Russia under the Old regime

232

sixteenth century there was precious little left of the Byzantine ideal of'harmony'. Just how subservient the church had become during this time can be seen from its support of government measures aimed at limiting its right to make further land acquisitions. A synod convoked in 1551 approved tsarist orders forbidding monasteries to make new acquisitions without royal approval (p. 229 above), and another synod in 1584 reconfirmed them. These were the first steps towards ultimate expropriation of clerical land. In the end, the Russian church forfeited its autonomy without by this surrender salvaging its wealth. The Schism which in the 1660s split in two the Russian church was a religious crisis which only tangentially touched on the question of church-state relationship. Even so, it exerted a lasting effect on the political position of the Russian church. The reforms of Patriarch Nikon which led to the Schism alienated from the established church its most dedicated groups, draining it of most of its zeal which henceforth flowed into movements of religious dissent. The end result was the church's total dependence on the state. After the Schism, the Russian church required the full vigour of state support to prevent mass defections from its ranks; it could no longer survive on its own. Even one of its staunchest supporters conceded that if it were not for state prohibitions against the abandonment of Orthodoxy (a criminal offence in nineteenth-century Russia), half of the peasants would go over to the Schismatics, and half of educated society would be converted to Catholicism.8

The Schism resulted from reforms introduced into Russian religious practices to bring them closer in line with the Greek. Comparisons of Russian religious practices with their Greek models, begun in the sixteenth century but pursued with special vigour in the first half of the seventeenth, revealed beyond doubt that over time major deviations had occurred in Russian observances. Less apparent was the answer to the question whether such discrepancies were good or bad. Purists, headed by Nikon, maintained that all departures from Greek prototypes were corruptions and as such had to be eliminated. Under his guidance books were corrected and changes introduced into rituals. The conservatives and nationalists, a party which included the majority of the Russian clergy, argued that the Russian church as then constituted was purer and holier than the Greek, which had fallen from grace for agreeing at the Council of Florence in 1439 to merge with Rome. Since that act of apostasy, the centre of Orthodoxy had shifted to Moscow which had repudiated the Union. As Joseph of Volokolamsk had said a century earlier, Russia was the most pious land in the world; any tampering with its practices would bring on its head the wrath of heaven. The issue was a grave one. The problem dividing the two parties had profound