Old Belief and the Great Schism: An Experience of Sobornost under the “Kingdom of Caesar” #

By George Neminuschy

Foreword

In this article, we shall attempt to uncover and articulate a direct link between the original attribute of Christ’s Church—its catholicity, or sobornost—and that which is referred to as communal life when speaking of Old Belief. We will not engage in an “apologia for Old Belief,” nor will we offer criticism of “Nikonianism”; the old and modern literature of the Old Believers contains more than enough of both. Our task is simply to show what is, namely—a direct connection between the Church of the Apostles and the community of defenders of ancient piety in Rus’. That connection shall testify for itself.

Unity and Catholicity of the Church in its “Symbol” #

The Good News of victory over death, the experience of communion with God, the experience of the Resurrection, brought forth onto the historical stage the phenomenon of the Church—a community “taken out of the world,” initiated into the Mystery of Divine Providence, an assembly of the “disciples of Christ” at the Lord’s Table, at the Divine Feast, where the “True Food” is the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, who transforms and manifests this assembly as the mystical unity of His incorrupt Body. This spark of new life in union with God, which shone forth amidst an old and hostile world, was to spread as fire to all nations, whom this small community was called to make into “disciples” through “immersing them into the Name” of God (Matt. 28:19). The essential nature and mission of the Church—revealed through the paradox of election and separation from the world for the purpose of the world’s reunion with God, for the transfiguration of all creation into a “partaker of the Divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4) through bearing witness to God the Creator and Savior—were forever sealed in the symbol, the concise confession of faith.

This confession, over the course of the first centuries of the “Christian era,” took form as a document defined by conciliar decisions, consisting of the principal dogmatic affirmations that characterize the original faith handed down by those who were “eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word” (Luke 1:2). This is the so-called “Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol.” Concerning the very community of “disciples,” concerning the Church, this symbol contains the words: “I believe … in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” In Greek: πιστεύω… εἰς μίαν, ἁγίαν, καθολικὴν καὶ ἀποστολικὴν ἐκκλησίαν. Here, μία means “one,” but also “undivided,” “indivisible”; ἁγία means “holy,” or “pure,” in the sense of “consecrated,” taken out of the world to belong to God. The word καθολικήν is derived from τὸ ὅλον—“the whole,” “the complete,” considered a priori as an inner organic unity. Lastly, ἐκκλησίαν is from ἐκκαλέω, “to call out,” “to assemble.”

Thus, the Orthodox Christian says, “I believe” in a Church that is one—and only one—not several; therefore, if the faith is to spread to all nations, they shall form a single harmonious and like-minded choir, a single Table of the Lord, and not several discordant or even warring “assemblies.” Unity is the very essence of the Church, for “One is the Lord Jesus Christ.” In this world, human beings—as all visible things—are divided among themselves by so-called “natural” reasons (natural, of course, to the world): they are mortal. Christ comes in order to heal fallen human nature by His power, to unite—or rather, reunite—that which was divided, into the true and original unity intended by God for the new people of God as one man, in whom “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female: but Christ is all, and in all” (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11). To gather all and everything into the “Body of Christ.”

“I believe,” further, that this community is consecrated to God, set apart from the surrounding world as His inheritance, and this quality it preserves always, even unto the time when its boundaries at last shall coincide with the boundaries of the oikoumene.

“I Believe” — further — that [the Church] most certainly exists, even if for some reason this is not immediately apparent; it is a whole, a holon, an organism (Body), and it is a mistake—one leading to delusion—to view any part of it apart from the entirety of the organism. The parts of this whole, then, are gathered with the idea of the whole already in mind; they are gathered for the sake of the whole, and apart from that whole, they lose their meaning. For “As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and, being gathered together, became one, so may Thy Church be gathered from the ends of the earth into Thy Kingdom” (Didache 9:4). The Catholic Church (rendered in Slavonic as “Sobornaya” [conciliar]) is unity in multiplicity, a diversity of the one, a living organism quickened by the Spirit of God. “You are all one (εἷς — thus in the most ancient manuscripts) in Christ Jesus,” says the holy Apostle Paul (Gal. 3:28).

