Old Believer Philosophy: The Triumph of the Spirit and the Metaphysics of Freedom #
By Roman Atorin
The past thirty years in Russia have been marked by a growing interest in faith, religion, and spirituality. Old Belief, as one of our traditional and culturally formative confessions, has not remained apart from these developments and is now the subject of extensive study by many researchers. Indeed, the true causes of the tragic Schism, as well as the origins and distinctiveness of Old Belief, remain poorly understood to this day. Moreover, the 350 years of division have played a role in shaping false stereotypes about the Old Faith. As a result, contemporary Old Believers, having emerged from the underground into the public sphere, have encountered widespread misunderstanding.
The issue lies in the fact that all Christian confessions today tend to be viewed through the lens of unity—through the search for common values, often with little regard for existing differences. Only a small percentage of people consider what actually separates us and whether those differences provide valid grounds for ecclesiastical schism. Many assume that the division in the Russian Church arose from the so-called rituals. This opinion is far from the truth.
In light of the above, it is especially noteworthy that the author of this work has chosen to focus on the inner life and struggle of Archpriest Avvakum. For this reason, I believe this book will be useful to anyone who sincerely seeks to understand the meaning of Old Belief.
Another trend that should not leave Old Believers indifferent today is what one might call the “fashion for religion.” This refers to the ratio of the number of Christians to the quality of their faith. Ideological freedom acts on a person in two ways. On the one hand, we have the opportunity to freely express our position and openly defend our principles and beliefs. But there is also a downside: how genuine is our faith when there is no persecution or oppression? If faced with a choice between life and death, can we confess the name of Christ before the powers of this world?
For sooner or later, every Christian must see themselves as one of the seeds described in the well-known parable: the one that fell by the wayside, or on stony ground, or among thorns—or the one that fell on good ground. Thus, a significant question arises: when does the true renewal of the Church of Christ occur? Is it during so-called freedom or under persecution? And what is renewal: an external denominational flourishing marked by an increase in parishes and followers—or a purification, a separation of wheat from chaff, a test of quality?
In the grim Middle Ages—during the mass burnings of the Inquisition’s fires, the sale of the saints’ “supererogatory merits,” and the general psychosis that cast a shadow over Europe for centuries—the patience of rational minds had not yet reached the point of explosive pressure in a sealed vessel. But by the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, that oppressive silence neared its breaking point. An explosion occurred that shook the entire Christian world of the Old World: tens of millions of Western Christians joined the movement of the Reformation.
Under Pope Innocent III, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1198 to 1216, the power of the Roman See reached its peak. Instead of carrying out its mission to proclaim the Resurrection of Christ to the nations, to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world,” to “go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), the Western Church was transformed into one of the most efficient financial and economic institutions of medieval Europe—hence the saying, “All roads lead to Rome.” Monasteries and parishes, in terms of land ownership, ranked high in the hierarchy of feudal landlords and posed serious competition to the secular nobility. Understandably, asceticism and spiritual labor on the part of clergy and monastics were pushed to the background, giving way to concerns about property and commercial calculation.
The church authorities, forgetting the spiritual mission entrusted to them, extended their web into nearly every sphere of human activity—political, economic, and social. To establish total control over the population, they employed repression, surveillance, and denunciation. It came to a direct seizure of power over people’s minds, consciences, and actions—a totalitarian submission and coercion. The infamous fires of the Inquisition became commonplace. The spirit of the time was akin to the ideological purges of the 1930s under Soviet or fascist dictatorship.
