Russia under the Old regime

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reconfirmed the inalienability and sacredness of ecclesiastical holdings. But the issue would not die quite so easily. Nil's speech was only the opening shot in a war between two clerical parties later labelled 'anti-property' (nestiazhateli) and 'pro-property' (liubostiazhateli) which went on until the middle of the sixteenth century.

The quarrel was not, in the first instance, over politics; at issue were differing conceptions of the church. Nil and the other Transvolga Elders envisaged an ideal church, unencumbered by worldly responsibilities, serving as a spiritual and moral beacon in a dark and evil world. One of the leading figures in Nil's party was Maxim the Greek, a native of Corfu who had studied in Italy and there fallen under the influence of Savonarola. Having come to Russia to help translate Greek books, he was appalled by the debased quality of the clergy. Why were there in Russia no Samuels to stand up to Saul and no Nathans to tell the truth to erring David, he asked; and the answer, given by Kurbskii or whoever it was that wrote the epistles to Ivan iv credited to him was: because the Russian clergy were so concerned with their worldly possessions that they 'lay motionless, fawning in every way on authority and obliging it so as to preserve their holdings and acquire still miore'.6 There was implied in this argument a clear political message, namely that only a poor church could look the tsar straight in the eye and serve as the nation's moral conscience. The conservative, 'pro-property' party, on the contrary, wanted a church which collaborated intimately with the monarchy and shared with it responsibility for keeping the realm truly Christian. To be able to do that, it needed income, because in fact only financial independence freed the clergy for excessive concern, with worldly affairs. Each party could draw on historic precedent, the former with reference to early Christian practices, the latter by appeals to the Byzantine tradition. The monarchy's stand in this dispute was ambivalent. It did want to reclaim the church's land, and with that in mind it encouraged at first the 'anti-property' group. But it preferred their opponents' political philosophy which viewed the church as the collaborator of the state. Allusions to Nathan and Samuel certainly could not appeal to patrimonial rulers who desired no independent institutions in their realm, least of all a church which took it upon itself to act as the nation's conscience. In the end, by skilful manoeuvring, the monarchy got the best of both worlds: it first supported the 'pro-property' faction; then, having with its help liquidated the proponents of an independent, spiritual church, reversed itself and, adopting the recommendations of the defeated 'anti-property' faction, proceeded to sequester church lands.

The leader and chief ideologist of the conservatives was Joseph, abbot of the Volokolamsk monastery. His was a very unusual monastic estab-