What is Malaksa?
As is known, Old Believers refer to the “nominal” finger arrangement used by Nikonite priests during blessings as “Malaksa.” This practice is named after Nikola Malaksa, a native of the city of Nafplion on the Peloponnese peninsula.
Nikola was born after 1573 and received his education in Constantinople. Following the Turkish conquest of the region in 1540, he relocated to Venice. According to Archimandrite Porfiry (Uspensky), in 1558, Nikola worked as a proofreader of books at the Venetian Greek printing house of Andrea Spinelli, who, following the custom of the time, edited printed books at his own discretion. Nikola Malaksa’s interpretation of the nominal finger arrangement was translated and published in 1656 in the Nikonite “Skrizhal” (Tablet) under the title “On the Significance of the Joined Fingers of the Priest’s Hand When Blessing the Christ-Named People.”
After the Greek Church came under intense cultural and religious pressure from Muslims and Crusaders, it lost its universal, catholic character of confessing Christ, leaning more toward a national identification of its faith. Thus, the Greeks began to assert that only the modern Greek language, along with new Greek customs and traditions, formed the basis of the Orthodox faith. However, some of these new Greek traditions directly contradicted the universal Orthodox tradition. For instance, the Greeks claimed that clergy should bless the people using the so-called “nominal finger arrangement,” meaning arranging the fingers to form the Greek letters IC and XC. They further stated that the fingers, shaped to represent these Greek letters, were given to humanity by God: “By divine providence, from the beginning, the Creator of all arranged the fingers of the human hand thus, neither more nor less… but sufficient for such a signification” (Skrizhal, sheet 817). Additionally, the Greeks and the Nikonites who followed them claimed that the Savior Himself was the first to bless using these Greek letters in Israel: “We have learned this form of blessing from our Lord Jesus Christ Himself” (Zhezl, sheet 63). Such speculations by Greek and Russian innovators were the result of teachings about the messianic role and Christian primacy of the Greek people. The Patriarch of Alexandria, Mitrophan (Kritopoulo), in his “Confession of the Eastern, Catholic, and Apostolic Church” (1625), justified the idea of Greek exceptionalism by arguing that the Jews and Romans rejected and crucified Christ, while the Greeks glorified Him.
By adopting the teaching of the nominal finger arrangement and other nationalistic Greek customs, Russian Nikonites went even further. They began to assert that only the Greek form of the Lord’s name, “Iisus,” could be salvific. At the councils of 1666–1667, the use of the Slavic form of the Savior’s name, “Isus,” was prohibited. Nikonite Archbishop Dmitry of Rostov (Tuptalo) explained this as follows: “It is better for us to write ‘Iisus’ rather than ‘Isus,’ since the extended name of the Savior, as used by the Greeks, is pronounced in three syllables, not merely two. In the Russian language, however, schismatics, pronouncing ‘Isus’ in two syllables, do not confess the Savior and Healer of our souls… but some sort of ‘Isus’ with equal ears…” (Dmitry, Metropolitan of Rostov. Investigation of the Schismatic Bryn Faith. Moscow, 1855, pp. 47–48).
The teachings about the nominal finger arrangement and the spelling of the Savior’s name are undoubtedly heretical, not only because the Lord did not create human fingers in the shape of Greek or Slavic letters, nor because the Savior did not preach to the Jews in the Greek language, but because these teachings directly contradict the commandments of Christ, the apostles, and the holy fathers to preach the Son of God “in all languages.”