The one thing the Catholic inquisitors failed to destroy was the living voice of conscience within individual souls. History remembers the names of the Englishman Wycliffe, the Bohemian Jan Hus, the Italian Dominican monk Savonarola, and the German Martin Luther. As Jan Hus stood before the flames, they made a final attempt to persuade him to recant his beliefs. But this forerunner of the Reformation replied, “I cannot go against my own conscience.” Meanwhile, the fires of the Inquisition continued to blaze. The Roman Church had come to embody what Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky put into the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov:
“They will marvel at us and look upon us as gods because we, who have placed ourselves at their head, have agreed to bear the burden of freedom and to rule over them—so dreadful will freedom eventually seem to them! But we shall say that we are obedient to Thee and rule in Thy name. Once more we shall deceive them, for we shall no longer let Thee come to us. This deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie…”
Bold and resolute men like Luther saw it all. He saw, in 1510, papal clerics performing the liturgy carelessly, turning it into mere spectacle. He saw the Dominican Tetzel in Wittenberg in 1517, setting up a market for the sale of indulgences. Luther’s despair and outrage reached such heights that the father of the Reformation burned the papal bull and wrote his 95 theses against indulgences and the abuses of the papacy. He nailed them with a knife to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. The beginning of the Reformation had announced itself…
Man is a free being. The course of history depends on his thoughts, desires, and actions. Quite often, the sins of the fathers weigh heavily upon the children. Mistakes, compounding throughout history, become sicknesses and grievous wounds, whose bloody traces linger long afterward. A society that fails to examine itself soon grows accustomed to these wounds and ailments, considering them an inseparable part of itself. Yet in such a case, how far does consciousness stray from living reality? Thus, entire nations vanish from the face of the earth, and empires are shattered to pieces. Therefore, the proverb “time heals all wounds” does not always bring regeneration.
Every historical event reveals to future generations its inestimable meaning, as though urging them to use that meaning as a lesson for shaping life. As the late Ivan Snychev once said, “The many historical and spiritually moral-religious parallels that arise when examining those distant events can clarify much about our country’s present-day problems…”
History, like philosophy, is by nature a realm not of ready answers, but of unresolved existential questions. These are two laboratories where ever-new inquiries are born. And the longer the life of mankind, the more questions are forged in these furnaces. “When was the Russian path abandoned, and how can we return to it?” (V. Solovyov), “What is Slavdom?” (K. Leontiev), “Why do we believe in Russia?” (I. Ilyin), “What air is left for us to breathe?” (A. Solzhenitsyn), and so on. These questions often bear a distinctly pessimistic tone. They grow in number, and yet, despite the volume of writing and speech at countless conferences and round tables, the response is silence and bewilderment. When faced with the fact of the dechristianization of the Russian people, we simply throw up our hands! We have almost nothing to say! We are helpless, and it is as if we have resigned ourselves to a stifling reality—while on paper, a very different picture is painted. “Our national consciousness has fallen into lethargy. We are barely alive—caught between a dull amnesia behind us and a menacing vanishing point ahead. We are in a national swoon.” And the cause of this is the loss of spirituality. Europe has long been walking this same path, where Christmas is celebrated without the One who was born, and Easter without the Risen One; where animals are baptized, and same-sex marriages are solemnized; where the sign of spiritual decline is said to be… a lack of education.
Czech President Václav Havel once said, “We are building the first atheistic civilization in human history.” Russia, having moved from one extreme (the state regulation of religious belief during the Synodal period) to another (mass secularization of the people’s worldview), is gradually merging with the Western path of Christianity’s degeneration.
Each of us tries to comprehend the ways and destinies of Russia, to give a proper assessment of the deeds of past years, to trace their influence on the people’s consciousness. In coming to terms with the past, each of us identifies a particular cause behind today’s calamities and disarray—a certain starting point from which the actual “fall of the empire” began.
Whom are these reflections about? About those who were called “the last believers on earth,” those who once held nearly 65% of the national capital of the Russian Empire, those by whose minds Russia’s major industrial enterprises were built. This book is about the man who, at the cost of his own life, gave birth to the existence of Old Belief. For over three centuries, the followers of Archpriest Avvakum hid from brutal persecution by the authorities. They were executed by tsarist gendarmes—though it was the Old Believers, known for their honesty, who were often entrusted with guarding the Russian emperors. Soviet aviation bombed their sketes. Yet through centuries and persecution, the Old-Orthodox Christians have borne and preserved the Faith and the traditions of their forefathers.
When one examines the phenomenon of Old Belief impartially—its meaning and the purpose of its existence—one is inevitably led to conclude that a vast number of works, statements, and opinions concerning this religious movement remain far from the truth. I hope that this modest work might offer at least a partial answer to one of the many pressing and contentious questions of our time.
