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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
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HARVARD THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
EDITED FOR THE
FACULTY OF DIVINITY
IN
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
BY
GEORGE F. MOORE, JAMES H. ROPES KIRSOPP LAKE
CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
Oxford University Press
I921
HARVARD THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
X
RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
FREDERICK C. CONYBEARE
HONORARY FELLOW UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
Oxford Univeesitx Press
I92I
COPYRIGHT, 19 2 1 HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASS., IINITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
This work was begun in 1914 and completed nearly as it stands early in 1917, about the time when the Russian Revolution began. It is too early yet to trace the fortunes of the Russian sects during this latest period, for the contradictory news of the struggle is not to be trusted; and few, if any, know what is really happening or has happened in unhappy Russia. Since, however, the future is largely moulded by the past, I trust that my work may be of some use to those who sincerely desire to understand and trace out the springs of the Revolu- tion.
It is not a work of original research. I have only read a number of Russian authorities and freely exploited them. I have especially used the History of the Russian Raskol by Ivanovski (two volumes, Kazan, 1895 and 1897). He was professor of the subject in the Kazan Seminary between 1880 and 1895. He tries to be fair, and in the main succeeds in being so. Subbotin, indeed, in a letter to Pobedonostzev, Procurator of the Holy Synod, who had consulted him about the best manuals on the subject, wrote slightingly of the work; but I think unfairly, for the only concrete faults he finds with it are, first, that the author allowed himself to use the phrase; 'the historical Christ,' which had to his ears a rationalist ring; and secondly, that he devoted too little space to the Moscow Synods of 1654 to 1667.
Another Russian work I have transferred almost bodily to my pages. This is the extremely rare brochure of I. Uzov or Yusov, Uusskie Dissidenty, St. Petersburg, 1881. This is a work of impartial and independent criticism, and valu- able for its numerous and well chosen citations from earlier works on the subject. In many cases where I have identified these citations I have found them accurate.
After these two authors, I am most indebted to the works of J. V. Liprandi, of H. I. Kostomarov, of Mehukov, of Maca- rius, archbishop of Moscow, author of a History of the Raskol,
PREFACE
published in 1889, of Kelsiev, of whose collectanea about the sects several volumes were printed in London between 1860 and 1870, of Th. Livanov, of our own William Palmer, the Historian of the Patriarch Nikon, of Paul Miliukov, of Father Palmieri, author of an Italian History of the Russian Church, of 0. Novitski, and of a few other authors whose names I have given in my pages.
It remains for me to express my gratitude to those who have helped me in my work; first and foremost to the Harvard Faculty of Divinity for their adoption of it ; to the Librarian of the Widener Library for the generous way he granted me every facility for study; to Dr. R. P. Blake for reading the final proof-sheets, and giving my readers the benefit of his great knowledge of the Russian language; and to Professors George Foot Moore and Kirsopp Lake for reading my work in advance. If there is any good order in my presentation of the subject, it is chiefly due to the latter of my two friends.
F. C. CONYBEARE.
Oxford, 1921.
LIST OF RUSSIAN PERIODICALS CITED
BaSjiioTeKa p^jisi ^Tenia ; 0. Hexep- Library for reading; St. Petersburg.
6ypn>. BpaxcKoe Cjiobo BpeMH
B-fecTHHRTb EBporrti; C. IleTepfiypirb BicTHHK'b MocKOBCKoft 3napxiH rojiocb CTapoo(3pH^n;a
^pyrb HCTHHBI
jZIymenojiesHoe HxeHie
The Brotherly Word.
Time.
Messenger of Europe; St. Petersburg.
Messenger of the See of Moscow.
The Voice of the Old believer.
The Friend of Truth.
Edifying Reading.
JKypnaji-b KasKascKoft 3napxiH SnaHie
HsB^CTin HMnepaTopcKaro 06iri;ecTBa HcTopin H 7I,peBHOCTeH npn Moc-
KOBCKOM'b yHHBepCHTexi Hc6opHHK1>
HcTHHa
MnccioHepcKoe Odosp'feHie
HeBCKifi CSopHHKTb 0630 p'b
IlepMCKaa 3napxiajii>Haa Fasexa IIpaBocjraBHBia Becfe^u IIpaBocjiaBHoe Odoap^Hie IIpaBOCJiaBHHH Co6ec'fe;iHHK'b npaBoc^aBHMH jnyTeBOAHTe.o.
^ I OliyTHHK1>
HpHjioaceHie Kt JKypnajiy KajiyHCCKofi
3napxiH PyccKia ApxHBXi PyccKia B'Scth PyccKiH Mip-b PyccKaa CiapHHa Cjiobo
Cjiobo IIpaB^H CoBpeMeHHBia JT'^TonncH CxapoodpH^eni'b Cxapoodpa^iecKiii BicxHHK'b Cxpana
CxpaHHHKXj
TpyAH KicBCKOH ^XOBHOfi
AKa^eMin XpHcxiaHCKia ^xenia
The Affair.
Journal of the Caucasian See.
Knowledge.
The Proceedings of the Imperial Society
of History and Antiquities at the
University of Moscow. The Elect One. Truth.
Missionary Review. Neva Collection. Review.
Gazette of the Perus See. Orthodox Conversations. Orthodox Review. Orthodox Conversationalist.
Orthodox Traveller.
Supplement to the Journal of the See
of Kaluga. Russian Archive. Russian News. Russian World. Russian Antiquity. The Word. The Word of Truth. Contemporary Chronicles. The Old-behever. The Old-behever Messenger. The Country. The Wanderer. Works of the Kiev Ecclesiastical
Academy. Christian Readings.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface v
List of Russian Periodicals Cited vii
Introduction 1
PART I THE OLD BELIEVERS OF GREAT RUSSIA
Chapter I. The Conditions leading to the Schism .... 13
Introduction. The Struggle against Centralization. Russia and Tartar Influence. Russian Ritualism and Liturgical Controversy. Nikon. Nikon's Reforms. The Council of Stoglav. The position of affairs in 1655. The Fall of Nikon. From the Fall of Nikon to 1666. The Council of 1666.
Appendix to Chapter I 69
P. Aurelio Palmieri's Account of the Russian Clergy.
Chapter II. The Early Days of the Schism 79
The Rebellion at the Solovetski Monastery. The Revolt of 1682. The Ukaze of 1685 and its Results. Tsardom and Antichrist.
Chapter III. The Dispersion 101
The Settlements of the Popovtsy. The Search for Priests. Epipha- nius, the First Raskol Bishop. The Uniat Movement. The Conces- sions of Paul I. The Persecution of the Raskol by Nicholas I. The Austrian Hierarchy. The General Character of the Popovtsy.
Chapter IV. The Bezpopovtsy or Priestless Sect .... 151
The Various Settlements of the Bezpopovtsy. The Stranniki. The Netovtsi and the Self-Baptizers. The Prayerless and the Sighers. The Intellectual Development of the Bezpopovtsy. Opinion on Priesthood and Sacraments.
Chapter V. The Question of Marriage 189
Marriage among the Stranniki. Varieties of Opinion among the Bezpoptovtsy. Theodosius Vasilev. Ivan Alexiev. I. A. Kovylin. The Present Situation.
X CONTENTS
PAGE
Chapter VI. The Organization, Legal Position, and Numbers
OF the Raskol 215
Introduction. The Communes of the Vyg. The Communes of Sopelok. General Organization. Legal Position of the Raskol. Before Peter I. Peter I. Peter III to Alexander I. Nicholas I and his Successors, to 1903. The Reforms of 1903. The Number of the Raskol. Controversial Propaganda against the Raskol. The PubU- cations of the Raskol in Modern Times.
PART II THE RATIONALIST SECTS OF SOUTH RUSSIA
Introduction 261
Chapter I. The Dukhobortsy 266
Chapter II. The Molokanye 289
The Evidence of their Confession of Faith. The Accounts of Uzov, StoUov and Kostomarov. Ivanovski's account.
Chapter III. The Communists, Stundists and other Small
Sects 327
The Communists. The Righthand Brotherhood or Zion's Tidings. The Stundists.
PART III THE MYSTIC SECTS
Chapter I. The Khlysty 339
Chapter II. The Skoptsy 363
RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
INTRODUCTION
One cannot better approach the study of the Russian Dissenters or Raskol (i. e. division, schism) than by repeating the words with which I. Uzov begins his work upon them. They are these: ''Haxthausen need not have warned Russia how serious a peril to her security her dissenters formed, nor have warned her to have regard thereto ; ^ as if in order to compass their destruction she had not all along resorted to the auto-da-fe, the knout, gallows and every sort of slow and painful death. Mindful of the proverb: 'Beat a man not with a stick, but with roubles,' the Government has imposed on them double taxes and curtailed their civil rights. Every petty official has been at liberty to help himself out of their pockets, and yet dissent has not weakened or diminished; on the contrary it has struck roots ever deeper and stronger into the life of the people." When at last the Government realized that the old system of frank and fearless extermina- tion could not stand criticism, it was pretended that the best way of getting rid of them was to encourage among them reading and writing and general enlightenment. It may be that if the Tsar's Government had given all its citizens at the least a middle class education. Dissent in the form in which it now exists might be weakened. But this was never done. Such instruction as was usually reckoned to be good enough for peasants was not of a kind to induce them to give up dissent, as is shewn by the fact that most dissenters had al- ready received it. We have the testimony of an official, Liprandi, commissioned by the Government of Nicholas I to hold an inquisition into them, that "the range of their
^ Aug. Haxthausen. Researches into Inner Life of the People of Russia. Han- nover, 1847, i, 415. A. H. aims his remark at the Dukhobortsy only.
1
2 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
activity is not lessened but extended by education." ^ Count Stenbok, another official set to study them by the Govern- ment, affirms that "Dissent perpetually spreads and becomes stronger," that, "notwithstanding a weakening of religious interest, their adherents are no weaker as a body," and that "all measures taken against them, by the government are up to the present unavaihng." - An anonymous authority, S. M. V., states as a fact fully known, that "as of old dissent flourished upon persecution in secret, so now with freedom (?) it flourishes in the open." ^ We could produce many more attestations of the kind, but rest content with the above in order to avoid reiteration.
Uzov infers that Dissent flourished just the same, no matter whether the Government was strict or lenient; and that it did so proved that it is not engendered by temporary or transient causes, but is founded on deep cravings and satisfies daily spiritual needs of individuals.
Yet "neither Russian administration, nor Russian poHte society understands thoroughly what sort of thing Dissent is";^ and this not from want of facts accumulated by students, but from their onesidedness. By preference they have di- rected their attention to the ceremonial pecuUarities which distinguish dissent from orthodoxy, without remarking, nay rather, without wishing to remark, that the dissenters' out- look is framed on quite other principles than those which underhe our present social structure.
"We beUeve," says Uzov, "that the period of social experi- ments made on the inarticulate masses is drawing to a close, and that we are being driven to the conclusion that ameUora- tions of a community must be based on a profound study of the nature of the individuals who compose it, because in no other case can reforms reap any success.
"The intellectual and moral characteristics of our people are pecuUarly prominent in the Raskol; and that is why a
* Lectures at Imperial Historical Society in Moscow University for 1870, Bk. 2, by Liprandi, p. 83.
2 Kelsiev, IV. 325. Stenbok had in view in particular the Stranniki.
3 Strannik, 1871, 2nd Art. S. M. V. p. 93.
* P. Melnikov, Treatise {Pismo) on the Raskol.
INTRODUCTION a
study of it is indispensable for any statesman who desires to pursue with even tenour and without groping or guesswork^ the pathways of his activities and enterprises."
I have begun my study of Russian dissent with the above words of Uzov, because they rightly insist on the importance of understanding the social, moral and religious characteristics of a great people in order to obtain a general comprehension of its origin and character.
Dissent, by which I render the word Raskol, implies, like our own word 'nonconformist,' the existence of a dominant and established Church against whose doctrines, rites, and oppressive tendencies (inherent in every such Church) the dissenters are permanently in revolt. In Russia this Church knows itself under the title of Orthodox, and has been from its earliest age, when the first metropoUtan, Leontius was dis- patched from Byzantium with a cortege of Greek bishops by the patriarch Nicholas Chrysoverghes (983-996), a purely exotic, imported and foreign product in all that regards beUefs, disciphne and ceremonies.
In this respect it is in strong contrast with the old Armenian Church, in which, in spite of the fact that its doctrine and rites were of Greek or Syriac origin, there nevertheless remained much that was racy of the soil, in particular the institution of animal sacrifice for the sins of the living, for the repose of the souls of the dead, and for the support (by the assignment to them of the Levitical portions of the victims) of the priest- hood. The Christian priest of Armenia was the direct heir of the pagan priest who preceded him; the Armenian patriarch was for long generations a scion of the Arsacid house which occupied the throne, and when that throne finally disappeared in the fifth century the Patriarch, or CathoUcos, as he was styled, retained a large portion of the loyalty which had upheld it against the combined assaults of Roman Emperor and Sassanid oppressor. Even as late as the crusading epoch the patriarchs of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia boasted themselves to be of the old Arsacid hneage. Ecclesiastical ofhce in Armenia was based on heredity rather than on charis-
4 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
matic gifts, and none that did not belong to the old priestly families could be ordained.
In Russia, on the other hand, though the old pagan supersti- tions long survived, and survive to-day in popular magic and song, the orthodox Church never possessed such an odour of pagan antiquity as the Armenian. It was in no sense a native product; and if the priesthood has tended to become heredi- tary, this is because the village popes began to own their manses, and the difficulty of providing an incoming parish priest with a residence was most easily met by choosing his son to succeed him. It was not because sacerdotal gifts ran in the blood of certain old famiUes. Of the twenty-four successors of Leontius, the first Russian metropohtan (who died in 1004 or 1008), there are barely two or three during the two hundred and thirty years that preceded the Mongol con- quest of Russia that do not bear Greek names, and they were all nominees of a patriarch of Byzantium who regarded Kiev and Moscow as mere provinces of his own church, or of a Greek emperor who regarded the rulers of Moscow as his vassals.
In one respect, however, the Russian Church resembled the Armenian, as it did other early Christian Churches, namely in the predominance of the monasteries. Greek asceticism took firm root among the Slavs. The convent, richly endowed with fields, villages and serfs, was the teaching church; and until Peter the Great forbade its inmates the use of pens and ink, it was the home of all the intellectual work, and of all the wTiters of the land. The parish priests, who must be married men, have never counted. They are an inferior order of beings, in spite of their white habihments. The higher clergy and episcopate have been recruited among the cowled and black- coated monks. Peter the Great made a fierce attack on the monasteries, raised the age of the noviciate to thirty, reduced the number of monks by half, made most of them work with their hands, denied them paper and ink in order to prevent them from describing liim as Antichrist, filled their houses with his discharged soldiers, subjected them to a thousand indignities; but even he did not venture to break with the rule
INTRODUCTION 5
that every bishop must be a monk. This exclusion of the "white" clergy from all positions of emolument and authority has created for centuries a chasm in the ranks of the clergy; and under the rule of the Tsars the Russian bishop was a mere courtier and functionary of the state ; he stood for absolutism, for oppression in every form and of every grade of society; he was a spaniel fawning on the Government which distrib- uted the sweets of office. He detested above all things light, liberty, free growth and living development of institutions; he was a parasite, but, alas, he was the Russian Church, an incarnation of Byzantinism. It is important to grasp this distinction between the parish clergy and the monks. Possi- bly under the Mongol regime in Russia which began in 1237 the monasteries were hearths of Slav patriotism, but even in 1294 under the patriarch John XII the secular clergy were already loud in their complaints of the exactions of the bishops. Certain it is that the great schism of which the Raskol is the permanent fruit was largely due to friction between the parish clergy and the monkish agents of the absolutist and centralis- ing government of Moscow.
Historians of Russian dissent, no matter to what school they belong, whether, hke Uzov, sympathetic, or, like Prof. N. Ivanovski,^ partisans of the Holy Synod, agree in dividing it into three classes, or categories, of Old rituahsts or Old beUevers, RationaUsts and Mystics.
Ivanovski seeks to load upon the dissenters and lift off the Church, of which he is a modern spokesman, the onus of blame for the great Russian schism of two hundred and fifty years ago. He sets undue store by the old appellation of the Raskol of Staroobryadets, "Old rituahst." He would have us beUeve that the schism was created by ignorant people who could not distinguish between what was "of faith," and what was unessential, such as matters of discipline and posture and vestment.
The Old rituahsts took their rise in the XVIIth Century by way of protest against the correction of chiu'ch books and
1 History of the Raskol, 1897, Introduction, pp. 3 ff.
6 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
rites under the patriarch Nikon. Their essential characteristic lay in their confusion of rite or ceremony with dogma, and in the attribution to ritual and to the letter of the prayer books of the Russian Church of a fixt invariabihty. Old rituahsm therefore consists in the upholding of the rites in vogue before the time of Nikon, and rests on the false assumption that no other rites but these went back to the age of Prince Vladimir under whom Christianity was adopted as the national rehgion. In fact, argued the dissenters, the rites introduced by Nikon were new rites. They acted in separating themselves from the Church as if orthodoxy was bound up with the preservation of certain rites, and precluded all change in matters unessential. For example, worshippers are to prostrate themselves exactly as of old, to keep exactly the same fasts and in the same way; even old customs in daily life are to be maintained as if a reUgious interest was subserved in doing so. In church, for example, the same garb is to be worn as was anciently in vogue. In all such ways, Ivanovski concludes, these sectaries cling to hfe as it was in the XVIIth Century.
It is probably true that the Raskol regarded such unessen- tials with what to-day would be considered superstitious veneration. But did the Patriarch Nikon and the innovating section of the Russian Church, which, having the Tsar and his army on their side, were able to enforce their will upon the con- servatives, attach less weight to them? If the Raskol confused mere rites with dogma, did their antagonists not do the same? If the points at issue were so insignificant, why could not the party of Nikon allow these simple folk to keep the reUgious customs and forms of words which from time inomemorial had been in vogue, and be content themselves in their own superior enhghtenment to adopt the new and, as they — in most cases falsely — imagined, correcter ones in their own churches? Instead of saving the position by a little well-timed tolerance, the Patriarch Nikon resorted to the knout, the sword, the stake; and getting together a council of his parti- sans, excommunicated and anathematized his opponents as heretics en masse. Now it is, as Ivanovski admits, quite uncanonical for orthodox churchmen to have recourse to
INTRODUCTION 7
these extreme methods of argument, unless the unchange- able dogmas of the Christian rehgion be at stake and directly impugned. It is evident then that the Russian Authorities made the changes as much a matter of faith as did the Raskol, who at least had on their side that prescription of antiquity to which Christian Fathers like TertulUan and Augustine regularly appealed as decisive against innovators and heretics. The Fathers of Nicea in 325 professed to base their decision on the rule: "Let what is ancient prevail." The Raskol have never appealed to any other canon. They are accused of 'bhnd adherence to antique details.' Was the adherence of Nikon to modern details any less bUnd?
Quite other is the basis of the antagonism to the Church of what Ivanovski labels the RationaUst sects, viz. the Dukho- bortsy — whose name is a translation of the Greek Trvevfiaroiidxot. or battlers with the Spirit, but which is usually rendered in Enghsh Spirit-wrestlers, in the sense of men in whom the Holy Spirit wrestles for utterance; the Molokanye or milk- drinking sect; the recent sect of Stundists and some others. These sects, in his opinion, — an opinion which, as we shall see later on, is erroneous — reflect an intrusion about the year 1700 of the ideas of Western Europe. He terms them ration- ahst because they reject the authority of the Church and claim a hberty to interpret Scripture as they Uke. The Old ritualists attach importance to ceremonies; the ' RationaUsts' repudiate them and reject all the externals of worship, sacraments, ikons or holy pictures and rehcs. None of these aids to devotion appeal to them. Of fasting in the sense of a rejection of this or that diet they will not hear; and their worship consists wholly of prayer and singing of hymns. They call themselves 'Spiritual Christians' in token that they set no value on the outer husks of worship, but only on the kernel of rehgious faith.
The third group is the Khlysty or flagellants, of which the Skoptsy or self-emasculators are an offshoot, dated by Ivanovski at the middle of the XVIIth Century, though he admits their origin to be obscure and that some features of their teaching go back to remote antiquity, to paganism and old Christian heresies. They were never, hke the Old rituaUsts, champions
8 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
of externals, of the letter, nor like the Molokanye, of the human reason; but are mystics, that is creatures of irresponsible feeling, believing in the immediate relationship of man to God to the extent of accounting themselves Gods, Christs, Prophets, divinely born, soothsayers. These sects enshroud themselves in almost impenetrable secrecy, but in presence of strangers call themselves orthodox Christians.
Uzov's own prehminary account of the first two divisions is as follows, and he claims to adopt the terminology of the sec- taries themselves: "The first division comprises the Old beUevers; the second the Spiritual Christians. The Old behevers have spht up into two chief groups, the Popovtsy, or priest-sect, and the priestless, or Bezpopovtsy {Pope in Russian = priest). The latter are divided into minor sects, the Pomorskiye, Spasovo, Thedosyevo, Phihppovo or Lipovany, Wanderers (Stranniki or Beguny), and finally the Prayerless Ones. And in this hst we only enumerate the stronger and typical sects omitting the minor ones. The most extreme and typical of these is that of the Wanderers (Stranniki) and particularly the Prayerless, who closely resemble the Spiritual Christians and even so call themselves. Many writers, indeed, who are ill acquainted with the Prayerless doctrine refer them to that group; nevertheless their derivation from the Old behevers is so indehbly stamped upon them, that those famihar with their teaching have no difficulty in recognizing in them all the characteristic marks of the 'Old behef.'"
"The 'Spiritual Christians' are divided into Dukhobortsy, Molokanye, Communists, and Evangelicals or Stundists.
