Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/110

 86 attracted attention, and their doctrine then found fresh food in the shape of additions to the ecclesiastical literature—fresh writings, still of Byzantine origin, but conceived in a more independent spirit, which indicated various defects in the religious life, declaimed against an excess of ascetic practices, which was animalizing faith and piety at the expense of their spiritual qualities, and denounced the corruption of the monastic rule. Meanwhile the teachings of certain Byzantine heresiarchs, Pauliciens and Bogomiles, drawn from those of the Gnostics, the Manichæans and the Messalians, began to creep into the country.

On this groundwork a mass of local heresies sprang up, and these were soon generalized under the name of 'judaizing heresies' (jidovstvouiouchtchyié), because certain of their external features were borrowed from some anti-Talmudic Jews or Caraïtes, who took refuge at Novgorod towards the year 1471. Some of these heresiarchs went so far as to adopt the Jewish Easter, the Jewish calendar, and the rite of circumcision. But the general tendency of all these sects was towards rationalism, a common denial of the Trinity, of our Lord's Divinity, of the future life, and of all the external trappings of Christianity. Their appearance certainly did the Orthodox Church a great service. It forced her, in the first place, to a certain exegetical labour, imposed by the necessity for making a fight against her adversaries, and also to some amount of self-examination and an endeavour at internal reform. Thus one religious movement stirred another. The last took two different directions. The correction of the sacred books, on which Maximus the Greek was employed, indicates a desire to parry certain doctrinal criticisms. But monastic life deserved a yet severer censure. I have already endeavoured to set forth this twofold aspect of the religious life, which is set down in letters of fire and branded with a hot iron in Ivan the Terrible's famous writings. Here is a passage from his celebrated letter to the Monastery of St. Cyril, written in 1575:

'Bred up in abstinence from your very childhood, you kill yourselves with privations: loving God, you flee from men; dwelling in solitude and silence, you put away all earthly enjoyments; you mortify your flesh with a cruel hair-shirt, you bind your loins with a harsh belt that wrings all your limbs, and thus you have weakened your very backbones; you have sent all succulent dishes far from your table, so that your dried-up skin clings to your poor bones; you have cast off every earthly thought; the lack of nourishment has dried up the marrow in your bones; your protruding ribs have strangled your stomachs; all your nights have been spent in prayer, and you have wetted your beards with your tears.'