Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/113

 Rh who traced his descent from Guedymin, a near kinsman of the reigning house, continued a man of the world. A statesman and diplomatist, it was only after a most brilliant career, and even then by force majeure, and in consequence of a sudden loss of favour, that he assumed the monkish garb in 1499. Old ties bound him to a circle in which freedom of thought prevailed, almost to the point of heresy, and his forced stay at Biélooziéro brought him into contact with Nil Sorski. Summoned to Moscow for the conciliable of 1503, he boldly espoused the cause of the niéstjatiéli, placing at its service a skill and energy which the hermit of Volok lacked, and a literary talent which, though he was no more than a popularizer of other men’s ideas, gave him a high rank among the few writers Russia then possessed. After Sorski's death, Vassiane found a fighting comrade in the person of Maximus the Greek, whose labours as a corrector had led him to seek out other elements of moral corruption, and who, in the heat of his discussions with local and foreign heretics, had gone so far as to echo the Hussite view as to Church property. Joseph Volotski had followed Nil to the grave in 1515, but his partizans, the Iosiflianié, as they were called, still held firm, and at the conciliable of 1523 Maximus, in his turn, received a sentence, the imposition of which was rendered easier by some translating blunders due to the weakness of his scientific methods and his ignorance of the Russian language. Then it was that he met Vassiane Patrikiév, himself exiled and under sentence, at the monastery of Volok (1531), and the rest of his life was dragged out in prison cloisters. 'We kiss your bonds, but we can do nothing for you,' wrote the Metropolitan Macarius, a more wily diplomatist than even Vassaine himself, whose skill enabled him to play a dubious part between the two camps.

But the struggle continued and its borders widened. Among the men sentenced by the concilable of 1531 there was a prior of the Troïtsa called Artemi, who, like all professors of the doctrine of the Iosiflianié, objected to the putting to death of heretics, and in this resembled the 'monks from beyond the Volga,' who held the same view. 'We have no right to judge these unhappy beings,' wrote one of these hermits; 'all we can do is to pray for them.' A development of liberal thought, surprising at such a period, occurred in this circle, and Artemi and his disciples simultaneously came into contact with the anti-Catholic movement, which reached them through Poland, where Protestantism was then in full progress, while other opponents of the official Church, soon to be smitten by her thunderbolts, though accepting certain features of the teaching of the hermit of Volok, followed a line of thought that ran parallel with the rationalist movement of the day.