Maxim Grek

On May 29, 1453, during the capture of Constantinople by the troops of the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II, the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos died. But in the minds of the people, who did not want to put up with the destruction of the once great Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, there lived a legend that the basileus did not die, but was petrified. He will come to life and resurrect when Hagia Sophia again becomes an Orthodox church. The priest will also return to complete the service in Hagia Sophia, interrupted during the storming of the city. They told it differently. The head of the king was allegedly brought to Mehmed when he was heading from the square near the Great Church (as Hagia Sophia was called), where the patriarchs, the entire clergy and many people gathered, to the royal palace. Seeing the head and being delighted, the conqueror called all the boyars and strategists and asked - may they tell the whole truth! - Is this the king’s head? They confirmed, overcome with fear. The Sultan kissed the head and sent it to the patriarch to preserve it, decorating it with gold and silver. The Patriarch placed the head in a silver gilded reliquary and hid it under the altar of the Great Church. Not everyone believed that the king’s body went to the enemies. They said that he was kidnapped that same night by those who remained with him at the Golden Gate, transported to Galata and buried 1. We do not know whether our hero has heard these legends. But it is known that he conveyed other legends to his Russian listeners - about the fate of Greek books after the fall of Constantinople, about their salvation through the efforts of the emperor and the patriarch. Prince Andrei Kurbsky spoke about this. Greek books - ancient and Christian - were a source of wisdom in Russia. They turned to the ancients when questions arose that could not be answered here and now. But the ancients - both the Christian Fathers of the Church and the ancient sages - seemed to know more, to possess the knowledge that was later lost. The search for ancient books, their translation, appeal to the authority of Antiquity is one of the components of European culture during the Renaissance. Kurbsky, living in Lithuania after fleeing Russia in 1564, wrote this: “In books and book studies I found consolation from the troubles and sorrows of the world. Comprehending the minds of the ancient men, I read and studied Aristotle’s “Physics”, ten books of his “Ethics”, and also often turned to the sacred scriptures dear to me, according to which my forefathers raised their souls. Delving into them, I often remembered the Monk Maximus, the new Confessor, because I once happened to talk with him. And I asked him about the books of our Eastern teachers: were they all translated from Greek into ours? the Slovenian language and where they were preserved - among the Serbs, or among the Bulgarians, or among other Slavic peoples? He answered that they were not translated not only into Slovenian, but also into Latin for a long time. The Romans 1 really wanted to translate them, they made many requests to the Greek kings, but they forbade: “I don’t know,” Maxim added, “why they did that.” And when the city of Constantine was surrounded by godless Turks and the last Tsar Constantine realized that a great and unbearable misfortune lay ahead for the city, he took up arms against the Turks with an army, defending the walls of the capital until he died. And he sent his queen with the treasury and the royal bookkeeper across the White Sea on ships to Rhodes and Venice. And then - due to Christian sins - the city of Constantine of God was transferred by a righteous court to the power of the godless Turks... and the great sanctuary of God's wisdom, Hagia Sophia was desecrated, and the great altar was overthrown, and Patriarch Anastasius 4, the elders and clergy were expelled from the church, taken captive and into slavery. But then the patriarch with the elders and deacons escaped from captivity to Venice and took with them the church library. The Venetians, seeing in their hands what they had long desired, abandoned all other matters, unanimously set to work on the books of the teachers of the Eastern Churches and entrusted the translation to two presbyters of St. Sophia and Peter the Archdeacon, men skilled not only in the Holy Scriptures, but also in secular sciences, and they assigned their own wise scientists to them, and translated the books of all our Eastern teachers, as many as they found, into Latin. The translations were sent for printing, multiplied in large quantities and sent for sale not only in Italy, but also in other Western countries for the education, correction and training of Christian peoples. Maxim told me all this, I heard from my beloved teacher, from his reverend lips. And having arrived here from my fatherland, I began to study Latin in order to translate into my own language what had not yet been translated, because strangers enjoy the works of our teachers, and we melt with spiritual hunger, looking at our own.” This is what Kurbsky said. That was his style. This was the style of the era. Kurbsky continued and expanded the story of Maxim the Greek. He announced further translations, now “into our language Slovenian”; A considerable part of Greek books have been translated into it, moreover, “without any price, for nothing.” “Some were translated by Maxim the philosopher and his student Selivan, others by me, a great sinner, with my assistants, skilled learned men.” This meant translations of the Conversations of St. John Chrysostom on the Gospels of Matthew and John, translated in 1524 by Maxim the Greek and his disciple, the Trinity monk Selivan. Kurbsky included not only his teacher, but also - without false modesty - himself in the long tradition of transmitting knowledge and scholarship (translatio studii). In the history of world culture, transmission, tradition, translation, and translation play no less a role than innovation and innovators. Only their coexistence ensures the full development of culture. Translations are an indicator of the activity of the national culture, and not its passivity 5. Maxim the Greek was not only involved in this broadcast, more precisely, in both directions in the history of culture. He himself, in the reality of his life’s destiny, repeated the path of the Greek books of his story; Moreover, the narrator’s own Odyssey complemented and changed the vector of movement, expanding its area. From Greece, his homeland, he first traveled west to Italian cities. In particular, he worked in Venice, mentioned by Kurbsky. Here, the famous Italian printer Aldus Manutius published a large number of Greek books in the 90s of the 15th century and at the beginning of the 16th century, and the future Maximus the Greek (then he still had a secular name) collaborated with him. Were there any legends about the origin of the books being published, about the imperial and patriarchal libraries as their source? Or did the legends recorded by Kurbsky from the words of Maxim the Greek arise on Slavic or Russian soil? How accurately did Kurbsky convey the teacher’s story, did he make any conscious distortions or simply errors of perception? Did he himself create another version of the story, strengthening its anti-Latin bias (according to him, the “Latins” burned the Greek originals after translation)? 