Icon and Axe

1. The Split Within

THE DECISIVE MOMENT of the century—what Russians call the perelom (divide in the stairs, breaking point of a fever)—was the formal, ecclesiastical pronouncement of the schism in 1667. It represented a kind of coup d’église, which in religious Muscovy was as far-reaching in its implications as the Bolshevik coup d’état exactly 250 years later in secularized St. Petersburg. The decisions of the Moscow Church Council of 1667, like those of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1917, were a point of no return in Russian history. Even more than in 1917, the significance of 1667 was not fully appreciated at the time and was challenged from many different directions by various defenders of the old order. But change had taken place at the center of power, and the divided opposition was unable to prevent the arrival of a new age and new ideas.

The raskol (like the Revolution) came as the culmination and climax of nearly a century of bitter ideological controversy which involved politics and aesthetics as well as personal metaphysical beliefs. Seventeenth-century Muscovy was in many ways torn by a single, continuing struggle of “medieval and modern,” “Muscovite and Western,” forces. Such terms, however, apply better to the self-conscious and intellectualized conflicts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue in seventeenth-century Russia might be better described with two conflicting terms that recur in the chronicles and polemic literature of the time: khitrost’ and blagochestie.

These terms—like the controversies in which they were used—are difficult to translate into the Western idiom. Khitrost’ is the Slavic word for cleverness and skill. Though derived from the Greek technikos, it acquired overtones of sophistication and even cunning in Muscovy. For the most part, this term was used to describe proficiency in those activities that lay outside religious ritual. “Cleverness from beyond the seas” (zamorskaia khitrost’) came to be applied to the many unfamiliar new skills and techniques which foreigners brought with them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹ When Boris Godunov became Russia’s first elected Tsar in 1598, he had to quiet popular misgivings about the procedure by publicly proclaiming that he had been chosen “in faith and truth without any kind of guile” (bezo vsiakie khitrosti).² The revolt of the Old Believers was based on the belief that the Russian Church, like those in the West, was now seeking to know God only through “external guile” (vneshneiu khitrostiiu).³ Subsequent Russian traditions of peasant revolt and populist reform were deeply infused with the primitive and anarchistic belief that even the use and exchange of money was a “deceitful mechanism” (khitraia mekhanika).⁴ The post-Stalinist generation of rebellious writers was also to cry out against the “deceitful (khitry) scalpel” of bureaucratic censors and “retouchers.”⁵

In his famous troika passage Gogol insists that Russia be “not guileful” (ne khitry) but like a “straightforward muzhik from Yaroslavl.” Precisely such types organized in Yaroslavl in 1612 the “council of all the land,” which mobilized Russian resources for the final expulsion of the Poles from Moscow, and served as the model for the council which installed Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613. The primitive frontier forces that had descended on Moscow from the cities of the Volga brought with them a deep distrust of all “cleverness from beyond the seas.” Brutal directness was characteristic of the military men who liberated Moscow and stayed on for the councils which acted as a kind of collective regent for the young tsar. Like Gogol’s “straightforward muzhiks of Yaroslavl” who moved “not through the turn of a screw” but “with the clean stroke of axe and chisel,” the provincial ruffians decapitated Polish prisoners in Red Square with scythes, and pulled out the ribs of suspected traitors with hot irons. The seal of Yaroslavl—a bear carrying an axe—seemed for awhile to have become a symbol of the new regime.

Along with their violence, these provincials brought the raw strength which transformed Muscovy into a great modern state. They also brought from their harsh environment a new religious intensity and a special reverence for the quality known as blagochestie. Usually translated as “piety,” this term has a fuller, and thus more accurate, sound to the modern ear when translated as “ardent loyalty.” Blago was the Church Slavonic word for “good,” carrying with it the meaning of both “blessing” and “welfare”; chestie was the word for “honor,” “respect,” “directness,” and “celebration.” All of these many-shaded meanings entered into the ardent devotion of the average Muscovite. Blagochestie meant both faith and faithfulness, and the adjectival form was inseparably attached to the word “tsar” in Muscovy. Ivan’s main accusation against Kurbsky was that, for the sake of “self-love and temporal glory,” Kurbsky had “trampled down blagochestie” and “cast blagochestie out of his soul.”⁶ The chroniclers saw in the sufferings of the seventeenth century the vengeful hand of God calling his people to repentance. Like Old Testament prophets, Muscovite revivalists repeatedly called not just for belief in a dogma or membership in a church but for a life of renewed dedication. This was a society ruled by custom rather than calculation. As social and economic changes made life more complex, Muscovites increasingly sought refuge in the simple call for devotion to that which had been. If men did not cling to old forms, they tended to become uncritical imitators of foreign ways. There was no real middle ground between the calculating worldliness of khitrost’ and the complete traditionalism of blagochestie.

Khitrost’ was clearly the wave of the future; and its development, the legitimate preoccupation of military and political historians. Western measurement slowly imposed itself on the dreamlike imprecision of the Eastern Slavs. A gigantic, English-built clock was placed over the “gate of the Savior” (Spasskaia vorota) of the rebuilt Moscow Kremlin in 1625; and shortly thereafter weathervanes began to appear atop the crosses of Muscovite churches. Reasonably accurate military maps and plans were first drawn up in Muscovy in the course of preparing for the 1632-4 war with Poland; and the first large-scale native production of armaments began at about the same time within the rebuilt armory of the Kremlin and the new, Dutch-built foundry at Tula.⁷ Clearly, Russia was to be dependent for national greatness on “The Skill [Khitrost’] of Armed Men”—to cite the title of its first military manual of 1647. The reign of Peter the Great represents the culmination of the slow transformation of Russia through Northern European technology into a disciplined, secular state.

For the historian of culture, however, the real drama of the seventeenth century follows from the determination of many Russians to remain—through all the changes and challenges of the age—blagochestivye: ardently loyal to a sacred past. The heroism and the violence of their effort drove schism deep into Russian society and helped prevent Russia from harmoniously adjusting to modernization. The childhood of Russian culture had been too stern and the first contacts with the West too disturbing to permit the peaceful acceptance of the sophisticated adult world of Western Europe.

To seventeenth-century Russia the humiliation of the Time of Troubles demonstrated not the backwardness of its institutions but the jealousy of its God. The overt and massive Westernization of Boris Godunov and Dmitry was discarded and the belief in God’s special concern for Russia intensified. While Western techniques continued to pour into Russia throughout the seventeenth century, Western ideas and beliefs were bitterly resisted. Ordinary Russians saw Muscovy as the suffering servant of God and looked to the monasteries for the righteous remnant.

The historical writings of the early seventeenth century were filled with introspective lamentations and revivalist exhortations, which shattered the dignity of the chronicling tradition without pointing the way toward serious social analysis. Abraham Palitsyn of the Monastery of St. Sergius bemoaned the “senseless silence of all the world”⁸ in the face of Russian humiliation; Ivan Timofeev of Novgorod decried the tendency to “tear ourselves away from our bonds of love toward one another … some looking to the East, others to the West”:⁹ and the semi-official “new chronicler” of the Romanovs bequeathed to Pushkin and Musorgsky their moralistic view that the troubles of Russia were divine retribution for Boris’ alleged murder of the infant Dmitry.¹⁰

The deliverance of Russia was uniformly seen as an act of God. The subsequent growth in Russian wealth provided new resources for discharging the debt Russians felt to God, but at the same time new temptations to turn away altogether. Ivan Khvorostinin, courtier of two tsars, became a convert to Socinianism, ceased to keep fasts or revere icons, and wrote elegant syllabic verse well before anyone else in Muscovy. Andrew Palitsyn, cousin of the monastic chronicler and governor of a newly colonized Siberian province, introduced smoking, studied sorcery, and preached the irrelevance of the clergy within his realm.¹¹ Far more common, however, was the widespread reassertion of traditional faith which predominated in the early seventeenth century and caught the imagination of later Russian poets and historians. Even the tolerant, pre-Revolutionary historian who saw in Khvorostinin “the first swallow of a cultural springtime” felt obliged to add that, in general, “there was nothing principled or ideological (ideiny)” in the impulse to look West.¹² The defenders of the old beliefs were nothing if not “principled and ideological,” with their implausible but psychologically compelling loyalty to “true Tsars” and “old rituals.” Paradoxical as it may seem, the determination of later radical intellectuals to take “principled and ideological” positions may originate in this early dedication of conservative anti-intellectuals to a very different set of principles.

The most dramatic event of the seventeenth century was not any direct confrontation of East and West, nor indeed the action of any tsar, reformer, or writer—though there were remarkable examples of each. The central event was rather the dramatic confrontation of two “straightforward muzhiks” from the upper Volga region: Patriarch Nikon and Archpriest Avvakum. These two rough-hewn priests were the key antagonists in the schism within the Russian Church. Each viewed himself as unalterably opposed to khitrost’: to all forms of corruption, guile, and foreign innovation. Each began his rise to fame through membership in a circle known as the “lovers of God” (Bogoliubtsy) and the “zealots of the old devotion” (revniteli drevnego blagochestiia). They fell from grace simultaneously in 1667, returning as prisoners to the frozen northlands whence they had come. Their disappearance was the decisive moment in the waning of Old Muscovy and marked the beginning of the slow and progressive banishment of the “old devotion” and the “love of God” from the new civilization of Imperial Russia.

To understand the rise and fall of these two powerful personalities one must consider first the general resurgence of religious concern in early-seventeenth-century Russia. Hand in hand with the political success of the new dynasty and the “formation of a national market” went the unifying power of a religious revival. At the center of it stood the monastic community, which—unlike merchants, boyars, and even tsars—had actually gained stature during the Time of Troubles. Almost alone of the major fortresses near Moscow, the Monastery of St. Sergius never fell to foreign hands. From behind its walls, moreover, came ringing appeals to rise up against the foreign invaders. The monastic community as a whole withheld from both Wladyslaw of Poland and Charles Philip of Sweden the aura of sanctification that would have been needed to sustain their claims to the Russian throne. All the surviving Russian contenders for power had fled to monasteries by the late years of the interregnum; and they were joined by increasing numbers of military deserters and dispossessed people seeking alms and shelter around these great national shrines.¹³ The two best and most famous short stories to appear in the primitive, moralistic literature of the seventeenth century (the tales of Savva Grudtsyn and Gore-Zlochastie) both end with the spiritual purgation of the hero and his entry into a monastery.¹⁴ A popular woodcut of the period shows a monk being crucified in monastic garb by figures representing the various evils of the day.¹⁵

Bequests and pilgrimages to monasteries increased steadily; and new cloisters, retreats, and churches were built in large numbers. Particularly remarkable were the “one-day churches” (obydennye tserkvi) fashioned out of the virgin forests as a penitential offering in times of suffering. A chronicle of the Vologda region tells a typical story of how people reacted to the plague in 1654 with neither blasphemous anger nor medical prudence, but rather gathered together at sunset to build “a temple to our God even as King David commanded.” Working by candlelight through the night while women held icons and chanted akathistoi to the Mother of God, they completed the church in time to celebrate the Eucharist inside before sundown of the following day. They prayed, “Take, O Lord, the plague from Israel,” and asked for the strength not to curse their “man-loving and long-tolerant God.”¹⁶

There were, however, unreal and unhealthy aspects to the rapid growth of religious institutions. The monasteries were burdened with far greater wealth than at the time of the controversy over monastic property—without having acquired the strict discipline on which the original “possessors” had based their case. The monasteries were becoming preoccupied with their role of feudal landowner at precisely the time when serfdom was becoming most oppressive. Bequests were, moreover, increasingly tainted by the institution of “pledging” (zakladnichestvo): a form of tax evasion in which property was nominally donated to a monastery, but the old owner continued to use and profit from it in return for a nominal service charge.

