Russia under the Old regime

THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE

than to Orthodoxy. They have traditionally been the strongest in the Ukraine.

The Old Believers associated Nikon's reforms with the advent of the Anti-Christ. By cabalistic computations they concluded that the coming of the Anti-Christ would occur in 1699-1700, and the end of the world three years later. When Peter returned from his foreign journey in 1698, and instead of going to church began to cut off beards and execute rebellious streltsy, many of whom were adherents of Old Belief, the prophesy seemed about to be fulfilled. At this time incidents of self-immolation and other expressions oimania religiosa multiplied. When the end of the world did not occur, the Old Believers faced a quandary: how were they to conduct themselves like proper Christians in a world ruled by Anti-Christ? The most urgent question had to do with priests and sacraments. The Old Believers recognized only priests ordained before Nikon's reforms. These had been a minority to begin with, and they were dying out. Confronting this problem, the movement split in two factions, the Priestly [Popovtsy] and the Non-Priestly (Bezpopovtsy), Adherents of the former, after having run out of suitable ministers, consented to accept priests ordained by the official church and eventually made their peace with it. The more radical Non-Priestly solved the problem in a different way. Some concluded that once Anti-Christ had taken charge, no more intermediaries between man and God were required; now it was every Christian for himself. Others performed only those sacraments which were open to laymen. For the latter, the thorniest problem concerned the marriage rite, indubitably a sacrament requiring the services of an ordained priest. They got round the difficulty either by denying the sacramental character of marriage and performing it without priests, or else by practising celibacy. Extremists argued that in a world dominated by Anti-Christ it was a Christian's positive duty to sin, because by so doing one diminished the total amount of evil abroad. They indulged in sexual licence which often assumed the form of pre-Christian rites still surviving in the village. The Non-Priestly Old Believers, as many other religious dissenters, tended to vacillate between ascetism and dionysiac indulgence. Certain among them thought Napoleon to be the Messiah come to deliver Russia from the Anti-Christ, and worshipped him, for which reason it was not uncommon to find in Russian peasant huts the portrait of the French Emperor pinned to the wall alongside ikons. In the course of time, the Non-Priestly expanded at the expense of the Priestly, who gradually faded into the established church. Their domain was the remote northern forest: the territory of what had been the Novgorod republic, Karelia, the shores of the White Sea and Siberia. Organized in disciplined, self-governing communities they proved excellent colonists. After Peter 1 had imposed on them a