“I believe,” lastly, that it (the Church) arises and unfolds from the witness of the “eyewitnesses,” the envoys of the Lord Himself—a witness handed down and passed along through ages and nations. Therefore, it is “apostolic.”

Yes, and of course, “I believe” that this community is an ekklesia—that is, an assembly of those called out from the world, chosen and initiated into the Mystery. This is the original “charge” or “impulse” of that community; for how shall it bear witness to the world unless it is first chosen from the world and then set apart from it? And this assembly—from the very moment of its existence, from the moment of the Mystical Supper, when at the Immortal Table (a foretaste of the Kingdom of God) the Church was first established, and from the moment of the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, when the Church was first revealed to the world—this assembly is catholic, that is, it is an eschatological whole, an eschatological fullness, prepared to meet the Lord coming in glory. The catholicity of the Church, therefore, flows directly from its unity and does not depend on the number of its members nor on the geographical reach of its preaching. The Lord said to His disciples, “Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). Christ Himself is the Principle of fullness and the very Fullness of the Church. And if (let us for a moment suppose the “pessimistic” outcome—not, let us immediately say, supported by Tradition) it should happen that the faith of Christ disappears from the earth, and on the last day of human history, among billions of people, there remain only two “men in Christ,” serving the Eucharist and partaking of it—then this would be the triumphant catholic holy Church of the final day of history, in perfect unity in Christ with the heavenly hosts and all the righteous from ages past.

Such—both eschatological and catholic—was the consciousness of the “disciples,” the Christians of the early centuries: “Come, Lord Jesus!” The Church lives in the Presence of God and awaits—yearns for—the new and all-encompassing Presence of God—the Parousia, which shall be revealed in infinite Power and Glory. In the Church, everything lives and moves by the Holy Spirit toward theosis as its Divine Goal. All her functions and ministries are charismata—gifts of the Grace of the Holy Spirit; there are many ministries, but the Spirit is one. In the Church, all ministries proceed from the Eucharist and return to the Eucharist—the Banquet of Deification. And this banquet expresses and testifies to the Church’s faith: “Our teaching agrees with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist, in turn, confirms the teaching” (Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, IV, 18).

East and West #

The paths of Divine Providence, nevertheless, are such that—after the initial impulse of the Church’s preaching, prompted by persecution of the “disciples” in Jerusalem—the first worldly structure to encounter this preaching was the late antique Mediterranean civilization, at that time politically embodied in the Roman Empire. The “Factor of Rome,” encompassing and uniting a vast multitude of elements into a complex phenomenon, would set the cultural vector for millennia to come, and for many centuries would shape the direction, character, and “coloration” of the Church’s language of proclamation.

The Eternal Truth proclaimed by the Church to the world, inevitably, within this Mediterranean-Imperial context, had to clothe itself in the “garments” of, on the one hand, Eastern philosophical discourse (though not only that—one must also include Syrian poetry and Egyptian asceticism), and on the other hand, Western Roman law. Accordingly, it took on distinct hues: in the East—a discourse of thinkers constantly working through emerging theological, conceptual, and philosophical challenges by way of conciliar clarification and articulation of the dogmas of Truth in the language of late antiquity; in the West—a juridically ordered structure for resolving various casus through the authority of centralized power.

These tendencies—with their elements present and intertwined in both East and West, particularly within a theocratic empire—nonetheless began, as dominant traits, to shape the character of Christianity in each part of the Mediterranean oikoumene roughly three to four centuries after the apostolic age. These two differing tendencies played a significant role in shaping how the unity of the Church was understood in the East and in the West.

Sobornost in the Church #

As we have already noted, the unity of the Church is an essential mark of its very nature. In the earliest Christian era, the unity-in-Christ of the people of God—the unity of the catholic Church—was manifested in the most evident way: each local Church, beginning with Jerusalem and soon extending to Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Antioch, and so on, expressed and realized itself in its Eucharistic assembly under the presidency (leadership) of a bishop. The Eucharistic assembly was the image of the one Body with Christ as its Head, and thus was the fullness of the catholic Church, encompassing the entire created order—“things in heaven and things on earth”—all the living and the dead.