Three and a half centuries separate us from the well-known events of the mid-17th century. In 1666, at a local council in Moscow, an anathema was pronounced against the Orthodox Christians who refused to accept the new church reforms—reforms persistently pushed forward by the tsarist authorities and the upper hierarchy of the Church. The tragic reality of the Schism, from its very beginning, spared no Orthodox family, no human conscience, no thinking heart. The division of the Russian people gave rise to rivers of blood and oceans of tears, unbearable torments and countless sufferings, the loss of loved ones, and an ideological and spiritual catastrophe that would eventually descend upon Russia once more in the early 20th century. “The religious schism gave way to a schism in national consciousness—the catastrophe was doubled and made more complex,” wrote Anton Kartashev.
Church schisms have always been and continue to be deeply painful for people, for any rupture in the unity of the Church—especially a division within a single confession in one country—inevitably affects all aspects of a society’s existence. As history shows, the healing of the wounds from the most severe spiritual conflict ever to occur in Russia—the Great Schism—through the harsh authoritarian methods of the Synodal era yielded no objectively positive results. The gulf of estrangement between Old Believers and the supporters of the new rite only deepened over time.
The state policy of the 17th century, which gave rise to the tragic reality of intraconfessional division, tore apart what had once been a united ecclesiastical body, creating two irreconcilable camps that remained in constant conflict. This exerted a profoundly destructive influence on Russian society, filling the historical record with ever more errors and dark stains. Given that the deep wound of the Great Russian Schism has not yet healed, and the consequences of the turbulent events of the 17th century still linger in our collective consciousness, the study of the religious and philosophical foundations of Old Belief remains highly relevant. It will help us to better understand the full depth of the schism’s contradictions and, insofar as possible today, to remove the barrier that has traditionally and stereotypically placed a certain part of Russian society outside of society itself—a reality vividly illustrated by the history of the “Synodal period” of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Church Schism of the 17th century is, in truth, a great tragedy of Russia—of its Church, of its people. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, speaking in 1974, said the following about this tragedy:
“Beginning with the soulless reforms of Nikon and Peter, when the erosion and suppression of the Russian national spirit began, came the erosion of repentance, the drying-up of that very capacity in us. For the monstrous repressions against the Old Believers—by fire, pincers, hooks, and dungeons—followed for two and a half centuries by the senseless persecution of millions of defenseless, unarmed compatriots, driven out into every uninhabited wilderness—for this sin the ruling Church has never repented. In 1905 the persecuted were merely forgiven… This irreparable persecution, this self-destruction of the Russian root, the Russian spirit, the Russian wholeness continued for 250 years—and could it not have brought a reciprocal blow to all of Russia and to all of us?”
To all this we must add the fact that the “transformed” Russia—in the negative sense—having created the tragedy of the Russian Schism, ceased to be the Third Rome in a spiritual sense; that is, it lost its status as the guardian of True Orthodoxy, free from unionism and imperial wars. With Peter I began the Synodal era: an era without a patriarch, a Church subordinated to the state, enamored with pomp, grandeur, and glitter, operating in detachment from the people, their inner life, their views, and their real spiritual needs.
Thus, to a certain extent, one may agree with the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote that “the schism was a withdrawal from history, because history had been seized by the prince of this world, the Antichrist, who had infiltrated the heights of both Church and State.”
Thus, based on all that has been said, it must be acknowledged that the error of the 17th century—one that brought the most devastating consequences for Russia—has not been rectified even to this day. Instead, it has taken on new forms and appearances, while retaining the same essence. Faith is the soul of a people, and that soul was wounded. The severing from the living source of faith and the subsequent neglect—even hatred—toward that very soul have driven the Russian people down a declining path toward nonexistence. Before them all stands a single question: can Russia endure the destructive burden that has been placed upon her? On this point, the great thinker of our time, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, spoke profound words:
“Let us not close our eyes to the depth of our national collapse, which has not ceased even today. We are in the penultimate stage of losing our spiritual traditions, our roots, the organic wholeness of our being. Our spiritual strength has been undermined beyond all expectations.”