"Over and above these main groups there remains," says Uzov, "a diminutive residuum, the Khlysty and Skoptsy." This group is very small and looked askance at by the common people who have given it the appellation of the 'dark' sect (cf. Liprandi, p. 104), — a sect which we may better define as being of a mystico-rehgious character. The sects forming this group have no future; their propaganda amounts to nothing, notwithstanding their age (for they were derived from Byzan- tium along with Orthodoxy), and notwithstanding that they are the only group of Raskol which can be called universal.
INTRODUCTION 9
In it courtiers are found side by side with peasants, Finns with Great and Little Russians. The conunon people have vari- ous names for them according to the places where they are found, for example, Liads, Vertuns, Medoviks, Khanzhas, Kladentsy, Kupidons, Shaloputs, etc. The chief danger of this group, according to Ministers of the Interior, is that it venerates "some of the Emperors, that have already passed away into another Ufe, as being still alive"; in other words "assumes the existence of a second lawful ruler." This ruler was Peter III (Liprandi pp. 93 and 95). The only intelhgible basis of such a behef is to be found in an express ukase of Peter III of Jan. 20, 1762, to the effect that the Raskolniks (dissen- ters) are not to be persecuted, because there "exist in the Empire not only men of other faiths, such as Mahomedans and idolaters, but also dissenting Christians whose superstition and obstinacy are such, that it is hopeless to convert them by duress and ill-treatment, from which they would only flee across the frontiers." ^
It is moreover clear that the Old believers of both groups belong to Great Russia, and that Moscow is their centre of origin, while the Spiritual Christians belong to the South, to Little Russia — the Ukraine, — and to Kiev rather than Moscow. It has therefore seemed best to divide the discus- sion into three parts, dealing with (1) the Old believers of Great Russia, (2) the Spiritual Christians of South Russia, (3) the Mystics.
^ Cf. Collection of Statutes regarding the Raskol, Bk. 1, p. 586."
Part I
THE OLD BELIEVERS
OF GREAT RUSSIA
CHAPTER I
THE CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM
No Church historian believes that great schisms are wholly- due to the insignificant and unmeaning dogmatic problems and differences to which ecclesiastical writers attribute them. Who, for example, will believe that it was the question whether the Spirit proceeded from both Father and Son or from Father alone which caused the great schism of East and West? It is obvious to a student of Mommsen or Gibbon that the real cause was a difference of national temperament which divided the Roman Empire into two halves, Greek and Latin. Long before the advent of the new religion, there had arisen a funda- mental antagonism between the Greek and Romans in matters political, moral, and intellectual. Similarly the schism between Byzantium and the Armenians was the expression of a desire for independence, an instinct of home-rule on the part of the latter. They wanted an excuse for quarreling with the Greeks and found it in religion, and in the Armenian Fathers it is not uncommon to find the boast that they adopted such and such a fashion in religion in order to ''raise a hedge" between them- selves and the Greeks. The German and Anglican reforma- tions, so-called, were not motived by dogmatic, nor even by ritual quarrels. Both nations wanted to eliminate Italian clergy and to say their prayers in the vernacular, above all to keep their spare cash at home instead of sending it abroad as Peter's pence.
Such considerations suggest that in the genesis of the Old beUevers, social and political causes must have co-operated with those on which Russian churchmen insist, and several Russian historians have given due weight to these. Kosto- marov ^ for example wrote as follows :
"As we survey the history, phenomena and structure of the rehgious life of the Russian people in the past, and try to seize its characteristics, enduring even up to our own age, we are
1 Messenger of Europe, 1871. No. 4, April, p. 471 and p. 480.
13
14 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
struck by the fact that there hardly ever was, in all Christen- dom, a land less inclined to religious movements, less prepared for them than Russia, especially Great Russia. That such movements were not in keeping with the coldness of their temper in such matters, is often revealed in our history. We hear nothing but complaints of the alienation of the people from the Church, of its indifference thereto, of its failure to live a Christian life. . . .
"It is the last thing one would have expected, that, among people whose leading trait had for so long been religious indiffer- ence, heresy and raskol (dissent) should manifest itself, much more that it should spread among the masses."
And Shchapov says :
"Popular indifference in respect of religious ceremonial was so strong in the age which witnessed the emergence and spread of the Raskol, that not only in the XVIIth Century the Tsars Michael Theodorovich and Alexis Michaelovich, but also at the beginning of the XVIIIth Peter the Great, had to drive the people by means of ukases to go to church, to con- fess and communicate."^
"The Russian people," says Palmieri, p. 402 (following Golubinski, ii, 871) "had a singular understanding of what constitutes piety. Many took no pains to observe the essential rules of Christian life, only attended Church two or three times a year, very seldom went to confession or communion, and waited for the deathbed before they could be induced to receive the Sacraments." Golubinski also dwells on the cold- ness of religious sentiment and supine ignorance of the lower classes in Nikon's age, and in the century which preceded. Further back in the age anterior to Maximus the Greek we have no data on which to base a judgment.
Nevertheless, A?vrites Uzov, we are suddenly confronted in Nikon's age with a vigorous propaganda and an obstinate struggle. How shall we explain it? He believes the true explanation to be that in the Raskol the true driving force was not religion, but other factors, which may be summarised as the struggle against centralisation and the growth of Tartar
1 A. Shchapov, Russian Raskol, p. 163.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 15
influence. The reforming zeal of Nikon, the Uturgical con- troversy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the councils of 1551 and 1667 were only the more spectacular symptoms of these deeper causes.
The Struggle against Centralisation
"In the XVIIth Century, before the time of the Raskol, it often happened that the inferior clergy in an entire province or in special districts refused to obey the orders of its arch- priest and endeavoured to free itself not only from the payment of legal dues, but from the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan. Already prior to the Raskol, priests were occasionally found imbued with a manifestly Raskol-like temper of insubordina- tion despising the hierarchical piety." More than once the clergy had aspired to independence of the spiritual authority, and laymen presumed to follow their example.
"Indifference towards the Church naturally led on to dis- obedience, opposition to Church authorities and in general to suspicion of and want of respect for the clergy. Attempts were already visible to achieve complete freedom from their jurisdiction or at least to get control thereof."^ "In some places and especially in Pskov and Novgorod there had oc- curred open revolts against Church jurisdiction and administra- tion. In Novgorod the movement in favour of independence from Moscow was so strong that on one occasion they sent to the Patriarch of Constantinople to urge their case: ' We do not want to be judged by the MetropoUtan,' they said, 'but we ask for your blessing; and if you will not give it, then we will take sides with the Latins.' "^ ''The ills of the Russian Clergy," writes Palmieri (p. 253), reproducing the words of Golubinski's History, "were due to the infiltration into Russia of Byzantine ideals. The priesthood lacked from the beginning the char- acteristics of an apostolic ministry. The priests were looked upon as artisans for whom it was enough to be able to read and celebrate the rites. Their spiritual labours were miserably
1 Shchapov, op. cit., pp. 77, pp. 168, 169.
2 D. D. Sontsov, Hist, of Russ. People up to XVIIth Century, p. 60.
16 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
recompensed, and as a class they made no pretence of educating and guiding the people. The difference of moral conditions dug an abyss between the episcopate and the lower clergy. The bishops needed vast sums to keep up their retinues which often numbered a hundred persons. In their palaces, courtiers, stewards, major-domos, chamberlains, exactors of dues, secre- taries, sacristans, hieromonachi (i. e. monks ordained as priests) and so forth elbowed one another. Episcopal revenues were beyond doubt large; thus early in the XVIth Century the MetropoHtan of Moscow possessed 100,000 desiatines (1 des. = 2.70 acres), and he of Novgorod had still ampler estates. Nevertheless such resources did not suffice them, and they took to robbing in order to satiate the voracity of their satel- lites. Priests had to toil like slaves in order that their bishops might live like princes. Nobles, pages and dignitaries had no scruples in the petty episcopal courts against plundering the country clergy who flocked in vain to the Tsar, the patriarch, and the bishops, to protest against the injuries inflicted on them. Their protests fell on deaf ears, and to losses were added jeers and insults. It is no wonder if now and then the unhappy popes, reduced to desperation, refused to pay the episcopal dues and resisted violence with violence. The populace flew to help them, and hunted away or roughly handled the episco- pal tax gatherers, as happened at Pskov in 1435 and later at Vyshgorod, whose inhabitants after duly cudgelling the agents of the MetropoHtan lona, expelled them from the vicinity." "There is no age," he writes again (p. 256), '4n which we do not feel the deepest pity for the much ridiculed popes. It is on them that the fatal consequences of the Byzantine system of the Russian Church fell, and episcopate and State vied with each other to sink them to the level of brutes and turn them into ci\dl and ecclesiastical pariahs. Thus the latent schism of that Church to-day has historical roots. The presbyterian move- ment of the present time, to use the expression of certain Rus- sian bishops, is the fruit of a policy of oppression which has rendered the hierarchy hateful to the lower clergy, which has drawn the latter closer to the people who share their misery with them, and actually drives many of the rural popes into
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 17
the ranks of socialism and of those who are in revolt against Church and State." ....
"Over against the bishops we behold the insurrection of a down-trodden clergy, upheld in their demands by an oppressed people. The popes cannot see why the highest posts of the hierarchy should be kept for monkery alone. No canon of councils, ecumenical or particular, sanctions such a custom." (p. 689).
The truth is, writes Uzov, that in the times prior to the Raskol the relations of the clergy to the people were utterly different from what they are now. The clergy were 'Hhe toy outright, the servant of what was then the all-powerful factor in Great Russia, the mir or village commune, whose members selected them and exacted of them a written pledge to obey the mir, which formed the parish, in all sorts of ways. With- out permission of the mir they could not quit the parish nor meddle with the economy of the church, still less of the mir; the priest even had in celebrating the rites to consult the likes and dislikes of his parishioners. In their court the members of the mir tried priest and layman alike for violations even of church regulations. The priest was like any other official chosen by the community."^
Such was the status of the clergy when a man of severe and despotic temper, Nikon Mordvinov'^ was made patriarch; and he lost no time in rousing against himself all the inferior clergy, towards whom he conducted himself with such excess of strictness and oppression that he was dubbed a second Pope.* For Nikon a priest was a mere nobody. "For any negligence in the discharge of his duties Nikon put him in irons, tortured him in prison and dispatched him whither he chose to beg his bread." *
I. Ya. Goremykin in his Sketches of Peasant History in Po- land, p. 13, has a passage which goes some way to explain the antipathy of Russian peasants towards the Latin Pope that is
1 Quoted by Uzov from Nevskii Sbornik 1867, art. by Vishnyakov, p. 80.
^ See further, pp. 41 ff.
^ i. e. of Rome. A. Shchapov, Russian Raskol, p. 78.
* N. Kostomarov, Rtissian History in Biographies, Ed. iv. pp. 178-9.
18 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
implied in the above comparison with him of Nikon. ''The preaching," he says, ''of the Byzantine missionaries of the IXth Century met with success and encountered no opposition on the part of the tribes, among whom it spread; the preachers from the west did not achieve the same success. The reason was that the former chose as a means for their propaganda the diffusion of Slav writing, and taking their stand on a popular platform introduced together with the light of Christianity the hght of a native learning that could be understood. It would not appear either, that they meddled with the Government, or tried in their own interests to influence the social order of the countries they were missionizing. For this reason people listened to them without misgivings and accepted their teach- ing of their own free will and readily. The Apostles of the Roman Church on the other hand were for the most part Germans, and, besides conducting their preachings in a tongue the Slavs did not understand, they brought with them principles of overlordship in society that were German and to Slavdom repugnant. The Slavs resisted and defended their popular rights with all their might."
The above extracts help to explain the popular fury which Nikon's so-called reforms aroused. He imported State des- potism; introduced or rather enforced the German principles of overlordship in every village; anticipated that harsh and brutal officialdom, that despotism of bureaucrats and multi- plied ministries which we to-day associate with Prussia, but which was really more rampant, and infinitely less plastic and intelligent in Czarist Russia. One cannot but be reminded of the words of the strange thinker Nietzsche, — so often in- voked, so seldom read and so little understood — which better than all else explain the genesis of the Raskol: —
"Somewhere there are still people and herds, but not with us, my brethren: with us there are States.
"The State? What is that? Well, now open your ears, for now I deliver my sentence on the death of peoples.
"The State is the coldest of all cold monsters. And coldly it lieth; and this lie creepeth out of its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people.'
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 19
"It is a lie. Creators they were who created the peoples and hung one belief and one love over them; thus they served life.
"Destroyers they are who lay traps for many, calhng them the State : they hung a sword and a hundred desires over them.
"Whatever a people is left, it understandeth not the State, but hateth it as the evil eye, and a sin against customs and rights."
Nikon, wTites Uzov, encroached on the local life of Russia. He overwhelmed every town and village with taxation. Not a priest or deacon but had to pay tithes on every truss of hay, every bushel of corn. Even the beggars were made to pay. But in particular his reforms were aimed to strengthen the grip of the higher grades of the hierarchy on the people, and to make himself Pope on the Roman model. But while striv- ing to subject the clergy to the despotic power of the Patriarch, Nikon at the same time devoted all his energies to releasing them from subjection to the mirs. In his time the parish was turned "as it were into a clerico-political circumscription." ^
The reforms of Nikon drew on him the hatred of every class of the people, to whom they seemed violations of their customs and rights. The principle of authority which he invoked as between the clergy and the people offended the customs of both and was reckoned to be a form of Latinizing and of Popery. "Nothing," wrote the protopope Avvakum in a petition to the Tsar Alexis Michailovich, "so much engenders schism in the churches as overbearing love of domination on the part of the authorities." ^
Nikon's reforms encountered from the lower clergy in particu- lar a stubborn resistance, because they tended to strengthen the powers of the archpriests. His despotic freaks aroused the indignation of the upper classes as well. The Pious Tsar Alexis in his letter to Nikon remarked that he had to find fault with him, because "he drove men to fast by force, but could not drive anyone by force to believe in God." ^
» V. Andreev: The Raskol and its significance in Russian popular history, Petersb. 1870, p. 96. 2 Ibid. p. 58. ' Ignatius, History of the Raskol, pp. 188-9.
20 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
One of the malcontents, the Boyarin Simeon Streshnev, "having taught his big dog to sit up on his hind-quarters and to bless with his front paws in the manner of an archpriest, gave him the name of Nikon. The mockery was carried on in public without shame or fear." ' Nikon's comment reveals a lack of humour: "If a mouse eats the host, it does not com- municate. So neither is a dog's blessing really a blessing."
After rendering himself odious to the lower clergy and the people, Nikon embarked on the correction of church books and of sundry rites, and carried out his plan with his accus- tomed masterfulness. It was less that the plan was destestable than that its executor was; for, to begin with, the so-called reforms, no less than the opposition to them, appealed to the clergy alone, and outside its ranks textual emendations neither interested, nor were understood by anyone. The majority of the Russian people, as might be expected, regarded the matter with ancestral indifference and phlegm.^ Andrew Denisov, an early leader of the Raskol, admits that there was at first no popular opposition to the new editions promulgated by Nikon. The masses had no idea what it was all about. How should they when the services were in old Cyrillic, a dead language which they could understand no more then than now? For a long time "they failed to discern that anything new was happening and were wrapt in their usual pall of ignorance." ^ Ecclesiastical dignitaries whose chief characteristic it was "to be easy-going and indolent in their own affairs and occupations were obviously not going to resist." ^ And this was just what Nikon counted on, — all the more so, because the changes had already begun under his predecessors, and "the innovations had already appeared outright in the newly printed books under the four patriarchs who preceded Joseph." ^ "In particular the books issued under Joseph were full of variants from the earlier printed editions, as is evidenced by the very ones to-day in use among the old-ritualists." ^
"In order to bring about everywhere the suspension of the
^ Ignatius, History of the Raskol, pp. 188-9.
2 Kostomarov, in Messenger of Europe, 1871, No. 4, pp. 481-2.
3 Ignatius, History of the Raskol, pp. 140, 151.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 21
old style of Church-service, Nikon ordered the old books to be taken away in every parish, both in towns and villages. In so acting he was merely following the example of the patriarch Philaret, who not only everywhere removed, but even burned the order for prayer and ministration printed in Moscow in 1610." 1
But Nikon, continues Uzov, by his rasping severity had already inflamed the clergy against himself. They hated him because he had done all he could to substitute for the old and more or less fraternal ties which bound the common clergy and ecclesiastical superiors together, a new relationship of harsh subordination. In this connection we must not forget that in the Eastern Churches the parish clergy must be mar- ried men like their parishioners, whereas the higher clergy have taken monastic vows. A family man and a monk easily lose touch with each other. The lower clergy were thus all of them ready to oppose Nikon's textual innovations, so soon as they were pointed out to them; and the tactless way he went to work only hardened them in their opposition. It was at his instance, as we have seen, that in the Council of 1656, the higher clergy solermily anathematized those who crossed themselves with two fingers.^ This resort to anathemas gave to Nikon's work the stamp of an abomination, for his oppon- ents could, and did, at once accuse him of levelling a curse against all former generations of saints that had crossed them- selves in that manner. It gave them a good excuse for pro- nouncing in their turn an equally solemn curse on Nikon and all his works.
More than all else this one innovation provided all who were discontented with the administration of Church matters with a battle-cry and a standard round which to rally. "As in Moscow the capital, so in the provinces, the revolt of the lower clergy and their leaning to dissent was due to a clerico- democratic instinct to free themselves from the restraints imposed by the higher hierarchy, and in particular from its juris- diction, its crushing imposts and dimes." ^ We must bear in
1 P. Melnikov: Historical Sketch of Popovshchina, Moscow, 1864, p. 14.
^ op. cit. Melnikov, p. 14.
' A. Shchapov, Russian Raskol, p. 204.
22 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
mind that in the good old times the parish priest was amenable to the jurisdiction of the village elders among whom he lived and who knew him personally and intimately. Nikon withdrew him from their jurisdiction and placed him under the surveil- lance of monks who hved far away and were foreign to him. Nor is there any reason to suppose that fees for ordination payable to the bishop were reduced by transferring to the latter so much of the authority which by ancient usage belonged to the llir. The undivided Church, as is well known, recog- nized but a single charismatic dignity alike in bishop and priest, and accordingly one of the earliest Raskol teachers, the protopope Neronov, wrote to the Tsar that "the priestly grade is one and the same in all. You cannot, he argued, speak of one man's holy orders as being perfect, of another's as imperfect, for all priests are on a level. If archpriests are successors of the highest Twelve Apostles, yet the priests and deacons are successors of the Seventy Apostles; and among themselves they are all brethren, servants of one Lord." For the settlement therefore of ecclesiastical disputes, he proposed the convening of a council at which should be present not only archpriests, but archimandrites, hegumens, protopopes, divines, priests and deacons, and ''also those who inhabit the village communes (mirs) and who, no matter what their rank, lead good hves . . . " ^
The Old behevers, in fact, were intent on defending the rights of the locality and of the individual; accordingly when the patriarch reproached them in public debate for not obeying their archpriests, they pointed out that ''respect is not due to persons, when the faith is being tampered with or even when the truth is at stake, and it must be proclaimed not only in the presence of the priestly caste, but of Tsars, inasmuch as to apostatize from true reUgion is to apostatize from God." ^
At the beginning of their struggle with the Church authori- ties the Old believers imagined they would meet with the sup- port of the civil ones; thus it is that the Raskol began its
* I. Kharlamov in Strana, 1880, No. 57.
* Three Petitions, pp. 1 and 96. The one I cite is given by Will. Palmer, The Taar and the Patriarch, Vol. II, p. 449. It was presented to the Tsar Oct. 6, 1667.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 23
history with petitions to the civil rulers.^ "Gracious Tsar," wrote the monks of Solovets, ''we beseech you with tears and lamentations, suffer not this new doctor and ecumenic patri- arch to change our true Christian faith delivered to us by our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy apostles, and by the seven general Councils upheld. Let us abide in the piety and tradi- tions in which our wonder workers Zosimus and Sabbatius and Germanus and Philip, metropolitan of Moscow, and all the saints found favour with God." Here there is no accent of disloyalty and revolt. But they were soon disillusioned, for, in what was really a struggle between the democratic elements and the authorities of the Church, the Tsar's Government speedily took the side of the latter and proceeded to punish the opposition with all severity. The Old believers promptly made up their minds that Tsar Alexis Michailovich "was no Tsar but a tyrant."^
The Church Council of 1666 decided to punish the dissidents "not only with ecclesiastical but with imperial penalties, i.e. by civil statute and execution."^ Persecutions and atrocities began, and a talented Old believer, the protopope Awakum, wrote in view of what was occurring: " 'Tis a marvel how little they think of argument. It is by fire, nay by knout, by the gallows, they want to affirm the faith. What Apostles ever taught such courses? I know not. My Christ never bade our Apostles to teach that fire, knout and halter are educators in faith. . . . The Tatar God Mahomet wrote in his book: Our behest is to strike off with the glaive the heads of those who will not submit to our tradition and statute."^ But such protests did not avail against the enemies of the Raskol, and persecution waxed all the fiercer.
The intervention of the Tsar's Government in a dispute between the people and Church Authorities could only result in "the rebel movement, which the teachers of the Raskol had begim on strictly ecclesiastical ground, being suddenly trans- ferred to the sphere of civilian and popular life; and at the head
1 Imperial Society of History and Antiquities, 1863, bk. 1, p. 57.
2 Some Words on the Raskol, by I. Nilski, p. 63.
^ Life of the Protopope Awakum, written by himself, pp. 93-4.