There was so much activity in and around churches that one might have had the impression of an unprecedented blossoming of religious ardor. In truth, however, it represented more the sagging overgrowth of Indian Summer than the freshness of springtime. The ornate brick churches with Dutch and Persian features, which sprang up at the rate of better than one every two years in Yaroslavl,¹⁷ appear today as a kind of unreal interlude between the Byzantine and baroque styles: heavy fruit languishing in the hazy warmth of October, unaware that the stem linking them with the earth had withered and that the killing frost was about to descend. Innumerable icons of local prophets and saints clustered on the lower tier of the iconostases, rather like overripe grapes begging to be picked; and the rapid simultaneous singing of paid memorial services (of which the sorokoust or forty successive services for the dead are the best-known survival) resembled the agitated murmur of autumn flies just before their death.

The crowds that built and worshipped in the brick and wooden churches of the late Muscovite period were animated by a curious mixture of spirituality and xenophobia. Holy Russia was viewed not simply as suffering purity, but as the ravished victim of “wolf-like Poles” and their accomplices the “pagan Lithuanians” and “unclean Jews.” Thus, the political revival and physical expansion of Russia were made possible not only by a common faith, but by an oppressive sense of common enemies. Mounting violence and suppressed self-hatred fed the traditional Byzantine impulse toward apocalypticism. Some of the new wooden churches beyond the Volga became funeral pyres for entire congregations, who sought to greet the purifying flames of the Last Judgment with many of the same hymns that their parents had sung while building these churches. To understand both the tragic end of Russia’s “second religiousness” and its subtle links with the religious controversies of the West, one must turn to the two principal cipal factions within the Russian religious revival: the theocratic and the fundamentalist. Each faction answered in a different way one common, central question: How can religion be kept at the center of Russian life in the radically changing conditions of the seventeenth century?

The Theocratic Answer

A THEOCRATIC SOLUTION was favored by many of the “black,” or celibate, monastic clergy from which the episcopal hierarchy of the Russian Church was drawn. Partisans of this position sought to strengthen the ecclesiastical hierarchy, increase central control of Russian monasteries, and increase both the discipline and educational level of the clergy by editing and printing systematic catechistic and devotional manuals. In fact, though not in theory, they sought to elevate the spiritual estate over the temporal by greatly increasing the power of the Moscow Patriarch. They continued to speak in Byzantine terms of a “symphony of powers” between the ecclesiastical and temporal realms, but the increased strength of the clergy and continued weakness of the new dynasty offered temptations for establishing virtual clerical rule.

Although the Metropolitan of Moscow had been elevated to the title of Patriarch only in 1589, the position had almost immediately assumed political as well as ecclesiastical significance. The post was created during a period of weakened tsarist authority—indeed, the first patriarch had been largely responsible for securing Boris Godunov’s elevation to the throne. During the troubles of the interregnum, patriarchal authority increased dramatically, largely because Patriarch Hermogenes refused to deal with foreign factions and accepted a martyr’s death within the Polish-occupied Kremlin. When, in 1619, the father of the tsar and former Metropolitan of Rostov, Philaret Nikitich, finally returned from Polish imprisonment to become the new patriarch, the stage was set for a great increase in the power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Until his death in 1633 ne was co-ruler with Tsar Michael, using the tide “Great Sovereign” and presiding over more important affairs of state than the Tsar. At the same time he created new sees in the east, increased central control of canonization and ecclesiastical discipline, and determined the form that the first printed versions of some church service books should take.¹⁸

If Philaret created the precedent for a strong patriarchate and a disciplined hierarchy, the theological arming of the Orthodox clergy was largely the work of Peter Mogila, the most influential ecclesiastical leader in Orthodox Slavdom for the period between Philaret’s death in 1633 and his own in 1647. Mogila’s career illustrates the way in which non-Muscovite elements were beginning to control the development of the Russian Church. He was the well-educated progeny of a Moldavian noble family and had fought with the Poles against the Turks in the storied battle of Khotin in 1620. Moved by the five pilgrimages he had made to the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, Mogila settled in that Polish-controlled city. He became a monk, then archimandrite of the monastery, Metropolitan of Kiev, and founder of the Kievan academy “for the teaching of free sciences in the Greek, Slavonic, and Latin languages.”¹⁹

Under Mogila the theological struggle of the Orthodox brotherhoods with the Catholic Uniats acquired new sophistication and organizational skill. He wrote for his co-religionists a concise Bible of Instruction, a Confession, and a Catechism, which were reprinted after receiving the endorsement of Orthodox synods that he organized in Kiev in 1640 and in Jassy in 1642. Even more important was Mogila’s leadership in checking the drift toward a theological rapprochement with Protestantism that had been aided by Cyril Lukaris’ patriarchate in Constantinople. He prevented attempts by Calvinists to spread their ideas in the Ukraine in the 1630’s. His Confession begins with a direct contradiction of the Protestant position on justification by faith. Although he remained firm in rejecting the authority of Rome, his writings were so deeply influenced by Jesuit theology that his Catechism (originally written in Latin) was approved at the synod of Jassy only after substantial revisions had been made by a Greek prelate.²⁰ Mogila also introduced into the Orthodoxy of the Eastern Slavs a Western element of scorn for superstitious accretions and irrationalism. He particularly challenged the charitable—even indulgent—attitude of the Russian Church toward those possessed, drawing up a purely Western guide for exorcising unclean spirits and preparing believers for proper instruction.²¹

Although Mogila was a Moldavian who spent his entire life under the political authority of Poland and the ecclesiastical authority of Constantinople, he properly belongs to Russian history. Most of his pupils either moved to Moscow or accepted its authority in the course of the victorious Muscovite struggle with Poland that began shortly after his death. To the Russian Church he gave priests capable of holding their own in theological discourse with Westerners, and infected the Russian hierarchy with some of his own passion for order and rationality. As early as April, 1640, Mogila had written Tsar Michael to urge the establishment of a speciai school in a Moscow monastery where his pupils could teach Orthodox theology and classical languages to the Muscovite nobility. Though such an institution did not formally come into being until the creation of the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy in 1689, considerable informal instruction was conducted in Moscow in the 1640’s by Mogila’s pupils.

With the accession to the patriarchate of the energetic Joseph in 1642 (and of the pious Alexis to the throne in 1645) a large-scale program of religious instruction began. The central weapon in this campaign was the patriarchal printing press—the only one in Moscow—which turned out in the first seven years of Alexis’ reign (the last seven of Joseph’s patriarchate) nearly ten thousand copies of the basic alphabet book in three editions, eight printings of the book of hours, and nine of the psalter.²²

The key figure in this printing program was Ivan Nasedka, a well-educated and widely traveled priest whose Deposition against the Lutheranst, written in 1644, was influential in blocking the proposed marriage of Tsar Michael’s daughter to the Danish crown prince.²³ Nasedka, whose anxiety about the growth of Protestant influences in Russia dated from his first trip as informal emissary to Denmark in 1621, found ready support for his theological position from the pupils of Mogila, who had taken the lead in combating the drift toward Protestantism elsewhere in the Orthodox world.

Thus, in the mid-forties there began a steady and increasing flow of Ukrainian priests to Moscow. These priests brought with them an emotional opposition to Catholicism and a doctrinal antipathy to Protestantism. Before the end of Joseph’s patriarchate in 1652, the Ukrainian priests trained by Mogila had set up in Moscow two centers of translation and theological instruction: that of Fedor Rtishchev in the Monastery of St. Andrew and that of Epiphanius Slavinetsky in the Monastery of the Miracles.²⁴

The times, however, were hardly favorable for tranquil intellectual activity. In 1648 war and revolution broke out in the east with unprecedented fury. Anti-Polish and anti-Jewish violence in the Ukraine and White Russia was accompanied by an uprising in Moscow itself. The foreign quarter was sacked and leading government administrators literally torn to pieces. Like the plague epidemic that accompanied a second wave of bloodshed in 1653-4, urban violence spread contagiously from city to city. The restive commercial centers of Novgorod and Pskov predictably sought to canalize the general violence into specific demands for greater freedom from central control in the last wave of uprisings in 1650. Basically, however, it was a formless series of rebellions. Bewildered Western observers noted only the blood-lust of the mob combined with a certain hatred of foreigners and reverence for the Church. When one prisoner of the mob in Kursk rebuked a hooded cleric who had joined his tormentors by crying “Off with your hood!” the horde screamed back with redoubled fury, “Off with your head!”²⁵

The fear of a new “Time of Troubles” loomed up before the young Tsar. His own infant son had just died; he was afraid of a new Tatar invasion, and he initially hesitated to support the Cossack insurrectionists, apparently fearing that “the rebellion of the Cossacks and peasants of Russia might spill over into his own country, where sparks had already appeared from the fire sweeping over Poland.”²⁶ There was even a pretender waiting in the wings: a thief, arsonist, and sexual pervert, Timothy Ankudi-nov, who had attracted some interest in both Poland and Rome for his claim to be the son of Shuisky and true heir to the Russian throne.²⁷

Faced with this threat of disintegration, Alexis rallied support by summoning one zemsky sobor of 1648-9 to draw up, approve, and print a uniform national law code, and another in 1650 to assure the pacification and reabsorption of rebellious Novgorod and Pskov. For all its deference to hierarchy and tradition, the law code of 1649 represented an important stage in the rationalization and secularization of Russian culture. The power of the annointed sovereign was fully invested in his appointed bureaucrats to punish “without any mercy” almost anyone challenging the “sovereign honor” of the “Muscovite state.” The monasteries were hurt economically by the outlawing of any new tax-exempt pledging of wealth and property, and politically by the creation of a government bureau to administer their affairs.

The monopoly of Church Slavonic as the written language of Muscovite culture was also broken by the large-scale reprinting and dissemination of a law code written in a language close to the contemporary vernacular. This Ulozhenie remained the basic code of the land until 1833, and played a role in the development of the modern Russian language that has been compared with that of Luther’s Bible in the making of modern German. Indeed, the language of the Ulozhenie was in some ways “closer to the contemporary Russian literary and conversational language than the language not only of Karamzin, but of Pushkin.”²⁸

Alexis, however, was not prepared to build his rule on laws rather than autocratic authority, or to speak in the language of the chanceries rather than the chronicles. Having conceded a code to the rebellious city dwellers, he turned to a program of xenophobic distraction—discriminating against foreign merchants and convening in 1651 and 1653 zemsky sobors to sanction mobilization against Poland, then the protectorate over the Ukraine, which made war inevitable. At the same time, Alexis turned in desperation for administrative support and spiritual guidance to a monk named Nikon, in whom the theocratic answer to Russian disorder found its last and greatest exponent.

Nikon was an ascetic from the trans-Volga region who awed his contemporaries with both spiritual intensity and physical presence. Shortly after arriving in Moscow as head of the New Monastery of the Savior (Novospassky), this six-foot six-inch monk cast his spell over young Tsar Alexis, who began to have regular Friday meetings with him. The decisive event in Nikon’s career appears to have been the arrival in Moscow in January, 1649, of Patriarch Paissius of Jerusalem. He was impressed by Nikon and helped secure his appointment as Metropolitan of Novgorod, the second highest position in the Russian hierarchy. Nikon for his part appears to have been dazzled by Paissius’ retinue of priests and scholars, who brought with them tales of the Holy Land and of the lost splendors of the Greek Church.

Paissius told of the horrors he had seen in the Balkans and the Ukraine, pleading for “a new Moses” who would “liberate pious Orthodox Christians from unclean hands, from wild beasts—and shine like a sun amidst the stars.”²⁹ The call for deliverance was addressed to the Tsar, but he—like his father before him—felt the need amidst widespread social unrest and intrigue to lean upon the Patriarch. Thus, in November, 1651, the Tsar began pairing his own name with that of Patriarch Joseph in official charters, while commencing a theatrical transfer of the remains of past patriarchs to the Moscow Kremlin for reburial. The remains of Patriarch Hermogenes were exhumed and venerated; and Alexis sent Nikon to Solovetsk to bring back to the Cathedral of the Assumption the remains of Metropolitan Philip, whose murder by Ivan the Terrible had given an aura of holy martyrdom to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. While Nikon was still gone, Patriarch Joseph died; and within a few weeks Alexis wrote Nikon a long, half-confessional letter of grief addressed to “the great sun” from “your earthly tsar.”³⁰ Clearly Nikon was some kind of higher, heavenly tsar, and it is hardly surprising that he was appointed Joseph’s successor as Patriarch in July. For six years, Nikon became the virtual ruler of Russia, using the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the printing press to extend the program of ecclesiastical discipline he had developed at Novgorod.

