Historiosophical Theories of South-Western Rus’ Theologians as a Source of Old Believer Historiosophy

-K. KOZHURIN, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences (Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia)

As has already been noted by a number of researchers, the “zealots of piety” of the mid-17th century and their followers—the Old Believers—in their historiosophical views relied on written monuments of South- and West-Russian origin. Over time these texts acquired unconditional authority, and quotations from them became foundational when arguing the idea most crucial for Old Believers: the enthronement of the Antichrist in the world.

Old Believer historiosophy reflected a specific mindset of that difficult era. Apocalyptic literature had been a favourite reading of Russian Christians ever since the Baptism of Rus’. Apocalyptic themes were repeatedly addressed and developed in original Old Russian literature, which drew on the traditions of patristic thought—from Sts Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome to St Ephrem the Syrian. The Holy Fathers called the Antichrist “serpent,” “beast,” “lion,” “enemy,” “destroyer,” “devil,” “Satan,” “demon of the abyss,” “adversary,” “supostat,” “man of sin and lawlessness,” “abomination of desolation,” “son of perdition,” “evil guide,” “unrighteous lamb,” and many other similar names. This enemy, according to prophecy, will be a man born “of an unclean virgin, a Jewess of the tribe of Dan” (in other sources, of the tribe of Judah). The Antichrist will usurp great power; at first he will appear quiet, reasonable, pure, and merciful, and will seduce the Jews, who will accept him as the Messiah. In reality, however, he will oppose Christ and attempt to eradicate Christianity. In the words of the holy Apostle Paul: “that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” (2 Thess. 2:4). To expose the Antichrist, the Lord will send Enoch, Elijah, and John the Theologian, and through them many will come to believe in the True God. Yet Elijah and Enoch will be killed by the Antichrist’s command. It was foretold that a portion of the Jews would also be converted by Elijah and Enoch to the faith of Christ, though many of them will accept the Antichrist.

According to the Book of the Prophet Daniel, the kingdom of the Antichrist will last three and a half years. His end is described by the Apostle Paul: “And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming” (2 Thess. 2:8), and by John the Theologian in Revelation: “And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet… these both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone” (Rev. 19:20). According to the interpretation of St Andrew of Caesarea, “these two (the Antichrist and the false prophet), in their incorruptible bodies, after the power given them by God has been emptied, will be delivered to the Gehenna fire, which for them will be death and slaughter by Christ’s command.”

The Antichrist is linked to the well-known number of which the holy Apostle John the Theologian writes: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six” (Rev. 13:18). Some understood this number as the time of the Antichrist’s coming—the year 1666, predicted by the Book of Faith, the year of the infamous “robber council” at which the old rites were finally condemned and the entire centuries-old tradition of Russian holiness was anathematized. Many tried to guess the name of the Antichrist or to link his number with the name of some opponent of Orthodoxy. Using various forms of letter-number notation (and sometimes dispensing with it altogether), the Antichrist was identified now with the Emperor Nero, now with the Roman pope, now with Patriarch Nikon…

As early as the late 16th century, the West-Russian theologian and preacher Stefan Zizanii (ca. 1550–1634), at the request of Prince Konstantin of Ostrog, translated from Greek the 15th Catechetical Oration of St Cyril of Jerusalem. The translation was accompanied by Zizanii’s own commentaries and was published in 1596 in Vilnius in Belarusian and Polish under the title The Sermon of St Cyril on the Antichrist and His Signs, with an Expansion of Learning against Various Heresies. Drawing on Holy Scripture, Zizanii reminded readers that the eighth millennium from the Creation of the world had begun in 1492 and that, according to prophecy, Christ’s Second Coming was to occur precisely in this period. In the events of his own day Zizanii saw all the signs of the approaching “last times” and asserted that the Roman papal throne was none other than the throne of Antichrists. When calling the Roman pope the Antichrist, Zizanii did not mean any specific individual pope, nor even the final “prince of darkness” who would reign immediately before Christ’s coming. He had in mind the papacy as a church institution and organisation, while individual representatives of that institution were forerunners of the Antichrist—his servants. Their chief aim was to undermine faith in Christ and the Church [2, p. 38].