And yet Solzhenitsyn also proclaimed:
“After traveling across Russia for four years, observing and listening—I declare under oath, if needed: no, our spirit is still alive! And at its core, it remains pure! At those meetings—it wasn’t I who spoke, it was told to me, people persuaded me: ‘If only we could save the soul of the people—everything else will be saved as well!’ Yes. The spirit has the power to reverse even the most destructive processes. To pull back from the very edge of the abyss. Some may find it hard to believe. But those who, in their lives, have been convinced of the truth and power of the Higher Power above us—they will believe that the Russian people still have hope. It has not been taken away.”
Archpriest Avvakum… Some loved him, others hated him. Some admired him, others slandered his name. Some burned him at the stake; others canonized him. Some saw in him a dark zealot and fanatic; others saw a Christian martyr, ascetic, struggler, zealot, and defender of the faith. Perhaps there is no more paradoxical figure in Russian history. Yet no researcher of our past, no historian of Russian religious thought, has bypassed this man, even though the same facts are interpreted differently by different people.
What kind of preacher was he? What questions of life did he raise to public attention? What was the meaning of his lifelong struggle that filled the heart of this spiritual giant? Despite the many existing studies, we are still yearning for answers to these questions. But this we can say for certain: the “fiery archpriest” is a name more than fitting for this passionate defender of ancient piety—whether we love him or not, whether we admire his struggle or despise him. Perhaps, through the centuries, through the smoke of the long-extinguished stake at Pustozersk, Archpriest Avvakum is speaking to all of us, to the Orthodox people of Russia, asking us about the aims and meanings of our existence, about God, faith, and salvation, about the future destinies of Russia… About things which today are not merely relevant—they have become a national crisis.
As the Russian writer Amphiteatrov said, Avvakum was marked by “a great historical love of the people.” The archpriest-hero was one of the brightest and most remarkable figures of the pre-schism era, an expression of the spiritual aspirations of Holy Rus—not as a political state, but as a spiritual force where human salvation is accomplished. The historian and academician S.F. Platonov spoke of Avvakum as follows:
“Ancient Rus knew no one more passionate and vivid. In both his life and writings, Avvakum was unyielding, fiery, and—through the strength of his personality—a formidable enemy of the church reforms, the so-called correction of books and rites undertaken by Nikon… When you read Avvakum’s works, you are confronted with an extraordinarily fervent nature, a sharp mind, a commanding will, and a burning faith…”
Avvakum transmitted to the thinking minds of later generations the faith of St. Sergius of Radonezh, the icon-painting of Andrei Rublev, the preaching of Chrysostom, and the martyrdom of the early Christians. Had such a “reform” been attempted not in the 17th century, but during the life of Sergius of Radonezh, surely that saint would have risen up against the trampling of Holy Tradition with no less indignation than Avvakum.
Ancient Rus knew not only no one more passionate—it likely knew no writer more gifted than Avvakum. The word, which the archpriest wielded masterfully, was his life, his very element. Avvakum’s love for the book and the pen is an inseparable part of the Old Believer mentality:
“The book was regarded by them as a bearer of sanctity and unshakable tradition.”
Naturally, within Old Belief, the literary authority of the great archpriest is unquestioned. In his writings, Avvakum raised many themes and ideas that later became foundational for the works of famous 19th-century writers. The spiritual development of Alyosha Karamazov and the visions of Elder Ferapont were written by Dostoevsky under the influence of the Life (Zhitie). The image of the Russian woman, which Avvakum was the first in the history of Russian literature to depict—in the person of his wife, Anastasia Markovna—would later echo in Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and Tatyana, and in Turgenev’s Natalya and Liza.
Writers of the 20th century—such as Voloshin, Shmelev, Remizov, and Leonov—also owed much to Avvakum’s legacy.
“He is an exceptionally powerful writer. His spiritual force and the secret of his influence lay in his extraordinarily passionate temperament, his ardent and steadfast conviction, and his literary talent.”
It is quite telling that L.N. Tolstoy—and later M. Gorky—strongly advocated including The Life (Zhitie) in school curricula. It is known that Tolstoy enjoyed reading Avvakum’s writings aloud to those close to him. As a writer, Avvakum was highly esteemed by I. Turgenev, V. Garshin, I. Goncharov, N. Leskov, and I. Bunin. A.D. Mamin-Sibiryak remarked that there is a remarkable similarity between The Tale of Igor’s Campaign and The Life of Avvakum: “In terms of language, there are no equals to these two works.”
