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Bishop Kallistos Ware Orthodox Church IntraText CT - Text |
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The schism of the Old Believers The seventeenth century in Russia opened with a period of confusion and disaster, known as the Time of Troubles, when the land was divided against itself and fell a victim to outside ene- mies. But after 1613 Russia made a sudden recovery, and the next forty years were a time of re- construction and reform in many branches of the nation.s life. In this work of reconstruction the Church played a large part. The reforming movement in the Church was led at first by the Abbot Dionysius of the Trinity-Saint Sergius Monastery and by Philaret, Patriarch of Moscow from 57 1619 to 1633 (he was the father of the Tsar); after 1633 the leadership passed to a group of mar- ried parish clergy, and in particular to the Archpriests John Neronov and Avvakum Petrovitch. The work of correcting service books, begun in the previous century by Maximus the Greek, was now cautiously resumed; a Patriarchal Press was set up at Moscow, and more accurate Church books were issued, although the authorities did not venture to make too many drastic alterations. On the parish level, the reformers did all they could to raise moral standards alike among the clergy and the laity. They fought against drunkenness; they insisted that the fasts be observed; they demanded that the Liturgy and other services in the parish churches should be sung with reverence and without omissions; they encouraged frequent preaching. The reforming group represented much of what was best in the tradition of Saint Joseph of Volokalamsk. Like Joseph they believed in authority and discipline, and saw the Christian life in terms of ascetic rules and liturgical prayer. They expected not only monks but parish priests and laity . husband, wife, children . to keep the fasts and to spend long periods at prayer each day, either in church or before the icons in their own homes. Those who would appreciate the severity and self-discipline of the reforming circle should read the vivid and extraordinary autobiography of the Archpriest Avvakum (1620-1682). In one of his letters Avvakum records how each eve- ning, after he and his family had recited the usual evening prayers together, the lights would be put out: then he recited 600 prayers to Jesus and 100 to the Mother of God, accompanied by 300 prostrations (at each prostration he would lay his forehead on the ground, and then rise once more to a standing position). His wife, when with child (as she usually was), recited only 400 prayers with 200 prostrations. This gives some idea of the exacting standards observed by devout Russians in the seventeenth century. The reformers. program made few concessions to human weakness, and was too ambitious ever to be completely realized. Nevertheless Muscovy around 1650 went far to justify the title .Holy Russia.. Orthodox from the Turkish Empire who visited Moscow were amazed (and often filled with dismay) by the austerity of the fasts, by the length and magnificence of the services. The whole nation appeared to live as .one vast religious house. (N. Zernov, Moscow the Third Rome, p. 51). Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo, who stayed in Russia from 1654 to 1656, found that banquets at Court were accompanied not by music but by readings from the Lives of the Saints, as at meals in a monastery. Services lasting seven hours or more were attended by the Tsar and the whole Court: .Now what shall we say of these duties, severe enough to turn children.s hair grey, so strictly observed by the Emperor, Patriarch, grandees, princesses, and ladies, standing upright on their legs from morning to evening? Who would believe that they should thus go beyond the devout anchorites of the desert?. (.The Travels of Macarius,. in W. Palmer, The Patriarch and the Tsar, London, 1873, vol. II, p. 107). The children were not excluded from these rigorous observances: .What surprised us most was to see the boys and little children... standing bareheaded and mo- tionless, without betraying the smallest gesture of impatience. (The Travels of Macarius, edited Rid- ding, p. 68). Paul found Russian strictness not entirely to his taste. He complains that they permit no .mirth, laughter, and jokes,. no drunkenness, no .opium eating,. and no smoking: .For the special crime of drinking tobacco they even put men to death. (ibid., p. 21). It is an impressive pic- ture which Paul and other visitors to Russia present, but there is perhaps too much emphasis on externals. One Greek remarked on his return home that Muscovite religion seemed to consist largely in bell-ringing. In 1652-1653 there began a fatal quarrel between the reforming group and the new Patri- arch, Nicon (1605-1681). A peasant by origin, Nicon was probably