5
THE GREAT SCHISM
Sophia was regent, and her regency began with an immediate test of her talent for rule. The Streltsy, who had brought her to power, now swaggered arrogantly through Moscow, assuming that any demand they might make would be instantly granted. The schismatic members of the Orthodox Church, or Old Believers, assumed that the triumph of the Streltsy over the government would bring a return to the old religion, a revival of the traditional Russian ritual and liturgy which had been condemned two decades before by the church establishment and suppressed by the power of the state. Sophia, no less than her father, Alexis, and her brother, Fedor, regarded the Old Believers as heretics and rebels. Yet, because many of the Streltsy—including their new commander, Prince Ivan Khovansky—were fervent Old Believers, it seemed likely that these two forces would combine to press their will on the fledgling regime.
Sophia handled the situation with courage and skill. She received the leaders of the Old Believers in the banqueting hall of the Kremlin palace and from her throne argued and shouted them into silence before dismissing them. Then, calling the Streltsy into her presence in detachments of a hundred at a time, she bribed them with money, with promises and with wine and beer which she herself served them from a silver tray. With these blandishments, she weaned the soldiers away from their aggressive support of the schismatic clergy, and once the Streltsy were pacified, Sophia ordered the leaders of the Old Believers seized. One was executed and the others dispersed into exile. Within nine weeks, Prince Khovansky was arrested, charged with insubordination and his head lay on the block.
This time Sophia had triumphed, but the struggle between the Old Believers and the established powers in church and state was not concluded; it persisted not only through her regency and the reign of Peter, but until the end of the imperial dynasty. It was rooted in the deepest religious feelings of the people, and is known in the history of the church and of Russia as the Great Schism.
Christianity, if practiced in the ideal, seems especially suited to the Russian character. Russians are preeminently a pious, compassionate and humble people, accepting faith as more powerful than logic and believing that life is controlled by superhuman forces, be they spiritual, autocratic or even occult. Russians feel far less need than most pragmatic Westerners to inquire why things happen, or how they can be made to happen (or not to happen) again. Disasters occur and they accept; orders are issued and they obey. This is something other than brute docility. It stems rather from a sense of the natural rhythms of life. Russians are contemplative, mystical and visionary. From their observations and meditations, they have produced an understanding of suffering and death which gives a meaning to life not unlike that affirmed by Christ.
In Peter’s time, the Russian believer exhibited a piety of behavior as complicated and rigorous as his piety of belief was simple and profound. His calendar was filled with saints’ days to be observed, and with innumerable rites and fasts. He worshipped with endless signs of the cross and genuflections before altars in church and before icons which he hung in a corner of his house. Before sleeping with a woman, a man would remove the cruciflx around her neck and cover all the icons in the room. Even in winter, a married couple who made love would not attend church before taking a bath. Thieves on the point of theft bowed to icons and asked forgiveness and protection. There could be no oversight or error on these matters, for what was at stake was far more important than anything that could happen on earth. Punctiliousness in religious observance guaranteed eternal life.
During two centuries of Mongol domination, the church became the nucleus of Russian life and culture. A vigorous religious life flourished in the towns and villages, and numerous monasteries were founded, especially in the remote forests of the north. None of these efforts was impeded by the Mongol khans, who traditionally cared little about the religious practices of their vassal states as long as the required taxes and tribute continued to flow to the Golden Horde. In 1589, the first patriarch of Moscow was created, signaling the final emancipation from the primacy of Constantinople.
Moscow and Russia had achieved independence—and isolation. Confronted on the north by Lutheran Sweden, on the west by Catholic Poland and on the south by the Islamic Turks and Tatars, the Russian church adopted a defensive stance of xenophobic conservatism. All change became abhorrent, and huge energies were devoted to the exclusion of foreign influences and heretical thoughts. As Western Europe moved through the Reformation and the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, Russia and her church remained pure—petrified in their medieval past.
