Jerusalem became-both literally and figuratively-a kind of alternative to Constantinople and Athos for the excited Muscovite imagination. Nikon, who had first sent Arsenius to the Holy Land, sent him back to Jerusalem to make a model of the Church of the Resurrection that sheltered the Holy Sepulcher; and sent a visiting Serbian metropolitan to Jerusalem to provide additional details on the rites and services of the Church. The new Muscovite theocracy was to be nothing less than the New Jerusalem. With this lofty vision in mind, Nikon set about building his "holy kingdom," the Monastery of the New Jerusalem, on a spot of great beauty by the Istra River outside Moscow. Giant bells, gilded gates, and a central cathedral modeled on the church over the Holy Sepulcher-all were part of Nikon's plan for bringing heaven to earth in Muscovy.62
For the puritanical fundamentalists, however, this New Jerusalem suggested the kingdom of the Antichrist, who was to establish his universal reign in Jerusalem. Rumors spread that Nikon's translators and editors were secret Moslems, Catholics, and Jews. Given the large numbers of refugees employed and the fluidity of confessional lines in the East, there were enough recent converts and mysterious personalities to lend some credence to this charge. Meanwhile, two well-educated brothers, the Potemkins, came to Muscovy from Smolensk, the advanced base for Uniat efforts to win the Pastern Slavs to Catholicism, warning that Latinization of the Greek ( Inirch indicated the imminent coming of the Antichrist. Spyridon Potemkin wiin hailed as a friend and prophet by the fundamentalists for his ten
treatises about the coming end; and his own death in 1664 was seen as a sign that history itself was drawing to a close. His brother Ephrem immediately set out for the woods north of Kostroma to await the end with fasting, prayer, and reading of the church fathers. Bearing the monastic name of the apocalyptical Syrian, this Ephrem proved no less gloomy and prophetic. He gathered a substantial following in the northern Volga region-partly by preaching doom at the famous summer fairs in the major trading cities.
Ephrem taught that Patriarch Nikon was the Antichrist, that the Second Coming was shortly to take place, and that men should gather provisions, because the seven years without bread prophesied in the Book of Daniel had already begun.63 Early in 1666 the government sent a special expedition to the trans-Volga region to burn the cells of his followers, imprisoned most of them, and brought Ephrem to Moscow. He was forced to recant and go on a humiliating public tour to demonstrate his acceptance of the new forms; but Ephrem's recantation and the simultaneous anathemi-zation of Awakum only deepened the apocalyptical gloom of the fundamentalists and sent them looking for more precise guidance on the expected end of the world.
Once again they turned to prophetic anti-Uniat writings. As early as 1620, one Kievan monk had prophesied that the spread of Catholicism would lead to the coming of the Antichrist in i666.64 Spyridon Potemkin developed this idea by computing that it had taken Rome a thousand years after the birth of Christ to break with Orthodoxy; six hundred more years for the White and Little Russian hierarchies; sixty years after that for the Great Russians; and six more years for the end of the world.65
The date 1666 became fixed in the popular imagination, because it contained the number 666-which held the key to the identity of the apocalyptical beast. The Book of Revelation had promised that
. . . anyone who has intelligence may work out the number of the beast. The number represents a man's name, and the numerical value of its letters is 666.66
Since numbers were still written by letters in seventeenth-century Russia, the Russians found it easy to apply the ancient practice of gematria: adding together the numerical value of the letters in a man's name to find his "number." The early Christians had found that the Greek form of Nero's name written in Hebrew characters added up to 666; and Zizanius at the time of the forming of the Uniat Church in 1596 had started the Orthodox community speculating about the possible meaning for their plight of the figure 666. In the course cf the theological crisis of the sixties, Russians
found that this magic number could be reached by adding together the numbers for the Tsar (Alexis = 104), the Patriarch (Nikon == 198), and one of Nikon's suspect foreign editors (Arsenius the Greek = 364). Later computations showed that the letters in the word for "free thinker" iyol'nodum) also added up to 666.07
Signs of the coming Antichrist were found in the natural world by Theoktist, former hegumen of the Chrysostom monastery in Moscow, who had moved to distant Solovetsk and used his erudition and association in prison with Neronov to provide ideological support for that monastery's resistance to the new forms of worship. In his On the Antichrist and His Secret Reign, Theoktist contended that the reign of the Antichrist had already begun and appended a catalogue of signs to watch for: a kind of program guide for the last days.68 Another shadowy figure, Abraham, Avvakum's "spiritual son" and constant companion in his last days of prison, saw signs of the Antichrist not only in the name "New Jerusalem" but also in the fact that Nikon called the river Istra "Jordan," a nearby mountain "Golgotha," and young monks his "seraphims." Frontier superstition was blended unconsciously with apocalyptical symbolism as Nikon was variously said to be the child of a water sprite (rusalka) or of the pagan Mordvin or Cheremis tribes.69 The atmosphere was charged with expectation that 1666-7 was t0 brmg portentous new events. The expectations were justified, for 1667, the first year in the expected reign of the Antichrist, was in many ways the beginning of a new order in Russia.
The Great Change
The decisive turning point in the religious crisis of seventeenth-century Russia was the church council of 1667, which excommunicated the fundamentalists en bloc. It was, superficially, a victory for Nikon, because the council upheld the central authority of the hierarchy and all of Nikon's reforms except his "our God" form of address in the Lord's prayer and his elimination of a dual blessing of the waters on Epiphany. Moreover, the ecclesiastical administration was greatly enlarged by the addition of twenty new dioceses to the already existing fourteen, and by the addition of four metropolitans, five archbishops, and nine bishops to the hierarchy.70
Yet defeat for the fundamentalists did not mean victory for the theocrats. On the contrary, the council devoted most of its attention to the final deposition and exile of Nikon. Its main result was to establish the clear subordination of church to state by flooding the church bureaucracy with
new priests who were, in effect, state appointed. One new Ukrainian metropolitan admitted with remarkable candor in sentencing Avvakum that "wc have to justify the Tsar, and that is why we stand for these innovations-in order to please him."71 Joachim, the new patriarch, was blunt in addressing the Tsar: "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."72
A cosmopolitan, primarily Ukrainian and western Russian hierarchy was replacing the older Great Russian Church administration, just as Muscovy, having wrested from Poland key sections of these regions, was rapidly being transformed into a multi-national empire. The ideal of an organic religious civilization-whether fundamentalist or theocratic in structure-was becoming as anachronistic as the ill-defined economic and administrative procedures of patriarchal rule.