the most brilliant and gifted man ever to become head of the Russian Church; but he suffered from an overbearing and au- 58 thoritarian temper. Nicon was a strong admirer of things Greek: .I am a Russian and the son of a Russian,. he used to say, .but my faith and my religion are Greek. (ibid., p. 37). He demanded that Russian practices should be made to conform at every point to the standard of the four an- cient Patriarchates, and that the Russian service books should be altered wherever they differed from the Greek. This policy was bound to provoke opposition among those who belonged to the Josephite tradition. They regarded Moscow as the Third Rome, and Russia as the stronghold and norm of Orthodoxy; and now Nicon told them that they must in all respects copy the Greeks. But was not Russia an independent Church, a fully grown member of the Orthodox family, entitled to hold to her own national customs and traditions? The Russians certainly respected the memory of the Mother Church of Byzantium from which they had received the faith, but they did not feel the same reverence for contemporary Greeks. They remembered the .apostasy. of the Greeks at Florence, and they knew something of the corruption and disorders within the Patriarchate of Constantinople under Turkish rule. Had Nicon proceeded gently and tactfully, all might yet have been well: Patriarch Philaret had already made some corrections in the service books without arousing opposition. Nicon, however, was not a gentle or a tactful man, but pressed on with his program regardless of the feelings of others. In particular he insisted that the sign of the Cross, at that time made by the Russians with two forgers, should now be made in the Greek fashion with three. This may seem a trivial matter; but it must be remembered how great an importance Orthodox in general and Russians in particular have always attached to ritual actions, to the symbolic gestures whereby the inner belief of a Christian is expressed. In the eyes of simple believers a change in the sym- bol constituted a change in the faith. The divergence over the sign of the Cross also raised in concrete form the whole question of Greek versus Russian Orthodoxy. The Greek form with three fingers was more recent than the Russian form with two: why should the Russians, who remained loyal to the ancient ways, be forced to accept a .modern. Greek innovation? Neronov and Avvakum, together with many other clergy, monks, and lay people, defended the old Russian practices and refused to accept Nicon.s changes or to use the new service books which he issued. Nicon was not a man to tolerate any disagreement, and he had his opponents exiled and imprisoned: in some cases they were eventually put to death. Yet despite persecution, the opposition continued; although Neronov finally submitted, Avvakum refused to give way, and after ten years of exile and twenty-two years of imprisonment (twelve of them spent in an underground hut) he was finally burnt at the stake. His supporters regarded him as a saint and martyr for the faith. Those who like Avvakum defied the official Church with its Niconian ser- vice books eventually formed a separate sect (raskol) known as the Old Believers (it would be more exact to call them Old Ritualists). Thus there arose in seventeenth-century Russia a move- ment of Dissent; but if we compare it with English Dissent of the same period, we notice two great differences. First, the Old Believers . the Russian Dissenters . differed from the official Church solely in ritual, not in doctrine; and secondly, while English Dissent was radical . a pro- test against the official Church for not carrying reform far enough . Russian Dissent was the protest of conservatives against an official Church which in their eyes had carried reform too far. The schism of the Old Believers has continued to the present day. Before 1917 their num- bers were officially assessed at two million, but the true figure may well have been over five times as great. They are divided into two main groups, the Popovtsy, who have retained the priesthood and who since 1846 have also possessed their own succession of bishops; and the Bezpopovtsy, who have no priests. 