By the middle of the seventeenth century—twenty years before the birth of Peter—the weight and strain of this cultural backwardness began to tell on Russian society. Despite the objections of the church, foreigners were coming to Russia, bringing new techniques and ideas in war, commerce, engineering and science. Inevitably, other principles and concepts crept in with them. The Russian church, suspicious and frightened, reacted with such extreme hostility that wary foreigners were forced to seek the protection of the tsar. Yet, the intellectual ferment continued to bubble. It was not long before Russians themselves, including some within the church, began to look with doubtful eyes on their orthodoxy. Questions were raised: The church challenged the church, and the church challenged the tsar. Separately, each of these struggles was a disaster for the church; together, they led to a catastrophe—the Great Schism—from which the Russian Orthodox Church would never recover.
In personal terms, these struggles took the form of a dramatic three-way confrontation among the Tsar Alexis and two extraordinary churchmen, the overbearing, iron-willed Patriarch Nikon and the fanatical, fundamentalist Archpriest Avvakum. Ironically, Tsar Alexis was the most pious of all the tsars; he surrendered more power to a man of the church—Nikon—than any tsar before or since. Yet, before the end of his reign the Russian church was fatally divided and weakened and Nikon was draped with chains in a cold stone cell. Even more ironic was the struggle between Nikon and Avvakum. Both were men of simple origins from the forests of northern Russia. Both rose quickly in the church, came to Moscow in the 1640’s and became friends. Both saw as the great goal of their lives the purification of the Russian church. Disagreeing violently as to what constituted purity, each passionately convinced that he alone was correct, the two great antagonists flailed and thundered at each other like mighty prophets. And then, almost simultaneously, both fell before the reasserted power of the state. In exile, each still believed himself the dedicated servant of Christ, had visions and worked miraculous cures. Death found one at the stake and the other by the side of a lonely road.
Nikon was the tall, rough-hewn son of a Russian peasant from the trans-Volga region of the northeast. Originally ordained a secular priest of the “white” clergy, he had married, but later he separated from his wife and became a monk. Shortly after arriving in Moscow as archimandrite or abbot of the New Monastery of the Savior, the six-feet-five-inch monk was introduced to the youthful Tsar Alexis. Awed by Nikon’s spiritual intensity as well as his physical presence, Alexis began to meet him regularly every Friday. In 1649, Nikon became Metropolitan of Novgorod, one of the most ancient and powerful sees of Russia. Then, in 1652, when the incumbent Patriarch died, Alexis asked Nikon to accept the patriarchal throne.
Nikon did not accept until the twenty-three-year-old Tsar fell on his knees and begged him tearfully. Nikon agreed on two conditions: He demanded that Alexis follow his leadership “as your first shepherd and father in all that I shall teach on dogma, discipline and custom.” And he asked the Tsar’s support in all major attempts to reform the Russian Orthodox Church. Alexis swore, and Nikon took the throne determined on a broad program of reform. He intended to rid the clergy of drunkenness and other vices, establish church supremacy over the state and then, at the head of this pure and powerful Russian church, assert its preeminence over the entire Orthodox world. His initial move was to attempt to change the liturgy and ritual by which millions of Russian people worshipped daily, purging all sacred books and printed liturgies of the many deviations, alterations and simple errors that had crept into them over centuries of use, and making them consistent with scholarly Greek doctrine. The old, uncorrected books were to be destroyed.
Changing the ritual and liturgy provoked a storm of controversy. Devout Russians considered crucial such matters as how many hallelujahs were to be shouted at various points in the service, how many consecrated loaves were to be at the offertory or on the altar, the spelling of Jesus’ name (from Isus to Iisus) and, most notably, whether, in making the sign of the cross, one extended the newly decreed three fingers (symbolizing the Trinity) or the traditional two fingers (symbolizing the dual nature of Christ). If one was convinced that the world was only a preparation for paradise or the inferno, and that personal salvation depended on the punctilious observance of church ritual, then crossing oneself with two fingers instead of three could mean the difference between spending eternity in heaven or in hellfire. Besides, the fundamentalist clergy argued, why accept the practices and wording of the Greek church over the Russian? Since Moscow had succeeded Constantinople as the Third Rome and Russian Orthodoxy had become the true faith, why bow to the Greeks in matters of ritual, dogma or anything else?
