§ 73.4. The Russian Church.—Photius speaks in A.D. 866 of the Conversion of the Russians as an accomplished fact. In the days of the Grand Duke Igor, about A.D. 900, there was a cathedral at Kiev. Olga, Igor’s widow, made a journey to Constantinople and was there baptized in A.D. 955 under the name Helena. But her son Swätoslaw could not be persuaded to follow her example. The aged princess is said according to the report of German chroniclers to have at last besought the emperor Otto I. to send German missionaries, and that in response Adalbert of Treves, afterwards archbishop of Magdeburg, undertook a missionary tour, from which, however, he returned without having achieved his purpose, after his companions had been slain. Olga’s grandson, Vladimir, “Equal of the Apostles,” was the first to put an end to paganism in the country. According to a legend adorned with many romantic episodes he sent ten Boyars in order to see how the different religions appeared as conducted in their chief seats. They were peculiarly impressed with the beautiful service in the church of Sophia. In A.D. 988, in the old Christian commercial town Cherson, shortly before conquered by him, Vladimir was baptized with the name Basil, and at the same time he received the hand of the princess Anna. The idols were now everywhere broken up and burnt; the image of Perun was dragged through the streets tied to the tail of a horse, beaten with clubs and thrown into the Dnieper. The inhabitants of Kiev were soon afterwards ordered to gather at the Dnieper and be baptized. Vladimir knelt in prayer on the banks and thanked God on his knees, while the clergy, standing in the stream, baptized the people. On the further organization of the Russian church Anna exercised a powerful and salutary influence. Vladimir died in A.D. 1015. His son Jaroslaw I., the Justinian of the Russians, attended to the religious needs of his people by the erection of many churches, monasteries and schools, improved the worship, enriched the psalmody, awakened a taste for art and patronized learning. The monastery of Petchersk at Kiev was the birthplace of Russian literature and a seminary for the training of the clergy. Here, at the end of the 11th century, the monk Nestor wrote his annals in the language of the country. The metropolitan of Kiev was the spiritual head of the whole Russian church under the suzerainty of the patriarch of Constantinople. After the great fire of A.D. 1170, which laid the glory of Kiev in ashes, the residency of the Grand Duke was transferred to Vladimir. In A.D. 1299 the metropolitan also took up his abode there, but only for a short time; for in A.D. 1328 the Grand Duke Ivan Danilowitsch settled at Moscow and the metropolitan went there along with him. The patriarch of Constantinople on his own authority consecrated in A.D. 1353 a second Russian metropolitan for the forsaken Kiev, to whom he assigned the Southern and Western Russian provinces which since A.D. 1320 had been under the rule of the pagan Lithuanians. This schism was overcome in A.D. 1380 on the next occasion of a vacancy in the Moscow chair by the appointment to Moscow of the Kiev metropolitan. But the Lithuanian government, which had meanwhile become Catholic (§ 93, 15), compelled the South Russian bishops in A.D. 1414 to choose a metropolitan of their own independent of Moscow, who in A.D. 1594 with his whole diocese at the Synod of Brest (§ 151, 3) attached himself to Rome.The primate of Moscow continued under the jurisdiction of Constantinople until, in A.D. 1589, the patriarch Jeremiah II. (§ 139, 26), on the occasion of his being personally present at Moscow voluntarily declared the Russian church independent of him, and himself consecrated Job, the metropolitan of that time, its first patriarch.[197]
§ 73.5. Russian Sects.—About A.D. 1150, the monk Martin, an Armenian by birth, insisted upon a liturgical reform that seemed to him most necessary. Among other things he declared that it was sinful to lead the subject of baptism to the baptismal font from right to left or from south to north; the direction should be reversed following the course of the sun. But it seemed to him most important that a reform should be made in the hitherto prevalent mode of making the sign of the cross. Instead of symbolizing, as up to this time had been done, the two natures in Christ and the three persons in the Trinity by bending the little finger and the thumb, and making the sign of the cross with other three, they made this sign with the fore and middle fingers. For nearly ten years this monk was allowed to disseminate his errors unchecked, till a Council obliged him to retract. Two hundred years later a certain Carp Strigolnik at Novgorod in A.D. 1375 publicly accused the clergy of sinning, because, in accordance with an old custom, they took fees in assisting in the consecration of bishops, and demanded of all orthodox Christians that they should separate from them as unworthy of their office. But he, along with many of his followers, was mobbed by the adherents of the opposite party and drowned in the Volga. More dangerous than all the earlier sectaries was the so-called Jewish sect at the end of the 15th century, which sought to reduce orthodox Christianity to a rationalistic cabbalistic Ebionitism. About A.D. 1470 the Jew Zachariah arrived at Novgorod. He won two distinguished priests Alexis and Denis to his views, that Christ was nothing more than an ordinary Jewish prophet, that the Mosaic law is a divine institution and is of perpetual obligation. By the advice of the Jew the two priests continued to profess the greatest zeal for the ceremonial laws of the Church, and by strict observance of the fasts obtained a great reputation for piety, but secretly they wrought all the more successfully for the dissemination of their sect among all classes of the people. When the czar, Ivan III., in A.D. 1480, came to Novgorod, they made so favourable an impression on him that he took them with him to Moscow, where they reaped a rich harvest for their secret doctrine. They succeeded through their influence with the czar in placing at the head of the whole Russian church a zealous proselyte for their sect in the archimandrite Zosima. Meanwhile at Novgorod iconoclast excesses were committed by the sectaries, which the archbishop of that place, Gennadius, set himself to suppress by imposing generally mild penalties. His successor Joseph Ssanin proceeded much more energetically. He did not rest till the czar in A.D. 1504 called a Church Synod at Novgorod which condemned the chiefs of the sect to be burnt, and their followers to be shut up in monasteries. Even the metropolitan Zosima as a favourer of the sect was sent to a monastery; but Alexis managed so cleverly that he retained his office and dignity to the end of his life.Secret remnants of this sect, as well as of the two previously referred to, continued to exist for a long time, even down to the 17th century, when sectarianism in the Russian Church made again a new departure (§ 163, 10).
