Monastery, Monarchy, and Miter

Abstract Halperin’s, Spock’s, and Kain’s contributions to this volume raise questions concerning: a) the toleration of post-mortem criticism of Ivan IV , and specifically of the murder of Metropolitan Filipp as expressed in the latter’s vita and related writings, given changing circumstances within Solovetskii Monastery; b) Russian crown security needs and policies relative to Ivan IV ’s legacy from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century; c) Patriarch Nikon’s visions of a Holy Russia; and d) the towering model influence of John Chrysostom. The combined analytical narrative of these three scholars enables us to envision a progression of accepted and then mobilized veneration of Filipp in both Solovki and Moscow, marked especially by Tsar Aleksei’s public atonement for his “ancestor’s” crime – seen here as a crown vow to rule piously and ethically – ; by the reburials of Filipp and also of Russia’s first Patriarch Iov in Moscow’s Uspenskii Cathedral; and by the foregrounding of Filipp in Nikon’s monastic foundations. The mounting open criticism of Ivan in the Filipp vita convoy and related writings, such as eulogies on the relic translations and chronicles and chronographs which contain Filipp’s murder, is characteristic of 17th-century Russia. And all of this seems to have influenced an aspect or two of Peter the Great’s church policies.