those that did, or that observed cross processions and other rituals, were exposed to
a dynamic message about faith—one that promoted loyalty to Church and state,
one that militated against moral excess, one that turned inward for spirituality, one
that saw saintliness in mundane good works, and one that alleviated their anxieties
about sickness, death, and the mysteries of life.
POLICING THE FAITH INTO SCHISM
The Church was constantly concerned that laymen did indeed not understand the
faith well nor practice it accurately. It policed the faith in two ways in these centuries:
judicial processes against those deemed heretics and reform programs to improve
religious life. Freethinking tended to enter the trading cities of Novgorod and Pskov
from their contacts with Europe, and“heresies”are recorded there since the
fourteenth century. Although some of these ideas spread to Moscow elites, they
were not broad popular movements. Some persecuted“heretics”challenged the
Church’s sacramental claims (strigol’niki), others criticized secular claims to power
over the Church, others earned the epithet“Judaizers”for anti-Trinitarian, ration-
alist and anti-clerical beliefs and others opposed changes in iconography. For trials of
heretics, hierarchs met in council, often with secular rulers, and they did not hesitate
to execute serious offenders. But David Goldfrank argues that the Church became
less harsh in punishing heretics in the sixteenth century, preferring, for example,
corrective, penitential monastic exile for religious offenders. That pattern continued
through the far more turbulent seventeenth century, as we will see in this chapter,
when the Church did not hesitate to execute those who refused to recant, but
preferred to offer forgiveness to those willing to accept spiritual rehabilitation.
The Church’s efforts to police belief and improve practice by institutional reform
had little success in the early modern centuries. Its principal anxieties and reform
proposals were enunciated at the 1551 Stoglav Church Council and repeated in
subsequent church councils in 1620 and the 1650s. One area of concern was the
proper representation of the faith: the Stoglav Council spoke out against innov-
ations in icon painting and in the shape of the crucifix (preferring the eight-pointed
cross). Another was ritual: the Council criticized simultaneous reading of services to
speed them up and ruled on the proper form of certain rituals (the sign of the cross
should be done with twofingers; two alleluias, not three, were mandated in a
particular prayer). Standardization of liturgical books was a major issue, a problem
recognized already in 1518 when a learned monk from Mount Athos, Maxim the
Greek (Michael Trivolis), was invited to Moscow to standardize religious texts. His
suggestions, in line with contemporary Greek scholarship, were rejected and earned
him condemnation as a heretic in 1525 and 1531; he died in confinement in 1556.
The Stoglav Church Council did not propose a better path to standardization, but
recognized the problem.
Moral behavior was a wide-ranging concern for the 1551 Council: it condemned
bishops’officials for corrupt treatment of laymen; castigated priests for poor educa-
tion, drunkenness, and shoddy performance of liturgy; condemned monasteries
254 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801