In 1655, Nikon sought and received support from a source outside Russia. He invited Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, to come to Moscow, and the Syrian churchman made the long journey, bringing with him his son and secretary, Paul of Aleppo. Paul kept a diary of the journey, and from it we have many firsthand views of Nikon and Alexis.* They arrived in January 1655 and were greeted by the regal figure of the Russian Patriarch, Nikon, “robed in a green velvet mandya embroidered with figures in red velvet, with cherubim in the center in gold and pearls. On his head was a white latia of damask, surmounted with a gold arch bearing a cross of jewels and pearls. Above his eyes were cherubim in pearls; the edges of the latia were laced with gold and set with pearls.”
From the beginning, the travelers were as much impressed by the piety and deferential humility of the young Tsar as by the commanding magnificence of the Russian Patriarch. On his own, Alexis made “a habit of attending on foot the festivals of the principal saints in their own churches, abstaining from the use of his carriage. From the beginning of the mass to the end, he stands with his head uncovered, bowing continually, striking his forehead on the ground in weeping and lamentation before the saint’s icon; and this in the presence of the whole assembly.” On one occasion, Alexis accompanied Macarius on a visit to a monastery thirty miles from Moscow, and there “the Emperor took our master [Macarius] by the arm and led him to the temporary hospital that he might bless and pray over the paralyzed and sick. On entering the place, some of us were unable to remain there for the disagreeable, putrid smell, nor could we endure to look upon the afflicted inmates. But the Emperor’s only thought was his wish that our master should pray over and bless them. And as the Patriarch blessed each, the Emperor followed him, and kissed the patient’s head, mouth and hands, from the first to the last. Wonderful indeed appear to us such holiness and humility while we thought of nothing but escaping from the place.”
On the matter of changing the ritual and liturgy which had so stirred up the Russian church, Macarius stood firmly behind Nikon. At a church synod summoned by Nikon in the fifth week of Lent 1655, Nikon pointed out the errors to his fellow Russian churchmen and repeatedly called upon Macarius to confirm his judgment. Macarius invariably sided with Nikon, and the Russian clergy, whether convinced or not in their hearts, publicly were forced to agree.
Like other lordly monarchs—for such he had become—Nikon was a great builder. As Metropolitan of Novgorod, he founded convents and rebuilt monasteries throughout his vast northern see. In Moscow, using tiles and stones given him by the Tsar, he constructed a magnificent new patriarchal palace inside the Kremlin. It had seven halls, broad balconies, great windows, comfortable apartments, three private chapels and a rich library of books in Russian, Slavonic, Polish and other languages. In one of these halls, Nikon dined on a raised platform while the other clergy were served at lower tables, exactly as, not far away, the Tsar was dining surrounded by his boyars.
Nikon’s greatest architectural monument was his huge Monastery of the Resurrection, known as “The New Jerusalem,” constructed on the Istra River thirty miles west of Moscow. The Patriarch meant the parallels to be exact: the monastery was erected on the “Hill of Golgotha,” the stretch of river nearby was renamed the Jordan and the central cathedral of the monastery was modeled after the Church of the Resurrection which houses the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem itself. On the cathedral, with its dome 187 feet high, its twenty-seven chapels, its bell tower, its high brick walls, gilded gates and dozens of other buildings, Nikon spared no expense, proclaiming in architecture what he was also proclaiming in other ways: that Moscow was the true site of the New Jerusalem.