The phenomenon of Avvakum—his talent, his genius—is a thoroughly Russian one. And yet, precisely because of this profound “Russianness,” his work took on truly universal proportions. His writings may be placed alongside such world-renowned works as The Confessions of Blessed Augustine, The History of My Calamities by Peter Abelard, the autobiography of the traveler Marco Polo, The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella, and N. Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?, among others. Avvakum’s work attracted attention even abroad, where his writings found admirers and The Life was translated into many languages of Europe and the world.
Old Belief is a unique, extraordinary phenomenon, singular in its kind, born out of Russian history. Historical and philosophical reflections on the events of the 17th century do not yield a single, unified perspective or a definitive conclusion about those turbulent events that took place in Russia.
“The destruction of traditional ecclesiastical and everyday structures, along with spiritual and moral values, divided what had once been a united people—not only in the religious sphere but also socially. A wound was inflicted on the national body, which at that time closely overlapped with the Church, and the devastating consequences of that wound have endured for centuries. The division of Russian society brought on by the Church schism became a forewarning of future fractures, which ultimately led to the revolutionary catastrophe.”
The tactless implementation of changes to the liturgical order—sanctified by antiquity itself—could not help but provoke resentment. The center of the ecclesiastical resistance to innovations formed around the Archpriest of Yuryev, Avvakum Petrov. Once he had defined his stance, Avvakum deliberately chose to break with the official church authority. For his convictions, he was repeatedly persecuted—suffering imprisonment, torture, beatings, starvation, and other torments. But can it truly be that the endurance and stubbornness of this sufferer were the result of some fanatical attachment to minor liturgical details?
Ivan Snychev writes:
“When they said, ‘We shall die for a single az’ (that is, a letter), the ritual zealots were bearing witness to the highest level of popular piety, bound by lived experience to the sacred liturgical form. Only total religious ignorance allows this devotion to worship to be interpreted as ‘backwardness,’ ‘illiteracy,’ or the ‘underdevelopment’ of the Russian people of the 17th century.”
Many so-called “schismatics” were not at all less intelligent than their opponents—in fact, some stood out for their extraordinary abilities. The respected church historian A.V. Kartashev noted that the voice of the Old Believer resistance was the voice of “the idealistic depths of the people’s soul, of Old Holy Rus’.” The same idea was expressed by the renowned philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev:
“The Russian schismatics represent a profound trait of our national character.”
V. Senatov, in his article The Philosophy of Old Belief, articulated a similar idea:
“The history of Old Belief is the history of the development of genuinely Russian religious thought—born in the depths of the centuries, crushed during the time of Nikon, yet never having lost its vital power, continuing to grow organically.”
The figure of Avvakum—who came to embody the sharpest expression of popular discontent—calls for a reevaluation in our historical consciousness.
“The world is not saved through the wise,” wrote Avvakum to Pleshchev, “the wise have fallen away; they claim our fathers erred in the Church’s dogmas and that for a long time the Church was in darkness, and now they have grown wise enough to correct it. Therefore, they do not believe Christ’s word about the Church’s infallibility.”
“This,” writes B. Bashilov, “is the natural point of view of a normal person—someone who believes that the most sacred matter of religion should not be entrusted to such unclean foreigners as the Greeks so often were.”
Those who entered the “schism” were the strongest, most spiritually steadfast and firm-minded Russians of their time. Their strict principles were rational and deliberate. It was a classical manifestation of spiritual strength and the mentality of the Russian people—of their pure roots, their national zeal, and their innate depths.
The emergence of the most radical Old Believer movements and sects, such as the beguny (“runners”) and stranniki (“wanderers”), was not due to religious ignorance, but rather to spiritual fervor and the desperate resolve that are in fact enduring traits of the Russian character. One day, Russia will give due honor to this preserved sense of spiritual urgency, from which the awakening of historical sound-mindedness will begin.
Among our Orthodox brethren, over the course of three centuries, there developed a remarkable ability—to endure any and all persecution, even the most brutal, and often from those who believed, paradoxically, that in so doing they were serving God and the Holy Church. Old Believers survived under every condition, in every hardship, under any form of rule.