In the far-flung see of Novgorod, Nikon dealt not only with a rebellious, Westward-looking city, but also with the chaotic and primitive northern regions, where he had previously served as a monastic administrator. There Nikon became attached to ecclesiastical splendor and magnificence as a kind of compensation for the bleakness of the region and the asceticism of his personal life. As Metropolitan of Novgorod, he was able to extend and even tighten central control over the monasteries of the north by securing from the Tsar complete exemption from subordination to the new governmental department created by the law code of 1649 to regulate monasteries.

As patriarch, Nikon not only shared with the Tsar the title “Great Sovereign,” as had Philaret, but in fact exercised sole sovereignty when the Tsar went off to lead the battle against Poland. Nikon used this position to set up a virtual theocracy in Moscow with the aid of visiting Greek and transplanted Ukrainian and White Russian prelates. Not just the Patriarch, but the entire episcopal hierarchy was given a new aura of majesty. Theatrical rituals were introduced, more elaborate vestments and miters required, and elaborate church councils held with foreign Orthodox prelates participating. The traditional Palm Sunday procession, in which the Tsar led the Patriarch on a donkey through Red Square in imitation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, was instituted in the provinces, where local civil authorities were encouraged also to humble themselves in this way before local metropolitans and bishops.³¹

Most important was Nikon’s effort to bring order and uniformity to Russian worship through a new series of printed service books. The printing program in the last years of Joseph’s patriarchate had already contributed to the sense of special dignity and destiny that Nikon felt about the Russian Church. Publication of a Book of the One True and Orthodox Faith in 1648, an edited version of Mogila’s Catechism in 1649, and the Pilot Book (Kormchaia Kniga) in 1650 provided Muscovy with, respectively, an encyclopedia of polemic materials directed largely against Uniats and Jews; “its first manual for popular religious instruction”;³² and its first systematic corpus of canon law. The first two works (and the apocalyptical Book of Cyril, which was also enjoying new popularity in Moscow of the late forties) came to Moscow from Kiev, the Pilot Book from Serbia. Moscow was rapidly becoming the focal point for all the hopes of the Orthodox East. As Muscovy launched its successful attack on Poland in the early years of Nikon’s patriarchate, its sense of holy mission and special calling grew apace. Even non-Slavic Orthodox principalities, such as Moldavia and Georgia, began to explore the possibilities of a protectorate status under Moscow similar to that which Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks accepted in 1653. Meanwhile the Greek-speaking monk Arsenius Sukhanov, who had accompanied Paissius back to Jerusalem on the first of two lengthy trips to gather books and information from the rest of the Orthodox world, reported that Orthodoxy had been corrupted in the Mediterranean area by Latin errors. He revived the long quiescent theme of Moscow as the third and last Rome, and added that “all Christendom” awaited the liberation of Constantinople by Russian force.³³ While Alexis led Russian troops into battle against foreign enemies of the faith, Nikon led his miscellaneous array of editors into combat against alleged corruptions within.

Between his deletions from a new psalter in October, 1652, and the appearance of new service books in 1655-6, Nikon sponsored an extensive and detailed series of reforms.³⁴ He changed time-honored forms of worship: substituting three fingers for two in the sign of the cross; three hallelujahs for two; five consecrated loaves for seven at the offertory; one loaf rather than many on the altar; processions against rather than with the direction of the sun. Nikon eliminated some practices altogether (the twelve prostrations accompanying the prayer of Ephrem the Syrian during Lent, the blessing of the waters on Epiphany eve); introduced textual changes affecting all three persons of the Holy Trinity. He altered the form of addressing God in the Lord’s prayer, the description of the Holy Spirit in the creed, and the spelling of Jesus’ name (from Isus to lisus) in all sacred writings.

At the same time, Nikon tried to impose a new, more austere artistic style, ordering the elimination of florid, northern motifs from Russian architecture (tent roofs, onion domes, seven- and eight-pointed crosses, and so on). In their place he introduced a neo-Byzantine emphasis on spherical domes, classical lines, and the use of the plain, four-pointed Greek cross. Two buildings that he constructed in the first years of his patriarchate launched this effort to transplant the imagined glories of the Greek East to Russia: the patriarchal church of the Twelve Apostles, within the Moscow Kremlin, and the ensemble of buildings for the new Iversky Monastery on Valdai Island.

All of this was accompanied by a determined effort to heighten the personal authority of the patriarch and that of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Prior to accepting the patriarchate, Nikon had exacted an unprecedented pledge from the Tsar to obey Nikon “as your first shepherd and father in all that I shall teach on dogma, discipline, and custom.”³⁵ This promise was taken from a ninth-century Byzantine defense of separate but equally absolute temporal and ecclesiastical authority. Like matter and form, body and soul, the two realms were supposed to co-exist harmoniously within the Christian commonwealth. Such a strong assertion of patriarchal authority was altogether unheard of in Muscovy. It seemed to challenge not only the Tsar, but the new law code, which had made the monasteries (and thus the church hierarchy) subject to secular jurisdiction. Nor was Nikon’s program very securely based in Byzantine tradition. The reforms were rapidly and secretly drawn up, and based on the selective use of Western compilations of Byzantine texts by an inadequately equipped research team.³⁶

To counter the power of the civil estate, Nikon issued a revised edition of the Pilot Book in 1653, and in the following year persuaded the Tsar to instruct provincial voevodas to make more general use of canon law in criminal matters.³⁷ Nikon brought in a steady stream of foreign patriarchs to approve his reforms and foreign relics and icons to sanctify them (beginning with the Georgian Mother of God, which Nikon had procured from Mt. Athos as early as 1648). He set up an academy in the Zaikonospassky Monastery for translating Greek and Latin texts and instructing priests in useful secular knowledge as well as theology. During the plague of 1653-4, for instance, the best of his imported Kievan translators, Epiphanius Slavinetsky, was diverted from a proposed translation of the Bible to a translation of Vesalius’ work on human anatomy; and Nikon’s book purchaser in the Greek East spent much of his time seeking out savants and manuscripts that would offer additional medical guidance.³⁸

Nikon had the profound misfortune of introducing his program into Russia at a time of great suffering through plague and war. He soon became a focal point of resentment for those who were anxious for a scapegoat and jealous of his closeness to the Tsar. His position was made untenable by the opposition of influential boyars, bureaucrats, and monastic leaders (often one and the same person) and by his own mixing of political and religious considerations. In his campaign against new trends in icon painting, for instance, Nikon ordered the streltsy to confiscate icons forcibly, to gouge out the eyes of the painted figures, and parade them through Moscow—warning that anyone henceforth painting similar icons would be treated in the same way. Nikon himself publicly shattered each of the mutilated pictures—naming just before each “burial” the high state official from whom it had been taken. This action terrified the bureaucracy and led the confused and superstitious Moscow mob to conclude that Nikon was a complete iconoclast responsible for the plague. In his campaign to gain acceptance for the new rituals, Nikon censured uncooperative boyars and anathemized priests during regular church services. He aroused opposition to his program among the proud and conservative monks of Solovetsk by trying to establish patriarchal control even over such sensitive disciplinary matters as drinking habits. He solidified popular feeling in the north behind the monks of Solovetsk by trying to found a rival monastery in the area and giving it a Greek name (Stavros, “cross”).

Solovetsk was thus emboldened to begin the organized resistance to Nikon, refusing to accept his new service books in 1657. A few months later three appointed heads of newly created provincial dioceses refused to leave their Moscow sinecures for the distant posts to which Nikon had assigned them. In the following summer the head of the Tsar’s imperial household beat Nikon’s chief official assistant as the latter was in the official act of arranging the order of religious procedure for a dinner in honor of the Orthodox crown prince of Georgia. When the Tsar failed to rebuke his official and subsequently the Tsar himself failed to appear at several worship services, Nikon reacted with a characteristic sense of drama.

Following a special liturgy in the Cathedral of the Assumption, Nikon announced that he was retiring to his new monastery, the New Jerusalem, outside Moscow until the Tsar reaffirmed confidence in him and his program. Not for eight years, however, did Nikon receive the Tsar’s summons; and then it was to appear before a church council to be formally deposed as Patriarch and sentenced to life exile in a distant northern monastery. Most of his modifications of church worship were formally approved by this council of 1667; but the heart of his program—the attempt to establish a theocratic state under a powerful and disciplined hierarchy—was rejected definitively. It is a tribute to the power and magnetism of Nikon that it took the prikaz of secret affairs and other servants of the new secular state nearly a decade to depose him formally.³⁹ But never again was the church hierarchy to exercise or even claim comparable political power in Russia. The abolition of the patriarchate and the thorough subordination of church to state was to follow in a few decades under Peter the Great.

The Fundamentalist Answer

AT THE SAME TIME that Nikon was heading off to exile and oblivion, another clerical figure was secretly taken even farther north to an even more grisly fate. Superficially, the Archpriest Avvakum was very similar to Nikon. He was a dedicated priest from northeast Russia, passionately opposed to Western influence and deeply determined to keep the Orthodox faith and ritual as the controlling force in Russian life. Avvakum had, indeed, been a friend of Nikon in Moscow during the late 1640’s, when both were “zealots of the old devotion.” They agreed that the Russian Church must be kept free of Western contamination and secularization. They both supported the first important church reform of the 1650’s: the elimination of the “forty-mouthed” simultaneous readings of different offices within the churches.⁴⁰

However, in the years that followed, Avvakum came to view the need for reform in totally different terms, and indeed to consider Nikon his deepest foe. Avvakum made himself the spokesman and martyr for the fundamentalist position. Like the theocratic view of Nikon, Avvakum’s fundamentalism summarized and brought into focus attitudes that had been developing for more than a century.

The fundamentalist position was mainly advanced by the “white” or parish priests in the provinces and was a faithful reflection of the conservatism, superstition, and vitality of the Eastern frontier. It was less a clearly articulated position than a simple equation of trouble with innovation, innovation with foreigners, and foreigners with the devil. The past that the fundamentalists sought to maintain was the organic religious civilization that had prevailed in Russia prior to the coming of “guile from beyond the seas.” To do this, they began to urge strict puritanical decrees against such Western innovations as tobacco (“bewitched grass,” “the devil’s incense”) and hops (“bewitched Lithuanian grapes”). Instrumental music and representational art were particularly suspect. The burning of six carriages full of musical instruments in Moscow in 1649 was a graphic illustration of the anti-foreign and puritanical activities of the early years of Alexis’ reign.⁴¹

Specially hated by the fundamentalists were the “Frankish icons” that had worked their way into Russian churches in imitation of representational art of Holland in the early seventeenth century. “They paint the image of Our Savior,” cried Avvakum, “with a puffy face, red lips, curly hair, fat arms and muscles, and stout legs and thighs. All this is done for carnal reasons.”⁴² Although Nikon formally shared their views on icons,⁴³ he had permitted churches near the Kremlin to be decorated with frescoes based on German models, and he was shortly to follow the unprecedented course of posing for a portrait by a Dutch painter.⁴⁴

Morbid excess, masochism, and heretical dualism often lay just below the surface of puritanical extremism. The numerous though still obscure communities founded north of Yaroslavl in the 1630’s by a strange figure known only as Kapiton appear to have discarded Christian doctrine along with ecclesiastical authority. The leader wore heavy chains held down by two huge weights, practiced extreme fasting and mortification of the flesh as well as certain Jewish rites, such as circumcision and abstention from pork. He enjoyed a sufficient following to escape repeatedly from the imprisonment which local officials imposed on him.⁴⁵

Puritanical and xenophobic discontent was given focus by a revival of prophecy within the established church. Leadership came primarily from a group of the married white clergy who held the title of “archpriest” (protopop), the highest open to the non-monastic clergy. The first of the archpriests, Ivan Neronov, championed a revival of the old trans-Volga tradition of piety, poverty, and prophecy. As a young preacher in Nizhny Novgorod on the upper Volga he was known as “the second Chrysostom.” He attracted attention by opposing the war against Poland in 1632 and by adding special buildings for feeding and housing the poor to the new cathedral which he took over in Moscow. Neronov began the grass roots opposition of the parish priesthood to Nikon’s reforms early in 1653 by speaking in defense of another archpriest whom Nikon had deposed for insolence to civil authority. Though Neronov was also punished for his defiance, he rallied a number of other archpriests to his defense, including Avvakum, who rapidly became Nikon’s most violent critic. The diaspora of the protesting archpriests began in September with the banishment of Avvakum to distant Tobol’sk in Siberia, and was continued the following year by a Church council which anathemized and exiled Neronov. Neronov set the pattern for the future Old Believers by rejecting the authority either of the Church council (which he likened to the Jewish court that had tried Christ) or of Nikon (who was unworthy to hold office because of his “voevodish tricks” and “lack of respect to the priestly class”).⁴⁶

Intertwined with their objections to Nikon’s authoritarianism was the archpriests’ profound opposition to any change in the familiar forms of worship. Changing the two-fingered sign of the cross (the form used on Russian icons and in all the reverences of the Russian peasant) and the double hallelujah meant to them destroying symbols of Christ’s divine-human nature. Changing the spelling of Jesus (one of the few words that all could read in old Muscovy) implied a change in God Himself. Changing the form of address in the Lord’s Prayer from “our Father” to “our God” seemed to remove God from the intimate relationship most easily understood in a patriarchal society.