Nikon was a stern enforcer of discipline on both laity and clergy. Attempting to regulate the daily life of the common people, he banned cursing, card playing, sexual promiscuity and even drinking. Further, he insisted that every faithful Russian spend four hours a day in church. Against the erring clergy, he was relentless. Paul of Aleppo reported: “Nikon’s janissaries are perpetually going the rounds of the city, and whenever they find any priest or monk in a state of intoxication, he is taken to prison. We saw his prison full of them in the most wretched condition, galled with heavy chains and with logs of wood on their necks and legs. When any of the higher clergy or a superior of a monastery has committed a crime, he is sentenced to irons and condemned to sift flour for the bakehouse day and night until he has completed his sentence. Whereas formerly the Siberian convents were empty, this Patriarch has filled them with the heads of monasteries and higher clergy and with dissolute and wretched monks. Lately, the Patriarch has gone so far as to deprive the High Steward of the Supreme Convent of Troitsky of his great dignity, although he ranked as the third dignitary of the kingdom after the Emperor and the Patriarch. He has sentenced him to be a corn grinder in the convent of Sievsk for the crime of taking bribes from the rich. By his severities, Patriarch Nikon makes all fear him and his word prevails.”
For six years, Nikon acted as virtual ruler of Russia. He not only shared with the Tsar the title of “Great Sovereign,” but he often exercised purely political power over temporal affairs. When Alexis left Moscow to campaign in Poland, he left Nikon behind as regent, ordering that “no affair great or small should be determined without his advice.” Given this authority, Nikon did everything possible to exalt the supremacy of the church at the expense of the state. Within the Kremlin, he behaved more regally than the Tsar; not only churchmen and commoners but the great nobles of Russia came beneath his sway.
Paul of Aleppo described Nikon’s imperious treatment of Alexis’ ministers of state: “We observed that, when the council met in the council chamber, and when the Patriarch’s bell rang for them to come to his palace, those officials who were too late were made to wait outside his door in the excessive cold until he should order them to be admitted. When they were allowed to enter, Patriarch Nikon would turn to the icons while all the state officers bowed before him to the ground, bareheaded. They remained uncovered until he left the hall. To each he gave his decision on every affair, commanding them how to act.” The truth, Paul concluded, was that “the grandees of the Empire do not entertain much dread of the Tsar; they rather fear the Patriarch and by many more degrees.”
For a while, Nikon ruled serenely and it began to seem that the exercise of power gave him the power itself. But this assumption had a fatal weakness: True power still rested with the Tsar. As long as the Patriarch retained the Tsar’s devotion and support, no one could stand against him. But his enemies continued to accumulate, like the slow piling up of an avalanche, and they worked to stir up the Tsar’s jealousy and distrust.
In time, signs of friction between Nikon and Alexis became more numerous. Even as Macarius and Paul were leaving Moscow to return to Antioch, they were overtaken by a royal courier summoning Macarius to return. On the road back, they met a group of Greek merchants who reported that on Good Friday the Tsar and the Patriarch had had a public argument in church on a point of ceremony. Alexis angrily called the Patriarch a “stupid clown,” whereupon Nikon retorted, “I am your spiritual father. Why then do you revile me?” Alexis shot back, “It is not you who are my father but the holy Patriarch of Antioch, and I will send to bring him back.” Macarius returned to Moscow and managed to close the breach temporarily.
By the summer of 1658, however, Nikon’s position had been severely weakened. When the Tsar began to ignore him, Nikon attempted to force Alexis’ hand. Following a service in the Assumption Cathedral, he dressed as a simple monk, left Moscow and retired to the New Jerusalem Monastery, asserting that he would not return until the Tsar reaffirmed confidence in him. But he had miscalculated. The Tsar, now a mature twenty-nine, was not unhappy to be rid of the imperious Patriarch. Not only did he let the surprised Nikon wait in his monastery for two years, but then he called a synod of churchmen to accuse the Patriarch of having “of his own will abandoned the most exalted patriarchal throne of Great Russia and so having abandoned his flock and thus having caused confusion and interminable contention.” In October 1660, this synod declared that “by his conduct the Patriarch had absolutely abdicated and thereby ceased to be Patriarch.” Nikon rejected the synod’s decision, sprinkling his rebuttal with abundant references to the Holy Scriptures. Alexis sent both the accusations and Nikon’s replies to the four Orthodox Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, pleading with them to come to Moscow “to review and confirm the case of the ex-Patriarch Nikon, who had ill-administered the stewardship of the patriarchal power.” Two of the Patriarchs, Pasius of Alexandria and Macarius of Antioch, agreed to come, although they did not arrive until 1666. In December of that year, the trial of Nikon was convened with the two foreign Patriarchs presiding over a synod of thirteen metropolitans, nine archbishops, five bishops and thirty-two archimandrites.