This unity was also lived out on the regional level: it was the shared consciousness of the unity of faith among all brethren in Christ—in Jerusalem and Corinth, Antioch and Caesarea, and so on. It was the awareness of the same apostolic succession across different communities founded by the missions of the circle of witnesses to the Resurrection; the sense of the same Tradition, the same life in Christ, the same joy in the Lord, the same experience of the triumph of Grace and Peace over the “natural” divisions and “war of all against all” characteristic of this fallen age.

In such a union of communities, each one, through its Eucharistic assembly, revealed itself as the fullness of the catholic Church—and at the same time, as a part of the regional and universal (oecumenical) unity of all who “call upon the Name of the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:2)—as a part in which the fullness of the whole was present. Thus, in the early Christian era, the universal unity of the Churches throughout the empire and the unity of each local Eucharistic gathering were one and the same unity—in which each community and the sum of all communities in the world were together the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.”

There could be no talk of any juridical subordination of one community (meaning: one Eucharistic assembly at the Lord’s Table) to a higher “organ of authority.” “In the Church, there can be nothing above the Church” [4], just as nothing can be above the Eucharist within the Church. The consideration and resolution of questions of catholic significance took place in the gathering of the Church—that is, the community itself, properly speaking—in council, and in especially important cases, with the participation of invited bishops from neighboring communities (from this practice arose the rule requiring the presence of several bishops for the ordination of a new bishop). The decisions of such a council—the gathering of the Church—were the manifestation of catholic Truth, and were acknowledged as such (as the manifestation of Truth) after being received by the entire assembly (the so-called “reception”).

Forerunners of the Schism #

Life, however, did not stand still: historical conditions and the external circumstances of “Christian living” changed. With the end of the “Palestinian period” of Christianity, in which the apostolic community of Jerusalem was the indisputable center of regional unity, new centers arose—prompted by the growth in the number of believers as a result of apostolic and post-apostolic preaching in other cities of the empire. The weight and authority of these new communities were increased by such factors as the political and economic significance of those cities.

As new centers of the “increase of the word of God” (Acts 12:24), the local Churches of Rome, Antioch, Corinth, Alexandria, Ephesus, and others, though large in number of Christians, at first had no juridical or canonical superiority over each other, nor over the community of Jerusalem or, say, Capernaum. Authority came to these prominent urban communities precisely as the authority of love—the power of love—and specifically because, having greater resources, they naturally became sources not only for the spreading of the faith in surrounding towns and villages but also of almsgiving—economic support to the needy and smaller communities (1 Cor. 16:1–3). Letters from the late first and early second centuries—such as those from Rome to Corinth, and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch to the communities of Asia Minor—are very authoritative, but they are filled with the spirit of meekness and love.

Almost immediately, special authority accrued to the local Church of the imperial capital, Rome, sanctified by the memory of Peter and Paul and the custodianship of their relics. At first, this was a “primacy in love,” a primacy among equals. But whereas in the First Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, we still see apostolic language (1 Clement 1:1): “The Church of God sojourning [παροικοῦσα—lit. ‘dwelling as a foreigner,’ ‘sojourning,’ ‘living in exile’] in Rome to the Church of God sojourning in Corinth” (clearly expressing equality between “strangers and pilgrims,” “who here have no continuing city, but seek one to come”), very soon the bishops of Rome began to supplement the acknowledged authority of their local Church with formal-legal overtones.

The see of the bishop of Rome began to be understood not only as “first in love,” but as endowed with special divinely-instituted rights to exercise centralized authority over all the Christian communities of the oecumene. Significantly, this supposed “divine institution” no longer had the Eucharist as its starting point (and thus, no longer had as its foundation the “deified” unity of all under Christ as the Head). This meant that those who carried out these “rights” no longer felt that such power was, in fact, power over Christ.

The unity of Christ’s Church, from this perspective, began to be understood not as something flowing from the very divine-human nature of the Church—not as a natural property of the Church as the Body of Christ—but as the product of an institution external to each local Church, an institution with external and therefore coercive authority, justified by an interpretation of an allegedly absolute, Divine authority. But such a unity—imposed from without and not arising from the Church’s own nature—could not be, and indeed was not, stable.

