The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  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 And 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. "Hetmans" 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.80

  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 In-victissimo. Moscovitarium lmperatori Alexio.H1 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.

  ? most praiseworthy Tsar, may God reward you.

  Who would not be glad to live in this land?80

  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 t
o 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.90

  An even greater symbol of secular elegance was the palace built by Alexis between 1666 and 1668 at Kolomenskoe, outside Moscow.9" 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 Awakum; 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. Awakum 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 Awakum 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 h
auled

  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.