24 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
of it popular leaders made their appearance and took command, partisans opposed to the imperial Government, such as Kho- vanski, Stenka Razin, the Denisovs and others."^ But this doubhng, says Uzov, of ecclesiastical protest by civil did not come at once, but only gradually, and ill-success attended the first essays of the Raskolniks to link their own fortunes with revolution against the civil powers. Thus, for example, in the time of the revolt of the Streltsy guards, the dregs of the populace rose along with them against the princes and boyars and massacred many...^ They tore up judicial writs and ordinances affecting the serfs, burned the stores in the for- tresses, made havoc of legal decisions, declared the serfs to be free, rescued from prisons the interned.-^ When they began to pillage boyars and princes, the Streltsy did not spare even the Tsar's treasury. The Sovereign's enemies were joined by the foes of the ecclesiastical authorities, and these Old believers, though a small group to begin with, formed a welcome accession of strength to the rebel soldiers, who regarded them as men of learning; not that they had the least idea of how the party of Old believers differed from Nikon's, indeed the majority of them had not the least desire to know; they were only minded to end the old regime, and so were led incidentally to demon- strate in favour of freedom of conscience. Meanwhile the Government was well aware that the Streltsy took no interest in the struggle of the Raskol as such and presently succeeded in detaching them. "Why," asked the heads of State and Church of them, ''why sacrifice us and the whole Russian realm for half-a-dozen monks?" The soldiers gave ear and answered: "With that (viz: the quarrel of the Old beUevers with the heads of the State) we have nothing to do."
The Old believers, however, were not disheartened by this first repulse of fortune, but pursued their aims unswervingly and with superhuman fortitude. The party of opposition among the clergy was in itself weak, but alhed itself with any sort of popular agitation, however much the result of motives
1 A. Shchapov, Russian Raskol, p. 218.
2 Three Petitions, pp. 72, 60, 89, 137, 142. » Three Petitions, pp. 137, 142.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 25
and convictions other than its own; among the people there were great numbers who were ready to adhere to anything which magnified, much more sanctified, their old grudge against authority in general; and the Raskolniks ranged themselves in opposition to the Government under the banner of holy ^vrit and of theology. Their protest against social abuses was formulated in phrases culled from theological texts. Theology of course was the only ''science" known to the Russian of that age, and it does not surprise us that he threw his feeUngs and aspirations into the mould of its terms and conceptions.^ It really signified little in what form his feelings and ideas were moulded, — his chief concern was to arrange them in a system of teaching intelligible to others, and here theology stood him in good stead. Yet, asks Uzov, how explain the fact that dis- content with social institutions in thus moulding itself in religious form, to wit in that of the Raskol, announced that it could only be satisfied by a return to the ancient order? Why did it not aspire to something newer, as is usually the case? To answer this query we need to consider wherein consisted this old order and who it was that was intent on its abrogation.
Russia and Tartar Influence
"In old Russia every province enjoyed a certain autonomy of its own, freely evolved an independent life, conditioned only by locality, by tribal character, by the special nature of its occupations and activities. As the forces of centralization waxed stronger, this independent life was levelled out and conformed to a general current and plane. Localities, however, that had enjoyed such independence and freedom gave it up reluctantly; for they were loth to forfeit their privileges and aspirations, and continued for long to oppose a centralizing administration and policy that was new and alien to them. In the turbulent age of the impostors the forced and artificial unification of the provinces was temporarily relaxed, and every local centre endeavoured to strengthen itself and recover its old independent life, to regain its ancient rights. But when
1 Today (1919) the Political Economy of Karl Marx has taken the place of the 'Science' of theology of the 17th century.
26 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
-w-ith Michael Theodorovich and Alexis Miehailovich Russia was once more 'collected,' i.e. unified, the bonds were forged anew.^
And why, asks Uzov, was the transition, when it came, one from old and more liberal and humane institutions to those of Moscow? Was this the natural course of development for the Russian social organism? Here is a question which admits of no other answer than this: the new institutions which now developed in Russia were a consequence of the external pres- sure of the Tartar invasion. A savage people by dint of brute force had wiped off the face of the land a genuine Russian civili- zation that was already maturing; and it was relatively easy to do so, because it was not a warlike but a peaceful civihzation. All the dark forces latent in the Russian people leaned to the side of the Tartars, accepted their civihzation and by flattering and shuffling before them fettered — thanks to Tartar aid — the Russian people and riveted their yoke upon it.
"Thus Moscow fraternized with the Tartars, and under the shadow of their anti-nationalist system managed to gather round herself the provinces of Novgorod, Pskov, Tver, Ryazan, Perm and Kiev. In a Moscow torn from Southern Russia a Moscovite world emerged and entrenched itself. In the XVth Century when the rest of the Slav nationalities were reviv- ing, when among Poles, Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Bulgarians, and in South Russia a popular literature was beginning to appear, there opened in Moscow an era of final decadence. The art of writing, enlightenment, literature, art, wholesome international relationships, which had all aforetime culminated in Kiev in the Xllth Century — these perished in Moscow. Russian equity took flight and fled to heaven, and in Moscow quibbling chicanery and Moscovite intrigue took its place."^
To the Tartars Russia owes the introduction of iron rule with all its attractions, and the institution of draconian statutes. The code of Alexis Miehailovich was a product of Tartar character rather than of Slav. To the Tartars is due the sub- stitution of despotism and autocratic bureaucracy for the
1 N. Aristov, in Vremya {Time), 1862, No. 1, p. 76.
^ History of Cabarets in Russia, by Iv. Pryzhov, Moscow, 1868, p. 45-6.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 27
ordinances of common councils and provincial autonomy. Tartar civilization having forcibly cankered Russian society, took Tartars into its service, for the insufficiency of its own powers was realized, and it resorted to such means in order to safeguard its own existence.
"In the XVIth Century a fresh flood of violence and bar- barity inundated Russia along with the irruptions of Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberian Tsars, Tsaritsas, Tsareviches, princes, petty princes, who offered their services to the Tsar's govern- ment in Moscow and married into the Russian noblesse, so constituting themselves defenders of Russian territory and acquiring control of the cities of Kasimov, Zvenigorod, Kashir, Serpukhov, Khotun, louriev, along with many villages and hamlets." ^ And thus in this period the proverb was coined: "Live, live, until Moscow gets hold of you." Andreev states that the forefathers of the majority of Russian nobles in the realm of Moscow, were emigrants from Tartary or settlers from Western Europe.^ We may thus unhesitatingly conclude, writes Uzov, that in the age which gave birth to the Raskol, Russian society under stress of violence on the part of these Tartars had entered on a retrograde path. The latter were installed in the highest administrative positions in the society of the time, and were sustained in them by our own Russian home-bred Tartars. Christian standards of morals were over- whelmed by Tartar ones, national pecuharities were wholly lost sight of, all the more so because the governing caste, being principally composed of elements alien to the Russian genius, altogether lacked any idea of the character and aspirations of„ the people they ruled.
Russian Ritualism and Liturgical Controversy
Though great movements have always great causes, never- theless relatively petty circumstances seem always to provide their starting point. The great Russian schism was no excep- tion. It began not with any articulate protest against Tartar customs, or Byzantine polity in general, but with opposition
1 ib. p. 48.
2 Andreev, The Raskol and its Significance, p. 14.
28 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
to small details of ritual and the corrupt text of service books. Ivanovski gives a full account of these details, and the criti- cism to which he is justly subject is not that he is wrong in what he states, but that he neglects the greater though less spectacular points.
George Bourdon in his graphic history of the revolutionary convulsions, which in Russia followed the ill-starred campaign of 1904 against Japan, describes the religion of the Russian peasant as consisting mainly in the kissing of dirty greasy boards dignified with the name of ikon or holy picture, but often anikonic, in the sense that the images they once por- trayed are no longer decipherable. This superstitious respect for representations of the human face and person was well exemplified in the invasion of East Prussia with which the war of 1914 began. Then, as Mr. Stephen Graham attests in his work Russia and the World (London, 1915), the only objects in German houses which escaped the destructive zeal of the Rus- sian infantry were the pictures on the walls. Pianos, vioUns, books, furniture of all sorts were smashed to atoms, torn up and cast into the gutters, or burned, but never a picture was touched. These poor barbarians, of whom, according to the French statistics of 1911, nearly three out of four could neither read nor write, had never set foot in a civilized dwelling before; and they assumed that the pictures and paintings which adorned the walls harboured spirits or were holy ikons. Even the busts of the Kaiser, so Mr. Graham assures us, were spared, no doubt because he was mistaken for a saint.
It is then to such a respect for the external trappings of religion that Prof. Ivanovski traces the origin of the Raskol. It was from the first, he thinks, the essential character of popu- lar religion among his countrymen, the expression of their soul. They were, he says, in their infancy when they were converted, and his argument requires us to believe that they were still 'in their infancy' in the second half of the XVIIth Century when the Patriarch Nikon introduced his 'reforms'; and, to judge from the hold which Dissent still has upon them, they have not yet emerged from childhood. Their pohtical develop- ment had been arrested by the Mongol yoke, and religion sup-
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 29
plied the only channel along which their inner life could flow; but, like children, they could not embrace a religion which was abstract and meditative; they needed rather one of external aids and outside shows, in the absence of which they could not be stirred to faith and prayer. Temple rites and adorn- ments, vestments, shrines, pilgrimages, miraculous pictures, divine volumes, houses adorned in the style of churches, life in strict accordance with ecclesiastical rule, all these, he argues, were of the essence of religion in the age which gave birth to the Raskol. At that time few minds rose to the level of dis- tinguishing between these unessentials and the essential dogmas that embody eternal truth and are therefore unalterable. How low the general level of intelligence really was is proved by the frequent complaints to that effect on the part of the higher clergy; thus in the year 1500 Gennadius, Archbishop of Nov- gorod, attests the general ignorance in his epistle to the Metro- pohtan Simon, and in the middle of the XVIth Century it had reached its nadir. He complains that candidates for ordina- tion could not read the Apostle or chant the Psalms or recite an ektenia.
As an example of lamentable confusion of ritual with dogma, Ivanovski instances the dispute which arose in the XVth Century as to whether the Alleluia should be recited twice or thrice before the Gloria in the psalmody. The antecedents of the dispute are wrapt in obscurity; but it is clear that early in that century (1419) the clergy of Pskov began the triple recitation by the advice of the Metropolitan Photius; never- theless in 1450, thirty years later, the abbot Euphrosynof Pskov still entertained misgivings about it. In the hope of laying to rest his doubts, about which he consulted the Elders of bis own Church, but in vain, Euphrosyn paid a visit to the Patriarch Joseph of the 'Royal City' Tsargrad (Constantinople), where in the churches of Sancta Sophia he observed that the Greeks only recited it twice. This led him on his return to Russia to insist on the Greek usage in his monastery, thereby making enemies of the clergy of Pskov, where a certain Job, respected by laity and clergy as 'a philosopher, a sound teacher and a pillar of the Church' headed the opposition. Euphrosyn was
30 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
now accused of violating the canons of the Church, of denying the Trinity, of being a heretic and so forth. He retorted that he was following the usage of Tsargrad and of the ecumenic Church, while Job was a pillar, not of the Church, but of dung. This invited similar amenities from Job who persuaded his followers at Pskov, whenever they passed by the Monastery of Euphrosyn, not to bow, but to call out: 'There lives a heretic, ripe for anathema.' Both parties appealed to the arch- bishop Euthymius of Novgorod, who saw no way to reconcile them, and the quarrel went on after the protagonists departed this life in spite of the efforts of a learned Greek, Demetrius Gerasimus (Tolmach), to make peace between them. He wrote in 1493 from Rome a letter to Gennadius, Archbishop of Novgorod, to prove that one usage was as legitimate as the other, seeing that the one manifested the trine hypostasis of the consubstantial Godhead, the other the two natures in Christ. Such impartiality was not good enough for Russians, and finally the Council of the Hundred Heads ^ (Stoglav) in 1551 decided in its 42nd canon in favour of the double Alleluia, stigmatizing the triple one as a Latin heresy and as tantamount to the inclusion of four persons in the Trinity !
Nor was this the only dispute which ruffled the calm of the Orthodox Church in the XVth Century, for in its last years princes and bishops were divided on the question whether in solemn processions the priests and people should move ' wlther- shins ' or no. Over this point the Prince, Ivan Vassilevich III, and the Metropolitan Gerontius shewed httle of the love which Christians should bear one another. The bishop Gerontius, consecrating the Uspenski church in 1479, ventured to walk with his cross withershins round the new fabric, so offending against the Sun of Righteousness and outraging the feelings of Ivan who had on his side not a few bishops and monks, especially the hvely archimandrite Gennadius, afterwards Archbishop of Novgorod. The withershins party pleaded in
' So called because their debates were resumed in 100 chapters. At this council there were no representatives of Kiev. Orthodox Russians seek to impugn the authority and even authenticity of the 100 chapters. For the description of this important council see pp. 51 ff.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 31
vain that they advanced not to affront and insult the Sun, but to greet him; but as no canons existed to settle so vital an issue, the parties remained irreconcilable. The Metropolitan would not yield, retired in dudgeon to the Simonov Monastery, and for several years refused to consecrate any more churches, until the Prince gave way.
Another such dispute arose on the point whether documents should be dated according to the era which began with Crea- tion or that which began with Christ; for a monk Philotheus of the Eleazar Monastery revealed the fact to the world about 1500 that in old Russian MSS. both eras were met with. The Armenians solved the riddle by setting down both in their colophons, but then they were monophysite heretics. It did much harm to Peter the Great that he banished the old era for good. He was generally regarded as Antichrist because of the innovation.
But the most formidable and fertile source of dispute was the importance attached to the correct use of liturgical form- ulae, and — notwithstanding this — the almost infinite extent of textual variation in manuscripts and books.
In that age in Russia prayer was barely differentiated from magic spells; as is manifest from a fourth quarrel that raged in 1476 over the issue whether in a certain passage of the liturgy the clergy should cry 'Lord, pardon us,' or 'O Lord, pardon us.' Ivanovski complains that in such cases the Old- ritualist temper betrayed itself in those who demanded the continuance of the usage to which people were accustomed merely because it was the old one. It does not occur to him that it was at least as reasonable to demand its continuance as its discontinuance, and that if it mattered nothing one way or the other, the old usage might as well have been tolerated and not penalised with knout and rack.
If we open any collection of liturgical texts taken from ancient MSS., for example the Greek Euchologion of Goar, or that of Prof. Dimitrievski of Kiev, or my own Rituale Ar- menorum, we are at once struck by the infinite variety of text and rite in one and the same church. In the Church Books of the Orthodox Faith variety was all the greater because
32 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
the Monks of Athos and other centres who translated them from the Greek made so many blunders. Moreover some of the books passed into Russian not direct, but through Mora- vian, Serb and Bulgar versions.^ Already in the Xlllth Century the MetropoUtan Cyril complained of the errors which from these and other causes had crept into the service books of his church. In the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries such errors, duly multipUed by transcribers, passed at length into the printed texts. One common source of error was the intrusion into the text of glosses which should have been left in the margin, and Ivanovski gives one curious example of the sort in a MS. of the Xlth Century. The passage is Matt. XXVII. 65, where Pilate says to the high priests and Pharisees: "Ye have got a guard." Here the Slav translator, puzzled by the Latin word Custodia, assumed it to be the name of Pilate's maiden chatelaine ! Ivanovski informs us that there is much discrepancy between one text and another of the Baptismal rite; and one would like to know if it was not in the Epiphany rite celebrating the Benediction of Rivers in memory of the Baptism of Jesus, that the variants occur — to his mind so deplorable — which imply that Jesus was merely human until the Spirit descended upon him in his thirtieth year. For this was the old Ebionite or Adoptionist belief, which is prominent in old Armenian Epiphany homilies and not wholly absent from their hymns sung at the Blessing of the Rivers. We need pay no attention to Ivanovski's conjecture that Jews had tampered with these rites; for this very beUef characterizes the Dukhobortsy and Khlysty sects and is therefore very an- cient on Russian soil.
Slav divines already recognized in the XlVth Century how imperfect were their versions, and the MetropoUtan Theo- gnostos (1328-1353) tried to correct the Trebnik, a book which answers to the Roman missal. The Metropolitan Alessios (1354-1378) compared the Slav N. T. with the Greek text, and another Metropohtan, Cyprian, a Serb or Bulgarian — it is not known which — devoted much attention to the correct-
^ The Moravian Versions were the most ancient, and of them Serb or Bulgar translations seem to have passed into Russia.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 33
ing of his liturgical books, as Mansvetov has pointed out in his appendix (Prihavleniya) to the great series of Russian versions of the Fathers, Moscow 1882, vol. 29, pp. 152-305; 412-480.1
As an example of the dangers which beset a scholar, Ivanovski relates the career of a Greek monk, Maximus, invited to Moscow in 1518 by Prince Basil Ivanovich to take charge of the royal library and make a fresh translation of certain books. He was an Albanian by origin, had studied in Italy, and was a member of the Vatopedi convent on Mt. Athos. A man learned in Greek and Latin, he won the favour of the Prince and the friendship of the Metropohtan Barlaam, and was commissioned by them to revise the service books, though he deplored the recent severance from Constantinople of the Russian Christians and their new claim to constitute an independent national church, to be in fact the only orthodox body in the entire world. He did not possess Russian, and was therefore suppUed with two interpreters, named Deme- trius Gerasimov and Vlasius who also knew Latin, and with their aid he corrected the Triodion, the Hours, the Menaion, and the Apostolos. He rendered the psalter from Greek into Latin and the Latin was turned by his coadjutors into Slav. He is said, as we saw above, to have noticed gross errors in these books, intentionally introduced by Judaizers, for Jesus Christ was denominated in them a mere created man and de- clared to have died an eternal death.^
But neither the detection of these heretical opinions nor his polemics against the Latin and Armenian Churches and against Jews and Mohammedans saved his own reputation for ortho- doxy, and he was soon accused of having insulted the Russian saints and workers of miracles of old and of deflowering the old and sacred books of Cyril and Methodius. On Barlaam's death, the new Metropohtan Daniel, formerly prior of the Volokolam Monastery, openly charged him with arbitrarily altering the texts, and, like Henry VIII, the Tsar withdrew
^ Palmieri, Chiesa Russa, p. 400. I have not been able to gain access to this publication of Mansvetov.
2 See Plotnikov, Istoriia russkago Baskola, Petersb. 1905, p. 13.
34 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
his patronage for the excellent reason that he would not join Daniel in sanctioning his divorce of the childless Empress Salomona.
In 1525 Daniel convened a council of doctors and condemned Maximus as a heretic, it is said because he had tripped in Rus- sian grammar. He was deported to the Volokolam Mon- astery where, illtreated by the monks, he nearly died of smoke, cold and hunger. In 1531 another council, at the instigation of Daniel, accused him of altering the creed by eUminating the epithet true used of the Holy Spirit. He was banished to the Otroch Uspenski Monastery in Tver, and forbidden to receive the Sacraments, — for him a great privation. In vain the Greek patriarchs interceded in his behalf and the bishop of Tver befriended him. The utmost concession made was to permit him to communicate, and he died, almost friendless, imprisoned in the Laura of S. Sergius in 1556.^
Yet he left behind him rules, simple and sagacious, for the guidance of future revisers, and described the corrector's art as a gift of the Holy Ghost. Above all he prescribed a knowl- edge of tongues, which must be studied under good teachers. His rules were expressed in the form of Greek stichoi or stanzas. A century later under Nikon his principles triumphed and the intimacy of the Russian with the Greek Churches was revived and encoiu-aged.
We noticed above that Maximus gave offence by expvirging the one word true in the Creed. It comes in the eighth clause: And {we believe) in the Holy Spirit Lord true and giver of life. The older Slav MSS. are said to omit the word, and prior to Nikon some Service-books contained it, others not. The Stoglav^ (or hundred-headed) Council in 1551 decided in favour of omitting either Lord or true, but did not say which. A glance at the original Greek explains the difficulty. It runs: Kat et? TO TTvevfia to djiov to Kvpiov to ^(oottoiovv. Now the word Kvpiov may be rendered either as true or as Lord, and an early Russian translator had set one rendering in his text, the other no doubt in his margin, whence it had crept into
1 Ivanovski has 1566.
2 See p. 51.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 35
the text, so that many MSS. had the conflate reading: Gospoda, istinnogo, i. e. 'Lord, True.'
Somewhat later than the accession to the throne of Tsar Michael Theodorovich a tragic dispute arose over a variant in the Epiphany rite of the Benediction of the Waters, a variant that must itself have had a long history behind it. In old copies it was asked that the water might be sanctified ''by the Holy Spirit and by Fire," a reminiscence perhaps of a variant found in some ancient sources which add after Matt. 3, 15, the words: "And when he was baptised, a mighty Ught shone around from the water, in such wise that all who had come thither were struck with fear." This addition, if not suggested by, at least accords with John the Baptist's prophecy contained in a preceding verse (3, 11) that the Messiah ** shall baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with Fire." However this may be, the words ' and with fire ' were expunged from a revision of the Russian Euchologion or Potrehnik, made chiefly from Slav MSS. by a certain archimandrite Dionysius of the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, who found the phrase in only two copies of the old Slav version, and in no Greek copy at all. He had two collabo- rators in his work of revision, which occupied a year and a half, the Elder Arsenius and a priest of the village of Klementev attached to the Monastery, named Ivan Nasedkin. Another important change they made was to exclude the two prayers before the hturgy in which the priest seeks remission of his sins.
The excision of the words ' and with fire ' drew down on these correctors the wrath of a member of the Laura of St. Sergius, Longinus, who is said to have regarded the arts of reading and writing as almost heretical. He had himself passed these sup- posed errors in his edition of the year 1610 and prided himself on his learning. He now accused them of denying the Spirit to be composed of fire — a very ancient opinion. Philaret, his abbot, encouraged him and by the joint efforts of the two Dionysius and his fellow-students were in 1618 haled before the Patriarch lona's court, and subjected to torture in the cells of the Ascension with the approval of Martha Ivanovna, mother of the Tsar. The mob raged against them, being told that
36 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
they were guilty of the unparalleled heresy of banishing fire from the universe, and they were accused of heresy in front of the Kremlin and pelted with mud. Dionysius and Ivan Nasedkin were excommunicated by a council over which lona presided, and imprisoned in the Novospasski Monastery, to be dragged in fetters on festivals to the feet of lona the Patriarch. Arsenius who was deaf was imprisoned in the convent of S. Cyril. In the end however the new patriarch Philaret (1618) who had been ordained by Theophanes, Patriarch of Jerusalem, entertained Ivan Nasedkin's plea for mercy, and in 1619 they were pardoned. Ivan even received marks of the Tsar's favour, and was made priest of the court church. Dionysius also came into favour. Philaret at first did not venture to eliminate the words ' and with fire ' from the printed editions of the rite. In 1625 however, the patriarchs of Alexandria and Jerusalem decided against them, and Philaret had them struck out in all editions, although the immersion of lighted tapers in the water remained part of the Epiphany rite commemorating the Baptism of our Lord. Thus an ancient and respectable rite was mutilated of one of its most char- acteristic traits. It could hardly be otherwise in that ignorant age. A corrector was more likely to deprave a text than better it, for a Uttle knowledge is a dangerous thing.
