Of the two, Awakum has become better known to posterity because of the magnificent autobiography he wrote in the early years of his exile. In it, the old hagiographic style is fully adopted to the vernacular idiom, and the prophetic Muscovite ideology is transformed into a deeply personal profession of faith. Named for the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk, whose name means "strong fighter," Awakum reacts like a true prophet
to persecution, asking for God's help rather than men's mercy. Even while being beaten with the knout in Siberia by the leader of a military expedition,
I kept saying, "O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God! Help me!" And this I kept repeating without pause, so that it was bitter to him in that I did not say, "Have mercy!"120
Inveighing tirelessly against "lovers of new things who have fallen away from truth," Awakum calls for active witness to the truth rather than talk about it:
What matter that they talk vanity of me; in the day of judgment they shall all know of my deeds, whether they be good or evil.121
Awakum represents in many ways a culminating expression of the Muscovite ideology: a passionate prophet seeking to fill his life with "deeds of devotion" (podvigi blagochestiia). He combines within himself both the kenotic and the fanatic strains of early Russian spirituality. His polemic style is as pungent and polemic as that of Ivan IV, yet his message is conservative and his counsel compassionate. He bids men simply to preserve the old faith and accept suffering gladly in imitation of Christ, rather than fight back with the sword as do followers of "the Tatar God Mohammad," or with the "fire, knout and gallows" of the new faithless state.122 His own martyrdom gave his writings a special crown of authority, which tended to .perpetuate among Russian religious dissenters Awakum's semi-Manichean view of the world. Awakum called himself not an Old but a "True Believer," insisting (in objection to a Nikonian deletion from the creed) that
It were better in the Creed not to pronounce the word Lord, which is an accidental name, than to cut out "True," for in that name is contained the essence of God.123
Awakum places light first among the "essential names" of God and sees Christianity as "the first light of truth" now darkened by Western heresy. In advocating self-immolation he develops a dualistic dissociation of the body from the soul. "Burning your body, you commend your soul into the hands of God,"124 he wrote to one martyr. Shortly before he was burned at the stake, his attitude became almost masochistic: ". . . run and jump into the flames. Here is my body, Devil, take and eat it; my soul you cannot take!"125 Awakum was rebuked for his heretical views by his more learned prison mate, Deacon Fedor;126 but the archpriest's fanaticism and dualism were to exercise great influence on native Russian traditions of religious dissent.
Nikon also left an admiring life written in the hagiographical style by a seventeenth-century follower,127 and he too emerges as a deeply Muscovite figure. A Dutch visitor at his Monastery of the New Jerusalem in 1664 found nothing but Slavic and Russian books in his personal library.'-* Everywhere he went Nikon had special retreats from the world for meditation and prayer. Like Avvakum, he disciplined himself with strenuous physical labor. During his final monastic exile he actually built a small island retreat in the lake by hauling huge stones down through the water and building a synthetic island. He was fascinated with bells and had a large number cast with mysterious inscriptions at the New Jerusalem monastery. Almost the only question about the outside world that he asked his Dutch visitor pertained to the size and nature of bells in Amsterdam.129 Nikon was as opposed as Awakum to new icons, and had visions in which Christ appeared to him as He did in the icons. Nikon was said to have achieved in his last years even more miraculous cures of the sick than Awakum: 132 in one three-year period.130
Nikon was, of course, less decisively rejected by the new church than was Avvakum. In contrast to the fiery martyrdom of the archpriest, the dethroned patriarch died peacefully on his way back to Moscow in 1681 with a partial pardon from the imperial court. Nonetheless, Nikon used prophetic terminology similar to that of Awakum in denouncing the principal author of the resolutions of the Church council as a "precursor of the Antichrist." He saw in the new "Babylonian captivity" of the Russian Church to state authority a worse bondage than the Mongol yoke.131 A pamphlet supporting him in 1664 divided the world into those who sing "praises to the holy patriarch" and those who serve in the regiments of Antichrist.132
Rebels against the new secular state looked on Nikon no less than on Awakum as a potential deliverer: the defender of an older and better way of life. Just as the rioting streltsy were to glorify the rejected Old Believers, so did the Cossack leaders of the Stenka Razin uprising of 1667-71 glorify the rejected patriarch as a possible deliverer from the "reign of the voevodas."138
The points of similarity between these two figures serve as a reminder that the basic schism in Christian Russia was not the formal one between those who accepted and those who rejected the Nikonian reforms. The real schism was, rather, the basic split between the Muscovite ideal of an organic religious civilization shared by both Avvakum and Nikon and the post-1667 reality-equally offensive to both of them-of the church as a subordinate institution of a secularized state.134
The real loser amidst all this religious conflict in Russia was-as it
had been in the West-the vitality of surviving Christian commitment. The two main forces within the Church spent their time and energy combating and discrediting each other rather than the secular forces undermining them both. The Russian Church after 1667 tended to borrow secular ideas rather than spiritual ideals from each of the old positions. The official Church became neither a prophetic community as the fundamentalists had wished nor a self-governing sacramental institution as the theocrats had desired. From the fundamentalists modern Russia took not fervid piety so much as xenophobic fanaticism; from the theocrats, not so much Christian rule as ecclesiastical discipline.
This ideological protest against modernization left a corrosive legacy of xenophobia. Internal schism in the wake of widespread violence engraved the anti-Jewish attitude implicit in the Muscovite ideology deep into the popular imagination. The Old Believers accused Nikon of permitting Jews to translate sacred books; and the Nikonians accused the Old Believers of letting Jews lead sacred services. Both parties considered the council of 1666-7 a "Jewish mob," and an official publication of the council blamed its opponents for falling victim to "the lying words of Jews." Throughout the society rumors spread that state power had been turned over to "cursed Jewish governors" and the Tsar lured into a corrupting Western marriage by the aphrodysiacs of Jewish doctors.135 Anti-Catholicism also became more widespread if not more intense than during the Time of Troubles. One Orthodox historian has pointed out that "until the sixties of the seventeenth century, aside from the name itself, the simple people could in no way distinguish Uniat from Orthodox."136 Henceforth, the general antagonism vaguely felt toward the Pope of Rome and "the Latins" was also directed at the Uniat Church as a tool for the "guileful politics of the Polish republic."137