After the death of Emperor Constantine the Great in 337 A.D., the empire was divided into the Western—“weaker” in terms of imperial authority—and the Eastern—“stronger”—parts. This division contributed to the rise in prestige of the bishop of Rome, who by then was already being referred to as pope. By force of circumstance, the pope became one of the few Church leaders whom the “weak” Western emperors could not influence—especially since the Western empire would soon collapse under the blows of the barbarians—while the “strong” Eastern emperors could not “get at him” [3]. For this reason, Eastern hierarchs often appealed to bishops in the West (not only to the Roman pope, by the way) for support in those cases where there was a need to limit the emperor’s interference in Church affairs.

Cyprian of Carthage had already called the Apostle Peter a model of pastoral ministry—but a model for all bishops, both Eastern and Western. Thus, the “chair of Peter,” if Cyprian’s words are understood precisely, is not only the Roman see, but any episcopal throne occupied by a bishop who worthily embodies the apostolic archetype. The polarization of Eastern and Western views began to manifest later, after the Second Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople, whose third canon mentions the “primacy of honor” of Constantinople “after” Rome. This “after,” if interpreted not as implying “inferiority” but rather “chronology,” made it possible to view the city of Constantine not only as equal in honor, but as having inherited that “honor” from Rome—especially since the canon continues with the clarification: “For Constantinople is the New Rome” [5]. From this it could be deduced that the “Old” Rome had lost its primacy of honor.

The “Western” response to this canon came in the form of the text known as the Decree of Gelasius, though it most likely originated from the chancery of Pope Damasus, a contemporary of the Constantinopolitan council. This document solemnly declared that the Church of Rome is the head of all the Churches by divine institution—namely, by the words of Christ addressed to Peter: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” From this point, the West began to develop a doctrine of the “institutional,” legal character of Rome’s primacy in Church affairs. The East, for its part, never accepted this doctrine, as it contradicted the ancient catholic self-awareness of the Church—even though, in the East as well, during the first five centuries of Christianity, there was a gradual departure from the catholic consciousness of early Christianity.

This departure occurred mainly for objective reasons (the growth in the number of Christian communities in large cities, the massive influx of converts during and after the reign of Constantine the Great, and so forth), but also often for subjective reasons (the lowering of the general level of piety, the “temperature” of faith among the majority). The awareness of the Eucharist as the mystical and supreme value, the highest “authority” of the Church, was gradually diminished and gave place, alongside itself, to the administrative-legal element. This was inseparable from the Church’s incorporation of the kingdom of Caesar. The Roman emperor had become a Christian, and this was perceived as a miracle—and indeed it was a miracle. But the Christian emperor remained a Roman emperor: Roman law, the pax Romana, did not disappear; the laws of the Augustus, the principles of earthly law, made their way into the realm where previously the only law had been the law of Love.

The Church, having become a “state Church,” began to structure its own laws after the pattern of the “city” [1]. The local Church was less and less thought of as the catholic fullness of the mystical assembly at the Lord’s Table. A tendency arose to consider the community merely as a part of the universal, imperial Church. Whereas earlier the bishop had emerged “from within” the community and dwelt among them as the presider of its Eucharistic gathering, in the Constantinian and post-Constantinian era the bishop came to be viewed as standing above the community, above the Eucharist, and could be appointed by the universal Church to any community. Thus began the understanding of episcopal—and clerical—authority in general as the “power of the keys,” given to a specific caste of ministers, who were increasingly referred to as “the ordained,” while in truth it was the Church as a whole—as Eucharistic assembly—that had always been and remains “ordained” (hagía, “holy”).

Doctrinal questions requiring catholic discernment were now resolved by a representative body composed of as many bishops as possible—representatives of communities or groups of communities: this was the prototype of the ecumenical councils [4]. The decisions of such a council were proclaimed to all communities and were no longer subject to “reception.”

The Great Schism #

The Church acts within history, and therefore the dust of humanity’s difficult historical path will always be present in the Church; but this “dust” must never be confused with the very essence, the very nature, of the Church.