§ 73.6. Romish Efforts at Union.—From a very early time Rome cast a covetous glance at the young Russian church, and she spared neither delicate hints nor attempts to subdue by force by the aid of Danes, Swedes, Livonians and at a later time, the Poles. In order to avert this danger and to obtain from the West assistance against the oppressive yoke of the Mongols, A.D. 1234-1480, the Grand Duke Jaroslav [Jaroslaw] II. of Novgorod was not averse to a union. His son Alexander succeeded him in A.D. 1247. By a glorious victory over the Swedes in A.D. 1240, on the Neva, he won for himself the surname Newsky, and in A.D. 1242 he defeated the Livonians on the ice of Lake Peipus. Pope Innocent IV. who had already in A.D. 1246 nominated Arch bishop Albert Suerbeer (§ 93, 12) a legate to Russia with the power to erect bishoprics there, addressed an earnest exhortation to the young prince in A.D. 1248 with promises of help against the Mongols, urging him to go in the footsteps of his father and to secure his own and his subjects’ salvation by doing what his father had promised. The Grand Duke referred to the wisest men of the land and answered the Pope: From Adam to the flood, from that to the Confusion of languages, etc., down to Constantine and the seventh œcumenical Council, we know the true history of the Church, but yours we do not wish to acknowledge. Alexander Newsky died in A.D. 1263, and has been ever since venerated by his country as a national hero and by his Church as a national saint. The prospects of the Roman Curia were more favourable during the 14th century owing to the Lithuanian and Polish supremacy in South and West Russia, and by the schism of the Russian Church into Kiev and Moscow primacies. In those Southern and Western provinces there was originally less disinclination to Rome than in Moscow. Still even here we meet during the 15th century in the metropolitan Isidore, born in Thessalonica, a prelate who made everything work toward a union with Rome. When the Union Synod of A.D. 1438 was to meet at Ferrara (§ [67, 6]), he represented to the Grand Duke Vassili that it was his duty to appear there. He gave a hesitating and unwilling consent. At the Council Isidore along with Bessarion showed himself a zealous promoter of the union. He returned in A.D. 1441 as cardinal and papal legate. But when at the first public service in Moscow he read aloud the union documents, the Grand Duke had him imprisoned and banished to a monastery. He escaped from his prison and died in Rome in A.D. 1643.—Continuation, § 151, 3.
SECOND DIVISION.
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE GERMAN AND ROMAN CHURCH DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.[198]
§ 74. Character and Divisions of this Period of the Development.
With the historically significant appearance of the Germanic peoples, from whose blending with the old Celtic and Latin races of the conquered countries the Romance group of nationalities has its origin, there begins a new phase in the historical development of the world and the church. The so-called migration of the nations produced an upheaval and revolution among the very foundations and springs of history such as have never since been seen. For a similar significance cannot be ascribed to the appearance at a somewhat later period of a motley crowd of Slavic tribes and a detached contingent of the Turanian-Altaic race (Finns, Magyars, etc.), because the stream of their development ran in the same channel. Thus the appearance of the Germans forms the watershed between the old world and the new. This dividing boundary, however, is not a straight line; for the shoots of the old world run on for centuries alongside of and among the young growths of the new world. In so far as those remnants of the old have no relation to the new and work out uninfluenced by their surroundings their own material in their own way, the history of their developments has no place here; but even these demand consideration at this point in so far as they affect the development of the new world as a means of educating and moulding, arresting and perverting. Just as the history of the church and the world as a whole is distributed into ancient and modern, so the special history of the Germano-Roman world can and must be distributed into ancient and modern, the dividing boundary of which is the Reformation of the 16th century. The earlier of these two phases of history presents itself to us with a Janus-head, whose two faces are directed the one to the ancient, the other to the modern world. This follows from the fact that the groups of peoples referred to did not require any longer to pursue the weary way of their development on their own charges, but rather entered upon the spiritual heritage of the defunct ancient world, and were able by means thereof more quickly and surely to grow to the maturity of their own proper and independent rank and culture. The Roman and, for some branches of the Slavic races, also the Byzantine, church was the bearer and medium of this spiritual heritage, and as such became teacher and disciplinarian of the young world. The Reformation is the emancipation from the administrator of discipline, whose leading strings were cast off by the youth when he reached the maturity of man’s estate. It is the assertion of the German nation that it had reached its intellectual majority.