Many of the changes seemed to shorten and simplify the worship service at a time when the puritanical archpriests felt there should be more rather than less demands. Changes in the creed seemed to weaken the relevance and immediacy of God to human history. Nikon changed the traditional Russian reading in the creed that Christ’s kingdom “has no end” to “shall have no end.” From representing Christ as “sitting” at the right hand of God, the new creed read “was seated”; and from affirming belief in the “true and life-giving Holy Spirit,” the new creed substituted “life-giving Holy Spirit.” Though these changes were intended merely to rid the Russian church of uncanonical accretions, their effect to the fundamentalists was to imply that Christ was now sometimes on and sometimes off his throne (like a seventeenth-century monarch) and that the Holy Spirit merely participates in truth (like any student of the worldly sciences).

The most passionate and irrational defenders of fundamentalism were women. Indeed, without the initial support of influential noblewomen, no coherent movement of schismatics would probably have emerged from the religious crisis. The attachment of women to the old ways was more deep and purely spiritual than that of the men; for they shared none of the earthly rewards and glory that Muscovy had to offer. Left to the isolation of the upper chamber (terem) and relegated to an inferior position in every aspect of Muscovite life, many of them nonetheless developed a passionate attachment to the religious ritual which gave meaning and sanctity to their world. The most tender and saintly devotional passages in all of Old Believer literature are found in the letters of Avvakum’s feminine supporters in Moscow, such as the Boyarina Morozova, widowed scion of the wealthy Morozov family. Avvakum was indebted to his own mother for his religious upbringing; and the most moving figure in his Autobiography is, in many ways, his long-suffering wife, who accompanied him on all his arduous missions. The greatest retrospective artistic study of an Old Believer theme is, appropriately, Surikov’s large canvas of the black figure of Morozova on a sledge taking her to martyrdom, with her hand extended upward in a defiant, two-fingered sign of the cross.⁴⁷

If the women simply clung to the old ways, the restless men required some kind of explanation, or program for resistance. As the archpriests’ despair deepened over securing repeal of the reforms, they began to turn to the belief that Russia was entering the last stage of earthly history.

The natural connection between Byzantine fundamentalism and apocalypticism provides a key to understanding the formation of the schismatic tradition in Russia. However animistic their identification of faith with form, however confused their understanding of tradition, the fundamentalists stood on solid Byzantine ground in insisting that inherited church traditions were begun by Christ, sanctified by the Holy Spirit at the early church councils, and must be preserved inviolably until His coming again. Jesus’ last assurance to the apostles that “I am with you always, even to the end of time” applied to the ideas and forms of His Holy Church. If these were to be changed on a large scale by human decree, it must necessarily mean that the “end of time” is at hand.

Unlike Protestant fundamentalists these fundamentalists of Russian Orthodoxy identified God not with the words of scripture but with the forms of worship. Indeed, the only parts of scripture they knew were the psalms and those passages from the prophets and New Testament which were read orally in regular worship services. Some extremists among the Russian fundamentalists even took the position that the Bible itself was a secular book, since it contained many worldly and even pornographic stories and had first come to Russia by means of the “guileful” printing presses of corrupted Western Slavs.⁴⁸

When Avvakum cried “Give us back our Christ!” he was not speaking figuratively; nor was he rhetorically addressing those who had changed the spelling of Jesus’ name. He was praying directly to God for the only Christ he had ever known: the Christ of the Russian frontier. This Christ was not a teacher like the pagan Greek philosophers, nor the bearer of a sacred book like the Tatar Mohammed, but the original suffering hero, or podvizhnik, in whose name and image Muscovites had taken the rudiments of civilization far out into a cold and forbidding wilderness. If the Holy Spirit was no longer to be described as “true and life-giving” in the creed, then its sanctifying presence must be cut off from the Church. But the tongues of fire with which the Spirit first came upon the apostles at Pentecost cannot be extinguished by the hand of man. They will, on the contrary, come again in the purifying fire that prepares man for the final judgment of God.

Thus, changes in church practices led directly to the “eschatological psychosis” of the mid-seventeenth century. This psychosis arose directly out of the emphasis on the concrete and historical in the Muscovite ideology. The intensified spirituality of monastic asceticism and holy folly was directed not primarily toward establishing private, ecstatic union with God but rather toward receiving the concrete guidance and reassurance which God was believed to be continually offering his chosen people through voices and visions. Amidst the confusion and upheaval of the First Northern War, God’s seeming silence led the overpopulated monastic estate into a “sensual hallucinatory cast of mind.”⁴⁹ The exhumation and canonization of St. Cyril of the White Lake late in 1649 set off a veritable panic of efforts to possess relics from the uncorrupted bodies of saints. The officially sponsored austerity and asceticism of Alexis’ early years intensified the psychological pressure to find spiritual compensation for material privation. Meanwhile, historical memory, or pamiat’, the supreme source of authority and wisdom in Muscovy, was becoming an increasingly confused “nervous reservoir”⁵⁰ of sensual impressions and wish projections. In mid-seventeenth-century Europe Muscovy had come to resemble the house of a stubborn but powerful eccentric in a fast-changing city. Rooms were cluttered with vast quantities of unsorted memorabilia which were, strictly speaking, neither antique nor modern. The more insistently that apostles of change and rationalization came knocking at the door, the more fanatically the unkempt inhabitants burrowed back into their congenial world of illusion.

At the end, there is, of course, nothing but chaos suitable for rodents or combustion. Everyone noticed the rats in congested and plague-ridden Muscovy; and fire continued to be a menace in the wooden city. As the city slowly came to the conclusion that the living God was no longer present in the agitated voices and visions of its holy men, the most fanatical of its fundamentalists pressed on to a conclusion which—however shocking to modern rationalism—was entirely consistent with its emphasis on a concrete and historical Christianity. In the popular imagination as well as the monastic chronicles, all history was permeated with God’s presence. God’s silence and withdrawal from present history, therefore, could mean only that history was at or near its end. Those who looked desperately for some final, tangible way to fulfill His will in this unprecedented situation could find but one act left to perform: the committing of oneself to the purgative flames which, according to tradition, must precede the Last Judgment.

Before turning to this final, desperate expedient of self-immolation, however, the fundamentalists sought an explanation in the ancient idea that adversity heralded the reign of the Antichrist and was to precede the true Christ’s Second Coming and final, thousand-year reign on earth. Already at the time of Alexis’ coronation, a lonely hermit in Suzdal contended that the new Tsar was a “horn of the Antichrist.”⁵¹ Russian prophets found many more signs that this terrifying last stage of history was about to begin in the reforms, plagues, and wars of the following decade. Ukrainians and White Russians brought with them prophetic ideas that had been developed in the course of the long Orthodox struggle with Catholicism in those regions. The learned Deacon Fedor, of the Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin, wrote that “a dark and impenetrable pagan god” which had “taken Lithuania captive” had now come to Russia to “devour the condemned within the churches.”⁵² The original anti-Uniat treatise from White Russia, The Book of Cyril, with a long epilogue on the coming reign of Antichrist, was published in a Moscow edition of six thousand copies. The Book of the One True and Orthodox Faith, a later anti-Uniat compilation from Kiev, was also published in a large edition. It blamed Roman Catholicism not only for attacking Orthodoxy but for letting loose in the West the spectre of “evil-cunning (zlokhitrykh) and many-headed heresies.”⁵³

Even further afield, from the anti-scholastic Hesychasts on Mt. Athos, came reinforcement for the anti-intellectualism of the fundamentalists. As early as 1621, Ivan Vyshensky, a Ukrainian elder, had returned to lead the fight against union with Rome and had urged the “Russian, Lithuanian, and Polish people” to leave their “different faiths and sects” for a revived Orthodoxy. In his Council on Devotion (Blagochestie), this “Savonarola of the Ukrainian renaissance” juxtaposed the Roman “Church of Jezebel” with an idealized Orthodoxy in apocalyptical terms:

I say to you that the land under your feet weeps and cries aloud before the Lord God, begging the creator to send down his sickle as of old in Sodom, preferring that it stand empty and pure rather than populated and corrupt with your ungodliness and illicit activity. Where now in the Polish land can faith be found?⁵⁴

There were two opposing forces in his world: the devil, who dispenses “all worldly graces, glory, luxury and wealth,” and “the poor pilgrim,” who renounces the temptations offered by “a wife, a house, and an ephemeral piece of land.”⁵⁵ The Latin academies of the Jesuits and even of Mogila were part of the devil’s campaign to destroy the true Eastern Church and lead men away from the world of the early fathers and hermits. “Thou, simple, ignorant, and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naive gospel wherein eternal life is found,” rather than the “phrase-mongering Aristotle” and “the obscurity of pagan sciences.” “Why set up Latin and Polish schools?” he asked. “We have not had them up to now and that has not kept us from being saved.”⁵⁶ The introduction of Aristotelian concepts into the discussion of divine mysteries was a form of “masquerade before the portals of our God Christ.” Following Vyshensky’s line of thought (and quoting many of the same patristic sources), Avvakum inveighed also against “philosophical swaggering” and “almanac mongers” (almanashniki) with his statement “I am untutored in rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy, but the mind of Christ guides me from within.”⁵⁷

One of the original Muscovite correctors of books, Ivan Nasedka, suggested that the turn of the Greek Church to Latin philosophizing indicated the approach of Antichrist. “We have no time now to hear your philosophy,” he proclaimed to the learned Lutheran theologians who accompanied the Danish crown prince to Moscow in 1644. “Don’t you know that the end of this world is coming and the judgment of God is at the door?”⁵⁸ Reinforcement for these ideas was also found in the prophetic sermons of Ephrem the Syrian, who had fought the saturation of the Byzantine Church with pagan philosophy in the fourth century, warning the Syrian church in his Seven Words on the Second Coming of Christ that impending doom awaits those who stray from the simplicity of Christ. Never before printed in any Slavic language, Ephrem’s sermons suddenly appeared in four different editions in Moscow between 1647 and 1652. Part of his impact upon the fundamentalists came from the fact that his work had been the basic patristic source for the pictorial representation of the Last Judgment in Russian icons and frescoes. The sudden discovery of his text, therefore, seemed to offer the unlearned Russian priests “confirmation” of their traditional image of coming judgment—and led them to believe that the hour itself might be approaching. Renewed reverence was also attached to Ephrem’s prophecies because of the fact that Nikon was believed to have “insulted” this early ascetic by eliminating the prostrations that had traditionally accompanied his famed Lenten prayer of humility.⁵⁹

The fundamentalists were also stirred by the writings of Arsenius Sukhanov. Sent by three successive patriarchs to examine the practices and procure the writings of other Orthodox Churches, Arsenius returned with a lurid picture of corruption and of craven submission before Latin authority and Turkish power. In all of the East, Arsenius seemed to find but two sources of hope: Muscovy, the third and final Rome, in which alone “there is no heresy,”⁶⁰ and Jerusalem, the original font of truth.

