Nikon, however, happened to have been a very difficult man, headstrong, tactless, and on occasion ruthlessly brutal. Having alienated with his reforms the mass of the clergy, he next aroused the anger of court dignitaries, resentful of his arrogation of sovereign prerogatives and generally overbearing manner. He was intrigued against by courtiers bent on estranging the tsar from him. Alexis gradually became persuaded that the patriarch had indeed overstepped the bounds of his authority, as his enemies charged, and visibly cooled to him. Hoping to force the tsar's hand, Nikon abandoned his post and retired to a monastery. But he miscalculated, for the tsar did not come to beg forgiveness as he had anticipated; instead, he waited and did nothing, allowing the patriarchal office to remain, in effect, vacant.
Finally, in 1666 Alexis convoked a major church synod to which he invited prominent ecclesiastics from Greece to settle his dispute with Nikon and pass judgement on his reforms. Defending himself from the charges brought against him, Nikon advanced a novel (to the Orthodox) theory of church supremacy over state:
Has thou not learned... that the highest authority of the priesthood is not received from kings or emperors (lit. Tsars), but contrariwise, it is by the priesthood that rulers are anointed to the empire? Therefore it is abundantly plain that priesthood is a very much greater thing than royalty...
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In spiritual things which belong to the glory of God, the bishop is higher than the Tsar: for so only can he hold or maintain the spiritual jurisdiction. But in those things which belong in the province of this world the Tsar is higher. And so they will be in no opposition the one against the other. However, the bishop has a certain interest... in the secular jurisdiction, for its better direction, and in suitable matters; but the Tsar has none whatever in ecclesiastical and spiritual administration... For this cause, manifestly, the Tsar must be less than the bishop, and must owe him obedience.10
Nikon failed to persuade the synod, which reasserted the traditional idea of 'harmony': the tsar had the right to rule all his subjects, the clergy included, and the church establishment, from the patriarch down, had to obey him in all matters save those touching on doctrine. At the same time, the synod sustained Nikon's reforms which had brought Russian religious observances more in line with the Greek.
The synod's religious resolutions were not accepted by a sizeable part of the laity. (The clergy promptly fell in line.) Almost immediately defections from the official church began of parishes which refused to make the required revisions and adhered to the old ways. In the 1670s rumours spread that the end of the world was approaching, and entire communities of believers fled into the forests, shut themselves in coffins or set themselves on fire. At least 20,000 persons are believed to have burned themselves to death during this outburst of religious mania. Some fanatical Old Believers even talked of burning down all Russia.
It is only with the Schism that intense religious life in Russia begins on a mass scale. Dissent, which had great appeal to the peasantry because of its anarchist undertones, compelled every believer to choose between the official church and the schismatic, and by this very choice to make a religious commitment. Those who decided on a break then faced many further decisions concerning not only ritual but also conduct, and thus step by step they were drawn into religion of a more personal and spiritual kind. Foreigners found dissenters to be the only Orthodox people in Russia familiar with the Holy Scriptures and able to discuss religious questions. Adherence to dissent cost dearly both in money and exposure to government harassment which sometimes turned into outright persecution.
Russian dissenters are customarily divided in two basic groups: the Old Believers, known to themselves as 'Old Ritualists' (Staroobriadtsy) and to the official church as 'Splitters' (Raskol'niki), and the Sectarians. The former, who are stronger in the taiga, repudiate the Nikonian reforms and adhere to the old rituals, but in every other way remain faithful to Orthodoxy; the latter depart more or less consciously from the doctrines and practices of the Orthodox church, developing new forms of religion, some of which come closer to early Protestantism
THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE
than to Orthodoxy. They have traditionally been the strongest in the Ukraine.
The Old Believers associated Nikon's reforms with the advent of the Anti-Christ. By cabalistic computations they concluded that the coming of the Anti-Christ would occur in 1699-1700, and the end of the world three years later. When Peter returned from his foreign journey in 1698, and instead of going to church began to cut off beards and execute rebellious streltsy, many of whom were adherents of Old Belief, the prophesy seemed about to be fulfilled. At this time incidents of self-immolation and other expressions oimania religiosa multiplied. When the end of the world did not occur, the Old Believers faced a quandary: how were they to conduct themselves like proper Christians in a world ruled by Anti-Christ? The most urgent question had to do with priests and sacraments. The Old Believers recognized only priests ordained before Nikon's reforms. These had been a minority to begin with, and they were dying out. Confronting this problem, the movement split in two factions, the Priestly [Popovtsy] and the Non-Priestly (Bezpopovtsy), Adherents of the former, after having run out of suitable ministers, consented to accept priests ordained by the official church and eventually made their peace with it. The more radical Non-Priestly solved the problem in a different way. Some concluded that once Anti-Christ had taken charge, no more intermediaries between man and God were required; now it was every Christian for himself. Others performed only those sacraments which were open to laymen. For the latter, the thorniest problem concerned the marriage rite, indubitably a sacrament requiring the services of an ordained priest. They got round the difficulty either by denying the sacramental character of marriage and performing it without priests, or else by practising celibacy. Extremists argued that in a world dominated by Anti-Christ it was a Christian's positive duty to sin, because by so doing one diminished the total amount of evil abroad. They indulged in sexual licence which often assumed the form of pre-Christian rites still surviving in the village. The Non-Priestly Old Believers, as many other religious dissenters, tended to vacillate between ascetism and dionysiac indulgence. Certain among them thought Napoleon to be the Messiah come to deliver Russia from the Anti-Christ, and worshipped him, for which reason it was not uncommon to find in Russian peasant huts the portrait of the French Emperor pinned to the wall alongside ikons. In the course of time, the Non-Priestly expanded at the expense of the Priestly, who gradually faded into the established church. Their domain was the remote northern forest: the territory of what had been the Novgorod republic, Karelia, the shores of the White Sea and Siberia. Organized in disciplined, self-governing communities they proved excellent colonists. After Peter 1 had imposed on them a
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double soul tax, many Old Believers turned to commerce and industry at which they proved extremely adept. They enjoyed the reputation of being the most honest businessmen in Russia.
The Sectarians sought not so much to defend the old ways as to formulate new answers to religious questions. Sectarianism was a logical outgrowth of Old Belief, especially of its more radical Non-Priestly wing. Most sects issued from this source, although it appears that some antedated the Schism and represented a revival of heresies dormant since the Middle Ages and believed extirpated, such as that of the Judaizers. The basic quality common to the sects was the turning away from church tradition, books and rituals in quest of a 'Spiritual Christianity' based on an inner faith. Once the tie with the official church had been broken it was inevitable that many spontaneous religious trends would emerge. The process has by no means run its course as the contemporary Russian press reports time and again the discovery of some new sect. Most sects have had an ephemeral existence, revolving around a single inspired leader and falling apart upon his imprisonment or death. Some, however, established themselves more solidly. Among the better known are the following: