The Icon and the Axe

A new polyglot caste of tsarist officials was being assembled by the new head of the Tsar's royal household, Bogdan Khitrovo, a previously obscure war hero and court intriguer who bore within his name the label "guileful" (khitry). Two important new appointments of 1667 illustrate the growth of a state servitor class plus royaliste que le roi. Metropolitan Theodosius, a displaced Serb who had formerly been custodian of the Tsar's burial places in the Archangel Cathedral of the Kremlin, was named as the administrator of Nikon's patriarchal properties. Afanasy Ordyn-Nashchokin, a Westernized professional diplomat from Pskov, was made head of the ambassadorial chancery, which at last acquired the character of a full-fledged foreign ministry.74

The subservient nature of the new Church hierarchy is well illustrated by the two figures who drew up the agenda of the 1666-7 councils: Paissius Ligarides and Simeon Polotsky. The former was a Catholic-educated Greek priest who had corresponded secretly for some years with the Roman Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and had come to Russia as the disputed metropolitan of the meaningless Orthodox see of Gaza. Ligarides' tangled history is so full of deceit and intrigue that it is hard to ascribe anything but opportunistic motives to him. He had passionately

defended Greek ways in Rumania, where he had gone in the late forties to set up a Greek school at Jassy and help produce a Rumanian edition of the basic Byzantine digest of canon law. Now, however, he appeared as a savage attacker of the Grecophile Nikon; and his efforts after the council were principally devoted to advancing Alexis' claim to the vacant throne of Poland.75

Polotsky is a more serious figure: an articulate White Russian priest who wrote the Sceptre of Rule, a stern guide to ecclesiastical discipline which received the formal endorsement of the 1667 council. Later in the same year he became court preacher and tutor to the Tsar's children. For the secular occasion of New Year's Day, 1667, Polotsky published The Eagle of the Russias, an elaborate secular panegyric to his imperial benefactor, replete with baroque decorations, anagrams on the Tsar's name, and praise above that given to Hercules, Alexander the Great, and Titus. All this adulation merely echoes his earlier poem, which called Alexis the sun and his wife the moon and ended:

May thou be victorious over all the world And may the world And faith by means of thee.76

Polotsky's knowledge of classical political philosophy enabled him to give a sophisticated secular defense of tsarist absolutism. The scholastic method acquired in his Kievan education rapidly became a fashionable idiom of the new church hierarchy in Moscow, thanks to such works of the late sixties as The Key of Reason by Rector Goliatovsky of the Kiev Academy and Peace with God for Man by "the Russian Aristotle," Archimandrite Gizel of the Monastery of the Caves.

Gizel's Sinopsis, an officially commissioned history of Russia that underwent five editions by the end of the century, flatly attributed the victory of Muscovy over Poland to God's preference for absolute autocracy over the divided sovereignty of a republic. "Hetmans" and "senators" had led Poland "from tsardom to princedom, and from princedom to voevodism." But the Tsar of Muscovy has now delivered "the mother of Russian cities" from its bondage to Catholic Poland, and emerged as "the strongest of monarchs." True Christian Empire has thus returned to the East for the first time since the fall of Byzantium "as if the eagle had recaptured its youth."77

Polotsky also popularized in Moscow this new sense of imperial destiny and the new language of scholastic disputation which the Kiev academy had introduced. He was, moreover, an aggressive spokesman for new, Western art forms. His ornate syllabic verse and decorative book illustrations establish him as a master of the baroque. In 1667 Polotsky

wrote a memorandum to the Tsar, setting forth a new and more permissive theory of iconography, which was upheld during the following two years in a series of pronouncements by visiting patriarchs, by the leading practitioner of the new methods of painting, Simon Ushakov, and by the Tsar himself.78 Citing classical as well as Christian authorities, Polotsky contended that creative talent was a gift of God and must be used inventively; that icons could convey the physical realities and inner feeling of a given subject along with its traditional, stylized form. In the same year, 1667, Alexis went even further, hiring Nikon's former portrait painter as the official painter of the royal family. Within a few months illustrations from the German Piscator Bible were adorning the walls of his son Alexis' apartment, and a new illustrated manuscript even depicted the long-proscribed figure of God the Father-as a fat and prosperous figure reclining on a divan.79