Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/55

 Rh even the wearing apparel of his community, and the monks did without kvass, and reduced their own food to the barest necessaries. The establishment of permanent refuges and hospitals within the monasteries dates from this period.

What was wanting to these priests, whose lives were so often heroic, who went from door to door begging the sustenance of thousands of unhappy beings, braved the elements in wild northern countries, or—and that was worse—faced, on the steps of the throne, the rage of Princes? What did they lack to raise them up yet more, to make their churches and their hermitages, like those of Western lands, centres of higher culture or of elementary teaching, to enable them to be, not only the religious teachers, but the educators and civilizers of their people?

History has long since answered this question. They were uneducated.

Up to the Mongol invasion, out of twenty-three Metropolitans holding Russian sees, seventeen were Greeks, and long after that the Greek or Bulgarian element predominated in the composition of the two clergies. Even after Constantinople had ceased to appoint them—that is to say, after the Florentine Union—the Metropolitans were still confirmed in their titles there, and the constant advent of Eastern monks, who came to collect alms in Russia, and the journeys, just as frequent, of Russian pilgrims to the shrines of Mount Athos and other neighbouring sanctuaries, kept up a constant stream of intercourse between the two Churches. Thus the religious life of the country was in perpetual touch with its original source. Now history has taught us what that spring, from which the Europe of the West herself had drunk in former times, had now become. I shall presently have to show what the Russia of the sixteenth century was able to draw from it, what elements of moral and intellectual culture it could supply. I will confine myself, at present, to one fact.

Between 1420 and 1500, the country had seen the rise of 150 new monastic establishments, between 1500 and 1588, of 65 more. Although the English traveller Fletcher exaggerated when he described sixteenth-century Russia as 'a land of monasteries,' it is certain that foundations of that nature did then increase to a relatively considerable extent. To this the extreme liberty in connection with such establishments largely conduced. Any hermit who found means to build a little wooden church or oratory could, if it so pleased him, become a prior, or head of a community. He applied to the Sovereign, to the boïars, or simply to wealthy persons, for a gift of land, and the piety of the faithful, the value generally attributed to monkish intercession, did the rest.