As M.V. Nazarov aptly put it:
“As a result, the most steadfast portion of the Russian people—the part most faithful to the idea of Holy Rus (around a quarter of the population!)—was removed from the ecclesiastical and social life of Russia and from the further struggle for her Orthodox statehood. That absence was sorely felt…”
And finally, the religious thinker Ivan Ilyin affirms the rightness of the Old Believers:
“The Old Believers became the faithful guardians of Russian Orthodox-national consciousness in all its inviolability, its simplicity, and its assertiveness. This was touching, and even beneficial—not because Old Belief was entirely correct in its ecclesiastical position, but because for centuries, with spiritual integrity and moral zeal, it preserved fidelity to the original form of Russian religious and national self-awareness. Fidelity can be touching and valuable even in liturgical minutiae, for in them is embodied the depth and sincerity of religious feeling.”
One must not ignore the fact that adherents to the ideal of Ancient Rus—its spirit and mentality—remain unyielding in their convictions even to this day. This is no reason to label them “backward,” “stubborn,” or “ignorant.” Strong faith, a lofty patriotic spirit, and a vividly sharpened religious consciousness may prove to be strategic weapons in the next (perhaps final!) spiritual and ideological battle for Russia’s survival.
Old Believers see themselves as the custodians of ancient piety—piety intimately bound with the established traditions of Orthodox worship and the way of life of Holy Rus. It is especially telling that Archpriest Avvakum chose to express his spiritual protest in his Discourse on Icon Painting. In it, the defender of the faith cries out in righteous indignation, condemning the new fashion for painting the image of Christ Emmanuel:
“The face is bloated, the lips are ruddy, the hair curly, the arms and muscles thick, the fingers swollen—only the sabre at his thigh is not painted. But all the rest is painted according to carnal fancy, for the heretics themselves love fleshliness and corpulence and have cast down the heavenly.”
With this, he points to changes at a spiritual level—to a search for new values, alien to those upon which Ancient Rus raised her saints.
“Clearly, when John of Damascus instructed painters in how to depict the image of Christ, he intended something wholly different behind the outward appearance. It is precisely the loss of that intention over which Archpriest Avvakum grieves.”
Noticing in the new style of icon painting a displacement of ascetic motifs by realistic ones, and a substitution of ontological meaning with anthropomorphism, Avvakum writes:
“The Germans do not venerate icons—they merely paint their own likenesses; as they themselves are hairy, so too do they paint their images.”
Just as strongly, the iron-willed archpriest expresses his rejection of Catholic partes polyphony in contrast to the Orthodox znamenny chant:
“Whoever does not love the unison chant of the [Russian] tradition is confused, and his prayer is vain, and he is an imperfect lover of God, stealing the soul with such foolishness, refusing to submit to the eternal Divine truth.”
Avvakum’s statements testify to the changes he observed in the prayerful life of the Russian Orthodox faithful—changes that signaled the beginning of secularization, the replacement of religious-mystical knowledge and spiritually refined experience with Catholic sensuality or Protestant ethics, the desacralization of the synergistic relationship between God and man. Never before have the words of the holy martyr Avvakum sounded more prophetic and urgent than in his lament and sigh:
“Oh, Holy Rus’! Why is it that thou hast craved German customs and Latin ways?”
Herein lies the true essence of the “reform.” Its core is not in changes to the rites, but in the enthronement of a spirit later named “Nikonianism”—a so-called “Orthodoxy” clothed in the vestments of Latin-Protestant thought.
One consequence of the Schism was a certain confusion in the national worldview. The Old Believers, taking a conservative stance, regarded history as “eternity in the present”—that is, as a stream of time in which each person has a clearly defined place and bears responsibility for all they have done. For Old Believers, the idea of the Last Judgment was not mythological but profoundly moral in nature.
For the new-ritualists, however, the concept of Judgment ceased to be a consideration in historical forecasting and became a subject for rhetorical exercise. Their worldview became more focused on earthly needs rather than eternity.
Old Belief has preserved the original Russian spiritual tradition, one which commands a constant search for truth and a sustained moral vigilance. The Schism struck directly at this tradition, especially once the prestige of the official Church declined and secular power asserted control over the education system. A shift occurred in the goals of education: instead of forming a person as a bearer of a higher spiritual nature, schools began producing individuals prepared to fulfill a narrow range of specialized functions.
