Download PDF | Robert Romanchuk - Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North_ Monks and Masters at the Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, 1397-1501-University of Toronto Press (2007).
471 Pages
Preface
The fifteenth century in Rus' was at once an age of spiritually oriented monastic reform and the time of the first inroads of Aristotelian rationalism – two different means of understanding the word, and the world, that were fated to encounter each other with great force.
The Kirillov Monastery at White Lake, at the northern boundary of the Muscovite state, was the arena where this encounter was to play itself out. The present work traces the variegated paths of interpretive activity at the great (yet still barely studied) bibliographical centre of Kirillov over this eventful century. It shows the process by which a community formed around a teacher whose conversation united the scriptural word – that is to say, writings – and the world; and how developments in this community caused the word to be wrested from its dialogic context in the world and turned, as a scholarly tool, back towards that world. The first comprehensive study of pedagogy and hermeneutics at the eastern European monastery, this work also articulates a micro-historical ethology of reading (to employ Ivan Illich’s term).
It examines how habits of reading and interpretation ‘answer to different social priorities’ in a single community – thus responding to a programmatic call made by Brian Stock in his Listening for the Text. It is grounded in several years of archival research, and has been broadened by a year of interdisciplinary work and collaboration at the Penn Humanities Forum Seminar on ‘The Book.’ Far from conforming to the dominant western model of the ‘intellectual silence of Old Russia,’ readers at Kirillov evinced a broad range of interpretive activity and intellectual curiosity.
From the time of the monastery’s foundation by the hesychast reformer, Kirill of White Lake, at the end of the fourteenth century, through the last decades of the fifteenth, books were read and interpreted against the horizon of a desert herme-neutic, reaching back to the desert fathers of Egypt.
The word of the ascetic miscellany, mumbled, memorized, and put into practice by Kirill and his disciples, recreates an authority that preaches, teaches, and leads the reader to God. Such a book is characterized by its seemingly random (meditative) selection of texts and its explicit ethical call to the reader to ‘close the book and look at his or her own life anew,’ in the words of John Dagenais, and even to seek perfection through reading. But interrupting this desert tradition at mid-century is a different kind of book, reflecting a very different culture of interpretation.
This new encyclopedic miscellany is oriented towards the world, and privileges information over edification. It reflects the arrival of academic pedagogy and an academic hermeneutic, in which interpretive activity acquires a heuristic force and whose textual productions (historical epitomes and glosses, natural-scientific compilations, an analytical catalogue of library volumes) and cultural innovations (the desacralization of nature, the cult of knowledge) resemble early developments in western scholasticism.
Where previously the reader had applied the text to his life and was corrected by it, now he could apply his own correction to the text; where technê/khitrost' (art) had been blamed as improper to the monk, now it was praised. In the unlikely milieu of a monastery founded by a mystic and hesychast appeared the first signs of ‘Byzantine humanism’ in Russia. Kirillov’s academic culture arrived with the hegumens of the 1430s and 1440s, in the form of a Byzantine-styled school curriculum – first and foremost in it being the Dialectica or Philosophical Chapters of John Damascene, a scholarly treatise on semantics translated into Slavic.
These hegumens’ priorities were the rationalizing of the monastery’s social life in a strict cenobium with external trappings of prestige, and the reining in of an unruly group of charismatic elders who represented the memory of the original laura, the loosely structured association of monks gathered around their abba, Kirill. In this earlier, lavriote order, where hesychast mysticism dominated the approach to books, the social structure of the monastery had been conceived as a recovery of the spiritual sources of Christian monasticism.
At Kirill’s laura, the abba, his voice indistinguishable from that of scripture (writings), edified his disciples immediately and individually. His pedagogy led monks to understand their books as teachers leading them to perfection and encouraged an ethical reading largely congruent with the western lectio divina, reading as meditative technique. In contrast, at the rationally organized cenobium, a new figure, the master (kyr/gospodin) endeavoured to teach his students Aristotelian predication from the presentation of John Damascene.
This pedagogy, although aimed at a transcendent goal, reoriented interpretive practice onto the information in the text. The book came to function as a tool wielded by an academic reader-artisan. Pedagogical discipline bound hermeneutical practice to social organization. Over the course of the fifteenth century, a full range of interpretive habits, linked to institutional forms and mediated by pedagogy, was present at Kirillov. This work has been written for western medievalists, Byzantinists, and Early Slavists alike.