§ 74.1. The Character of Mediæval History.—As its name implies the mediæval period of church history is one of transition from the old to the new. The old is the now completed development of Christianity under the moulding influences of the ancient Greek and Roman world; the new is the complete incorporation of the special forms of life and culture that characterize the new peoples, who are placed by means of the migration of the nations in the foreground of history. But since the peculiar culture of these nations was first present only potentially and as a capacity, and was to realize itself first through the influence of the early Christian culture, between the old and the new a middle and intermediate age intervened, the extent of which was just that influence of the old completed culture upon the new developing culture. This conflict during the whole course of the Middle Ages was carried on by those powerful waves of action and reaction (formation, deformation, reformation), which, however, amid the ferment of the times displayed an ever varying mixing of the one with the other. The Middle Ages have brought forth the most magnificent phenomena, the papacy, the monastic system, scholasticism, etc., but characteristic of them all is that crude blending of the three kinds of movement named above, which hindered its effectiveness and led to its own deterioration. First in the beginning of the 16th century did the reformatory endeavours become so mature and strong that it could assume a purer form and carry out its efforts with success. With this too we reach the end of the Middle Ages and witness the birth of the modern world.
§ 74.2. Periods in the Church History of the German-Roman Middle Ages.—The first regular period is marked by the end of the Carolingian age, which may be regarded as completed by the dying out of the German Carolingians in A.D. 911. The movement in all the chief departments of the church was hitherto regular and unbroken: before Charlemagne an ascending one, during his reign reaching the summit, and after his death declining. It is the universal German period of history. The fundamental idea of the Carolingian dynasty, which survived even its weakest representatives, was no other than the combination of all German, Roman and Slavic nationalities under the sceptre of one German empire. The last German Carolingian carried this idea with him to the grave. The powerful impulse present even in the 9th century toward national separation and the dismemberment of the Carolingian empire into independent Germanic, Romanic and Slavic nations has since asserted its irresistible power. But with the Carolingian empire the Carolingian epoch of civilization also came to an end. And even the glory of the papacy, whose intrigues had undermined the empire, because it had thus snapped the branch on which it sat, now sank into the lowest depths of weakness and corruption. When we take a general survey of the beginning of the 10th century, we find on all sides, in church and state, in secular and spiritual governments, in science, culture and art, the creations of Charlemagne overthrown, and a seculum obscurum introduced from which amid great oppression and savagery, emerge the conditions, earnests and germs of a new golden age.—A second period is marked out, in quite a different fashion, by the age of Pope Boniface VIII. or the beginning of the 14th century. Up to this time Germany stood distinctly in the foreground both of the history of the world and of the church; but the unhappy conflict of Boniface with Philip the Fair of France placed the papacy at the mercy of French policy, and so henceforth in all the movements of Church history France stands in the front. The pontificate of Boniface forms a turning point also for the historical development within the church itself. The most vast and influential products of mediæval ecclesiasticism are the papacy, monasticism and scholasticism. The period before Boniface is characterized by the growth and flourishing of these; the period after Boniface by their decay and deterioration. The reformatory current, too, which permeated the whole of the Middle Ages, has in each of these two periods its own distinctive character. Before Boniface those representatives of the dominant ecclesiastical system were themselves inspired by a powerful reformatory spirit working its way up from the great and widespread depravation of the 10th century, accompanied, however, by a hierarchical lust of power far beyond the limits justifiable on evangelical principles. The evangelical reformatory endeavours again directed against those representatives of ecclesiasticism are still relatively few and isolated and find but a slight echo, while as their caricature we see alongside of them heretical extravagances which have scarcely ever had their like in history. Toward the end of the first period, however, this relation begins to be reversed. The papacy, monasticism and scholasticism becoming more and more deteriorated are the patrons of every sort of deterioration within the church. The revolutionary heretical movement is indeed overcome, but all the more powerfully, generally and variedly does the evangelical reformatory movement, though still always burdened with much that was confused and immature, assert itself independently of and over against those ecclesiastical principalities, without being able, however, to exert upon them any abiding influence.—Thus our phase of development is divided into three periods: the period from the 4th to the 9th cent. (till A.D. 911); the period from the 10th to the 13th cent. (A.D. 911-1294); and the period of the 14th and 15th cent. (A.D. 1294-1517).