The central idea expressed by Archpriest Avvakum is the idea of spiritual freedom—a freedom brazenly and cynically trampled by the Synodal mechanism. The parish priest of the official Church was no longer seen as a shepherd and spiritual father, but as an agent of the state, a carrier of its ideology—in short, a policeman, who blasphemously turned the sacred mystery of confession into a tool for identifying and eliminating dissent.
The Church voluntarily handed itself over to the protection and supervision of the state. From then on, the head of the Church was no longer Christ, nor a council, nor the patriarch—but the emperor, and his appointee—a secular official, the Ober-Procurator. The patriarchate was abolished. The head of state appointed the Church’s highest hierarchs. Church governance was carried out in accordance with the will of the state leader, whose word became, for the Church, the highest earthly and even heavenly law.
Thus, the Church’s well-being came to depend on the earthly sovereign and his political direction. Naturally, this entangled the Church in the political processes of the state, forcing it to participate in the shifting opinions of tsars, emperors, provisional governments, general secretaries, and presidents.
As the well-known Old Believer scholar F.E. Melnikov wrote:
“In keeping with the changes in opinion at the top—with the new alignments of political parties, or the mood of the secular mass, incapable of judgment—the Church’s balance scales rise and fall as well. Whether members of the Church administration are filled with the Spirit of Christ—this is of little concern. The chief criterion is whether they align with the current policies of the government, and whether public opinion favors them.”
The Orthodox people were ultimately removed from parish life, stripped of the right to choose their own clergy. According to the 7th canon of Theophilus of Alexandria and canons 66, 99, 112, and 132 of the Council of Carthage, the testimony to the worthiness of a man being ordained was the conciliar voice of the Church—that is, the voice of the people. By the 12th century, however, in the Church of Constantinople, the right to elect clergy had passed entirely into the hands of the state.
Vladislav Tsypin notes that “the exclusion of the people from the election of pastors was not a violation of fundamental canonical rules,” but this assertion cannot be considered unambiguous in light of the following:
First, command-administrative governance of an Orthodox community is a direct violation of the ninth article of the Nicene Creed, which professes belief in “one, holy, catholic [conciliar] and apostolic Church”—that is, the Eucharistic unity and living, direct participation of each and every Christian in Church life.
Second, according to the 30th Apostolic Canon, the appointment of clergy by secular authority is uncanonical. The canon states: “If any bishop or presbyter is appointed by secular rulers, let him be deposed.”
Third, it is not the canons that regulate spiritual life; rather, it is the inner religious experience that gives rise to the formation of canonical norms. From this follows a clear conclusion: the systematic violation of canonical law, the attempts to justify such violations, and the reinterpretation of canons to accommodate one’s own weaknesses all bear witness to the loss of true Orthodox thinking.
What we are witnessing in this case is a grave and nearly irreparable loss by the Church of its conciliarity and spiritual independence—the true religious freedom of the Gospel, granted by Christ Himself.
Thus, the election of priests became the exclusive prerogative of the secular authorities, and more rarely, of the episcopal hierarchy. From then on, the role of the people was reduced to attending services and paying church taxes. The religious policy of the Russian Empire repeated Byzantium’s error, stepping on the same rake, and as a result, what was once a great state was reduced to ruins. The root cause was above all the bureaucratization of spiritual life—forcing it into the framework of secular, state law. It was this that the Old Believers fled from, expressing their spiritual and social protest in a sincere and persistent way against the violence being done to human conscience.
The Old-Orthodox Christians, like all spiritually sane religious people, could not reconcile themselves to the essentially anti-Christian reality of the Church becoming one of the state’s departments—a convenient instrument for keeping the people in slavish submission and for doing whatever the authorities pleased under the guise of service to the Christian God.
There was an excessive, even criminal, redistribution of authority between the state and the Church, for the former, as S.L. Frank observed,
“imagining itself the supreme ruler over human life, is one of the most terrifying and ruinous manifestations of human pride—of demonic force in human existence.”