In short, as Ivanovski himself recognizes, such corrections as scholars of that age could make, were as likely to be for the worse as not, for how could they distinguish good from bad? Any attempts of the kind were sure to bear the impress of arbitrariness and ignorance; and it was futile for the Stoglav Council of 1551 to complain of church books being faulty. Their canon prescribing to copyists the use of correct versions and warning the higher clergy to supervise their industry was as difficult to observe as it was well meant.
The first printing press was set up in Moscow in 1552, in the reign of Ivan, Vassilevich; it had been brought from Denmark by a printer named Hansa, who was assisted by the deacon Ivan Thedorov or Feodorov and Peter Timothy Mstislavets. Only church books were issued from it, and the Apostolos^
^ Rambaud, History of Biissia, more correctly, says: Acts of the Apostles.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 37
was the first book printed. It was followed by a Description of Moscow and the Book of Hours. It was hoped that the texts issued would be more correct, but the printers confessed their ignorance of what was or was not correct, and the press could but stereotype the errors of the particular MS. used. No better success greeted the laudable efforts of the Patriarch Hermogenes (1606) to obtain more correct texts by attaching to his press at Moscow a corps of scholars charged to compare the books already printed with the MSS. and to collate these with each other. It would seem that they confined themselves to Slav MSS., and those recent ones, sparing themselves the trouble of following the precept of the wise Maximus to study the Greek originals. As an example of the inefficiency of Russian scholars of that time, Ivanovski instances the Canon or Rule of divine service {Ustav = tvitlkov) printed in 1610, of which the Patriarch Philaret was obhged subsequently to collect and burn all copies, because its contents were of so startling and unauthorized a character. I should conjecture that they were merely archaic and original, and not in accord with then current standards of orthodoxy. I once saw the copies of old Nestorian codices upon which was based Bedjan's great repertoire of the liturgies of that ancient church, so beautifully printed at the Propaganda press in Rome. The copies were plentifully scored and underlined with red and blue chalk; the red signifying, so I was informed, passages to be entirely removed, the blue those to be amended in the interests of Roman orthodoxy; and I regretted greatly that these origi- nal readings were not given in an appendix or otherwise re- corded for the use of scholars. In mentioning this case, I convey no censure of the Roman Propaganda, for I am sure that the only intelligible procedure is that on which Rome insists, namely, on the one hand to print for modern church use officially authorized texts agreeable to current standards of orthodoxy, and on the other to allow scholars and liturgiolo- gists to edit for the learned world the more ancient texts exactly as they stand in the most ancient codices. This procedure the Roman Church follows in the case of Latin texts, and it encourages the Uniat Churches to do the same.
38 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
No objection, for example, is placed in the way of the Armenian Mekhitarists of Vienna and Venice, if they like to print for liturgical scholars an Euchologion containing the ancient rites for the sacrifice of birds and f ourfooted animals ; but they would not be allowed to print these interesting but out of date rites and disseminate them for popular use.
A number of grammarians and rhetoricians were employed by the patriarch Philaret (1612) to assist in editing the Church books, among them the Elder Arsenius the Deaf, Antony Krylov, the priest Ivan Nasedkin already mentioned, Elias the hegumen of the Theophany convent and even a layman Gregory Onisimov. One or two of these could read Greek, but made no use of their gift. But it marked a real advance when the Patriarch ordered a search to be made for older MSS. in other cities besides Moscow. Even texts written by the western Slavs were collected, though sparingly consulted from fear of their having been contaminated by Latin influences. Philaret's efforts were of course doomed to disappointment, and Ivanovski remarks that between later and earlier editions of the same service book wide discrepancies were discovered as soon as they were compared, especially in the rites of Epiphany and of Baptism; again, the Euchologia printed in 1625 and 1633 included the rites for the adoption of children and of brethren {aBeX(f)07roLia) given in Greek prayerbooks; that of 1623 omitted them. It is clear that what the Russian Church dignitaries were intent upon was uniformity, and it was bound to be a mere accident if, in arriving at it, they did not exclude much that was old and had better have been retained, and include much modern rubbish which it was better to omit.
The Patriarch Joasaph who succeeded Philaret in 1634, and died Nov. 28, 1640, issued edition after edition of Psalter, Euchologion, Menaea, Hours, Gospels, Triodion, Nomocanon, etc. Though he too insisted on old MSS. being consulted, he only made confusion worse confounded; and some of the books printed by his authority were in startUng disaccord with his predecessor's editions, especially the Euchologion of 1639, which stigmatized Philaret's rite for the Burial of Priests as having been drawn up by the heretical pope Jeremia
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 39
of Bulgaria. Among the new books issued by him were a spelling book, an anthologion, a Triodion in four volumes, and a life of Nicholas the Wonder-worker.
The activity of the Moscow Press was great under the next Patriarch, Joseph, who acceded in March, 1642.^ He ap- pointed Ivan, sacristan of the Uspenski Church; Joseph Nased- kin, the controverter of the Lutheran propagandist Prince Valdemar of Denmark, Protopope Michael Stephen Rogov; Silvester, archimandrite of the Androniev Monastery, Joannes, Protopope of the Alexandronevski Church along with certain presbyters and lajonen as a college of "correctors." But they did not go beyond Slav books in their quest for correcter texts, and the press under the direct management of the Tsar's favourite divine, Stephan Boniface, and of John Neronov, Pro- topope of the Kazan Church, for the most part merely issued reprints of the earher editions of the Patriarchs Job, Philaret, and Joasaph. Some sUght changes, however, were now made to suit the prescriptions of the Stoglav Council of ninety years before. Thus the passage where in earUer editions the Alleluia was thrice repeated, was now printed: ''Alleluia, Alleluia, glory to thee, 0 God." At the same time a CyriUic rubric appeared in the Psalter, enjoining the faithful to cross them- selves with two fingers instead of three conjoined. Editors and controllers of the new presses generally adopted the two fingers, though within a few years the question of two or three fingers was to become a burning one. The Stoglav Council had enjoined the use of the two fingers only. A Russian grammar was printed in 1648, a Lives of Saints in 1646, HomiUes of Ephrem Syrus in 1643, a catena on the gospels by Theophylact the Bulgarian, Anastasius Sinaita, '^nd others in 1649.
It speaks well for the Tsar Alexis Michailovich, that he undertook in May 1649 an edition of the Russian Bible revised from the Greek original, and wrote to the half PoUsh Metro- poUtan of Kiev, Silvester Kossov, to send to him scholars competent for the task.^ Two monks arrived, Epiphan Slave-
1 Macarius Hist. t. 11, pp. 94-97.
2 Macarius Hist. t. 12, p. 112 foil. Christian Readings 1883, Nov.-Dec. Art. Materials for Russian History. y '
40 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
netski and Arsenius Satanovski, an ill-sounding, but really local name. A young seigneur, Theodor Michailovich Rtish- chev (1625-1673), shared his prince's enthusiasm, and at his own expense erected outside Moscow, on the Kiev road, two versts away, a monastery in which the newly arrived teachers of Greek, of grammar, and of rhetoric, were to find a home. He himself w as their first pupil, and the learned men assembled there began at once the work of collating Slav texts with the Greek, and presently gave their results to the world in a new edition of the Church book called the Shestodnev (Hexahemeron) ; first printed in Cracow in the year 1491. This was the first work to be revised from 'good' Slav MSS. and at the same time from a Greek text, and Nikon put it forward as an example for future editors of sacred texts. At the instance of this Tsar sundry Greek divines now began to visit Moscow, where alone in the Orthodox world they could collect alms for themselves. One of the best-known was Paisius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, who stayed there four months during which he consecrated Nikon archbishop of Novgorod, and had time, according to Nikon, to notice not a few ritual discrepancies between his own and the Russian Church. The result was that a Russian Presbyter, who knew Greek, Arsen Sukhanov, was commissioned in 1649 to accompany Paisius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, on his return in order to report upon Greek rites. Arsen was a cultivated man for his age and architect of the Theophany convent in the Kremlin, a dependency of the Trinity-Serge Laura, and a partisan in rehgion of the old national tradition. On their way they halted at Jassy, in Roumania. In the sequel he twice went to Greece and back, and in the course of one of his journeys brought back some hundreds of Greek codices which are among the treasures of the Synodal Ubrary of Moscow. For this alone his name deserves to be remembered. He also pubhshed the results of his investigations in four ^'Dia- logues upon Faith with the Greeks,'' ^ in which he somewhat
* Prenia o VierU. It is doubtful if they were written as early as 1650; the Proskinitari (i. e. Worshipper), on which see below p. 44, was written after his return from the East in 1653. In the first dialogue held April 24, 1650, the Patriarch Meletius, Metropolitan of Braila, challenges the Riissian use of two fingers only in blessing, and Arsenius defends it as the usage of St. Andrew, the
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 41
wavered over the use of the three fingers in blessing, though he observed it among the monks of Athos. We shall see later on that members of the Raskol appealed to Arsen's work in evi- dence of the fatal decadence and even apostasy of the Greeks; judged from an old Russian standpoint, with no Uttle reason. About the same time Gabriel, metropoUtan of Nazareth visited Moscow, and while there took no less exception to the use of two fingers than his colleague of Jerusalem.
Nikon
In 1652 the patriarch Joseph died, to be followed by one whose fanaticism was to break the orthodox church in two over utterly insignificant issues, and originate a schism which lasts until to-day with results to Russian society and polity of which the importance can hardly be overestimated.
This was Nikon,^ named Nicetas in the world before he donned the monastic garb. Born in 1605 of peasant and pos- sibly Finnish stock in Veldemanov, a village in the province of Nizhegorod, he learned to read and write at the village school, bringing to his task the rugged strength and superstitious temperament of a common peasant. At twelve years of age he entered the monastery of St. Macarius of Zheltovody on the Volga in the same Government, where he soon distinguished himself above other novices by his apphcation to learning and his asceticism. When he was twenty his parents persuaded him to marry, and, ordained one of the white clergy, he took a cure of souls in Moscow; before he was thirty his three chil- dren died, and, persuading his wife to take the veil, he himself took monkish vows and retired to the Skete or hermitage of Anzer on the White Sea. His was an imperious nature, and within five years, in consequence of a quarrel with his col- leagues over the building of a church, he departed thence to become the hegumen or prior of the Kozheozerski ^ Monastery
illuminator of Russia. Arsenius equally maintains the Russian baptism by triple immerson to have been introduced in Russia by the Apostle and condemns the Greek usage of baptising sick infants by sprinkling only.
1 Strannik 1863, t. 3: Macarius Hist. t. 11: Solovev. Hist. Rms. t. 11.
2 Perhaps Kusheryetskoe, close to Onega, in the railway map of A. Ilin of 1908. Waliszewski, however, locates it in the district of Kargopol in the eparchy of Novgorod, so also the Russian Encyclopedia, xxi, 139.
42 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
on Lake Kozhe on the western shore of the White Sea, In that capacity he had occasion to visit Moscow to attend a council held there in 1645-6. There he attracted the notice of the Tsar Alexis who preferred him to the position of archimandrite in the Novospasski convent in the Capital. The Tsar entrusted him with the fulfilment of many pubhc duties and invited him every week to the Kremhn in order to converse with him, and it is a good trait in the ecclesiastic that he availed himself of his intimacy with the Prince to intercede in behalf of widows and orphans denied their rights by venal courts of justice.
Two years later he was made Metropohtan of Novgorod where he helped to put down the revolt of 1650, sheltering in his own house the Voivoda KMlkov, when his own hfe also was threatened by the populace. In July 1652, at the age of forty- seven, he was chosen patriarch at the Tsar's instance, though on his own terms, and with the approval of Synod, clergy and people, who had to go down on their knees to him before he would accept the Patriarchate. He was already, as we saw, a favourite with the Tsar, who presently (1654) conferred on him the title and authority of grand vizier, Gosudar or Regent, never till then conferred on anyone except Philaret, Patriarch in 1618, and the father of Michael Theo- dorovitch the first of the Romanov's. When the Tsar was away conducting his wars, it now devolved on Nikon to look after his family, govern the State and control the Boyars or great nobles who had to make to him the reports which they ordinarily made to the sovereign, and render to him an account of all their doings.
Historians give no unfavom-able picture of his activity at the beginning of his patriarchate. He was severe indeed with his clergy and so rigid a disciphnarian that some charged him with being a tyrant, but in so disorderly an age it was necessary to be strict. One step he took at once which conmiends itself to all Church reformers. Instead of the ready-made homihes for all sorts of occasions he tried to revive the art of preach- ing, and encouraged his clergy to use their natural gifts of eloquence. This was to innovate on old custom, and contrasts with the system which was in vogue in the Russian Church a
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 43
few years ago, if it is not still/ of obliging the clergy to submit their sermons to censors before they are delivered from the pulpit. Another of his aims was to introduce uniformity, a measure which needed much tact in view of the discrepancies which existed between the rites of one place and another, for editions of church-books differed and still more widely the manuscript copies still in vogue; and in different localities the clergy and monks were likely to be jealous of interference with rites already in use. But there was also much disorder in Church Services that called for instant correction; for example it was only decent that prayers and canticles should be recited or sung in one tone unisono, and not in several at once, and it was a scandal that in order to get through the liturgy as quickly as possible it was customary for one priest to be reading, another singing, and the deacon crying his ecteni, all three at once. In the church singing it was also usual to interpolate vowels and prolong the voice upon them to the detriment of the sense. This was, it appears, an offence in Nikon's eyes, though it is not unknown in other Churches, and as it is the rule in the Armenian Church, it may have been ancient in the Slav Churches. Most of these irregularities had already been reproved by the Stoglav Council, as well as by the Patri- archs Hermogenes and Joseph, but in vain. Nikon now set about to correct them by sterner methods, and he also lost no time in chastising the fashionable artists who were beginning to paint ikons for rich men's houses in the gaudy style of the Latins. He collected their masterpieces, burned them, and on pain of anathema forbade painters for the future to prosti- tute in such a manner their sacred craft. In spite, however, of such conservatism in the matter of art, Nikon threw the weight of his authority on the side of those who favoured the correcting of the old rites and service books, and even headed the new movement, choosing Greek and Slav of western origin as his models. ''Though I am Russian,' he said at the Council
^ Pobedonostseff, Procurator of the holy Synod, in his Reflections of a Russian Statesman (London 1898), after insisting on the want of simplicity, unnatural intonation, conventional phrases of Protestant preachers, adds: "We feel here how faithfully our Church has been adapted to human natm-e in excluding sermons from its services. By itself our whole service is the best of sermons," p. 214.
44 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
of 1656, 'I am in faith and convictions a Greek." Accordingly he introduced Greek ambons, Greek pastoral staffs, Greek cowls, cloaks, hymns, painters, silversmiths, Greek architec- ture. He invited Greeks to Moscow and followed their advice in everything.
We have already mentioned the trips to Greek centres under- taken by Arsen Sukhanov at the instance of the Tsar Michael. When he returned to Moscow in June 1653 he dedicated a vol- ume entitled Proskinitari to his prince and to the new Patriarch Nikon; to this book, although it barely influenced the latter's reforms, as it had been intended to do, a certain importance attaches, because upon it, as upon his four discussions with the Greeks, alluded to above (p. 40), the Raskol teachers later on based their charge of apostasy against the Greeks, a charge sufficiently absurd in view of the fact that the author expresses no sort of doubt about the orthodoxy of the Greek Churches and even regards them, especially that of Alexandria, as a court of appeal for the resolution of doubts which had arisen in Russia with regard to particular points of ritual. It con- tained a pilgrim's guide to the Holy Places, of the kind familiar in the early literature of every church, along with the answers of the Alexandrine Patriarch to certain questions propounded by Arsen. One of these regarded the Alleluia, as to which the Patriarch decided that it ought to be repeated thrice with the addition of the words: "Glory to thee, 0 God!" Arsen notes sundry liturgical variations in the Greek Churches from Russian usage, e. g. the use in the Eucharistic office of only five prosphorai instead of seven, withershins processions, etc. But it was especially the concessions to Western or Latin usages that shocked him; for example, they admitted baptism by sprinkling, they had adopted Prankish vestments; they as- sociated with the Franks even in church, ate in their society and intermarried with them. In Jerusalem the orthodox and Armenian patriarchs visited one another and went to church together. The Armenian even dehvered the Benediction in church, and afterwards entertained the Greek patriarch, the Turkish pasha being among the guests. ^
* From time immemorial the monophysite Armenians have shared the Church
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 45
Arsen also criticised the slovenliness with which the Greeks conducted their services. Their priests, no less than their laity, wore turbans in church, and the monks attended without their cloaks. Their Patriarch ate sweetmeats in Lent and on fast days ; at Bethlehem on the feast of the Nativity a mass of pilgrims slept in the church and defiled it. The ref- erence here is hardly to the usage of incubation in a church, which still lasted on in the Caucasian Chiirches, especially on the night of the Feast of St. John. Probably the pilgrims used the Church of Bethlehem as a caravanserai. Is it possible, however, that Arsen merely witnessed the all-night service which we find in old Eastern prayerbooks, e. g. in the Armenian? It is noteworthy that he says nothing in the book either for or against the use of the two fingers in blessing.
This wholesale canonization was both cause and effect of the growing belief that Moscow was the third Rome. Russia was no longer beholden to a Constantinople that was become a centre of Mahommedan heresy. The Sun of righteousness there eclipsed shone afresh on the Moskva.
Three men above others had worked for this triumph of nationahsm in the ecclesiastical sphere, Joseph Sanin, prior and founder of the Volokolam monastery and his disciples Daniel and Macarius, both metropoUtans of Moscow. They repre- sented three generations from 1500 to 1550. Their monastery was a fashionable training school for the higher clergy and a focus of nationaUst propaganda. They had not however Nikon's idea of asserting the rights of the Church as such; and consohdation of the spiritual ran for them hand in hand with aggrandisement of the Moscovite despotic state. The Church consecrated the State which in return protected it and guaranteed its privileges. The way was marked out for the Church in Russia to become what it was in old Byzantium, the humble servant of secular despotism. Nikon a century later essayed to free the Church of which he was the head from
of the Sepulchre with the Latins and Greeks and great pictures of their saints adorn its walls. If ever the Holy Synod of Moscow acquires jurisdiction over the Holy places, the Armenian heretics certainly, and the Latin schismatics probably, will be served with notices to quit.
46 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
Erastian control. He met the fate of St. Thomas of Canter- bury. He championed the Patriarchal against the Imperial prerogatives, and failed. His failure signified the erection in Russia of a lay Papacy of the Tsar which lasted until yesterday.
Nikon's Reforms
Shchapov fifty years ago compared the Raskol to Lot's wife who looked back, and in the act of doing so was turned into a pillar of salt. The comparison is unfair; for the schism was for those who engaged in it the beginning of religious emanci- pation, of inward liberty and comparative enUghtenment. It is the dominant orthodox Church which may rather be accused of petrifaction and putrifaction. It remains true however that the Raskol leaders in the 17th century stood for the exclusive nationalism in spiritual matters that had tri- umphed a hundred years earlier under Ivan in the Stoglav council. They could not rid themselves of the old suspicion of the Levantine Greek. Nikon conquered it, and even headed a reaction against a nationalism which prejudiced the ecumen- icity of his country's Church, and was an implicit negation of its claim to be a worldwide and ancient faith. In his ignorant zeal for ecumenicity he was ready to adopt from the fawning Greek ecclesiastics, whom he invited to Moscow and who were ready to deceive him, much that was merely modern, much that was trivial. The partisans of antiquity were shocked to note how whimsical were his alterations of the old service books. Why substitute temple for church and vice versa? Why change children into scions, cross into tree, and so on? Why was a new fangled phrase better than an old one? How did the old reading violate di\ine writ? They discerned accordingly httle in his corrections but wilful hatred of the old, and parodied his instructions to Arsenius thus: '^ Print the books as you Uke, provided only you discard the old way."
Their disgust with the correctors was complete, when it was found — what modern scholarship confirms — that they did not in practice adhere to their own canon of comparing the Cyrillic texts with old Greek books. Recent hturgical scholars in Russia have shewn that of the 500 Greek MSS. brought to
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 47
Moscow by Sukhanov for Nikon's use from the East only- seven were consulted in editing the service books afresh. The Greek euchologion printed by the Latins at Venice in 1602 was almost the only text which they regularly employed. Nikon's intentions no doubt were good, but he and his band lacked the scholarship necessary to carry them out. Well might Awa- kum, the Raskol leader, write to the Tsar as follows: "Thou, Michailovich, art a Russian, not a Greek. Then use your own native tongue, and forbear to depreciate it in Church, in home and elsewhere. Does God love us less than the Greeks? Has he not given us our books in our own tongue by the hand of Cyril and Methodius? What do we want better than that? The tongue of angels? Alas, that we may not hear until the general resurrection comes!" It was Nikon's substitution, probably suggested by Latin texts in which it survives, of Kyrie eleison for the old Russian equivalent Gospodi pomilui which motived this outburst. Awakum and his partisans, notably Ivan Neronov and Stephan Boniface, were not in principle opposed to the use of Greek texts in editing the Russian ones. Under the patriarch Joseph (died 1652) they had even participated in the work of revision led by the learned monks whom Rtishchev brought from Kiev; and the old beUevers still use today the editions printed under Joseph. Their revolt was due to three causes: the violence of Nikon, the capricious manner in which under his auspices their Church was being Grecized, and the insolence with which the monks of Athos condemned their earher essays in correction and made a bonfire of the service books printed in Moscow.