The trial was held in a hall of the new patriarchal palace which Nikon had built in the Kremlin. Nikon was charged with exalting the church above the state, illegally deposing bishops and “having left the church to nine years of widowhood caused by his disorderly departure from his chair.” Nikon defended himself by arguing that his office was clearly superior to that of the temporal ruler: “Has thou not learned that the highest authority of the priesthood is not received from kings and tsars, but contrariwise it is by the priesthood that rulers are anointed? Therefore it is abundantly plain that the priesthood is a very much greater thing than royalty. For this reason, manifestly, the tsar must be less than the bishop and owe him obedience.” The synod, however, rejected this view and reasserted the traditional balance of church-state power: the tsar was supreme over all his subjects, clergy and patriarch included, except in matters of church doctrine. At the same time, the synod confirmed and sustained Nikon’s changes in the Russian ritual and liturgy.
Nikon himself was condemned to exile. Until the last days of his life, he lived as a monk in a remote monastery, in a tiny cell at the top of a winding staircase so narrow that a single man could scarcely pass. His bed was a square of granite covered with a blanket of cut rushes. In mortification, he wore a heavy iron plate on his chest and chains attached to his arms and legs.
In time, Alexis’ anger faded. He did not overturn the decision of the synod, but he wrote to Nikon to ask his blessing, sent gifts of food and, when Peter was born, a sable coat in the name of his new son. Nikon’s final years were spent as a healer; reportedly, he achieved 132 miraculous cures within one three-year period. On Alexis’ death, young Tsar Fedor tried to befriend Nikon. When, in 1681, it was reported that the aging monk was dying, Fedor granted him a partial pardon and freed him to return to his New Jerusalem Monastery. Nikon died peacefully on the road home in August 1681. Afterward, Fedor obtained from the four Eastern patriarchs letters of posthumous rehabilitation, and in death Nikon regained the title of patriarch.
Nikon’s legacy was the opposite of that he had intended. Never again would a patriarch wield such power; thereafter the Russian church would be clearly subordinate to the state. Nikon’s successor, the new Patriarch Joachim, well understood his designated role when he addressed the Tsar saying: “Sovereign, I know neither the old nor the new faith, but whatever the Sovereign orders, I am prepared to follow and obey in all respects.”
Nikon had been deposed, but the religious upheaval he brought to Russia was only beginning. The same synod which condemned the Patriarch for attempting to raise church power over royal power had also endorsed the revisions in liturgy and ritual which Nikon had sponsored. Throughout Russia, the lower clergy and the common people cried out in anguish at this decision. People who cherished the old Russian practices of their fathers, who had been taught that theirs was the only true, uncontaminated faith, refused to accept the changes. For them, the old forms were the key to salvation; any suffering on earth was preferable to damnation of their eternal souls. These new changes in their services in church were the work of foreigners. Had not Nikon himself admitted, even proclaimed, “I am Russian, the son of a Russian, but my faith and religion are Greek”? The foreigners were bringing the Devil’s works to Russia: tobacco (“bewitched grass”), representational art and instrumental music.* Now, bolder and more wicked than ever, the foreigners were trying to subvert the Russian church from within. It was said that Nikon’s New Jerusalem Monastery was filled with Moslems, Catholics and Jews busily rewriting the sacred Russian books. It was even said that Nikon (some said it was Alexis) was the Antichrist whose reign presaged the end of the world. In essence, the religion these Russians wanted was that preached by an earlier fundamentalist priest: “Thou simple, ignorant and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naïve gospel wherein eternal life is found.” Now under attack, devout Russian believers could only cry out, “Give us back our Christ!”
