, and often a very religious environment. But it isn’t really more or less chaotic than the democratization of the globe in our own times or the never-ending upheavals that political referenda and elections can have on civil and religous life. This blog and Metropolitan Hilarion’s volumes are not meant to be an easy apology for monarchy - it’s often quite a ridiculous idea to most people in modern societies anyway. But monarchical government is a large part of Orthodox history, although there isn’t any necessity that it should be in the future. Its influence shouldn’t be overlooked, and it shouldn’t be so quickly dismissed as a backward and unimportant factor in the creation of many Orthodox countries and an enduring identity always awaiting a renewal.
The last section of this chapter deals with what Metropolitan Hilarion refers to as “Orthodoxy in Western Rus’” by which he means primarily the country of Ukraine and the Ukrainian ethnos. The Union of Brest was basically an attempt again by influences and parties from the Pope in Rome to convert Orthodox Christians in Eastern Europe. The idea is called Uniatism. It’s a pejorative term that entails Orthodox Christians keeping their outward Byzantine rite while submitting all jurisdictional and doctrinal authority to the Pope. It goes far back to 1458 when civil unrest exploded in Russia at the consecration of metropolitan Gregory in Rome. In the 1460s the Russian Orthodox in the Great Principality of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland refused to recognize the Union of Ferrara-Florence. The Kievan metropolia were consolidated back into the Moscow patriarchate in 1685, and the Patriarch Dionysios IV of Constantinople consented to this union of Kiev and Moscow.