Stefan Zizanii’s ideas about the approaching kingdom of the Antichrist received further development. Around 1622, a fundamental anti-Catholic work appeared in the Kyiv Orthodox Metropolis—Zachariah Kopystensky’s Palinodia (d. 1627). In the preface to the Palinodia, Zachariah Kopystensky sets forth his scheme of successive falls of Christians toward the world of the Antichrist. In his view, from the year 1000 Satan had established himself in Rome. “The number 1000 acquired enormous significance for the Orthodox theologian. Zachariah Kopystensky interpreted it in the Augustinian tradition as already fulfilled, proceeding from the idea of Satan being ‘bound’ for 1000 years at the moment of Christ’s first coming” [3, p. 290]. It was precisely by the triumph of the Antichrist in Rome from the year 1000 after Christ’s birth that he explained the division of the Christian Church into Catholicism and Orthodoxy—or more accurately, the falling away of the Catholics from the Church. In this context, the Baptism of Rus’ by Prince Vladimir in 988 (i.e., approximately at the same time) and the formation of the Russian Church acquired special significance. Although Rome had fallen away from the true faith, Rus’ entered the Church and took Rome’s place in the sacred pentarchy (the authority of the five patriarchs).

Zachariah Kopystensky then turned to the well-known apocalyptic number 666, the addition of which to the first date yielded the year 1666. He broke the number down into successive stages—1000 – 1600 – 1660 – 1666… Each of these dates he linked to some church schism. Thus, according to Zachariah Kopystensky’s scheme, the next stage of falling away was the year 1600. It was precisely around that time—in 1596—that a new attack by the Antichrist on the true faith took place, directed against the very part of the Christian world which, in Kopystensky’s view, preserved the heritage of Rus’’s baptizer: the Kyiv Metropolis. This was the notorious Union of Brest concluded between the Catholic Church and the Ukrainian-Belarusian Orthodox Church, a union that effectively deprived Western Rus’ Orthodox of their three-degree hierarchy. “Zachariah Kopystensky explained the conclusion of the Union of Brest as the machinations of the Roman pope-Antichrist and perceived it as an event of cosmic scale. In his understanding, the fate of the world now depended on the confrontation between Uniates and defenders of Orthodoxy. Evidently, should the union persist further, he implied heavenly intervention. According to biblical prophecies, the Second Coming would begin with Christ saving His persecuted chosen ones who were being hunted by the Antichrist. Undoubtedly, Zachariah Kopystensky saw the last community of the truly faithful on earth in the Kyiv Orthodox Metropolis. According to the prophecy of the Palinodia, the further development of events connected with the Antichrist would occur in 1660 and, finally, in 1666. These dates marked the next steps of apostasy. In the text of the Palinodia they had no concrete historical referents. Exactly what would happen in the final year, 1666—the end of the world or the earthly incarnation of the Antichrist—Zachariah Kopystensky did not specify. His scheme could be interpreted in either direction” [3, p. 292].

Similar views on successive apostasies from the true faith were developed in the works of another prominent Ukrainian polemicist, the Athonite monk Ivan Vyshensky (ca. 1550 – after 1621). Ivan Vyshensky spoke of the apostasy of the Uniates who, by their reckless actions, had placed the fate of the entire world in jeopardy. In his writings he asserted that, as a result of several such apostasies, the Antichrist was already triumphing over the world, the end of the age was near, and the hour of reckoning was approaching for those who had submitted to Satan. Vyshensky, however, gave no specific dates. His main criticism was directed against a secularised episcopate that had become detached from the Orthodox people and had gone over to the Unia. Addressing the Uniate bishops, he wrote:

“How can you call yourselves spiritual – nay, not merely spiritual, but even faithful – when you make your own brother, born together with you in the one font of baptism by faith and of one mother – grace – lower than yourselves, humiliate him, count him as nothing, brand him a serf, a tanner, a saddler, a cobbler for mockery? Very well, let him be a serf, a tanner, a saddler, a cobbler – but remember that he is your equal brother in everything…” [1, p. 239].

In the conditions of the Orthodox episcopate’s fall into union with the Catholics, Ivan Vyshensky, in his treatise “Porada” (“Counsel”), expressed a thought that was quite bold for his time and that would later become the ideological foundation of the priestless trend in Russian Old Belief – the possibility of the Church existing without priesthood in the time of the Antichrist:

“It is better for you to go to church without bishops and without priests set up by the devil and to preserve Orthodoxy, than to be in church with bishops and priests not called by God, to mock it, and to trample Orthodoxy under foot. For it is not priests, nor bishops, nor metropolitans that will save us, but the mystery of our Orthodox faith together with the keeping of God’s commandments: that is what must save us” [1, p. 256].

He develops the same idea in another work, .“A Quarrel between a Wise Latin and a Foolish Ruthenian”:

“It is all the same, or a hundred times better, that such seducers should in no wise be in the church at all, and it is more profitable… for the assembly of the faithful to gather in church by themselves and be saved, than to follow seducers and blind guides into perdition and eternal torment” [1, p. 174].

