The Icon and the Axe

The initial reactions of many monasteries had been to lash out in defense of their former privileges, allying themselves at times with those who advanced the claims of another "true" line of tsars. Typical was a monk of Tambov who fled his cloister convinced that the Antichrist had taken the place of the real Peter and was responsible for the murder of Peter's son. Although his prediction proved ill-founded that the end of the world would come early in 1723, he continued to gain monastic followers in the excitable Tambov region and went to Moscow at the time of Peter's death with high hopes of turning Russia back to the true path. Instead, he was arrested and executed, his followers rounded up and mutilated, and his head exhibited in the streets of Tambov by troops from one of the new guards regiments.86

Only after the impossibility of a full return to the old ways had been clearly realized, perhaps, was the way clear for fresh approaches in Russian monasticism. Once all hope was lost of recovering their lost wealth and independence, the Russian monasteries began to return to the long-submerged tradition of the original fourteenth-century monastic pioneers and evangelists. This spiritual revival began quietly in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth, producing a gradual increase in the size of the monastic establishment87 and a deepening of its spiritual life.

The heart of the revival was, once again, the "holy mountain" of Athos and the rediscovery of its still-vigorous traditions of patristic theology and inner spirituality. The man who brought the spirit of Mt. Athos a second time to Russia was Paissius Velichkovsky, the son of a Poltavan

priest and a converted Jewess. Although descended from one of the greatest Ukrainian baroque poets, Paissius was repelled by the "pagan mythology" that he found in this Westernized heritage. Like Maxim the Greek in the sixteenth and Ivan Vyshensky in the seventeenth century, Paissius came to Russia from Athos in the eighteenth century with a simple message: turn back from secularism to the simple ways of the early desert fathers. Like these earlier elders, Paissius was deeply opposed to worldly learning, yet was himself a learned and articulate figure. He began a series of Russian translations of the works of the early fathers-the best and longest collection of patristic writings yet to appear in Russia-and translated the popular Greek collection of ascetic spirituality, the Philokalia.*8

Unlike Maxim or Vyshensky, however, Paissius was the initiator of a movement within the church rather than a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness. He founded a number of new cloisters in Moldavia and southern Russia, and provided them with a series of "Letters of Spiritual Direction" as guides for the purification of the monastic estate. The key to monastic life for Paissius was common obedience to the spiritual elder within a community of ascetic hermits dedicated to the practice of unceasing prayer. The spiritual life was thus seen in hesychastic terms as one of internal prayer and self-discipline; and the "rule" adopted was modeled on that of the early desert fathers. The term pustyn', or desert, increasingly replaced other designations for a monastery as the austere rule of Paissius became more widely accepted.

Even more influential and original was Tikhon Zadonsky, an anguished seeker for a new religious calling in a new kind of world. Born and brought up near St. Petersburg and educated in Novgorod, Tikhon was fully exposed to the new secularizing influences of the capital and also to the new wave of German pietistic thought. Influenced perhaps by the pietistic idea of inward renewal and rededication. Tikhon moved from his high post as suffragan bishop of Novgorod, by way of the bishopric of Voronezh, to a new monastery in a frontier region of the Don. The title of Arndt's influential pietistic tract On True Christianity became the title of Tikhon's own magnum opus on the holy life. In it and in his other writings and sermons Tikhon emphasizes the joys of Christ-like living. At Zadonsk, Tikhon took the role of the spiritual elder out of the narrow confines of the monastery into the world of affairs, becoming the friend and counselor of lay people as well as monastic apprentices.89

The man who carried this revival into the nineteenth century, Seraphim of Sarov, combined Paissius' ascetic and patristic emphases with Tikhon's insistence on self-renunciation and ministering to the people. Seraphim gave up all his worldly goods and even his monastic habit to don a white peasant