Having equipped himself, as he imagined, with the authority of the Sister Churches, Nikon took the first step in 1653 of imposing the use of three fingers in blessing. This at once evoked a protest from Paul, bishop of Kolomna, from Ivan Neronov, Protopope of the Kazanski church and from another Protopope Awakum, or as we say, Habakkuk, of the ancient Yurievets convent on the Volga who was staying in Moscow. ''It looks like winter coming," the latter is said to have remarked; and with the aid of another Protopope, Daniel of Kostroma, he proceeded to draw up a catena of authorities in
48 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
support of the use of two fingers — no less Greek in origin than the rival use — and of the old fashion in the matter of prostrations. They presented their catena to the Tsar, thereby embittering not a little their relations with Nikon, to whom the Tsar passed it on and whose election as patriarch they had opposed. They pretended that any books corrected before Nikon were orthodox, any after him Latin and heretical. There was nothing he could do or suggest that was right. But Nikon was too strong for them and Neronov quickly found himself relegated to the Kamenski Monastery on the Kubenski lake near Vologda. Awakum also found himself excluded by his fellow clergy from the Kazanski Church when he went thither prepared to celebrate as usual and read his sermon to the congregation; thereupon he retired to Neronov's house, where he read vespers in the bath-house and succeeded in getting some of his old parishioners to attend his ministra- tions. He did not, however, despair of the Tsar, and, in con- junction with other Protopopes, Daniel of Kostroma and Longinus of Murom, who had been correctors of Service books for the press under the Patriarch Joseph, drew up a petition and despatched it to his prince. The only result was that Daniel was unfrocked and exiled to Astrakhan where he died; Longinus was also unfrocked, and banished to Murom. Awa- kum, still a young man (he was born near Novgorod in 1620) was spared at the Tsar's instance and banished with all his family to the depths of Siberia, to the region called Daura. On his way thither he sowed the seeds of religious revolt. Such was the result of trying to preserve a mode of blessing himself which every Russian had learned on his mother's knee, Nikon himself among others.
From his place of exile Neronov wrote to the Tsar, accusing Nikon of heresy, and the latter, aware of the fact that his prince was not yet won over to the use of two fingers, — as according to Ivanovski, Nikon himself was not at this stage, having only taken action to please his Greek colleagues, — resolved to lay matters before a Council, which was accordingly convened in 1654 in the royal palace. Before it Nikon, no doubt ignorantly, condemned the secret recitation at the beginning of the liturgy
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 49
of the priest's prayer for remission of his sins, — a topic I have discussed above; and he also urged the practice of depositing rehcs under the altar when a church was first consecrated. He thus reserved the issue of the two fingers, but in other respects aspired to change old customs in accordance with the Greek books. The plan of issuing corrected service books was not opposed, though it was found impossible to come to an agreement about prostrations and genuflexions. In support of the old rule on such points observed in Moscow, Paul of Kolomna, appealed to an old parchment, and recorded his opinion in the acts of the Council. By doing so he drew down on his head the wrath of Nikon who objected to learning when it did not accord with his views. No sooner was the Council at an end, than Paul was expelled from his see, subjected to corporal punishment and locked up in prison where he lost his reason and died in a manner unrecorded. The Raskolniki of the time, however, testify that he was burned aUve near Novgorod.
Nikon had already despatched afresh Arsenius Sukhanov, on his return to Moscow, to Athos and other centres of the East in quest of Greek originals on which to base the revision he had in mind of the old Russian service books; for the proceedings of 1653-4 seem to have inspired even him with misgivings, not to be silenced by any knouting and exiUng of his opponents. Accordingly he had resolved in 1654 to send a fresh mission of enquiry to Constantinople, and this time he selected a Greek named Manuel, who had lived for a time in Moscow, to lay his queries before the Patriarch Paisius and the doctors of New Rome. A year later about May 1655, Manuel returned with the answers which Paisius ^ of Constantinople had penned Dec. 1654 to the twenty-eight queries put to him by Nikon, and being on his own ground Paisius, after dealing with them, ventured to address to Nikon some very sound advice as to the necessity of compromise in such trumpery disputes: "You complain," he wrote, ''of discrepancies on certain points of ritual which exist in local churches, and you apprehend harm to our faith from these differences. For that much I conmiend
1 Christ. Readings, 1881, No. 3-4.
50 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
you, since one who so keenly fears to slip in small things is hkely to safeguard himself in great; nevertheless we would
correct your timidity If it should happen that certain
churches vary from others in usages of no importance and unessential for the faith, for example with regard to the time ^ when the Hturgy is performed or over the question with what fingers a priest ought to bless,^ and such like, these issues should provoke no dissensions . . . Nor ought we to imagine it to be prejudicial to our orthodoxy, that somebody or other enter- tains other modes of ritual observance than ourselves in matters that are not essential to the Faith." He appeals to Epi- phanius and other Fathers in proof that rites had grown up little by little and were never uniform.
As to Nikon's queries with regard to the Sacraments he writes: "As touching the polemics which you raise over the rite of the divine Sacrament, we implore you to put a stop to them; for a servant of the Lord it is unbecoming to embroil himself over trifles which do not belong to the articles of faith." This good advice Paisius tendered in the name of the Council he had convoked at Constantinople to discuss the Russian business. It was attended by 24 metropohtans.
None the less Paisius tempers these mild rebukes with stern reproaches against Nikon's opponents, Paul of Kolomna and Ivan Neronov, who had denied their signatures to the decrees of the Moscow synod of 1654. They are corrupt and stiff- necked schismatics whom Nikon will do well to excommunicate, because they have impugned the vahdity of the prayers that Paisius and other Greek Patriarchs have approved. As to the number of fingers, although, as we have seen, Paisius regarded it as a matter of little importance, he recognizes that ancient Greek custom in making the sign of the cross was in favor of joining the first three fingers, for the three joined together symbohzed the Trinity better than two. The epistle of Paisius was accepted later on as authoritative by the Russian Council of 1667.
' The Greeks celebrated at the third hour, except on Holy Thursday and Sat- urday, when the service was held in the evening, as in Armenia.
2 Palmer in his work "The Patriarch and the Tsar," vol. II, p. 408 inexplicably omits the words: "with what fingers to bless."
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 51
To return to Nikon. Duly installed as patriarch, he pro- ceeded to search the library of his residence, and in it he found a chrysobuUa or patriarchal document relating to the estab- lishment of the Russian Patriarchate in 1589. It was dated May 8, 1590 and bore the subscriptions of the Eastern patri- archs, who assisted, Jeremiah of Constantinople, ecumenical patriarch, and others. In it, it was stipulated that the said patriarch must in all matters agree with them, and it contained the symbol of faith in Greek, with the single epithet to Kvptov (Lord or chief) in the eighth clause. He found the same symbol inscribed in Greek letters upon a cope brought to Moscow two hundred and fifty years before by the Metropoh- tan Photius. He also noted sundry omissions and additions in the service books of his Church.
A visit was paid to Moscow in April, 1653, by the deposed Athanasius Patellarius, formerly Patriarch of Constanti- nople, nine months after Nikon's elevation to his new dignity. Athanasius died in April, 1654, on his return journey, at the monastery of Lubni in the Government of Poltava, but during his stay in Russia in receipt of royal alms, he had urged Nikon not to insist on the use of the two fingers in blessing, and also to promulgate the rest of the so-called 'reforms' which he was minded to introduce, regardless of the circumstance that they directly violated the decisions of the Council of Stoglav or a hundred heads.
The Council of Stoglav
This Coimcil had been held in 1551 expressly to decide many of the issues now to be decided by Nikon according to his newer Hghts. The first of these regarded the number of fingers to be extended in blessing or exorcising oneself or others (it is all the same thing) with the sign of the cross. The Council was motived in its decision by various reasons : because Christ had so blessed his apostles at his ascension; because the ikon of Tikhvin at Novgorod, of the Mother and Child, painted, hke so many holy pictures, by St. Luke, represented the Messiah extending two fingers, and not one, as the Monophy-
52 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
sites, or three, as the Latins were supposed to do. Ivanovski irreverently suggests that the said ikon was never painted by St. Luke at all. Thirdly, the Council appealed to a passage of the Father Theodoret, which Ivanovski, who is monstrously critical when by being so he can upset Old believers, declares to be supposititious. He deals similarly with a certain legend about S. Meletius, bishop of Sebaste and later on patriarch of Alexandria, and shews that the Stoglav misinterpreted their Theodoret and Sozomen.
The same Council had insisted on a double Alleluia as opposed to a triple one, and had argued, with more subtiUty than we might expect from such an assembly, that as the word Alleluia already signified the same thing as Glory to thee God, therefore, if you repeated it thrice and added that formula, you really repeated it four times, at the risk of implying four persons in the Trinity instead of three, — a shocking impiety of which in the fifth and succeeding centuries the Armenians and other monophysites commonly accused the adherents of the Council of Chalcedon. In favour of the double Alleluia the Stoglav Fathers also adduced an old ' Life ' of S. Euphrosyn of Pskov according to which the Virgin herself stood sponsor, in a dream she vouchsafed to the saint, for this particular usage. But the Council of 1667, which could be critical at the expense of a theological antagonist, unkindly voted this 'Life' to be an apocryph. We have already noticed that the Stoglav decided in favour of reciting in clause 8 of the symbol not both, but only one, no matter which, of the rival epithets which in many MSS. dignified the Spirit. Another of their canons. No. 95, is of peculiar interest, because it prescribes the keeping of the Sabbath, no less than of the Sunday, as a holy day or feast, in accordance with the so-called canons of the Apostles, already abrogated by canon 29 of the Council of Laodicea of A. D, 343-381. In Russia it seems that the former set of canons were ascribed to Saints Peter and Paul, and Joasaph, a Patriarch who preceded Nikon, had anathematised those who sabbatised^ and blasphemously invoked in favour of doing so the authority of St. Peter. This Sabbatarian precept
* The Sabbatarians still exist in Russia as a separate sect.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 53
of the Stoglav Council the Raskol themselves set aside, so exposing themselves to a charge of inconsistency.
Nikon's adherents in 1667 imputed no malice to the Bishops who formed the Stoglav Coimcil in 1551, nothing worse than simplicity and ignorance, as if Moscow had made a great stride in the matter of enhghtenment during the hundred years. What had really happened in the interim was that the Rulers of Moscow had got into touch with the leading Greek sees in the epoch of their deepest decadence and darkest igno- rance, with the result that a certain revival of Greek learning was observable in the higher ranks of the Russian clergy. Any revision of Slav rites and texts could under such conditions only lead to ehmination of much that was ancient and sincere.
But the chief significance of the Stoglav council lay in this : — it marked the triumph of a tendency, which had long been at work, to elevate the Russian Church from being a mere see under the jurisdiction of Constantinople to the dignity of an independent national Church. It was a grave shock to Rus- sian Christians when the Patriarch of Constantinople insisted that the metropohtan Isidore, lately consecrated by him, must attend the Council of Florence. He did so, but on returning to Moscow was deposed. The fall of Constantinople was regarded in Moscow as a punishment of the Greeks for their apostasy, and the conviction gained ground that, old and new Rome having both of them apostatised, Moscow was the third Rome and the Tsar the only orthodox prince. Russian divines now began to cast about for an apostoUc origin of their Church, and the legend grew up that St. Andrew had founded it. Nikon accepted this mjd^h.'
A legend was also started that the rulers of Moscow derived their secular authority direct from Prus, a brother of the Emperor Augustus. With the triumph of the centralized state at Moscow over the appanages, or more or less autonomous
1 Similarly the Armenians, when they began to quarrel with the Greelcs and wanted their Church to be something better than a dependency of Caesarea of Cappadocia, invented the fable that Christ had descended in person at Valar- shapat before the eyes of a Cathohcos — who was really a Greek missionary. Simultaneously they appropriated to themselves the Syriac legend of King Abgar and Addai.
54 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
local Slavonic provinces, it was also felt to be necessary to assemble in the capital the local cults of saints dispersed all over Russia in almost every town and village. It was Uke the ancient Roman adoption of the gods of Veii, which were dragged with due pomp from their own city to Rome. The famous ikon of the Saviour reverenced at Novgorod was now removed to Moscow, as were countless rehcs and miraculous pictures from other places. By order of Ivan the terrible, a search for local saints and legends began in 1547; and 40 were promptly discovered, whose miracles entitled them to a place in the new national pantheon. Macarius the metropoUtan was charged to compile an all-Russian hagiology, and thenceforth the Russian Church could not be accused of lacking saints and miracle-workers.
The 'position of affairs in 1655
We are now at the year 1655, and twelve years are to pass before the Council of 1667 consmnmates the schism already begun in the bosom of Russian Christianity. During those years no effort was spared to bring Moscow into closer associa- tion with Greek centres of piety, to assimilate old Slav rites to such Greek models as were obtainable. Russian prelates could not but reverence the Greek Church as the parent of their own rehgion, and their first patriarch Job had been conse- crated by Jeremiah of Constantinople, as Philaret by Theo- phanes of Jerusalem. It was after all a slender minority that raised among themselves doubts as to the orthodoxy of the Greeks, and Stefan Bonifatsi, Nikon's rival for the patri- archate, expressly bore witness thereto in his Book on the Faith, printed in Moscow in 1649, — a work much appealed to at a later date by the Raskol on account of the chronology it afforded them of Antichrist's reign on earth. Nevertheless, as Ivanovski candidly recognizes, there was always a school of thinkers in his country that distrusted the Greeks. The early chronicler of Kiev, Nestor, wrote that they were ever deceivers, and the natural antipathy of a virile race for the debased Levantine was intensified by the open apostasy to Rome of the Greek Emperor, John Palaeologus and his higher clergy
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 55
at the Council of Florence in 1439, when under the guidance of the Patriarch Ignatius even Isidore, the Greek Metropolitan of Moscow, became a backslider, to the horror of Prince VasiU and his subjects. The result was that Russian Christians then formed the conviction that no orthodoxy survived in the entire world outside their own pale, and the fall of Constanti- nople was regarded as a judgment upon backshders. As for the Western Church the Russians consistently regarded it as the vilest of heresies, and have never ceased to empty the vials of their wrath and scorn upon the Poles, because, being Slavs, they are filled with the spirit of apostasy. The recent war, as regards Russia and Austria, was, from one point of view, an episode in the age-long struggle of Byzantium and Rome. It reproduced once more the quarrel of the Patriarch Photius and the Pope of Rome for jurisdiction over Bulgaria just over a thousand years ago.
Abominating the West and suspicious of the East, it is not wonderful that the Orthodox Church has ever suffered from intellectual anaemia and chosen for its motto: ''no learning, no heresy." Nikon's patronage therefore of Greek learning only served to rouse distrust of his new methods and placed a fresh weapon in the hands of those whom his autocratic violence had already aUenated. His associations with Kiev and the doctors of South Western Russia did not in any way weaken these prejudices, for Kiev during the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries was little more than a centre of Latin culture; amid the Little Russians there had been a movement in the XVIth Century for union with Rome; and not only in Eastern GaUcia, but also in the Polish province of Cholm (or Holm), there are still found millions of Ruthenes or Little Russians, who were educated by those greatest of teachers, the Jesuits, three centuries ago, still retaining the Cyrillic Slav rites, but recognizing the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome.
It deepened popular suspicions against the "Correctors," that they allowed to be printed in Moscow various books of doubtful orthodoxy written by divines of these outlying and more or less Latinized Slav churches. Such was the "Cate- chism" of Laurence Zizania (an ominous name) of Korets,
56 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
now in the Volynski or Volhynia Government. Zizania wrote in Lithuanian about 1600 and was a teacher at Lvov, or Lem- berg, in doctrine opposed to the Uniats. Nevertheless, as we might expect in a book written in a city so deeply influenced by Jesuit learning, his Catechism was tainted with Latin heresies and even inculcated the doctrine of Purgatory. The Boyar Rtishchev incurred censiu-e because in his school near Moscow he admitted teachers from Kiev; and in 1650 three conserva- tive Russian divines, Ivan Vasilev Zasetski, Luke Timothy Golosov, and Constantine Ivanov, clerk of the Blagovesh- chenski or Annunciation church met at the monk Saul's lodg- ings in order to formulate their indictment against an institu- tion in which Greek and Western Slav learning was held in esteem.
In the Spring of 1655 Nikon ^ availed himself of the presence in Moscow of two foreign prelates, Macarius of Antioch and Gabriel of Servia, to convene a synod, which he hoped would support him in his emendations of the Russian Service books, and in the use of three fingers instead of two. There was also a dispute as to the right ceremony of reconciUng Latins, which meant Poles, to the Orthodox Communion; some holding that they should be rebaptized; others, merely anointed. Nikon here shewed better sense than the Greek Church did, by rang- ing himself with the latter party, who had on their side the weight of the ancient and undivided Church. The synod met in March and confirmed the decisions arrived at by the Council of the year before. It also gave its formal approval to a new edition of the Sluzhehnik or missal which was printed and dis- tributed towards the close of the year to all the churches in Russia; it was the first of the corrected books to be thus dis- tributed *'by authority."
Nikon, in spite of his dictatorial instincts, was consistently anxious to present his reforms as an expression of the mind of the entire Orthodox Church and not of the Russian hierarchy alone. For this reason in 1655-56 he had printed and distrib- uted a collection of writings, called Skrizhal, relative to the crisis, penned in 1653 by Paisius of Jerusalem, which |Arsenius had * Macarius Hist. vol. 11.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 67
rendered into Russian. The Synod of April 1656 ratified its contents. Skrizhal was the Russian equivalent for the tables of the Mosaic commandments or a bishop's pectoral. The book contained a commentary on the Uturgy and other priestly rites, with the Byzantine prelate's letter on the use of the two fingers and the credo. In a later edition were included Nikon's address to the Synod of 1656 and other controversial tracts. In that year Nikon thought the time was at last come for putting an end to the differences which prevailed in the rites and books used in the churches all over Russia, and he resolved to call in en masse, in order to bring about their destruction, all the discordant texts, and to issue instead to all parishes his authorized versions. He was wilUng to brave the chorus of disapproval sure to be roused by the wholesale condemnation of books printed by his predecessors as well as of MSS. which had been for centuries the object of almost superstitious reverence and had been from the beginning in the hands of Russian saints and workers of miracles; for he had secured in advance the approval of Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, of Gabriel of Serbia, of Gregory of Nicea and of Gedeon of Mol- davia, who were all staying in Moscow and present at his Synod in 1656. The Synod met on February 12, the day of St. Meletius, and began with the perusal of an apocryphal life of the Saint, in which it was related how, when engaged in a controversy with the Arians, he had drawn sparks of fire from heaven by joining two fingers together and then adding a third in crossing himself.-^ Next Macarius was formally asked to interpret the legend, and answered that it signified the usage on which Nikon had set his heart; whereupon the Synod ratified it as an act symbohc of the Holy Trinity. The members of the Council then proceeded to the Uspenski church to hear mass which was performed by the prelate Macarius, Gabriel
1 The usage condemned was that of extending the index and middle finger, while crouching the fourth and fifth over the thumb in the palm of the hand. The extended middle finger was slightly bent. The explanation now given of this usage by Greek monks is that the first two fingers represent IC, the other two and the thumb XC, i. e. the customary Greek abbreviations for ' Jesus Christ.' Nikon substituted the rule to make the sign on the forehead with the first three fingers of the right hand.
58 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
and Gregory, Metropolitan of Nicea; and solemnly standing before the Tsar who was present, these three anathematized the use of two fingers as an Armenian heresy approved by Theodoret, the Nestorian, all present joining in their anathema. But this somewhat mechanical unanimity did not yet satisfy Nikon, so he summoned yet another Council in the following April (25th), at which he adduced the authority of Athanasius and Paisius, the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem for the change; once more the use of two fingers was anathema- tized, this time as an innovation (!) and as savouring of the Arian and Nestorian heresies.
The rebaptism of Latins was also condenmed, and more wisely, and six Poles were marched in ad hoc and reconciled to the Church merely by unction with the Muron or holy chrism mixed by Nikon on the Great Thursday. Some of the Russian clergy present were nevertheless scandaUzed at such facihty of conversion being granted to Latin heretics; but in the end they yielded to the arguments of Macarius who adduced pre- cepts in favour thereof from the nomocanons or books of eccles- iastical law and discipline, and the Tsar cUnched the matter by lending the weight of his authority to a recognition of the orders and baptism of the Cathohc and Southern Russian Churches. The decision, we may remark, was nevertheless in direct contra- vention of the earlier rituals (potrehnik) issued under the Patriarchs Joasaph and Joseph and of the rule made by the great Patriarch Philaret; for these authorities laid it down that not only Latins, but orthodox White Russians as well, who had received baptism by sprinkling only, were to be rebaptized.
Orthodox historians naively remark that these ''reforms" roused the opposition of many who by reason of the excessive behef in mere ritual were unable to distinguish it from dogma, as if the older practices had not been anathematized by the subservient Greek patriarchs mustered in Moscow as heretical, e. g. as Armenian, as Arian, as Nestorian. If Paul of Kolomna could not distinguish ceremony from behef, neither could Nikon and the Tsar. You do not excommunicate and hurl anathemas except at heretics, still less whip and burn aUve men who are perfectly orthodox, and only err by being simple-
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM ' 59
minded and conservative. The ''reforms" outraged not a few of the higher clergy; some openly mm-miired, others kept silence from fear of sharing the fate of Paul; and their stiff- necked obstinacy and restlessness, as Ivanovski styles their feelings of dissatisfaction, rapidly spread beyond the clergy and took hold of the masses of the people, who could not be- lieve that men whom they so deeply venerated were misguided heretics.