Influenced by his friendship with Patriarch Paissius and deeply impressed by such rites as the lighting of candles on Easter Eve from the “heavenly flame” in the church at the Holy Sepulcher, Arsenius sought in his writings to link Muscovy with the pre-Hellenistic church. Christ had lived and died and the Apostolic Church grown up around Jerusalem. The first gospels were not written for the Greeks; Russia was converted not by Byzantium but by the apostle Andrew; and, in any case, “from Zion came forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” The “word of the Lord” had been muffled in Byzantium since the seventh ecumenical council of the church; and it was not accidental that the white cowl given by Pope Silvester to Constantine the Great was now in Moscow, or that the icon of first the Tikhvin and then the Georgian Mother of God had been miraculously transferred from Athos to Moscow.⁶¹

Jerusalem became—both literally and figuratively—a kind of alternative to Constantinople and Athos for the excited Muscovite imagination. Nikon, who had first sent Arsenius to the Holy Land, sent him back to Jerusalem to make a model of the Church of the Resurrection that sheltered the Holy Sepulcher; and sent a visiting Serbian metropolitan to Jerusalem to provide additional details on the rites and services of the Church. The new Muscovite theocracy was to be nothing less than the New Jerusalem. With this lofty vision in mind, Nikon set about building his “holy kingdom,” the Monastery of the New Jerusalem, on a spot of great beauty by the Istra River outside Moscow. Giant bells, gilded gates, and a central cathedral modeled on the church over the Holy Sepulcher—all were part of Nikon’s plan for bringing heaven to earth in Muscovy.⁶²

For the puritanical fundamentalists, however, this New Jerusalem suggested the kingdom of the Antichrist, who was to establish his universal reign in Jerusalem. Rumors spread that Nikon’s translators and editors were secret Moslems, Catholics, and Jews. Given the large numbers of refugees employed and the fluidity of confessional lines in the East, there were enough recent converts and mysterious personalities to lend some credence to this charge. Meanwhile, two well-educated brothers, the Potemkins, came to Muscovy from Smolensk, the advanced base for Uniat efforts to win the Eastern Slavs to Catholicism, warning that Latinization of the Greek Church indicated the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Spyridon Potemkin was hailed as a friend and prophet by the fundamentalists for his ten treatises about the coming end; and his own death in 1664 was seen as a sign that history itself was drawing to a close. His brother Ephrem immediately set out for the woods north of Kostroma to await the end with fasting, prayer, and reading of the church fathers. Bearing the monastic name of the apocalyptical Syrian, this Ephrem proved no less gloomy and prophetic. He gathered a substantial following in the northern Volga region—partly by preaching doom at the famous summer fairs in the major trading cities.

Ephrem taught that Patriarch Nikon was the Antichrist, that the Second Coming was shortly to take place, and that men should gather provisions, because the seven years without bread prophesied in the Book of Daniel had already begun.⁶³ Early in 1666 the government sent a special expedition to the trans-Volga region to burn the cells of his followers, imprisoned most of them, and brought Ephrem to Moscow. He was forced to recant and go on a humiliating public tour to demonstrate his acceptance of the new forms; but Ephrem’s recantation and the simultaneous anathemi-zation of Avvakum only deepened the apocalyptical gloom of the fundamentalists and sent them looking for more precise guidance on the expected end of the world.

Once again they turned to prophetic anti-Uniat writings. As early as 1620, one Kievan monk had prophesied that the spread of Catholicism would lead to the coming of the Antichrist in 1666.⁶⁴ Spyridon Potemkin developed this idea by computing that it had taken Rome a thousand years after the birth of Christ to break with Orthodoxy; six hundred more years for the White and Little Russian hierarchies; sixty years after that for the Great Russians; and six more years for the end of the world.⁶⁵

The date 1666 became fixed in the popular imagination, because it contained the number 666—which held the key to the identity of the apocalyptical beast. The Book of Revelation had promised that

… anyone who has intelligence may work out the number of the beast. The number represents a man’s name, and the numerical value of its letters is 666.⁶⁶

Since numbers were still written by letters in seventeenth-century Russia, the Russians found it easy to apply the ancient practice of gematria: adding together the numerical value of the letters in a man’s name to find his “number.” The early Christians had found that the Greek form of Nero’s name written in Hebrew characters added up to 666; and Zizanius at the time of the forming of the Uniat Church in 1596 had started the Orthodox community speculating about the possible meaning for their plight of the figure 666. In the course cf the theological crisis of the sixties, Russians found that this magic number could be reached by adding together the numbers for the Tsar (Alexis = 104), the Patriarch (Nikon = 198), and one of Nikon’s suspect foreign editors (Arsenius the Greek = 364). Later computations showed that the letters in the word for “free thinker” (vol’nodum) also added up to 666.⁶⁷

Signs of the coming Antichrist were found in the natural world by Theoktist, former hegumen of the Chrysostom monastery in Moscow, who had moved to distant Solovetsk and used his erudition and association in prison with Neronov to provide ideological support for that monastery’s resistance to the new forms of worship. In his On the Antichrist and His Secret Reign, Theoktist contended that the reign of the Antichrist had already begun and appended a catalogue of signs to watch for: a kind of program guide for the last days.⁶⁸ Another shadowy figure, Abraham, Avvakum’s “spiritual son” and constant companion in his last days of prison, saw signs of the Antichrist not only in the name “New Jerusalem” but also in the fact that Nikon called the river Istra “Jordan,” a nearby mountain “Golgotha,” and young monks his “seraphims.” Frontier superstition was blended unconsciously with apocalyptical symbolism as Nikon was variously said to be the child of a water sprite (rusalka) or of the pagan Mordvin or Cheremis tribes.⁶⁹ The atmosphere was charged with expectation that 1666-7 was to bring portentous new events. The expectations were justified, for 1667, the first year in the expected reign of the Antichrist, was in many ways the beginning of a new order in Russia.

The Great Change

THE DECISIVE TURNING POINT in the religious crisis of seventeenth-century Russia was the church council of 1667, which excommunicated the fundamentalists en bloc. It was, superficially, a victory for Nikon, because the council upheld the central authority of the hierarchy and all of Nikon’s reforms except his “our God” form of address in the Lord’s prayer and his elimination of a dual blessing of the waters on Epiphany. Moreover, the ecclesiastical administration was greatly enlarged by the addition of twenty new dioceses to the already existing fourteen, and by the addition of four metropolitans, five archbishops, and nine bishops to the hierarchy.⁷⁰

Yet defeat for the fundamentalists did not mean victory for the theocrats. On the contrary, the council devoted most of its attention to the final deposition and exile of Nikon. Its main result was to establish the clear subordination of church to state by flooding the church bureaucracy with new priests who were, in effect, state appointed. One new Ukrainian metropolitan admitted with remarkable candor in sentencing Avvakum that “we have to justify the Tsar, and that is why we stand for these innovations—in order to please him.”⁷¹ Joachim, the new patriarch, was blunt in addressing the Tsar: “Sovereign, I know neither the old nor the new faith, but whatever the Sovereign orders I am prepared to follow and obey in all respects.”⁷²

A cosmopolitan, primarily Ukrainian and western Russian hierarchy was replacing the older Great Russian Church administration, just as Muscovy, having wrested from Poland key sections of these regions, was rapidly being transformed into a multi-national empire. The ideal of an organic religious civilization—whether fundamentalist or theocratic in structure—was becoming as anachronistic as the ill-defined economic and administrative procedures of patriarchal rule.

The defenders of the Muscovite ideal of an organic, religious civilization were being confronted in their own land with a sovereign secular state similar to those of Western Europe. The year 1667 accelerated this trend through the formal transfer of Kiev from long years of Polish overlordship to Muscovite control and the promulgation of a new decree to insure national control over all foreign trade.⁷³ The process of freeing autocratic authority from any effective restraint by local or conciliar bodies had already been accomplished in the early years of Alexis’ reign by the crushing of town revolts and the abolition of the zemsky sobors.

A new polyglot caste of tsarist officials was being assembled by the new head of the Tsar’s royal household, Bogdan Khitrovo, a previously obscure war hero and court intriguer who bore within his name the label “guileful” (khitry). Two important new appointments of 1667 illustrate the growth of a state servitor class plus royaliste que le roi. Metropolitan Theodosius, a displaced Serb who had formerly been custodian of the Tsar’s burial places in the Archangel Cathedral of the Kremlin, was named as the administrator of Nikon’s patriarchal properties. Afanasy Ordyn-Nashchokin, a Westernized professional diplomat from Pskov, was made head of the ambassadorial chancery, which at last acquired the character of a full-fledged foreign ministry.⁷⁴

The subservient nature of the new Church hierarchy is well illustrated by the two figures who drew up the agenda of the 1666-7 councils: Paissius Ligarides and Simeon Polotsky. The former was a Catholic-educated Greek priest who had corresponded secretly for some years with the Roman Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith and had come to Russia as the disputed metropolitan of the meaningless Orthodox see of Gaza. Ligarides’ tangled history is so full of deceit and intrigue that it is hard to ascribe anything but opportunistic motives to him. He had passionately defended Greek ways in Rumania, where he had gone in the late forties to set up a Greek school at Jassy and help produce a Rumanian edition of the basic Byzantine digest of canon law. Now, however, he appeared as a savage attacker of the Grecophile Nikon; and his efforts after the council were principally devoted to advancing Alexis’ claim to the vacant throne of Poland.⁷⁵

Polotsky is a more serious figure: an articulate White Russian priest who wrote the Sceptre of Rule, a stern guide to ecclesiastical discipline which received the formal endorsement of the 1667 council. Later in the same year he became court preacher and tutor to the Tsar’s children. For the secular occasion of New Year’s Day, 1667, Polotsky published The Eagle of the Russias, an elaborate secular panegyric to his imperial benefactor, replete with baroque decorations, anagrams on the Tsar’s name, and praise above that given to Hercules, Alexander the Great, and Titus. All this adulation merely echoes his earlier poem, which called Alexis the sun and his wife the moon and ended:

May thou be victorious over all the world

And may the world find faith by means of thee.⁷⁶

Polotsky’s knowledge of classical political philosophy enabled him to give a sophisticated secular defense of tsarist absolutism. The scholastic method acquired in his Kievan education rapidly became a fashionable idiom of the new church hierarchy in Moscow, thanks to such works of the late sixties as The Key of Reason by Rector Goliatovsky of the Kiev Academy and Peace with God for Man by “the Russian Aristotle,” Archimandrite Gizel of the Monastery of the Caves.