Western medievalists will note a number of recognizable signposts along the path of what may be their first encounter with the Orthodox, eastern European culture of schooling and exegesis, but they will also find challenges to commonly used formulas and approaches. This study distinguishes the history of reading from the history of technology – two fields that fall together in orality-literacy theory as well as in much of recent rhetorically focused criticism and the history of material texts – at the same time that it restores the reading subject to a historical context. At Kirillov, memory-as-mnémotechnique was overshadowed by memory’s task in forming the ethical subject; when desert pedagogy was replaced by its academic counterpart, this subject itself was de-ethicized, readers following their ‘own will.’
The case of Kirillov allows for an inversion of our scholarly perspective. Western medieval studies has tended to problematize the ethical style of reading, which has the potential to remove the text (and the reader) beyond the warp and weave of rhetoric. But for medieval Russian readers without well-articulated rhetorical and grammatical traditions, any non-ethical approach to the book would be problematized.
We may thus pose (and answer) questions such as, Why and under what precise circumstances might an academic culture arise? Why would readers elect to estrange the application of the text from their life, allowing the effects of reading to be inscribed back into a nascent school-book tradition? Byzantinists will find utility in this local history of reading at a monastery of the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth,’ familiar yet far-flung, founded on a hesychast reformer’s recovery of the pedagogy of the desert fathers but soon turned towards the ‘love of learning’ (John Damascene) by the arrival of translated Byzantine propaedeutic and school texts.
A sustained study of the transmission and application of such under-researched texts as John Damascene’s Dialectica and secondary-school textbooks of cosmography and history, this work also locates the scholarly use of such texts at the monastery, an institution traditionally held in contempt by modern students of ‘Byzantine humanism.’ From before the time that Festugière laid out his opposition of ‘holiness or culture,’ Byzantinists have insisted that the Orthodox monastery was not a school, leading to a stereotyped contrast of the eastern European monastery with the learned monasteries of the medieval West. Yet the school texts the monks of Kirillov read – which are linked to the ‘first Byzantine humanism’ – effected changes in the culture of reading that echoed, however faintly, the achievements of the western ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.’
This study sheds some light on the latent potential of ‘Byzantine humanism’ at the same time that it interrogates the notion of this ‘humanism’ itself. Finally, and most directly, this work is addressed to the Slavic field. It is the first study of a number of the most important works of translated and ‘original’ Rus' literature in their typical (monastic) milieu. From edificatory prose such as Hegumen Daniil’s Pilgrimage to texts usually called ‘belletristic’ such as the Judgments of Solomon, the uses of writings will appear in a new and (I hope) clarifying light.
This study recontextualizes the work of Kirillov editors and scribes of the end of the fifteenth century, such as the elder Efrosin, who have previously been treated as representatives of an ill-defined ‘(pre-)Renaissance’ in Russia. Such figures will be far better understood in connection with the development of Byzantine-style learning at their own monastic house over the middle third of the century. At the same time that it questions Soviet scholarly dogmas, this study challenges the western paradigm of the ‘intellectual silence of Old Russia.’
In part owing to the long dominance of this school, the scholarly discourse about silence is now at risk of ‘becoming transformed into silence, pure and simple,’ to borrow Carlo Ginzburg’s formula; we are drowsing in the image of a drowsing Muscovy. To be sure, the school of ‘intellectual silence’ has had a salutary effect on the field (and has been a key influence on my own work). But forty-five years on, it is time to move beyond its limits, in particular by turning to the history and ethology of reading. Such a discipline will allow us to recover moments of intellectual endeavour in medieval eastern Europe which, when viewed in their proper context, stand out quite vividly.
A study like this is not the result of a single effort, although I alone can answer for its shortcomings. For what is valuable in it, I am deeply indebted to many teachers, colleagues, and close friends. Before all else, this study exists due to the curators, scholars, and research assistants at the archives and libraries where I have worked with such pleasure for many years: at the Manuscript Division of the Russian National Library in St Petersburg, Ekaterina Krushel'nitskaia, Zhanna Levshina, Natalia Nevzorova, Natalia Rogova, Elena Shevchenko, Mikhail Shibaev, Denis Tsypkin, and the erudite and very human Viacheslav Zagrebin, whose untimely passing shocked us all; at the Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library in Moscow, Tatiana Anisimova; at the Hilandar Research Library of The Ohio State University, Tania Ivanova-Sullivan, M.A. Johnson, and of course Predrag Matejic*.
During my first extended research trip to Russia, I was hosted by the Sector of Old Rus' Literature at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), where the kindness and erudition of Oleg Panchenko, Gelian Prokhorov, Tatiana Rudi, and Evgenii Vodolazkin helped me navigate forbidding waters.