The Fall of Nikon
And now a reaction set in against Nikon and all his works, provoked by his headstrong courses, cruelty and violence. For a time the stars seemed to fight in their com'ses against him. As is usual in times of popular excitement, portents were seen, the heavens were darkened and comets sped across the void. Dreams and visions were of the order of the day. The Almighty himself appeared demanding that the printing presses should be suspended from their impious work and destroyed. The Virgin and St. Paraskeve joined in his expostulations. Not only the inferior clergy were outraged; their indignation spread to the Boyars or great proprietors above and to the peasants below; it even penetrated the Palace of the Tsar. Plague and war were endemic then as now in the land, and served to enhance the general discontent. In August 1656 the mob broke into the Uspenski Church and assailed Nikon with the accusation of having set a heretic, Arsenius Sukhanov, to tamper with the holy books. Overwhelmed by their menaces Nikon hastily quitted Moscow, and retired to the Voskresenski mojiastery of New Jerusalem built by himself in 1656 in imitation of the Church of the Anastasis.
The very forwardness of Nikon in exiling his antagonists served indirectly to diffuse over Russia the rumour of his own impiety and apostasy. He had had Awakum (Habbakuk) deported to Siberia, but he had forgotten to cut out his tongue beforehand, — a precaution he took with many of his antagon- ists. The result was that the exile spread the tidings, as he travelled, of the profanation of the old religion. In scores of villages they listened to his seductive preaching, and at Tobolsk
60 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
he even converted to his views the Archbishop Simeon. Nero- nov, we saw, had been incarcerated at Vologda in the Simonov Spasso-kamenski monastery, but the conditions of seclusion in that day were not so rigorous as a modern State knows how to impose. Villagers anxious to know what was passing in Moscow flocked round him and eagerly imbibed his teaching, for men are everywhere more prone to believe evil than good about the men in authority, especially in Russia. For a time it looked as if Nikon might share the fate of Maximus, the over- bold Greek corrector of a generation earlier. Even in modern England it is easy to get up a heresy hunt. How easy then must it not have been in XVIIth Century Russia. Western Europe was in those far-off days, as in oiu* own, envisaged by all "true" Russians as a contaminated region, the home of Satan and of every Satanic innovation. Even to-day there are innumerable Old believers in Russia who eschew tobacco and potatoes on the ground that they were brought in from the West by the accursed nemtsy, i. e. Germans and Scandinavians. When the first Duma was instituted in 1905, and certain hberals therein ventured to ask questions about how the money of taxpayers was being spent, Russian conservatives denounced them as infected with the "Western Poison." It was worse in the XVIIth Century to be accused of Latinizing than of Judaiz- ing. Nikon accused some of his opponents of using tobacco, but that was barely so grave as the charge of Latin heresy now spread abroad against himself, and the grand Seigneur or Boyar Pleshcheev reminded Neronov of the prophecy con- tained in the Book of Faith (see above p. 54) of schisms and dissensions in the Church; that book, he said, was full of warn- ings concerning the backsliding of the West and the apostasy of the Uniats to the Western Church. Let Nikon beware lest thereby they also should suffer. Most of Nikon's little improvements in ritual were set down to his Latin heresy, in particular the use of three fingers in blessing, the impressing on the eucharistic wafer of a four-cornered cross, the triple Alle- luia, and the substitution in the phrase "offering the thrice holy hymn" (trisagion) of the word chanting or intoning for offering. For the word substituted among the Latinized
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 61
Slavs signified accompaniment by the organ of the voice, and of the organ the Eastern Christians had the same horror as John Knox of the "box o' whistles." Nikon was freely hkened to the Greek apostates Isidore and Ignatius, and accused of truckling to the Pope of Rome.
Ivanovski and Macarius set before us a graphic account of the events which ensued and culminated in the emergence of the Raskol as a counter-Church after the Councils of 1666-7. In 1858 the opposition to Nikon, confined five years before to a few of the higher ecclesiastics, began to swell into a popular movement of such dimensions as to engender misgivings in the Tsar. It was in vain that Nikon at the eleventh hour was cowed into making a few concessions; for example, to the clergy of the Uspenski Church in Moscow permission was given to use as they liked either the old or the new Service books. This was because Neronov, who had now been shorn as a monk and taken the name of Gregory in religion, had from fear of schism relaxed his opposition to Nikon's revision of the church books. Nikon had many enemies in the hierarchy itself, in especial Pitirim of Krutits. Not a few ladies of the court and relatives of the Tsar were inflamed against Nikon by Awa- cum's denunciations. Boyars or nobles whom he had treated with such rigour, when in the Tsar's absence he was entrusted with the administration of the realm, now saw their oppor- tunity to retahate. They cast all their influence with the Tsar against Nikon, who in 1658 suddenly found himself fallen from the royal favour.
On July 6th of that year Teimuraz, the prince of the neigh- bouring little kingdom of Georgia, whose capital was at Tiflis, visited Moscow. He was a Christian and orthodox, for early in the Vllth Century his ancestors had abandoned their com- munion with the monophysite church of Armenia and gone over to the Byzantines. In an age when few independent Christian states survived in the East, the warriors of Georgia retained their freedom; it was natural therefore that this prince, who bore the ancient name of Teimuraz, should be accorded a splen- did reception in the Tsar's capital. On such an occasion the Patriarch would naturally have taken, after the Tsar, the most
62 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
prominent part in the ceremonies, but it was noticed that he was absent. He had not been invited, and his emissary on his way to the reception was assaulted by the Tsar's attendants and told to get out of the way. On July 8th, the feast of the Kazan ikon of the Theotokos, the Tsar in turn absented him- self because Nikon was celebrating. On the 10th he also took no notice of Nikon's invitation to him to attend the Hours, and he sent a noble to inform the prelate that he was offended and would not come to hear him repeat the liturgj^
Nikon was not the man to admit himself in the wrong or to take the first step in reconciliation with his prince. He quitted the church on foot leaning on a common crutch, and turned his steps to Ilinka, where lay the hostel of the Resurrection Monastery. There he halted three days and then quitted Moscow for good, declining any more to occupy himself with the business of the patriarchate. His quarrel with the Tsar, according to Ivanovski, was due to nothing in particular. They no longer sympathized; the nobles had stirred the Tsar's distrust, and the latter looked askance on Nikon as one who had pressed him to undertake the unsuccessful war with Sweden from which he had lately returned. The chief reason was that Nikon interfered in the administration. There was no room for two heads of the State.
From the Fall of Nikon to the Council of 1666
A time of chaos followed the departure of Nikon. The affairs of the Church were entrusted to his enemy Pitirim, the Metropolitan of Krutits, the nobles had succeeded in thor- oughly poisoning the mind of their Sovereign against him, and even incited the people to protest openly against his reforms. The Raskolniki now began to shew themselves in public, and Awakum after many years exile in Siberia was recalled and given a position in the Kremlin. The Tsar patronized him afresh and went out of his way to ask his blessing. There was even talk of his being made the Tsar's chaplain. The renewal of Court favour, however, did not abate Avvakum's Raskol enthusiasm. He undertook to debate with Theodore Rtish-
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 63
chev the subject of Nikon's reforms, and these discussions degenerated into noisy scenes.
About the same time the monk Gregory Neronov returned from his place of confinement. Haunted with the fear of a schism between the Russian and the Eastern Churches, he had, as remarked above, left the ranks of the Raskol; but he continued to agitate against the correction of the Service books, and addressed petitions to the Tsar stigmatizing Nikon as a son of perdition and demanding his condemnation by a Coun- cil. In this agitation he was joined by several notables who till now had maintained a guarded silence. Among these were Spiridion Potemkin of the Pokrovsky Monastery, an uncle of Theodor Rtishtchev, and Theodor Trofimov, deacon of the Church of the Annunciation, Dositheus and Cornelius. Dositheus later on headed the Raskol among the Don Cossacks of Olonets. Nicetas, a pope in Suzdal, and Lazarus of Romanova also repudiated Nikon's reforms.
The populace of Moscow was by now infected with enthusi- asm for Awakum; his adherents ran along the streets and stood in the pubhc places proclaiming "the grace of the old piety." Street fanatics pursued the Tsar's equipage, appeal- ing to him to restore the ancient rehgion. In the provinces equally agitation raged against Nikon and petitions from the clergy and bishops poured in to the Tsar, denouncing the book Skrizhal which Nikon had disseminated in defence of his policy. Raskol and Boyars joined in demanding the expulsion of Nikon from the patriarchate. Even members of the royal family joined in the outcry, for example Theodosia Morozov, one of Awakum's penitents and widow of GUeb Ivan Morozov, with her sister the Boyarina Eudokia Urusov. They even went to the length of repudiating Nikon's baptism. They died in 1675 after being scourged, racked and imprisoned in under- ground cells at Borovsk in the Kaluga Government, their martyrdom aiding the spread of the Raskol.
It is not wonderful if the clergy in many places resumed the old books and modes of singing; and if the authorities had been capable of good sense and moderation, they would have accepted the warning. The spkitual temperature was indeed
64 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
rising, and as has happened again and again in times of stress, fanatics began to read the signs of the time in that fertile storehouse of reUgious dementia, the Apocalypse.
When the year 1000 of the Christian epoch arrived it was generally supposed that the reign of Antichrist was at hand and preluded the end of the world. It had passed away however, without much harm, and now the year 1666 was at hand, a date which the Raskol teachers connected with the number of the Beast, which, as everyone knows, was 666. The Book of Faith, widely current, as we have seen, in Russian rehgious circles, prophesied that this mystical date would witness a grand apostasy from the faith and the advent of the precursor of the Man of Sin or Antichrist, if not of that personage him- self. Men's minds were stuffed with such speculations, and a seer from the Volga, a compatriot of Nikon, appeared on the scene with stories of his visions. He had passed a night in the company of Nikon and had witnessed a number of demons install him on a throne, crown him as if he were a king, pros- trate themselves before him and cry: "Of a truth thou art our beloved brother," and so forth. Another fanatical monk, named Simeon, had his vision also of a huge serpent coiling his scaly folds around the palace of the Tsar and whispering into the latter's ear the blasphemies of the contaminated service books. Needless to say, the serpent was Nikon. The Tsar himself wrote despairingly to Nectarius, the patriarch of Jerusalem: "In our entire Church rites there lacks all uni- foimity, everyone in the churches follows what order he chooses." A Tsar of that age could not perhaps be expected to realize what is even among ourselves on the threshold of the XXth Century so little understood or desired that in rehgion the important thing is not conformity but conomunion.
And now the pendulum began to swing once more the other way,^ for those who had brought back Awakum and their partisans from the obscurity of their places of exile or of hiding, began to tremble at the wild success of their propaganda, which seemed to strike at the roots of all authority in ecclesiastical
1 Acts of the Moscow Councils of 1666-7, Moscow, 1881, with introduction by Prof. Subbotin: Macarius Hist., t. 12, p. 640 foil.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 65
and even in political matters. Hatred of Nikon had tempo- rarily won for the Raskol teachers the support of the Boyars, but this aUiance now began to crumble. The Tsar was per- suaded in 1664 once more to relegate Awakum to exile, and sent him this time to Mezen near Archangel. In those days travel was slow, and prisoners less circumscribed in their activities than to-day. It amounted in effect to a missionary tour; the following year Awakum started back to attend the Council of 1666. On his way to and from Archangel he had spread his tenets right and left.
The Council of 1666
The Council of 1666 was ostensibly summoned by Imperial decree to pass sentence on the fallen Nikon, still the victim of the Tsar's displeasure and doubtless unpopular with many powerful people. In the first session, after the credo had been duly recited by all the members, three leading questions were put to each and all: " Do you accept the four Greek Patriarchs as orthodox? Do you accept as such their printed books and MSS.? Do you accept the findings of the Council of 1654? " These questions only bore indirectly on Nikon and removed the question of his personal actions from purview. The Council could condemn him, yet accept his handiwork, the corrected books, the three fingers and the rest. They did both. The result of the manoeuvre was what might be expected. All present answered the questions in the affirmative and gave their signatures in that sense. The next session was held under the presidency of the Tsar himself, in his Stolovaya or banqueting hall, his privy council assisting. The Tsar took up his parable against the Raskol propaganda, declaring it to be directed against the Church and its sacraments. He recited the symbol from the Chrysobull of 1593, in the eighth clause of which, as we saw, the one epithet Kyrion was used of the Holy Ghost. As he was certainly unacquainted with Greek, this was for a Tsar of that age a very impressive feat. Pitirim, formerly MetropoUtan of Novgorod, who had taken charge of the affairs of the Church when Nikon was disgraced, tendered in the name thereof its thanks to the Monarch for
66 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
his defence of orthodoxy, which the Raskol had never in any way assailed. All who were present, Pitirim affirmed, unfeign- edly accepted the said symbol.
In the third session the Raskol teachers were called up for judgment singly or in batches. They were invited to accept the corrected books and to repent, the charge preferred against them being, not that they adhered to the pre-Nikonian texts and rites, but that they condemned the new ones, that they decried the authority of the Eastern patriarchs, calumniated Nikon and falsely accused the Muscovite clergy of denying the dogmas of the Incarnation and Resurrection. Some of the accused remained impenitent, led by Awakum and Lazar; some sincerely abjured the supposed errors, as Alexander, Bishop of Vyatka, who in 1663 had protested to the Tsar against Nikon's correction of the creed and service books. An abjiu-ation of his errors was also forced from the monk Gregory Neronov; others abjiu-ed, but, as the event proved, in- sincerely, such as Nicetas and the Deacon Thedor or Theodore, who eventually had his tongue cut out. The obstinate were excommunicated and sent to prison; the rest were hurried off to monasteries to undergo discipUne and be subjected to further examination. The synod closed its dehberations by unani- mously condemning the new sect and ordaining that all incum- bents should use the new books.
The Raskol leaders were confirmed in their opposition by the knowledge that the Greek Ecclesiastics brought to Moscow were ignorant of the issues at stake. The latter could not speak Russian and were tools in the hands of Nikon and of the court party who alternately cajoled and overawed, bribed and menaced them. They countersigned Nikon's edicts, but did not in the least understand them. The Raskol leaders had on their side a learned Greek, named Dionysius, a monk from Athos, who had lived in Moscow for ten years before the patriarchs arrived and was famihar with the ins and outs of the quarrel, for he knew the Russian language and Hturgies thoroughly well. A letter of his survives, written in 1667, in which he accuses them of being deceived, of knowing nothing of what was going on, of believing whatever they^were told. ' If," he writes, "you would exercise your own judgment, avoid
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 67
honours and gifts from princes and ecclesiastical authorities. But if you do, I warn you that you will share the fate of Maximus. They will intern you in a monastery, and you will never see your homes again."
Never was a great schism forced on a great Church upon a flimsier pretext, and the feverish anxiety of the triumphant faction to obtain the approval of foreign prelates for their innovations shewed plainly that in their hearts they felt many misgivings. This was why a few months later, in November 1667, the retiu'n to Moscow of Paisius of Alexandria and of Macarius of Antioch after a lapse of eleven years was made the occasion of a fresh meeting, this time to deal expressly with Nikon. The other Eastern prelates who had attended the last council were present along with sundry of the Greek clergy. Nikon was condemned — Ivanovski does not seem to know what for, but really of course because in an autocracy there is no room for two supreme authorities — and exiled to the Therapontov cloister; none the less the Synod approved of his revision of the Church books, as also of the book Skrizhal which as we saw above, was a stumbling-block in the path of old-fashioned Churchmen. The condemnations of 1666 were reaffirmed and those who resisted were anathematized, on the ground that, in adhering to the old order, they thwarted ecclesi- astical authority and calumniated the orthodox eastern church as an heretical body. The excormnunications pronounced against the dissidents were superfluous, for most of them had already withdrawn from communion with the Chiu-ch. Three Patriarchs, fourteen metropolitans and eight archbishops, and others, in all 76 ecclesiastics signed the acts of this Synod which were then laid up for a perpetual record in the cathedral of Moscow.
But the decisions of the Stoglav council a centm-y before had also to be got out of the way. It had solemnly anathematized the practices now declared to be orthodox. Accordingly its anathemas were as solemnly revoked as they had been pro- nounced, and the doctors who had attended it declared to have been the dupes of dreams and forgeries. Thus began that famous Raskol movement which still divides Russians, yet
68 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
has undoubtedly contributed much to the social, moral and intellectual progress of the people and is destined, we may hope, to contribute yet more in the future.
K. Waliszewski, the historian of the first Romanovs, in his work (Paris 1909) entitled Le Berceau d'une dynastie, insists hardly less than Kostomarov and Miliukov on the fact that the events of 1667 laid the foundations of hberty and revolution in Russia. In respect of its originating causes and conceptions the schism, he freely admits (p. 416), "wore the air of a petrified fragment of old Moscovy. And yet its heart beat with an intense life, and it shewed itself capable of such a power of resistance and propaganda, of such a capacity for independent development, as two centuries of persecution could not master or subdue. It was to endure and grow, and in doing so itself to unfold new phases in spite of the immobiUty which its initial principle seemed to impose on it. It was to diversify itself in an infinity of ways; robust organisms were to spring up in its bosom and seek to bring about manifold phases of existence in harmony with all sorts of creeds. A day was also to come when revolutionaries, freed from all confessional interests, and also reactionaries, no less indifferent to dogmatic controversies, will contend for this problematic ally, the one party hailing him as an instrument of their sociaUstic and even anti-reUgious agitation, the other as an element of poUtical and social regeneration . . . The Lazars and Awakums vowed the society of their time to eternal fixity, and yet none the less and all unconsciously implanted therein principles that utterly contradicted their postulate. Stationary or retrograde in regard to the intellectual movement of their country along the paths of civilization, they nevertheless were sharers in that progress and added to the awakening of thought the awakening of conscience. The subjection of the Church to the State was only rendered possible by the general indifference of those concerned. By attracting to itself such behevers as were more jealous than the rest of the Uberties thus set at nought, the Raskol faciUtated that pohcy; but at the same time it furnished the spirit of independence with an asylum of refuge of a kind to keep it alive and develop its energy."
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I
p. AURELIO PALMIERFS ACCOUNT OF THE RUSSIAN CLERGY
It is opportune, in illustration of Uzov's contentions, to add here the strictures on the status of the Russian country clergy in La Chiesa Russa by P. AureHo Palmieri, 0. S. A. (Firenze, 1908). He writes, p. 164, as follows: —
*'Dobroklonsky, an esteemed historian of the Russian Church, thus speaks (t. ii, p. 147) of the defects which the inferior clergy contracted from the very beginning of Russian Christianity, and which still paralyze its mission: The chief defects of the clergy (in the 17th century) were the multi- pUcity of its members, the dependence of parish priests, their want of means, their intellectual ignorance and moral short- comings. Against these drawbacks provisions were indeed made, but they did not avail to eradicate the evils and neutra- hzed them only for a short time. The result was that they became inveterate."
''This author," continues Palmieri, "does not touch upon one of the principal defects, the absence of abnegation and of apostohc spirit in the clergy, a direct result of the servility to which it was habituated by the social conditions of Russia and the draconian laws of the Government.
"The inferior clergy live in parishes which in Russia have undergone the strangest vicissitudes, and have been reduced step by step from an unUmited autonomy to the level of mere succursals, branch offices, of the poHce or bureaus of the State. The Russian inferior clergy, from the first dawn of Russian Christianity, appear to us to have been ah-eady predestined to servitude. In the pre-Mongol epoch the material and moral conditions of the priesthood were so low that it was not the sons of boyars or of merchants or of well-to-do famihes that aspired to it, but only persons belonging to the lowest social strata, who regarded it as a rise morally or an employ- ment for the sake of making both ends meet. This resulted,
69
70 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
as Golubinsky, the historian of the Russian Church, expresses it (i, p. 448), in a priesthood of cossacks and proletarians. . . .
"The ancient Russian Church was not organized, and the choice of priests belonged more to the faithful than to the bishops. In the Byzantine Empire, owing to the large num- ber of dioceses, there was more famiharity between the hier- archy and lower clergy. Christian Russia in contrast possessed to begin with a very limited number of sees, which were of great territorial extent. There were no schools for the educa- tion of the clergy, and the bishop was not in a position to grasp the needs of the new forms of Christianity growing up among the Russian pagans who were embracing it. At first the monasteries supplied the deficiency of pastors. The churches of the cloister were transformed into parish churches, and certain monks also devoted themselves to the task of sacer- dotal ministry in the cities.
"The Parish churches were, to begin with, founded by Russian princes or by private individuals or by the communi- ties themselves. The first were kept up at the expense of the princes, the second belonged exclusively to those who had built them; they could be ahenated or let, and formed part of the hereditary patrimony. This gave rise to abuses, and Russian councils, especially that of the Hundred Capita (or Heads, Stoglav), sanctioned measures intended to put an end to this traffic in edifices of worship. The other churches were the property of the mirs or communities which erected them in cities and villages. To the right of ownership the mir added that of supervision, particularly in respect of the goods belonging to the Church. The mir chose delegates whom it charged to look after the economical interests of the parish, one only at first, later on two. There were no laws relative to the parochial clergy, and the faithful could increase or diminish it at their pleasure. This right was a corollary of the material conditions of the clergy in that age, for they derived their Uvelihood from the community or mir which sought their services.
"The priests of parishes were chosen by popular suffrage. The choice made, a candidate presented himself before the
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 71
bishop, who laid hands on him, and ordained him, if he was not a priest : or, in case he were such aheady, he blessed him.^ The bishop had no right to refuse a candidate so proposed, and, moreover, the ample gratuity which he received for the ordi- nation of any priest whatever effectually silenced conscientious scruples, if he felt any. As years rolled by, the ease with which the priesthood was acquired and the hghtness of the work required by the ministry produced a plethora of popes . . . It was enough for a candidate to secure a few votes or to adduce two witnesses to affirm that a certain parish needed a priest, and the bishop ignorant of the real facts, ordained the postulant. So the caste of popes assumed the aspect of a set of sweated operatives. The priests remained under the thumb of the laity, which could deny them the means of livelihood and expel them from their offices. Among the many com- petitors who presented themselves for the posts vacant in parishes, the mir chose those who most lowered the scale of their salary and of their tariff for ecclesiastical functions. This led, as a Russian bishop deplored, to lazy or drunken priests being chosen in preference to priests that were lettered or led good lives. ^ The nobility contributed to the decadence of clerical prestige. In fact many nobles scrupled not to present to the bishops, as candidates, their own serfs in order to secure for themselves part of what they earned as priests .... He continues on p. 168: —
"Notwithstanding, the progressive decadence of the autono- mous regime of parishes and of the free choice of priests, though it led to so many evils, is deplored nowadays by reformers of the Russian Church, as an element in the dissolution of ortho- doxy. The ancient parish was considered a juridical unit, legally organized and in poHtical and religious aspects enjoying autonomy. The bishops had not the right to make what rules they liked in parishes, and if occasionally they attempted to, conflicts arose which dragged on for years. The mir had its starosta or head who together with the parishioners and clergy
^ Dobroklonsky, iii, p. 53.