6 There is no answer to these questions yet, but perhaps future research by scientists will reveal the mysteries of the origin of stories and legends about the paths of Greek books, and in different versions. The further fate of the narrator of these legends is extraordinary. He left Renaissance Italy and retired to Athos, the first turn of the vector. The rich book treasuries of the Svyatogorsk monasteries then provided more opportunities for studying ancient books than European cities and universities. The antiquity that Italian humanists were so eager to master was preserved and lived here. But in 1516 there was a new turn in the vector - sharply to the north. The Athos authorities sent brother Maxim to Moscow as a translator, and he became a “Hyperborean from Hellas,” as he ironically defined himself in one of the Moscow letters of the late period (1552) to his compatriot friend 7 . In Moscow, he translated the works of the Holy Fathers and secular works from Greek, wrote his own works, and served the cause of spiritual enlightenment. In his Message to the Grand Duke on the completion of one of his largest translations, the Explanatory Psalter (1522), he mentioned the “Greek books” that were in the Moscow royal book depository and remained there without any benefit, serving only as food for moths. Already here the author of the Epistle did not stop before expressing some reproach to the ruler 8. Knowing from his European experience the significance of ancient books and the enormous interest in them that existed then, Maxim the Greek could not help but start searching for them in Moscow. The Epistle speaks very briefly about Greek books - the author had in mind only the manuscripts of the Explanatory Psalter, chosen for translation. But the compilers of one of his first biographies of the end of the 16th century (“The Tale of Maxim the Holy Mountain Monk of the Vatopedi Monastery”) colored the brief mention with eloquent details and began the biography of Maxim the Holy Mountain with a story about how “the Orthodox and all Russian land sovereign Grand Duke Vasily opened the royal treasures of the great princes, his ancestors, and found in some chambers there are countless Greek books, which the Slovenian people did not understand.” Next, it talks about the search for a translator, brief information about him is given, and then follows a story about how Vasily Ivanovich, having called the monk Maxim, introduces him to his royal book depository and shows him “countless numbers of Greek books,” and the monk stands “in thoughtful surprise” about such a countless hardworking meeting and swears before the pious sovereign that even the Greeks do not have was honored to see “so many books” 9. Next, the version about the fate of the Greek books, known from Kurbsky's Preface, is presented, but in the second version, with the version about the burning of books by the Latins. Some “pious people,” in order to save the “luminary of Greek Orthodoxy,” took away “numerous Greek books” by sea from Constantinople to Rome (here this is a collective designation for the Catholic world), and “vain Latin people,” having translated the books, “burned with fire” the Greek originals. That is why philosophy among the Greeks finally became impoverished, and the “great bookish impoverishment” engulfed the Greek land after the Turkish conquest. Thus, according to the “Tale,” Maxim the Greek concludes his story and repeats: “And I, sovereign Vasily the autocratic, have never seen so much Greek wisdom as your royal zeal for the divine treasure.” Here a new version of the theory of translatio studii that was discussed is reflected; Now the final result of the movement of books, their custodian becomes Moscow, the royal library. You should also pay attention to the information in the “Tale” that Maxim compiled a certain inventory of untranslated books: “... he clearly created the names of the books.” Of course, now it is difficult to say whether these stories are entirely the fruit of artistic fiction or based on some sources that have not reached us, on oral tradition. We will still have to discuss the reliability of later evidence. Nevertheless, the “Tale” became one of the sources of another legend - about the extensive library of the Moscow sovereigns, more often called the “library of Ivan the Terrible,” where the most valuable ancient Greek manuscripts were allegedly preserved in large quantities. It is revived from time to time even today, awakening the imagination of book lovers and treasure hunters. But let's leave the legends. To reconstruct the biography of Maxim the Greek, we have enough sources that are completely reliable and information that is completely reliable. As the poet said: Forward, forward, my story! A heroic face calls to us. The same biographer of the late 16th century reports that the works of Maxim the Greek and his scholarship aroused envy and slander. For errors allegedly made when correcting the translation of liturgical books (due to insufficient knowledge of the language), he was accused of heresy, to which other charges (“guilts”) were added, tried twice (in 1525 and 1531), and spent 22 years in prison. It took considerable fortitude to, while remaining under church excommunication, without communion, in “seclusion,” write messages to different people, insisting on one’s rightness, to prove one’s innocence and the injustice of condemnation with the help of philological arguments, reasoning about the intricacies of language (for example, about the meaning of Greek homonyms 2 ), about the correctness of the terms used. At the same time, the prisoner continued his denunciations and wrote new works, spiritual and moral “Words” about free will, about man’s responsibility for his earthly affairs, about ascetic standards of life, about just rulers and their wise advisers. A heroic face is calling us... This is not the heroism of an instant impulse, a glorious feat, an outburst of feeling, but unceasing ascetic service - service to the Word, loyalty to work and duty in spite of prisons, "harms", envy and slander, conviction in one's own rightness and self-affirmation in patience. To stand on this, a very strong foundation was needed. “Romans” here is a collective designation for “Latins,” as representatives of the Catholic Church were called. Homonyms are words that have the same sound but different meanings.