reading, responding, or listening. Thus holydays were celebrated with processions
around the church and through public squares; churches were lined with icons and
frescos intended not so much to teach the faith as to open windows to prayer; icons
in homes served the same purpose. Inheriting the saints of early Christianity and
Byzantium and adding its own, Russian Orthodoxy venerated saints through their
icons and relics, often crediting them with“miracle-working”powers.
Orthodoxy lived with a constant tension between inner spirituality—the pursuit
of kenosis through liturgy, ritual, and prayer—and the dogmatic, hierarchical, and
sacerdotal structure of the Church as institution. This tension burst forth period-
ically when some felt the Church had fallen into formalism; such outbursts took the
form of revivals of mystical, contemplative practice. In the 1300s such a revival
swept Byzantium; following Gregory of Palamas, who theorized the presence of
God as“uncreated Light,”it was called hesychasm after its techniques of medita-
tion, which involved a mantra-like chant of the Jesus Prayer and breath control to
achieve states of mystical visions and union with God. Hesychasm reached Russian
monasteries by the 1400s but was not fully integrated into practice, as we discuss in
this chapter. Similarly, in the second half of the eighteenth century another
“hesychast”revival reached Russia, with influences from European Catholicism
and Protestantism, as we discuss in Chapter 20.
THE CHURCH AS INSTITUTION
By 1450 the Russian Orthodox Church had a strong presence at the Moscow court,
the grand princes leaning on the Church for justification and representation of their
power. The metropolitan resided there, as did most of the bishops; major monas-
teries also kept a presence within Kremlin walls. The Church enjoyed exemptions
from secular taxation, administration, and most secular judicial authority save
criminal justice, and jealously guarded its right to judge clergy on virtually all
issues. It also judged the entire population in religious areas, including family law,
marriage, divorce, rape, inheritance and dowry, as well as heresy; it judged its
dependent lay peasants and servants in petty crime or other disputes. For all this
judicial work the 1551“Hundred Chapters”(Stoglav) Church Council decreed a
system of diocesan courts; when in 1649 the state created a Monastic Chancery to
abolish monastic immunities and to try clerics and their dependents for all but
religious crime, the Church fought back and in 1669 forced the abolition of the
new chancery.
Ostensibly the Church was centrally run and powerful; rejecting the Byzantine
Church’s agreement with the Vatican to the short-lived Florence-Ferrara Church
Union (1438–9), in 1448 the Moscow metropolitanate declared itself independent
of Constantinople. That autocephaly was enhanced in 1589 when fellow patriarchs
elevated the Moscow metropolitan to the status of patriarch, a move made in
anticipation of the 1596 Brest Union of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with
Catholicism and in recognition of the fact that Russia was the most powerful
political entity in the Orthodox world. Dynamic leaders such as Patriarchs FilaretVarieties of Orthodoxy 247