The result was that Nikon’s attempt to reform the church produced—even after Nikon himself was gone—a full-scale religious rebellion. Thousands of people who refused to accept the reforms became known as Old Believers or Schismatics. Because the state was supporting the church reforms, revolt against the church widened into revolt against the state, and the Old Believers refused to obey either authority. Neither persuasion by the church nor repression by the government could move them.
To escape the rule of the Antichrist and the persecution of the state, whole villages of Old Believers fled to the Volga, the Don, the shores of the White Sea and beyond the Urals. Here, deep in the forest or on remote riverbanks, they formed new settlements, enduring the hardships of pioneers to build their communities. Some did not flee far enough. When the soldiers followed, the Old Believers declared themselves ready to be engulfed in purifying flames rather than renounce the ritual and liturgy of their fathers. Children were heard saying, “We shall be burned at the stake. In the next world, we shall have little red boots and shirts embroidered with golden thread. They will serve us with as much honey, nuts and apples as we want. We will not bow down to the Antichrist.” Some communities, tired of waiting, crowded together—men, women and children—into their wooden churches, barricaded the doors and, singing the old liturgies, burned the buildings down over their own heads. In the far north, the monks of the powerful Solovetsky Monastery won over the garrison of soldiers to fight for the Old Beliefs (in part by stressing the Nikonian ban on drink). Together, monks and soldiers endured an eight-year siege, repelling all the might that the Moscow government could send against them.
The most commanding, incandescent figure among the Old Believers was the Archpriest Avvakum. At once heroic, passionate and fanatical, he possessed a physical courage to match and sustain his puritanical faith. He wrote in his autobiography, “A woman came to confess to me, burdened with many sins, guilty of fornication and of all the sins of the flesh, and, weeping, she began to acquaint me with them all, leaving nothing out, standing before the Gospels. And I, thrice accursed, fell sick myself. I inwardly burned with a lecherous fire, and that hour was bitter to me. I lit three candles and fixed them to the lectern and placed my right hand in the flame, and held it there till the evil passion was burned out, and when I had dismissed the young woman and laid away my vestments, I prayed and went to my house, grievously humbled in spirit.”
Avvakum was the most vivid writer and preacher of his day—when he preached in Moscow, people flocked to hear his eloquence—and, among the leading clergymen, the one most outraged by Nikon’s reforms. Bitterly, he condemned all change and any compromise, and denounced Nikon as a heretic and tool of Satan. Raging against such changes as the realistic portrayal of the Holy Family in newly made icons, he thundered, “They paint the image of Immanuel the Savior with plump face, red lips, dimpled fingers and large fat legs, and altogether make him look like a German, fat-bellied, corpulent, omitting only to paint the sword at his side. And all this was invented by the dirty cur Nikon.”
In 1653, Nikon banished his erstwhile friend Avvakum to Tobolsk in Siberia. Nine years later, with the Patriarch himself in disgrace, Avvakum’s powerful friends in Moscow persuaded the Tsar to recall the priest and establish him once again in a Kremlin church. For a while, Alexis was a frequent and respectful member of Avvakum’s audience, even referring to the priest as an “Angel of God.” But Avvakum’s stubborn fundamentalism kept intruding. Defiantly, he announced that newborn babies knew more about God than all the scholars of the Greek church, and declared that, in order to be saved, all who had accepted the heretical Nikonian reforms must be rebaptized. These outbursts led to a second banishment, this time to far-off Pustozersk on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. From this remote spot, Avvakum managed to remain the leader of the Old Believers. Unable to preach, he wrote eloquently to his followers, urging them to preserve the old faith, not to compromise, to defy their persecutors and to accept suffering and martyrdom gladly in imitation of Christ. “Burning your body,” he said, “you commend your soul to God. Run and jump into the flames. Say, ‘Here is my body, Devil. Take and eat it; my soul you cannot take.’ ”
Avvakum’s final act of defiance assured his fiery destiny. From exile, he wrote to young Tsar Fedor declaring that Christ had appeared to him in a vision and revealed that Fedor’s dead father, Tsar Alexis, was in hell, suffering torments because of his approval of Nikonian reforms. Fedor’s response was to condemn Avvakum to be burned alive. In April 1682, Avvakum achieved his long-desired martyrdom, bound to a stake in the marketplace of Pustozersk. Crossing himself a last time with two fingers, he shouted joyfully to the crowd, “There is terror in the stake until thou art bound to it, but, once there, embrace it and all will be forgotten. Thou wilt behold Christ before the heat has laid hold upon thee, and thy soul, released from the dungeon of the body, will fly up to heaven like a happy little bird.”