Nevertheless, juridical norms entered the Church—but the East resisted their deep penetration more than the West. We cannot here dwell at length on the doctrinal disagreements that soon developed between West and East. But it can be stated firmly that all the “innovations” invented by Rome stem from the very degree to which the “kingdom of Caesar” penetrated the Roman Church—the principle of legalism supplanting the principle of Grace and Love.

What ought to have been recognized and received in love as Mystery—and for which God-worthy words were to be sought in order to express the experience of participation in it (as seen in the early letters of the Apostolic Fathers, and later preserved in the definitions of the Ecumenical Councils)—was in the West subjected to exposition in the language of “persuasive human words,” the language characteristic of legal documents (such as papal decrees and Roman scholasticism).

The accumulated differences by the 11th century led to the division of the Church into West and East, and the later Crusades, attempted unions, and church-political manipulations of the papacy toward the East for a long time—down to this very day—have delayed the possibility of Western Christians being received as true brethren in Christ and fellow communicants with the Orthodox at the Lord’s Table.

Russian Old Belief as Heir to Ancient Sobornost #

In the mid-17th century, the Russian Church faced the fact of a violent annulment of its structure, its piety, and its liturgical order—that “manner of faith” which had been handed down to Rus’ at the time of its reception of Orthodoxy from Byzantium. And it is significant that this annulment took place under the guise of “Greek-loving” reforms, but was, in essence, pro-Latin and even “pro-papist,” being thoroughly imbued with the spirit of bureaucratic authoritarianism, legalism, and haughty arbitrariness.

Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexei Romanov—note, in a never-ceasing rivalry over which of them held supreme authority—undertook sweeping changes to the liturgical rites, a modernization of the language, and the forced replacement of essential liturgical and prayerful symbols; not merely a substitution, but a cancellation followed by condemnation and anathema. This conduct of the patriarch, who assumed unprecedented powers, had nothing in common with the principle of sobornost, the catholicity of the Church, or its unity; on the contrary, it closely resembled the extreme papal claims to unilateral power—not within the Church, but over the Church.

The very first reformist documents included threats against dissenters, and these quickly turned into police repression. Under such conditions, the defenders of piety found themselves to be the bearers of the ancient, genuinely ecclesial principle of sobornost.

Thus, the events described in the Life of Archpriest Avvakum unmistakably characterize the community resisting Nikon’s reforms as the catholic Church—once again παροικοῦσα, the “sojourning” Church. The prophetic vision of Archpriest Ivan Neronov—when he heard the Voice from the icon of the Savior in the Chudov Monastery, announcing the coming time of suffering for the faith—was received by the entire community of piety’s defenders as if in a Church gathering (a kind of “reception”), within which (not above which!) was a bishop—Pavel of Kolomna—who immediately confessed before the other hierarchs his fidelity to Tradition and went forth to martyrdom. This reception was a witness that catholic Truth had been revealed through that vision.

Likewise, the petitions to the Tsar asking him to “come to his senses” and rebuke the overreaching patriarch (such as Avvakum’s Supplications)—though unsuccessful and showing that the “kingdom of Caesar,” as a thousand years before, remained hostile to the Truth of Christ—became both a witness of loyalty (not subjection!) to the “Caesar” and of the Church’s complete independence from the “kingdom of Caesar,” for the Church belongs to another order of being. The Church’s exhortations to the Tsar to uphold piety gave way to its own independent actions—its martyr-like witness to the Truth, prefigured both symbolically and prophetically by Avvakum’s vivid vision in which, by the grace of God, he saw himself as containing “heaven and earth and all creation” (Fifth Supplication of Archpriest Avvakum), becoming, in full agreement with the Apostle Paul, “one in Christ”—that is, an image of the Church as the “Body of Christ,” containing and transfiguring all creation into a “partaker of the Divine nature.”

