and convents for lax discipline and sexual misbehavior by monks and nuns. The
council directed particular animus against folk belief: the bishops accused both
clergy and laity of mixing folk superstition with Christian belief and practice; they
condemned sexual license and unseemly dancing and singing by minstrels at holy-
day celebrations that often coincided with winter and summer solstice or at other
moments in the agricultural or seasonal calendar. Nevertheless, the Stoglav Council
proposed few concrete measures—it advocated not a school system (a proposal put
forth already in the 1490s by the learned Novgorod Archbishop Gennadii), but
simply that master teachers should teach priests; it proposed supervisors to rein in
corrupt diocesan tithe collectors, but this idea went nowhere. It mandated the
creation of priest supervisors to improve the moral and spiritual performance of
parish priests; this latter proposal was not widely implemented until the Church
Council of 1675 revived it, and even then the supervisors did not provide rigorous
oversight.
The seventeenth-century Church made some progress on the Stoglav’s reform
programs. Various stimuli towards reform came together in thefirst half of the
century: Greek churchmen brought books and ideas to Russia with the metropol-
itan’s elevation to patriarch in 1589; the Time of Troubles brought Russian elites in
close contact with Polish Catholics, particularly in the person of Fedor Nikitich
Romanov, father to Tsar Michael Romanov. A powerful boyar rival of Boris
Godunov, he had been forcibly tonsured in 1601 and was held in Polish captivity
from 1610; when he returned to Moscow in 1619, he was immediately made
patriarch and served as de facto co-ruler with his young son (born 1596) until his
death in 1633. As Patriarch Filaret, Fedor Romanov was not only a shrewd secular
politician, but also a vigorous proponent of the Church’s economic power and
political autonomies. At this same time, influence wasflooding to Muscovy from
the reformed Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Afinal new influence were the visits,
throughout the seventeenth century, of patriarchs and monks of the worldwide
Orthodox diaspora, seeking alms.
All these forces combined for tremendous spiritual and institutional ferment in
the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. From about 1640 it was
focused in the Kremlin in a group of learned churchmen who came to be called (by
modern historians)“Zealots of Piety.”Their concerns fell into two areas, epitom-
ized roughly by two groups, although there was much overlap. Thefirst concern,
reminiscent of the Stoglav fathers, was the moral and spiritual quality of lay
religious life; this theme was promoted by learned parish priests and dynamic
preachers (Avvakum, Ivan Neronov, Daniil, Loggin). They advocated changes in
the liturgy, such as the introduction of sermons to instruct the faithful and the
abolition of practices used to shorten lengthy services, such as simultaneous reading
by multiple priests that rendered a service incomprehensible. On sermons they were
successful in principle, but it took almost two centuries for sermonizing to become
regular practice by parish priests. Like the Stoglav Council, these churchmen railed
against folk belief and pagan practices, minstrels, drinking, tobacco, and other
moral offenses; in this they won Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s support, expressed in
state decrees against minstrels and moral offenses in the 1640s.
Varieties of Orthodoxy 255