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'etat 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.118 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 entitled 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 t
he 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 Awakum 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 Awakum 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 Awakum 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, Awakum 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," Awakum 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," Awakum 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
Awakum 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 Awakum's semi-Manichean view of the world. Awakum 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
Awakum 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 Awakum 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.'-* 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 Awakum 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 Awakum: 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 Awakum 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 Awakum 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."138
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 ten
ded 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.
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