^ Znamensky Uchebnoe Rukovodstvo po Istorii russkoi Tserkvi, 144-5, "School Handbook on the History of the Russian Church."
72 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
conducted the affairs of the Church. The constitution of parishes was in consequence lay rather than ecclesiastic, and it is exactly this lay character which so much recommends it to apostles of a laicization of the church of such a kind as would assimilate priests to municipal counsellors and the bishops to parhamentary deputies, the one group Uke the other subject to the jurisdiction of their electors.
"In the 18th Century the autonomy of parishes, opposed by the hierarchy and looked askance at by the Government, gradu- ally dechned, and its diminution contributed to the enslavement of the peasants, the spread of the Raskol and anaemia of rehgi- ous sentiment.^ In the Ecclesiastical Code of Peter the Great the parish is still regarded as a juridical personaUty, a legal association invested with the right to elect its own priests and those who served in the Church, and to agree with the clergy on terms that were legitimate. The parishioners also retain the right to nominate the starosty, who were allowed out of the collections made in church to raise hospices for beggars and hospitals or asylums for foundlings . . . Peter the Great Hmited the parochial right of choice by requiring that only men should be chosen as ministers who had completed their studies in diocesan schools. In the reign of Paul I, in order to render the parish clergy more docile instruments of Government, the Synod, in accordance with an imperial ukase, decided that the worthiest and best instructed candidates should be given prefer- ence over those who enjoyed the confidence and goodwill of the people; in this way Government candidates won a preference over parochial ones. At last an ukase of July 24, 1797, decreed the abohtion for good of the custom of electing the parish clergy, and also annulled the permission given in the 18th century to the parish to present to the bishop for acceptance and confirmation a hst of candidates enjoying the people's confidence. Later on the statute of ecclesiastical consistories, promulgated March 27, 1841, cancelled the last traces of paro- chial autonomy, and laid it down that sacerdotal ordination is a right which belongs immediately and exclusively tojthe eparchial or episcopal authority. Thus the poUtical slavery * Papkov, in Revue Internationale de TMologie, 1900, t. 8, p. 554.
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 73
of the Church entered the last phase of its evolution. The lower clergy, withdrawn from the free choice of the people, became a laughing-stock in the hands of the hierarchy, and the latter in its turn, transformed into one of the many cog-wheels of the State, ceased to feel any solicitude for the liberty of the Church, and took its orders blindly from the lay bureaucracy of the Synod. In addition the parish clergy were condemned to truckle to a hierarchy they cordially hated just because, being enrolled in the monasteries, it was dominated by ascetic ideals, and could not understand the wants of married priests." He continues on p. 174: —
''The movement of reform now (1908) afoot in Russia aims at the resurrection of the parish as the chief factor in a renova- tion of the Church. The memorandum of Count Serge Witte on the present situation of the Orthodox Church published in the Slovo of March 28, 1905, insists before all things on the reorganization of the primitive Russian ecclesiastical communi- ties. The ancient parish, so his memorandum runs, was as it were the channel in which religious life flowed. The pernicious revolution in ecclesiastical administration, thought out and effected by Peter the Great, paralyzed its energies. In the parishes religious and social Ufe before his time excelled in intensity. They formed juridical entities, autonomous units. The community built its own church, chose its own pastor and parochial ministrants. The parochial budget was regarded as of considerable importance, and out of the resources of the members of the community were maintained the church, the manse, the school and works of charity. The parochial balance also took the place of an agrarian bank, and could be used to aid the necessitous. The conmiunity judged its members and scrupled not even to penetrate the sanctuary of the home in order to restrain it from moral ruin. And yet an institution so useful for the development of rehgious sentiment and social harmony crumbled to nothing after the reforms of Peter the Great were adopted, and of it nothing remained but the name.
'' What causes produced the fall of the parish? Witte shows it with a sincerity rare in a statesman, and therefore, if we quote his words, we run no risk of deserving the epithet of
74 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
systematic detractors of the Russian Church. The aggrandise- ment in the 18th century of the rights of the nobility over the bondmen of the glebe suffocated ever more and more the initiative of the communities which had lost their religious autonomy. The Government pohcy of concentration, pur- sued with such obstinate ferocity that any union of people which took the name of a fraternal association was looked upon as a revolutionary or secret society, dealt pitiless blows at the autonomous organization of the parishes. More than that, the reformer of Russia looked upon the Church as part of the complex mechanism of the State, and linked with its holy duties a pohceman's and inquisitor's tasks, utterly out of keep- ing with the dignity of its character. The priest was charged to draw up an exact list of those who paid the imposts and was obUged, in violation of the secret of the confessional, to draw up a report of poUtical plots or offences. With the change of their character from that of shepherds of souls to inspectors of police, the clergy forfeited the confidence of the people, and the ties which united them with it were snapt for good.
"The decadence of the parish brought with it another in- convenience. The community ceased to take an interest in the material conditions of its pastors, and the latter had to provide for the support of their famihes out of the scanty glebe the State allotted to the parochial clergy and out of the legal contributions of the villagers. The result was that they fell into extreme indigence, and often the Government was obhged to assign to their orphans lands intended for the main- tenance of the churches; by consequence the clergy Uttle by little took on the aspect of an hereditary caste and aUenated still more completely the sympathies of the people.
"For the resurrection of the parish it is needful to reestab- lish the participation of the parishioners in the economic management of the goods of the parish and in the choice of the clergyman.
"In the first centuries of Christianity not only priests, but bishops as well were chosen by the people, with the result that the one and the other came before their flocks as true pastors, and not in the character of intruders sent to govern a church
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 75
by way of an act of grace or of rigour on the part of the political authority. In the case of the bishops the day seems still to be far off when their nomination will be made with the assist- ance of the people."
With these views of Palmieri may be compared those of Mihukov in his Russian Civilization, 1905, pt. 1, p. 149. He allows that the Raskol, though more attached to the letter and form of rites, yet were more penetrated than the masses around them by their inward spirit, and anyhow lived their religion. But he doubts whether it was so much a protest, as the above writers contend, against new restrictions imposed by the authorities of the Church on the free spiritual life of parishes and on their choice of parish priests. It is true that the priest as the elect of the mir little by little had his place taken by the nominee of the bishop, in such wise that the parish became a half administrative, half reUgious unit. But the change was less due to systematic crushing out of the interest taken by the laity in church matters than to the fact that most who were so interested went over to the raskol. Indifferentism was not forced on them, but was a natural growth. That is also, as we saw above, the view of Wahszewski.
Indeed the free election of the pope, even when it was a reahty, formed no spiritual tie between pastor and flock, just because they exacted of him no gifts of teaching or knowl- edge. They wanted mass to be sung regularly and the Sacra- ments administered, especially to the dying, and no more; consequently they used their right of election to procure a pope as cheaply as possible, and they wanted in their deacon just one gifted with a big voice for the responses. His func- tion was that of a deep tongued bell. He also served them as a clerk to keep accounts etc., but was in any case a luxury, and was usually the gift of a rich elder, like the chorister of today. The government never overruled the choice of the parishioners, and it was their indifference which turned the ministry into a sort of trade. ''What made you turn priest?" asked Dimitri of Rostov of one early in the 17th century. ''Was it to save yourself and others? " " No," was the answer, " but to support my wife and children. "
76 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
The mere fact that parochial election was conducted on such grounds did not in itself cause episcopal nomination to take its place. The bishop did not grasp a privilege the parishioners resigned. They were not his rivals, but merely let things take their course; and the result was that parishes, hke other offices, became hereditary, and particular families, son succeeding sire, held particular benefices generation after generation, very much as is the case in England, where ' family livings' are equally an institution. In some parishes one family owned the office of priest, another that of lector, and every clerical grade was hereditary. There was in fact a tendency for the clergy to become a close guild, not through legislation to that effect, but as the result of social tendencies working equally in other spheres of administration, to which free access was as difficult for all and sundry as to the clerical office. Officially the priest was supposed to feel a vocation; in practice he became a wheel in the bureaucratic machine, and in this he occupied no exalted position, but was humiUated to the lowest rung of the ladder. It was only in 1796 under Tsar Paul that proprietors lost the right of knouting the village priests; their wives were only exempted under Alexander I in 1808, their children under Nicholas I in 1839. Moreover the Government, while closing all other careers to the sons of popes, set itself to cut down the number of parish clergy to the lowest possible limit, and so forced the younger sons into the army. These disabilities lasted from the reign of Peter I until 1869, when at last other services and professions were thrown open by Alexander II to clergymen's sons. In earfier days, when the office of pope was still open to others than sons of the clergy, those who assumed it usually did so not from rehgious impulse, but in order to avoid the taxation which pressed so hard on the individual in other walks of life.
The Raskol were sensible of this regress and naturally preferred the old institutions to the innovations. They set to work to defend national pecuharities on the plea that the innovations were borrowed from the Latins, which was partly true, inasmuch as the outward veneer of the Government set up in Moscow was borrowed from the West. They were the
CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE SCHISM 77
champions of personal liberty and maintained that the new and harsh system of law was an anti-Christian institution. The Code of Alexis Michailovich was and still is regarded as a violation of Christian faith.^ Accordingly in constituting themselves the champions of the old, they really took their stand not on the side of what was old as being old, but as being better.
^ A. Shchapov, Russian Raskol, pp. 468, 477.
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY DAYS OF THE SCHISM
With the council of 1666 the Old believers began their his- tory as a body separate from the official church. The prin- cipal events of the next few years were the Rebellion at the Solovetski Monastery, and — even more important — the Revolt of the Streltsy in Moscow, which led up to the great dispersion of the Old believers far and wide in Russia and even beyond its borders.
The Rebellion at the Solovetski Monastery
Ivanovski gives a graphic account of the rebelUon which took place in the Solovetski Monastery, on the White Sea; and as it was typical of the age, it is worthy to be narrated.^
Already before the final rupture took place the inmates of this convent had shewn themselves hostile to Nikon's ecclesiastical improvements. It is true their abbot Elias attended the Council of 1654 and even subscribed to the reso- lution passed by it in favour of more correct Service-books. But he could not get a hearing for such a project among his brethren, who formally declined in June 1658 to accept the new editions and adhered to the old texts. Even before that date their archimandrite during the Great Fast had induced them to sign an abjuration of such impious novelties, and forti- fied by the assent of his monks had administered a sort of anti- modernist oath to the clergy of the villages grouped round the Monastery. Elias' leading supporters were the Cellarius Serge, Sabbatius Obrjnitin, Gerasimus Thirsov and some other Elders. Three of the brethren, however, dissented and sent a petition to Nikon, which never reached him, for he had already fallen into disgrace with the Tsar before it arrived.
1 Simeon Denison's homeric account of the Siege is accessible to English readers in Will. Palmer's the Patriarch and the Tsar, vol. H, p. 439. He also gives the peti- tion sent from the convent to the Tsar in Oct. 1667.
79
80 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
In 1659 Elias died, and his successor Bartholomew of Vol- ogda was irresolute. He had indeed been consecrated Archi- mandrite at Moscow according to the new rites, and he went thither in 1660 and 1664 to take part in Nikon's Synods. Nevertheless he took no steps to impose Nikon's decrees in his monastery, and for eight years the brethren continued in the old ways without the clerical bureaucrats of Moscow taking any notice of them. It was quite in keeping with Bartholo- mew's toleration of the old rites that in other respects he was a martinet, maintaining an iron discipline among his monks. He even went to the length of imprisoning and scourging such of them as offended by rioting in church or complaining of his rigour. The Monastery, however, remained a centre of Old behevers ; and the Government did not mend matters by send- ing thither for confinement numbers of rebellious clerks and elders, as well as sundry of the laity, exiled from their homes as criminals or notorious Raskolniks. A mihtant complexion was lent to the monastic society gathered there by various fugi- tive Cossacks who had belonged to the band of Stenka Razin.^ The ringleaders of the place were Gerasimus Thirsov, Genna- dius the Elder, Jona Bryzgalov, a runaway deacon of Tula who had taken monkish orders, John Stukalov and the deacon Ignatius. Among the exiles sent to the convent by way of punishment was Prince Lvov, who had directed the Moscow printing press. The name is famihar as that of a leader of the first revolutionary government in Petersburg; another exile, who presently led the revolt, was the archimandrite Nicanor, who was in villeggiatura there after being prior of the Mon- astery of St. Sabba at Zvenigorod, the Tsar's summer residence. He was a friend of Nikon's two arch-enemies, the Elder Theok- tistus and the Protopope Awakum.
In 1666 the monks addressed a petition to their archi- mandrite, then attending the Council at Moscow, to be laid before the Tsar. It contained a request that they should be permitted to continue with the old rites; but instead of pre- senting it, Bartholomew did penance for observing them so
^ A Don Cossack who revolted and after ravaging all the cities of the Volga was caught and executed in Moscow in June 1671.
EARLY DAYS OF THE SCHISM 81
long and rejecting the new. In this he set the example to the other members of the Council on July 13. Nicanor was not present at the Council, and had pleaded old age as an excuse for keeping away from it. Offended by the subserviency of Bartholomew, the monks at the instigation of Gerasimus Thirsov, petitioned to have him replaced by Nicanor, and in this demand Prince Lvov supported them. But Gerasimus in turn was now summoned to Moscow, required to do penance and despatched to the Volokolamski Monastery, where accord- ing to Denisov he was strangled. The rebels at Solovets were thus obliged to choose new ringleaders and they selected Alexander Stukalov, Gennadius and Ephrem.
The authorities in Moscow now began to feel concern, and sent Sergius, archimandrite of Yaroslav, to reduce the mutinous monks to order. He was to communicate to them the decision of the Council in favour of the new rites and to hear their complaints against Bartholomew. To support him, there were sent with him members of the Tsar's bodyguard. But before he arrived Stukalov and Nicanor had overcome the hesitancy of the brethren, deposed the Cellarius Sabbatius and appointed in his stead an illiterate monk Azariah, whose function was to awaken the brethren of a morning. At the same time a fresh remonstrance was despatched to Moscow. Sergius when he arrived was treated with contumely, confined with his suite in dark cells, and guarded by men armed with clubs. No monk was allowed to communicate with him except in a general audience, and the population of the neigh- bourhood made as if they would stone him as an emissary of Antichrist. Ultimately he managed to escape, and warn the authorities at Moscow. He was no sooner departed than the treasurer, who bore the Coptic name of Barsanuphius, no doubt in honour of the monophysite monk of Gaza of that name, was deprived of his office, and Gerontius, a hiero- monachus, entrusted with his functions. Stukalov at the same time was sent with an elder and a couple of attendants to Moscow to lay a fresh petition before the Tsar who by now was thoroughly incensed at the spirit of insubordination evinced by the brethren. It seems, however, to have been a
82 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
principle with this Tsar, in cases of ecclesiastical squabbles, to punish the ringleaders on both sides; and accordingly, while he sent the petitioners to monasteries under ecclesiastical censure and restraint, he also sent Bartholomew about his business. Nicanor too was doomed to disappointment; for though he was in Moscow at the time, he was not preferred to the vacant priorate, which was assigned instead to the Elder Joseph, architect of the Hostelry in Moscow. The comparative benignity, remarks Ivanovski, with which the Tsar treated the recalcitrant monks only served to excite their fanaticism and tempt them to commit further excesses. There speaks the orthodox historian.
The three, Joseph, Nicanor and Bartholomew, all quitted Moscow for the Monastery at one and the same time. The first two were intended to stay there for good, the last no longer than he would need to do in order to make over the conduct and goods of the convent to Joseph. Nicanor, how- ever, gave his companions of the road the sUp in Archangel, and sent the brethren a letter by his valet warning them not to admit Joseph or receive his benedictions, and this advice they carried out. Ten days later, Sept. 23, Nicanor and his partisans sent the Tsar another petition by the hand of an Elder, Cyril Chaplin, whose English name recalls the discovery of Russia by the Merchant Adventurers more than a century before; he also bore a missive from the archimandrite Joseph, whom, along with Bartholomew, the monks were treating with disrespect, confining both of them to cells from within which they could hear abuse lavished on them by all without. They were boycotted and threatened and forbidden to ap- proach the altar, to kiss cross, gospel or ikons. Finally they were bundled out in mid-winter on to the bank of the river. Simultaneously the monks sent the Tsar a fifth petition, drawn up by Gerontius the treasurer, more stringent than any of the former ones. It is not known if it ever reached the hands of the Tsar; but in any case it was printed later on and scattered broadcast among the Raskolniks.
Joseph's letter denoimcing the mutinous conduct of the brethren reached the Tsar, who promptly ordered the goods
EARLY DAYS OF THE SCHISM 83
of the convent to be sequestrated; while the council of Moscow which had not yet broken up, excommunicated them. But confiscation and anathema had lost their terrors for the ring- leaders, who merely set about to strengthen their defences against the Tsar's officer Volokhov who in the autumn of 1668 was sent with a troop of soldiers to reduce them to obedience. They began by allowing such of the inmates as were unwilUng to face a siege to depart, and of this privilege, eleven of the monkish and nine of the white clergy availed themselves, and crossed over to the Sumski bank of the river which the convent over-looked, — a circumstance that alone enabled its defenders to stand a siege.
Volokhov unsuccessfully beleaguered the place for four years, at the expiration of which Clement lovlev, captain of the Moscow imperial guard, took his place; a year later he in turn gave way to Meshcherinov the voevoda or general. Nicanor meanwhile was life and soul of the defence, ably seconded by his valet or body servant Thaddeus. The garri- son sustained a heavy blow, however, in the loss of Azariah the Cellarius, who, before Volokhov took his departure, was caught out fishing by the enemy along with a few other monks and sundry laymen, assisting in so necessary a sport. Their boats armed with small guns also fell into the possession of the enemy. Early in 1670, against the better judgment of several of the monks, the ringleaders had determined to use the Dutch artillery, with which the convent was armed, against the imperial troops, and Nicanor having mounted the tower and sprinkled the guns with holy water, had apostrophised them in the words: 'Little Dutch mothers, our hopes are centred in you, protect us!"
Eventually internal quarrels led to the downfall of this old- beheving fortress. Several monks who wanted to surrender are said to have been starved to death, and it is possible that the more resolute in their determination to hold out kept the dwindling stocks of provisions for themselves; the victims are said to have courted their fate by insisting on continuing to pray for the Tsar in the hturgy. After they had been got rid of in this cruel manner, certain unordained monks, says
84 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
Ivanovski, ventured to celebrate the rites and to hear confes- sions and grant absolution, while some even were left, if indeed they had any choice, to die without the Sacraments.
Among the few brethren who, escaping from the fortress on the arrival of Meshcherinov, went over to the enemy, was an Elder named Theoktistus, and he revealed to the Voevoda a secret entrance by way of a conduit under the White Tower, so, Denisov quaintly adds, betraying the convent as Aeneas and Antenor betrayed the Trojans. Through it the troops gained access to the interior, and in a moment, the siege, which had lasted eight years, was at an end, Jan. 22, 1676. All the monks were pitilessly executed, and a fresh company of celibates, more amenable to the new discipUne of Moscow, was sent to take their place.
The importance of this episode, rightly remarks our historian, was not to be measured so much by its military aspects as by its effect on the imagination of a rehgiously-minded peasantry. For ages the convent had been a centre of popular pilgrimage, and continued to be so all through the siege. It was the shrine of the great Christian athletes Zosimus and Sabbatius. The pious arrived beneath its walls and, finding it beleaguered, so that they could not gain admission, returned to their homes with indignant tales of the oppression and violence exercised by the ecclesiastical authorities of Moscow. Not only the pil- grims, but inmates of the convent who escaped before and during the siege, carried far and wide over The Pomorye, as the drear coastlands of the White Sea are called, the legend of the brilUant exploits and ultimate martyrdom of its gallant defend- ers. Forty years later Semen Denisov, a poet of the Raskol, celebrated the siege in an epic which has enjoyed an enormous success for two centuries. The poem of course teems with visions and miracles; the rebels are extolled as martyrs, the Tsar is an emissary of Satan, who perishes on the very day the convent fell. He really died a week later; but the rehgious, like the patriotic propagandist, prefers poetical justice to that of dates, and the sacrifice of truth in this case was slight. Ivanovski plaintively remarks that Denisov and his readers should have borne in mind that Christian martyrs never either
EARLY DAYS OF THE SCHISM 85
rioted or rebelled against an emperor's authority, and argues that the defenders of the Solovets convent had no title to be called martyrs, for they were only mutineers. He is strangely ignorant of the Acta Sanctorum.
The Revolt of 1682.
On May 15, 1682, a revolution^ broke out in Moscow which continued until it was repressed with ruthless energy by Peter the Great in 1698. In essential respects this resembled that of 1917. For it, too, was a joint revolt of the Streltsy, the Praetorian guard of the day, and of the populace. After rioting for three days, and murdering many who were obnoxi- ous to them, the soldiers proclaimed the two striplings John and Peter Alexeevichi to be both Tsars under the regency of their elder sister Sophia. A certain Prince Ivan Khovanski who possessed a mansion in Moscow was a partisan of the Ras- kol, and had long incurred suspicion by harbouring fugitive priests and using the old books in his private chapel. He was captain of the Streltsy and had little difficulty in investing what was in origin a mutiny of soldiers with the character of an Old believer rising. To him as officer of the guard was presented a petition for the restoration of the old piety drawn up by a monk Sergius. He professed his readiness to cham- pion the cause and promised to allow the Raskolniks to dis- cuss publicly their faith in the square where executions took place; It sounds a grim project, but we must not forget that the finest open spaces in Europe were but a few generations ago consecrated to such uses. The petition was naturally approved by the mutinous soldiery who can have had no idea of what it was about. Nicetas Dobrynin, also named Pustosviat, who had been pope or parish priest of Suzdal and had hypo- critically given his adherence at the council of 1666 to the new church regulations, was chosen to conduct the debate in the presence of the young princes and the regent.
