Whether these ideals and moralistic messages penetrated to laymen almost
cannot be known. They were embodied in hagiography, icons, and sermons;
collections of sermons, from great Byzantine saints such as John of Chrysostom
to Moscow’s Metropolitan Daniil, were available to be read. But that eliminated
the illiterate masses. In principle hagiography was a good medium for promoting
lay or religious messages, since saint’s lives were read aloud in daily church services.
In addition to ascetic saints, promoted by the founder’s monastery, Russians also
patronized cults of other kinds of holy figures, evidence perhaps of popular
spirituality. In thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, tales of“holy
fools,”such as St. Michael Klopskii or St. Basil (of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow),
circulated widely. Following the ancient Christian model of a“fool in Christ,”holy
fools lived outlandish lives of extreme poverty, deprivation, and irrational, often
theatrical, behavior. Feared and shunned, they were also revered for their willing-
ness to speak truth to power, whether in scolding people who humiliated them or
exposing corrupt public officials. The popularity of such saints would suggest that
their extreme humanity and vulnerability spoke to people, perhaps in ways that the
ascetic saintly model could not. Icons within reason modeled ideal spirituality;
icons of holy fools showed them disheveled, while the ascetic saint was presented in
modest robes, thin and gaunt, reinforcing the message of both the hesychast and
the cenobitic monastic ideals.
We are still far from lay spirituality, however. It is difficult to see how these ideas
emanating from monasticism couldfilter down to the populace. But in the
seventeenth century, new emphases in icons, saints’cults, hagiography, and ser-
mons suggest some changes in popular belief. After the Time of Troubles
(1605–13), spirituality seems to have moved towards a more personalized faith,
as Paul Bushkovitch argued. In response to enserfment, rising taxes and more
aggressive state intervention in society, new saints’Livesshowcased saints who
represent normal people living lives of piety and good works in home and com-
munity. Iuliana of Murom earned saintly status not as a nun, but as a wife, mother,
and local benefactor, caring for the ill and poor. The semi-mythicalLifeof Sts. Peter
and Fevroniia became quite popular, with folk elements of female power, magic,
and conjugal love. Both theseLivescelebrated women’s spiritual role and depicted a
more inner and more personal piety than seen in theLivesof sixteenth-century
saints. Where St. Sergii was depicted advising princes and performing large public
miracles for large groups of people, Iuliana’s good works were domestic and
individual. A similar piety is evoked in a new profusion of cults of local saints
unremarkable in worldly achievement but revered for their ability to heal. Their
shrines became the sites of posthumous miracles and cycles of miracles done in their
time and posthumously were added to theirLives. Peopleflocked to these shrines,
finding these saints accessible and human compared to the strict and aloof ascetic
saintly model.
The Church responded to this pious enthusiasm by policing sainthood as best it
could, given that the Church lacked the sort of formal procedures for canonization
that the Latin West enjoyed. On the one hand, periodically the Church recognized
new saints, affirming many new cults in the mid-sixteenth century (as a way of
252 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801