Patriarch Nikon had his own views on the relationship between state and church power. He believed that the priesthood was above the kingdom, due to the superiority of its tasks and authority. To the kingdom was entrusted the earthly, the lower; to the priesthood, the heavenly, the higher; kings were anointed to reign by the hands of priests. This view, however, was a theoretical error on Nikon’s part. He considered the patriarch to be an image of Christ. But Christ, the King of Heaven, avoided earthly power. He said:
“My kingdom is not of this world…” (John 18:36).
Christ withdrew from political activity. People awaited Him as an earthly Messiah who would deliver the Jews from Roman oppression. But Christ granted freedom—not from the Romans, but from sin. To those who asked Him about liberation from Rome, He answered:
“Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin… If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:34–36).
What is the purpose of Christ’s ministry? It is captured in His own words:
“To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice” (John 18:36–37).
In these words is expressed the true goal of the Church’s ministry: to bear witness to truth and righteousness. But Nikon was not concerned with Christ’s truth—he was preoccupied with who would be first in the state: himself or the tsar.
Here, we cannot omit the following Gospel episode. During the Last Supper, a dispute arose among the apostles about who should be considered the greatest. Christ said to them:
“The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are called benefactors. But ye shall not be so: he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve” (Luke 22:25–27).
From the Savior’s words just cited, it is clear that Nikon—who considered himself the image of Christ—was in fact very far from Christ.
According to the teaching of the Church, a bishop (and the patriarch is first among bishops) must possess the following qualities: he “must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves” (2 Tim. 2:24–25). The canons of the Holy Apostles forbid bishops and priests from engaging in political activity. The 30th Apostolic Canon states: “Let neither bishop nor presbyter undertake worldly cares.” In his pursuit of power, Nikon clearly contradicts the doctrine of the Orthodox Church. And in his “pride against the royal power,” he reveals nothing less than a striving after papism.
The Council of 1667 defined the boundary between secular and ecclesiastical authority. This same boundary had once been proposed by Pope Gregory to Emperor Leo the Isaurian: “To bishops is entrusted the Church, and they are not to interfere in matters of civil governance… and kings must not interfere in ecclesiastical affairs.” The state’s issuance of sealed decrees to the Church was a significant concession. But this step, on the part of the state, was inconsistent. The right of the Church to function as a sort of duplicate of the state apparatus—a kind of spiritual principality—had already become obsolete and was abolished with the unification of the Muscovite state. Yet the Church hierarchy failed to grasp this.
This is evident from the fact that the bishops at the council firmly supported Nikon—or rather, his ideas. The patriarchs who followed him, Ioakim and Adrian, continued to echo Nikon’s claims of the priesthood’s superiority over the tsar’s authority. All of this shows that the ecclesiastical leadership misunderstood the essence of its calling. The clergy, the hierarchs, failed to recognize that they were servants of the King whose kingdom is “not of this world.”
The outcome of all these disputes was that the Church, whose very nature is spiritual, reached for the crown of the state, then clutched the sword of the state (to strike down the Old Believers), and finally was forced to don the uniform of the state in the form of the Holy Governing Synod. From this came the weakness and lack of authority of the prerevolutionary church hierarchy, its intellectual barrenness, its inability to bear witness to social truth or to nourish the minds and hearts of the people. As a result, the Russian Church lost its initiative in the national and historical upbringing of the nation. The Russian person would now come to know their national history not from the church choir loft, but from the opera stage, through the canvases of secular painters and the books of writers. It is easy to see how all this accelerated the secularization of Russian society.
Nikonianism, as the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov noted, does not consist in the three-finger sign of the cross or in newly printed service books.
“It consists in that false Roman principle by which the Truth and Grace of Christ, being the property and privilege of the church hierarchy, may be forcibly imposed upon the rest of the Church as if it were a voiceless flock, and religious unity may be achieved through means of coercion.”
Thus, the two-finger sign of the cross—treasured by Old Orthodoxy—not only preserves the truest form for expressing Orthodox dogma but also symbolizes spiritual freedom, set in direct opposition to the authoritarian fusion of Church and state.
“And the two centuries of suffering endured by the Old Believers will forever remain a crown upon Russian popular history—a history of the spirit’s struggle against brute force.”