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 wUl, 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 patniat', 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 fundamentali
sts 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 Pastern Slavs to Catholicism, warning that Latinization of the Greek ( Inirch indicated the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Spyridon Potemkin wiin 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 Awakum 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 i666.64 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" iyol'nodum) also added up to 666.07
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 t0 brmg 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 "wc 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 fo
llow 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 sobers.
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
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