Gizel’s Sinopsis, an officially commissioned history of Russia that underwent five editions by the end of the century, flatly attributed the victory of Muscovy over Poland to God’s preference for absolute autocracy over the divided sovereignty of a republic. “Hermans” and “senators” had led Poland “from tsardom to princedom, and from princedom to voevodism.” But the Tsar of Muscovy has now delivered “the mother of Russian cities” from its bondage to Catholic Poland, and emerged as “the strongest of monarchs.” True Christian Empire has thus returned to the East for the first time since the fall of Byzantium “as if the eagle had recaptured its youth.”⁷⁷

Polotsky also popularized in Moscow this new sense of imperial destiny and the new language of scholastic disputation which the Kiev academy had introduced. He was, moreover, an aggressive spokesman for new, Western art forms. His ornate syllabic verse and decorative book illustrations establish him as a master of the baroque. In 1667 Polotsky wrote a memorandum to the Tsar, setting forth a new and more permissive theory of iconography, which was upheld during the following two years in a series of pronouncements by visiting patriarchs, by the leading practitioner of the new methods of painting, Simon Ushakov, and by the Tsar himself.⁷⁸ Citing classical as well as Christian authorities, Polotsky contended that creative talent was a gift of God and must be used inventively; that icons could convey the physical realities and inner feeling of a given subject along with its traditional, stylized form. In the same year, 1667, Alexis went even further, hiring Nikon’s former portrait painter as the official painter of the royal family. Within a few months illustrations from the German Piscator Bible were adorning the walls of his son Alexis’ apartment, and a new illustrated manuscript even depicted the long-proscribed figure of God the Father—as a fat and prosperous figure reclining on a divan.⁷⁹

Polyphonic baroque music also rushed in to challenge the older Russian forms of chant; and original secular dramas were produced for the first time. The first two were written and produced in rapid succession in the autumn of 1672 by the pastor of one of the German churches in Moscow, Johann Gregory. Four other plays and two ballets followed, with Gregory’s original cast of sixty from the foreign suburb of Moscow soon augmented by recruits from the Baltic regions. Performances were given in both German and Russian in settings that ranged from private homes and the Kremlin to a specially built wooden theater. Ukrainians and White Russians also wrote and staged a number of the “school dramas” that had been popular in those Latinized regions. Music accompanied most of these performances, so that Russia “first became acquainted with secular singing and secular instrumental music not in life, but in spectacles,”⁸⁰

The overlapping of old and new sounds at the court of Alexis was likened by his English doctor to “a flight of screech owls, a nest of Jackdaws, a pack of hungry Wolves, seven Hogs on a windy day, and as many cats.…”⁸¹ Nowhere was the cacophony greater than at Alexis’ second wedding reception in the Kremlin, an affair which lasted most of the night and contrasted with his first puritanical wedding of 1645, in which no music was permitted. There was a kind of restoration atmosphere about Moscow in these last years of Alexis’ reign. In the instructions of 1660 to his first ambassador to the restored English monarchy Alexis requested that “masters in the art of presenting comedies” be brought back to Russia.⁸² The first ambassador from Restoration England staged “a handsome Comedie in Prose” with musical accompaniment on arrival in Moscow four years later.⁸³ Gregory’s plays were of the “English comedy” variety; and Alexis’ second wife (whom he married early in 1671, two years after the death of his first) was from the Marx Maryshkin family which was close to foreigners including Scottish royalists who had fled the Puritan Protectorate in England.

In many ways 1672 marked “the end of the secular isolation of Russia.”⁸⁴ The Tsar’s new wife produced a son, the future Peter the Great, and the exultant Alexis dispatched to all the major countries of Europe a “great embassy”⁸⁵ which both announced the birth and prefigured the trip that Peter himself was to take West at the end of the century. Another indication in 1672 of the coming of age of Russia as a full member of the European state system was the appearance of a sumptuously colored and officially sponsored Book of Titled Figures, with 65 portraits of foreign as well as Russian rulers. These relatively lifelike pictures of European statesmen were identified as the work of individual artists in sharp contrast to the idealized, anonymous images of purely Orthodox saints that had previously dominated Russian painting.⁸⁶

Already under Alexis the semi-sanctified title of tsar was giving way to the Western title of emperor. Although the title was not formally adopted until the time of Peter, Alexis’ new Polish-designed and Persian-built throne of the 1660’s carried the Latin inscription Potentissimo et Invictissimo. Moscovitarium Imperatori Alexio.⁸⁷ Subtly, the distinctively modern idea was being implanted of unlimited sovereignty responsible only to the national ruler. The “great crown” that arrived in June, 1655, from Constantinople contained a picture of the Tsar and Tsarina where symbols of God’s higher sovereignty used to be; and pictures of Alexis began to replace those of St. George on the seal of the two-headed eagle.⁸⁸ To the large group of dependent foreigners in Muscovy, Alexis was no longer the leader of a unique religious civilization but a model European monarch. As Pastor Gregory wrote in a poem of 1667:

… how can I praise enough

the incomparable tsar, the great prince of the Russians?

Who loves our German people more than Russians

Dispensing posts, distinctions, grants and riches.

O most praiseworthy Tsar, may God reward you.

Who would not be glad to live in this land?⁸⁹

Secular curiosity was reaching out in every direction. Russians acquired their first regular postal contact with the West⁹⁰ and, in 1667, made their first use of astronomical calculations for navigation⁹¹ and sent their first trade caravan to Peking, empowered to negotiate with the Chinese emperor. The head of the delegation was to bring back a favorable report on the literacy and civic spirit engendered by the Confucian tradition.⁹² Within Russia itself, Alexis transferred artistic talent from sacred to secular activities. Icon painting in the Kremlin was placed under the administrative supervision of the armory; and the most important new construction inside the Kremlin in the late years of Alexis’ reign was undertaken not for the church but for the foreign ministry, whose director surrounded himself not with icons but with clocks and calendars.⁹³

Whereas Muscovy had thought of Russia as a “vineyard planted by God” for ultimate harvest in the life to come, Alexis seemed now to think of it as a place in which man could create his own “many-flowered garden.” These were the titles respectively of the most famous Old Believer protest against the reforms and the most famous collection of poems by the new court poet Simeon Polotsky. Just as Simeon’s “garden” of verse was full of tributes to such non-Muscovite subjects as “citizenship” and “philosophy,”⁹⁴ so Alexis’ new Izmailovo gardens outside Moscow were full of Western innovations. Behind the baroque entrance gate there were windmills, herb and flower gardens, irrigation canals, caged animals, and small pavilions for rest and relaxation.⁹⁵

An even greater symbol of secular elegance was the palace built by Alexis between 1666 and 1668 at Kolomenskoe, outside Moscow.⁹⁶ There was, to be sure, the superficial traditionalism so characteristic of Alexis’ reign, as onion domes and tent roofs dominated the basically wooden construction. But light streamed in as it never had before in Muscovite buildings, through three thousand mica windows, revealing a vast fresco depicting the universe as heliocentric and an equally unfamiliar world of mirrors, opulent furniture, and imported mechanical devices. Pictures of Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Darius stared down from walls where icons might have been, and Alexis received visitors on a throne flanked by two giant mechanical lions whose eyes rolled and jaws opened and roared on prearranged signals. Polotsky considered Kolomenskoe the eighth wonder of the world. It would perhaps be more correct to speak of it as the first wonder of a new world in which Western technology began to dominate the monuments of a new empire. Retaining the garish and ostentatious features of native tradition, Alexis had built the first of the palatial pleasure domes that came to symbolize Romanov Russia. He had taken over the pretentious building program of Nikon and the xenophobic arrogance of Avvakum; but he had left behind the religious convictions of both. The path was to be long and agonizing—but in some ways direct and inescapable—from seventeenth-century Kolomenskoe and Izmailovo to twentieth-century parks of culture and rest.

The Westernizing changes of Alexis’ late years were profoundly revolutionary in the modern sense of the word. But in the seventeenth-century meaning of revolution—the restoration of a violated natural order, based on the image of a sphere revolving back to its original position—the defeated religious reformers were the true revolutionaries.⁹⁷ Both the theocrats and the fundamentalists were trying to return Russia to its presumed original Christian calling after an unnatural capitulation to foreign ways. Each put his faith in the Tsar to lead Russian Christendom back to its former purity; yet each instinctively understood that his cause was hopeless. They sorrowfully concluded that Alexis was either another Julian the Apostate who had secretly deserted the faith, or that Moscow had become the “fourth Rome,” which they had previously thought would never be.⁹⁸

Everywhere that the religious reformers looked in the new secularized court culture they found signs that the reign of the Antichrist had begun. Not only had the church council been summoned in a year containing the number of the beast, but the new doctrinal work Peace with God for Man presented to the Tsar in that very year by Gizel had 666 pages in it.⁹⁹ The frontispiece of another Kievan work of the same year showed King David and St. Paul pointing swords toward a globe on top of which rode the tsar of Russia into battle accompanied by a citation from the Book of Revelation—one of the most frequently quoted biblical books of the period.¹⁰⁰ The first painting done for the Tsar by his newly commissioned Dutch court painter (and presented to him on New Year’s Day of 1667) further intensified the feeling of foreboding by depicting the fall of Jerusalem.¹⁰¹

The apocalypticism of the schismatics was the logical outgrowth of their extreme fidelity to the prophetic Muscovite ideology. But any full understanding of the schism requires not only Russian but Byzantine and Western perspectives as well. Indeed, this seemingly exotic and uniquely Russian schism can, in many ways, be described as “Byzantine in form, Western in content.”

Of the Byzantine form, there can be little question. The concern over minute points of ritual and procedure, the elaborate court intrigue involving both emperor and patriarch, the constant appeal to Greek fathers on both sides, and the polemic invocation of apocalyptical and prophetic passages—all is reminiscent of earlier religious controversies in the Eastern Christian Empire. Church councils, which included foreign patriarchs along with Russian clergy, were the arenas in which the decisive steps were taken: the initial approval of the Nikonian reforms in 1654 and the condemnation of the fundamentalists and deposition of Nikon in 1667. The destructive internecine warfare between the intellectually sophisticated patriarchal party and the prophetic Old Believers during a century of continuing peril to the Muscovite state recalls in some respects the fateful struggle between the pro-scholastic and the Hesychast party during the embattled later days of Byzantium.

Nonetheless, in reading the detailed argumentation of the ecclesiastical debates, one feels that the essence of the controversy lies deeper than the verbal rationalizations of either party. Avvakum turned to patristic sources for the same reason that Nikon turned to Byzantine precedents: as a means of justifying and defending a position that had already been taken. Indeed, both men violated basic traditions of the Orthodoxy that they claimed to be defending. Avvakum’s dualism led him in prison to defend the heretical position that the Christ of the Trinity was not completely identical with the historical Jesus. Nikon’s ambition led him to claim—in fact if not in theory —greater power for the patriarchate than it had ever tried to assume in Constantinople.

Nothing would have shocked either Avvakum or Nikon more than the suggestion that his position resembled anything in the West. Neither had any appreciable knowledge of the West; and compulsive anti-Westernism was in many ways the driving force behind both of them. This very sensitivity, however, points to certain deeper links; for Russia in the time of Alexis was no longer a hermetically sealed culture. Inescapably if half-unconsciously, it was becoming involved in broader European trends—ideologically as well as economically and militarily. Indeed, the schism in the Russian Church can in some ways be said to represent the last returns from the rural precincts on the European Reformation: a burning out on the periphery of Europe of fires first kindled in the West a century before.

In broad outline, the schism in the Russian Church—like the schism in the West—grew out of renewed concern for the vitality and relevance of religion amidst the disturbing economic and political changes of early modern times. This “second religiousness” occurred later in Russia than in the West, primarily because economic change and secular ideas came later. It was more extreme in Russia than in many parts of the West largely because it followed rather than preceded the great wars of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. The revival of Russian religious concern followed a course broadly similar to the preceding Western pattern. Contending forces within the Church became embroiled in bitter strife, which soon led to physical violence and doctrinal rigidity. The two major parties to the dispute burned themselves out fighting one another and thus cleared the way for the new secular culture of modern times.

If one bears in mind that no precise parallel is intended or direct borrowing implied, one may speak of the fundamentalist faction as a Protestant-like and the theocratic party a Catholic-like force within Russian Orthodoxy.

Neronov’s opposition to the wars against Poland, his love of simple parables, his desire to preach to the forgotten, uprooted figures who hauled barges on the Volga or mined salt in Siberia—all were reminiscent of radical Protestant evangelism. The fundamentalists represented, moreover, the married parish clergy’s opposition to the power of the celibate episcopacy. Like the Protestants, the fundamentalists found themselves fragmented into further divisions after breaking with the established Church hierarchy. As with Protestantism, however, there were two principal subdivisions: those with and without priests: the popovtsy and bespopovtsy. The “priestists” roughly correspond to those Western Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans) who rejected Roman authority while continuing the old episcopal system and forms of worship; the “priestless,” to those (Calvinists and Anabaptists) who rejected the old hierarchical and sacramental system as well.

