Nonetheless, in reading the detailed argumentation of the ecclesiastical debates, one feels that the essence of the controversy lies deeper than the verbal rationalizations of either party. Awakum turned to patristic sources for the same reason that Nikon turned to Byzantine precedents: as a means of justifying and defending a position that had already been taken. Indeed, both men violated basic traditions of the Orthodoxy that they claimed to be defending. Avvakum's dualism led him in prison to defend the heretical position that the Christ of the Trinity was not completely identical with the historical Jesus. Nikon's ambition led him to claim-in fact if not in theory -greater power for the patriarchate than it had ever tried to assume in Constantinople.
Nothing would have shocked either Awakum or Nikon more than the suggestion that his position resembled anything in the West. Neither had any appreciable knowledge of the West; and compulsive anti-Westernism was in many ways the driving force behind both of them. This very sensitivity, however, points to certain deeper links; for Russia in the time of Alexis was no longer a hermetically sealed culture. Inescapably if half-unconsciously, it was becoming involved in broader European trends- ideologically as well as economically and militarily. Indeed, the schism in the Russian Church can in some ways be said to represent the last returns from the rural precincts on the European Reformation: a burning out on the periphery of Europe of fires first kindled in the West a century before. In broad outline, the schism in the Russian Church-like the schism in the West-grew out of renewed concern for the vitality and relevance of religion amidst the disturbing economic and political changes of early modern times. This "second religiousness" occurred later in Russia than in the West, primarily because economic change and secular ideas came later. It was more extreme in Russia than in many parts of the West largely because it followed rather than preceded the great wars of the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century. The revival of Russian religious concern followed a course broadly similar to the preceding Western pattern. Contending forces within the Church became embroiled in bitter strife, which soon led to physical violence and doctrinal rigidity. The two major parties to the dispute burned themselves out fighting one another and thus cleared the way for the new secular culture of modern times.
If one bears in mind that no precise parallel is intended or direct borrowing implied, one may speak of the fundamentalist faction as a Protestant-like and the theocratic party a Catholic-like force within Russian Orthodoxy.
Neronov's opposition to the wars against Poland, his love of simple parables, his desire to preach to the forgotten, uprooted figures who hauled
barges on the Volga or mined salt in Siberia-all were reminiscent of radical Protestant evangelism. The fundamentalists represented, moreover, the married parish clergy's opposition to the power of the celibate episcopacy. Like the Protestants, the fundamentalists found themselves fragmented into further divisions after breaking with the established Church hierarchy. As with Protestantism, however, there were two principal subdivisions: those with and without priests: the popovtsy and bespopovtsy. The "priestists" roughly correspond to those Western Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans) who rejected Roman authority while continuing the old episcopal system and forms of worship; the "priestless," to those (Calvinists and Anabaptists) who rejected the old hierarchical and sacramental system as well.
The possibility of Protestant influence on some of the early Old Believers cannot be excluded, though there is an absence of direct evidence and an obvious theological gulf between the fundamentalists' fanatical dedication to ritual and icon veneration and the outlook of Protestantism. The already noted saturation of Muscovy with Protestant merchants and soldiers in the seventeenth century may nonetheless have had an impact on attitudes and practices, if not on the actual beliefs, of the fundamentalists. Some of the White Russian Protestants decimated by the Poles in the mid-seventeenth century must have resettled in Russia and may well have retained elements of their former faith even while formally accepting Orthodoxy. Throughout the seventeenth century the Swedes pursued an active program of Lutheran evangelism in the Baltic and Karelian regions, which later became centers of Old Believer colonization. One converted Russian priest wrote a Russian language tract in the late fifties or early sixties seeking to convince Russians that Lutheranism was the way to check the corrupted practices of Orthodoxy.102 The banishment of the once-favored Protestants from Moscow in the late forties was partly justified by accusations of Protestant proselytizing. There were still some eighteen thousand Protestants resident in Russia and five Protestant churches in the Moscow area during the late years of Alexis' reign,103 and the provincial regions in which the Old Belief took root were precisely those where Protestant presence had been the greatest: in the Baltic region, White Russia, and along the Volga trade routes.
Like the first Protestant circles around Luther, the original Old Believers came largely from a bleak but pious region of Northern Europe. For all their anti-intellectualism, many of the early Old Believers (such as Deacon Fedor and the Solovetsk monks) were-like Luther-learned students of sacred texts. They juxtaposed an idealized original Christianity to the recent creations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, reviled the decadence and complacency of a distant Mediterranean civilization, and sought to
bring monastic piety into everyday life. Neronov, like Luther, was particularly versed in the epistles of St. Paul and was often compared to him by contemporaries.104
The backing of local political leaders was as indispensable in turning the theological concerns of Neronov and Avvakum into a social movement as was the backing of German princes to Luther. Indeed, the amorphous, newly expanded empire of the Romanovs was no less vulnerable to the pressure of divisive forces than the empire of Charles V a century before. If Lutheranism proved more successful than Neronovism, it was only because it accepted the institution of the secular state more unreservedly. But this distinction only serves to identify the Russian schismatic tradition more with the radical, "non-magisterial" reformation: the tradition of Anabaptists, Hutterites, and the like, whose strength had in any case been greatest in Central and Eastern Europe.105 In their relentless opposition to war and raison d'etat and their tendency to speak of "houses of prayer" rather than consecrated churches, the Russian schismatics resemble Quakers and other radical Protestant sects.106 In their apocalyptical expectations and ingrown communal traditions, the Old Believer colonizers on the distant eastern frontier of Christendom were close in spirit to some of the sectarian pioneers of colonial America on its far-western periphery.
Other minority religions of the expanding Russian empire may have melted into the schismatic tradition, for the new secular state tended to produce a sense of community among persecuted dissenters. One of the earliest and most influential defenders of the Old Belief in Siberia was an Armenian convert to Orthodoxy, who had been conditioned by his previous Nestorianism to make the sign of the cross with two fingers rather than three.107 Nor can the possibility of some interaction with the Jewish community be excluded. The year 1666, in which the Antichrist was expected by the fundamentalists, was the same year in which Sabbatai Zevi claimed to have become the long-expected Messiah of the Jews. Using many of the same prophetic passages and computations as the Old Believers and influenced perhaps by a wife who was a Ukrainian survivor of the Khmelnitsky massacres, Sabbatai attracted a greater following for his claim than any Jew since Jesus, particularly within the decimated Jewish community of Poland and Russia. The Ukrainian hierarchy which was dominating the new Russian Church denounced Jews along with Old Believers. One Ukrainian priest wrote the first major Christian refutation anywhere of the claims of Sabbatai, The True Messiah, in terms that indicated that Sab-bataian ideas were finding some response within the Orthodox community.108 Since Sabbatai himself became an apostate to Islam and the entire movement was resolutely condemned by Orthodox Jewry, absorption into other