These specialists have all been exceedingly generous with their time and expertise; they often shared their work, in advance of its publication, as well. Many scholars at the institutions where I have learned and taught have left their mark. At the UCLA Slavic Department (piloted in my formative years by the inimitable Michael Henry Heim), the late, beloved Henrik Birnbaum, Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, Roman Koropeckyj, Gail Lenhoff, and Dean S. Worth, together with Claudia Rapp in History, guided my first steps towards the conclusions I reach here, and continue to direct me.
At the Penn Humanities Forum of the University of Pennsylvania (ably run by Jennifer Conway), the presentations and interventions of Roger Chartier, Rita Copeland, and Peter Stallybrass encouraged me to seek out the connections between various disciplines. At Florida State University I benefited enormously from Strozier Library’s purchase of the superb Berkeley Slavic Specialties Library of Old Russian Literature, accomplished under interim Director of Libraries F. William Summers. FSU’s Faculty Senate Library Committee provided several Primary Source Materials small grants to help build up this collection, and the Interlibrary Loan Service worked to fill many of the remaining gaps for me.
I have learned a great deal from all my colleagues at FSU, but my debt to Carol Poster (now at York University), who encouraged my study of Neoplatonic philosophy and late antique secondary schooling, cannot be put in words. At its moment of origin and as it neared completion, a number of senior scholars generously took an interest in this project. Pierre Gonneau of the Sorbonne and William R. Veder, now retired from the University of Amsterdam, offered sound advice and corrections to my dissertation (which could not have been written had Michèle ToucasBouteau not shared her own findings with me).
In Philadelphia, Nancy Ševcmenko led me through a Byzantine maze of library inventories; in Rome, Marcello Garzaniti (UdiFirenze) was a learned guide to Italian scholarship (and to the city); in St Petersburg, Aleksandr Bobrov (Pushkin House) gave me his forthcoming writings on Efrosin and heard me out as I talked of the grammar school and the library at Kirillov; and at Harvard, the eminent Byzantinist Ihor Ševcmenko listened patiently to a long presentation on the same themes and bolstered me with Greek analogues to my findings.
I thank them all. It is also a great pleasure to mark my debt to David Goldfrank (Georgetown University), the leading specialist in sixteenth-century Muscovite intellectual culture, who enthusiastically read this entire study at a critical stage, made countless corrections and suggestions, and sent encouragement and cheer during the dark nights of editing.
In its various forms, this study has received support from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Department of State, and the US Information Agency, none of which is reponsible for the views expressed; from the Eurasia Program of the Social Sciences Research Council with funds provided by the State Department under the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII); from UCLA’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Sudies (Lynn White, jr. Dissertation Fellowship), Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Center for European and Eurasian Studies (formerly CERS); from the Penn Humanities Forum, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and from Florida State University’s Council on Research and Creativity, Office for Academic Affairs and Office of the Provost, and Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. FSU and its Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics have supported my scholarship financially and in many other ways, including a semester of pre-tenure sabbatical.
I especially thank Alec Hargreaves, Mark Pietralunga, and William Cloonan. Norman W. Ingham of the University of Chicago and Gail Lenhoff of UCLA have both organized yearly forums for Early Slavists where I have discussed my findings, Claudia Rapp’s gracious invitation to the UCLA Byzantinists’ Colloquium allowed them to be heard by Byzantinists, and the panels organized by David T. Murphy (University of St Louis) at the International Congress on Medieval Studies have provided for them an audience of western medievalists.
My two anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press offered detailed and constructive criticism, the Press’s copy-editor John St James and Managing Editor Barb Porter did a painstaking job on a difficult manuscript, and its Senior Humani ties Editor, Suzanne Rancourt, has laboured to see the project through to book form. My student Matthew Herrington (Harvard) and my colleague Holly Raynard (University of Florida) offered many stylistic suggestions as well as a superlative amount of help with the manuscript.
This study could not have been written without the critical eye, love, and patience of my wife and colleague, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya; for a long time it has been her companion as well as mine, and now that it is done we hurry on to what comes next. This book is dedicated to the memory of my teacher, Henrik Birnbaum, whose advice I hope to have succeeded in following. The inscription on the dedication page, echoing the Stoic-Neoplatonic ‘river of time,’ is taken from some Serbian dodecasyllabic lines compiled into Efrosin’s florilegium Seven Chapters of Use to the Soul (c. 5). I encourage the reader to seek them out.
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