The Greek Monk Maximus Trivolis between Eastern and Western Religious Tradition

Abstract

The most extensive Russian chronicle, the so-called “Nikon Chronicle”, provides, for the year 1437, the information that the prominent Greek “Metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia”, Isidore, had announced to the Grand Prince of Moscow, Vasilij Vasilevic (1447-1462) the decision of the Patriarch Iosif of Constantinople and Emperor John Palaeologus to take part together with the Romans in the eighth ecumenical council to discuss the differences between the Eastern and the Western Churches. This was the Council of Ferrara-Florence of the years 1438-1442. What followed is well known. In Florence Isidore signed up to the union with the Church of Rome 1 and the Grand Prince expelled him from Russia for good, precisely because he had betrayed the “Greek faith” 2 . In the minds of the Russians, the Greeks had proved themselves traitors to the very faith they themselves had brought to Russia. Years went by and the same chronicler tells us that, in the spring of 1518, the Athonite monk from Monastery Vatopedi, Maximus Trivolis, or Maxim Grek as the Russians called him, offi cially arrived in Russia 3 . Strange though this may seem, the monk of Vatopedi was a child and student of Florence, with the intellectual stamp of the city, the name of which evoked woeful memories in the minds of the Russians as regards issues associated with the Orthodox faith and their relations with the Greek world. Apart from that, Maximus made no secret of the fact that he still hankered after his Florentine spiritual experiences. So the city which years earlier had produced a Greek, Metropolitan Isidore, who reneged on his orthodox faith and caused much damage to Greek-Russian Church relations, had now to restore the spiritual status of the Greek world in Russia and would, indeed, be proclaimed a saint of the Russian Church 4 .