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44 the tsar resembled all other men, in power he resembled the supra-mundane God.

The opponents of Iosif and his party, led by Nil Sorskii, regarded the priestly dignity as higher than the imperial dignity, and denied the emperor's right to interfere in spiritual and ecclesiastical affairs, but this view did not prevail. To protect the church and to maintain the purity of religious dogma were regarded as the principal duties of the grand princes and the tsars. Protection was to be afforded, not merely against foreign enemies holding other creeds, but also against heretics and scctaries at home. Gennadii, archbishop of Novgorod (1485–1504), another harsh ecclesiastic, fulminating against the rationalistic sect of the Judaisers whose doctrines may be regarded as a protest against monkish rule, quoted with approval the example of the king of Spain, and demanded a radical purification of Orthodox Russia. To his opponent Kurbskii, John the Terrible enunciated the doctrine that the tsar's chief duty was to educate his subjects to be religious, so that they might acknowledge the one true triune God, and the tsars given them by God. In the Stoglav, the protocol of the Old Russian council of 1551 (wherein the adherents of Iosif maintained a majority), the theocratic position of the tsar and the theological foundation of the Russian theocracy were definitively codified. An outward manifestation of its true nature has furnished by the theocracy in the nomination of the patriarch Filaret to be co-emperor with his son Michael, the first of the Romanovs.

HE weakening and the ultimate fall of the Byzantine empire exercised important effects upon the spiritual life of the third Rome, for the civilising influence of Byzantium was thereby reduced, and Moscow was left to her own resources. The Old Russia of Novgorod and Kiev had been in relationship with Europe as well as with Byzantium. By Byzantine influences Moscow was estranged from Europe, but after the fall of Constantinople became necessarily all the more dependent upon Europe.

Muscovy's need of Europe's spiritual help was shown by the participation of the Russians in the attempts at the union of the eastern and western churches made at Florence in the