embracing conquered lands into the Muscovite state) and in the mid-seventeenth
(to nationalize, as it were, some of the local cults). On the other hand, in the
seventeenth century the Church, with reformist zeal, also embarked on widespread
review of local claims to saintliness and miracle working: they rejected many local
cults as more reflective of a town’s or monastery’s desire to profit from pilgrims than
evidence of the revered person’s sanctity. They declared some“miracle-working
icons”fraudulent, all to the discontent of locals.
New ways of thinking about self, God, and society, and new ways of depicting the
spiritual, came from Ukraine to Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century,
with impact on elite and lay religious life. As we have seen, from the late sixteenth
century the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had been under siege,first by successful
Protestant missionaries and then by even more successful Counter-Reformation
Jesuit proselytizing. Many Orthodox magnates converted to Catholicism (pushed
by the Polish Vasa kings’refusal to award high office to non-Catholics); Ukrainian
Orthodox clergy, townsmen, and some lesser nobles responded by meeting the
Jesuits with sophisticated polemics and reviving their Church pastorally. They
published vernacular service books, catechisms, and pietistic works to rally the
faithful, in the process introducing new ideas, texts, and artistic imagery from the
Catholic West. In thefirst half of the century Ukrainian clerics and Cossack leaders,
eager for Russia’s aid, regularly traveled to Moscow, bringing with them a reformed
faith. After the Cossack Hetmanate of Left Bank Ukraine agreed to become a
protectorate of Russia in 1654, cultural contacts multiplied.
At the tsar’s court in the 1670s–80s, Ukrainian, Belarus’an, and Russian church-
men (Semeon Polotskii, Karion Istomin, Epifanii Slavinetskii, Sylvestr Medvedev)
preached to the tsar’s family (including future regent Sofiia and the future Peter I)
and boyar elite new concepts of spirituality and self that derived from the Jesuit-
based curriculum of Ukrainian schools. As Bushkovitch details, they called people
to a more personal morality, replacing the sixteenth century’s condemnation of
public displays of excess with a focus on vices such as avarice, pride, and lack of
charity. In the political realm, they introduced Aristotelian ideas such as the ruler’s
duty to serve“the common good”and Renaissance concepts of civic virtue; they
validated change and social improvement.
At least in major urban centers, visual expression reflected a more activist,
“humanist”emphasis that also came from the west through Ukraine. A more realistic,
three-dimensional painting style with true perspective and lifelike visages modeled on
baroque Catholic painting appeared in icons and frescos. Church architecture sported
exuberant baroque external ornament and vibrant colors; donors made their tastes
and patronage known, including the tsar’s Naryshkin in-laws.
While courtly art and philosophy probably had little impact beyond the Kremlin
elites, the more personal and domestic spirituality preached in seventeenth-century
hagiography might well have resonated broadly. But one should not assume that all
subjects of the tsar were aware of all these innovations; after all, most parishioners
lived so far away from their parish church that they rarely attended services. In the
absence of parochial schools for the layman and seminary education for parish
priests, parishioners might not have understood the faith well to begin with. But
Varieties of Orthodoxy 253