59 There is much to admire in the Raskolniki. They numbered in their ranks the finest elements among the parish clergy and the laity of seventeenth-century Russia. Historians in the past have done them a serious injustice by regarding the whole dispute merely as a quarrel over the posi- tion of a finger, over texts, syllables, and false letters. The true cause of the schism lay else- where, and was concerned with something far more profound. The Old Believers fought for the two-finger sign of the Cross, for the old texts and customs, not simply as ends in themselves, but because of the matter of principle which was herein involved: they saw these things as embody- ing the ancient tradition of the Church, and this ancient tradition, so they held, had been pre- served in its full purity by Russia and Russia alone. Can we say that they were entirely wrong? The two-finger sign of the Cross was in fact more ancient than the three-finger form; it was the Greeks who were the innovators, the Russians who remained loyal to the old ways. Why then should the Russians be forced to adopt the modern Greek practice? Certainly, in the heat of con- troversy the Old Believers pushed their case to extremes, and their legitimate reverence for .Holy Russia. degenerated into a fanatical nationalism; but Nicon also went too far in his un- critical admiration for all things Greek. .We have no reason to be ashamed of our Raskol,. wrote Khomiakov. ..It is worthy of a great people, and could inspire respect in a stranger; but it is far from embracing all the richness of Russian thought. (See A. Gratieux, A.S. Khomiakov et le mouvement slavophile, Paris, 1939, vol. II, p. 165). It does not embrace the richness of Russian thought because it represents but a single aspect of Russian Christianity . the tradition of the Possessors. The defects of the Old Believers are the Josephite defects writ large: too narrow a nationalism, too great an emphasis on the externals of worship. Nicon too, despite his Hellenism, is in the end a Josephite: he demanded an absolute uniformity in the externals of worship, and like the Possessors he freely invoked the help of the civil arm in order to suppress all religious opponents. More than anything else, it was his readi- ness to resort to persecution which made the schism definitive. Had the development of Church life in Russia between 1550 and 1650 been less one-sided, perhaps a lasting separation would have been avoided. If men had thought more (as Nilus did) of tolerance and freedom instead of using persecution, then a reconciliation might have been effected; and if they had attended more to mystical prayer, they might have argued less bitterly about ritual. Behind the division of the seventeenth century lie the disputes of the sixteenth. As well as establishing Greek practices in Russia, Nicon pursued a second aim: to make the Church supreme over the State. In the past the theory governing relations between Church and State had been the same in Russia as in Byzantium . a dyarchy or symphony of two coordi- nated powers, sacerdotium and imperium, each supreme in its own sphere. In the Assumption Cathedral of the Kremlin there were placed two equal thrones, one for the Patriarch and one for the Tsar. In practice the Church had enjoyed a wide measure of independence and influence in the Kievan and Mongol periods. But under the Moscow Tsardom, although the theory of two equal powers remained the same, in practice the civil power came to control the Church more and more; the Josephite policy naturally encouraged this tendency. Nicon attempted to reverse the situation. Not only did he demand that the Patriarch.s authority be absolute in religious mat- ters, but he also claimed the right to intervene in civil affairs, and assumed the title .Great Lord,. hitherto reserved to the Tsar alone. Tsar Alexis had a deep respect for Nicon, and at first submit- ted to his control. .The Patriarch.s authority is so great,. wrote Olearius, visiting Moscow in 1654, .that he in a manner divides the sovereignty with the Grand Duke. (Palmer, The Patriarch and the Tsar, vol. II, p. 407). But after a time Alexis began to resent Nicon.s interference in secular affairs. In 1658 Ni- con, perhaps in hopes of restoring his influence, decided upon a curious step: he withdrew into 60 semi-retirement, but did not resign the office of Patriarch. For eight years the Russian Church remained without an effective head, until at the Tsar.s request a great Council was held at Mos- cow in 1666-1667 over which the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch presided. The Council decided in favor of Nicon.s reforms, but against his person: Nicon.s changes in the service books and above all his ruling on the sign of the Cross were confirmed, but Nicon himself was deposed and exiled, a new Patriarch being appointed in his place. The Council was therefore a triumph for Nicon.s policy of imposing Greek practices on the Russian Church, but a defeat for his attempt to set the Patriarch above the Tsar. The Council reasserted the Byzantine theory of a harmony of equal powers. But the decisions of the Moscow Council upon the relations ref Church and State did not remain long in force. The pendu1um which Nicon had pushed too far in one direction soon swung back in the other with redoubled violence. Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725) altogether suppressed the office of patriarch, whose powers Nicon had so ambitiously striven to aggrandize.
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