The possibility of Protestant influence on some of the early Old Believers cannot be excluded, though there is an absence of direct evidence and an obvious theological gulf between the fundamentalists’ fanatical dedication to ritual and icon veneration and the outlook of Protestantism. The already noted saturation of Muscovy with Protestant merchants and soldiers in the seventeenth century may nonetheless have had an impact on attitudes and practices, if not on the actual beliefs, of the fundamentalists. Some of the White Russian Protestants decimated by the Poles in the mid-seventeenth century must have resettled in Russia and may well have retained elements of their former faith even while formally accepting Orthodoxy. Throughout the seventeenth century the Swedes pursued an active program of Lutheran evangelism in the Baltic and Karelian regions, which later became centers of Old Believer colonization. One converted Russian priest wrote a Russian language tract in the late fifties or early sixties seeking to convince Russians that Lutheranism was the way to check the corrupted practices of Orthodoxy.¹⁰² The banishment of the once-favored Protestants from Moscow in the late forties was partly justified by accusations of Protestant proselytizing. There were still some eighteen thousand Protestants resident in Russia and five Protestant churches in the Moscow area during the late years of Alexis’ reign,¹⁰³ and the provincial regions in which the Old Belief took root were precisely those where Protestant presence had been the greatest: in the Baltic region, White Russia, and along the Volga trade routes.

Like the first Protestant circles around Luther, the original Old Believers came largely from a bleak but pious region of Northern Europe. For all their anti-intellectualism, many of the early Old Believers (such as Deacon Fedor and the Solovetsk monks) were—like Luther—learned students of sacred texts. They juxtaposed an idealized original Christianity to the recent creations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, reviled the decadence and complacency of a distant Mediterranean civilization, and sought to bring monastic piety into everyday life. Neronov, like Luther, was particularly versed in the epistles of St. Paul and was often compared to him by contemporaries.¹⁰⁴

The backing of local political leaders was as indispensable in turning the theological concerns of Neronov and Avvakum into a social movement as was the backing of German princes to Luther. Indeed, the amorphous, newly expanded empire of the Romanovs was no less vulnerable to the pressure of divisive forces than the empire of Charles V a century before. If Lutheranism proved more successful than Neronovism, it was only because it accepted the institution of the secular state more unreservedly. But this distinction only serves to identify the Russian schismatic tradition more with the radical, “non-magisterial” reformation: the tradition of Anabaptists, Hutterites, and the like, whose strength had in any case been greatest in Central and Eastern Europe.¹⁰⁵ In their relentless opposition to war and raison d’état and their tendency to speak of “houses of prayer” rather than consecrated churches, the Russian schismatics resemble Quakers and other radical Protestant sects.¹⁰⁶ In their apocalyptical expectations and ingrown communal traditions, the Old Believer colonizers on the distant eastern frontier of Christendom were close in spirit to some of the sectarian pioneers of colonial America on its far-western periphery.

Other minority religions of the expanding Russian empire may have melted into the schismatic tradition, for the new secular state tended to produce a sense of community among persecuted dissenters. One of the earliest and most influential defenders of the Old Belief in Siberia was an Armenian convert to Orthodoxy, who had been conditioned by his previous Nestorianism to make the sign of the cross with two fingers rather than three.¹⁰⁷ Nor can the possibility of some interaction with the Jewish community be excluded. The year 1666, in which the Antichrist was expected by the fundamentalists, was the same year in which Sabbatai Zevi claimed to have become the long-expected Messiah of the Jews. Using many of the same prophetic passages and computations as the Old Believers and influenced perhaps by a wife who was a Ukrainian survivor of the Khmelnitsky massacres, Sabbatai attracted a greater following for his claim than any Jew since Jesus, particularly within the decimated Jewish community of Poland and Russia. The Ukrainian hierarchy which was dominating the new Russian Church denounced Jews along with Old Believers. One Ukrainian priest wrote the first major Christian refutation anywhere of the claims of Sabbatai, The True Messiah, in terms that indicated that Sab-bataian ideas were finding some response within the Orthodox community.¹⁰⁸ Since Sabbatai himself became an apostate to Islam and the entire movement was resolutely condemned by Orthodox Jewry, absorption into other creeds became the norm rather than the exception. Sabbataian ideas influenced Polish thought; and it must have infected the substantial numbers of Jews who sought anonymity and shelter in Muscovy amidst the confusion and massive repopulation of the mid-seventeenth century.¹⁰⁹ At the very least, there is a striking similarity between the Sabbataians and the Old Believers in their apocalypticism, fascination with occult numerical computations, ecstatic sense of election, and semi-masochistic acceptance of suffering.

If the Old Believers show a certain kinship with radical Protestantism and Sabbataian Judaism, the theocratic party bears a curious resemblance to Counter Reformation Catholicism. Although Patriarch Philaret was a prisoner and then a diplomatic foe of Catholic Poland, he nonetheless adopted many Catholic ideas—just as Peter was later to borrow heavily from his Swedish adversary. In establishing centralized control over ecclesiastical publication and the canonization of saints, in expanding the bureaucracy, jurisdiction, and landholding power of the hierarchy, Philaret was following Catholic rather than Russian precedents. The same was frequently true of Mogila, whose opposition to Catholicism was purely external and political, but whose conflict with Protestantism was profoundly ideological.

A Swede in Moscow in the early fifties described Vonifatiev, the Tsar’s confessor and heir apparent to the patriarchate, as “a cardinal under a different name”;¹¹⁰ and an Austrian likened Nikon, who was chosen over Vonifatiev, to the Pope himself.¹¹¹ Nikon’s attempt to provide rigid dogmatic definition in matters of phraseology is more reminiscent of the Council of Trent than of the seven ecumenical councils. Many of the Greek texts he used for models came from Venice or Paris, with Catholic accretions. His sense of the theatrical in court and ecclesiastical ceremony, his calculated reburials and canonizations, his orders to bring back secular classics along with church books from Greece, his opposition to any council which challenged the authority of the first primate—all have more the ring of a Renaissance pope than of a return to Byzantine purity. His program for building and embellishing new monasteries in spots of great natural beauty climaxed by the creation of his monastery of the New Jerusalem seems strangely reminiscent of Julian II and the building of St. Peter’s just before the great split in Western Christendom.

In defending the ecclesiastical realm from civil authority, Nikon used traditional Byzantine texts. But his actual policies as patriarch went beyond established Orthodox practice. An Orthodox visitor who accompanied the Patriarch of Antioch to Russia in 1654-5 complained that Nikon had in fact become “a great tyrant over … every order of the priesthood and even over the men in power and in the offices of the Government.”¹¹² Nikon, he complained, had arrogated to himself the Tsar’s traditional right to name the archimandrites of Russia’s leading monasteries and had increased the number of serfs bonded directly to the patriarchate by 250 per cent. Although Nikon was careful not to claim pre-eminence of the patriarch over the Tsar, he did at times argue that the spiritual power was higher than the temporal. In his new edition of the canon law in 1653, he cites the Donation of Constantine, the forged document that had been used to sustain extreme papal claims in the late Middle Ages. Although Nikon at no time suggested the establishment of a Russian papacy, he claimed that the authority of the Muscovite patriarchate derives from its replacement of the lapsed see of Rome, seeming to imply that some of the pretensions of the latter have been transferred to the former.¹¹³ His quasi-papal ideal is revealed in a vision he claimed to have had of Metropolitan Peter, the founder of the Muscovite hierarchy, appearing to him through the imperial crown on a throne with his hand on the holy gospel.¹¹⁴ In the long and adamant defense of his position throughout the early sixties, Nikon insisted that the patriarch possessed a kind of papal infallibility. “The first primate is the image of Christ and all the others pupils and apostles, and a slave is not entitied to the seat of a sovereign.”¹¹⁵

A final indication of catholicizing tendencies in Nikon lies in the area of foreign policy. Whereas the fundamentalists particularly hated Rome and the Poles, Nikon appears to have been more fearful of Protestantism and the Swedes. He opposed the war against Poland of 1653 and the re-baptism of Catholics. Some of his assistants in the correction of books were former Uniats from White Russia and the Ukraine; and the decision of the council in 1667 to confirm his abolition of the requirement of 1620 for rebaptising Catholics was one of many concessions to these non-Great Russian priests. Nikon compared the situation in Russia to that produced by the “Latin heresies” in the West, lamenting that “we have come to those times when we [priests] are fighting one another like lay people.”¹¹⁶ He called Nikita Odoevsky, the principal author of the Law Code of 1649 and leading apologist for the subordination of church to state, “a new Luther.”¹¹⁷

The multiple ironies as well as the confessional confusions of the age are demonstrated by the fact that the principal collaborator of this “new Luther” in the trial of Nikon was Ligarides, a former Vatican agent wearing the robes of an Orthodox metropolitan. It seems only fitting that this erstwhile Grecophile from distant Gaza ended up destroying Nikon’s Greek revival and posing as the defender of Muscovite tradition. Ligarides summoned up the distinctively Russian symbol of the icon screen as the model for an ordered hierarchical society to challenge Nikon’s concept of a symphony of powers between civil and ecclesiastical authority. Recognizing the patriarch as in any way equal to the Tsar would, Ligarides warned, place two icons in the center of the chin, where only the “Christ enthroned” is traditionally found; and man “cannot serve two masters … pray through two icons.”¹¹⁸

In contrast to Ligarides, both Nikon and Avvakum devoted much of their lives to such prayer and were constant in their loyalties. They were both profoundly Muscovite in temperament and training, “unlearned in speech, yet not in thought; untaught in rhetoric, dialectic and philosophy, but with the mind of Christ our guide within us.”¹¹⁹ Thus, it would be misleading to end a consideration of the original schism between them on any note of comparability with the West. The conflict between Nikon and Avvakum was not a theological debate, but a death struggle between two towering frontiersmen in a world of one truth. Only after they had destroyed one another did Russia become a safe place for Ligarides’ doctrine of state service and many, shifting truths.

The idea that there is but one truth in any controversy was Byzantine; and both Nikon and Avvakum thought of themselves as defending its apostolic heritage from either foreign corruption or domestic debasement. Each sought to make that truth relevant to Russian society through the force of his own prophetic personality. Each underwent severe physical suffering and spent his last years in lonely isolation from Muscovy. Each was ascetically indifferent to the bourgeois virtues of cleanliness and moderation. Neither of them was ever outside of Russia.

The essential similarity of these two Muscovite prophets becomes particularly striking in their years of tribulation and exile. Each viewed himself as the suffering servant of God. Each was fortified in his convictions by visions. Each continued to seek vindication in history, appealing to the Tsar and other authorities for restitution of the True Church rather than engaging in disputations with the new hierarchy. Each sought to prove the Tightness and sanctity of his own cause by deeds rather than words. Denied access to the councils of the great, they sought to prove themselves by working miraculous cures on the humble believers who came to their distant retreats.