The project failed however for the moment, and the petition alone was presented to the royalties. On June 25 took place
1 Macariu.?, Hist, of Raskol: Solovyev, Hist, of Russ. 1. 12: Bratskoe Slovo, 1875, bk.4.
86 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
the coronation of the two httle Tsars, the rite being performed from the new books, and in the hturgy instead of seven, only five prosphorae ^ were offered, a number displeasing to the Raskol- niks. Nevertheless Nicetas held a service in honour of the occasion in the Uspenski Church along the old hues as a sort of counter-demonstration with the permission of Khovanski; and this modest success inspired the partisans of the 'old piety' to conduct a procession through Moscow with ikons and books. Street preachers denounced the profanation of the churches and service-books, and appealed to the multitude to defend the old faith. Adherents of the new order were roughly handled by the crowd.
On July 3 the Raskolniks began a pubUc discussion with Joakim the patriarch in his palace of the Cross, of which Sabba Romanov, one of those who took part in it, has left us a description. It was renewed two days later in the square of the royal palace. The Old believers came with their books and their cross, their pulpit and their lighted tapers, and Nicetas standing on a dais began to read his diatribe before the people. He wanted a public discussion of his thesis, but the authorities declined this as unseemly and invited him into the palace, where the lady regent Sophia was present with several other princesses, her aunt Tatyana Mikhailovna, her sister Maria Alexeevna and the Tsaritsa NataUa Kirileovna. There were present also the patriarch and sundry archpriests. Asked what he wanted, Nicetas returned: "To supplicate humbly concerning the correction of the books. A new faith has been introduced among us." Athanasius, bishop of Khohnogory, repUed for his patriarch, whereupon Nicetas, according to the official report of the case, struck Athanasius and abused the Patriarch. Sabba however who was present states that he merely led him slightly aside with his hand. The Princess Sophia then began to reproach Nicetas with having recanted in 1666, and Nicetas rephed, no doubt truly, that he had only done so out of fear. The Princess thereupon irritated by the way her father Cyril and brother Ivan were
^ i.e., the loaves from which bread for consecration was taken. These loaves were offered in the deacon's chamber and not at the altar on the bema.
EARLY DAYS OF THE SCfflSM 87
spoken of in the petition (both of them had been murdered by the mutinous soldiers) threatened to withdraw from Mos- cow with the rest of the Royal Family. At the same time, Joakim, gospel in hand, proceeded to address a reprimand to the Old behevers, who received his remarks with derision, signing themselves with two fingers — their most effective method no doubt of exorcism, — and shouting 'Thus, thus!' The interview then broke up, and the Raskolniks proceeded to promenade about the city, entered the churches and said prayers in their own fashion, and beat the bells.
Sophia, a capable and determined woman, like most of the women who have from time to time controlled the fortunes of Russia, now took prompt steps to separate the cause of the revolted soldiery from that of the populace. She succeeded by means of her donatives, and so far regained their loyalty that they made themselves the agents of the arrest of Nicetas, who was instantly beheaded for rebeUion. This was July 21, 1682. His followers were banished to monasteries for correc- tion. The revolt of the Streltsy, it is true, was not quelled and went on simmering; but henceforth it had httle or no connection with the grievances of the Old behevers.
The Ukaze of 1685 and Its Results
There followed the Tsaritsa Sophia's ukase of 1685, one of the most draconian statutes on the page of history. It utterly proscribed the dissidents and forbade their very exist- ence. If detected, they were to be subjected to three-fold torture, after which, if they did not recant, they were to be burned ahve. If they repented they were to be sent for correction to an ecclesiastical prison. Those who had re- baptized a convert were to be put to death, no matter whether they repented or not; those they baptized to be knouted in case of repentance, but, in the opposite case, slain. Anyone who harboured them, even unwittingly, was hable to a fine of 5 to 50 roubles, in those days a great sum of money.
As might be expected, the dissidents did not wait to be caught, and a great flight of them followed into the farthest forests and deserts of Russia and even across the frontiers,
88 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
for it was impossible to draw such a cordon that they could not escape from the Empire.
"In order the more freely to wander from city to city and from \dllage to village, the itinerant preachers and mission- aries cleverly assumed all sorts of disguises. Sometimes they made their way in the garb of beggars, with wallet on back. This was supposed to hold the alms of the charitable, but more often it concealed Raskol books and tracts; at other times they assumed the garb of pilgrims; often they travelled as peddlers and colporteurs, with bags on their backs in which equally they hid the hterature of their teachers." ^
For all that, remarks Uzov, they were caught often enough, and it was not for nothing that the teaching grew up among them of the expediency of suicide en masse. P. Mihukov (Outhnes of Russian civiUzation, 4th ed. pt. 1, p. 71) estimates that from the beginning of the Raskol to end of 1689 as many as 20,000 burned themselves ahve, and most of these in the last nine years when Sophia's ukase was being executed against them.
"The self-immolation of the Raskolniks was in their time as heroic an exploit as we should to-day account a similar action on the part of the defenders of a fortress." ^ "Let us baffle Antichrist," ^ was the cry with which the Raskolniks rallied one another's courage and declared it preferable to burn them- selves ahve than give themselves up into the hands of a Govern- ment they detested. For the rest, it must be admitted that "it was perfectly logical reasoning on their part; it was better once for all to settle accounts with this life than be deprived of it by inhuman tortures; moreover, they argued, you may fail in the trial and against your will deny your convictions after all." ^ "Many have affirmed that self-immolation was a peculiar dogma of the Raskolniks. Had this been so, we should meet with cases of voluntary self-immolation, provoked by this teaching, without any other incentives. But in fact in all the
* Shchapov, Russ. Rask., p. 313.
^ Vestnik, Evrop. 1871, No. 4, Kostomarov's art., p. 494. ' The Raskol revealed in their own Hist. p. 228.
* Vremya, 1862, No. 1, art. by Aristov, p. 95.
EARLY DAYS OF THE SCHISM 89
known cases this form of death was chosen as an alternative to forcible capture by army commandos, and for the most part it was only adopted when their homes were being attacked. What was there to induce a few fanatics, who had won over ignorant peasants, to resort to so horrible a measure? They furnish themselves an answer to the question in the historical and trustworthy pictures they penned of contemporary perse- cution: ''Everywhere blows resound; everywhere thrashings and subjugation to his yoke follow in the train of Nikon's teaching; everywhere whips and rods soaked daily in the blood of confessors. The preachers of Nikon's new ideas breathe, not the spirit of gentleness, but that of fury, wrath, tyranny. Beatings and wounds, such are the methods of their instruction, and not the grace of Christ; guile and evil deceit, and not apostolic humiUty; with these they would spread their faith, and the outcome of their cruel violence and tyranny is a rain of blood. Village and field are bathed in tears, wilderness and forest are loud with weeping and moaning and groaning . . . Some suffered for the faith, others hid themselves wherever they could, others when the invaders, the persecutors, shewed themselves with guns and weapons, assiu-ed of martyr- dom, burned themselves alive." ^ Now and then, when they saw the forces sent against them to be weak, they tried to escape, and for a time were successful. Thus, for example, they one day forced a commando to retire, having slain the captain, Portnovski; but on that occasion they only fired with the wads, out of terror; but irritation against the authorities took the shape of cutting the dead body of Portnovski to bits.^ We may thus affirm without injustice to the facts "that self- immolation was their last mode of escape. In no other sense was it ever adopted as a dogma than as a way of avoiding per- secution and of escape from the rack, which was always in store for such Old believers as fell into the hands of the Govern- ment." ^
^ Hist, of the Vygovski Old bel. hermitage, By Ivan Philippov, V and VI.
2 ibid. ch. 7.
3 Nation. Memorials, 1863, No. 2, art. by Esipov, p. 607.
90 RUSSIAN DISSENTERS
Peter the Great
In the year 1689 another poHtical revolution took place; Sophia was driven from power and sent into a convent; and her brother, Peter the Great, mounted the throne. He was for some time too occupied with more pressing matters to turn his attention to the Raskol, and they made use of the precious respite accorded them to estabhsh their various settlements, which were at first formed, if not along strict monastic Hnes, at any rate with a show of monastic terminol- ogy.
One of his first actions was to suppress the lingering revolt of the Streltsy. "Rumours of their awful punishment were carried all over Russia and struck terror into the hearts of the people," ^ who regarded their Emperor with horror, and the word Antichrist, whispered by the Raskolniks, was now bruited far and wide. "But Peter annihilated the Streltsy, and the popular risings came to nothing. The power was in the end in his hands . . . After his terrible vengeance was wreaked on the Streltsy, he could do exactly as he pleased." ^ So-caUed "European reforms" were forthwith sprung upon the people, tax-gatherers and press-gangs were everywhere, the peasant labourers were lowered to the condition of serfs. A hundred thousand of the people perished on pubhc works, i.e. in the building of Petersburg, of fortresses, canals; for the Sovereign in his reforms had at heart the strengthening of his own prerog- atives and not the happiness of the people.
"The system of administration he raised was mechanical and arbitrary, centralization was carried in dry hard style into ridiculous details. MultipUcation of provincial bureaucrats, division of his subjects into castes, contempt for Russian popu- lar Ufe with all its traditions and leanings to local pecuharities, — all this served to rouse the hostility of the people for the amelioration of whose fate he did nothing at all." ^ Under Peter the Government steadily pursued its work of centrahza-
1 Raskol Happenings in 18th Century, by H. (G) Esipov, t. 1, p. 8, and t. 2, p. 162. » IMd. 3 Aristov in Fremt/a (Time) 1862, No. 1, p. 77.
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tion, yet the masses "impelled by mediaeval tendencies to separation and setting at naught the new ideas of administra- tion, refused to submit to a scheme of unification, and with considerable resilience strove to maintain the ancient system or, as the documents characteristically put it, to break off." '•
The administrators ''did everything they could to bind the people with eternal bonds, spared no effort to reconstruct society according to an arbitrary plan which lacked all basis in life and reason nor had any roots in popular ideas, feelings or aspirations." ^ A fresh swarm of about 10,000 foreigners from the West, mostly Germans, descended upon Russia, and were concentrated by Peter in Moscow, ''illuminated instructors who made no effort to grasp the deeper popular tendencies and needs of the national spirit, but held the people tight by the bearing-rein of their methods and regarded them as so many country bumpkins." ^ But "in the soul of the people was engrained a deep and powerful bias against royal prerogatives, and a profound distaste for a fiat governmental rule the same for all, an instinct to be free from the strict regime of a single absolute authority, to assert their own will and manage their own affairs. The very idea of a supreme authority, of autoc- racy, which attained full development in the rule of an Emperor had never yet penetrated the entire people." ^ "Seditious" tracts were pubhshed, penned, by the admission of the authors, " because of their sympathy with the people," or "for their advantage and in order to alleviate the weight of taxation." In these it was contended that God made man "in his own image and hkeness, and that it was God's own ordinance that man should be absolute master of himself." * The Russian steam-roller invented by Tartar tyranny and perfected by Peter the Great was never much admired by the Russians themselves.
The Old beUevers led the opposition to the reforms of Peter I, alleging that he "was an agent of all wickedness and of Satan's will, and had raised himself on high above all false gods."
^ Shchapov, Russian Raskol, p. 465.
2 Vremya, 1862, No. 1, art. by Aristov, p. 78.
3 Shchapov, op. cit., p. 471.
* Esipov, op. cit. t. 1, pp. 165, 182.
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He was, they declared, a false Messiah who magnified himself and surrounded himself with glory before all. In 1721 Peter assumed the title of Patriarch, took the name of Father of his country, as the pamphlet 'Kingdom of the Dead' attests against him (p. 115), made himself head of the Russian Church and autocrat; he now had no one on an equality with himself, and appropriated not only the authority of Tsar, but of priest- hood and Godhead. He became absolute shepherd of a head- less church, the adversary of Christ, in a word Antichrist." ^ As Shchapov remarks, the Old beUevers ominously com- plained that Peter the Great ''called himself Emperor and Monarch, that is to say sole ruler and sole authority, thereby assuming the title of God of Russia, as is testified in the pam- phlet 'Peter's Cabinet' in which it was said: "Behold thy God, behold thy God, 0 Russia!" ^
Accordingly the Raskolniks rose against all the statutes and edicts by which Peter set himself to uphold his autocratic rule. They declared the census Hst to be Antichiist's list, and taught the people not to inscribe their names in it. "We," they wrote, "have been instructed by Christ in his law, and we keep his commandment and preserve the holy faith; and therefore we refuse to submit ourselves to such a false Christ and to obey him; never will we inscribe ourselves in his books and share the transgressions of the impious, nay, we will not counsel anyone to do so who desires to be saved." "Verily we see fulfilled the mystery of the Apocalypse; the reign of the primal beast is established among us, and the earth and all that live thereon are made to bow the knee to Satan and say : ' Settle our account, we beg you humbly to grant us pass- ports.' He will answer: 'Out with your poll-tax for the new year, and are there no other arrears to pay up, for you live on my earth?' There you have a deep pit for the destruction of the human race." ^
From the time of Peter the Great the Russian Government
^ Proceedings of the Imperial Society of History and Antiquities, 1863, bk. 1, pp. 53 and 63.
^ Shchapov, Russ. Rask., p. 478.
' Imperial Society of History and Antiquities, 1863, vol. 1, pp. 55, 58, 59.
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spent time and trouble on the compilation of statistics, of which, however, it never made much use. If we bear in mind that the project of a methodical census of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom when it was first mooted late in the XVIIIth Century, provoked angry protests from religious people, and was actually rejected in the House of Lords on the ground that, like the similar experiment of King David, it might call down upon the land the wrath of God, we shall not be surprised at the acute displeasure of the Raskol when Peter the Great imposed a census and a poll-tax on them nearly a century earlier. In 1890 it was still one of the chief griev- ances of the Armenians under Russia's rule, that the Govern- ment obUged them to register their births, deaths and mar- riages. They had suffered no such indignity under Turkish and Persian rule, and it partly explained the saying, then and now common among them, that whereas the Turk only slew their bodies, the Russian slew their souls. We shall have occa- sion, however, to point out later on that the rehgious census prepared under the auspices of the Russian State and Church has no statistical value whatever and was only contrived to deceive and conceal facts. It is noteworthy that the Raskol also, in combating a census under Peter, adduced the warning example of King David's reign.
"The Raskol rebelled against the very structure and organi- zation of the imperial government, beginning with the Senate and the provincial administration. Everywhere the dissidents found fault with aspects of the administration which conflicted with the welfare of the people, and exploited the disorders which broke out in the provinces for strengthening their influence and extending it." ^
Pitirim, bishop of Krutits, Nikon's successor, in his report to Peter I, said of them: "Wherever you find them, instead of being pleased with the good fortune of the Sovereign, they delight in his misfortunes." ^
Such was the attitude of the Old believers to the pbUcy of Peter the Great, and they continued their hatred of his govern-
^ Shchapov, Russ. Rask. p. 515.
^ Imperial Society History and Antiquities, 1860, bk. 4, p. 281.
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ment to that of his successors: ''We behold," they said, ''what a spirit of impiety works and shall work to the end of the world in all holders of power." ^ They remained obstinate, and to this day, says Uzov, the Old beUevers retain this conviction; only a fraction of them under the influence of the reforms of the present regime (1881), have begun to relax the severity with which they judge the Government. Their spokesman, Macarius Ivanovich Stukachev, an adherent of the Theo- dosian sect, in his address to the Tsar Liberator in the Sixties, intimated as much: "In the innovations," he wrote, "of your regime we seem to behold our good old time." ^ In such words we detect the point of view of the Old beUevers in their opposi- tion to the Government and seize the meaning of the ' good old times ' for which they stood.
Tsardom and Antichrist
Almost from the dawn of Christianity the teaching about an Antichrist or counter-Messiah, if not Satan himself, at any rate his heutenant, has furnished enthusiasts with a theme for prophecy and dreary dissertations; and it has been cynically observed that no student can long preoccupy his mind with that most characteristic work of mixed Jewish and Christian piety, the so-called Book of Revelation, without jeopardizing his reason. Never have the Kings of the Gentiles raged furi- ously and devoted themselves to the ever congenial task of violating the essential spirit and precepts of Jesus of Nazareth by setting their subjects to cut one another's throats, without an appeal being made by each side to this bizarre monument. During the recent war French divines found in it a prophecy of German barbarism, and their German counterparts read in it a record of French, Russian and Enghsh impiety. We are not therefore surprised to find that such vaticinations filled a large space in the mind of the Russian dissidents. Their attitude towards Nikon and the Tsar of the time was summed up in the behef that the two men were the instruments, if not the impersonation, of Antichrist.
1 Ibid., 1863, Bk. 1, p. 59.
2 Istina (Truth) 1867, bk. 2.
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The Messiah himself, according to an early tradition, had disclaimed knowledge of his second advent on earth, but was sure that it would on the one hand usher in the end of the world, on the other be preceded by the appearance of Antichrist; and accordingly in the 24th and 25th chapters of the first Gospel we find enumerated from some contemporary apocalyptic document the signs that are to herald the last days. But in every age Christian teachers have claimed a knowledge which was denied to the Founder; and the author or redactor of the Book of Revelation which closes the canon of the New Testament was already acquainted with the exact chronology of Antichrist and knew that Satan was to be bound for a thousand years, whence it was argued that the world would end in A. D. 1000.
But alongside of this behef was current another, equally ancient, that this great event was timed 7000 years from Crea- tion, because one day in the Scriptures symbohzes a thousand years, and as the world took seven days to complete, so it will run for an equal period. Rome, the imperial city, was to endure to the end. When old Rome fell in the fifth century the rehgious imagination found no difficulty in readjusting itself to events, and it was agreed that the prophecy regarded not old but new Rome or Byzance. Presently new Rome fell also into the power of the Turks in 1453, and then it looked as if the visions of the seer were really to be fulfilled, for 5508, the tale of years which according to Christian chronologists had preceded the birth of Jesus added to 1453 made a total of 6961 which was not far from 7000. The full period would mature in 1492.
That year also came and went without any cataclysm; and then in Russia arose a new interpretation of the prophecy, of which few echoes ever reached Western Europe. This was the remarkable theory that in default of old and new Rome, Moscow was the imperial city, was the third Rome of which, as was thought to be foretold by St. Paul in II. Thess. ii, 7, the mission is to be the last refuge of orthodoxy and to hold down the Antichrist. The Russians shared the Hussite behef that by A. D. 1000, if not earUer, the Pope of Rome had become the precursor of Antichrist, and this view is enunciated
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in the so-called Book of Cyril compiled by Zizania. The author of another work, which circulated in XVIIth Century- Russia, the Book of Faith, shewed that in 1439 at the Council of Florence the Western Slavs had apostatized to Rome and therefore to Antichrist, and hinted that the turn of the Great Russians and of Moscow was coming. Chance arranged the year 1666 as that of the final triumph of Nikon's 'reforms.' Now 1000, the date of old Rome's final apostasy, added to 666, the apocalyptic number of the Beast, just made that date. It was inevitable that the Raskol teachers should put two and two together and teach that the prophecy of the Book of Faith was being fulfilled before their eyes. About that they were all agreed.
The only point left doubtful was this: in whom was the Antichrist to be recognized? Who was the Man of Sin? Was it Nikon or the Tsar? or both? It was not difficult to find, among the martyrs of the Raskol, incarnations of Elias and Enoch who according to ancient prophecy were to confute Satan and his emissaries; but neither Nikon nor the Tsar bore the distinguishing marks of the Antichrist, beyond the fact that they were real men of flesh and blood. That much the Antichrist was to be, but then he was also to reign for three and a half years ; his mother, like Christ's, was to be a virgin, and even the traits of his personal appearance were prescribed in old prophecies. In some ancient documents, for example, the picture of St. Paul in the Acts of Thekla was adopted unchanged as that of Antichrist — an indication of a Judaizing source hostile to the Apostle of the Gentiles. An Elder of the Raskol, Abraham, set about to prove that Nikon was Anti- christ, with the aid of passages from St. Cyril of Jerusalem and from Hippolytus' tract on the subject; but his arguments did not please everybody, and Awakum more modestly pretended that Nikon was only the Precursor of Antichrist, for as Christ had a precursor in John the Baptist, so it was necessary for his antitype to have one.
Theodore the deacon broached a third view to the effect that Antichrist was no other than Satan himself, an invisible spirit who issues from the abyss at the end of a thousand years to
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corrupt Rome with heresy and Lithuania with apostasy. In 1666 this serpent entered into his two chosen vessels, the Tsar and Nikon. Thus there came into being a counter Trinity of serpent, beast and lying prophet. This theory of the incar- nation of Antichrist in these two men was a step in the develop- ment of a doctrine which the Bezpopovtsy adopted later on; they broached the view that the entire series of Tsars from 1666 onwards were and are incarnations of the Evil One. Anti- christ to their imagination is rather an ideal of evil, a tendency that makes for Hell rather than Heaven, than a real person. The excellent Ivanovski sets out arduously to overthrow these old world opinions and argues seriously that Antichrist when he appears will be a circumcized Jew of the tribe of Dan, of miraculous birth, etc. in the same spirit as is found in pseudo- Hippolytus, in John of Damascus, and in Andrew of Caesarea's Commentary on the Apocalypse.
The mediaeval Cathars were on rather safer ground when imder stress of Papal persecution they argued that this world is already Hell, so that we need not wait for another existence in order to experience its tortures.