Across Russia, the example of Avvakum’s death inspired thousands of his followers. During a six-year period, from 1684 to 1690, 20,000 Old Believers voluntarily followed their leader into the flames, preferring martyrdom to accepting the religion of the Antichrist. Sophia’s government seemed to fit this image as well as that of Alexis or Fedor; indeed, she was even harsher on Schismatics than her father or her brother had been. Provincial governors were instructed to provide whatever troops were necessary to help the provincial metropolitan enforce the established religion. Anyone failing to attend church was questioned, and those suspected of heresy were tortured. Those who gave shelter to Schismatics suffered loss of all their property and exile. Yet, despite torture, exile and the stake, the Old Beliefs continued strong.
Not all the Old Believers submitted to persecution or cremated themselves. Those who had fled to refuges in the northern forests organized life there along new lines, not unlike the Protestant religious dissenters who in this same period were leaving Europe to found religious communities in New England. Keeping to themselves, the Old Believers established farming and fishing communities and laid the foundations of a future prosperity. A generation later, in Peter’s time, the Old Believers were already recognized as sober, industrious workers. Peter, appreciating these qualities, told his officials, “Leave them alone.”
In the long run, it was the established church and therefore Russia itself which suffered most from the Great Schism. The reforms which Nikon had hoped would purify the church and prepare it for leadership of the Orthodox world had shattered it instead. The two antagonists, Nikon and Avvakum, and the two factions, the reformers and the Old Believers, fought each other to exhaustion, draining the energy of the church, alienating its most zealous members and leaving it permanently subordinate to the temporal power. When Peter arrived, he would look upon the church in much the same light Nikon had: as a disorganized, lethargic body whose corruption, ignorance and superstition must be vigorously purged. Setting about this task (and not completing it until near the end of his reign), Peter had two overwhelming advantages over Nikon: He had greater power, and he was dependent on no one to approve his reforms. Even so, he attempted less. Peter never tampered with ritual, liturgy or doctrine as Nikon had. Peter enforced the authority of the established church against the Schismatics, but he did not broaden the religious schism. Peter’s schisms lay in other realms.
* Paul of Aleppo’s journal, The Travels of Macarius, is an extraordinarily rueful catalogue of lamentations, grumbles, groans, sulks and whines at having to put up with the hardships of life in seventeenth-century Russia.
Worst of all were the length and conditions of the Russian church services which they, as visiting churchmen, were required to attend. “All their churches are void of seats,” complained Paul. “There is not one, even for the Bishop. You see the people all through the service standing like rocks, motionless, or incessantly bending with their devotions. God help us for the length of their prayers and chants and masses.… Custom has made them insensible of weariness.… We never left the church but tottering on our legs after so much standing.… We remained very weak with pains in our backs and legs for some days.… We suffered from the severe cold, enough to kill us as we had to stand upon the iron pavement. What surprised us most was to see the boys and little children of the great officers of state standing bareheaded and motionless without betraying the smallest gesture of impatience.” In one service all the names of all the soldiers who died fighting against the Poles over the past two years were read. “The archdeacon read with great slowness and composure while the singers continually chanted ‘Everlasting Remembrance’ until we were ready to drop with the fatigue of standing, our legs being frozen under us.”
In conclusion, Paul decided, “anyone wishing to shorten his life by five or ten years should go to Muscovy and walk there as a religious man.”
* During the anti-foreign riots of 1649, six carriages of musical instruments had been found and burned by the mob. This prejudice was not new, nor has it changed. The Russian Orthodox Church, believing that God should be praised only by the human voice, still does not permit instrumental music in its services. The result is its superb a cappella choirs.