The Icon and the Axe

However, Golitsyn was more successful in changing old ways than in establishing anything in their place. He was eventually rejected and exiled -as were most other innovators of the period. Russia was not yet willing to commit itself to new ways of doing things. The continuing search for new answers was concentrated in the overgrown wooden metropolis of Moscow, where every shade of opinion was represented from the xenophobic fundamentalism of the streltsy quarter to the transplanted Germanic efficiency of the foreign suburb. The young Peter the Great derived many of his new ideas and tastes from a carefree boyhood spent largely in this Western enclave of Moscow. But the preoccupation of the uneasy ruling elite with combating religious-tinged rebellions against innovation-by Razin, So-lovetsk, and the streltsy--naturally conditioned them to look for religious answers of their own: for a viable religious alternative to that of Old Muscovy. Thus, although the ruling elite had nowhere to look for guidance after 1667 but to the West, it still looked for religious answers: solutions of the old sort from the new font of wisdom.

The late years of the seventeenth century saw the consideration in Moscow of four religious answers-all of them brought in from the outside. Only after rejecting these last efforts to find religious answers for Russia's problems did Russia turn to the West for the secular and political solutions of Peter the Great.

Each of the four religious answers proposed in Moscow represented an effort to come to grips with the reality of the schism and the irreversible changes in Russian life. None of these solutions was proposed by Great Russians steeped in the Muscovite ideology, like Nikon and Avvakum. Two of the solutions-those of the Latinizers and Grecophiles-were group movements sponsored by new elements within the Russian Orthodox Church anxious to give it solid new foundations. Two other, more radical proposals-direct conversion to Roman Catholicism and Protestant sectarianism-were offered from without by lonely prophets coming to Moscow from the West. This proliferation of conflicting solutions bears testimony to the state of confusion and uncertainty into which the schism had plunged Russian Christendom.

The Latinizing and Grecophile solutions arose because of the belated acceptance within the Russian Church of the need to develop a systematic educational system. Such a need had not been keenly felt by prophetic partisans of the Muscovite ideology. Neither Nikon nor Awakum had attached any importance to systematic education of the clergy, though both advocated careful study of the holy texts of which they approved. The question that divided the two parties in the post-1667 church was simply

whether Latin or Greek language and culture should dominate the religious education of the new polyglot hierarchy.

The continued influx of Ukrainian and White Russian priests and the banishment of the Grecophile Nikon gave a considerable initial advantage to the Latinizing party. Polotsky set up in Moscow during the 1660's an informal school for instructing state servants in Latin culture; and one of Polotsky's first students, Silvester Medvedev, became the champion of the Latinizing party in the 1670's. Medvedev was a widely traveled diplomat who had helped negotiate the treaty with Poland in 1667 and had taken monastic vows only in 1674. In 1677 he was given important new responsibilities in Moscow as chief corrector of books and head of the Zaikonospassky Monastery, which became the center of an expanding program of Latin instruction in the capital. In 1685 he petitioned the regent Sophia (who had also studied under Polotsky) for permission to convert his school into a semi-official academy.

Medvedev's efforts to extend his already great authority rendered him vulnerable to the savage intrigues that were characteristic of Moscow during this period of upheaval and suspicion. He met much of the same resistance that Nikon had encountered; but Medvedev lacked the personality, the patriarchal power, and the authority of Byzantine precedent to carry out his reforms. He was soon attacked by a rival faction supported by the Patriarch Joachim and by a rival Greek school attached to the Moscow Printing Office.