Of the two, Avvakum has become better known to posterity because of the magnificent autobiography he wrote in the early years of his exile. In it, the old hagiographic style is fully adopted to the vernacular idiom, and the prophetic Muscovite ideology is transformed into a deeply personal profession of faith. Named for the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, whose name means “strong fighter,” Avvakum reacts like a true prophet to persecution, asking for God’s help rather than men’s mercy. Even while being beaten with the knout in Siberia by the leader of a military expedition,

I kept saying, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God! Help me!” And this I kept repeating without pause, so that it was bitter to him in that I did not say, “Have mercy!”¹²⁰

Inveighing tirelessly against “lovers of new things who have fallen away from truth,” Avvakum calls for active witness to the truth rather than talk about it:

What matter that they talk vanity of me; in the day of judgment they shall all know of my deeds, whether they be good or evil.¹²¹

Avvakum represents in many ways a culminating expression of the Muscovite ideology: a passionate prophet seeking to fill his life with “deeds of devotion” (podvigi blagochestiia). He combines within himself both the kenotic and the fanatic strains of early Russian spirituality. His polemic style is as pungent and polemic as that of Ivan IV, yet his message is conservative and his counsel compassionate. He bids men simply to preserve the old faith and accept suffering gladly in imitation of Christ, rather than fight back with the sword as do followers of “the Tatar God Mohammad,” or with the “fire, knout and gallows” of the new faithless state.¹²² His own martyrdom gave his writings a special crown of authority, which tended to perpetuate among Russian religious dissenters Avvakum’s semi-Manichean view of the world. Avvakum called himself not an Old but a “True Believer,” insisting (in objection to a Nikonian deletion from the creed) that

It were better in the Creed not to pronounce the word Lord, which is an accidental name, than to cut out “True,” for in that name is contained the essence of God.¹²³

Avvakum places light first among the “essential names” of God and sees Christianity as “the first light of truth” now darkened by Western heresy. In advocating self-immolation he develops a dualistic dissociation of the body from the soul. “Burning your body, you commend your soul into the hands of God,”¹²⁴ he wrote to one martyr. Shortly before he was burned at the stake, his attitude became almost masochistic: “… run and jump into the flames. Here is my body, Devil, take and eat it; my soul you cannot take!”¹²⁵ Avvakum was rebuked for his heretical views by his more learned prison mate, Deacon Fedor;¹²⁶ but the archpriest’s fanaticism and dualism were to exercise great influence on native Russian traditions of religious dissent.

Nikon also left an admiring life written in the hagiographical style by a seventeenth-century follower,¹²⁷ and he too emerges as a deeply Muscovite figure. A Dutch visitor at his Monastery of the New Jerusalem in 1664 found nothing but Slavic and Russian books in his personal library.¹²⁸ Everywhere he went Nikon had special retreats from the world for meditation and prayer. Like Avvakum, he disciplined himself with strenuous physical labor. During his final monastic exile he actually built a small island retreat in the lake by hauling huge stones down through the water and building a synthetic island. He was fascinated with bells and had a large number cast with mysterious inscriptions at the New Jerusalem monastery. Almost the only question about the outside world that he asked his Dutch visitor pertained to the size and nature of bells in Amsterdam.¹²⁹ Nikon was as opposed as Avvakum to new icons, and had visions in which Christ appeared to him as He did in the icons. Nikon was said to have achieved in his last years even more miraculous cures of the sick than Avvakum: 132 in one three-year period.¹³⁰

Nikon was, of course, less decisively rejected by the new church than was Avvakum. In contrast to the fiery martyrdom of the archpriest, the dethroned patriarch died peacefully on his way back to Moscow in 1681 with a partial pardon from the imperial court. Nonetheless, Nikon used prophetic terminology similar to that of Avvakum in denouncing the principal author of the resolutions of the Church council as a “precursor of the Antichrist.” He saw in the new “Babylonian captivity” of the Russian Church to state authority a worse bondage than the Mongol yoke.¹³¹ A pamphlet supporting him in 1664 divided the world into those who sing “praises to the holy patriarch” and those who serve in the regiments of Antichrist.¹³²

Rebels against the new secular state looked on Nikon no less than on Avvakum as a potential deliverer: the defender of an older and better way of life. Just as the rioting streltsy were to glorify the rejected Old Believers, so did the Cossack leaders of the Stenka Razin uprising of 1667-71 glorify the rejected patriarch as a possible deliverer from the “reign of the voevodas.”¹³³

The points of similarity between these two figures serve as a reminder that the basic schism in Christian Russia was not the formal one between those who accepted and those who rejected the Nikonian reforms. The real schism was, rather, the basic split between the Muscovite ideal of an organic religious civilization shared by both Avvakum and Nikon and the post-1667 reality—equally offensive to both of them—of the church as a subordinate institution of a secularized state.¹³⁴

The real loser amidst all this religious conflict in Russia was—as it had been in the West—the vitality of surviving Christian commitment. The two main forces within the Church spent their time and energy combating and discrediting each other rather than the secular forces undermining them both. The Russian Church after 1667 tended to borrow secular ideas rather than spiritual ideals from each of the old positions. The official Church became neither a prophetic community as the fundamentalists had wished nor a self-governing sacramental institution as the theocrats had desired. From the fundamentalists modern Russia took not fervid piety so much as xenophobic fanaticism; from the theocrats, not so much Christian rule as ecclesiastical discipline.

This ideological protest against modernization left a corrosive legacy of xenophobia. Internal schism in the wake of widespread violence engraved the anti-Jewish attitude implicit in the Muscovite ideology deep into the popular imagination. The Old Believers accused Nikon of permitting Jews to translate sacred books; and the Nikonians accused the Old Believers of letting Jews lead sacred services. Both parties considered the council of 1666-7 a “Jewish mob,” and an official publication of the council blamed its opponents for falling victim to “the lying words of Jews.” Throughout the society rumors spread that state power had been turned over to “cursed Jewish governors” and the Tsar lured into a corrupting Western marriage by the aphrodysiacs of Jewish doctors.¹³⁵ Anti-Catholicism also became more widespread if not more intense than during the Time of Troubles. One Orthodox historian has pointed out that “until the sixties of the seventeenth century, aside from the name itself, the simple people could in no way distinguish Uniat from Orthodox.”¹³⁶ Henceforth, the general antagonism vaguely felt toward the Pope of Rome and “the Latins” was also directed at the Uniat Church as a tool for the “guileful politics of the Polish republic.”¹³⁷

To say who was responsible for the schism in the Eastern Church of Christ would be no easier than to determine who was responsible for the crucifixion of its founder. In both cases, the main historical arena of the immediate future belonged to men of state: the “great” Peter and Catherine and the “august” Caesar. Yet the “third Rome” was to be haunted by schismatics almost as much as the first Rome had been by the early Christians.

The year 1667, which brought a formal end to religious controversy, saw the beginning of two powerful social protest movements against the new order. From the north the monks and traders of Solovetsk began their active resistance to tsarist troops, which was to inspire the Old Believer communities that soon formed along the Russian frontier. At the same time Stenka Razin (who had made two pilgrimages to Solovetsk) began the Cossack-led peasant rebellion which provided the precedent for a new tradition of anarchistic rural revolt. The subsequent history of Russia was to be, in many ways, the history of two Russias: that of the predominantly Baltic German nobility and the predominantly White and Little Russian priesthood, which ran the Romanov empire; and that of the simple peasants, tradesmen, and prophets from whom its strength was derived.

The original fundamentalists and theocrats made an impressive final exit from the stage of history in the late seventeenth century. Even after both positions had been rejected and Avvakum and Nikon were dead, each camp managed to give one last witness to its old ideals: one final ringing vote of no confidence in the new order.

The fundamentalist protest was that of communal withdrawal from the world. In the very year after the council in 1667, peasants in Nizhny Novgorod began to leave the fields and dress in white for all-night prayer vigils in anticipation of the coming end. Further north along the Volga, the unkempt Vasily Volosaty (“the hairy one”) was attracting interest in his program for the destruction of all books and the launching of a penitential fast unto death. Others taught that the reign of Antichrist had begun in 1666, or that the end of the world would come in 1674 or 1691 (which was thought to be 1666 years after the entrance of Christ into hell). The death of Tsar Alexis in 1676 just a few days after the final fall of the fundamentalist redoubt at Solovetsk was seen as a sign of God’s disfavor and an assurance of His intention to vindicate soon the defenders of the old faith.

Some sought to anticipate the purgative fires of the Last Judgment through self-immolation; others withdrew to form new puritanical communities in the virgin forests. The formation of these communities permitted the fundamentalist tradition to survive into modern times; but their creative activities belong more to the eighteenth than the seventeenth century. The final years of the seventeenth century were dominated by more negative protests against the new order, reaching a climax in the movement to abjure all worldly speech save repetition of the word “no”—the famous netovsh-china of a peasant from Yaroslavl named Kozma Andreev.¹³⁸

Only a few miles from the spot where Kozma was trying to exercise his veto power against the modern world, there arose at the same time the last great monument to the rival, theocratic protest against secularism: the new Kremlin of Rostov the Great. Built by the Metropolitan Ion Sysoevich during the 1670’s and 1680’s as part of a deliberate effort to perpetuate the cause of his friend Nikon, the Rostov Kremlin is one of the most magnificent architectural ensembles in all of Russia. The majesty of its symmetry and relative simplicity of its brick and stone construction represent a direct effort to perpetuate the Nikonian style in architecture, and they constitute a massive, silent rebuke to the exotic pretentiousness of the new state architecture. There could hardly be a more striking contrast than that of this massive yet white and austere ecclesiastical ensemble with the garish colors and chaotic appearance of the new architectural ensembles concurrently built in wood by Tsar Alexis: the palace at Kolomenskoe and the foreign office building within the Moscow Kremlin.

More important, however, the ecclesiastical construction at Great Rostov represented an effort to vindicate Nikon’s theocratic ideas by dramatizing the majesty of the ecclesiastical estate and its pre-eminence over the civil. Sysoevich borrowed many of the ideas and technicians that Nikon had used in his own building program. Like Nikon’s new monasteries, the ensemble of churches and ecclesiastical buildings at Rostov was built in a spot of beauty by a lake and was richly endowed. As in Nikon’s monasteries, Sysoevich established a kind of theocratic rule over the village of Rostov, which even today is totally dominated by its Kremlin.¹³⁹ Like Nikon, Sysoevich had become preoccupied with the need for discipline and order while serving in the hierarchy of Novgorod. He went so far as to declare once in public that “the Jews were right to crucify Christ for his revolt”—which became regarded by the Old Believers as one of the outstanding blasphemies of the new church even though Sysoevich was severely punished for it.¹⁴⁰

Sysoevich’s Kremlin in Rostov was the headquarters for a metropolitan who controlled the rich and powerful Yaroslavl-Kostroma region of the upper Volga, where the most lavish churches of the century were built. The elaborate frescoes of the 1670’s and 1680’s that filled every nook and arcade of the new churches in this diocese represented a final effort of Muscovy to produce an all-encompassing hieroglyphic encyclopedia of the faith. But the intrusion of secular subject matter—a harvest scene, women looking in a mirror, a nude being seduced by a devil—destroyed the spiritual integrity of these vast new compositions.¹⁴¹ In Yaroslavl and Rostov as elsewhere in late-seventeenth-century Russia, scenes of Christ’s passion and crucifixion borrowed from the West began crowding out the more exalted images of transfiguration and resurrection that had traditionally dominated the iconography of the Savior in the East. Christ no longer seemed altogether comfortable on His throne at the center of the new icon screens in the cathedrals of Yaroslavl.¹⁴² There was no longer any sanctuary, no place for God to be present on earth, behind the icon screens of the Old Believer temples that were springing up in the nearby woods along the Volga. But there was still the hope that God’s presence might be maintained within the great Kremlin of the metropolitan at Rostov; and the legend had begun that “one must see Rostov the great before dying.”

Many of its churches rose up directly and majestically over the walls of the Kremlin. Within them, classical columns framed the approach to the royal doors and a throne behind the altar provided the metropolitan with a suitably Nikonian place of authority. The main church of the Savior on the Walls must have been the scene of marvelous singing in view of its unparalleled acoustics and a choir area nearly as big as the nave. Even today its bells are among the most sonorous in Russia. Faithful to both the xenophobia and the love of pictorial beauty of Old Muscovy, the Last Judgment scene on the west wall of the Church of the Savior is a magnificent monolith that depicts an unprecedented three rows of foreigners among the ranks of the condemned.¹⁴³

But history was about to condemn this mighty monument of Muscovy rather than the foreigners in its frescoes. In 1691, the year of Metropolitan Ion’s death, young Tsar Peter began the humiliation of Rostov, making the first of many forced exactions from its rich store of silver. He was soon to complete the process of subordinating the church by abolishing the patriarchate and establishing a state-controlled synod as its ruling body. There were to be no more “Great Sovereigns” from the clergy like Philaret and Nikon, no more Great Rostovs in the world of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great—and the Great Revolution.