Such a sharply negative attitude toward the Roman Catholic Church, as we find among the Orthodox of South-Western Rus’, was provoked not only by Rome’s external expansionist policy but also by purely spiritual reasons. What provoked rejection were the papacy’s claims to secular power – claims that contradicted the very spirit of Christian teaching – and the violation of the principle of the Church’s conciliarity (the pope was declared head of the Church and the highest authority in matters of faith), which in turn fostered the Church’s secularisation and worldliness. Sharp rejection was also aroused by the papal authority’s attempts to impose faith by fire and sword, by violence and with the support of secular power. Only a few decades would pass, and all these same signs would manifest themselves vividly in the activity of Patriarch Nikon and his followers. As the scholar of Old Russian literature A.N. Robinson justly observes,

“half a century later a socio-historical and cultural situation arose in Russia which, in its general type and in essential circumstances, reminded contemporaries of the recent events in Ukraine and allowed them to make use, in various directions, of the fruits of the richest Ukrainian polemical literature” [5, p. 313].

Indeed, the works of Stefan Zizanii, Zachariah Kopystensky, and Ivan Vyshensky exerted considerable influence on Russian polemical literature of the 17th century thanks to Muscovite anthologies published shortly before the schism of the Russian Church. In 1644 the famous Kirillova kniga (Book of St Cyril) was issued at the Moscow Printing House; it included “The Discourse of Cyril of Jerusalem on the Eighth Age, on the Second Coming of Christ and on the Antichrist” and a letter of Ivan Vyshensky. In 1648 came the Kniga o vere (Book of Faith), which set forth the ideas of Zachariah Kopystensky and expressed the fear that, as the year 1666 approached, the Russians might follow the Orthodox of South-Western Rus’. The works of the West-Russian polemicists also circulated in manuscript form.

When the Nikonian-Alexian reform began, one of the first to perceive it in the light of the prophecies about the onset of the “last times” was Archpriest Ioann Neronov, who led the opposition to the reforms. The theme of the end of the world becomes dominant in his writings. In his earliest epistles he turns to eschatological prophecies and compares the events taking place in the Russian Church with the Unia. Union with the Catholics – that is, falling away from true Orthodoxy – would, in Neronov’s view, entail the perdition of Holy Rus’ and the approach of the kingdom of the Antichrist. As early as 1652 – the very year Nikon ascended the patriarchal throne – Ioann Neronov prophetically wrote to Stefan Vonifatiev:

“Let not Rus’ today suffer what the Uniates suffered…”

In his “Second Epistle to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich” of 27 February 1654 he calls upon the sovereign to “be on his guard” lest he suffer

“from him who desires to come at the end and disturb the universe, whose coming, O most pious Tsar, thou knowest full well from Holy Scripture; for he is exceedingly cunning and will be recognised by the small things in which the grace of the Holy Spirit is affirmed.”

In Neronov’s view, the Antichrist will appear not in his true guise but in a deceptive one:

“he will attempt to seduce the people with righteous deeds, will feign love for every virtue, will show himself merciful toward all who have grown poor in virtues, but will persecute the slaves of Christ who bear upon themselves the sign of the Heavenly King” [4, pp. 81-82].

Later this theme would be continued in the writings of Spiridon Potemkin, Igumen Feoktist, Deacon Feodor, Archpriest Avvakum, and other Old Believer theologians.

References

1. Vyshensky, Ivan. Sochineniia [Works]. Moscow–Leningrad: Nauka, 1955.
2. Mirolubov, I. I. “Russko-ukrainskie dukhovnye sviazi nakanune raskola” [Russian-Ukrainian Spiritual Connections on the Eve of the Schism]. Starobriadcheskii tserkovnyi kalendar’ na 1989 god. Riga, 1989.
3. Oparina, T. V. “Chislo 1666 v russkoi knizhnosti serediny – tret’ei chetverti XVII veka” [The Number 1666 in Russian Literature of the Mid- and Third Quarter of the 17th Century]. In Chelovek mezhdu Tsarstvom i Imperiei. Moscow, 2003.
4. Archpriest Ioann Neronov. Sobranie dokumentov epokhi [Collection of Documents of the Epoch]. Ed. K. Ya. Kozhurin. St Petersburg: Svoe izdatel’stvo, 2012.
5. Robinson, A. N. Bor’ba idei v russkoi literature XVII veka [The Struggle of Ideas in 17th-Century Russian Literature]. Moscow, 1974.