Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/69

 to regard the Muscovites as polytheists rather than as Christians, whereas the Russians themselves extolled their land as "Holy Russia."

The church established monastic ethics, monastic asceticism. The most harmless pleasures, even laughter, were penalised by the zealots, and non-theological poetry was banned. The nature of the prevalent morality can be estimated from the views that were current regarding woman and the family. We need only compare the teachings of the Domostroi (the book on household management by Silvester, who was banished to a monastery in 1560) or of the Stoglav (the code of ecclesiastical law containing one hundred chapters, issued in 1551) with Monomachus' Instruction, to learn how unnatural Moscow had become under the rigid discipline of the church. In Tatar fashion women are to be relegated to the harem (terem, the Tatar word for palace and in especial for the women's quarters). The family is subordinated to the father, the "patriarch," just as peasants are subordinated to their lords and as lords are subordinated to the tsar. Social and political slavery found its strongest prop in the moral slavery of family life. Intellectually Russia was ruled by the monastery. The hierarchy was chosen from among the monastic clergy, and the secular or "white" clergy was completely subject to the monastic or "black" clergy, the result being that the ethics of the monkish celibates triumphed over the ethics of the married secular priests.

The monastery, shunning the world but dominating men, was wealthy in spite or perhaps because of its asceticism; and through its extensive ownership of land it was able to wield great political and social power. The monks not infrequently gave a conspicuous example of a mode of life that was far from ascetic.

Those whose views on the world and life were of this character had thoroughly anthropomorphic and sociomorphic conceptions of God and the divine. To the uncultured people and to the uncultured priests it was inevitable that the power of the tsar who had conquered the enemies of the church and had overthrown the domestic opponents of his autocracy, should seem to typify the power of God.

In the fifteenth century, Iosif, the rough and harsh renovator of the monkish ideal, formulated this widely held view of the tsar's theocratic position by saying that while by nature