Russia under the Old regime

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Foreigners state that ordinary laymen knew neither the story of the Gospels, nor the symbol of the faith, nor the principal prayers, including 'Our Father' and 'Virgin, Mother of God', naively justifying their ignorance on the grounds that all this was 'very subtile science fit only for the tsar and the patriarch, and altogether lords and clergy who did not have to work'. But the same foreigners give also the most devastating evidence against those who did have the leisure and even a special leisure to acquire this knowledge. Olearius... writes that in his time hardly one [Russian] monk in ten knew 'Our Father'. At the end of the seventeenth century Wahrmund mentions a monk begging for alms in the name of a fourth member of the Holy Trinity, who turned out to be St Nicholas. After this, it is not surprising to read in Fletcher... that the Bishop of Vologda was unable to tell him from which book of the Holy Scriptures he had just finished reading aloud at Fletcher's request and how many evangelists there were; nor to learn from Olearius and Wickhart (seventeenth century) that the patriarchs of their time were extremely ignorant in matters of faith and could not engage in theological arguments with foreigners.*

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Russian church immersed itself so deeply in secular affairs that it ceased to uphold Christianity in any but the most primitive magic-ritualistic sense. And even in this respect it found it difficult to resist shortcuts. Thus, for instance, to compress their interminable services, Muscovite churches and monasteries adopted the practice of mnogopenie which had several priests or monks chanting successive parts of the liturgy at the same time, with resultant bedlam.

This worldliness in time produced the inevitable reaction which, for all its superficial resemblance to the western Reformation, was an event sui generis with an entirely different outcome.

Russian frontiers were never as hermetically sealed as the government wished, and in the late Middle Ages foreign reform movements succeeded in penetrating Muscovy. One of these, the StrigoVnik heresy, spread in the middle of the fourteenth century in Novgorod, the Russian city in closest contact with the west. Though little authentic information is available about this movement because its adherents were eventually extirpated and their writings destroyed, it appears to have been a typical proto-Reformation heresy similar to the Catharist (Albigensian). Preaching on street corners, its adherents castigated the ordained clergy and monks for their corruption and worldliness, denied the validity of most of the sacraments, and demanded a return to the 'apostolic' church. In the 1470s a related heresy of the so-called 'Judaizers' emerged in Novgorod. Its adherents also attacked the church for its materialism, especially its ownership of great landed wealth, and called for a simpler, more spiritual religion. The Judaizing heresy became very dangerous to the established church because it gained converts among priests close to the tsar and even members of his immediate family.