The Church's efforts to police belief and improve practice by institutional reform had little success in the early modern centuries. Its principal anxieties and reform proposals were enunciated at the 1551 Stoglav Church Council and repeated in subsequent church councils in 1620 and the 1650s. One area of concern was the proper representation of the faith: the Stoglav Council spoke out against innovations in icon painting and in the shape ofthe crucifix (preferring the eight-pointed cross). Another was rituaclass="underline" the Council criticized simultaneous reading ofservices to speed them up and ruled on the proper form of certain rituals (the sign of the cross should be done with two fingers; two alleluias, not three, were mandated in a particular prayer). Standardization of liturgical books was a major issue, a problem recognized already in 1518 when a learned monk from Mount Athos, Maxim the Greek (Michael Trivolis), was invited to Moscow to standardize religious texts. His suggestions, in line with contemporary Greek scholarship, were rejected and earned him condemnation as a heretic in 1525 and 1531; he died in confinement in 1556. The Stoglav Church Council did not propose a better path to standardization, but recognized the problem.
Moral behavior was a wide-ranging concern for the 1551 Counciclass="underline" it condemned bishops' officials for corrupt treatment of laymen; castigated priests for poor education, drunkenness, and shoddy performance of liturgy; condemned monasteries and convents for lax discipline and sexual misbehavior by monks and nuns. The council directed particular animus against folk belief: the bishops accused both clergy and laity of mixing folk superstition with Christian belief and practice; they condemned sexual license and unseemly dancing and singing by minstrels at holy- day celebrations that often coincided with winter and summer solstice or at other moments in the agricultural or seasonal calendar. Nevertheless, the Stoglav Council proposed few concrete measures—it advocated not a school system (a proposal put forth already in the 1490s by the learned Novgorod Archbishop Gennadii), but simply that master teachers should teach priests; it proposed supervisors to rein in corrupt diocesan tithe collectors, but this idea went nowhere. It mandated the creation of priest supervisors to improve the moral and spiritual performance of parish priests; this latter proposal was not widely implemented until the Church Council of 1675 revived it, and even then the supervisors did not provide rigorous oversight.
The seventeenth-century Church made some progress on the Stoglav's reform programs. Various stimuli towards reform came together in the first half of the century: Greek churchmen brought books and ideas to Russia with the metropolitan's elevation to patriarch in 1589; the Time of Troubles brought Russian elites in close contact with Polish Catholics, particularly in the person of Fedor Nikitich Romanov, father to Tsar Michael Romanov. A powerful boyar rival of Boris Godunov, he had been forcibly tonsured in 1601 and was held in Polish captivity from 1610; when he returned to Moscow in 1619, he was immediately made patriarch and served as de facto co-ruler with his young son (born 1596) until his death in 1633. As Patriarch Filaret, Fedor Romanov was not only a shrewd secular politician, but also a vigorous proponent of the Church's economic power and political autonomies. At this same time, influence was flooding to Muscovy from the reformed Ukrainian Orthodox Church. A final new influence were the visits, throughout the seventeenth century, of patriarchs and monks of the worldwide Orthodox diaspora, seeking alms.
All these forces combined for tremendous spiritual and institutional ferment in the Russian Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century. From about 1640 it was focused in the Kremlin in a group oflearned churchmen who came to be called (by modern historians) "Zealots of Piety." Their concerns fell into two areas, epitomized roughly by two groups, although there was much overlap. The first concern, reminiscent of the Stoglav fathers, was the moral and spiritual quality of lay religious life; this theme was promoted by learned parish priests and dynamic preachers (Avvakum, Ivan Neronov, Daniil, Loggin). They advocated changes in the liturgy, such as the introduction of sermons to instruct the faithful and the abolition ofpractices used to shorten lengthy services, such as simultaneous reading by multiple priests that rendered a service incomprehensible. On sermons they were successful in principle, but it took almost two centuries for sermonizing to become regular practice by parish priests. Like the Stoglav Council, these churchmen railed against folk belief and pagan practices, minstrels, drinking, tobacco, and other moral offenses; in this they won Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich's support, expressed in state decrees against minstrels and moral offenses in the 1640s.
While one group was pursuing moral reform, a second, represented primarily by Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, his close associate F. M. Rtishchev, his confessor Stefan Vonifat'ev, and the cosmopolitan metropolitan of Novgorod Nikon, focused on preparing Russian Orthodoxy to take its rightful place of leadership over eastern Christianity (in 1685 the Kyiv metropolitanate was made subordinate to Moscow, not Constantinople). Associated with a newly sanctioned printing press (Pechatnyi dvor), they returned to a key problem identified by the 1551 Church Counciclass="underline" standardizing liturgical books so that Slavic-speaking Orthodox would worship with the same words and rituals. They embarked on the difficult task of identifying authentic texts in a tradition that had been developing for centuries. They were most influenced by Greek advisors and patriarchs, who pressed upon them the service books of the Greek diaspora, often printed in Venice and influenced by post-Tridentine Catholicism. Guided by such sources, on issues of ritual and text Moscow's editors often contradicted the 1551 Church Council, whose rulings the Church repudiated in the 1660s.
In 1652 Metropolitan Nikon was made patriarch, and with his new position he pushed forcefully ahead to reform texts. In 1653 he issued a revised canon law book, Nomokanon; in the next few years a raft of reformed books appeared—a Psaltyr, a book of Hours, New Testament, Acts of the Apostles, and other service books. They, and myriad decrees, contained changes in wording and ritual that subtly but substantively changed Orthodox practice, if not belief. They included a three-fingered sign of the cross, a Greek four-pointed crucifix (in place of the traditional eight-pointed shape), a different number of prostrations and bows in Lenten services, a new transliteration of the name of Jesus, and small but significant changes in the Nicene Creed. Abrasive and ambitious, Nikon sent the new books to all parishes, cathedrals, and monasteries with orders to adopt them or face (by a decree of 1656) charges of heresy. He made no effort to prepare the ground or explain to far-flung monastic and parish communities the rationale for the changes.
In these reforms the Orthodox Church was following Russian tradition, fulfilling pastoral goals it had set itself in church councils since 1551. But it was also paralleling self-disciplining processes occurring across Catholic and Protestant Europe since the sixteenth century, processes of which some of these reformers were aware. In many ways, Nikon's new books and the Church's interventions into lay moral life constitute a kind of confessionalization like that being done by Protestant sects and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Confessionalization involved an institutional Church's effort to define its creed in vernacular catechisms and bibles, to instruct the faithful in belief and ritual practice, and to discipline church members in moral behavior and adherence to the creed. In Russia, however, this disciplining process was less successful than that of Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist Churches in Europe because it lacked resources. Nikon's new books were disseminated by fiat, but little was done to bring the laity on board. Key elements of European confessionalization were not even tried: founding seminaries, improving clerical education, creating a parish school system, publishing vernacular pietistic works, and expanding literacy for the laity. An important first step would have been to create a denser parish network, but a 1680s effort to create smaller dioceses was rebuffed by bishops jealous of their power. Even so, in Russia many in the laity rebelled at these reforms, precisely because they changed what they considered the most integral part of the faith, namely ritual.