One must also mention a specific feature of sobornost: the constant spiritual connection among Church members—as “members” of the one Body—even in conditions where direct contact was physically impossible, through letters and verbal messages passed by intermediaries. And another characteristic: the desire to be near one another in times of trial. Vivid testimonies of this unity and sobornost are seen in the visits of fellow Christians to the imprisoned confessors—Feodosia Morozova and Evdokia Urusova were visited by Elder Dosifey and the eldress Melania, by the hieromonk Job of Lgov, who gave them Communion; Archpriest Avvakum was visited by the fool-for-Christ Theodore and others.

That this sobornost is truly catholic is also evidenced by the fact that even in persecution, “underground,” the suffering faithful yearned for communion with Christ—realized through the Communion received by the confessors Feodora and Evdokia from the monk Job of Lgov. Finally, the same catholicity of the Church is witnessed in the priest Lazarus’s desire to demonstrate to the reformers their departure from the Truth by showing them the Presence and Intercession of the Lord Jesus Christ (which, as noted earlier, is revealed in the catholic Church, where “two or three are gathered together in My Name”): in his Supplication to the Tsar he pleads:

“Command, O Sovereign… that we may go to a common trial, to the judgment of God, and in the sight of the whole realm enter into the fire for the revelation of the truth; and let the piety of thy fathers be made manifest, and let all doubt be removed from the souls of the pious, and let the holy Church be united, and let the All-Holy Spirit be glorified with one accord.” [6]

Even to this day, Old Believers preserve many of the principles of sobornost: the bishop is not regarded as an unapproachable ruler with “divine” infallible authority, beyond all criticism; all important questions are decided communally when possible; local communities and parishes choose their own rectors and, if necessary, can express lack of confidence in them; a bishop may not transfer priests from one parish to another at his whim; church councils, regularly convened and called “Holy Councils,” are not merely gatherings of bishops: the people take part—not just observe—and each person has the right to vote. These councils are not subordinate to the bishops and are the highest authority in the Church.

True, this includes a “legal element” (see above), but at the very least, from a legal standpoint, this “institute of voice and representation” acts as a safeguard against the tendencies toward despotism and arbitrary rule that increasingly penetrate church administration among the New Ritualists, who, true heirs of Patriarch Nikon—and of papism—nurture ambitions of “power over the Church.”

According to the expression of St. Arseny of the Urals, the ancient Orthodox Church is a “Church that adheres to the Old Rite” (старообрядствующая) [2]. This expression is undoubtedly more precise than the term “Old-Rite Church” (старообрядческая): the Church cannot be “Old-Rite” in the adjectival sense—she is Christ’s, and therefore she is One, Holy, and Catholic; and precisely for this reason she adheres to the Old Rite: she simply remains “standing in the old place,” as a stone lies across the current of a river. The Church remains where she always was—in the Truth—while the world around her, which until recently was “Christian,” has turned toward “novelties” devised to flee from faith in Christ.

In this adherence to the Old Rite—or more accurately, in this Old-Rite faithfulness—is revealed the same original, apostolic independence from the world: that is, the fullness and unity—the catholicity—of the Church of Christ, ever ready to meet the Lord coming in glory.

Bibliography

1. Archpriest Nikolai Afanasiev. The Church of the Holy Spirit. — Kyiv: Center for Orthodox Books, 2005. — p. 430.

2. Bishop Arseny of the Urals. The Truth of the Old-Rite Hierarchy Against the Accusations Brought Against It. Moscow: Kitezh, 1996.

3. Archpriest John Meyendorff. The Unity of Empire and the Divisions of Christians (https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Ioann_Mejendorf/edinstvo-imperii-i-razdelenija-hristian/1. Accessed: 16.03.2020)

4. Archpriest Nikolai Afanasiev. Church Councils and Their Origin. — Moscow: St. Philaret Orthodox Christian Institute, 2003. p. 32.

5. Canons of the Holy Ecumenical Councils with Commentaries. Published by the Moscow Society of Lovers of Spiritual Enlightenment. Moscow, 1877, pp. 87–91.

6. Old Belief: Persons, Objects, Events, and Symbols. An Encyclopedic Dictionary. Moscow: Tserkov’ [“Church”], 1996.

7. The Nicene Creed in Greek (https://azbyka.ru/molitvoslov/simvol-very-na-grecheskom-yazyke.html. Accessed: 10.03.2020)

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