The councils of 1666-7 had far-reaching implications for the future of the Russian Church. They made clear that Tsar Alexis and his advisers - the secular government and its ecclesiastical allies - had decisive power over the Church. Thereafter any religious dissenters understood correctly that the state was also their enemy. Moreover, for better or worse, in exercising its leadership of ecumenical Orthodoxy, Alexis's government chose to make scholars from Ukraine and the Greek world and their local disciples the intellectual leaders of the Russian Church.
The decisions of 1666-7 appeared to have restored peace and uniformity to the Russian Church. Reality soon proved to be far more complicated. Even in disgrace and prison, Nikon retained the allegiance ofmany ofthe faithful who revered him as the true patriarch and turned to him for spiritual counsel. He remained intransigent in his belief that the state - the agent of the Antichrist - had trampled on the rights of the Church. Nevertheless, in 1681, Alexis's son, Fedor, gave him permission to return to his beloved New Jerusalem although he died before reaching it.
The enforcement of the reformed liturgy seemed to proceed successfully. As Michels has shown, the Printing Office quickly sold each printing of the new service books and, by 1700, the new liturgical texts had spread to even the most remote parts of the realm.[318] Once again, however, matters were not so simple.
The determined defenders of traditional Russian practices - the Old Believers - understood full well that, after 1667, there could be no compromise with the official Church or the state. Avvakum and his fellow prisoners smuggled virulent attacks on the new order to small groups of supporters in Moscow and elsewhere. Their execution at the stake in 1681 only added the authority of martyrdom to their teachings. Ironically, they agreed with Nikon, their old enemy, that the reign of the Antichrist, precursor of the End Time, had begun. During the 1670s, persecution and intimidation - or widespread indifference to the liturgical reforms, as Michels argues - limited the number of open adherents of the Old Belief.
Yet the decisions of 1666-7 had brought not peace but the sword. Outbursts of violent resistance to the state and the Church became a regular feature of the Russian landscape in the last decades of the seventeenth century. Local grievances fuelled each uprising: opposition to the reformed Church and its new liturgy also played a prominent part in the rebels' demands. In the most dramatic instance, the Solovetskii monastery, long a law unto itself, rebelled against the imposition of the new liturgy and held out against besieging government troops from 1668 until 1676. Even though its surviving defenders were massacred, its example strengthened the determination of other opponents of the new order in state and Church. For example, Old Belief was a significant element in the resistance of the Don cossacks to Moscow's administrative control.
The bloody uprising in Moscow in 1682, in which Old Believers led by Nikita Dobrynin joined forces with the mutinous garrison, made the explosive mixture of political and religious opposition unmistakably clear. When Sophia emerged from the crisis as regent for her two brothers, her government issued the decree of December 1684 which mandated death at the stake for all unrepentant Old Believers and severe penalties for anyone who sheltered them. Her government sent troops to enforce the law even in the most remote areas of the country.[319]
The government's intransigence elicited equally militant responses. Scattered groups of religious radicals had already demonstrated the ultimate form of protest against the powers of this world - suicide by fire. Following their lead, in the 1680s and 1690s, groups of militants seized isolated monasteries and villages - notoriously the Paleostrovskii monastery in 1687 and 1689 and Pudozh in 1693 - and, when government forces attacked them, burned themselves alive rather than surrender. These episodes of mass suicide which combined social banditry and religious fanaticism profoundly shocked the government, the Church and more moderate Old Believers, one of whom, Evfrosin, in 1691 wrote a denunciation of the practice as a violation of the traditional Christian prohibition of suicide.[320]
The second response of the opponents of the reformed Church was less spectacular but ultimately more successful. Many fled to remote corners of the realm or beyond the borders of the empire, founded unofficial communities, and began to adapt Orthodox liturgical observances to their new circumstances. Some fugitive groups soon fell victim to governmental persecution; others, such as the Vyg community, managed to survive and became the principal centres of the Old Belief in the first decades of the eighteenth century.
The official Church after 1667
In the last years of the century, Patriarch Ioakim (1674-90) set the agendas for the official Church. By background a member of the service nobility, he proved to be a strong-willed leader who, like Nikon, saw the patriarch as the personification of the Church. At the same time, he understood the necessity of collaboration with the governments that followed one another in rapid succession during his tenure and recognised the practical limitations of his position. For example, when Tsar Fedor insisted on pardoning Nikon, he acquiesced in spite of grave personal misgivings. In the crises of 1682 and 1689, he supported the claims of Peter I to the throne.
Within the ecclesiastical administration, he strove for a disciplined, clearly organised hierarchy free from the routine interference of the state. Following the recommendation ofthe councils of 1666-7 and the decision of a local council in 1675, Ioakim abolished the Monastyrskii prikaz in 1677 and replaced it with a system under which members of the clergy conducted trials of churchmen and supervised the administration of Church lands. The elaborate plan of Tsar Fedor's government to address the enormous size of Russian dioceses achieved very limited success, however, thanks to the resistance of the episcopate, led by Ioakim, who feared a system in which bishops would report to archbishops and not directly to the patriarch. In the end, the Church created eleven new dioceses by dividing the territory of existing jurisdictions and, in 1682, succeeded in filling only four.
Ioakim's greatest achievement, however, may well be the agreement, concluded with the support of Hetman Samoilovych in 1686, that the new Metropolitan of Kiev, Gedeon, would recognise the ultimate jurisdiction of the Patriarch ofMoscow, not of Constantinople as previously. Since then, the fates of the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine and Russia have been inextricably linked, with profound consequences for both.[321]
Ioakim's understanding of the Church required that the hierarchy, under the patriarch's leadership, control devotional life and ecclesiastical culture. In dealing with popular religion, as part of his crusade against the Old Believers and other dissidents, Ioakim and his supporters sponsored miracle cults that gave divine sanction to the three-finger sign of the cross, but suppressed unofficial and unverifiable saints' cults, notably the veneration of Anna of Kashin. He also believed that, since an embattled Church required educated priests, it was vital to found a theological academy in Moscow. The first two attempts, however, collapsed because of the theological and political controversies between the so-called Latinophile and Grecophile parties within the ecclesiastical elite - both of which, in reality, adapted international Latin scholarship to Orthodox uses.
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Robert O. Crummey
321
K. V Kharlampovich,